The ayahuasca king: the man who gives jungle 'medicine' to lost souls
For years, Matthew Haddock was drifting on a tide of disillusionment. Like many Americans, Haddock, a practicing attorney in his late 40s, was hit hard by the 2008 recession – so hard it curdled the way he saw the world. People had become so obsessed with accumulating stuff, Haddock came to believe, that they had lost touch with what was important. This pervasive materialism, he thought, was a way of thinking that was “inevitably doomed”.
Desperate to reconnect with something meaningful, Haddock found himself turning to unexpected places. Though he was raised Southern Baptist, he now regularly sought refuge in the
Book of the Hopi – a compendium of teachings drawn from 30 Hopi elders in northern Arizona. He researched paganism in Ireland, and spent nine months visiting the Kabbalah Centre in Dallas (he left because the staff “kept trying to sell him things”). Once, in Tennessee, he visited a man who’d built his house over a Native American burial ground: “The basement wall had fallen in, and I went and put my head against it. I thought: ‘I want to know what these people know.’ Because that’s what we lose.”
Haddock had “an unquenchable thirst” for meaning. And then, in 2015, he met a man called Peter Gorman through a friend in Texas.
The shelves surrounding Peter Gorman’s office are filled with artifacts from the Peruvian Amazon. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux for the Guardian At first glance Gorman comes across as a gruff family man who speaks with a salty growl. But he also happens to be an award-winning journalist, a seasoned explorer, and a raconteur with a singular résumé. He’s also the author of two remarkable books about hallucinogenic drugs (he calls them “medicines”) sourced from the Amazon forest:
Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming and
Sapo in My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine.
Short supply of plant has led to uptake in commercial planting, use of dangerous alternatives and fears of deforestation
Since first visiting Peru in 1984, Gorman has become the American repository for a particularly unusual form of indigenous knowledge, which he shares with guests several times a year on his “
Jungle Jaunts” – nine-day expeditions into the Amazon that have earned a following among people who seek to “clear up physical ailments, emotional problems, [or] solve mid-life crises”.
There are now dozens of tourist retreats scattered around the waterlogged town of Iquitos that promise healing with hallucinogens and “traditional” plant remedies. But Gorman, who carefully screens all his guests, pitches something a little more advanced: what he has called “absolute Amazon reality”.
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Gorman told me when I asked what sort of people sign up for these adventures. “These people don’t want to be desperate. They want to do something extraordinary.”
I found myself growling and moving around on all fours. I felt as though animals were passing through me
At the beginning of 2016, Haddock flew to Iquitos to accompany Gorman into the Amazon. Following Gorman’s lead, he climbed aboard a small boat and floated for a dozen hours up the Río Ucayali. At the town of Genaro Herrera, he and other guests switched to dugout canoes, then drifted for another few hours up a smaller tributary. Eventually, they came to the rustic camp that Gorman maintains on the Río Aucayacu, surrounded by macaws, pink dolphins and fish that bite as you bathe in water the color of chocolate milk.
Haddock took off his shoes and ran around barefoot. “I fell in love with the jungle,” he told me longingly. He would stay there for several weeks, sequestered from society in a kind of prelapsarian Eden.
Gorman employs a
curandero, or traditional healer, at his camp. At their own discretion, guests can engage in a regime of medicines administered by the shaman: ayahuasca, “vine of the little death”; Nu-nu, a fiery snuff blown forcefully into the nasal cavity using a long pipe; and sapo, a secretion from the Phyllomedusa bicolor tree frog that is introduced directly into the bloodstream through a small burn (the shaman jabs you with a burning stick, then swabs frog slime into the open wound).
These kinds of medicines have become famous for their strong psychotropic effects, inducing vivid, occasionally terrifying visions. But they also seem to provide a sensation of universal connection that people like Haddock find profoundly stirring. He told me his senses had been sharpened after receiving the drugs; he felt opened up, newly aware of what was actually around him. “It’s about getting the natural world back into you,” he said.
What happens in the jungle does not necessarily stay in the jungle, either. After returning home, Haddock kept in close contact with Gorman in Texas. During the rest of 2016, he took doses of medicine over 20 more times – including, he mentioned casually, sapo just a few hours before I called him for this interview.
