Amazon leaders and academics denounce ayahuasca rituals led by outsiders

[SixBuckets]

http://america.aljazeera.com/articl...ounce-ayahuasca-rituals-led-by-outsiders.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Among indigenous peoples from the upper Amazon in South America, views on outsiders participating in rituals involving ayahuasca — the medicinal plant and the hallucinogenic drink made from it — vary. But even those who are more welcoming believe some ayahuasca tourists diverge too far from tradition, putting themselves and others at risk.In the region, in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, shamans administer the drink for physical and spiritual healing purposes. It can cause visions and purge the body, and indigenous communities believe the concoction has divinatory and healing powers. Users often report coming away from the experience with a sense of purpose. It is not uncommon for nonindigenous people from these countries and from abroad to visit the Amazon in search of the spiritual experience that ayahuasca promises.
Such is the case with Alberto José Varela, an Argentine who has become embroiled in a public feud with the Cofán (or A’i) indigenous people of southern Colombia. He has been commercializing ayahuasca (or yagé, as it’s more commonly known in the country) for about a decade and organizing tours for Europeans to partake in rituals involving the plant.
Varela runs various websites, grouped under an organization called Ayahuasca Internacional (legally constituted in Spain as Inner Mastery International), through which he sells the yagé plant and offers trips to Mocoa, in the Colombian Amazon, for people to try the beverage. The tours cost 150 euros ($170) per person per day and require a minimum stay of seven days. Varela also organizes other workshops and retreats around the world, which he says 4,000 people attend annually.
His is a popular, global operation. He said that he manages about 50 Facebook pages and websites, with a combined following of a million people. He also runs a school, known as Escuela Ayahuasquera or Escuela Consciente, which has chapters in Spain, Italy, Germany and Mexico, with about 2,000 students.
But the Cofanes — a small community of about 1,000 people — and their authorities published a letter in July denouncing Varela and his businesses, arguing that he is insulting their traditions and putting lives at risk.
Lorenzo Morales, the governor of the Ukumari Kankhe reservation, where most of the Colombian Cofanes live, said, “To truly understand the power of yagé and how to give it to others, you have to take it and be immersed in its culture since you are a kid.”
Morales sees Varela as a disrespectful and dangerous foreigner.
“His schools train shamans in under three months, and he doesn’t even take yagé,” Morales said. “To properly give this medicine, you have to drink more of it than your patient.”
Varela said he drinks yagé “one to four times a year.”
“I have done it hundreds of times, but for me, it is not a cultural act, merely a tool for self-recognition and healing,” he added. “Also, I am very sensitive, so a small dosage can last me for days, during which I channel infinite information, which is where most of my Web updates come from.”
Varela said he’s not trying to re-create sacred rituals. Rather, he organizes what he termed “psychotherapeutical sessions” using ayahuasca and other techniques. He believes the plant doesn’t belong only to indigenous people.
“We are not shamans. We don’t want to create shamans. We educate people on a new discipline of ayahuasca,” he said.

