Ayahuasca

"Ayahuasca is a particularly interesting case of a psychedelic plant medicine that left its traditional context in the Amazon jungle to spread throughout the world. Any history of the ayahuasca brew will usually mention a lineage of White men who discovered, reported on, or studied it. One of the earliest western encounters was recorded in 1853 by Richard Spruce, a botanist looking for new plants to collect and classify in the Vaupés area in Colombia (Spruce, 1908). Since then, ayahuasca has been reported by several explorers, botanists, and ethnographers (Koch-Grünberg, 1923; Schultes & Raffauf, 1992; Villavicencio, 1858).

"Interest in ayahuasca arose in the 1960s, with several books introducing ayahuasca to popular audiences. William Burroughs, a known heroin-addict, hoped to find in ayahuasca what he did not find in other drugs. He characteristically wrote: “Yagé may be the final fix.” Burroughs traveled to South America to try ayahuasca and 7 years later Allen Ginsberg did the same; their correspondence from that period resulted in the Yagé Letters. Burroughs did not find what he was hoping for in ayahuasca or in Peru – he reported “…I had been conned by medicine men” (Burroughs & Ginsberg, 1963, p. 15) – while Ginsberg’s account is closer to a stereotypical first-person account. There was a fundamental difference between researchers like Schultes and Wasson who only had interest in studying psychedelics and people like Burroughs who hoped to integrate them in western cultural and spiritual life (Znamenski, 2007).

"Some anthropological studies also raised awareness about ayahuasca most notably Dobkin de Rios (1972), who discussed urban folk ayahuasca uses. Eduardo Luna’s work on mestizo ayahuasca use increased knowledge of ayahuasca and made clear that ayahuasca practices were different from other psychedelics (Luna 1984a, 1984b, 1986). Dobkin de Rios (2006) felt responsible for the popularization of ayahuasca and later published a short piece of expressing regret."