Altered States

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.

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.

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.

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.