Amazon.coma – Details Magazine

On the trail of Ayahuasca and biopiracy in the Ecuadorean rainforest

In my dream, I’m sitting on lush, wet grass in a place I’ve never seen before. With me are a man and woman, both young and attractive, strangers to me. We’ve drunk a potion and now we are waiting. Suddenly the woman’s expression changes and she collapses to the ground, vomiting all over herself. I stare at her, horrified. I know it’s just a matter of time before the drug takes ahold of me as as well.

I’d first found out about ayahuasca from an old friend, David, who told me wild tales of an exotic, mystical drug that was sending New York City New Agers to nirvana. He’d heard that ayahuasca purges your body of impurities, leaving your vision, and the world, crystal-clear – not to mention taking you on the psychedelic rollercoaster of a lifetime. A thick, bitter concoction made from the vine or bark of banisteriopsis caapi, a liana vine, ayahuasca comes from the Amazonian rain forest. To the South American shamans, ayahuasca (“vine of the soul,” as translated from the Ecuadoran Indian Quichua) is a sacred essence — and only they can harness its force. They drink it to trip themselves into the supernatural, where they confront the jaguar spirit, the highest power in the jungle. Once they’ve assumed its strength, these wise men can cure illnesses, counsel their people, even communicate with the dead.

As with anything so potent, there is a downside: “It was like going under ether, or when you are very drunk and lie down, and the bed spins. Blue flashes passed in front of my eyes…I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door hitting my shoulder against the door post. I felt the shock but no pain. I could hardly walk. No coordination. My feet were like blocks of wood…I was saying over and over, All I want is out of here.”‘

That was William S. Burroughs writing to fellow Beatster Allen Ginsberg in 1953 after traveling to Colombia to try ayahuasca (or yage, as it’s also known). Aficionados say ayahuasca can send you straight to heaven — or to hell; Burroughs just took a wrong turn. Still, the hell part is pretty hellacious. The drink, which is made by combining the ayahuasca vine or bark with other Amazonian plants, is a heady mix of the hallucinogenic compounds harmaline and DMT. It is, of course, illegal in the States.

Resilient drug fiend that he was, though, Burroughs soon discovered the pleasures of yage. “Space time travel” was how he later described it. And many have since followed in his footsteps: Today, Web sites hawk ayahuasca plants and give tips on preparing the magical elixir. Tour outfits offer spiritual vacations and vision quests. (According to one brochure, ayahuasca is used for “cleansing” ceremonies as well as “visionary art sessions [that] allow everyone to express their visions, dreams and impressions.” Even Sting has waxed poetic on the subject.

Now, there’s not a New Age bone in my body (though I have done yoga once or twice), but yage had me hooked. Mmaybe it was the complete irratioinality of shamans curing illness in a hallucinogenic haze. Mmaybe I was looking for a mind-blowing transcendent conversion. But the idea of $300 ayahuasca ceremonies performed by “gurus” in swank downtown Manhattan apartments seemed a bit contrived. Clearly, there was something very spiritual about the drug, and to truly experience its magic, I felt I had to journey to its source: the Amazon.

After hearing David’s tantalizing stories, I read a short newspaper article telling a bizarre tale of Amazon Indians threatening the life of a California entrepreneur who claimed to town the legal rights to the ayahuasca plant. The scandal was big news in Ecuador, and the U.S. embassy had denounced the “terrorist” actions of the Indians. I had to know how a vine could be causing so much controversy.

So here I was, several months later, heading into the rain forest — and petrified of losing my mind to some badass jaguar spirit with a grudge against nosy gringos. All I could think about as we pulled into the Puyo bus station in the middle of Ecuador was, What the hell am I getting myself into?

A DUSTY LITTLE OUTPOST on the edge of the rain forest, Puyo serves as the nearest “city” for the neighboring communities of Indian tribes: Quichua, Shuar, Achuar, Huaorani, and Zaparo. The starting point for many of the jungle tours, Puyo is also the sort of place that the hardened gringos in Ecuador’s capitol, Quito, consider the “real” Ecuador — no Holiday Inn, no pizza joint, no hope of finding fresh coffee.

