The debate about ayahuasca arrives in Girona

GironaAyahuasca is a beverage made from Amazonian plants, with very potent psychoactive and hallucinogenic effects. In the Western world, it is often associated with the consumption of psychedelic drugs, as it causes intense visions, alterations of consciousness, and all kinds of physical reactions, often adverse and dangerous. Its origin, however, has been linked for thousands of years to indigenous Amazonian peoples, who use it as traditional medicine in shamanic rituals, spiritual ceremonies, and processes of purging and healing. For these peoples, ayahuasca is not just a mere substance, but also represents the neuralgic center from which they articulate their entire relationship with life and nature. This ancestral aspect, linked to anthropology and biocultural sustainability, is what the World Ayahuasca Forum aims to reclaim, which, for the first time, is taking place at the Girona Congress Palace Auditorium from September 11th to 13th.

It is a historic event. It is the first international gathering around this issue and has brought together spiritual leaders from about twenty Amazonian peoples, scientists, healers, and social agents from all over. The congress – organized by two Brazilian Amazonian institutes and the Barcelona-based foundation ICEERS, dedicated to researching alternative therapies with fungi and plants – has gathered about 1,700 people. Tickets, with very, very high prices between 160 and 1,000 euros, have almost sold out. Delegations of indigenous peoples have arrived in the city in their traditional attire, crowned with plumes, tattoos, earrings, and necklaces.

Among the organizing associations and companies, there are no names or institutions recognized within the European and Catalan scientific sphere. That said, the forum has the support of the Girona City Council, which is why it has been held in the city. "Ayahuasca is an ancestral ethnobotanical knowledge of the Amazonian communities. Communities that have a great impact on the preservation of the territory. From Girona, we want to vindicate them and thank them for this fundamental role they perform, whether through ayahuasca or beyond ayahuasca," defends Sergi Cot, Councilor for the Environment of the Girona City Council.

Against the decontextualized globalization of ayahuasca

The forum speakers do not teach preparations, recipes, or ways of using ayahuasca, as each people has their own. Neither do they break down its pharmacological components, concrete benefits, or risks in a traditional academic sense; rather, from a generic and almost mystical perspective, they insist on its inseparable role regarding the territory and ecology. The leaders of the Amazonian peoples mainly criticize the extractive logic and the improper appropriation of this substance by Western society, alleging that it has awakened interest everywhere due to its psychedelic faculty, without taking into account everything that surrounds it. "There is a lot of talk about ayahuasca, but the deepest thing remains in our villages: respect for the land. Today, facing the landscape of globalization, there is talk of commercial and pharmaceutical interests, decontextualized from indigenous knowledge, crossed by preconceived ideas about our people with colonial intentions. In our people, everything comes from ayahuasca: the knowledge, the paintings. And knowledge is responsibility, care, and commitment to what we are and to Mother Earth," argues the artist Daiara Tukano, of the Colombian Yepá Mahsâ people.

In the same vein, Benjamin De Loenen, founder and executive director of ICEERS, expresses himself: "Lately, there is talk of psychedelic therapy and all these plants are put in the same bag. A psychedelic alters consciousness, but this has nothing to do with the way indigenous peoples work with these plants to maintain balance in the territory. This is the risk when these plants are globalized without knowledge of what surrounds them. Scientific evidence has caused their knowledge to be excluded, and they see how dominant systems generate a threat to their territories," he defends.

"Our territories are a living pharmacy"

The same is reiterated by Edina Shanenawa, political and spiritual leader of the Shanenawa people, who demands respect and rejects any attempt to patent the medicinal use of plants without counting on the communities that have preserved them. "I feel very sad. We are the owners of the sacred medicine. It teaches what we need to know with love and affection. It is our true faculty," she defends. The leader also explains that she would have liked to be able to bring this medicine here (it is prohibited), because just landing at the airport, she saw that "many people need it." "Our territories are a living pharmacy," she adds.

And regarding the international meeting in Girona, Adana Omágua Kambeba, leader of the Omágua Kambeba people, who has also trained as a doctor at the University of Brazil, concludes: "The forum has great historical importance because these are times of alliance and it can provoke a dialogue between Western medicine and indigenous ancestral medicines. Indigenous ancestral medicine is as true as Western medicine, and the Global North feeds on the knowledge of the Global South.".