Plant Medicine — The Alkaloid

Comic illustration linking an orange-fruited iboga shrub, a basket of roots, a shipping crate and a laboratory vial.

Field Notes

Field Notes #11: Who Gets Paid for the Root?

Gabon wants a share of the ibogaine boom. New reporting exposes the distance between paying for bark and sharing the value created afterward.

Comic illustration of a leafy kratom branch and an amber bottle with a tablet packet, connected by a blank tag examined through a magnifying glass.

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The Alkaloid #31: The Leaf and the Label

Kratom leaf and concentrated 7-OH can share a name on the shelf without sharing a chemical profile. The distinction matters for safety, research and regulation.

Three-panel comic strip: a peyote cactus in the desert, a brain in an MRI scanner with the cerebellum glowing, and that glow spreading connection lines across the brain.

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The Alkaloid #20: The Oldest Trip

Humans have used peyote for 5,700 years, yet mescaline is the psychedelic neuroscience knows least. A new Northeastern brain scan shows the oldest trip has a signature all its own — and Big Pharma just bet up to $3.8B on its molecular cousins.

A tobacco plant in a glass flask inside a dim greenhouse, its leaves glowing green, purple, orange, and teal, with a glowing molecular diagram floating beside it.

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The Alkaloid #15: The Factory in the Leaf

A lab in Israel engineered one tobacco plant to make psilocybin, DMT, bufotenin, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin at once. The molecules just left the mushroom and the toad behind. What that means for cost, supply, and a drug law written when the drug and its source were the same thing.

A single red-and-white Amanita muscaria mushroom on a dark, snow-dusted forest floor in low evening light.

Field Notes

Field Notes #5: The Animals That Get High on Purpose

Jaguars roll in the ayahuasca vine. Reindeer hunt psychedelic mushrooms in the snow. Wallabies leave crop circles in Tasmania's poppy fields. The urge to get high isn't uniquely human — one researcher called it a fourth drive, as deep as hunger and thirst.

A split image: a clinical glass vial and an IV needle on a cold sterile surface on the left, and a clay pot of dark ayahuasca brew surrounded by vines and candlelight on the right

Field Notes

Field Notes #3: The Molecule Without the Ceremony

A London lab gave 34 depressed people a single IV dose of DMT, the compound in ayahuasca, and saw depression scores fall for up to six months. No ceremony, no all-night vigil, no nausea. Just the molecule. Which raises a question the trial can't answer: how much was ever the chemical alone?

Clusters of dark chokecherries on branches arranged above a glass petri dish filled with deep burgundy liquid, set on weathered dark wood. A moody, botanical still.

Plant Medicine

Field Notes #1: Chokecherries and Cancer Cells

A Shoshone and Paiute student named Destany Pete tested her tribe's traditional chokecherry pudding against uterine sarcoma cancer cells — and only the traditional preparation worked. The science is preliminary. The story is worth understanding.

Carved stone tenon head with swirling features inside the underground gallery at Chavín de Huántar in Peru

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The Alkaloid #6: The Oldest Trip in the Andes

In a high mountain valley at 10,000 feet, archaeologists found 23 snuff tubes carrying residue of vilca, a DMT-bearing plant, used 2,800 years ago in hidden chambers at Chavín de Huántar. The findings complicate every popular framing of psychedelics as inherently liberatory.