From Mexico to Lesotho: Rethinking the scope and history of traditional psychedelic use

A common assumption among scientists and popularizers is that Indigenous peoples around the world have used psychedelics for millennia, often for social and psychological healing. But how strong is the evidence? In this talk, I review ethnographic and archaeological records on the traditional use of serotonergic psychedelics and argue that, despite their widespread natural availability, reliable evidence is largely confined to a few regions in Meso- and South America, representing a tiny fraction of documented societies. Although the behavioral contexts of such practices are diverse, efforts to draw direct parallels with contemporary clinical applications are misleading, suggesting that modern clinical applications are more historically novel that often claimed. I then present new ethnographic research on psilocybin mushroom use among Basotho healers and non-healers in southern Africa, providing arguably the first systematic evidence of Indigenous psychedelic use outside the Americas. Unlike documented cases in Mesoamerica, psilocybin mushroom use in southern Africa appears sporadic and non-central within a broader ethnobotanical repertoire. A rigorous evaluation of the scope and history of psychedelic use demonstrates that Indigenous psychedelic use may be rarer and more heterogenous than often admitted.