According to Varela, his students must pass three levels that take six months to complete to become eligible to work for Inner Mastery International and train how to use ayahuasca themselves and give it to others.
Yagé contains DMT, a psychedelic that can cause visions. The beverage is believed to cleanse the stomach, provoking vomiting and sometimes diarrhea. If it’s not done in a proper setting, the experience can go badly; Henry Miller, an English teenager, died last year in Colombia after consuming yagé twice, apparently without proper guidance.
Brian Anderson, a resident physician at the University of California at San Francisco, said he believes that the beverage “is not dangerous in terms of toxicology” but that drinking it “should be done by keeping the situation in a safe format and regulated socially by people who have experience with it.”
Charles Grob, a child psychiatrist from UCLA who has researched yagé in Brazil, has a similar opinion. “People who are relatively naive about yagé need supervision,” he said. “Otherwise, they might be vulnerable to psychological decompensation.”
There is also the legal issue. DMT is a Schedule I substance that is heavily regulated in many countries, including Spain, where the legal status of its trade remains ambiguous (although its consumption is explicitly allowed by the international 1971 U.N. Convention on Psychotropic Substances).
Because of this, Varela spent 14 months in prison in Spain, after 40 kilograms of the plant were found at his home in Madrid. Colombia has no legislation explicitly addressing yagé, but it has constitutional provisions ensuring the legality of most indigenous traditions. For decades, tourists have gone to participate in yagé rituals without legal issues.
As for his operations in Colombia, Varela says he was granted the right to work with yagé by taita Querubín Queta, the oldest member from the Cofán Ukumari Kankhe reservation. To prove this, he has two letters from Queta (from2007 and 2014), in which the shaman apparently gave him and his organization the go-ahead to work with yagé and transport it internationally.
However, Queta spoke on a Colombian TV newscast last month and said that a letter was drafted by Varela’s team and that he had signed it without knowing what it read.
“This is an internal power struggle,” Varela responded in an interview with El Espectador newspaper. Varela published a video from May that apparently showed Queta giving him his support. But in the TV interview, Queta said the video was “out of context” and that he was speaking “to Cofán people, not to white people.”
In an interview with Colombian TV news Noticias Uno last month, Varela countered the accusations by saying Queta has repeatedly tried to blackmail him.
“[This] is part of the resentment the indigenous people have had with white people for 500 years,” Varela said in that interview. “Yagé doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to humanity.”
Varela told Al Jazeera America that he refused to pay the Cofanes and distanced himself from the community. “That’s when all of this came about,” he said.
Morales said that is nonsense and insisted that the Cofanes are happy to provide their sacred medicine to anyone — indigenous or not — who seeks it for healing but that they could never teach how to unleash the sacred powers of ayahuasca rituals to an outsider. “Its power is only given by God to the indigenous person that carries the culture of the plant,” he said.
Pressure is mounting on Varela. Earlier this month, the Cofán community received the support of 100 anthropologists, doctors and other experts on indigenous issues who published a letter denouncing him for what they consider a violation of a sacred institution. The experts — from top universities in Colombia, Brazil, the United States, the U.K. and other countries — feel he is a charlatan who is making money unethically and that his ayahuasca rituals are fraudulent, disrespectful and dangerous.
They also complain that he is merely pursuing monetary gains rather than helping people find spiritual enlightenment with yagé.
“Varela’s sites are well marketed, and they shouldn’t be the first place where people find information on yagé,” said anthropologist and law student Jesse Hudson, one of the letter’s signatories. “We wanted to counter that.”
Varela has temporarily shut down the websites through which he sold yagé, he said, “while some legal issues are resolved.” He maintains that he is being honest in not selling the plant as medicine and insists that the benefits of ayahuasca should be available to all.

 

[Crankinit]

An interesting situation. I don't know enough to comment fully, but it seems like a little bit of Column A, a little bit of Column B.

I would definitely be very wary of someone who's taken something like ayahuasca rituals and turned them into some kind of multinational financial enterprise, but on the flip side I agree that no plant, drug, medicine, ritual or spiritual practice belongs to a specific ethnicity or demographic, and I would be equally wary of anyone or any group who expresses such a prejudiced and unenlightened attitude while claiming to possess any kind of spiritual authority.

 

[SixBuckets]

An interesting situation. I don't know enough to comment fully, but it seems like a little bit of Column A, a little bit of Column B.

I would definitely be very wary of someone who's taken something like ayahuasca rituals and turned them into some kind of multinational financial enterprise, but on the flip side I agree that no plant, drug, medicine, ritual or spiritual practice belongs to a specific ethnicity or demographic, and I would be equally wary of anyone or any group who expresses such a prejudiced and unenlightened attitude while claiming to possess any kind of spiritual authority.

