A Skeptical Journalist Takes Ayahuasca: A Conversation with Ernesto Londoño
Ernesto Londoño would probably be the first to admit that he was an unlikely candidate for an ayahuasca transformation experience. He had no experience with any psychedelics, and he did not really consider himself to be a “spiritual” person. Londoño’s anti-drug stance was a byproduct of growing up in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s—the height of the War on Drugs. Since Colombians were often singled out as pariahs when they traveled abroad, Londoño came to believe that all drugs were inherently “destructive” and “harmful.” Despite his ingrained skepticism, the New York Times reporter found himself signing up for an ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon region when was overcome with severe depression and a nasty bout of suicide ideation that prompted him to consider leaping from his 21-story apartment building in Rio de Janeiro.
When Londoño arrived at the Spirit Vine Ayahuasca Retreat Center in Bahia, he was alarmed by the starry-eyed converts who raved about ayahuasca, a powerful mind-altering compound that frequently induces vomiting and contains a strong dose of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine). When one convert told him, “the medicine knows what it is doing. Trust it,” he felt a bit uncertain about his decision to sign up for the retreat. Londoño, a war correspondent who had covered the Iraq war and the conflict in Afghanistan, was also skeptical about the Spirit Vine’s stringent rules for the retreat: all participants were urged to give up smoking, alcohol, red meat, pork, salty foods, masturbation, and sexual intercourse. The final request—participants were advised to avoid “watching the news” for a week prior to the retreat—was comical because Londoño earned his living by paying attention to the news. However, the Spirit Vine website insisted that the prohibitions had a clear purpose: “being clean prior to ceremony will facilitate a deeper process.” Although Londoño thought that he might have stumbled upon a “cult” in the middle of the Bahian jungle, he persisted because his chronic depression showed no signs of retreating. He was ready to try anything that would give him “a reprieve from the status quo.”
Londoño’s dramatic experience with ayahuasca is succinctly captured in his superb new memoir, Trippy: The Perils and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics (2024). Unlike many ayahuasca conversion memoirs, Londoño’s journey provides an outsider’s perspective of psychedelics. His transformation narrative frequently juxtaposes journalistic skepticism and ecstatic enthusiasm. At one pivotal moment in the apex of the ayahuasca ceremony, the author writes that his “autonomy and thought had been hijacked, and somehow it did not terrify me.” Londoño points out that “many people who are really rigid, rational thinkers—really struggle to allow themselves to go into that state of surrender. And I think it finally happened for me: ayahuasca cracked me open emotionally, and there was this huge relief that it wasn’t scary; it was a portal into a different way of existing in the world.”
After reading Londoño’s confessional narrative, I was excited to interview him because I had many questions about all the profound changes in his personal life that were prompted by his intense encounter with ayahuasca. For example, he found himself giving up meat, alcohol, gay dating apps, noisy nightclubs, and having sex with strangers. Londoño also noted that he had a new found interest in spirituality: “…when you are in an ayahuasca induced altered state, so often you feel that there is a dance with divinity that you encounter. [I encountered] a form of intelligence that feels otherworldly…really profound and almost holy. And I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it meant, or how to access it, or where it resides, but I did feel intuitively that this force was part of what made the experience so healing. It gives you a sense that you are not alone with your earthly problems, but that there is something larger at play.”
After serving as New York Times Bureau Chief in Brazil for four years, Londoño and Hugo, his Brazilian rescue dog, decamped from Rio De Janeiro and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota to be with his new husband, a veterinarian. I met the New York Times correspondent on Zoom just a few days after the November 5th election. The dark cloud of the election results hung over our heads as we discussed what the return of Trump meant for the War on Drugs and the future of psychedelics.
Penner: In your memoir, you describe your experiences with various psychedelics, ketamine, MDMA, and ayahuasca. However, your central focus is really ayahuasca. In your opinion, what makes Ayahuasca unique? What separates it from other psychedelic drugs?
I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’ve only sampled a few compounds. So I’m not the kind of person who sort of went all in and felt like I needed to try everything under the sun. With ayahuasca, I found something that, on a very basic level, was a very effective antidepressant for me. It pulled me out of this state of deep sadness and numbness and my inability to think clearly or act intentionally. So that— in and of itself—was a huge relief.
But it also made me really curious about what had just happened inside my brain, and how long its effects were going to last? I also wondered whether this was replicable—could everyone [who tried ayahuasca] expect the same results? I walked away from that experience feeling a lot better, and went through a period where I wanted to know everything about the history of these plants and the cosmology of the indigenous people who have kept these traditions alive over centuries. I wanted to learn more about the really interesting web of people who have decided to reimagine, reinvent, commodify, and appropriate these rituals and kind of make them their own.
