Growing up in East London in the 90s, Darren Le Baron’s classmates would tell him about their psychedelics trips. “They were like, ‘Yo, we was in the park, we took LSD and we spoke to the trees and UFOs came down,’” Le Barron recounts. “I just thought they were druggies.” But as Le Barron embarked on his own spiritual journey in his late teens and twenties, he learned about Indigenous cultures that used hallucinogens to communicate with their ancestors. He decided to try some of these mind-altering drugs for himself. His first experience was with Salvia divinorum, a psychoactive species of sage which delivers a short but disorienting trip. After that, he found his way to mushrooms and DMT.

One of Le Baron’s early mentors, an accomplished martial artist, told him he’d been tracing the connections between “fighting arts” and psilocybin mushrooms. He invited Le Baron to the 2011 Breaking Convention conference, the first meeting of the multidisciplinary psychedelic conference held biannually at UK universities. There, he noticed that people were talking about drugs like ibogaine to treat opioid addiction, but when he asked these researchers how people in Gabon, where the plant grows, use the plant they could not tell him.

Le Baron wanted to know more about psychoactive substances in Africa and among the African diaspora so he dug into that history himself. He now teaches workshops on those themes, as well as mushroom cultivation classes. The Microdose spoke with Le Baron about the use of psychedelics on the African continent, and the psychedelics scene in the Caribbean, where Le Baron lives part-time.

What have you learned about how psychedelics have been used by the Indigenous peoples of Africa?

So I went to Roman Catholic school, and one of the fundamental teachings was that life began with Adam and Eve. I decided I wanted to find them — the oldest people — and find out whether they’d ingested psychedelics. History, science, and anthropology all suggest that human life began in Africa, and those peoples — so-called pygmies — are still there. I say so-called because that's not how they refer to themselves, but they’re in central and southern Africa. There are several different groups, known as the Aka or Ba’Aka, the Mbuti, Babongo, the Khoisan, called the Bushmen by colonizers. These were the people who gifted the world iboga, and I wanted to find out what they do.

In my course I take people on a chronological and geographical journey, mapping out Indigenous peoples on the continent, who were also the first people to migrate off of the continent into the Americas. Wherever they went, they took their cultures and traditions with them. They were pastoral people, so they worked a lot with the cattle — and as you know, the cattle provide the funk, and on that funk you get the magic: the mushrooms that grow on cattle poop. Their traditions, religions, and spiritual systems stem from these roots — the roots that these first peoples established, which they’re still practicing to this day.

Can you describe a few examples of how these psychoactive plants are used across Africa today?

They primarily work with psychoactives as tools for communication with the ancestors. I always say it's like picking up the phone and calling the ancestors, like “ET, phone home” — as well as a form of divination. For example, the Bushmen of southern Africa, they've got a tradition known as the trance dance, which is for healing. They make the call home, to their ancestors, to find out how they can evaluate the illness or the disease at hand, and how to mitigate that. Once they've gotten that feedback, they can then do the healing dance and the traditional healer will then partake in different brews and substances — a combination of mushrooms and plants — and they go into this altered state, or perhaps a better way of putting it is an enhanced state of consciousness. The healer goes inside the body and evaluates then removes the disease. In some cases the client or patient would also need to partake in drinking the concoctions as well, so they can get an understanding of the root cause of their illness to nip it in the bud. If we’re drawing parallels to western culture, their integration work primarily revolves around dance, music, and singing.

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You mentioned that the healer is communing with these substances, and sometimes also the person seeking healing. In these ceremonies, are just those two people present, or are there other folks around as part of this tradition?

There may be some consultation work between the two, or the healer may have done some divination work before, but during the actual healing work, the whole village turns up, because if you're ill, the whole village is ill. The illness is part of the collective consciousness, part of the community. If one person’s not feeling well, that's going to impact the whole village so we're all going to come out and get you healed.

That feels very different from the medical model being developed in the Western world right now - where you go to a clinic and take a drug, and there’s a guide sitting with you. What do you make of the developing medical model for psychedelics in Western countries compared with these other, more community-oriented traditions?

There’s that saying: why reinvent the wheel? I feel like that’s kind of what's going on. I always say that in my humble opinion, the research, the trials, have already been done. You've got these groups who are the ones who have gifted these technologies to the rest of the world - they are the wisdom keepers and have been, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. When you explore how they approach it, they're definitely not saying this is medicine. Rather, what they're saying is it can be used as a medicine, but it's not medicine. It brings more to the table than that: mushrooms and other fungi create soil, and have many other functions besides just being a medicine for human beings.

In the West, we're sick, and we need medicine and healing, so we're clutching at straws. But I would say we're approaching it backwards: the fundamental learnings I've gotten from elders around the world is that plants are a tool for communicating with the ancestors. The primary way that Indigenous cultures have prevented depression, anxiety, PTSD, you name it, is by having these practices. When you're out of link with your ancestors and with nature, that's when disease can easily manifest because you have no foundations.

The West is lacking those foundations, so we're looking at these “exotic” places, looking for answers. Here in the UK, people go to Peru or Colombia, and they spend six weeks there and come back with a feather and a garb, and say they're the local ayahuasca brewer and healer in London. I'm like, “Bro, you can't fake the funk.” I think it would serve people well to learn the legacy of your own lineage rather than trying to pretend that you're Peruvian.

Over the last few years, you’ve also spent time in Barbados and Jamaica. What’s the psychedelics scene like in the Caribbean?

My family comes from Barbados, so I think of my time there as spreading the spores. Mushrooms are still pretty much taboo there for political and religious reasons. In both places they’re referred to as “duppy umbrella.” They’re ghosts or spirits, and people want to stay away from them. People believe that all mushrooms, especially if they grow in wood, are deadly, so there's a lack of education. And that's what I'm doing in Barbados: bringing education and awareness to what mushrooms actually are, they are not just poisonous, deadly and toxic, they play a key role in the ecosystem by replenishing the soil for other plants.

Jamaica is a hotspot right now; since there’s the ability to legally work with psilocybin, there’s been a lot of tourism where people spend thousands of pounds, dollars, or euros to have these experiences. Jamaica could benefit from this, but currently the people there are not. Most local Jamaicans don’t know anything about it, and few are being engaged in it outside of being cooks or cleaners. Part of the work I am doing there are retreats, where the focus is on what we call ancestral alchemy. We work primarily with therapists and space holders coming from African, Caribbean, and African-American communities who are interested in engaging with mushrooms, and building foundations rooted in our culture and our traditions rather than a Western lens, a South American lens, or a clinical lens.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.