I'm with you on actual plants not belonging to anyone (more on that in a bit) but I 100% disagree that groups can't own rituals or spiritual practices. It's a really white and Western perspective to think it's OK to just come along and appropriate someone's spiritual or religious practices, or that you can just join any culture or religion you like (general you). Many groups don't allow conversion to their religious or spiritual practices and I think that's completely acceptable.

On the ownership of plants: the argument behind intellectual property claims over the traditional medicinal qualities of plants is actually not so much to restrict their use to the groups who traditionally use them, but to prevent pharmaceutical companies claiming "ownership" and patenting them. This is one of the reasons why my mob in Australia, for example, are really hard core about protecting their bush medicine secrets. (The other reason is that that knowledge is traditionally held by old women and it's deemed inappropriate to commercialise it). Unfortunately, it means this knowledge is dying out.

 

[Crankinit]

I'm with you on actual plants not belonging to anyone (more on that in a bit) but I 100% disagree that groups can't own rituals or spiritual practices. It's a really white and Western perspective to think it's OK to just come along and appropriate someone's spiritual or religious practices, or that you can just join any culture or religion you like (general you). Many groups don't allow conversion to their religious or spiritual practices and I think that's completely acceptable.

Call a spade a spade here - if someone genuinely desires to, eg. go to the Amazon, sit at the feet of a shaman, submit to his training, learn what he has to teach and then practice it in the traditional manner, and is rejected purely because (s)he happens to be white, or black, or asian, as opposed to a native Southern American, then that's racism, pure and simple.

Obviously nobody can force them to share their teachings, but refusing to do so with those who are genuine in their desire to learn and practice in the traditional manner seems counterproductive, as it just encourages pseudo-practitioners like Varela in the article, who will eventually come to outnumber and overshadow the traditional practitioners. And blatant racism seems fairly contradictory to any claim to some kind of spiritual authority to me.

This is one of the reasons why my mob in Australia, for example, are really hard core about protecting their bush medicine secrets. (The other reason is that that knowledge is traditionally held by old women and it's deemed inappropriate to commercialise it). Unfortunately, it means this knowledge is dying out.

There's a middle ground between hoarding secrets (which, as you've pointed out yourself, has the result of them dying out) and turning them over to gross commercialization.

 

[slimvictor]

I have tried ayahuasca twice. Both times, I concocted it myself following directions I found on Erowid.
I had two amazing, life-changing experiences (especially the first one). Really phenomenal.
If someone came along and told me that I was not doing it correctly, because I was supposed to follow their religion / spiritual practice, I would find it difficult to care, or, maybe, to hold back my laughter. I get it - you have a long tradition of using this drug. Wonderful! But that does not mean that I am somehow beholden to this tradition, which doesn't make sense in my culture.
Similarly, the plants, which are grown by mother nature, belong in the hands of whoever wants to make use of them, imo.
Nothing against traditional rituals - if you like that style, I support you. Make your trip to the amazon, find a real ayahuasquero. Maybe you will have an even more amazing experience. Maybe I will try that myself some day.
But in the meantime, when I partake of plants grown by nature, according to my culture / belief system, I don't see how you have any right to criticize me for doing so.

“To truly understand the power of yagé and how to give it to others, you have to take it and be immersed in its culture since you are a kid.”

This is dangerously close to "lame". I can understand the power of ayahuasca. Maybe not smart to give it to others, especially due to my limited experience. But this is just the typical closed-minded "us vs. them" attitude that so many people have. "If you are not one of us, you have no way to understand the power of the drug." Yeah, right. Whatever.

I don't really believe in the concept of "cultural appropriation", I suppose. Japan "appropriated" Kanji from China and used them to construct a written language. Were they somehow wrong to do so? Americans "appropriated" spaghetti from Italy - should they stop making it? Purely ridiculous. After all, Italy learned about noodles from China (as the story goes, at least). This is how cultures "naturally" merge, grow, and influence each other. I am an ambassador of global cultural exchange, personally and professionally, and I believe that being influenced by a culture, and imitating it, is the highest form of flattery.

