Luis is a young Tico who lives in the municipality of Tibas, just north of San Jose. He works as an office clerk and has consumed more than 200 hits (doses) of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD 25) since 2006. In 2011, journalism major Marqo Adrian of the International University of the Americas interviewed Luis for a four-part investigative piece titled Costa Rica Consumes LSD. He described a nice LSD experience:

“All of a sudden everything exploded in thousands of particles and time stood still, just as if everything I was looking at separated into distinct colors and textures.”

He then described a “bad trip”, a not so pleasant experience brought on by LSD in Costa Rica:

“I took a trip to a volcano with some friends. I started feeling despised and alienated. Hours before I dropped acid I had gotten into an argument with one of my friends, and then I was tripping and feeling that they wanted me dead. I thought I heard them saying that they were going to kill me and make my body disappear.”

Luis is part of a small group of Ticos who drop acid or use other psychedelic drugs –notwithstanding tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana, which on occasion may induce effects that may be considered psychedelic. According to a nationwide survey published by the Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Institute (IAFA in Spanish) in 2006, only about 0.1 percent of the population had heard about LSD. The drug has been classified as a controlled substance in Costa Rica since the 1960s, but it was only until 1990 that law enforcement took an interest in it and began reporting on seizures.

Law enforcement reports indicate that in the year 2000 there were 1,046 hits of acid confiscated by special anti-narcotic units of Fuerza Publica. In 2008, that number had dropped to 177 hits. The National Commission for the Improvement of Judicial Process (CONAMAJ), however, reported a significant LSD seizure in 2011: 9 kilograms of blotting paper sheets that tested positive for LSD, apparently ready for distribution.

According to the investigative report by Mr. Adrian, the fact that LSD is mostly colorless and odorless makes it a challenge for law enforcement in Costa Rica to detect and may mask real usage statistics. Undercover anti-narcotic agents infiltrating raves in San Jose and electronic music festivals at different beaches in the Pacific estimate that in a gathering of 300 Ticos, more than 150 hits of LSD could be flowing.

While possession of LSD in small amounts is a decriminalized offense in Costa Rica, trafficking in LSD is prohibited by Law Number 8204. Still, Mr. Adrian reports that the current price of a single dose of LSD can range from 4,000 to 8,000 colones ($8 to $16), while in 2005 street dealers in Jaco Beach sold single hits for about $4.

The Foreign Psychonauts

The tourism industry of Costa Rica attracts many types of visitors. Any given flight landing at the Juan Santamaria or Daniel Oduber Quiros international airports is bound to arrive carrying a miscellany of tourists and visitors who may have very different plans in mind. Some are attracted by nature and biodiversity while others just want to relax at the beach. Others are more active-minded and come to Costa Rica specifically for surfing, paddle boarding, whitewater rafting, fishing, scuba diving, etc. Then there are those tourists who like to get rather close to the locals in places like Puerto Viejo (for the ladies), Jaco Beach and San Jose (for everyone else).

The hospitality industry in Costa Rica has been focusing lately on attracting other types of tourists, specifically business and scientific visitors, yet there is one kind of tourism activity that remains in the underground. Drug tourism is usually associated with cities like Amsterdam in The Netherlands for cannabis -although the liberal Dutch drug policy has been subject to a recent clampdown. Other known drug tourism spots are the Rif Mountains in Morocco for hashish and the Canary Islands of Spain for just about every known drug. Then there’s Route 36 in La Paz, Bolivia –a cocaine lounge.

Drug tourists who travel the world in search of psychedelic experiences tend to look for more than just a place where they can get high at a reasonable cost and without getting arrested. These psychonauts are usually in search of healing or some kind of transformational enlightenment, what Zen Buddhists call satori. These daring psychonauts often travel to Peru in search of San Pedro, a powerful hallucinogenic cactus, or to villages in the Amazon looking for ayahuasca. In recent years, mind-trippers have been visiting Costa Rica, where they can take part in Ayahuasca ritual ceremonies guided by shamans who are either indigenous South Americans or else have trained in the herbal arts.

