This article undertakes a historical ontology of psychoactive substances, or, in other words, an exploration of the philosophical and political nature of modern categories for plants and chemicals that alter consciousness. Drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking and using the method of critical discourse analysis, I elucidate three distinct contemporary meanings of the English word “drug.” Further, I demonstrate how these meanings of “drug” map onto a modern stereotypology of psychoactive substances that informs public discourses and sustains an ideological drug war paradigm. I trace this paradigm through the generative metaphors of drugs as “malevolent agents” and “pathogens” in modern public discourses, and explore how these metaphors frame and support policy responses within the international drug control regime that are inconsistent with human rights. In so doing, I argue that the language we use to talk and think about “drugs” may not be ideal for crafting sound public policy.
No
The Globalization of Ayahuasca: Harm Reduction Or Benefit Maximization?
Ayahuasca is a tea made from two plants native to the Amazon, Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, which, respectively, contain the psychoactive chemicals harmala alkaloids and dimethyltryptamine. The tea has been used by indigenous peoples in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador and Peru for medicinal, spiritual and cultural purposes since pre-Columbian times. In the 20th century, ayahuasca spread beyond its native habitat and has been incorporated into syncretistic practices that are being adopted by non-indigenous peoples in modern Western contexts. Ayahuasca’s globalization in the past few decades has led to a number of legal cases which pit religious freedom against national drug control laws. This paper explores some of the philosophical and policy implications of contemporary ayahuasca use. It addresses the issue of the social construction of ayahuasca as a medicine, a sacrament and a “plant teacher.” Issues of harm reduction with respect to ayahuasca use are explored, but so too is the corollary notion of “benefit maximization.”
Drug Tourism Or Spiritual Healing? Ayahuasca Seekers in Amazonia
This research addresses the question of whether Westerners who seek traditional spiritual medicine known as ayahuasca can be best characterized as “drug tourists” or as people pursuing spiritual and therapeutic opportunities. Participants in an ayahuasca retreat in Amazonia were interviewed regarding their motivations for participation and the benefits they felt that they received. These findings from the interviews were organized to reveal common motivations and benefits. Contrary to the characterization as “drug tourists”, the principal motivations can be characterized as: seeking spiritual relations and personal spiritual development; emotional healing; and the development of personal self-awareness, including contact with a sacred nature, God, spirits and plant and natural energies produced by the ayahuasca. The motivation and perceived benefits both point to transpersonal concerns, with the principal perceived benefits involving increased self awareness, insights and access to deeper levels of the self that enhanced personal development and the higher self, providing personal direction in life.
Prohibited or Regulated? LSD Psychotherapy and the United States Food and Drug Administration
Over the 1950s and early 1960s, the use of the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to facilitate psychotherapy was a promising field of psychiatric research in the USA. However, during the 1960s, research began to decline, before coming to a complete halt in the mid-1970s. This has commonly been explained through the increase in prohibitive federal regulations during the 1960s that aimed to curb the growing recreational use of the drug. However, closely examining the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of LSD research in the 1960s will reveal that not only was LSD research never prohibited, but that the administration supported research to a greater degree than has been recognized. Instead, the decline in research reflected more complex changes in the regulation of pharmaceutical research and development.
Neo-Shamanism
This encyclopedia provides an overview of the main religions of Latin America and the Caribbean, both its centralized transnational expressions and its local variants and schisms. These main religions include (but are not limited to) the major expressions of Christianity (Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses), indigenous religions (Native American, Maya religion), syncretic Christianity (including Afro-Brazilian religions like Umbanda and Candomblé and Afro-Caribbean religions like Vodun and Santería), other world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam), transnational New Religious Movements (Scientology, Unification Church, Hare Krishna, New Age, etc.), and new local religions (Brazil’s Igreja Universal, La Luz del Mundo from Mexico, etc.).
Neoshamanism is a set of discourses and practices involving the integration of indigenous (especially American) shamanic and psychotherapeutic techniques by people from urban Western contexts. It has emerged, like other New Age modes of spirituality, in opposition to the materialism and positivism of European modernity and presents as central the idea of reconnecting panindigenous ancestral knowledge that people of the West had purportedly forgotten. It results in large measure from the circulation of literature on shamanism, altered states of consciousness (often, but not always, involving the use of psychoactive drugs), and the possibility of generating new psychotherapeutic modalities.
