The Noke Koi are an Indigenous group from Acre, Brazil who consider themselves guardians of the psychoactive plant brew ayahuasca, which they call “uni.” This summer, they traveled to the U.S. to spread an urgent message: their home in the Amazon is being destroyed.

When a neurosurgeon claimed he glimpsed the afterlife during a coma, skeptics offered a more earthly interpretation – a surge of DMT produced by his own body. Was his tale of eternity a trick of the brain, or a window into something science can’t explain?

Vivaldi. Bach. The Beatles. The Johns Hopkins playlist has been the standard soundtrack in psychedelic trials at Johns Hopkins and therapy rooms around the world for more than 25 years. It also skews toward Classical and Christian music. When Sughra Ahmed, a Muslim, enrolled in a psilocybin study that used this playlist, she didn’t love what she heard. So where did this playlist come from exactly? And what can science tell us about what role music plays in a trip?

Nearly a decade ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University gave some two dozen religious leaders from various faith backgrounds a high dose of psilocybin. Now, the long-awaited results of the study are out. Journalist Michael Pollan, who wrote about the research for The New Yorker, weighs in on whether science can ever truly measure mysticism.

Over the next ten episodes we’re going to explore two distinct camps in the world of psychedelics. On one side there’s the realm of spiritualists, mystical experiences, and psychedelic churches. And on the other are scientists, clinical trials, animal studies and psychopharmacologists. These two camps are often far apart but when they get all tangled up together things get really interesting.

A former Navy SEAL named Craig deployed nine times over nearly three decades in the military. When he left the service, he felt lucky to have all his limbs, toes and fingers. But he found himself struggling with language and memory and rising frustration. One day he forgot his wife’s name and couldn’t remember it for hours. His wife Gretchen started looking for help online and found information about a Stanford University research study on ibogaine and veterans. Craig volunteered. 

For a transcript of this episode, please visit this link.

A plan to protect the peyote cactus is taking shape on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska during this summer’s Native American Church of North America conference. Indigenous leaders are hustling to take their peyote proposal all the way to the White House before the November election. Producer Adreanna Rodriguez tells the story.

For a transcript of this episode, please visit this link.

When journalist Anna Silman started reporting on ketamine five years ago she did so because people in her friend group had begun taking the drug recreationally. She was intrigued by the ways that interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy meant more people were taking ketamine, both with a prescription and without one too. But as she started to see friends struggle with dependency, something other countries have been ringing the alarm about for years, she began to wonder whether the U.S. has been too naive. We hear from a woman we’re calling Olivia, just a few months out of rehab, who thinks the risks of ketamine have been severely underestimated.

For a transcript of this episode, please visit this link.

At first the effort in Oregon to legalize psilocybin seemed doomed. Then the organizers started talking to the architect behind the carefully coordinated, state-by-state campaign to legalize cannabis, an attorney by the name of Graham Boyd. His initial thought was that what worked for cannabis would never work for psychedelics. But what he found in Oregon changed his mind. Producer Damiano Marchetti investigates.

For a transcript of this episode, please visit this link.

Ernesto Londoño is a national correspondent and former war correspondent at The New York Times. For most of his life, Ernesto was a classic journalist – skeptical, stoic – whose early life in war-torn Colombia and reporting experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan left him traumatized, though he didn’t know it. Then Ernesto signs up for a retreat in the Amazon where he drinks ayahuasca. This retreat is followed by many more throughout Latin America. These experiences began to melt some of his armor, revealing a surprising new side of himself. Along the way, Ernesto reports on the strange world of international psychedelics retreats.

For a transcript of this episode, please visit this link.