The Shamanistic Ayahuasca Rituals

A finca in the Southern Zone of Costa Rica offers spiritual healing retreats that involve drinking ayahuasca, an infusion made from the extract of a powerful psychoactive vine loaded with alkaloids. Ayahuasca has hallucinogenic properties, but the comparisons to LSD stop there. An ayahuasca ritual is undertaken for healing or transformational, rather than recreational, purposes. The Facebook Timeline of an ayahuasca shaman in Costa Rica explains it succinctly:

“Ayahuasca is NOT a recreational ‘drug’. It is a serious affair that offers profound insights into ones life. You lose the ability to hide from yourself and the things you normally try and block from your mind. Your life is laid out before you.

Nobody can predict what they will experience when they take ayahuasca.”

Irresponsible use of ayahuasca has been previously discussed in The Costa Rica Star by pointing out a 2011 article on the Canadian online magazine Common Ground, which described the “zombie kids” of Iquitos in Peru -a region known to attract psychedelic tourists:

“[zombie kids] are young tourists who have been psychologically bruised by quickie ceremonies with bad concoctions. These train wrecks are partly the unfortunate outcome of misunderstanding across cultures […]. Excessive demand from tourists is eliminating the plants that go into the ayahuasca brew from the Amazon basin. A peasant farmer with a hungry family to feed, who has hung out a shingle as a curandero, figures the white rich kids just want to obliterate their senses – so he finds the next best thing: scopolamine (burundanga).”

Magic Mushrooms

Other psychonauts who may be interested in hallucinatory fungi experiences in Costa Rica should also be careful. A 1983 research study of 67 species of mushrooms in Costa Rica revealed 4 hallucinatory, 55 edible and 8 poisonous. Online stores that sell mushroom spores for those who enjoy fungi cultivation as a hobby usually carry one or two sets of spores from Costa Rica that promise to yield substantial amounts of the hallucinogenic psilocybin compound. One of these stores -The Hawk’s Eye- includes a narrative by psychonauts who found Psilocybe cubensis in the Chachagua waterfalls near the Arenal volcano:

“I asked [a Tico Rasta] if he knew about psilocybe mushies and if they could be bought in Costa Rica. He laughed and said they are everywhere and they are free…only the herb cost $$. Cattle had not inhabited the fields immediately around his place for several months and the grass was waist high.

We scoured the fields and only came up with only a handful that day. We ate just a little bit for a buzz and sat outside with them as the sun set. Mateo ate a full dose and looked to be to be in full bloom after about an hour…”

Considering that the great biodiversity of Costa Rica is still being classified, psychonauts who come here looking for magic mushrooms should exercise due caution, as many fungi have yet to be classified as hallucinatory, edible or poisonous. The most common toxic mushrooms have been conveniently identified and posted online by the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBIO); they are to be avoided.

A Word of Caution to Drug Tourists

Just like the “zombie kids” described above by Common Ground, psychonauts and drug tourists face dangers that are closely associated with the activities they choose to partake in. Escapism is one of the great allures of drug tourism, and it is usually accompanied by recklessness. The psychonauts who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies entrust their lives to the shamans who conduct the rituals and care for them; unfortunately, other drug tourists forego supervision and throw caution to the wind.

In late December of 2011, an English backpacker from West London was taken into custody by Fuerza Publica after he allegedly stabbed a young woman from the Czech Republic to death in a tent in Upala, near the border with Nicaragua. News media reports indicated that the murder was the result of drug-fueled attack carried on by the British tourist.

A 2011 research paper by Maikel Vargas Sanabria, a forensic medicine expert and adjunct professor of the University of Costa Rica School of Medicine, indicated that between 2006 and 2010, 23.3 percent of all fatal drug overdoses that took place in Costa Rica occurred to foreigners -many of them tourists. Most fatal drug overdoses involved a mixture of alcohol and cocaine, with some appearances by heroin and other opiates, although no deaths were attributed to hallucinogenics.

Tourists should always err on the side of caution, particularly those who are looking for psychoactive thrills. In the end, taking copious amounts of drugs in a foreign land without supervision or a support network will always be very risky.