Paying $170 / day for an ayahuasca adventure sounds really ridiculous to me, and commercializing the drug, and the experience, could have bad results, I admit. I understand wanting to stop that. But plants belong to everyone - not just one tribe, or nationality.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

I do agree with some of what they said.

A very good friend of mine who is sadly no longer on ths plane of existence, was greatly involved with various tribes in the Amazon that have used Ayahuasca for thousands of years. He grew up with them, and has been and led many ceremonies. My friend said how they did not like the outsiders/foreigners/gringos going to the Amazon just to take Ayahuasca.

My friend also said how the native people of the Amazon really did not like the McKennas since they feel as though the McKennas abused and did not respect Ayahuasca, mushrooms, and other plants/fungi that have been used by such cultures for thousands of years.

I did tell my friend about my experiences with psychedelic mushrooms, and he said how it is best to take such things, including San Pedro and Ayahuasca in a religious/spiritual ceremony with an actual shaman or guide, and not to do it yourself at home.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

You can get DMT's benefits anywhere. You don't have to in the Amazon.

If someone uses DMT by themselves in their apartment or something, and has a great experience, who am I to judge?

 

[SixBuckets]

Call a spade a spade here - if someone genuinely desires to, eg. go to the Amazon, sit at the feet of a shaman, submit to his training, learn what he has to teach and then practice it in the traditional manner, and is rejected purely because (s)he happens to be white, or black, or asian, as opposed to a native Southern American, then that's racism, pure and simple.

No one is saying you can't participate in cultural rituals because you're white or Asian, though? They're saying you can't participate because you're not a member of their ethnic and cultural group. Don't you have things that you only do with your family? Is it "racist" if you tell someone, "Sorry, I don't want to do that thing with you because you're not related to me"?

I have a whole bunch of cultural stuff that my spouse can't participate in (or really understand) - not because he's white, but because he's not Wiradjuri. He doesn't share my heritage and he's not of my ancestral totem. There are even things I can't participate in because my mum's not Wiradjuri and I haven't inherited the appropriate moiety from her (ie I'm not part of the skin groups that are passed down through the mother - they have specific obligations and practices attached to them). That's all relevant to Australia, not South America, but I would guess that they have similar deals about what you makes you ethnically and culturally "appropriate" for their spiritual practices.

I'm curious if you feel the same way about Hinduism or any other non-evangelical religion.

There's a middle ground between hoarding secrets (which, as you've pointed out yourself, has the result of them dying out) and turning them over to gross commercialization.

I agree, but sometimes things being secret is really important to the culture they're part of.

 

[slimvictor]

I have a whole bunch of cultural stuff that my spouse can't participate in (or really understand) - not because he's white, but because he's not Wiradjuri.

I don't know your specific situation, but I wonder if his ethnic/racial/cultural background are really the key factors.
After all, I am not Japanese, but I have a deep interest in Japan, and I know more about many Japanese traditions and ceremonies than my wife, who is Japanese, does. I participate in the cultural events pretty fully, I would say.
Yes, I do speak the language, and have lived in the country for many years, so my interest and knowledge are what allow me to participate.
The only people who try to keep me out of the ceremonies are the racists who cannot fathom a white guy being able to understand or participate.

(This is most definitely not intended as an attack; I am just interested in getting to the roots of the matter here.)

 

[SixBuckets]

I don't know your specific situation, but I wonder if his ethnic/racial/cultural background are really the key factors.

"His" as in my spouse, or as in the person I was replying to?

In our case, it's definitely exactly what I said it was. Indigenous cultural roles (at least where I'm from) aren't something you can choose to opt into. I don't know if I can fully explain moiety, totem and skin with enough brevity to fit in a forum comment, but they're kind of part of you and your family history, not something you convert to.