One of my favorite parts of Trippy was your description of the ayahuasca ceremonies and how plant medicine had the power to stimulate powerful memories from your psyche. One such memory was your encounter with Dominic, a fellow war correspondent and gay man who also suffered from trauma and suicide ideation. How is it that plant medicine can insightfully trigger memories that point to your own situation? How is ayahuasca able to do this?
I have no idea. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to explain it as a phenomenon. But what I experienced repeatedly was really interesting. This ability to stumble into a memory, or a really difficult or formative snapshot of your past, and being anchored in it for what seems like a long period of time without doing what I think we normally do with traumatic memories, which is to retreat and to find comfort by pulling back when something triggers us. And there’s something really strange and mystifying that I experienced in kind of rebuilding the narrative arc of my life and just being able to wind back the tape. And oftentimes it wasn’t a deliberate choice, but it almost felt like I was being “guided” towards something. In a way, it’s similar to how we can’t really choose what we dream about, but the dream just kind of presents itself.
When I read this passage, my impression was that your unconscious—or whatever you want to call it—was saying that Dominic’s path could be your own path.
On that note, Dominic died by suicide. I experienced suicidal ideation. A lot of the people in my book talk about suicidal ideation. I feel like psychedelic retreats and circles are the rare place where it feels safe to even say the “S” word out loud without fear that you’re going to set in motion a chain of events that’s going to be really destabilizing and scary and stigmatizing and may lead to getting you locked up in a psychiatric ward. Suicide ideation is something many people experience, and there’s ways and places and settings where you can talk about it without being judged or confined or stigmatized, and that was really, really helpful just to build up the ability to even say the word out loud.
It seems like the memories that were revealed to you—that ayahuasca illuminated— don’t seem to be random at all. How is it that you learned so much about your sexuality?
I think at that point of my life, I kind of assumed that being a “gay man” was a “non-issue” for me. I assumed that I was surrounded by people who were supportive and loving and for whom that was a non-issue. However, I realized that the wound I had—which had been so raw and difficult in my teenage years and early twenties—was still with me and it needed tending. I learned how important it was to go back and reflect on those periods [of my life] and the intensity of some of those feelings of shame and fear. And I think the takeaway was that even after we feel we’ve overcome hardships or challenging periods of our lives and put “them behind us,” there’s often a lot that we skipped over. And there’s value in having the ability to go back in time and pressing “the pause button” and really sitting and reflecting on things that you assumed are “bygones” and the things that are immaterial to who you’ve become and where you are in life. So I think sexual orientation was a big one for me.
Does ayahuasca have the ability to speed up psychotherapy? Instead of doing five years of psychotherapy, you have this intense experience that goes right to the essence of your conflict.
I spent a few years in psychoanalysis at a young age when I was a teenager in Colombia, so I have a frame of reference. My sister is also a psychiatrist, so I think I know a lot about that world. However, I am uncomfortable when I hear people say that a mushroom trip or an ayahuasca retreat was ten years of therapy in one night, which is probably a line you’ve heard a million times. And it’s not to dismiss the notion that that’s how this feels for many people, that can be a valid experience, and I don’t want to challenge that on an individual basis. But I think it’s become so prevalent and widespread, and especially in how these experiences and retreats are marketed, that I’m afraid that they set people up for disappointment.
In my experience, I feel that these Ayahuasca ceremonies and, especially these retreat centers, can really be an accelerant in somebody’s quest to heal or to feel better, or to become more resilient. If you live with depression or addiction or PTSD or whatnot, it definitely can give you a huge boost. And importantly, it can give you key insights that are oftentimes elusive if you are in the mental lock jams of depression, or trauma where you’re just kind of thinking obsessively about a few things, and your mind lacks the wherewithal to see the “big picture.”
So what role does ayahuasca play in the healing process?
I don’t think psychedelics heal you in and of themselves. I think they give you a set of doors that suddenly open, but then it’s up to you to walk through those doors and make sense of these new opportunities that have presented themselves and to start shifting the way you think, the way you behave, and to start gravitating toward thought patterns and behaviors that are more conducive to being healthy and being more stable and more grounded. And I’ll be more specific. For me, one of the early clear “downloads” was my relationship with alcohol up to that point in my life had been detrimental to my health. And it was crystal clear, and this is something I may have understood intuitively before, but not with enough clarity to understand that that was the reality, and this led me to stop drinking.
But had it not been for that first retreat, I don’t think I would’ve understood drinking bad, maybe let’s not do it anymore, and meditation probably good. Why don’t we give it a real try and make that kind of a pillar of how you were made more resilient. So those are two examples that I think speak to the fact that the cure is not in the psychedelic itself. I think it’s in some of the cognitive changes that they induce that lead you to make different choices. And if those choices become long lasting and sustainable, I think that is how people start to really heal. But this takes time. It takes discipline, intention, and it doesn’t happen without setbacks and backsliding.
How did your colleagues at the New York Times and The Washington Post react to your psychedelic transformation? Were they supportive of your journey, or did some of them think you went off the deep end when you took ayahuasca in Brazil?
