Oo-koo-he: The Drug They Were Looking For

“The McKennas went to La Chorrera specifically to find oo-koo-he, a Witoto plant preparation that produced effects described as similar to orally active DMT. They never found it. They found psilocybin mushrooms instead.”

True Hallucinations does not begin with the mushrooms. It begins with oo-koo-he.

Oo-koo-he was the Witoto name for a plant preparation described in the ethnobotanical literature as producing effects similar to ayahuasca, oral DMT activity through some combination of beta-carboline inhibitors and tryptamine-containing admixture plants. Schultes had documented its use in the Colombian Amazon. The McKenna brothers went to La Chorrera specifically to find it, study it, and attempt to synthesize an orally active DMT compound that could extend the brief experience of smoked DMT into something more sustained.

The expedition was scholarly in intention if adventurous in execution. Dennis was studying botanical pharmacology. Terence had read extensively in the ethnobotanical literature. They brought field guides, laboratory equipment, and a level of prior knowledge about Amazonian plant pharmacology that distinguished them from simple psychedelic tourists.

They never found oo-koo-he. The Witoto population in the La Chorrera area had been devastated by the rubber boom, reduced from forty thousand to five thousand in the preceding sixty years, and the ceremonial practices that Schultes had documented were no longer intact in the community they reached.

What they found instead, growing abundantly in the cattle pastures of the mission station in the fog and rain, were Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, the same species they had encountered in California, growing wild in equatorial abundance. The expedition that had traveled thousands of miles to find one psychoactive plant found a completely different one.

The way science actually works, sometimes, is that you go looking for one thing and come back with something else. True Hallucinations is the account of what happened when the McKennas accepted the substitution.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Wikipedia, Terence McKenna