After all, I am not Japanese, but I have a deep interest in Japan, and I know more about many Japanese traditions and ceremonies than my wife, who is Japanese, does. I participate in the cultural events pretty fully, I would say.
Yes, I do speak the language, and have lived in the country for many years, so my interest and knowledge are what allow me to participate.

The equivalent in my situation would be you saying that because you participate in these ceremonies, you ARE Japanese. The culturally specific stuff around my heritage is packaged in with being Wiradjuri - it's a thing that's done by Wiradjuri people, as part of being Wiradjuri people, and people who aren't Wiradjuri can't do those things or play those roles. It's not about interest or knowledge. There are plenty of events and ceremonies that non-Indigenous people CAN participate in, and there's even a traditional concept of adoption into skins.

Again, I'm Australian, but I completely understand other indigenous people saying that a spiritual practice is "for them" and not something that can be done by outsiders. Remember that most of us inherited these traditions from a heritage that included a lot of complex stuff about interactions between our groups and other tribes/nations: there's a historical expectation that any outsider has their own "stuff" to participate in.

 

[SKL]

White Americans already have their traditional cultural psychedelic. It's called LSD. If they want to take other drugs, so be it, but they ought to stop buying into weird cultic shaman/guru stuff, especially the profiteering sort, the guy described above sounds exactly like what to avoid. To the natives worrying about cultural appropriation, I can dig it, I am a Roman Catholic, in my tradition we exclude people who are not baptised and confirmed from the Eucharist unless they are in danger of death, so excluding outsiders from sacred rites doesn't seem to be that unreasonable, in fact it's been a part of many religious traditions going back millenia. But yeah, if you want to do a DMT/MAOI combination, just cut out the spiritualistic stuff and do a DMT/MAOI combination. The best one, IME, was moclobemide and smoked DMT, but YMMV. I distrust plant drugs and distrust "shamans" even more, so whatever our drug culture can do to disentangle itself with this oh so trendy phenomenon is an excellent thing in my book.

 

[SixBuckets]

White Americans already have their traditional cultural psychedelic. It's called LSD. If they want to take other drugs, so be it, but they ought to stop buying into weird cultic shaman/guru stuff, especially the profiteering sort, the guy described above sounds exactly like what to avoid. To the natives worrying about cultural appropriation, I can dig it, I am a Roman Catholic, in my tradition we exclude people who are not baptised and confirmed from the Eucharist unless they are in danger of death, so excluding outsiders from sacred rites doesn't seem to be that unreasonable, in fact it's been a part of many religious traditions going back millenia. But yeah, if you want to do a DMT/MAOI combination, just cut out the spiritualistic stuff and do a DMT/MAOI combination. The best one, IME, was moclobemide and smoked DMT, but YMMV. I distrust plant drugs and distrust "shamans" even more, so whatever our drug culture can do to disentangle itself with this oh so trendy phenomenon is an excellent thing in my book.

I was actually thinking of Catholics as a Western example of "certain rituals for certain demographics" but I wasn't 100% clear on the details.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

Catholicism has been appropriated and altered by a variety of different cultures, though, so that's not really a great example if we're talking about an exclusionary set of cultural practices.

 

[SixBuckets]

Catholicism has been appropriated and altered by a variety of different cultures, though, so that's not really a great example if we're talking about an exclusionary set of cultural practices.

Yes, and Catholicism is a really prime example of a religion that IS evangelical, so again not a great example.

 

[Crankinit]

No one is saying you can't participate in cultural rituals because you're white or Asian, though? They're saying you can't participate because you're not a member of their ethnic and cultural group.

Semantics, in practice they amount to the same thing -

ethnic
ˈɛθnɪk/
adjective
adjective: ethnic

1.
relating to a population subgroup (within a larger or dominant national or cultural group) with a common national or cultural tradition.
"ethnic and cultural rights and traditions"
synonyms: racial, race-related, ethnological, genetic, inherited;

Don't you have things that you only do with your family? Is it "racist" if you tell someone, "Sorry, I don't want to do that thing with you because you're not related to me"?

