Putin and Ayahuasca

I decided to take a break from Russia-Ukraine and global politics and instead write about another subject that is on many minds.

People often ask what I think about ayahuasca, a consciousness-altering drink used by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon that is gaining popularity elsewhere. If more people took it would the world be a better place?

But politics wouldn’t stay away. An interviewer wanted to know: “Don’t you think we’d have peace if Putin drank ayahuasca?”

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer with the Shuar indigenous people in the Amazon in 1968-69, I became very sick. A shaman gave me ayahuasca. As I’ve written in several books, it helped me change my perception about the food and drink the Shuar were serving me. I saw that, despite my cultural revulsion for eating live grubs, drinking a type of beer that killed harmful microorganisms but used human spit in the fermentation process, such staples gave the local people great vitality and therefore could not be making me sick.

After that I was trained as a Shuar ayahuasca shaman. Over the years since, I’ve taken hundreds of people into the jungle to experience it with the indigenous people who know the plants so well. I’ve seen that it can help some become more self-aware and may offer them new perspectives on their lives.

However, I also believe that false claims about ayahuasca’s world-changing attributes are not only misleading but also dangerous.

I recently received a request to donate money for scholarships so that people can stay at a for-profit upscale resort that is built around a week of ayahuasca consumption. The letter claimed this experience at that resort will “spread love and understanding throughout the world.” That is a difficult statement to defend, given that the Shuar and other Amazonian tribes have a centuries-old tradition of taking ayahuasca – and killing each other. They believe that ayahuasca helps them become “kakaram” (Shuar for an “exceptionally brave warrior,” per my book Spirit of the Shuar).

That doesn’t support the idea that ayahuasca would shapeshift Putin into a peacenik or spread love and understanding across the planet.

I fear that, like other plants used by traditional cultures for medicinal and ceremonial purposes, ayahuasca and those cultures are being seriously exploited. I fear that ayahuasca is on the way to following in the footsteps of tobacco, another plant that is held sacred by Amazonian peoples. Like tobacco, it will be grown on farms that apply chemical fertilizers and insecticides.

I respect ayahuasca and wish it could be a silver bullet for making the world a better place. Unfortunately, I think we all know there is no pill to cure cancer and no silver bullet to cure the cancer that human development and violence have brought to our planet. The cure requires that we all come together to end the idea that human success is based on excessive materialistic consumption and the maximization of short-term profits. Let’s not be distracted into thinking that a plant can save us. What can save us is a concerted effort to create systems that clean up pollution, restore destroyed rain forests and other environments, and facilitate the transition from a degenerative Death Economy into a regenerative Life Economy.

Click here to learn more about the Shuar in “Spirit of the Shuar” — and about my time in the Amazon in “The World Is As You Dream It”

Dates to join my upcoming trips to the shamans will be listed here and on my website soon.