Psychoactive Ubulawu Spiritual Medicines and Healing Dynamics in the Initiation Process of Southern Bantu Diviners
The use of psychoactive plants by traditional healers in southern Africa appears to be a neglected area of ethnobotanical research. This article explores the healing dynamics involved in the use of popular psychoactive plant preparations known as ubulawu in the initiation rituals of Southern Bantu diviners. Research methods include a review of the literature, fieldwork interviews with Southern Bantu diviners, and an analysis of experiential accounts from diverse informants on their use of ubulawu. Findings reveal that there is widespread reliance on ubulawu as psychoactive spiritual medicines by the indigenous people of southern Africa to communicate with their ancestral spirits—so as to bring luck, and to treat mental disturbances. In the case of the Southern Bantu diviners, ubulawu used in a ritual initiation process acts as a mnemonic aid and medicine to familiarize the initiates with enhanced states of awareness and related psychospiritual phenomena such as enhanced intuition and dreams of the ancestral spirits, who teach the initiates how to find and use medicinal plants. The progression of the latter phenomena indicates the steady success of the initiates’ own healing integration. Various factors such as psychological attitude and familiarization, correct plant combinations/synergy and a compatible healer-initiate relationship influence ubulawu responsiveness.
The Intersection of Culture and Science in South African Traditional Medicine
Traditional African medicine often carries with it a perception and stigma of being irrational and ungrounded in scientific method in academia. One reason for this common prejudicial view of traditional African medicine is the failure to effectively interpret African traditional medicine concepts, as these are often metaphorical descriptions of the biological and psychological effects of plants or combinations of them used in the traditional medicine preparations. When translated into other languages such as English, these metaphorical descriptions of medicinal plant use can seem to incorrectly reflect mysticism and/or superstition with no scientific basis. This difficulty in interpreting cultural descriptions of medical phenomena, together with the fact that there are hardly any academic papers engaging the science of South African traditional medicine in the biological sciences, is an indication of the disconnection between the humanities studies and the biomedical studies of South African traditional medicine. This paper investigates some popular examples of spiritual plant use in traditional South African medicine using phytopharmacological studies together with anthropological fieldwork methods, demonstrating the empirical basis for use of some plants in divination (by producing clarity of thought or dreams). The examples also reveal the phytochemical and biomedical foundations of the South Bantu speaking traditional healers’ explanations of why and how various spiritually used plants have medicinal value. The challenge for scientists (such as botanists) is to effectively translate and interpret cultural and language based descriptions of spiritual medicinal plant use made by indigenous peoples while recognizing and discarding cultural prejudices that prevent a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the science that intersects and forms the basis of many, though not all, cultural healing practices.
Psychedelic Pleasures: An Affective Understanding of the Joys of Tripping
Background: This paper considers the pleasures of psychedelic drugs and proposes a Deleuzian understanding of drugged pleasures as affects. In spite of a large body of work on psychedelics, not least on their therapeutic potentials, the literature is almost completely devoid of discussions of the recreational practices and pleasures of entheogenic drugs. Yet, most people do not use psychedelics because of their curative powers, but because they are fun and enjoyable ways to alter the experience of reality.
Methods: In the analytical part of the paper, I examine 100 trip reports from an internet forum in order to explore the pleasures of tripping.
Results: The analyses map out how drugs such as LSD and mushrooms – in combination with contextual factors such as other people, music and nature – give rise to a set of affective modifications of the drug user’s capacities to feel, sense and act.
Conclusion: In conclusion it is argued that taking seriously the large group of recreational users of hallucinogens is important not only because it broadens our understanding of how entheogenic drugs work in different bodies and settings, but also because it may enable a more productive and harm reductive transmission of knowledge between the scientific and recreational psychedelic communities.
Enigma of Drug-Induced Altered States of Consciousness Among the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert
This article examines data presented in Katz’ book, Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung, particularly with regard to plant drugs present in the community during the 1968 visit. The author argues that the similarity of the Bushman trance state, kia and that of drug-induced altered states of consciousness has been paid too little attention in the research, and that an enigma currently exists with regard to the degree to which plant drugs may have influenced the !Kung trance phenomenon and healing beliefs. The author discusses the existing evidence for plant drug use based on Katz’ research and the specimens currently on hand at the Harvard Botanical Museum herbarium, and presents a Table which contrasts drug-induced behaviors and ideologies of societies known or suspected to have used mind-altering drugs with similar behavior/beliefs of the!Kung. It is suggested that the influence of a number of psychoactive drugs may have played a much more pivotal role in Bushman behavior and belief than is generally acknowledged.
