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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that happened. There's another center in the jungle I know of that changes its name every time they have a guest die. And I've heard stories of "shamans" who add a paralytic to the dose they give attractive young female guests...

But you know what? Those are the exceptions. I've taken ayahuasca dozens of times, and am booked for another trip to Peru next month. I've been fortunate only to work with reputable people, and have consistently only met others in my travels that have also worked with reputable people.

Please don't judge a tradition that's thousands of years old, and actually remarkably safe — with a few caveats, that the reputable folks will screen for — on the basis of a couple of cretins who look at the plants and the gringo tourists and just see dollar signs.

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All that kind of shadiness is a consequence of prohibition -- since it's illegal, black and grey markets staffed by crooks and irresponsible flaky types fill the vendor niche. Without prohibition you could go to a professionally run center and take pharmaceutically pure DMT+MAOI instead of shaman piss, and do so with experienced genuinely psychologically educated guides and with modern medical care available in case of a reaction.

I disagree. It's legal in Peru, where all of the cases I listed occurred. (Technically, it's a gray area where, in the case of indigenous practitioners working on foreign guests, the law literally has nothing to say — neither legal nor illegal, but tolerated because tourism dollars. Indigenous folks treating indigenous folks is black-letter legal, and protected.) It's not prohibition, but rather greed and predation, that create most of the harms that have happened in ayahuasca practice in the jungle.

I've never done it, but I have a strong sense that pharmahuasca would be cold, sterile, and missing some of the je ne sais quoi that the "shaman piss" [1] experience offers. I'm sure it would still be a valuable experience, and one I'd be open to exploring, but drinking trees works well enough for me, thanks.

I mean, sure you can puke (I often do, sometimes several times in the course of a night), and it tastes horrible, and your sweat smells like tree bark at the end of the night — let alone the end of the week. That's just the process, though, and "optimizing" it out would probably also remove many of the things that are actually among the most valuable (for me, and everyone else who does this more than once with whom I've spoken) aspects.

EDIT: footnote added.

[1] Interestingly, in one of the earliest-documented shamanic traditions, tribes on the Siberian steppe would use amanita muscaria mushrooms, which are visionary, but also mildly toxic. The shaman would take a shaman-sized dose, and journey, then collect his urine (which still contains threshold doses of psychoactive metabolites), and serve that to his "patients".

It's prohibition in Wastern countries, which drives a "drug tourism" industry that distorts local markets and encourages that kind of "tourist trap" predation. Prohibition tends to export the corruption it breeds.

I agree about set and setting. The "clinics" I picture are probably not what that word normally conjures up.

I take your point, and don't disagree, but there's an element of the gestalt of the experience that calls for its being done in its ethnic and ecological context. For many of the people I know through my time down there, the act of taking the journey to the jungle to do this work is an integral part of the process. That is to say, it's not just "jurisdiction shopping" (but by the same token, that doesn't mean there's none of that, either).

I don't disagree. It would be our shamanic experience, not theirs. It would have a different set, setting, gestalt, mythology, and symbolism around it.

I'd be fascinated to know then if certain underlying themes and insights would remain similar or not. So far the western experience with psychedelics does show some commonality with that of indigenous peoples-- it's common for people to report a kind of cosmic oneness experience, insights about their character, etc. But there are also unique cultural twists. Ours have a flavor reminiscent of Greek and Roman Dionysian and Bacchanalian ceremonies, and then there is stuff like:

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/2006/06/podcast-042-–-“us...

You beat me to the story about fly agaric being distributed to the tribe through the shaman's piss. :)

>> Please don't judge a tradition that's thousands of years old

Somewhat off topic question but I'd like to ask anyway - How exactly do you know its thousands of years old ?

I'm not saying it isn't, but how do you know for sure ?

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