I Quit Cocaine After One Ayahuasca Trip | Roman’s StoryI Quit Cocaine After One Ayahuasca Trip | Roman’s Story
Hard Knox Talks: Sober Stories. Real Talk.
Roman talks about ending a 12-year cocaine addiction after an intense ayahuasca experience involving alien-like beings, deep emotional visions and a sense of mental reset. He and Daniel Unmanageable discuss psychedelics, recovery, resilience, and how these experiences reshaped Roman’s views on women, addiction and compassion.
1:15:15•8 May 2026
Aliens, Ayahuasca and Ending a 12-Year Coke Habit: Roman’s Story
Episode Overview
- Ayahuasca may help disrupt addictive patterns by creating new neural pathways, but it still requires personal effort and follow-through.
- Powerful psychedelic experiences can confront people with painful realities, including their impact on others, in ways that feel unavoidable yet ultimately caring.
- Recovery tools shouldn’t be judged against each other; 12-step meetings, psychedelics, the gym or spiritual practices can all be valid if they help someone stay well.
- Repeated ceremonies with experienced guides or shamans can offer support, but overusing psychedelics may undermine the development of everyday resilience.
- Harsh self-judgement and reducing others to their worst behaviour can block compassion; recognising people as more than their mistakes can change how anger and blame are handled.
“"Ayahuasca severed these old connections, so it was almost like I was never an addict. I had the memory of it, but I woke up feeling reset."”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? Roman’s story takes that question into some pretty wild territory, featuring aliens, centipede-like beings, and a 12-year cocaine habit that seemed to vanish after one ayahuasca ceremony. Hard Knox Talks keeps things raw and conversational as Roman chats with host Daniel Unmanageable about more than a decade of cocaine use that started as part of an "artist" lifestyle and spiralled into snorting eight-balls alone while watching conspiracy videos.
He describes reaching a point of total exhaustion with himself: grey, overweight, blood pressure through the roof, and ready to risk anything for change. That change came in an ayahuasca ceremony where, as Roman puts it, "these little kind of weird centipede creatures crawled all over me, just ripping me apart, putting me back together" before an alien presence told him his addiction was gone.
From there, he talks about feeling as if his brain had been "reset", keeping the parts of life he valued and leaving cocaine off the list. The conversation doesn’t sell psychedelics as a magic fix. Roman is clear that ayahuasca opened doors, but he still had to build resilience, especially later when he survived a stroke and the loss of someone deeply important to him.
He’s upfront that psychedelics don’t work for everyone and that people in the West are prone to overdoing anything that helps. You’ll also hear him reflect on powerful visions of female suffering, how they shifted his attitudes towards women, porn, and language, and what repeated ceremonies in Peru with traditional shamans taught him about fear, compassion, and “beating demons with love”.
For anyone curious about the intersection of addiction, psychedelics, creativity, and recovery, this candid chat offers a lot to sit with – are you ready to question what change might look like for you?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.
Related Episodes
Similar episodes from other shows in the catalogue.