Ayahuasca — why INFUSE refuses to sell the vine

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

tagline · chemin

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

Why we refuse — TL;DR

INFUSE will sell neither Banisteriopsis caapi, nor Psychotria viridis, nor any ayahuasca preparation — in any form, at any time. Three reasons hold this refusal without appeal.

1. Ayahuasca is not a product. It is a ritual frame inseparable from a living lineage (Shipibo, Asháninka, Kichwa, Quechua, Shuar, and several Brazilian syncretisms). To sell the vine or the leaves to a buyer with no frame is to extract the medicine from its remedy. The remedy is the frame.
2. Major health risks outside the frame: interactions with antidepressants (serotonin syndrome), psychotic decompensation in vulnerable people, cardiovascular accidents. In traditional ceremony these risks are held by decades of apprenticeship. An isolated buyer cannot hold them.
3. Ecological and social pressure: the global fashion for ayahuasca has already destabilised the source communities. Over-harvesting, predatory tourism, the killing of elders (Olivia Arévalo, Shipibo, 2018). To add a brand to this flow is to accelerate the harm. INFUSE refuses to take part.

The history — who truly knew this plant

Ayahuasca is attested among more than fifty Amazonian peoples. The names vary — yagé among the Colombian Cofán, natem among the Ecuadorian Shuar, oni among the Peruvian Shipibo, hoasca in the Brazilian syncretisms. The practice varies too: among some peoples ayahuasca is exclusively a man's work, among others exclusively a woman's, among others mixed. Among the Shipibo, the women's main work is the singer (icaros) — the vine is held by the song.

First written European mention: the Jesuit father Pablo Maroni, around 1737, in the province of Maynas (upper Amazonia). He describes "a brew the Indians take to have visions, which puts them into a state of prophecy". The missionaries of the next two centuries swing between fascination and condemnation. The plant survives Spanish and Portuguese colonisation, the rubber conquest of the 19th century, evangelisation.

In the 20th century, Western ethnobotany turns its attention to it. Richard Spruce (the English botanist) brings back the first scientific descriptions in 1850–1855. Richard Evans Schultes, through the 1940s–1960s, maps the diversity of its use. Terence McKenna, later, makes it a countercultural icon — with all the ambiguity that status implies.

From the 1980s onward, two simultaneous phenomena: (1) the diaspora of the Brazilian syncretisms (Santo Daime, União do Vegetal) out of Brazil — toward Europe, the United States, Japan; (2) the rise of a ceremonial tourism in Iquitos, Pucallpa, and other Amazonian towns. From the 2000s, the movement explodes. Today, the number of ayahuasca ceremonies held each year outside Amazonia is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, led by facilitators of every origin and every level of training.

This explosion has consequences. On the source communities: the economic pressure of tourism, young curanderos trained too fast to meet demand, the capture of knowledge by Western intermediaries, and at times the killing of guardian figures (the murder of Olivia Arévalo Lomas, an 81-year-old Shipibo elder, in April 2018, is a signal). On Western practitioners: documented accidents (deaths, decompensations, abuse), a recent wave of allegations of sexual abuse by facilitators.

What this history carries

• A pharmacological combination so precise it can only be the fruit of a knowledge many millennia deep
• A complete ceremonial cosmology, inseparable from the plant
• A living lineage — not a product
• A global wave of demand that outstrips the source communities' capacity to receive it
• A chain of extraction in which every link (tourist, facilitator, middleman, merchant) takes its share — and where the source peoples receive the crumbs

The pharmacology — millennial precision, contemporary danger

Ayahuasca rests on a precise pharmacological combination. The vine Banisteriopsis caapi contains beta-carbolines — harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine — which are reversible inhibitors of monoamine oxidase A (MAOI-A). The leaf Psychotria viridis (chacruna) contains N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Taken alone by mouth, DMT would be broken down by the digestive MAO. The vine's MAOI blocks that breakdown and lets the DMT act.

This combination opens a powerful, prolonged altered state of consciousness (4 to 6 hours), classically accompanied by purges (vomiting, diarrhoea) that the Amazonian traditions regard as an integral part of the medicinal work. The effects are described as visionary, introspective, at times confronting.

The major pharmacological risk lies in the MAOI. MAO inhibitors interact dangerously with: (1) serotonergic antidepressants (SSRIs, SNRIs) — risk of a potentially fatal serotonin syndrome; (2) other MAOIs (pharmaceutical or dietary: tyramine in aged cheese, cured meats, red wine); (3) sympathomimetics (cocaine, amphetamines, certain decongestants); (4) opioids (in particular tramadol, pethidine, dextromethorphan). This list is not exhaustive.

The traditional handling of these interactions rests on the "dieta" — a preparatory regime of several days to several weeks (no salt, no pork, no alcohol, no sexual contact, sometimes isolation) that clears the body and signals to the curandero any incompatibilities. This dieta is not folklore: it is a sophisticated pharmacological safety procedure, inherited from generations of observation.

Contemporary ayahuasca tourism shortens or drops this dieta. The consequences are predictable: documented cardiovascular deaths, serotonin syndromes in people on undisclosed antidepressants, psychotic decompensation in vulnerable people. These accidents are not residual risks — they are the direct consequence of having extracted the medicine from its remedy.

Why the current market is a problem

The contemporary ayahuasca market has several faces, all of them, to our eyes, troubling.

First face: the sale of caapi vine and dried chacruna leaves online. Several European and American sites sell them, generally under the label "botanical plants for collectors", sometimes explicitly with preparation recipes. The toxicological risk for the isolated buyer is major. The ecological risk for the source forests is rising — demand outstrips the regeneration capacity of plants that take a decade or more.

