Salvador Roquet, María Sabina, and the Trouble withJipis

This essay introduces Salvador Roquet, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who collaborated with the famed Mazatec curandera María Sabina, and argues that their work together exemplifies a cross-cultural collaboration in psychedelic psychiatry. Roquet developed a therapeutic method partly from Sabina's teachings, and both shared a disdain for jipis (hippies). Their partnership offers an alternative history of psychedelic drugs in Mexico, where local, naturally occurring psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, datura, and ololiuqui were seen as powerful medicines requiring respect, expert handling, and careful prescription, with the counterculture acting as a foil to this view.

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Abstract

Abstract While María Sabina has long been an iconic figure among drug enthusiasts and advocates for indigenous rights, her sometime collaborator Salvador Roquet remains largely unknown. This essay introduces the work of this iconoclastic psychiatrist and, in particular, his work with Sabina, highlighting their contributions to the world of psychedelic psychiatry and exploring the nature of their exchanges. Beyond examining the contours of the therapeutic method Roquet developed in part due to Sabina's teachings, the essay argues that their work together offers us a fascinating example of cross-cultural collaboration. Moreover, their mutual disdain for jipis introduces an alternative history of psychedelic drugs in Mexico — one in which the counterculture acted as a foil to those who believed that local, naturally occurring psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, datura, and ololiuqui were powerful medicines that needed to be respected, handled by experts, and used in carefully prescribed ways.