How are race and family even remotely equatable? There are plenty of multi-racial families, and people can join a family via marriage, adoption, etc. Race is genetically predetermined and unalterable.

I have a whole bunch of cultural stuff that my spouse can't participate in (or really understand) - not because he's white, but because he's not Wiradjuri. He doesn't share my heritage and he's not of my ancestral totem. There are even things I can't participate in because my mum's not Wiradjuri and I haven't inherited the appropriate moiety from her (ie I'm not part of the skin groups that are passed down through the mother - they have specific obligations and practices attached to them). That's all relevant to Australia, not South America, but I would guess that they have similar deals about what you makes you ethnically and culturally "appropriate" for their spiritual practices.

I'm not going to get into debating your personal situation, that's veering way off topic and I don't know enough about you and your life to be able to comment properly either way.

I'm curious if you feel the same way about Hinduism or any other non-evangelical religion.

Feel which way exactly?

I agree, but sometimes things being secret is really important to the culture they're part of.

That's up to them, but they'll have nobody to blame but themselves when their traditions die out in another generation or two.

Besides, how is secrecy inherently valuable? I understand not wanting to randomly spread knowledge all over the place so it doesn't become distorted and diluted, but going out of your way to restrict it from people who want to learn properly for arbitrary, uncontrollable reasons such as race makes no sense.

I am a Roman Catholic, in my tradition we exclude people who are not baptised and confirmed from the Eucharist unless they are in danger of death, so excluding outsiders from sacred rites doesn't seem to be that unreasonable, in fact it's been a part of many religious traditions going back millenia.

The difference is that the Catholic Church doesn't refuse to baptize and confirm people for not being part of a specific racial group - they openly welcome any prospective members who are serious in their desire to learn and live by the teachings of the Church.

 

[SKL]

I will say this: a huge factor in the trendiness of ayahuasca is Noble Savage fetishism which is arguably offensive but regardless of one's stance on the P.C. elements of "cultural appropriation," it's pretty obnoxious. I mean, it's past being cool. It's no longer something you have to traipse into the jungle for or have some connection to some underground "shaman" who does sessions late nights at a yoga studio. Miley Cyrus does ayahuasca now FFS. It's mainstream. It's not something that makes you special anymore. Just do drugs, drop the nonsense. Don't invade people's cultural spaces just because you think that it adds legitimacy to the high, and don't buy into some New Age woo that isn't part of your heritage. Get high if you want, but all that other nonsense is legitimately offensive IMO. Most of the people who I know who got into that scene became totally insufferable and basically involved in a cult, if not a typical one. All of that extra stuff is a liability. If you want drugs, take drugs, otherwise if you're looking for some spiritual journey if you're starting with drugs you're starting in the wrong place, especially when it comes to invading someone else's millenia old culture that doesn't want you. Anyone who is recruiting gringos to this stuff probably is just after your US dollars and doesn't have your best interests at heart. Look at the fatalities, the sexual abuse, etc. that goes on. Fuck those people TBH. All of plants, and the pure chemical/pharmacological equivalents, are readily available enough in the comfort of your own home, or if you want to do it in some sort of rigorous setting, go camping or something and listen to chant or whatever. Avoid weird rituals and cults at all costs. This kind of stuff also has a propensity to invite malign preternatural influences into your life ... avoid, avoid, avoid.

