Near the tail end of my living adventure in Mexico City, I began voraciously consuming content about psychedelics, in particular, mushrooms, DMT, and ayahuasca, among others.
Listening to dozens of psychedelics-related podcasts, as well as rapidly consuming audiobooks, I gained a general, although passive, understanding of psychedelics.
This ranged from psychology, sociology, biology, and chemistry, all the way to the legal systems of various countries, the histories within indigenous cultures, western society and western medicine, and various conspiracies that involved experimenting on people passively, as well as, actively to see if they could give special powers (hint: the answer is no).
Nonetheless, Mexico has a deep and rich, yet secluded culture of using psychedelics as an indigenous medicine.
San Jose Del Pacifico was a name of a town in Mexico that came up several times throughout learning about psychedelics. In a sister town several hundreds of KM away, a scientist from the USA arrived in the 1950’s, and began experimenting with mushrooms.
He arrived back in the USA, and slowly the message spread of a substance that can ‘open your mind’, thus leading to the first ‘psychedelic tourism’.
By the 1960’s and 1970’s, this tourism, started to corrupt the towns with money, and thus began a decline in indigenous traditions, and a rapid rise in hippies who simply wanted to get high, with no regard to anything else about the cultures.
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