But in the United States, many master plants contain chemical compounds categorized by the Food and Drug Administration as Schedule I substances, the harshest drug classification that deems them as having no medical value. However, as cases of addiction, depression and PTSD continue to rise in the United States, researchers are increasingly challenging the FDA’s classification as more underground and international studies confirm the therapeutic and non-addictive properties of psychedelics like LSD, mescaline and psilocybin. Regarding master plants specifically, in 2015, neuroscientists at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, found that ayahuasca reduced depression in subjects immediately after consumption as well as in the following weeks. In Canada, Mexico and New Zealand, ibogaine root is currently used to treat heroin addiction.

On a broader scale, psychedelic evangelists like Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna have asserted that quite possibly, psychedelic plants shaped the course of human history as the source of religious visions. Zapolin, who studies Jewish mystical cabala and co-authored a book with Deepak Chopra on the subject, became interested in master plants after reading the Hebrew Bible.

“I was looking at the Book of Exodus around five years ago,” Zapolin recounts. “I was looking at the manna stuff. It says that manna was a small round thing that appears in the morning dew and if you put it in your tent, worms will come out of it and it will stink. I was like, ‘Well that’s what happens with mushrooms.’ And if you carry it over to the Jesus story, where he turned water into wine, according to the Cabalistic oral tradition, he put manna in the pots. And the people who drank it reported that Jesus’s wine was incredible, that they were connected to the angels.”

“So I was like, I gotta call Deepak,” Zapolin says, starting to laugh. “He’s gonna tell me I’m nuts, but I had to get it off my chest. So I called him and said, ‘I think that this manna that’s described in the Bible may have been mushrooms.’ And he’s totally silent. He’s like, ‘The reason why this resonates with me is that in my Vedic tradition, there’s the plant soma, which was described as a mystery plant that would connect you to God. According to them it doesn’t exist anymore, but based on our scientific knowledge now, it’s obvious that it was mushrooms’.”

At the end of their discussion, Chopra instructed Zapolin “to take people on this [psychedelic] journey and document it.” Zapolin gathered a motley crew of filmmakers, including his cousin Laurent Levy, a cinematographer. She connected him to Michelle Rodriguez, who had been reading about ayahuasca and wanted to try it. After filming interviews with David Lynch, Sri Ravi Shankar and other celebrities on the topic, Zapolin, Rodriguez, and a film crew embarked for Peru to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. They had, what looked like to them, the beginning of a movie.