Ethnobotanist, author and medicine hunter and True Kundalini founder Christopher Kilham is a renowned expert on cannabis, as well as other psychoactive plants and fungi. He recently released his 15th book, The Lotus and the Bud, which examines the role of cannabis within the ancient yogic traditions of India and the Himalayas, and Kilham completed a four-week engagement as MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Canada’s expert in residence for the latest installment in the Examining the Psychedelic Renaissance Expert Series, titled “Ethnobotany Of Psychoactive Plants.” CULTURE chatted with Kilham about exploration in the world of cannabis and the budding, legal psychedelics movement.
How did you first get interested in psychedelics, and what drew you to them?
Becoming involved with psychedelics was both a function of the times and of my own inclination to explore the mind. I was a teenager in the 1960s when LSD exploded on the scene in a big, loud way. Everybody heard about LSD; it was in the papers and magazines, and news organizations ran endless stories about acid, mostly about how it would destroy your life.
At the same time, the hippie movement was in full swing, and many bright and eloquent people were speaking out about the marvels and revelations of LSD. It seemed to me and to many of my friends that we were being totally gassed by governmental “experts” and lurid propaganda. I read everything I could get my hands on and decided that LSD was worth trying.
So at age 15, on a sunny, 1967, Saturday afternoon at a boarding school in Massachusetts, I got high for the very first time on 250 micrograms of White Lightning LSD, produced by venerable genius acid maker Owsley Stanley. It was magnificent.
What do you think are still some of the biggest psychedelics misconceptions holding back society?
Misconceptions and basic lack of knowledge contribute to the overall misunderstanding of psychedelics. One pervasive misunderstanding is that psychedelics are gateway drugs to ruin and that eventually, you’ll wind up with a needle in your arm in a shabby place. Another is that psychedelics are the domain of only fringe people and social losers.
In the basic lack of knowledge department, many people do not know that psychedelics of all sorts, from magic mushrooms to ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, iboga, morning glory, virola and more, have been utilized all over the globe since antiquity for healing, divination, revelation and spiritual refreshment. These don’t come from Haight Ashbury but from millennia of traditional enjoyment.
In general, many social concepts about psychedelics simply ape vile propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s. We are still digging out of that nasty hole.
Do you think psychedelics will eventually become an industry like cannabis? And do you want it to?
There have always been industrious people supplying psychedelics. Owsley Stanley, Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully made millions of hits of acid and turned on a huge number of people. Now, that is industrious. But the pharmaceuticalization of psychedelics, an old concept, is a profiteering, short-sighted, exclusionary, reductionist fool’s errand that fails to consider our fundamental nature as human beings and pays scant attention to the full possibilities of true healing.
Yes, pharmaceutical companies will do what they have always done, patenting psychedelics, fighting in court to protect patents, hawking “shareholder value” to investors who have no skin in the game and supplying the clinical market. Remember, LSD was developed at Sandoz (as Delysid), as was pure psilocybin (as Indocybin). Both of the Sandoz psychedelics were developed by Dr. Albert Hoffman, whose famous bicycle ride tripping on acid we celebrate.
Ibogaine was a pharmaceutical drug in the 1960s, and MDMA is an old Merck amphetamine.
So pharmaceutical involvement is nothing new. But don’t pop the Champagne corks over impending stock values quite yet. Those of us who have dived very deeply into psychedelics and healing are here to challenge this misguided effort, to keep psychedelics broadly accessible, natural and wild. We must never allow pharmaceutical dominance in the psychedelic world. The basic pharma model of exclusivity and dominance is utterly anathema to the open, sharing, unified experience promoted by psychedelics.
We instigators are here to fight. Independent, extra-legal labs will turn out brilliant LSD, DMT and psilocybin. I am for nature, for millions of years of our coevolution with plants and fungi and their glorious synergistic arrays of biologically active compounds that no lab can duplicate. Eat mushrooms. Drink ayahuasca. Swallow Peyote. Blow virola up into your sinuses. Keep to the plants and fungi. The psychedelic underground will prevail.
What advice would you give to someone trying psychedelics for the first time?
My advice is to adhere to set and setting, to be in a lovely and safe spot, to be with friends and to trip full-on. It’s a good idea to have ground control, someone thoughtful, caring and experienced. This can prove helpful when you are way out passed the shipping lanes.
I am well aware that many people benefit from micro-dosing, and that is a good thing. But, if you want to experience what psychedelics can really do, then elevate yourself with a solid amount that will crack your cosmic egg wide open. In other words, go for the gold. When my friends and I first elevated ourselves with psychedelics, we went full-on, and the experience was almost uniformly enlivening and revelatory.
How does yoga tie in with cannabis and psychedelics?
Among its many virtues for promoting health, energy, vitality, peace and awareness of spirit, yoga is a path of ecstasy. Cannabis and psychedelics also promote ecstasy, though more readily and easily for most people. As a yogi, I have found that devoted everyday practice, sometimes accentuated with cannabis, and seasoned with occasional dips deep into the nectar tank of powerful psychedelics, is a wonderful, enlivening program. Yoga is innately healing and harmonizing, as are cannabis and psychedelics when thoughtfully employed. Many yogis have re-discovered these agents and have added them into their lives. A favorite scripture I like says, “a Yogi must know the medicines.” These are profound medicines. It’s okay to embrace them and revere them.
Are there any travel plans you’re especially excited for, post-pandemic?
Yes. Back to Vanuatu, South Pacific for Kava, back to Malaysia for rainforest medicines there and the same for northern Thailand. I also have recently found the location of a shaman I’ve been chasing for 12 years and will go back down to Peru to dive deeply into more ayahuasca with him. Now that will be a full-on psychedelic situation with an epic maestro who shatters boundaries.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
People are attracted to psychedelics because these marvelous agents open new dimensions of thought and provide healing and inspiration when other things fail. Do not fear the vastness of consciousness. Dive in with all your heart.
