I would like to give a little background. I have been a moderator of the Ayahuasca forums for twelve years (and a member a few years longer) and (besides living for several years with Amazonian Indians, being a member of the Santo Daime church, and being a member of a network of academic researchers who study ayahuasca from many different angles) have had a front row seat for many people's experiences with ayahuasca.
Most people who take ayahuasca ARE benefitted, some experience tremendous benefit and healing. From my experience, the number of people with bad outcomes may be only about 2-3%. Nevertheless, given that more and more people are trying ayahuasca, probably tens of thousands since the ayahuasca tourist boom started in earnest about a decade ago, that is not an insignificant number, and the depth of the harm to those few people can be severe.
(AH has reportedly been receiving 100 inquiries a day, or 3000 a month, and they plan to open enough centers to accommodate these numbers, so using that informal percentage means that perhaps 60 to 90 people a month would leave with severe or worsened psychological problems.)
In my observation, practically all bad outcomes happen in poorly run groups. People who take it alone very rarely have lasting problems, as do people who take it in properly run therapeutic, shamanic or religious settings. (And, with all respect to dabcult, speaking as a fellow fardada, not all Santo Daime churches are benign. Each church is different, and some individual churches ARE cultlike and harmful to their members. It is observing this, firsthand, that has made me so alarmed at the potential for disaster if cult leaders in this country were to get legal access to use ayahuasca in the name of "religious freedom.")
As far as ayahuasca tourism in Peru, people who go seeking "authentic shamanic experiences" don't realize that the ayahuasca retreats are not authentic at all, even if they employ local curanderos. It has never been traditional in the Amazon to administer ayahuasca to large groups of people overseen by a shaman. The indigenous shamans work with one or a few people at a time, and usually their patients don't even drink the ayahuasca, or only a little. Even the genuine Amazonian curanderos have no training or experience in handling large groups. (Notoriously, many of these curanderos, authentic or not, have discovered how easy it is to seduce their starry-eyed gringa clients who are in the afterglow of the medicine, a state in which you can be feeling completely in love with the entire world, and easily convinced that the ceremony leader is some kind of incredible spiritual being -- indeed, once again, I shudder at the thought of cult leaders getting hold of ayahuasca.) I would still say that probably 97% of people who take ayahuasca even in those settings probably experience benefit. But the maybe 3% who experience quite the opposite are not to be ignored.
Trinity displays the starry-eyed in-love-with-the-world feeling that is common among neophytes on the ayahuasca path. Just seeing that initially alarmed me, that the project was being led by infants. Infants who would oversee other infants. That was alarming enough. But the thing is, when people are in that state, or that stage, it is extremely easy to manipulate them and get them to focus that state on the leader and fall in love with the leader. I'm sure that most cults are already led by leaders who know how to make their followers fall in love with them.
It is also extremely common for neophytes on the ayahuasca path to experience a "messianic call" and believe that they have some special destiny to save the world. Usually this is transitory. It is so common that it is almost a normal phase to go through. But if you put ayahuasca in the hands of someone who already has messianic tendencies, it can totally blow them up.
So there are both of these ways that ayahuasca has the potential to dangerously exacerbate the problem of cultism, if it were to be made legal for anyone who started a "religion" to give it to people under the name of "religious freedom."
Ayahuasca is in the main a highly beneficial therapeutic tool, but, like most technologies, it has the potential to be misused. Giving cult leaders legal permission to use it in the name of religion would open the door to the most grotesque misuse of ayahuasca. We don't want the DEA to think that ayahuasca is mainly dangerous to people and slam the door on it. In fact, it would work in favor of ayahuasca being permitted its proper use if the DEA were to see that people both in and out of the ayahuasca community can differentiate between safe and unsafe use.
And it is a simple and straightforward enough message, that it is unsafe for ayahuasca to be administered by unqualified people, especially in large groups. The burden of proof should be on the person who seeks to administer ayahuasca that they are qualified to do it, but the doors should be open to that. (In the long run, as legal doors are opened, it may be possible to form professional associations such as doctors and lawyers have to certify them).
