Ben Greenfield Fitness: Diet, Fat Loss And Performance

When it comes to plant based medicine, my guest on today's podcast is widely considered to be a groudbreaking pioneer. His name is Dennis McKenna. Dennis's research - spanning back to the 1970's - has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. During the early 1970's, he developed a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms with his brother Terence McKenna and they later published what they had learned in a book entitled Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. Dennis has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brasilian Amazon. His doctoral research (University of British Columbia, 1984) focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by