THE DMT LIBRARY · MAP
DMT around the world
Plants, traditions and finds
This map shows where the plants, traditions and archaeological finds discussed in our DMT guides come from: the ayahuasca vine and the brew, yopo and cohoba snuff, jurema, the Sonoran Desert toad and the oldest snuff tubes and ritual bundles in the Andes. Every note restates its guide, which links the sources.
It is a map of history and research, not of where to get anything. Education only: no sourcing, preparation, retreats or advice to use. DMT is a controlled substance in Canada.
On the map
13 PLACES
Select a marker to see what our guides say about that place, or browse the full list below.
- Plant
- Tradition
- Archaeology
- Animal
EVERY PLACE
The list
All 13 places on the map, grouped by kind, each with the guide it comes from. So far every place our guides discuss is in the Americas. For how widely DMT occurs in plants and animals, see where DMT comes from in nature.
Plants
Upper Rio Negro: the Uaupés River
The ayahuasca vine was first classified, as Banisteria caapi, by the German botanist August Grisebach from material the British botanist Richard Spruce had collected near the Uaupés River. Along the Uaupés in the upper Rio Negro, the Desana call the plant gaapi, also a divinity in their creation story.
Read the guide: Banisteriopsis caapi, the ayahuasca vine: botany, history, harmine and what the research showsAndes of southern Ecuador and Peru: San Pedro (wachuma)
San Pedro is an Andean columnar cactus whose main psychoactive alkaloid is mescaline, a phenethylamine; Kew gives its native range as southern Ecuador to Peru. It is the only psychoactive plant unequivocally depicted in Chavín’s iconography, and a healing tradition continues in northern Peru.
Read the guide: Wachuma vs ayahuasca: how the San Pedro cactus and the Amazonian brew compareNortheastern Brazil: jurema
Jurema is the Brazilian name for Mimosa tenuiflora, a spiny legume of dry northeastern Brazil whose bark is used in a sacred drink of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian religion. In Pernambuco, the Truká of Assunção Island call the drink jurema wine.
Read the guide: What is jurema? Mimosa tenuiflora, the jurema tradition and its chemistry
Traditions
Hispaniola: Taíno cohoba
Ramón Pané, who travelled with Columbus on his second voyage, described the ceremonial use of cohoba snuff in Hispaniola as early as 1496. In 1916 the botanist W. E. Safford identified its source as the tree now called Anadenanthera peregrina. Its use in the islands did not survive the colonial period.
Read the guide: Yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina): the cohoba tree, its history and its chemistryOrinoco basin: yopo
Humboldt and Bonpland recorded niopo or yopo, a snuff from the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, among peoples of the Orinoco region of Colombia and Venezuela in 1801. A 2011 study of the Piaroa and Cuiva found yopo tied to narratives central to each group’s cosmology and identity.
Read the guide: Yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina): the cohoba tree, its history and its chemistryWestern Amazon: ayahuasca
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew from the western Amazon that contains DMT together with β-carboline alkaloids that block the enzyme MAO. It is used in Indigenous and Mestizo traditions and in Brazilian churches. How old the practice is remains disputed.
Read the guide: What is ayahuasca? The Amazonian brew, its contested history, and what science knowsUcayali, Peru: Shipibo-Konibo healing
The Shipibo-Konibo are an Indigenous nation of the Ucayali region of Peru. In Shipibo-Konibo healing, a healer sings songs called icaros, and fieldwork shows that historically the healer, not the patient, often drank.
Read the guide: What happens at an ayahuasca ceremony? What anthropologists and researchers have documentedBrazilian Amazon: Santo Daime and the UDV
Santo Daime was founded in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a rubber tapper; the UDV was founded on 22 July 1961 by José Gabriel da Costa, who had worked in rubber forests in Acre, Rondônia and Bolivia. Both use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and Brazil regulates religious use through a 2010 resolution.
Read the guide: Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal: the ayahuasca churches, their beliefs and the court cases
Archaeology
Chavín de Huántar, Peru
At this temple complex in the north-central highlands of Peru, bone tubes from a sealed underground gallery dated to about 800–350 BCE carried traces of bufotenine, nicotine and, in one artifact, DMT, consistent with vilca and wild tobacco.
Read the guide: Ancient DMT: what snuff tubes, ritual bundles and residue chemistry really showQuilcapampa, southern Peru
At this Middle Horizon site (about 600–1000 CE), excavators argue that vilca was consumed alongside a fermented fruit drink at shared events, reinforcing the power of the Wari state. The plant identification is the authors’; the political reading is preliminary.
Read the guide: Ancient DMT: what snuff tubes, ritual bundles and residue chemistry really showCueva del Chileno, Bolivia: the ritual bundle
In a rock shelter at about 3,890 metres in the Lípez highlands of southwestern Bolivia, a leather ritual bundle dated to about 905–1170 CE held a pouch with traces of DMT, bufotenine, harmine and cocaine. Its authors say it is not conclusive evidence of ayahuasca as drunk today.
Read the guide: Ancient DMT: what snuff tubes, ritual bundles and residue chemistry really showNorthwest Argentina and northern Chile: vilca snuff
The earliest evidence of vilca use, about 4,000 years old, is vilca seeds found with pipes in northwest Argentina. In Chile, snuff powders from pre-Hispanic San Pedro de Atacama were analysed in 1991, and hair studies of Azapa Valley mummies report bufotenine and harmine (preliminary evidence).
Read the guide: Ancient DMT: what snuff tubes, ritual bundles and residue chemistry really show
Animals
Sonoran Desert: the Sonoran Desert toad
The Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius, formerly Bufo alvarius) is found mainly in southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. It is the only animal known to secrete 5-MeO-DMT as a chemical defence; neither 5-MeO-DMT nor the bufotenine in its secretion is the N,N-DMT of most DMT research.
Read the guide: Bufo alvarius: the Sonoran Desert toad, its secretion, its conservation and the law
More from the library: start here, the fact sheet, the myths quiz or every guide.