Can ayahuasca change a man? The rise of trips against misunderstood masculinity

Drugs, like any product, go through marketing phases. Just as cocaine, before it alarmingly permeated all layers of society, was perceived as a yuppie pastime and glorified as entertainment for the upper classes or an accessory for charismatic characters in the most commercial cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, and in recent years ketamine has come to be considered the drug of Generation Z, now the turn of rebranding has come to ayahuasca, an ancient Amazonian plant that has psychoactive properties after its decoction. We are no longer just talking about the exotic anecdote of the adventurer who spent a sabbatical year in the jungle or the murky ritual of another friend who became a hippie, but rather a kind of trend among Silicon Valley executives, a recurring topic of conversation in the sphere of podcasts of men talking to men (and lately certain men can’t stop talking), and a substance of renewed pharmacological interest for modern psychiatry.

An architect who prefers not to provide her name reveals to EL PAÍS that years ago she worked on a project to build a pavilion in Malibu next to a meditation retreat for supervised ayahuasca consumption. “The dimensions were around 250 square meters. The concept that the clients were looking for was that the effect of ayahuasca would be translated into the design. That is why it was proposed that it be like a chrysalis, simulating the process that a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. It was designed for people with a lot of money,” she explains. The prices for clients were exorbitant. And not just anyone could apply: those interested had to send an application that would then go through a screening process. “They asked us for the bathrooms to be large, because that was where the clients would go to vomit. And a bathtub for them to get in when they finished,” recalls the architect.

In the absence of further scientific research, users engage in a sort of trial and error that, according to specialists, should always consist of “guided experiences.” Because ayahuasca, whose taste and intensity do not make it suitable as a recreational drug, carries the same risks as any other hallucinogenic substance. As psychologist and psychopharmacologist Dimitri Daldegan Bueno told EL PAÍS in 2023, “the psychological effects can be very intense and sometimes the person may need support to assimilate the experience. In general, ayahuasca is not recommended for people with mental conditions related to the psychotic spectrum because it can cause an episode or worsen it.” He also indicated that there may be “interactions with some antidepressant medications, so it is advisable that people who take them consult their psychiatrist before taking ayahuasca.”

We did it in the house of an older man who was a psychiatrist and who smuggled in ayahuasca. He told us to dress in white, but otherwise it was all a bit lumpen”

Ángel, Barcelona

The omnipresent Elon Musk had an initiation journey with the controversial computer guru Lex Fridman. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, also confessed in an interview that his “totally incredible” experiences with psychotropic drugs made him go from being a “very anxious and unhappy person to a calm guy.” And these testimonies are not entirely new. After all, Steve Jobs once said that taking LSD “is one of the two or three most important things I have done in life,” and that “Bill Gates would be a more open-minded guy if he had dropped acid from time to time.”

Austen Allred, CEO of Bloom Tech, warned about the corporate consequences of the popularization of ayahuasca among millionaire entrepreneurs. He did so with a dismayed message on X: “Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year. Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.” Allred went so far as to estimate that eight entrepreneurs had resigned from their responsibilities after opening the third eye of their consciousness.

Psychiatrist Josep Maria Fàbregas, a leading expert in the therapeutic use of psychedelics, is not surprised by these resignations from the technological world. “Many of these executives realized that they were working on creating algorithms to hook teenagers and sell them things. Through ayahuasca, it is possible to obtain such a powerful emotional shock with reality that you prefer to dedicate yourself to organic farming or the wellbeing of others. The potential of the plant for connecting with emotion and with the universe can lead you to this,” the expert tells EL PAÍS. Fàbregas argues that ayahuasca has proven useful in treating severe depression, complicated grief, or post-traumatic stress. That cliché of contemporary audiovisuals in which a character discovers, thanks to a psychotropic trip, that the monster that haunted him in childhood was actually his father? (See Queer, the recently released film that reinterprets William Burroughs’ book.) The doctor assures that it also happens in real life. “One of the advantages of these substances is the possibility of entering the unconscious to refocus on those experiences. The word unconscious is nothing more than that part of the memory where we have stored things that we do not like or that hurt us. Ayahuasca has the ability to illuminate this dark part.”

Fàbregas believes that we are experiencing a rebirth in the therapeutic use of hallucinogens. “There is a paradigm shift in how to understand the role of psychedelics in mental health. Many therapies were launched in the seventies, but that trend was aborted in the early eighties as a result of the war on drugs started by Nixon. This change made some sense, because there was a banalization of the use of these substances, with an excessive spread, not only on the individual level, but also on the social and political level. Then there was a period of darkness, a 40-year journey through the desert. And now we are witnessing a renaissance in which psychedelics have regained a prestigious role in mental health.”

The number of studies with these active ingredients plummeted when they were included in Schedule 1 of the Vienna Convention on the Control of Narcotic Substances, a move that stigmatized them as materials of no medical interest. But the social proliferation of that typical friend who returned from his vacation in the Amazon with enticing anecdotes revived scientific interest. “The milestone that demonstrates the psychedelic renaissance,” argues Fàbregas, “is that in 2022 at the Davos forum there was an entire panel with conferences dedicated exclusively to the use of psychedelics.”

