By Thomas Varley
AYAHUASCA: A MOLECULE EYE’S VIEW
As the psychedelic renaissance continues to build up steam and shake off a half-century of hibernation, the popular conception of drugs such as psilocybin and LSD is beginning to change. No longer are psychedelics just pharmacological cluster bombs, ready to push a hapless user to insanity. Instead, a new image, still in development, reveals these drugs as medicines for ailing souls.
No psychedelic drug has captured the popular imagination as a healing substance quite the way ayahuasca has. Celebrities from Lindsay Lohan to Sting have publicly endorsed its healing potential, and it has even wormed its way into popular television shows such as (believe it or not)
However, despite changing popular conceptions of psychedelics, particularly ayahuasca, the dialogue remains firmly planted in the domain of the therapeutic and the spiritual. While a quick Google search can return hundreds of articles, forum posts and trip reports that deal extensively with the psychological, therapeutic, and spiritual ramifications of experiences like those engendered by ayahuasca, what the discussion often lacks is a firm scientific footing—some context about how these drugs work on a chemical level, an explanation of what’s actually happening inside your body and brain when these drugs are consumed.
This feels like something of a missed opportunity: There’s a beauty and sense of wonder that comes from knowing how the world works, and the nature of the psychedelic experience dovetails almost perfectly with that awareness. There’s a profound symmetry between the wonder you feel learning how a biological or physical process happens and the wonder you feel when your mind is expanded by a psychedelic. Seeing a flower as a complex and emergent property of a hundred million chemical processes, and seeing that same flower as a beautiful manifestation of an interconnected, spiritual universe are not that different; they may even be the same.
DMT AND SEROTONIN
Ayahuasca is made by making a crude extraction from two very specific plants: Banisteriopsis caapi (which is the ayahuasca vine itself) and Psychotria viridis. While different curandero/as have their own recipes that can include various admixtures (and some leave out the P. viridis entirely), if you find yourself talking to an up-and-coming tech bro at Burning Man about his visionary ayahuasca experience, you’re almost certainly talking about the combination of those two plants for one very special reason: DMT. While ayahuasca without DMT can be a profound experience, it is the oral DMT that creates the visual fireworks, and its near-mythical status in the family of psychedelic drugs definitely adds to the mystique surrounding ayahuasca.
After boiling the plants for several hours, a few important molecules have migrated from the plants into the water. DMT, obviously, is one, although the others are arguably more important: harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine, which are all very similar molecules and belong to a family called beta-carbolines. It is these three molecules that make the ayahuasca experience possible. Ordinarily, DMT is not orally active, which means that if you were to sit down and take a pill of DMT, it would have no effect on your consciousness. While it has visionary effects when inhaled or injected, when eaten it is (normally) worthless.
All of this is a quirk of biochemistry, which will be important later. Organic molecules, such as DMT, harmine, and our own neurotransmitters, gain their function from their shape: all of them are basically bundles of identical carbon atoms arranged into different configurations (with a handful of other atoms like Oxygen and Nitrogen thrown in). The shape of a molecule determines what its effect is; form determines function. At this level, biology and biochemistry are essentially applied geometry: The physical substrate of our body is largely carbon, no different than a diamond, or a charcoal briquette, but all that carbon in our bodies and brains happens to be organized into exquisite and dizzyingly complicated shapes which fit together in just the right way. From that intricate clockwork, life emerges.
When you look at the shape of DMT, you’ll notice it looks quite a bit like the shape of another well-known molecule: serotonin. As everyone knows (thanks to concerted advertising campaigns from the pharmaceutical giants) serotonin is a neurotransmitter, occurring naturally in the brain, helping to regulate the complicated dance of neural information processing. This symmetry means that in the body, DMT interacts with other molecules in much the same way that serotonin does: The classic metaphor is a lock and key. In this case, if serotonin is the key to a variety of different locks, DMT is a knock-off key similar enough that it can open some of the same doors. This is where its psychedelic effects come from. Before we get there though, we still need to determine why DMT isn’t ordinarily orally active, but is in ayahuasca.
When serotonin is released in the brain and body, it serves a very particular purpose; once that purpose is filled, it’s in the interest of the body to get rid of it. This is accomplished through the use of enzymes, which are biochemical machines that facilitate chemical reactions that otherwise would be too slow, or wouldn’t occur at all. The enzyme we’re interested here is called L-monamine oxidase A (MAO-A). From its name, someone literate in biochemical jargon can figure out it takes monoamine molecules (like serotonin), and degrades them through a process called oxidation. Coming back to our lock-and-key metaphor, imagine a lock that fit a particular key—but rather than locking or unlocking a door, it was immediately snapped in half. In everyday bodily functioning, this is all well and good, all part of the delicate balance of metabolism. But for those looking to explore consciousness, DMT looks enough like serotonin that it too fits into our imaginary key-chewing machine. When DMT is eaten, it passes from the stomach into the bloodstream, where it goes directly to the liver and is immediately chewed up by MAO-A into something that has no interesting biological activity whatsoever.
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