ANDREW WEIL HAS SPENT SIX DECADES being loyal — it appears exclusively loyal — to his curiosity and to the pursuit of wellness and health in the fullest sense of those words. That curiosity took him from the Harvard Botanical Museum to Japan (where he first encountered matcha tea, decades before it became trendy), from the Amazon rainforest to spontaneous healing, from psychedelic medicine to integrative approaches to aging consciously. For this loyalty to intellectual exploration and his joyful willingness to be his own guinea pig, he’s been celebrated to an extraordinary degree — alternatively castigated, embraced, dismissed, vindicated.
The pattern showed up early for Andy. At Harvard in the 1960s, his curiosity about consciousness-altering plants earned him both acclaim for groundbreaking research and suspicion from authorities uncomfortable with students studying what they forbade. He had the peculiar fortune of early contact with Ram Dass and Timothy Leary — a front-row seat to the birth of the counterculture. There’s a touch of Forrest Gump to it all, this weird ability to find himself at the center of major cultural movements, not quite by design but not quite by accident either.
His 1972 book The Natural Mind proposed that the desire to alter consciousness was natural and universal, and challenged the war on drugs and reductionist neuroscience simultaneously, while his best-seller, Spontaneous Healing, brought his ideas about integrative medicine to millions of readers. Medical establishments have only gradually, grudgingly begun incorporating practices he championed decades ago.
And, now 82, after founding the school of integrative medicine at the University of Arizona, he has become the very embodiment of the integrative medicine movement. His current interests include that matcha tea he discovered in Japan long ago, which has become a kind of trend.
Given his wide circle of friends, Andy could live anywhere. But like so many people, he’s coming back to Santa Fe. When I asked if he considered himself an aspiring local, almost local, or getting to be a local, all were fine with him.
We did a quick Q&A with Andy in our last issue, but he was so provocative and interesting that we wanted to get to know him better. We’re glad Andy gave us more time. Because in a world that often rewards certainty, however groundless — it’s reassuring that curiosity may be the truest compass after all.
As a Harvard undergraduate, you studied ethnobotany. That wasn’t exactly common in the 60s.
I’ll tell you a story about that. I got my love of plants from my mother, who got it from her mother, who was a real wizard with plants. And when I got to Harvard, I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I remember everybody was always asking me, what do you want to be? And I didn’t know what to say. But I was thumbing through the Harvard course catalog, and I came across this course titled Plants and Human Affairs.
I was intrigued by the title. So, in order to sign up for it, you had to go to the Harvard Botanical Museum, which is this old Victorian brick building. I was walking up a whole bunch of steps to the office and on my way up, a guy came down.
This was 1960. It was the first long-haired man I’d seen. He was a proto-hippie, who obviously had been in the ethnobotanical library up there, which had a big collection of books on drug plants.
Anyway, I had to go to the office of Richard Schultes, who headed the course. And that was one of the best courses I’ve ever taken. It’s the only course I ever took in which I got practical knowledge.
It was about useful plants, plants of economic importance other than ornamentals. It was about foods and fibers and dyes and medicines and drugs. And each week we had a lab.
The first lab was making a typical Mexican meal. We had a lab on making soap, and one on making ink. And there was one where you got to try some exotic Amazonian drugs.
It was wonderful. So that started me off on a career interest in medicinal plants, which is unusual for someone going into medicine.
I had a long association with Schultes and the Harvard Botanical Museum. It was an important foundation of my work. And it was shocking to me when I was in medical school, in my pharmacology course, the people teaching had no conception of the natural sources of the drugs they were talking about.
At the same time, I also wanted to study consciousness, and that was impossible in those days. I had a brief period majoring in psychology, but psychology was completely dominated by BF Skinner, and they were trying to explain behavior without any reference to consciousness. I found that very frustrating.
Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were experimenting with psychedelics at Harvard.
Well, that was really interesting stuff. And I think they genuinely felt that these agents were the most interesting things they’d ever come across and had tremendous potential for changing society. I think Timothy Leary had really no awareness of how that was going to push the buttons of straight society.