It is a simple enough message to give to the DEA, that the AH people are unqualified to lead ayahuasca ceremonies, and that their practice, therefore, is unsafe.
Most people who take ayahuasca ARE benefitted, some experience tremendous benefit and healing. From my experience, the number of people with bad outcomes may be only about 2-3%. Nevertheless, given that more and more people are trying ayahuasca, probably tens of thousands since the ayahuasca tourist boom started in earnest about a decade ago, that is not an insignificant number, and the depth of the harm to those few people can be severe.
(AH has reportedly been receiving 100 inquiries a day, or 3000 a month, and they plan to open enough centers to accommodate these numbers, so using that informal percentage means that perhaps 60 to 90 people a month would leave with severe or worsened psychological problems.)
In my observation, practically all bad outcomes happen in poorly run groups. People who take it alone very rarely have lasting problems, as do people who take it in properly run therapeutic, shamanic or religious settings. (And, with all respect to dabcult, speaking as a fellow fardada, not all Santo Daime churches are benign. Each church is different, and some individual churches ARE cultlike and harmful to their members. It is observing this, firsthand, that has made me so alarmed at the potential for disaster if cult leaders in this country were to get legal access to use ayahuasca in the name of "religious freedom.")
As far as ayahuasca tourism in Peru, people who go seeking "authentic shamanic experiences" don't realize that the ayahuasca retreats are not authentic at all, even if they employ local curanderos. It has never been traditional in the Amazon to administer ayahuasca to large groups of people overseen by a shaman. The indigenous shamans work with one or a few people at a time, and usually their patients don't even drink the ayahuasca, or only a little. Even the genuine Amazonian curanderos have no training or experience in handling large groups. (Notoriously, many of these curanderos, authentic or not, have discovered how easy it is to seduce their starry-eyed gringa clients who are in the afterglow of the medicine, a state in which you can be feeling completely in love with the entire world, and easily convinced that the ceremony leader is some kind of incredible spiritual being -- indeed, once again, I shudder at the thought of cult leaders getting hold of ayahuasca.) I would still say that probably 97% of people who take ayahuasca even in those settings probably experience benefit. But the maybe 3% who experience quite the opposite are not to be ignored.
Trinity displays the starry-eyed in-love-with-the-world feeling that is common among neophytes on the ayahuasca path. Just seeing that initially alarmed me, that the project was being led by infants. Infants who would oversee other infants. That was alarming enough. But the thing is, when people are in that state, or that stage, it is extremely easy to manipulate them and get them to focus that state on the leader and fall in love with the leader. I'm sure that most cults are already led by leaders who know how to make their followers fall in love with them.
It is also extremely common for neophytes on the ayahuasca path to experience a "messianic call" and believe that they have some special destiny to save the world. Usually this is transitory. It is so common that it is almost a normal phase to go through. But if you put ayahuasca in the hands of someone who already has messianic tendencies, it can totally blow them up.
So there are both of these ways that ayahuasca has the potential to dangerously exacerbate the problem of cultism, if it were to be made legal for anyone who started a "religion" to give it to people under the name of "religious freedom."
Ayahuasca is in the main a highly beneficial therapeutic tool, but, like most technologies, it has the potential to be misused. Giving cult leaders legal permission to use it in the name of religion would open the door to the most grotesque misuse of ayahuasca. We don't want the DEA to think that ayahuasca is mainly dangerous to people and slam the door on it. In fact, it would work in favor of ayahuasca being permitted its proper use if the DEA were to see that people both in and out of the ayahuasca community can differentiate between safe and unsafe use.
And it is a simple and straightforward enough message, that it is unsafe for ayahuasca to be administered by unqualified people, especially in large groups. The burden of proof should be on the person who seeks to administer ayahuasca that they are qualified to do it, but the doors should be open to that. (In the long run, as legal doors are opened, it may be possible to form professional associations such as doctors and lawyers have to certify them).
It is a simple enough message to give to the DEA, that the AH people are unqualified to lead ayahuasca ceremonies, and that their practice, therefore, is unsafe.