Haddock’s experience in the Amazon left an indelible impression. “I find it more and more difficult to connect to things here,” he said. “Honestly, it’s almost ruining me for life in materialistic, capitalist, urbanized society.” This sentiment echoed something Gorman mentioned while explaining how he felt responsible for his guests long after the tours ended: “I expanded you with the medicine and now you don’t fit into your life any more.”
Photographs of tribesmen and women from the Peruvian Amazon taken by Peter Gorman during one of his expeditions. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux for the Guardian This past December, I flew to Texas to listen to Gorman’s stories at his modest house in Joshua, which is a town 20 miles outside Fort Worth better known for its contingent of KKK members than liberal-leaning medicine men.
By then I’d interviewed nearly a dozen of Gorman’s former guests, including a licensed therapist, a clinical psychologist, a man who was looking to “refresh” after divorce, and an Alberta schoolteacher who got more than she bargained for on a vacation with her father. Many of these former guests had described their jungle jaunts as transcendental, and almost all of them had described Gorman in roughly equivalent terms. He was “a whole lot of trouble”, but in a good way, “like Charles Bukowski”. He was “rough around the edge” and extremely direct. He was intimidating yet reassuring, “a walking paradox”, not unlike a classic figure from Buddhism: “The good spirit hidden inside the old beggar.”
I found Gorman sitting in his home office chain-smoking cigarettes. At 65 years old, he is grey-bearded and weather-beaten, and wore cargo shorts and a Cheshire Cat grin. He speaks with a booming, theatrical voice that somehow reminded me of a pirate – several of which, incidentally, he once encountered in the Amazon during a river expedition to gather plants (according to his book, he and his shipmate, a woman named Chepa, shouted them off while waving machetes; then he turned to her and confessed his love, and they got married a year later).
By way of introduction, Gorman pointed out some of his favorite objects around the office, including numerous journalism awards for his coverage in Fort Worth Weekly of the Keystone pipeline battle and fracking in Texas. He has twice been named Texas print journalist of the year by the Houston Press Club, proof of which hangs on his wall next to a framed letter from the American Museum of Natural History thanking him for three artifacts he donated and which are currently on display.
Many more are right here, on cluttered shelves kept for his own edification – Shipibo pottery, exotic bird feathers, a necklace made from ocelot teeth. Gorman gestured to a fearsome-looking poison dart. “I always tell the kids if somebody comes at night, take that down,” he said. “They won’t make it back to their car.”
Gorman hosts trips to the Peruvian Amazon with those seeking a life change. The trips often includes use of the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux for the Guardian Gorman was born in Queens into a family of actors and artists. He found his own calling as a writer, and traveled to South America in the early 1980s, hoping to earn money as a freelance foreign correspondent to pay his way. In the Amazon, which he wanted to see “before capitalism completely destroyed it”, he took ayahuasca decades before it became a trend drug among Brooklyn and Silicon Valley elites.
Gorman’s initial hallucinations involved astral travel with birds and conversations with snakes. He was skeptical of his experience, asking himself: “Was it possible that my ego had really dissolved enough – momentarily – to allow me to interplay with another form, or was my ego so distended that I could dream the vision up and convince myself it was true?” After further visits, he decided on the former.
Gorman’s Amazon guide, Moisés, introduced him to members of the remote Matsés tribe on the Peruvian-Brazilian border, who showed him even more exotic substances, such as sapo. Gorman had an extreme reaction when the frog secretion was swabbed on to his arm: “I found myself growling and moving around on all fours. I felt as though animals were passing through me, trying to express themselves through my body. It was a fantastic feeling, but a fleeting one.”
Every year, thousands of tourists head to the Peruvian Amazon to take the plant medicine ayahuasca. But what does the powerful drink actually do, and what do local shamans think of the rise in its popularity?
Gorman claims to be the first person ever to have written about “an animal product being put directly into a human bloodstream for medicinal purposes”. His writings on sapo caught the attention of Vittorio Erspamer, the famed Italian pharmacologist who discovered serotonin and was twice nominated for the Nobel prize. Erspamer gave some money to Gorman to return to the Amazon and collect a frog for his research. Erspamer’s
initial studies of sapo “showed it to be a complex mix of proteins that were all bio-active”, Gorman later wrote, “which meant they interacted with the human body as though the body had produced them.”