I try to be pretty transparent with my colleagues and supervisors because I didn’t want this to be something that was a secret I was keeping from people. And I think initially there may have been some questions, but there was no pushback and nothing was said that felt stigmatizing.
I did think long and hard about what it would mean to have this kind of book out in the world and the extent to which it may change how people viewed me and my journalism. So I did think about that, and I interrogated that fear. And I think the biggest dividend of my psychedelic experiences so far is that I think it has helped me constantly renegotiate my relationship with fear. I think when you examine the anatomy of depression—at least in my case—the ingredients are fear about things that may happen in the future and regret about things that have happened in the past. Those were the big heavy anchors that kept you in that depressed state.
Is the journalistic community more skeptical about psychedelic conversion stories? Or do you think psychedelics and psychedelic therapy have become more widely accepted now ?
I think when you look at the broader arc of narratives in the history of psychedelics or drugs more broadly, there was a lot of pendulum swinging. And I think there was a period in the post-Michael Pollan How to Change Your Mind world—post 2018—where everybody and their grandmother was interested in psychedelics. There was this furious recalibration of wanting to think about these compounds as being “benign” and inherently healing. And now, I think we are recalibrating again. I think more skeptical voices are being amplified, which I think is healthy for this field.
I find that since my book came out, we seem to be in this era where doubt again is creeping in. I think we saw that in the FDA’s rejection of MDMA, which I think would’ve marked a huge turning point for the movement. I think there’s also been a recognition that some of the business models that were being contemplated, like in 2021 when there was a lot of venture capital pouring into psychedelics was probably based on wishful thinking, and there may not be huge fortunes that are made down the line.
It’s a messy landscape, but I think it’s healthy that there are vigorous debates taking place. I think it’s healthy that there are voices that are more skeptical that are getting attention. And I hope that my book contributes to a more open conversation and more candid conversation grounded in facts and the reality of the world as it is and not as we would necessarily want it to be.
At this point, do you see yourself as an advocate for the therapeutic use of ayahuasca? Or are you just a journalistic observer? How do you see yourself?
I see myself, first and foremost, as an observer and somebody who is interested in continuing to report on the evolution of drug use and drug policy. I don’t see myself as an advocate. I don’t have answers or policy prescriptions for how we should reimagine the regulatory and legal space. That’s just not the lane I’ve chosen for myself. And I don’t have ardent views on how exactly things should evolve or go forward. I think I’m good at asking questions. I think the fact that I have acknowledged that I have “skin in the game” when it comes to psychedelics and healing makes me somebody who’s knowledgeable and who has a personal story that informs my broader knowledge of this. But for the time being, an advocate is not what I want to be.
In Trippy, you write often about the commercialization of ayahuasca. Specifically, you write about a very exploitative ayahuasca center in Costa Rica. Is it possible to keep ayahuasca from being commercialized and co-opted?
I think that cat is out of the bag. We live in a capitalist world. Even many indigenous people are commodifying these experiences and opening up their ceremonies for profit. So the short answer is “no.” I don’t think you can kind of put that genie back in the bottle and turn back the clock to an era in which no money was exchanged for access to these rituals. But it certainly adds layers of complexity to the exchange that is happening, and it creates incentives that can be problematic. So yeah, I think it’s something that requires real skill and ethics to navigate in a way that will feel healthy and sustainable and not exploitive. And I think there’s so much malpractice you see out in the wild west of ayahuasca centers, and some of the price tags on these experiences have become really crazy.
What does the future of psychedelics and ayahuasca therapy look like? Do you see them eventually achieving greater acceptance in the US and Western Europe?
I do not know how the story ends. And I think we may be on a path toward a future where they’re more broadly available, they’re less stigmatized, and there’s kind of places where people can partake in these experiences with a reasonable degree of safety and safeguards. I also think it’s conceivable that some of this unfolds in a way that feels so problematic and over the top that we find ourselves in the kind of backlash that shut this whole enterprise down like in the early seventies. So it’s a really uncertain future. I think the history of the war on drugs has always been really hard to predict. And again, I think we kind of move in waves in how we think about and talk about drug use right at this moment. We find ourselves, and I’m really interested in how much optimism there is in the psychedelics world about Trump’s victory and the doors that could open considering that many of the people who have his ear, and particularly RFK Jr., have spoken about psychedelics and the regulatory landscape as one area in which they’d like to see major changes. So I think that is one kind of unexpected plot twist.
Is there anyone who is pro-psychedelic who has Trump’s ear?
Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are examples of people who I think are psychedelic evangelists and critics of the FDA’s more conservative approach that you could see them really leaning on this issue if they chose to, especially because oftentimes it’s framed as a “Veterans’ Issue” and a solution to mental health care crises among veterans. So anything feels possible, and I would be a fool if I made predictions about how this is likely to play out.