Of course, when I arrive, there isn’t a traveler in sight. Then again, there aren’t many people at all, just a few taxi drivers gossiping in the main square, and a few Indian women roasting corn and plantains on sidewalk grills. Most of the locals have headed off to the nearby river to swim or do their laundry.

Indian activists in Quito told me to check out the Puyo office of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza, the most prominent organized Indian group in the region, But, like everything else in Puyo this sweltering Saturday morning, OPIP is closed. Which means I’m in trouble. Residents are already suspicious of foreigners asking questions about their medicinal plants; over the last few years, this region has been inundated with researchers from giant U.S. pharmaceutical companies hoping to discover the latest natural wonder drugs. The companies call their work bioprospecting. The Indians call it biopiracy.

My taxi driver suggests I visit a nearby tourist agency. There I meet Camillo, a slender, twenty-eight-year-old Quichua with jet-black hair falling over his face and a shy way of looking at you with a sideways glance. He brightens up the moment I mention ayahuasca, and tells me that, while OPIP won’t be open until Monday, he himself has started to train as a shaman and knows plenty about the drug. “So you want to drink?” he asks in Spanish, looking me in the eye. “Are you prepared? It is a very powerful drink. You think that monsters and spirits are trying to get you. You have to be very strong. Otherwise, you can go crazy.”

Camillo must sense my fear because now he really starts to pile it on. “We had two gringos come looking for ayahuasca,” he recalls with an evil grin, “and both drank half a glass. We told them they had to stay very still and dominate the drink. One just sat back and fought the drunk, and in time he saw beautiful visions of his mother who had died and his friends back home. The other couldn’t control it. He threw up everywhere and collapsed to the floor. His head grew hot and he stripped off all his clothes until he was completely naked.”

Not knowing whether to thank Camillo or curse him, I say goodbye, check into Puyo’s “best” hotel, and head straight to the nearest bar.

MONDAY, MORNING FINDS ME in the dour concrete offices of OPIP president Cesar Cerda, a slight man in his forties with tired eyes and the faintest wisp of a mustache. OPIP is involved in the fight with the U.S. oil company ARCO over drilling in the area. Two months before, a group affiliated with OPIP had taken three ARCO workers hostage for a week in a nearby village to protest the company’s plans. (They were later released unharmed.)

Cesar says that to understand ayahuasca, I must first understand how important the rain-forest lands to his people. He mentions the destruction done by U.S. oil giant Texaco in northern Ecuador and fears the same will happen here in the Pastaza region. “At first, seeing the big oil and pharmaceutical companies arrive humiliated us,” Cerda says. “Now, it just makes us stronger to fight.”

OPIP, he tells me, is also embroiled in another battle: this one over ayahuasca. Some ten years ago, a Bay Area entrepreneur named Loren Miller took ayahuasca vines from Ecuador back to the States. Claiming to have discovered a new variety of the plant, Miller was awarded a twenty-year U.S. patent to research the use of ayahuasca in cancer treatment and psychotherapy. The patent made Miller the sole legal owner of ayahuasca under U.S. law.

Back in the Amazon, local activists were outraged. Miller was declared an “enemy of indigenous peoples,” and the Indians forbade him from setting foot on any indigenous territory of the Amazon basin. “Ayahuasca is a sacred plant in our, society,” Cerda explains. “It is not permitted to be sold or used in business. We consider [the patenting of it] a robbery of our knowledge.” (Miller who has refused to surrender his patent, declined to be interviewed for this article.”

Reassured that I have not come to steal ayahuasca, Cerda tells me to visit Don Sabino Gualinga, renowned as the best shaman in the region. There’s only one problem: He lives in the Quichua village of Sarayacu some fifty miles into the rain forest. Cerda introduces me to Sabino’s son, Jose, a savvy young man in neatly pressed designer jeans and loafers — who happens to run a company that takes tourists into the jungle. Sarayacu is two days travel by canoe or thirty minutes if I’m prepared to rent a light airplane. Jose looks me up and down and advises me to fly.

I SHOULD HAVE GOT A BIGGER PLANE, I think to myself as the packed six-seater Cessna trundles down the runway, creaking under the weight of myself, the pilot, three children, three more adults, four sacks of rice, and other miscellaneous cargo. From the air, I can see how Puyo sits on the edge of a vast green carpet of trees crisscrossed by rivers and bisected by a solitary road that heads off to the North.