Gorman began offering jungle expeditions in 1998, after he relocated from New York to Iquitos more permanently and struggled to make ends meet as proprietor of the town’s Cold Beer Blues Bar. (The bar, Gorman says, was popular among ex-pats and government operatives, who would get drunk and spill secrets to him even after he installed a sign announcing himself as a journalist.)
By then, Gorman’s personal visits to the Amazon had transformed his life; he used the jungle to guide his decision-making and regulate his mental states. He found the natural medicines revelatory, and he came to suspect that others might pay for the privilege of a similar awakening, though he also felt guilt about “the thought of exploiting ayahuasca for money”.
Eventually, he decided that “the medicine had been a wonderful teacher for me; why wouldn’t it be wonderful for other people?” Also, he needed to feed his family.
In 2013, Gorman was infected with four strains of flesh-eating bacteria, which immediately set about decimating his left leg. Gorman was hospitalized in Iquitos, and then again in Texas after it became clear that his life might be in danger. It took major skin grafts, months of antibiotics, and so much ibuprofen that Gorman imperiled his liver before the leg was saved.
I asked Gorman what had happened in the jungle to cause the infection – how, in a sense, his obsession had taken him so far that it began to consume him.
He said the easy answer was that his leg was already covered in cuts and mosquito bites, and that he’d walked through the market of a small village looking for a bathroom, slipped in black sludge, flown backwards off his feet, and landed in fish guts that had been baking in the sun for more than 24 hours. An infection took hold after he failed to disinfect the cuts properly back at camp.
The more difficult answer, however, was linked to the fact that
curanderos in some of the places he visits see him with guests and assume he has money. (Gorman insists that he breaks even on trips, and sometimes runs at a loss after paying the staff.) A few of them have been resentful in the past, and, Gorman said, “hatred takes whatever form it needs”. Who made him need to pee so badly that day? Who made him trip into the fish guts? The word for this is
brujería – willing bad things to happen to your enemies. A form of witchcraft.
Gorman knows how all this sounds. “If I start writing this stuff, you people are going to think I’m out of my fricking mind,” he said. But he doesn’t expect people to blindly take his word on anything. He only advocates open-mindedness, suggesting that the world is not as “solid” as we like to think.
If it is not immediately clear from this brief biographical sketch, Gorman is not your stereotypical New Age hippy-dippy guru. He does not wear a white smock or light scented candles. He told me a story about dropping the Eucharist as a child and then eating it off the ground, saying: “I like that attitude to the divine.” It is his irreverence that has endeared him to his guests.
Several of them were present when I arrived in Joshua, including a computer programmer from New York; a film-maker who was following Gorman for a documentary; and Haddock, who nodded at me in polite recognition. Occasionally, in between the jungle jaunts, Gorman will get a phone call from one of his guests asking for help. (Think of somebody calling a chiropractor to request a neck adjustment.) Then he will arrange a medicine ceremony at his own house and step into the role of substitute curandero. These evenings are only for friends – an exception was made for me so I could observe him working – and he refuses all payment.
Twenty minutes after our arrival, Gorman was marching past a broken treadmill around his backyard, speaking in tongues and spraying a mysterious liquid out of his mouth. The guests followed behind him, puffing tobacco smoke into a white cloud. They were constructing a protective wall for the ceremony.
In 2013, Gorman was infected with four strains of flesh-eating bacteria, which immediately set about decimating his left leg. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux for the Guardian This is not one of those articles where a journalist drinks ayahuasca and then experiences either
almost nothing or a gradual
life transformation that involves giving up alcohol and joining CrossFit.
I did not take any medicines while reporting this story. Partly this is because Gorman declined to offer, saying: “I don’t know you well enough.” Partly because psychotropic drugs are well-known for waterboarding you with your deepest fears, and less than 24 hours before I flew to Texas my father was diagnosed with cancer. There were certain horrors I was not quite ready to be confronted with.
Now Gorman was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room. Haddock and the other guests had crawled into sleeping bags scattered around the floor and couches, like children waiting to be told a ghost story.
“If you get scared, come sit with me,” Gorman advised the room. “Don’t allow yourself to be alone.” He said people should blow away any bad visions they might be besieged with – literally blow, as if they were blowing a fly from their eyes. Then he began to sing a song, a soft icaro, as he poked around a collection of plastic bottles by his side. After a short time, he made a signal for the first man to crawl forward: “Chocolate milk awaits.”