He had an incredible knack for saying things that really pissed people off. And he craved attention as well. So that was a bad combination. Harvard was not the right place for them.
And how about Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass?
He was more complicated. Leary was a kind of Irish leprechaun, Piper figure. Alpert was complex.
In those days, I think he was uncomfortable in his own skin and his transformation into Ram Dass was quite amazing. I owe him, I learned a lot from reading him. Be Here Now had a great influence, listening to his stories about his experiences in India.
These guys have passed from researchers and innovators into the stuff of legend. And you were one of the people that actually bore witness to it.
They demonstrated the great positive potential of psychedelics, like the work with prison inmates, for example. They were, I think, the first people to really stress the importance of set and setting in shaping these experiences. Those were very valuable contributions.
But the publicity surrounding Alpert’s firing from Harvard was what really brought these drugs to the attention of the general public. It was a front page story of The New York Times. That was the first time Americans ever heard of these drugs.
And here we are, years later, and that insight seems to have come full circle. Does that strike you as strange?
Yeah, all of that. Someone recently asked if I was surprised to see how rapidly the interest in psychedelics was proceeding. And I said, I’m not surprised. I’m disappointed that it’s taken this long. It’s been a really long time since the research in the late 50s and 60s demonstrated the positive potential of psychedelics. Finally, we are slowly moving toward making these available.
Your career seems like a mission. You critically examine things as they are taught, conventional wisdom. You’ve taken on a lot of sacred cows.
I think I came into the world that way. I have always been naturally curious and my parents didn’t snuff that out. They encouraged me to be curious and follow my interests.
And I always, from a very young age, questioned when people told me this is how things are. Part of me always said, well, maybe there’s another way of looking at it. I just think that is my essential nature.
I don’t think I’ve changed much over the years since my book The Natural Mind came out. That was 1972. It caused quite a lot of controversy. Life magazine ran a big review of it, which concluded, this is a dangerous and subversive book. I was very happy to see that.
There was this fundamental idea you had that you should take control of your own health. There was a suspicion of only getting your advice when you go to a doctor who makes you pay at the door.
I think most people that I meet have very little confidence in their body’s healing abilities.
And I’ve always tried to give people a sense of that and make them more confident and show them how they can be independent of practitioners of all sorts. For instance, with aging, I’m very bothered by the longevity stuff, people saying they’re going to live to 165. I just don’t think that’s true.
I think what we should be focusing on is staying healthy as we get older. There are some things that get better as you get older. Even some aspects of memory and mental function. And I think it’s easier to have emotional equilibrium as you get older and not get thrown off as much by things. And something that has become very important to me is travel.
When I was 17, I was part of an experimental school that took a group of students and faculty around the world for eight months. We lived with native families and that changed my life, really gave me a sense that there are other ways of looking at things. I’m bothered by how many people in this society have really no experience of other cultures. That has been very important to me.
Is it the shock of difference? Is that it?
It’s the different ways of interpreting reality. In every society, there’s things they do stupidly and there’s things they do wisely, but there’s an awful lot to be learned from.
Over the years at different times, you’ve gotten a lot of shit for taking on those sacred cows. How do you take criticism?
I don’t pay attention to it so much. I’m aware of it, but it’s actually dramatic how that has fallen off.
I used to be a major target of the quack busters and that’s completely disappeared. And the center that I started at the University of Arizona, we are the first dedicated academic integrative medicine center to open in the heart of a medical campus of a major university. And we’re embraced by all the colleges and the university and the president.
It’s very gratifying and interesting to see that that changed from someone who was a total outsider. It’s kind of funny to watch. I mean, I haven’t changed my message.
And that is integrative medicine. How does it contrast with the care most people get?
Yeah. I’ve always said one day we’ll be able to drop the word integrative and it’ll just be good medicine. The whole point of it is to try to correct the deficiencies and excesses of conventional medicine.
The main excess I worry about is over-medication and misuse of medications, which now account for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year in this country. The main deficiency is the total neglect of the nonphysical. You know, we don’t really believe the mind is real and we don’t see how nonphysical things can affect the physical body. And that greatly limits our effectiveness.