As we follow the Pastaza River south, the hamlet of Sarayacu looms into view – a cluster of thatched huts cut out of the thick forest and clinging to the sides of the river. We touch down on a make-shift grass runway and a group of men who’d been working in the fields gathers to greet us, machetes in hand.

It’s late afternoon when Don Sabino returns from carving out a new canoe some two miles away in the forest. A small, spindly man, he walks deliberately, an anvil slung over his back, secured by a band around his forehead. As he enters the oval hut that serves as kitchen and living area for his family, I’m finishing a bowl of sweet plantains, rice, and fried boca chica, an absurdly bony fish, that his wife Corina has prepared.

Sabino nods nonchalantly to me, as if I drop in to visit every day, and sits down in the corner of the hut. Picking the last spines out of my perforated gums, I introduce myself to him in Spanish. Up close, Sabino’s 78-year-old face has few lines, and his eyes appear jet black, depthless and ageless. On his head he wears a faded Mighty Morphin Power Rangers cap — a pretty weird sartorial choice, I think to myself, for a bonafide shaman.

Amid the cacophony of his grandchildren fighting over a quaking puppy, and two other family dogs waging a jihad against the pet pig, I ask him to tell me of his life. Shamans go back five generations in his family, he says. Don Sabino became a shaman at the age of sixteen, when, after years of training, other shamans acknowledged his wisdom. “I was taught to have the power to hunt, to be lucky in life, and for my children not to need for anything.” By then, he had also learned to cure iliness and to bring people good luck. “One time,” he says, chuckling, “a man from a town came to me saying his car had been stolen. I told him it would be returned. Soon after, the thief brought it back to him personally.”

As Sabino continues, Corina, who’s obviously younger but whose weathered face suggests otherwise, fusses in the kitchen, kicking an errant rooster that wanders into the hut. She brings the old man a cup of guayusa tea, a caffeinated brew from a potent plant that staves off hunger. Sipping it slowly, Don Sabino describes how all of his power comes from the rain forest. “Everything has a spirit,” he says, “the mountains, the trees, the sky, the lakes, the river. And those spirits teach the shamans how to cure.”

Ayahuasca is the shamans’ direct link to the spirit world. Don Sabino first drank it when he was ten. “The first time I felt nothing,” he recalls. “The second a little. The third time I had visions. I could see not just flowers and colors but every kind of sound and music. It was beautiful.” Now he drinks ayahuasca every time he is called upon to heal or counsel.

In fact, the plant plays a role in nearly every part of village life. In Sarayacu, newborn babies are given a sip of ayahuasca to inoculate them from illness, and the village itself was founded after a shaman had a vision of a river (yacu) flowing with corn (sara).

I ask him if he is aware ot the ayahuasca patent. Don Sabino looks straight at me. “Two years ago,” he says, “I learned that a guy from the U.S. said he was the owner of ayahuasca, that he had discovered it.” The shaman snorts derisively and says, “This guy has no shame.”

CORINA COMES FOR ME AT 8:30 p.m. “Esta listo (he’s ready),” she says. I’ve been waiting in the darkness for two hours. There is no way out.

I follow her from my “bedroom,” an open hut that doubles as a playroom for the kids, and walk the short distance to the main building. It is completely dark except for the low flame of a fire that burns day and night in the hut. By the light of the glowing embers, I can see Don Sabino’s face. “Sit down,” he says gently.

Sabino asks his wife to measure out about a small coffee cup of ayahuasca which she pours from an old whiskey bottle. “Is that a lot?” I ask. “Not at all,” she replies. “My husband drinks more than that and he is smaller than you.”

“But this is my first time. He’s been taking it all his life,” I say, rather pathetically.

Sabino hands me the cup and I look down at the brown, viscous liquid. “How do I drink it?” I ask- “Como un trago” – like a shot, down in one gulp, he says.

To say I am nervous is a wild understatement. Here I sit with a geriatric Indian shaman in a mud-floor hut in the middle of the jungle. The next plane out isn’t due for another day, and I’m about to start a hallucinogenic trip that, whether I wrestle the jaguar demons or not, is going to radically fuck with my worldview.

