A Skeptic’s Trip to the Heart of Ayahuasca TourismJournalist Kinga Philipps has built a career swimming with sharks, free-diving to perilous depths and chainsawing her way through jungles, but her latest assignment drew the most concern for her safety from friends and family, and the strongest opinions from colleagues. “Somehow, my attending a wellness retreat with plant medicine sparked more warnings than any of the above,” she writes, “which only made me more determined.” This wasn’t a weekend of sand and surf, but a weeklong trip to Central America to drink ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic brew that’s gaining popularity around the world. While it’s illegal in the U.S. as the tea, made from a vine and the leaves of a flowering shrub, contains DMT, over 15,000 participants have traveled to a particular luxury retreat in Costa Rica to experience the psychedelic effects of the “vine of the soul.” “The details of purging, diarrhea and visions are fairly well documented — and yes, they are absolutely true,” Kinga writes, and she doesn’t hold back in her saga either. But more intriguing than the sensational details is the story she tells of why people are interested in ayahuasca at all. In her group of 70, there were military veterans and psychologists, lawyers and taco-stand owners, single moms and parents with their adult children. Why were they seeking out something so radical? Kinga joined them to find out. | 