DENVER — On the way to the Bellco Theater, the main stage of Psychedelic Science 2023, a conference of more than 11,000 participants in a convention center the size of MetLife Stadium, you might wander through the expo stalls, where everything from mushroom-growing kits to Ketamine logo hats are on offer.
You might pass a blissful dance session breaking out in the hall to the beat of a metal drum, and hang a right just past the Contemplative Sacred Space.
If you arrive early, you’ll hear a lecture titled “Psilocybin Mushrooms and Their Tryptamine: Potential Medicines for Neurogeneration” ending to rapturous applause.
And then, amid this kaleidoscopic array of seekers, Aaron Rodgers — the new quarterback of the Jets and one of the country’s most famous, accomplished and wealthy athletes — takes the mic.
“Go Bears!” rings out from the audience. “Cal,” Rodgers clarifies. It’s not a day for negativity.
What’s on his mind is ayahuasca.
“That’s what I’m really here to talk about. If you do anything outside of the dinosaur norm — you’re an outlier, you don’t care about football, you don’t love football the right way,” Rodgers said.
“My first time I did ‘aya’ was 2020 in Peru right before the pandemic. … Went out and had probably the best season of my career. So I was like, at some point, I want to talk about this.”
So, what is ayahuasca? And what is Rodgers talking about?
The roots of ayahausca
Ayahuasca is a psychedelic brew with a centuries-old tradition among indigenous societies in the Amazon rainforest, where its use was guided by shamans for medicinal and spiritual purposes.
The word ayahuasca, in the native Quechua language, translates to “the vine of the souls,” according to Draulio B. de Araujo, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil who has conducted research on ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca use is legal in Brazil for research and under the auspices of religious groups, most notably the Santo Daime church, which now has international branches.
The psychedelic is concocted by brewing the leaves of the Psychotria viridis plant with the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine in water over a period of hours or days.
The result is a bitter, brown tea that customarily is dispensed in 3-ounce doses.
Dimethyltryptamine — or DMT, the psychoactive ingredient in the leaves — typically is broken down by the body’s stomach enzymes, but those enzymes are inhibited by chemicals in the bark, allowing the DMT to take effect.
What does ayahuasca do to you?
An ayahuasca trip lasts around five hours, per Araujo, the first 30 minutes marked by a feeling of calm or sleepiness before the psychedelic effects kick in.
The most prominent effect is visions.
“In ayahuasca, the visions, most of the time, come with your eyes closed,” Araujo said. “Very intense with very different natures and contexts. It can vary from geometric images to a conversation with someone that you know. … A lot of times people feel as if they have died, and then they are reborn from that experience.”
The other well-known effects of ayahuasca use are vomiting, nausea and diarrhea.
During Rodgers’ talk, he joked about the social bond that comes from seeing someone “double platinum” while on ayahuasca — “double platinum,” his co-panelist Aubrey Marcus helpfully added, “is when you’re purging in the bucket and s–tting at the same time.”
“This is one of the reasons ayahuasca is not used to get high, different from psilocybin and LSD,” said Nicole Galvao-Coelho, also a professor at Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte.
“It’s not fun.”
The ayahuasca advocacy
Ayahuasca is closely associated with enhanced introspection, per Araujo, who said four hours of ayahuasca visions can equate — for better or sometimes difficult worse — with two years’ of therapy.
Rodgers said he has found that level of introspection beneficial and that it’s allowed him to better love himself and others.
“Through my work with my medicine, [my] purpose is very, very simple to see — and that’s connection,” Rodgers said. “And if you get out of this game that I’ve played for 18 years professionally and many more before that without those relationships, without that connection with some people, you’re missing it.”
The potential therapeutic applications of psychedelics was a motif of the conference, down to an appearance by Republican former Texas governor Rick Perry, an advocate of psychedelics to treat veterans with PTSD.
Galvao-Coelho cited statistically significant responses from depression patients to one dose of ayahuasca as compared to a placebo.
Galvao-Coelho also mentioned new lines of scientific inquiry into ayahuasca reducing low-grade inflammation in the body — which might help, say, a 39-year-old who gets trucked by linebackers for a living.
“It’s a very sacred elixir,” said Maxi Cohen, a New York-based filmmaker whose newest documentary is called “Ayahuasca Diaries.” “It’s something to be done with great reverence because you go to worlds and see things that are real and are way beyond anything we know.”
Rodgers, in one of several sideways remarks in support of legalizing psychedelics, said, “Isn’t that ironic that the things that actually expand your mind are illegal, and the things that keep you in your lower chakras and dummied down have been legal for centuries?”
Rodgers’ reception
Rodgers seemed to find a receptive audience in the mile-high crowd.
“I was moved,” said Terry Braud, a nurse-practitioner from Baton Rouge, La. “I thought it was amazing that two people that have such standing in our society could stand up and talk about this and the potential.”
The Post approached a man in a tie-dye shirt and a cheesehead milling about by the stage.
Turns out, Douglas Finkelstein, of Goshen, N.Y., is a Seahawks fan who works with An Empathic Society, and he passed along a copy of the pro-psychedelic organization’s newsletter with the front-page headline: “Aaron Rodgers Commits Intentional Grounding.”
What did he think people could learn from Rodgers’ message about psychedelics?
“For Jets fans specifically, how to cope with misery,” Finkelstein said. “For football fans as a whole, that really, at the end of the day, he is a human being, he has problems like all of us do, and we all have to find what works best for us to tackle those problems, pun intended.”
