Further adventures of Peter Gorman are chronicled in this quasi-memoir, Magic Mushrooms in India & Other Fantastic Tales. Gorman's best known for his work in the Peruvian Amazon, where he's spent the good part of the last three decades hunting for rare flora and connecting with curanderos who turned him on to ayahuasca and other exotic hallucinogens.
Gorman was a contributing editor at High Times in the '90s, where many of these stories first appeared—visits to India seeking mushrooms and bhang, and to Morocco on the kif trail.
In the hilarious title story, Gorman eats a dozen shrooms as his ganja-puffing guide takes him to an alienating tourist trap before they finally plunge into the jungle.
Gorman and a photographer barely survive a trip to the Rif Mountains in Morocco where most of the world's hash is grown and made. Two gringos in the Ketama region are pretty much marked as narcs, but Gorman somehow manages to inflitrate the heavily paranoid area. They make it out by the skin of their teeth.
The last three chapters on Peru bring readers up to date. Over the last two decades, Gorman has led ayahuasca tours in the rainforest. The book doesn't tell of his many poisonous insect botes and skin-eating infections (his ayahuasca stories are told in Ayahuasca in My Blood), though he does go on at length about a jungle feast he once supervised. It's like a story out of Fitzcarraldo.
Now 71, it's been a long, strange trip for Peter Gorman, author of three fascinating books and subject of the 2019 Amazon Prime documentary, More Joy Less Pain.
Condensed from CelebStoner, Nov. 11
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Podcast: entheogenic adventures with Peter Gorman
In Episode 99 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews an old friend and colleague—legendary journalist, naturalist and adventurer Peter Gorman, who reflects on his long years collecting (and personally sampling) psychoactive and shamanic plants, from the Peruvian Amazon, to the Rif Mountains of Morocco, to the Palani Hills of southern India. Now approaching 71, Peter is about to head back down to the Amazon to revisit the remote Matsés indigenous people, who he first contacted in 1985. His latest collection of first-hand accounts is Magic Mushrooms in India & Other Fantastic Tales.
Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.