Don Quixote, DMT, psychedelic tourism: 5 Questions for literature professor Alberto Ribas-Casasayas

Ribas-Casasayas discusses perspectives on psychedelics from Latin American.

The year 2021 was what Albert Ribas-Casasayas called “mi año de milagros” — his year of miracles. Ribas-Casasayas, an associate professor of literature at Santa Clara University in California, had been struggling with depression, and after hearing from others that psychedelics had helped, he finally decided to try them himself. He experimented with psilocybin and MDMA, even going to a retreat in the desert southwest — and with support from friends, therapists, and the psychedelics, he clawed his way out of the fog.

At first, during the six months he calls his “honeymoon period” with psychedelics, he was enamored of the new psychedelic community he was connected to, but soon after he began seeing things more critically: sketchy practices, people who seemed more in it for greed and ego than healing. On the one-year anniversary of his first psilocybin experience, he wrote about this experience, in a piece called “Luces y sombras del renacimiento psicodélico" (Lights and Shadows of the Psychedelic Renaissance) which was published by Universo Ulises, a countercultural Spanish language press. Ribas-Casasayas, who grew up in Barcelona, was ready to go all in, to “drop everything” for psychedelics — but his partner, Ana Luego, a professor of Latin American studies at San Francisco State University, suggested he figure out a way to braid these substances and their resulting altered states into his academic work. Together the two then co-edited Otras iluminaciones, a collection of essays and academic writings that offer views on psychedelics from the perspective of Latin American literary and cultural studies. The Microdose spoke with Ribas-Casasayas about those perspectives and how psychedelic tourism has affected Latin America.

What has it looked like to braid psychedelics with your work in literature?

In the introduction of Otra iluminaciones, we focus on what a literary canon with a psychedelic focus would look like. There are some important works by canonical Spanish language writers that incorporate the presence of psychoactives. For instance, a scene in Don Quixote — in the cave of Montesinos — seems consistent with DMT trips. How do we look at these classical characters from this standpoint? Our collection also gets into what is this thing called “the psychedelic renaissance,” and what it means to territories in Latin America — and how a humanities-based approach can contribute to an understanding of it that is not so Anglo-centric.

What do you make of the “psychedelic renaissance” from that perspective?

Well, besides “renaissance” being a colonial term, the notion that it’s a “renaissance” at all is somewhat disingenuous. There’s this narrative that during the psychedelic prohibition, institutional research ground to a halt, but in fact some of the greatest works in history of psychoactives were produced during the 80s and 90s from people like the Shulgins and the Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado. There was also still a lot of citizen research, people conducting research on themselves; it’s a history that isn’t very well known because it was done clandestinely, but I find it outrageous and paternalistic to say there was no work happening. And if anything, I think that shows the current excessive focus on medical and pharmacological research, rather than the spiritual or creative use.

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A great deal of psychedelic tourism is happening in Latin America. How are these communities affected by tourists?

It varies from community to community, but a common problem is one of extractive tourism. It puts individuals or communities in these subordinate service positions. Retreats are predicated on this idea of exclusion, where someone who is well capitalized makes an agreement with the community — and suddenly, a community becomes reoriented towards tourists from abroad. The affluence of these tourists leaves a footprint on the land, creating services catered towards foreigners and driving up prices, making them unlivable for locals.

When this happens we must ask: who within the community is benefiting? And is it creating tensions locally? There’s a private resort in Mexico that has a Spanish name but they will not respond to correspondence in Spanish. They’re created this exotic looking resort for consuming psychoactives that’s walled off from the rest of the community. They hire a couple local people who come in wearing traditional garb to drum and sing — they play a very specific role. If that’s something the community has decided to do, then that’s awesome, but in this specific case, I have doubts that’s the case.

Many of these tourists are in search of this authenticity - or at least the idea of it. Do you feel true exchange or authenticity is possible, given cultural differences?

One thing I’m finding does not translate well is the idea of healing, or seeking a healer. In the west, there’s a specific understanding of what healing is: there are medicines and products to cure specific ailments that are described in medical literature, and this concept of mental illness as something that is happening to you. But many other cultures approach these illnesses as community ailments. That simply does not translate when tourists come in - those people arrive with expectations for people to feel towards them as they would members of their own communities, but they are not part of those communities. They often have this obsession with authenticity, but the person they are going to might not have the same authentic interest or commitment in them.

There’s a missing regard for community based approaches that have existed for decades.

I don’t know the solutions to these problems — I’m just a literature professor — but I do see a disconnect between the values people purport to have, and what they’re actually doing.

And what happens when these tourists go home?

For the locals, their communities are changed. And then there are people who do a 3-month training program, and when they return to their home country, they claim they are trained in a particular tradition. Perhaps they have served a couple medicines, but there are still a lot of things they don't know about serving it in different contexts — and those are the well-intentioned ones! I won’t even get into the stories about the bad practitioners who misrepresent their skills.

For those who traveled to heal, they return to the very same environment that made them sick in the first place: oppressive politics, environmental degradation, a job that sucks. How long do you think this is going to last? This risks going the same way antidepressants did. Psychedelics are tools — but we have a problem if we keep talking about the epidemic of mental health without a very serious discussion of what brought us here in the first place.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.