People who undergo psychedelic experiences often describe them as deeply personal and hard to put into words, yet they still try to narrate them. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork at drug treatment centers in Baja California, Mexico, this article examines how individuals in psychedelic-based treatment retell or struggle to retell their experiences. The author argues that the ineffable quality of psychedelic experiences poses unique challenges for anthropological study, resisting narrativization and creating both ethnographic and epistemological obstacles to producing knowledge about these substances and their therapeutic use.
In July 2018, the artist and her brother traveled to Portugal for his heroin addiction treatment with ibogaine. This visual essay presents drawings and photographs from Mezamer's artwork 'The Mother of Opium,' documenting the journey and the treatment process.