BoingBoing interview with Dennis McKenna

Avi: Give us a synopsis of you and your brother's adventures in La Chorrera

Dennis: The short answer is that we had scoured the ethnobotanical literature and had learned of an orally-active form of DMT that the Witoto Indians of S. America prepared from the sap of Virola species (a genus of trees in the nutmeg family). We were frustrated by the fact that the DMT experience, when smoking synthetic DMT, was overwhelming, quite intense, but very short (about 10-15 minutes). It was hard to spend enough time in that 'place' to really get a handle on what was going on. So when we stumbled across a paper by Schultes about this orally active form of DMT, we thought that maybe, in that form, the experience would last longer and we could understand it better. No one knew about ayahuasca and the fact that it is an orally activated form of DMT at that time; this was 1970, before the chemistry and pharmacology of ayahuasca had been thoroughly understood.

[Thanks Mason!]