Psychedelics Summer Camp: A New Form Of Tourism [5-MeO-DMT]

[blistersinthedark]

(Includes a neat experience report!)

Psychedelics Summer Camp: A New Form Of Tourism​

Unconditional love. An experience of nonexistence. Here’s what happened when I took 5-MeO-DMT at a luxurious retreat.
John Semley
Posted on September 20, 2021, at 1:20 p.m. ET


Montego Bay, on the northwestern edge of Jamaica, is, according to a popular tourist slogan, “the complete resort.” Snorkeling. ATV safaris. Catamaran cruises. An outpost of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville. Golf. But I wasn’t here for any of that. I traveled to Jamaica, during a global pandemic, to experience, well, total nothingness.

I came in pursuit of the feeling of nonexistence, chemically catalyzed by a tryptamine called 5-MeO-DMT, aka 5-MeO or Five. It’s also called Toad because it occurs naturally in the pustulelike glands of Bufo alvarius, a toad native to the Sonoran Desert. Most fancifully, 5-MeO-DMT is called The God Moleculebecause it facilitates full-blown mystical experiences, including an alleged communion with some higher-order, divine consciousness. It is the most powerful psychedelic on the planet. (5-MeO-DMT is illegal in the US and its full effects on one’s health are not known.)

Freebased at low doses, it promises an extremely intense rejigging of waking consciousness. As the underground chemist Ken Nelson described the experience in a 1984 pamphlet: “You will be completely absorbed in a complex chemical event characterized by an overload of thoughts and perception, brief collapse of the EGO [sic], and loss of the space-time continuum.” Among users of psychedelics, this is referred to as “ego death,” which a team of researchers at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University say is marked by “a complete loss of subjective self-identity” and a feeling of “merging into the surrounding environment or the entire universe.” Alexander Shulgin, a chemist best known for first synthesizing MDMA, or ecstasy, described a more pointed reaction after smoking 30 milligrams of Five. “I was crawled up on my bed (in the fetal position) with my eyes closed,” he wrote, “squirming around, screaming (in my head) ‘Fuck! You killed yourself!’ I repeated this several times, very fearful of death.”
Psychedelic tourism was, at least pre-COVID, trending. Gwyneth Paltrow dispatched her staffers to a magic mushroom retreat for an episode of her Netflix series The Goop Lab. Megan Fox recently told Jimmy Kimmel about visiting a Costa Rican resort serving ayahuasca, a ceremonial brew used by pan-Amazonian Indigenous groups; Lindsay Lohan is also an evangelist. According to Cameron Wenaus, cofounder of Retreat Guru (which he describes as “an Airbnb for psychedelic, and yoga, and meditation retreats”), such vacations are becoming normalized. “I mean, heck,” Wenaus told me from his home in Nelson, British Columbia, “now you can invest in psychedelics, as these companies are growing.” Biotechnology companies are now researching and developing psychedelic pharmaceuticals, with generous estimates speculating that the psychedelic drug market could be worth $10 billion by 2027. And as Wenaus noted, several companies are already attracting investors, whether on major stock exchanges like the Nasdaq or smaller exchanges trading in more specialized securities.
One of these publicly traded concerns is Silo Wellness, which has its headquarters in Toronto. It sells a variety of package holidays hosted at luxury resorts around Jamaica, where many psychedelics remain unscheduled under Jamaica’s Dangerous Drugs Act. These retreats are mostly focused around psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. But there is also a more curious offering. “Take on the Hero’s Journey,” reads the online catalog copy, “with the most powerful entheogenic substance on the planet, ‘The God Molecule.’”

Such mind-expanding sojourns are nothing new. In 1955, the J.P. Morgan exec and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson trekked to Oaxaca, Mexico, to take part in a traditional Mazatec ritual involving psilocybin mushrooms. Wasson’s travelogue “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” was published in Life magazine two years later, seeding interest in indigenous psychedelic rituals among white, middle-class Americans.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen a class of powerful, underground drugs reframed by mainstream medicine. I have heard stories from individuals whose lives have been enriched by these drugs and narrowed my gaze at a new class of profiteers looking to cash in on the increasing clinical and cultural acceptance of them. The psychedelic renaissance shows no sign of abating, and I’ve criticized its gentrifying effect on these drugs. Still, Silo’s Douglas Gordon invited me to take part in the company’s first 5-MeO retreat in Montego Bay, paid for by Silo. The offer was tantalizing, though it all seemed a bit ludicrous. I imagined the daily itinerary: At 9 a.m. some meditation, followed by a buffet lunch, and full ego death by 5 p.m.
Psychedelic tourism can fairly be called “problematic.” In the decades since Wasson, plenty of white folks have trekked south of the border in pursuit of mind expansion. And that’s fine, when done respectfully. What can rankle is the co-opting of traditions developed by native tribes, some of which date back a thousand years. It’s not uncommon for a rich, white, twentysomething to have an experience with a drug like ayahuasca, recast themselves as some nouveau shaman, and then set about hawking a version of that experience. Retreat Guru’s Wenaus tracked growth in several newer psychedelic retreats at reaching 50%–73% in the two years before the pandemic. “My gut sense,” he told me, “is that there have been many new entrants into the space in the last few years, so competition has increased.” And growth means growing pains.
Drugs prized for helping to heal the wounds of colonialism are now being colonized. This new cohort of tripper-tourists, as writer Mark Hay noted in 2020, “contribute to the wanton commodification and fetishization of the cultures whose practices they wish to insinuate themselves into.” Even Wasson’s original experience, it was later revealed, was underwritten by the CIA — all part of an ongoing psychedelic research project that included the psychological torture of unwitting clinical volunteers.

In this sense, 5-MeO-DMT is unique. It sounds similar to N,N-dimethyltryptamine (also known as N,N-DMT, or just DMT), a key ingredient in any ayahuasca blend. But the similarities are mostly alphabetic; 5-MeO is radically different, chemically and culturally. Despite trace elements being found in some Amazonian tobacco powders, it has little documented ritual place among Indigenous cultures. Its recreational use wasn’t even widely reported until the 1970s. And it was not ruled illegal in the United States until 2011, when the US Drug Enforcement Administration added it to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, alongside cannabis, mescaline, LSD, and heroin. (The DEA’s official ruling noted, “The risks to the public health associated with the abuse of 5-MeO-DMT are similar to the risks associated with those of schedule I hallucinogens. There have been reports of emergency room admissions and a death associated with the abuse of 5-MeO-DMT.”)
It also comes with no ancient playbook. Its biggest boosters are mostly super-nerdy clandestine chemists like Shulgin and Nelson, prodigious tinkerers whose experience with psychedelics is vast to the point of completionism. (Michael Pollan wrote about 5-MeO in his 2018 bestseller, How to Change Your Mind, a chronicle of the new landscape of psychedelics that has seemingly contributed to a marked uptick in psychedelic tourism.) Five, as far as psychedelic drugs go, remains more or less untainted by the stink of cultural appropriation. So what would a multiday retreat based on a drug that stimulates a wildly powerful but brief experience look like?

[cont'd]

I Tried The Most Powerful Psychedelic On The Planet

Unconditional love. An experience of nonexistence. Here’s what happened when I took 5-MeO-DMT at a luxurious retreat.

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[dragonix]

I thought they already did at the nude resort outside Negril? All joking aside looks like the lap of luxury is now at least trying to expand consciousness