Joe Wicks plans trip to the Amazon for mind-bending drug session

The fitness guru has revealed he wants to take the plant brew ayahuasca. Steve Boggan has personal experience of the drug and advises Wicks to proceed with caution

Joe’s jungle juice: Wicks faces a journey into his own mind  (AP)

I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate. Around me, all sense of distance is wrapping itself up like spatial origami, slowly shrinking until an entire dimension has disappeared. A moment ago, I was surrounded by 200 people dressed in white and singing like angels, but now they occupy the same space as me… if that makes any sense.”

This is what I wrote in my diary after taking ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic South American brew beloved of shamans and spiritualists. In some cultures and religions, ayahuasca is regarded as a sacrament, to some backpackers it provides a trippy drug experience and to curious New Agers it is considered a window into the soul.

It is the latter of these that the fitness guru Joe Wicks, 34, is hoping to experience after announcing this week that he would like to travel to the Amazon rainforest to try it for himself. During an interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast by fellow entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, Mr Wicks discussed his difficult childhood with a heroin-addicted father and said he would consider therapy as “personal training for the mind” but would prefer to try ayahuasca.