The ritual turned out to be the same for each person. They would shuffle up and sit at Gorman’s feet. Gorman would present them with a shot-sized glass of green sludge – the ayahuasca – and then several puffs of a nasal spray, followed by a lozenge to disguise the vile taste. Finally, he would spritz something fragrant over their head and body. “Just so she knows you want her to come on” – she being the spirit of ayahuasca – “put on some of that, because she loves that shit.”
Gorman drank last, and then picked up his shacapa – an Amazonian leaf rattle. As he shook the dried bundle, the sound, like wind rushing through palm trees, combined with words from his songs (“
medicina”, “
corazón”, “
espíritu”, “
selva”), created a simulacrum of the jungle in this suburban living room. Light crawled across the wall from passing traffic, but otherwise the effect was uncanny.
“I don’t even know what time it is,” Gorman mumbled after a few minutes.
“10.20,” offered the computer programmer.
“Burn that watch!” Gorman barked.
From my perspective, sitting on the outside of this communal trip, what happened over the following two hours was fascinating and deeply strange. A young woman ran past me to throw up, trailed by Gorman’s daughter, Madeleina, who was on standby as nurse. Haddock let out a strained cry, as though somebody had poked him sharply in a soft spot. Gorman’s singing became trapped temporarily inside an E-flat – eeeeeee – until his head lulled, then suddenly snapped back. Later, he would admit that he had drunk too much of the medicine, was “really out there”, and “wanted to scream”. But he stayed composed for the sake of his friends. “Go anywhere you like,” he told them in a strained voice. “Welcome the dreams.”
A line soon formed for the bathroom so people could purge, an inevitable messy part of taking ayahuasca (and part of its traditional value in the Amazon: it flushes parasites). As Haddock brushed past me, he asked: “Are you wondering why we put ourselves through this?”
Actually, I was thinking about something in Gorman’s book. “Imagine a dog whistle,” he writes. “You blow it, you hear nothing. Your cat hears nothing. Birds hear nothing. But a dog will yelp in pain at the sound. So while you couldn’t hear it, it was still there. Your hearing just didn’t have a broad enough band.”
To want to perceive reality beyond our limited “band”, suspecting it could offer some form of enlightenment about how the world truly works, seemed to me understandable enough. Because isn’t that also the aspiration of science – to expand our reach through the universe beyond the five senses? I wasn’t sure the medicine Gorman offered could genuinely expand human perception, but I believed these people were convinced it could, and I saw the serious comfort they took from their contact with him.
Before flying to Texas, one of the guests I’d spoken with was a young man named Devon Wright. Like Haddock, Wright, who lives in Hawaii, found himself going through “a life crisis”. He’d dropped out of school and was struggling on anti-depressants. “I needed to do something or die … I was looking for help, something outside of myself, in order to come back into myself.” He admits he “wasn’t thinking that clearly” at the time.
Wright made his own way to Iquitos when he was just 17 years old. Initially, he went to attend a shamanism conference. Then he met Gorman and returned for one of his jungle trips. What he found on the Río Aucayacu, Wright told me, was “who I am”. There was no irony in this statement. He meant what he said.
“Peter will sometimes use this analogy: we carry around this sack of potatoes on our back for a long time, and then every once in a while, if you do something like ayahuasca, it gives you an opportunity to unload.” Wright said he now took the medicine once or twice a year. “It allows me to let go and see what’s left.”
The morning after the ceremony, I woke up on Gorman’s floor with my toes numb from the cold. Dried shacapa leaves lay scattered around the rocking chair.
As I was preparing to head back to the airport, Gorman moved the chair to the middle of the room and turned on the television to a Rangers game. By the bright light of morning he was just an average guy, passing Sunday like thousands of other average guys in Texas. He thanked me for coming as though I’d just dropped by for a friendly barbecue and passed out on the couch.
But then he said something else: that he would sing for my father. I’d mentioned cancer the night before, because cancer was all I could really think about. Smiling, Gorman said he would include him in his songs to the spirits.
I am not what might be called a credulous person. But I would agree that the world is not as solid as we like to believe – complicated, multi-layered and mostly beyond my comprehension. So when Gorman emailed me later that day, asking my father’s name, I wrote back and told him it was Murray.
Why didn't I know about this stuff before? Though it would seem that some states in the US have already banned the substance. It won't be long before the rest of the world follows suite baaaa (in my best effort at mimicking a sheep), what?