Drug Tourism in the Amazon: Why Westerners Are Desperate To Find the Vanishing Primitive
Tourists from the US and Europe are travelling to cities in the Amazon River Region to participate in religious ceremonies and ingest medicinal potions. Many of these tourists are seeking self-actualization and are sometimes exploited by fake healers.
A number of upscale, well-to-do, prominent Americans and Europeans are touring Amazonian cities. Interested neither in parrots nor piranhas, they revel in special all-night religious ceremonies, presided over by a powerful shaman, drinking a foul-smelling brew – a woody vine called ayahuasca. Unlike the jungle denizens who for the last several thousand years have drunk the potion to see the vine’s mother spirit – a boa constrictor – in order to protect themselves from enemies, to divine the future, or heal their emotional and physical disorders, the urban tourist is on a never-ending search for self-actualization and growth. In this postmodern period, where people no longer produce their own food, where the family has broken down, where there is a significant absence of community tradition and shared meanings, individuals are racked with feelings of low self-esteem and confusion about values. They are compelled to fill the emptiness with the experience of receiving something from the world. Why not a mystical experience with divinity? From travels, they bring home outrageous stories of their journeys, of the fabulous witch doctor encountered, of the vomiting and diarrhea, of the fast-moving kaleidoscopic visions, of the sounds and the smells of the jungle – Wow! What a trip.Unscrupulous practitioners who exploit the tourists abound, and they are conscious of the farce they perpetrate. In Amazonian cities, middle-class men become instant traditional healers without undergoing an apprenticeship period, without any teachers, and without any control. They give tourists mixtures of 12 or more different psychedelic plants to help them mystically become embedded in the universe. Many are witchcraft plants that affect neurotransmitters, decrease certain brain chemicals, and even make it impossible toread or write for an entire year. These so-called shamans fight among themselves, and all have their champions abroad who functionas travel agents and tour guides. A few make money, seduce women, and obtain personal power and control over others. Agents abroad often earn as much as $8,000 to $10,000 from a three-week trip. Drug tourism is like international mass tourism, where millions of temporary travelers from industrialized nations seek in the margins of the Third World a figment of their imagination, a fantasy of Western consciousness – the exotic, erotic primitive or happy savage. The drug dilettantism has a special rhetoric, and travel literature includes terms like “advanced shamanic training.” Expensive brochures, in color-separated glory costing thousands of dollars, tout spiritual-transformation techniques of jungle shamans. The Amazon is the last remaining sanctuary on Earth, and by paying the cost of the trip, one becomes an impeccable warrior. The phenomenon has become so flagrant since the mid 1980s that native peoples are in danger of extinction as New Age magazines invite readers to take guided tours to remote villages or sacred places of power. This is a deadly, contemporary weapon to hasten the demise of native cultures, as international drug enforcement treats this type of tourism as one more illegal activity and persecutes native peoples involved with tourists. These tourists see exotic people of color, untouched by civilization, close to nature. They will not see the civilizing influences in these areas of Catholic and Protestant missionary activity. Little do they know that the Amazonian city dweller gets better TV reception than I do in Southern California because of the major telecommunications satellites on the outskirts of their cities. There is little hope for dialogue between the drug tourists and the Amazonians whose traditions of ayahuasca use are linked in a matrix dealing with the moral order, with good and evil, with animals and humans, and with health and illness. This has little to do withthe experiences and needs of people in industrial societies. There is an evil, exploitive aspect of this ecotouristic enterprise. These “native healers” are common drug dealers, dressed for deception. They provide the exotic setting and prep the tourist to have an “authentic personal experience.” The drug tourism often leaves psychotic depression and confusion in its wake.
Modernization and cultural change over the last century have destroyed the material base of many Amazonian traditional cultures. Must we now allow this final spiritual denudation? Must the fifteenth-century Conquest still continue? Only the boa knows….