The Trippy Science of Psychedelics as Medicine

Ernesto Londoño shares five 5 key insights from Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics.

Photo by Christopher Ott on Unsplash

Are you tripping? Ernesto Londoño was in 2018 when he participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in the jungles of Brazil. Not only did the experience seem to relieve his depression, it sent him on a journalistic journey to understand the rising use of psychedelics -- in formal and informal settings -- to address a range of mental and spiritual maladies. Ernesto is a national correspondent at The New York Times and he joins us now to share 5 key insights from his book Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics.

1. The hype is outpacing the science.

Over the past five years, there has been a surge of interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. This was turbocharged by Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, which tells the fascinating history of a promising field of medicine that was hastily abandoned in the 1970s at the dawn of the War on Drugs.