Plants of the Gods: S1E10. The Life and Times of Richard Evans Schultes

Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast

The Life and Times of Richard Evans Schultes – Schultes was a scholarship student at Harvard College when entered as a Freshman in 1933. An undergraduate term paper on peyote resulted in an opportunity to partake in a traditional ceremony with the Kiowa in Oklahoma, which then led to research in southern Mexico where he produced the first detailed, scientific account of the so-called “magic mushrooms.” Post-graduate research led him to the Colombian Amazon where he produced the first detailed scientific account of ayahuasca and other Plants of the Gods. In 1967, he organized a conference in San Francisco with Albert Hoffman where the conclusion was that the Plants of the Gods would reshape the treatment of certain emotional and psychiatric disorders at some point in the future, a prediction, which has recently come to full fruition.

Sources:

Kreig, Margaret. Green Medicine: the Search for Plants That Heal. Bantam Books, 1966.

Mann, John. Murder, Magic, and Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Plotkin, Mark J. Ph. D. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: an Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest. Viking, 1993.

Prance, Ghillean T., et al. Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. Synergetic Press, in Association with Heffter Research Institute, 2018.

Stewart, Amy, et al. Wicked Plants: the Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009.