As a possible medicine, ayahuasca has absolutely clear and manifest indications and also contraindications, without a doubt. I advocate that psychedelic knowledge cannot fall into the trap of trivialization again and must be accompanied by science and respect”

Josep Maria Fàbregas, psychiatrist

Any search on YouTube that brings up the items “Joe Rogan + ayahuasca” will confirm that the manosphere is experiencing a strange love affair with the plant, but the doctor invites us to look beyond the clichés and trends. Yes, the world of bombastic masculinity may have found its new favorite toy in the psychotranscendent experience, but an introspective journey, properly guided, can also lead to deactivating those same structures of patriarchal conceit. “Every day there is more information from people who have felt their lives transformed in a profound way by an experience with a psychedelic, that is totally real,” explains Fàbregas. “There are people who go to unregulated, non-medical ayahuasca sessions, looking for these answers, and they find essential information to change. For example, individuals with a masculinity understood from chauvinism who, thanks to a powerful spiritual experience, are transformed very deeply. Ayahuasca, properly administered, can be a tool for growth.”

Experiences are diverse. Ángel took ayahuasca for the first time at the age of 25 with several friends in an apartment in Barcelona. He remembers the experience as “not very bucolic” but positive. “We did it in the house of an older man who was a psychiatrist and who smuggled in ayahuasca. He told us to dress in white, but otherwise it was all a bit lumpen.” The session developed very differently for all the participants. Ángel remembers that he was receptive and that the effects of the plant came on him much faster than his companions after the first intake. “I was very high, I closed my eyes and flew over some diamond caves accompanied by a clearly feminine presence who spoke to me telepathically. At one point, she said to me: ‘If you want to go there, I will go with you, but you are going to promise me that you will never tell anyone, it is something for you to enjoy alone.” Ángel told the voice that he wasn’t going to be able to keep the secret, and then the experience came to a screeching halt. “She told me no deal and the shutters suddenly went down. From then on I was sober all night. The psychiatrist gave me two more shots, but it was impossible to get high again. And the rest of my friends were high.”

Ángel thinks it’s logical that many men reflect on their identity after an ayahuasca trance, especially now that the cultural and political boundaries of a certain masculinity are increasingly blurred. “In the end, in any field you look for answers to fashionable questions. If gender is in vogue and there is a lot of reflection on it, it’s normal that when you face a transcendental experience, the questions that are most in the collective imagination appear there. Our shaman told us that ayahuasca was a clearly feminine drug while peyote is masculine. I experienced it that way, clearly.” Ángel says he has tried mushrooms, MDMA and LSD, but maintains that ayahuasca is the experience that has affected him the most for the lengthiest time.

“I have spent thousands of euros on therapy because I have ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] that was diagnosed late and I have often thought: why don’t I go to a therapist who can get me high so I can talk? The barriers that are broken when you are high can be useful for the therapist to guide you,” ººhe says.

Teresa took ayahuasca for the first time at the age of 23, surrounded by friends, in London. Today she remembers that first experience as a rather idyllic initiation exercise. “Although it sounds hippie, I have to say that I felt like I was thinking differently. Your neurons make other types of connections and it is easier for you to reach conclusions. I am not talking about great revelations, but thoughts that you internalize in a different way, as if your personality changed a little,” she confesses. Precisely this cognitive modulation makes her now aware of the danger that an experience under the guidance of the wrong hands can have. In particular, those of a perverse man. “The figure of the shaman seems dangerous to me and it is very easy for it to correspond to narcissistic figures,” she warns.

That is why Teresa is hesitant when asked about the possibilities of ayahuasca as a lever for new masculinities. “We live in a patriarchal culture in which men are assimilated with a presumed stoicism, which is very questionable if we take into account that, later on, this same masculinity is the most emotional and overwhelming. Now, can ayahuasca help channel these emotions from other perspectives? Maybe. But it is only a vehicle, a medium; ayahuasca cannot be the answer to any problem. There is no point in taking anything if you do not aspire to change.”

Do we take drugs to escape reality or to understand it? Here is the chicken and the egg of altered consciousness. Those who resort to the disinhibition of plant elixirs are often apostles of some kind of revelation. The relationship between truth and substance, long cherished by drug historiography and its scholars, from Antonio Escohotado to Jonathan Ott, equates the consumer of entheogenic toxins with an explorer in search of a piece of transcendence. Fàbregas confirms the capacity of this drug to access profound truths but also warns of the risks of imprudent use. “As a possible medicine, ayahuasca has absolutely clear and manifest indications and also contraindications, without a doubt. I advocate that psychedelic knowledge cannot fall into the trap of trivialization again and must be accompanied by science and respect. Respect for previous knowledge, for the Indigenous populations that have used it for millennia. We must understand how to translate this knowledge into our culture and act correctly. And it must be in the hands of capable, prepared, and ethical people.”

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