Michael Taussig first visited the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon in 1972, and has returned almost annually since 1976 to drink yage (the hallucinogenic vine ayahuasca) by the Mocoa River with his shaman friend, the late Santiago Mutumbajoy. Research on these trips constituted much of the fieldwork for his 1987 book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, which is a primary topic of this interview, along with Colombian politics, cultures of drug use, and changes observed by the author over the last three decades. Pamphlet.