At the Brava Theater, in the Latino Mission District of San Francisco, a striking Amazonian figure slowly descended the stairs of the packed auditorium, singing with such vitality it was as though the forest itself was sprouting up between seats. The audience, full of therapists, activists, journalists, and researchers, was deeply affected by the forceful yet serene presence of a shaman completing her final phase of training and the first Indigenous doctor to have her traditional name officially recognized by Brazil’s Federal Board of Medicine: Adana Omágua-Kambeba.

It was the closing ceremony for the conference on psychedelic culture, an international event organized by the Chacruna Institute on April 27 and 28, 2024. Focused on the Indigenous roots of psychedelics, the conference is taking place at a time when capitalism is flirting with the complete appropriation of these substances, because psychedelics are back in fashion after five decades of strict prohibition.

Psychedelics are substances capable of strongly modifying perception, mood, and cognition and can produce inner visions and the sensation of mind expansion. They include dimethyltryptamine (DMT), found in plants such as jurema preta and chacruna; psilocybin, present in certain mushrooms; mescaline, found in peyote and San Pedro cacti; and many other natural or synthetic molecules.

Ever since academic science demonstrated that psychedelics can increase the production of new neurons and the connections between them, the public in the United States and other dominant countries has become increasingly fixated on these substances. This is unsurprising, as the short-term cellular effects of psychedelics are accompanied in the medium term by improvements in mood and cognition.

These are welcome findings, as the planet is full of anxious, depressed, and traumatized people. Psychic suffering is a hallmark of our time, particularly among vulnerable social groups, who are at increasing risk of suicide. Among Indigenous Brazilians living in forests and villages, in favelas and along roadways, suicide rates reached almost triple that of the general Brazilian population in 2020 (17.6 versus 6.3 suicides per 100,000 people). This same wave of despair is also hitting hard farther away, in the United States, where suicide rates among girls aged 14 to 18 have risen in the past decade, with particularly alarming trends among non-white and LGBTQIAP+ teens. It is estimated that around 30% of high school students have seriously considered suicide, and around 13% have actually attempted it. Among LGBTQIAP+ students, these figures are 45% and 22%.

In the unfolding global cataclysm, it is not only subordinate human beings, those treated by society as prey, who suffer; even those in predatory positions can go through hell. Inside the U.S. Armed Forces — one of the deadliest war machines the world has ever known — suicide has claimed four times more military lives in the past two decades than all combat operations combined.

In the face of so much suffering, it is easy to understand why the public turns eagerly to scientific discoveries of the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. However, the ways these discoveries should be used are hotly debated. The scientific recognition of these substances has attracted the attention of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which is currently researching them as possible substitutes for conventional antidepressants, since the latter have low efficacy and are associated with adverse side effects. Numerous appropriation initiatives are underway.

Some corporate researchers are trying to synthesize molecules similar to psychedelics, capable of inducing neuroplasticity without producing any change in mental state, in an attempt to sanitize the psychedelic experience of otherness. Meanwhile, other researchers and entrepreneurs are trying, astonishingly, to patent ayahuasca itself.

The day before she sang, Adana had given a talk about this sacred medicine, used by her people as well as dozens of other native peoples in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. As with other psychedelic substances, this preparation of two plants cooked together for several hours has powerful antidepressant effects, which have already been well documented by academic science. For the Indigenous inventors of ayahuasca, peoples ranging from the Ye’pâ-masa-Tukano to the Shipibo-Konibo, the Huni Kuin to the Kichwa de Sarayaku, the Ashaninka to the Puyanawa, from the Nukini to the Kuntanawa, the Yawanawá to the Apolima-Arara and so many others, it is not merely a simple medicine but a spiritual being of immense power—or even a gateway to contact a multitude of entities.