Second face: the international ceremonial retreats — in Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, but now also in Europe and North America, in settings that step over local law. Cost: 1,500 to 5,000 euros for a few days. The quality of the accompaniment is wildly variable. Allegations of abuse (financial, sexual, psychic) are regular. No effective regulation.

Third face: the Western facilitators — often trained over a few months or a few years alongside Amazonian curanderos, sometimes not trained at all, who lead ceremonies in semi-clandestine or openly religious settings (Santo Daime, União do Vegetal). This face is the hardest to judge as a whole — some of these facilitators are serious, others dangerous. No body can publicly tell them apart.

Fourth face: the pharmaceutical capture. Several Western companies (notably American) are seeking to patent synthetic ayahuasca derivatives for clinical indications (treatment-resistant depression, addiction). This extractive dynamic, which goes around the source communities without compensating them, has been denounced for twenty years by Amazonian indigenous collectives and by organisations such as ICEERS and the Chacruna Institute.

INFUSE's ethical reasons for not selling

First reason — the medicine is the frame

To sell the vine and the leaf to an isolated buyer is to sell them an active pharmacological substance without the frame that makes it a medicine. The frame — song, dieta, curandero, community, night — is not optional. It is constitutive. INFUSE sells only plants whose frame of use can accompany the purchase. Ayahuasca fits none of our cases.

Second reason — the lineage that cannot be transferred

The Amazonian peoples who hold ayahuasca have asked collectively, for twenty years now, through their own assemblies (UMIYAC in Colombia, UNAYA in Peru, and others), that the plant be respected as a lineage — which means not commercialising it outside a recognised traditional or syncretic frame. INFUSE listens to this request and honours it.

Third reason — the pressure on the communities

The global ayahuasca wave has already cost the source communities a great deal: over-harvesting of the vines, economic dependence on tourism, young curanderos trained too fast, the capture of knowledge, and at times killings. The murder of Olivia Arévalo Lomas, an 81-year-old Shipibo elder, in April 2018 in Pucallpa, is one of the most chilling signals. To add our brand to this flow, even with the best intentions, is to accelerate the pressure.

Fourth reason — the danger to health

Outside the frame, ayahuasca is dangerous. Drug interactions (notably with antidepressants) are potentially fatal. Psychic decompensation in vulnerable people is documented. INFUSE carries responsibility only for products that, if misused, do not carry a direct risk to life. Ayahuasca does not meet that criterion.

For those who still wish to approach: the legitimate paths

1. Read first. Schultes & Hofmann (Plants of the Gods, 1979), Stephan Beyer (Singing to the Plants, 2009), Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna (Ayahuasca Visions, 1991), Jeremy Narby (The Cosmic Serpent, 1998 — with a critical eye). Read too the reports of ICEERS and the Chacruna Institute, which document the contemporary ethical stakes.
2. If there is a serious calling: go through the recognised Brazilian syncretisms (Santo Daime, União do Vegetal), which operate legally in several European countries and carry a long-standing community structure. This is not the only path, but it is one of the most framed, both legally and theologically.
3. If the traditional Amazonian path draws you: go through self-designated indigenous organisations (UMIYAC, UNAYA, and their Western partners such as Temple of the Way of Light, which pays directly back to the Shipibo communities). Refuse any intermediary who cannot show a signed community partnership.
4. Always check: your own medication (antidepressants, serotonergic anti-anxiety drugs in particular); your personal and family psychiatric history; your present life situation (acute crises are not the moment).
5. If none of this is possible: do not look for a substitute (vines for sale, dubious European retreats, improvised brews). Ayahuasca waits for those who can come to her within her frame. She is in no hurry. The inner work can continue by other paths — meditation, somatic therapy, dream, writing, community.

Nuggets & legends

• The word ayahuasca is Quechua: aya (spirit, ancestor, the dead) + waska (vine, rope). Literally "vine of the spirits" or "rope of the dead". The name names the function.
• The icaros — the curanderos' songs — are received during the dieta. Each plant has its own icaro. Learning the icaros takes years, sometimes decades. Without icaros, the ceremony is not held. This is one of the reasons "ayahuasca" and "the ayahuasca ceremony" are two different things.
• Pablo Amaringo, a Peruvian painter born in 1938 and died in 2009, founded the Usko-Ayar school of painting in Pucallpa. His ayahuasca-inspired canvases are among the only visual records this detailed of the ceremonial visions. His book Ayahuasca Visions (1991, with Luis Eduardo Luna) is a reference.
• The MAOI of the vine B. caapi is so specific that Western researchers first named it "telepathine" (Lewin, 1928), then "banisterine" and "yageine", before understanding it was the beta-carbolines already known as harmine. Four scientific names for a single molecule — each one reflecting a wave of Western "discovery".
• In 1953, the American writer William Burroughs travelled to Amazonia in search of yagé, which he had heard of as a plant of "telepathy". His correspondence with Allen Ginsberg about that journey (published as The Yage Letters, 1963) is one of the first Western countercultural texts on ayahuasca — well before McKenna.
• The Santo Daime syncretism was born in Brazil in the 1930s with Mestre Irineu, an Afro-Brazilian worker from Acre who met ayahuasca in the forest and founded a religion blending popular Christianity, Kardecist spiritism, and ayahuasca cosmology. It is today one of the two main syncretic structures (with União do Vegetal) that practise ayahuasca legally in several countries.
• Olivia Arévalo Lomas, a Shipibo elder of Victoria Gracia, was shot dead in April 2018, at 81. She was held to be one of the greatest onanyabos (medicine-singers) of her generation. Her murder, presented as the act of a disturbed Canadian national, was itself followed by the lynching of the suspect. The episode remains one of the most painful signals of the collision between ayahuasca tourism and the source communities.