I was interested in studying consciousness way back when and I couldn’t do it within academia, but I’ve always been fascinated by how what’s in our head influences what’s outside of our head and how we can change things outside of our head by changing things in our head. That goes back to my earliest childhood.
It’s rare people get to do what they want to do when they grow up.
Yeah. You know, my parents were horrified at various points by my dropping out of medicine and they really worried about me. Even when I did marijuana research way back when, I’d come home and my mother, she never said anything, but she’d cut out little articles about how marijuana caused brain damage and leave them by my bedside. I’m sure they worried a lot about me, but deep down they trusted me and believed I would come out right.
Wow.
Let me just tell you one funny incident. Maybe in the 1990s, I was in New York in the summer and it was around the beginning of the evening. And I was walking along Park Avenue and a very disheveled homeless man sidled up to me to panhandle me.
And he looked at me, he said, are you Andrew Weil? And I said, yes. He said, wow, I read The Natural Mind when I was in college. And that’s the most influential book I’ve ever read.
You write that the modern body was never designed for the kind of slings and arrows of the internet and all the constant information we are pummeled with.
I think these are just tough times for everybody in a lot of ways, but here’s one observation I’ve made: I think for me and for many people, we have the experience that time is going faster and faster.
For instance, it seems like Christmas is always coming around, and that wasn’t my experience as a child. Then, it was a long time between Christmases and summer vacations and it seemed endless. I’ve read that one explanation of this is as you get older, each unit of time is a shorter percentage of the time that you’ve lived.
But my daughter, when she was about 11 or 12, said she had the same experience of Christmas coming around really fast. I think time has sped up because more is happening per unit of time. And I think that has to do with devices and the way that we’re exposed to information. It’s changing everything.
I think all we can do is try to limit exposure to that. I try to disengage from the phone and computer by early afternoon and try not to pay attention to it after that. But it takes constant work and it’s getting harder and harder.
One of the appealing things about your work is that you’re kind of your own, I won’t say guinea pig…
I try not to tell people to do things that I don’t do myself. That seems responsible.
You are a celebrity. Forgive that word, famous, whatever you want to call it. Has that helped or hurt?
I feel fortunate that that didn’t happen to me until relatively late in my life. It was in my forties and I can’t imagine what it must be like to have that kind of celebrity when you’re 18 or 20.
Because I haven’t really changed as a result of that. In some ways it’s been helpful — I don’t think I could have achieved what I did at the University of Arizona without that.
But it used to annoy me. They’d have their fancy brochures for fundraising campaigns and they’d have a centerfold with my picture and they never gave me a cent for the work that I was doing there. But I’ve had people in other parts of the world who only know about me from my center at the University of Arizona. So, in that sense, it has been helpful to me.
Do you get people walking up to you and asking personal advice?
First of all, I’ve often been mistaken for the amazing Oliver Sacks! We’re people with beards, you know. But it’s fallen off because I’m not on television as much now. When I was on a lot of television, people would come up to me to thank me for something that helped them from my books or hearing me speak. And sometimes they were very moving stories.
I have a good friend who for a long time was Joseph Campbell’s personal assistant. She said people would come up to him and tell him about their alien abductions, you know, all sorts of stuff. So I don’t get that. Mostly it’s very nice stuff.
Also, although I may look like an extrovert, I am actually an introvert. I’m a fairly private person and I enjoy my solitary time. But I can play the role to go out and speak and so forth.
How did you get interested in matcha?
I’ve been interested in matcha since I was 17, when I first went to Japan on an exchange student trip. From the moment I got there, I felt at home. Maybe I had past lives there. My mother read me Japanese fairy tales when I was little, so some of that stuck with me.
I’d never had good tea before. Growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank –mostly Lipton iced tea with lots of sugar. The first time I had green tea in Japan, I loved it. The second night there, I sat in on an abbreviated tea ceremony at a neighbor’s house. I tasted matcha for the first time and watched them whisk it with the chasen. I was fascinated and wanted that to be part of my life.
