Welcome to the Town of Puna!

[Kelena]

The New Yorker's copy editors must all be on vacation. This week's issue has an article on an emerging trend of ingesting a psychedelic that makes you throw up and feel like you are dying but which nonetheless leaves you enlightened in some way. This psychedelic comes from a South American plant, brought to the Big Island by a botanist and turned loose near a "town called Puna". It apparently runs rampant in the jungle and is in popular use in the area which is, sigh, like "The Wild West".


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/0...in-the-u-s

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Thanks Kelena,
I started reading the article yesterday, but didn't make it as far as the part on Puna. I'm going back for more... reading that is.

“Ayahuasca takes you to the swampland of your soul,” my friend Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, told me. Then he said that he wanted to do it again.

“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope,” James Baldwin to Margaret Mead in the book A Rap On Race

[alaskyn66]

That would explain alot about Pahoa and Puna in general actually if it were true.

..Bad boys,Bad boys what we gonna do...let ya out on bail for a buck or two...

[PunaMauka2]

My wife noticed this article last night with it's reference to Puna. It's rather long in it's entirety, but actually the latter half quite interesting where it delves into the research and very amusing where the author recounts her foray into a Manhattan ceremonial circle.


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ETA:

I've known a couple of people who have partaken of Big Island grown ayahuasca. One, an extended family member, 3 decades + ago. The other an acquaintance about a decade ago. Both described an experience far removed from something that could be described as casual recreational.