I drink slowly. The taste is bitter — so bitter that I gag as it goes down. “Wash your mouth with water,” the old man tells me, “but don’t swallow.” I do as I’m told and settle back into my seat.

Before long, the first wave hits – I’m blind drunk in seconds, as if I’d knocked back five enormous cognacs in quick succession. I’m just beginning to enjoy this woozy feeling when a searing pain hits my solar plexus like a hot poker. My body feels like the main booster rocket on a space shuttle that’s just been cleared for take-off. The g-force sensation lasts no more than an instant before I’m overcome by nausea, a wave that starts in my ankles and breaks in my head. Again and again, it batters me, and I feel myself drifting in and out of consciousness.

Concentrate. I seem to remember the Shaman telling me that. You control the ayahuasca, not the other way around. And just when I think I can’t take anymore, the rocket carries me back beyond the sickness — exploding into a new and brilliant multihued euphoria. My eyes are open, so why can’t I see? From nowhere, attack squadrons of neon blue, angular, masked faces race toward me, bombarding me from every direction. I fall back into my seat, expecting the worst, as the faces grow larger, fly faster, and take on a fierce mechanical intensity. I’m too awed to be scared. They soar around, underneath, throughme. They feel warm and comforting as they streak by.

Now the blue is gone and I’m floating, no, flying, facedown over a pale green planet. Below me are rows and rows of tanks, arranged in perfect symmetry. The further I fly, the more shapes, the more tanks, I see. It is as if I’m gliding over tank wrapping paper. I’m witnessing the most powerful army in the world, but they all look like toys, like patterns from Galaga or some other early-‘80s video game. I swoop down for a closer look, but the landscape falls away and once more I’m lost.

I’m sitting again. Green suffuses my vision but the tanks have vanished. Now, out of the tableau spring new shapes – I see the rain forest growing before me. Stems stand at attention, branches take form, colossal leaves open wide. Each plant has a face and grows larger until the whole forest envelops me. There is nothing to be scared of, however. I’m simply surrendering myself to the spirit of the vine. The greenery swallows me whole, my head does cartwheels, and then, abruptly, the colors disappear.

Now, I’m aware once again of my surrounding, of the hut. I can’t move – the very thought makes no sense ito me – but I feel there is someone sitting close by me. After what seems like hours of effort, I finally push my hand over to touch the person. There’s no one there.

I can see the shaman sitting to my right. One of his sons is kneeling at his feet and Don Sabino is praying over him – blowing tobacco smoke into his hair and beating leaves around his head – to cleanse him. Then the shaman begins singing. At first it is no more than staccato grunts and shrieks, shocking sounds that send my body reeling, but then come songs to the gods of ayahuasca, repetitive, entrancing chants that seem to reach out and carry me off with them into the rain forest. Around me the jungle is alive. I can hear the squawks, roars, and cries of the animals’ nocturnal banter. I’m sure they are just feet away, watching.

I feel deeply depressed as the ayahuasca leaves me. I know I’ve been somewhere wonderful, pure, unimaginable, and now I’ve come back down to Earth. At some point, I finally tell Sabino I’m ready to leave. “Yes, I think so,” he says, “You have been here over three hours.”

THAT NIGHT, I LAY AWAKE IN MY HUT, gazing up at the sky awash with stars. I came a long way to have this Amazonian experience. Back in New York, it seemed an exotic supernatural trip, but here, I realize that ayahuasca is an essential natural element shaping the Indian’s world — and, like every other part of their environment, it is threatened by outsiders. I feel honored to have drunk with Sabino but a little ashamed that this sacred plant is just the latest flavor of the month back in the States.

I get up at five the next morning and wander into the main hut. The old shaman is there, sitting by the fire and drinking his guayusa tea. In the dawn light, he seems delicate, fragile. He asks me about my experience and what I saw. When I describe it all, he nods approvingly.

“Yes,” he says, “you assumed the ayahuasca body.” He pauses, then says with a smile, “Next time, I will give you a little more.”

This feature was first published in Details magazine in 1999.