I had many trips to Japan in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and whenever I went, I’d bring matcha back and try to turn friends onto it. Nobody had ever heard of it. In the 1980s, I partnered with a Japanese matcha company and tried to sell it through my website, but it was too early—it never took off.
Then, ten years ago, I just had a sense: this is now. I formed a company with my partner, Andre Fasciola. We built relationships with tea producers in Japan and it’s taken off incredibly. I feel partly responsible for this amazing matcha boom that’s happening worldwide.
It’s mainly among young people. I think this phenomenon is being driven by social media. The profusion of matcha cafes everywhere is remarkable. I never thought I’d see it take off to this extent.
Let me talk about coffee for a moment. When people offer me coffee, I say I don’t touch hard drugs. Coffee is a very strong drug. Most people who drink it are physically addicted and will have withdrawal symptoms if they stop. When I was actively practicing, I achieved many miracle cures just by getting somebody to stop drinking coffee – anxiety, insomnia, bladder and stomach problems.
The cultural associations with tea and coffee are so different. Coffee has always been associated with arguing, loud voices, that kind of energy. I heard that one Seattle newspaper even banned coffee from the newsroom because it was making people too anxious and loud. Whereas tea has associations with meditation and contemplation, especially matcha, because of the tea ceremony.
I think it’s a really good thing that more people are drinking tea, especially young people. They’re also not drinking alcohol as much — that’s a big change.
Matcha has the stimulating effect without being drugged like caffeine. It has theanine in it, so it doesn’t produce this jangling stimulation with a crash afterward. People describe it as relaxed alertness or calm focus. It’s remarkable.
You seem to have a knack for spotting trends before they become mainstream — matcha, mushrooms in skincare, psychedelics.
I have a knack for being able to see where things are going. In my books and speaking, I’ve stated things that five or seven years later, people come around to. I warned people about the dangers of trans fats long ago. I started American Health magazine in 1981—I had this ability to spot trends. It’s something you can’t make up; you just kind of have it.
Fifteen years ago, the CEO of Origins asked me to help design skincare products. I said I don’t use hair products, but I could think of new ingredients to try. My first thought was mushrooms—I know a lot about them. I gave them a list of species that might have good topical effects. They launched Dr. Weil for Origins Mega Mushroom, which became their leading brand worldwide. Now mushrooms are everywhere in skincare.
As you look over the landscape of our current moment, we see a suspicion of science. What do you make of that?
Yeah, that’s a strange thing. I’m disturbed by it, especially the anti-vax stuff. However, I think the scientific establishment has brought some of this by its own behavior and arrogance.
But the consequences of this can be dire for our society. You look at RFK Jr., he’s such a mixture — there’s some things he says and does that are sensible and others that are just completely off the wall.
What do you think about Harvard and the dispute with the Trump administration?
I’m glad that Harvard stood up when so many other universities just knuckled under right away. I’m very happy they did that. And I owe Harvard a lot.
I really enjoyed my undergraduate time there. I was even an editor of the newspaper, where I developed a lot of my writing skills.
And I just met a lot of interesting people. It was a very great community. It was a real shock to go from there to Harvard Medical School, which was both physically and intellectually isolated from the rest of the university.
But it also had great value for you.
In the early days, when I was invited to speak to medical audiences and talk about my philosophy, there were very hostile people who would say, where did you go to medical school? And when I’d say Harvard, that ended the conversation.
Word has it that you will be spending more time in Santa Fe.
You know, I don’t know why Santa Fe was off my radar for so long. I live in Tucson, but escape it in the summers. I used to go to the Pacific Northwest, and for a long time I went to an island in British Columbia.
I’ve been to Santa Fe a few times, but when I came this time, I really thought it’s fabulous. And I don’t know why I ignored it for so long.
Really interesting people and the whole place feels congenial. It feels like a kind of bubble in these very perilous times we’re living in. I like it a great deal. I think I already have more of a community there than I do in Tucson. So I think I will spend more and more time here.
You’re almost an aspirational Santa Fean.
Yes!
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