It is a sacred drink, often not even ingested by the sick individual themselves but by the shamans who seek to cure them. Ayahuasca is drunk in the forest to cure fevers and pains, in the dark of night, taking care to keep the earth from trembling. Ayahuasca is drunk for all-night singing around campfires under the Milky Way, and to make the stars come down from the sky. For the discoverers and keepers of its secrets, ayahuasca isn’t taken simply as a pharmacological treatment but as a spiritual sojourn. Ayahuasca is drunk to journey, know, and learn.

This moment is both precious and dangerous. On the one hand, there is a huge cultural movement, with the Indigenous perspective stepping on stage and sparking awareness and flames in great cities around the planet. A wonderful, divine movement, where Indigenous youth (almost all excellent musicians), along with sages and shamans of all ages from a wide range of native peoples, women and men alike, are leaving their villages ever more often to share ayahuasca and other sacred medicines like rapé, sananga, and kambo with the world.

Through this back-and-forth travel, they also transport their languages, songs, and belief systems, which infiltrate the dominant belief systems with incredible agility, like the Mamãe Jiboia snake dance, revered in many countries today as part of syncretic rituals. Meanwhile, large churches have sprung up around ayahuasca, such as Santo Daime,  União do Vegetal, and Barquinha, highly syncretized with Christianity and African religions.

On the other hand, the danger is obvious. A discourse that reduces psychedelics to cellular plasticity is the gateway to their appropriation by the market, which presents them as “new generation drugs” when in fact they are “first generation drugs” of ancestral origin and traditional use. The same ideological apparatus that once banned psychedelics as a great evil now wants to sell them as an enormous good, provided they are fully in the control of capital and purged of all cultural facets in the name of a supposedly rational attitude. All for the benefit of big pharma. The cowboy’s motto still seems to apply: “Learn everything from the Indians — then get rid of them.”

In her talk on the first day of the conference, Adana warned against repeating the same old story, pointing to a parallel with the history of rubber. During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of tons of latex were extracted annually from Amazonian rubber trees to satisfy the planet’s appetite. The forest sustained the world’s immense hunger for bleeding trees and people via the enslavement of impoverished northeasterners in the rubber tree plantations and the extermination of Indigenous people.

In 1876, British botanist Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds to England, where they were sorted for careful planting in English colonies in Southeast Asia and Africa. As the trees grew and matured, South American rubber production faced stiff competition from England. Between 1909 and 1940, German and then Soviet chemists synthesized various kinds of synthetic rubber by polymerizing petroleum derivatives. During the Second World War (1939-1945), the demand for motor vehicle tires allowed Brazilian and Peruvian rubber to survive, but the industry imploded when demand fell off after the war.

No effective reparations for abuses committed against beings of so many different species were made during the ensuing economic collapse or in the subsequent decades. Exploitative labor and religious relations were maintained and perpetuated by decadent local patriarchs, sadists shielded by their micro-powerful privileges.

It was only thanks to the courageous actions of shamans, caciques, explorers, and scholars from the 1970s onwards that many people who had almost lost their culture, language, and even original names began to recognize themselves once again as Indigenous, in a process of de-evangelization in which ayahuasca played, and still plays, a key role.

In the middle of 2024, as we face a massive socioenvironmental crisis, the strengthening of Indigenous voices is a positive sign for Gaia’s health. We need to listen to them to find a way out of the tremendous mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Used in their traditional ways, psychedelics are sacred medicines with immense value for healing the planet and for our collective construction of the future.

That said, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that these “new drugs” alone will alleviate our terrible suffering because it derives primarily from our awful lifestyles: diets based on ultra-processed foods contaminated with pesticides, nights of restless sleep because of pitiful wages and terrible public transportation, and escape into screens till the early morning hours. Not enough time or space to stretch our muscles and move our skeletons. Not enough sitting around in circles, retelling our dreams, singing and dancing—exchanges full of life.

Mental disorders are, to a large extent, socially generated. Let’s not lose sight of the obvious: emotional poverty, growing loneliness, communities that are fractured, maladjusted, or missing. Listen to the voice of the forest—without our kin, we’re nobody.