JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Mind-altering drugs have come a long way since the psychedelic '60s. They are now a booming area for scientific research, and President Trump signed an executive order earlier this year to fast-track the review of psychedelic drugs for mental health and brain-related conditions. One of those compounds is DMT, a powerful hallucinogen that has shown promising results in reducing the symptoms of depression. DMT is found in the plant brew known as ayahuasca. It's also found in a tree known as jurema preta that's native to Brazil.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language).
ROSE: The jurema preta tree has long shaped the culture of Indigenous and Afro Brazilian people in Brazil's northeast. The chant we're hearing is from the Pankararu, who live in the Caatinga biome, where the jurema preta tree thrives and where it has been used in religious rituals that date back centuries.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Chanting in non-English language).
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language).
ROSE: Those are field recordings made by Marcelo Leite. He's a science journalist for the Brazilian news outlet Folha de Sao Paulo. He's also written a book, "The Psychedelic Science Of The Jurema Tree," which has just been published in English. And Marcelo Leite joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the program.
MARCELO LEITE: Thank you, Joel.
ROSE: Let's start with the scientific research around DMT and depression. What is it showing us?
LEITE: DMT is present in two brews or beverages in Brazil, both ayahuasca and the wine of jurema. This group at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte has been doing research on ayahuasca for depression for some years now, and they, at some point, decided in order to shorten the experience from four to six hours to maybe to 10, 15 minutes and make it more suitable for clinical purposes, they started using vaporized DMT, the psychoactive compound in those beverages.
They proved really powerful that they had the same kind of antidepressant effect on the volunteers. And so they are now trying to get to the phase 3 clinical trials. They are - used the synthesized form, not extracted from jurema, but it's the same substance. And they are trying to get the data necessary for licensing this new type of treatment against depression.
ROSE: So in addition to reporting on this new biomedical research, you also volunteered to be part of a pilot clinical trial on DMT. I have to ask you - what was it like when it kicked in?
LEITE: Well, that's correct. I took part in the very beginning of the - of this trial, in the so-called pilot phase, two doses of vaporized DMT, a few hours apart on the same day in 2022, respectively, 30 and a hundred milligrams. They proved to be too strong, in a sense. And in subsequent trials, the researchers reduced them to 15 and 60 milligrams. I was not new to psychedelics, having tried ayahuasca before. Naive patients might panic under the influence of such an overwhelming experience.
The first dose was pleasant, very visual and beautiful, launched me into a very happy state of mind. The second one, on the other hand, was a lot darker, as if I had descended to, let's say, a basement of my mind, one dominated by a feeling of being utterly vulnerable, about to dissolve in nothingness. I guess I was on the verge of what researchers call ego dissolution. In any event, a few hours later, I was feeling quite well, renewed, in peace with myself.
ROSE: You traveled extensively to villages far from Sao Paulo to understand the use of jurema preta by traditional cultures in northeast Brazil. Why was it important for you to do that?
LEITE: Well, jurema is a very important form of religion in the northeastern part of Brazil.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Chanting in non-English language).
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LEITE: They started using the so-called jurema wine - (speaking Portuguese), in Portuguese - centuries if not millennia ago, the Indigenous peoples there that were living in the Caatinga, the very dry biome in the northeastern part of Brazil, ritually. And I wanted to get in touch with this culture that is not really well-known in Brazil, to say the least. And that's why I visited quite a few Indigenous villages, as well as temples of worship in urban areas in the northeast, where people practice and carry rituals of jurema in order to be able to understand more of this long and history of repression, even, by the Catholic Church first and then by the police and even nowadays by some evangelical denominations that think that they are doing the work of the devil or black magic or something like that.
ROSE: You shared a video with us of a Fulni-o tribe member chanting. Let's hear a little bit of that.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Chanting in Ia-te).
ROSE: And you said this moment made you cry. Why?
LEITE: Difficult to say, Joel. I can't understand the word of this song because it's sung in Ia-te, the only language that remained among Indigenous peoples of the northeastern part of Brazil. And so I don't know, maybe the melody, the fact that the people were really nice and friendly to me when they got into this little hut where we had this maybe two or three hours of conversation. And at some point, after the interview that I was recording, they said that they wanted to sing a prayer of benediction.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Chanting in Ia-te).
LEITE: And I don't know. I felt, you know, welcomed. I felt safe. I felt happy to be there with those people that I had never encountered before. I felt like a - how can I say? - a brother. I felt well in this situation, and it's something really difficult to explain in rational terms.
ROSE: You have been in your life a self-described atheist. Do I have that right?
LEITE: Yes.
ROSE: And you have spent decades as a science journalist. How has your reporting on psychedelics changed your outlook?
LEITE: Well, I guess I developed a respect for mystical - what people call mystical experiences because I had the opportunity of feeling this kind of ocean feeling, of being part of something bigger than yourself. And having taken part in this, I have a different appreciation of the kind of manifestations and the experiences these people have.
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LEITE: And that's what changed me and also made me more humble, maybe, in the sense that I now understand a little better that science cannot explain away everything. There are parts of our lives and our psyche that are not easy to explain in scientific terms, and maybe we don't need to explain them. You have to just experience them. It's part of life, a very important part of life for many people and that I, for many years or decades as a science journalist, may have underappreciated. That's a big change. It doesn't sound maybe as a big change, but for me, it was a really big change.
ROSE: Yeah. You write that Western science can learn from Indigenous ways of thinking about mind-altering states. How so?
LEITE: There's a big potential with psychedelics in general for public health and for group healing. And that's what more or less the Indigenous people do. The later developments in psychedelic research and clinical trials point to a sort of medicalization of psychedelics and the use of psychedelics that might be underestimating the power of those drugs and those experiences, putting all the value and focus on the pharmacological effect. And I think that's a mistake because what Indigenous peoples teach us is that the group setting and the kind of cultural practices is very important as not only the drug, the molecule itself, but all the other elements and components that come together with the ritual use of those powerful medicines.
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ROSE: Marcelo Leite is a science journalist and the author of "The Psychedelic Science Of The Jurema Tree." Thank you very much for your time.
LEITE: Thank you.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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