 

[Crankinit]

I will say this: a huge factor in the trendiness of ayahuasca is Noble Savage fetishism which is arguably offensive but regardless of one's stance on the P.C. elements of "cultural appropriation," it's pretty obnoxious. I mean, it's past being cool. It's no longer something you have to traipse into the jungle for or have some connection to some underground "shaman" who does sessions late nights at a yoga studio. Miley Cyrus does ayahuasca now FFS. It's mainstream. It's not something that makes you special anymore. Just do drugs, drop the nonsense. Don't invade people's cultural spaces just because you think that it adds legitimacy to the high, and don't buy into some New Age woo that isn't part of your heritage. Get high if you want, but all that other nonsense is legitimately offensive IMO. Most of the people who I know who got into that scene became totally insufferable and basically involved in a cult, if not a typical one. All of that extra stuff is a liability. If you want drugs, take drugs, otherwise if you're looking for some spiritual journey if you're starting with drugs you're starting in the wrong place, especially when it comes to invading someone else's millenia old culture that doesn't want you. Anyone who is recruiting gringos to this stuff probably is just after your US dollars and doesn't have your best interests at heart. Look at the fatalities, the sexual abuse, etc. that goes on. Fuck those people TBH. All of plants, and the pure chemical/pharmacological equivalents, are readily available enough in the comfort of your own home, or if you want to do it in some sort of rigorous setting, go camping or something and listen to chant or whatever. Avoid weird rituals and cults at all costs. This kind of stuff also has a propensity to invite malign preternatural influences into your life ... avoid, avoid, avoid.

I've encountered the type of people you're talking about and I definitely agree that that particular attitude can be offputting.

But there's a second side to the story. Yes, some of these people are just going to South America for some kind of psychedelic holiday so they can boast to their friends about the time they took ayahuasca in the jungle with a shaman, but plenty of them are also seeking out legitimate help for some kind of internal or psychological crisis (addiction, PTSD, depression, etc), or genuinely hoping to gain some kind of spiritual benefit from their experience. And when it comes to these things, the drug is not enough, proper set, setting and guidance are all crucial, and given that these drugs have been used by these cultures for thousands of years, it only makes sense to assume that they've developed the knowledge and refined the art of using ayahuasca for these purposes, thus offering a better chance of providing a beneficial outcome from the experience as opposed to just tripping balls by yourself in your bedroom or your local national park or wherever.

 

[SKL]

Please, double blind studies on ayahuasca with a shaman vs a sham shaman (lol.) The shaman would do the traditional cultural practice, the sham shaman hand out the drugs, wait until approximate time of onset in a heightened state of anticipation or asking the subjects o meditate on their goals or what have you, start to do some other sort of woo, blow a didgeridoo on occasion, shake some maracas, dance around a fire, chant nonsense but vaguely Native syllables, whatever, but have absolutely zero background in traditional spiritual use of these drugs. I'd like to see, in ayahuasca-naive individuals, the difference, if any, in the mystical experiences so engendered (yes, there are research validated scales for mystiacl experiences in the context of drugs, and no, I don't think the difference would be particularly illuminating for the crowd who thinks ayahuasca, beyond it's pharmacology and dramaturgy, is somenow sui generis amongst trippy drugs.) Come to think of it, I think this would be a fascinating study for some of our young turned on friends in academia to get involved with. I might try to email a few but some of them are sort of invested in the more traditional (i.e. indigenous) approaches, and come with some ideological bias, Now I of course would come with a bias of another sort, so ideally, you know, we could meet together and do some science...

 

[Crankinit]

It would be interesting, yes (although the study you linked only accounts for the spiritual aspect, not the healing aspect), but until someone actually does that study I'm going to stick with the logical conclusion, which is that the people who've been doing it for thousands of years, over which time they've developed a specific process and structure for it, are most likely better at producing positive outcomes than people taking the drug in an uncontrolled set/setting, with no trained guidance. And regardless of what you or I think, that's certainly the conclusion most people are likely to come to when they decide to turn to ayahuasca for healing or spiritual guidance.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

White people need to stop robbing these poor indigenous tribes of their sacred culture and just need to do the white people version of an ayahuasca ceremony: dropping acid and snorting RC's while some dirty dreadlocked hippy who reeks of patchouli oil talks to you about his mission to save sea turtles in central America. Anything else is just AmeriKKKan imperialist cultural genocide as far as I'm concerned!