Mark Plotkin
speaker
534 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But to go back to our earlier points, that doesn't mean I rule it out, but it does mean that until somebody can show me a jaguar with ayahuasca in its stomach or has observed a jaguar eating ayahuasca, I'll say it remains to be proven.
So the answer to your question, long answer for short question, is that yes, animals do use plants medicinally.
And as it's shown in the drunken monkey hypothesis, animals do use plants to achieve altered states.
Jaguars and ayahuasca?
Questionable.
Proof remains to be seen.
Questionable.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, my old friend Wade Davis did some work on the zombie poisons in Haiti decades ago, and his theory is that this puffer fish poison is what knocks people out without killing them.
So it's been widely accepted, not universally accepted, but it's just another indication that nature does stuff that we don't yet understand.
And I'll give you a concrete parallel.
Okay.
There's a billion-dollar drug called Taxol used for, I think, testicular cancer.
It comes from the Pacific yew tree, except that it doesn't come from the Pacific yew tree.
It comes from a fungus that lives inside the Pacific yew tree.
So imagine that.
That's a billion-dollar drug, and it wasn't until decades after marketing it, using it, that we figured out this doesn't come from a plant.
It comes from a fungus.
Wow.
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