Marcus Boon examines William Burroughs' 1950s Amazonian encounters with yagé (ayahuasca) as a pivotal moment in his literary and spiritual development. Boon argues that these experiences informed Burroughs' later ideas about language as a virus, the cut-up method, and his cosmological view of control and resistance. The chapter situates yagé not as an anomaly in Burroughs' work but as central to its epistemological and aesthetic radicalism, intertwining Cold War paranoia, psychedelic experimentation, and postcolonial critique. Boon suggests that Burroughs helped carry yagé from the jungle into global discourse on language, healing, and power, complicating contemporary movements for psychedelic healing, spiritual tourism, and decolonial thought.
This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg's lifelong drug experimentation, which he pursued as a means to attain transcendent states and challenge conventional reality. Beginning at Columbia University, Ginsberg kept detailed notes and avoided addiction. His work with Timothy Leary on psychedelics expanded his view of their social potential, and he became a prominent advocate for drug legalization and broader scientific and social experimentation, while remaining candid about their harmful effects. The chapter explores Ginsberg's reasons for drug use, his advocacy, and poems written under the influence, collected mainly in Kaddish and Other Poems (1961).