“I plan to live until I’m 111,” said the hunchbacked wizard, hair disheveled in the evening breeze as he walked barefoot alongside me down the Pacific Mexican coastal town of Sayulita last year.
Jonathan Ott was a larger than life character who had an outsized influence on Western psychedelic culture. The reclusive ethnobotanist and savant of obscure drug chemistry passed away on 5 July at the age of 76, leaving a legacy far too strange and profound to ever be properly recorded or appreciated.
Ott was known for many contributions to drug culture in the 20th and 21st Century. Born to a working class family in Connecticut and spending his childhood living between the U.S. and Europe, his lifelong interest in ethnobotany was sparked in 1973 while attending a lecture from famed plant biologist Richard Evan Shultes. Ott subsequently came to prominence in the late 1970s after publishing several books on North American hallucinogenic plants. He wrote exhaustively researched and brilliantly composed articles on shamanism and visionary plant tools for multiple prestigious publications before arriving at his magnum opus in 1993: Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History.
Pharmacotheon is essentially the holy text of mind-altering plants and the history of their use across civilisations. In around 600 pages, it covers over 1,000 plants used for various visionary and divinatory purposes around the world, containing one of the most extensive bibliographies on the subject ever compiled. Along the way, Ott is co-credited with having coined the term “entheogen” in 1979 alongside researchers Carl Ruck, Danny Staples, Jeremy Bigwood and R. Gordon Wasson as an alternative to the word “psychedelic”. Entheogen is a portmanteau of the Greek words “entheos” (inspired, possessed), and “genesthai” (to come into being), which taken together suggest a divine encounter.
Rejecting renaissance
While just as iconic as fellow contemporary psychedelic figures like Rick Doblin and the late Amanda Feilding, he uniquely diverged from them in the latter part of his life. Just as the “psychedelic renaissance” began to surge, he rejected its increasingly corporatised form and chose solitude instead. The aging wizard steeled himself away in self-isolation, devoting himself to writing and archiving obscure botanical and entheogenic knowledge, debating the etymology of various terms used to frame it.
Speaking to Ott in Mexico, he made it abundantly clear to me that he was not a fan of the term “psychedelic”, and much less so the popular phrase “psychedelic renaissance”.
“In the first place, it’s not a renaissance because something has to die to be reborn. It literally means rebirth, and this has never died. It’s been with humankind for at least 10,000 years, and it’s still going strong,” he said.
Ott was very clear that the term “psychedelic” belongs specifically to a bygone era: the 1960’s.
“I use the term to refer to psychedelic art, psychedelic music, psychedelic culture, psychedelic 60’s. Because as I’ve said, it’s a slice of time that’s come and gone, it has a distinct connotation of the 1960s.”
He ultimately chose to disappear into the mountains of Mexico at some point in the 1980s. It’s no wonder he sought solitude and privacy towards the end of his life; both his lab and library burned down in a suspicious way in 2010. Books that Albert Hofmann himself had gifted to Ott were reportedly used as fuel for the fire. While Ott escaped unharmed, many personal possessions and precious knowledge were destroyed in the arson.
Over the next decade and a half, sightings of Ott were as frequent and as famed as Bigfoot. Anecdotes reported of him surfacing in a hostel deep in the Amazon jungle; others claimed they caught a glimpse of him in a cloud forest somewhere in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz.
At the colloquium we both attended in Mexico in April of 2024, I was given the task of tracking him down and bringing him to the closing party as he had been missing for several hours. I knew he had a particular interest in the local pharmacies, some of which were his regular haunts, and went from pharmacy to pharmacy to enquire of his whereabouts. I found him and we walked across town together, him barefoot, regaling me with long orations on rhododendron honey and the pantheon of Mexican pharmaceutical molecules the whole way. Earlier in the week during his last lecture, Ott shared some of his discoveries about the spoils he uncovered at one of the pharmacies nearby our guesthouse.
“I was shocked and pleased to find that you can buy things like amphetamines and benzodiazepines, even antibiotics here without a prescription, which is not legal in Mexico. This is strictly so people like us will buy them – I bought a few and I’ll just give you an example. You can buy generic Ritalin – methylphenidate, it’s called – for $64 or $0.50 a box of 60 times ten milligrams. And the benzodiazepines, a good deal is clonazepam, under that name boxes of 102 mg for $36, and they also have lorazepam boxes of 82 mg.”
Jonathan Ott had an extraordinary command of both the Mexican pharmaceutical zeitgeist and the inebriating plants used over history in rites of passage across pre-Colombian cultures native to the region. It was precisely this breadth and depth of highly specialised and often arcane knowledge that made him such an important bridge between eras, cultures, and ideas. He was simultaneously a contemporary of Albert Hofmann, a fluent German and Spanish speaker, a savant of indigenous visionary plants from the some of the world’s most remote areas, and a barefoot eccentric willing to scour small town Mexican pharmacies in 2024 to share good deals and appropriate dosing to digital natives like myself.
He shared fascinating tales of his transnational trials and tribulations commonly heard with old-school psychedelic characters. On one occasion, while attempting to cross a large shipment of DMT-containing root bark from Mexico into the United States, he successfully talked his way out of customs detaining the product by explaining that the bark was for making soap. On another occasion, he had a form of opiate confiscated from him by Spanish authorities when landing in Europe; he left their custody and immediately went to a pharmacy, where he bought the same active compound.
Doubts on psychedelic renaissance
Ott was certainly was not a fan of the medicalisation of “psychedelics”.
“Medicalisation of shamanic inebriants means they’re going to sell you less powerful versions of the whole plant for much higher prices.”
In the twilight of his life story, Ott could’ve easily been cashing in on his niche celebrity and credibility as a pioneer of psychedelic culture, as much as he despised the term. His personal “brand” would have warranted much fame through Joe Rogan podcast appearances, or a serious sum of money by joining the boards of multimillion biotech companies like some of his old guard contemporaries.
Instead, he chose a hermetic lifestyle far outside of the public eye, staying true to a life pursuit of ethnobotanical and scientific research outside of corporate interests or state regulation.
And in that quiet solitude, he produced a legacy of work that has not only documented the history of entheogenic plants, but shaped its future – whether you were aware of him or not.
