Alicia anisopetala

As Glenn H. Shepard, Jr. has written, “though a fair amount is now known about how psychoactive plants and compounds produce their peculiar effects on the human mind, it is still largely a mystery as to why certain plants produce such compounds.” 

In other words, why do some 100 plants from among perhaps half a million different plant species make these substances that can potentiate profound effects on humanity’s consciousness of our destructive (or even its opposite more egalitarian) relationship with the natural world? 

Does it indicate some kind of mutually beneficial co-evolution?  Schultes and Hofmann call this “one of the unsolved riddles of nature.” 

The phytochemistry and ethnobotanical history of the rare plant Alicia anisopetala (from the same family as B. caapi and D. cabrerana and often called “black” ayahuasca) are becoming clearer, though certainly warrant further research. A 2024 study conducted by a team of Australian scientists headed by Jonathan Tran used ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) to search for the following six psychoactive compounds in Alicia anisopetala: tryptamine, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), tetrahydroharmine (THH), harmaline, and harmine. What did they find? “No psychedelic alkaloids of interest or tryptamine were detected in our samples.”  Changing the research parameters, however, to focus on terpenes and other compounds of this plant could facilitate an understanding of an “entourage effect” in terms of how A. anisopetala is combined with other plants that are psychoactive.  Neil Logan affirms that A. anisopetala is also known as purgahuasca, and is used as a pre-ceremonial cleanse, an essential part of how these visionary plants are used efficaciously by Indigenous peoples. Does one of the confocal images included here capture a “blue” terpene emission from a trichome?