Indigenous Nations Issue Urgent Call to Protect Ayahuasca

The commercialization of ayahuasca by business interests purveying the psychedelic for financial gain must end, a coalition of leaders from 30 Indigenous nations has declared.

After the fifth Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference in late January, held in Taraucá, Acre, Brazil — the Amazonian home of the Yawanawa nation — governments, NGOs, research institutes, and businesses were called on to respect Indigenous peoples' “genetic heritage and intellectual property.”

The statement “repudiated all forms of commercialization of ayahuasca” and described a “global market” that is rife with transgressions of ethical boundaries.

Brazilian sociologist and Santo Daime leader Dr. Glauber de Assis, who attended the conference, called it the most significant and diverse ayahuasca gathering in the world. He noted that the event, founded in 2016, was created as an alternative to “Eurocentric” psychedelics conferences that often overlooked Indigenous voices.

The discussions covered ancient Indigenous knowledge regarding the ceremonial use of plant medicines, Indigenous views on the patenting of ayahuasca molecules, climate change, and the future of humanity. At least four million people have consumed ayahuasca across the world, according to a recent estimate, including 1.5 million Americans, equating to just under 0.5% of the population. While the boom in psychedelics has enriched a number of Indigenous medicine facilitators, the bulk of the profits is often taken by Westerners, and there are concerns over the investigation of ayahuasca by the pharmaceutical industry and efforts to patent parts of the brew.

“Many who come to the Amazon extract and appropriate from these cultures, trying to make a profit without any commitment to Indigenous rights,” says de Assis. “How can you ensure that Westerners won’t just visit the Amazon for a week to sit in a couple of ceremonies, and then start their own business, claiming, among other things, that they're ready to serve others?” Aside from the obvious dangers of untrained practitioners serving ayahuasca, the reduction of ancestral Indigenous knowledge into “mere commodities” infringes upon the rights of such communities, he adds, and can often “serve the ego and individual gain of a select few.”

Echoing speakers' concerns at the conference, who mostly spoke in Portuguese and their Indigenous languages, de Assis laments how the individualized focus of the Western psychedelic field ignores the core societal causes of many people’s issues. Meanwhile, “the genocide of Indigenous peoples continues across the Americas,” he says. 

The statement said: “We defend the integrity of Indigenous peoples’ heritage and their collective intellectual property rights … We call on governments, on governmental and non-governmental institutions, on research institutions, businesses, and other organizations to respect Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination and free, prior and informed consultation. Furthermore, we call for these organizations to make mandatory the upholding of the international laws that protect Indigenous Peoples, their territories, cultures, genetic heritage, and intellectual property. We repudiate all forms of commercialization of ayahuasca, which have come to form a global market transgressing ethical boundaries.”

Citing the arrests and detention of a number of ayahuasca practitioners in recent years, especially in Mexico, the statement continued: “We aim to guarantee the freedom to come and go with our voices, colors, traditional clothing, and garments, as well as to practice our traditional rituals, with our instruments, ceremonial arts and our medicines, wherever we go.”

The coalition of Indigenous nations outlined its opposition to “the creation of patents as well as any attempt to exploit the genetic heritage culturally associated with traditional indigenous medicines, as well as any form of appropriation of the heritage of Indigenous peoples.” 

The statement said that Indigenous communities supported the creation of legal instruments drafted with Indigenous leaders “to protect the access, use and the sharing of benefits associated with the traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples related to ayahuasca and other medicines, as well as to guide the transportation and circulation of medicines in accordance with the interests of Indigenous peoples.”

It also paid tribute to “our Indigenous relatives around the world who have their rights violated by authorities … often by being deceived and deprived of their freedom for sharing traditional practices, medicines, and objects.”

The conference was coordinated by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, an Amazonian conservation organization; the Nixiwaka Institute, a Yawanawa community organization; and the Yawanawa Cooperative, another non-profit organization.

“Indigenous cosmovisions [or frameworks for more holistic understandings of reality] and ways of life have some answers that the global north model regarding psychedelic-assisted therapy does not have,” de Assis says. “Indigenous healing perspectives are profoundly relational; they emphasize community life and recognize the inherent personhood of nature and plants.  They consider our relationships with both human and non-human beings and are deeply connected to forest protection and environmental awareness.”

Echoing Indigenous Brazilian philosopher, Ailton Krenak, de Assis says that ayahuasca, without the traditional cosmovisions—such as knowing what the shaman says to the plant—“is just a ticket to nowhere.”

It’s a sentiment that is increasingly gaining currency—as western neo-shamans strip ayahuasca of its traditional accompaniments, while indigenous facilitators may also overlook once critical aspects of the ceremony, possibly due to linguistic and cultural barriers. In an online event last week on the safety of using ayahuasca organized by the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service (ICEERS), psychologist David Londoño described the powerful psychedelic as “double-edged sword.” Citing how ayahuasca opens the door to processing trauma, he acknowledged that, “not everyone has the adequate psychological structure to face these intense experiences” and that some end up worse off than before they consumed the brew.

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