Abstract

Excerpted From: Viktorya Saroyan, Fantastic Fungi and Her Fickle Foes: Psychedelic Use and Western Medicine's Disparate Impact on Indigenous Communities, 33 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 156 (Winter, 2024) (172 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Psychedelic plants and fungi have a rich history of use within the traditions and cultures of numerous indigenous groups. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, various plants, cacti, and mushrooms were utilized in healing rituals and religious ceremonies to induce altered states of consciousness. Some examples include the Banisteriopsis caapi vine (commonly known as ayahuasca), peyote cactus, and mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus. While the origins of its use are lost to time, there is evidence dating Ayahuasca use back 1000 years. The psychotropic properties of peyote were used as far back as 5700 years by NativeAmericans. Certain mushrooms, which Aztecs knew by the name teonanácatl, were revered as the “flesh of the gods” or “God's flesh.” Mushroom stones from rituals dating back to 3000 BC have been discovered in Mesoamerica.

With the onset of colonialism came the subsequent impacts on these traditional practices and the commercialization of sacred rituals. Peru has become the center of cultural tourism due to its ayahuasca rituals. Western tourists have and still continue to shell out thousands of dollars to visit white, foreign-owned retreats in Peru, complete with free Wi-Fi and yoga sessions. As this “spiritual tourism” has boomed, the Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi is becoming increasingly difficult to source.

In regard to peyote, over exploitation and illegal trafficking has resulted in indiscriminate harvesting methods that adversely impact the plant's vitality. In addition, the expansion of commercial agriculture has decimated pilgrimage sites for the Wixárika--where extensive thickets of vegetation, including peyote, once flourished, now stand enormous greenhouses, expansive plots of cultivated land, and millions of caged chickens and pigs.

As for mushrooms, the Catholic Church condemned the use of mushroom-related practices during the Spanish Colonial period, equating it with worshipping the Devil. The use of teonanácatl was pushed to the furthest, most remote regions of Mesoamerica, until the mid-twentieth century work of amateur mycologist Robert G. Wasson and his wife, Valentina Wasson.

As the various cultural and religious practices of psychedelic use by indigenous groups are too broad to discuss, this paper will primarily be focusing on the traditional use of mushrooms within the Psilocybe genus. Robert Wasson is often considered to be one of the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec ceremony. His article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom, was published in Life magazine in 1959, and catapulted psychedelic mushrooms to the forefront of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. In it, he detailed how he met shaman María Sabina, who took him through a traditional Mazatec ritual, and the psychoactive effects of the Psilocybe species he experienced. His article resulted in hordes of Westerners descending upon the small town of Huautla de Jiminez, seeking the wisdom of Sabina. It also launched mushrooms into the spotlight of scientific inquiry. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted “breakthrough therapy” status to psilocybin therapy. Psilocybin is the compound responsible in mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus for its psychedelic effects. A follow-up study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research found that psilocybin treatment for major depressive disorder was effective for up to a year in most patients after just two doses. Most recently, psilocybin therapy was used in a major-breakthrough trial at NYU to treat alcohol use disorder.

As psilocybin remains a Schedule 1 substance within the US, it is mostly privately owned companies that are researching the effects of psilocybin containing mushrooms, synthesizing its compounds, conducting clinical trials, and registering patents on various forms of psychedelic therapy. Several difficulties arise when indigenous practices dating back a millennia are being patented by wealthy corporations seeking to capitalize off the traditional knowledge of native groups. One major issue is that the current U.S. intellectual property (IP) framework is functionally incompatible with traditional knowledge. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) require (1) an identifiable author, inventor or other originator (who will be individually rewarded), (2) an identifiable work, invention or other object, and (3) defined restricted acts. Traditional knowledge directly conflicts with these requirements--rarely are there identified authors or inventors of creations. Rather, inventions and knowledge are passed on and enriched from one generation to the next. Here, various Native groups have been using, breeding, practicing, and healing with mushrooms within the Psilocybe genus for over a thousand years. Intellectual property is largely shaped by Western expectations and valuations, which results in a capitalistic, exploitative, and inherently colonialist use of psychedelic mushrooms.

Some argue that without Wasson's article, the psychedelic counterculture would have never come to fruition. Others predict that psychedelic mushrooms could fundamentally transform mental health, illness, and addiction as we know it. Indeed, Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof once said “psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.” Given recent breakthroughs in psilocybin therapy, there is a preponderance of evidence indicating that the world is on the precipice of a mental health renaissance; for the first time ever, there is confirmation of treatment that can potentially cure some of society's worst mental illnesses. However, it is in danger of being the latest “cash crop” for big pharma. For hundreds of years, indigenous communities faced backlash for their beliefs. Now, their practices are being stolen, exploited, reclassified from plants to chemicals, and packaged to serve Western medicine's needs.

The mass production of plant medicine by the West is another form of colonialism, and if such plants are to be legalized and mass-produced, they should include an indigenous reciprocity component. The benefits of plant medicine should not be gatekept, especially if they truly hold the key to transforming the lives of those plagued by anxiety, depression, PTSD, and various other mental illnesses. Nevertheless, in the quest to legalize and implement psilocybin therapy, corporations should not forget where such practices originated, who championed their uses, and who colonialism has fought to silence for thousands of years. As an infinitesimal burden for a colossal industry, though indigenous reciprocity does not maximize economic efficiency, it remains a crucial marker driving the line between conscientious healthcare and pharmaceutical gluttony.

Through a critical indigenous lens, this article will explore the following: how primary sources in psychedelic literature uphold Western individualism; how Western culture encourages and is complicit in colonialism; how the United States can move forward ethically through possible solutions identified by scholars within the psychedelic field; the Convention on Biological Diversity and Nagoya Protocol's potential to address the various issues that arise in commercializing psychedelics; and why indigenous reciprocity is necessary despite its lack of economic viability.

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María Sabina retains a saintly status among psychedelic culture and counter-culture enthusiasts today. Literary writer and psychedelic explorer, Bett Williams, aptly summed up the issue with the enshrinement of Sabina within mushroom devotees, reflecting:

She was, afterall, just one of many practitioners in a very old tradition. What a strange lottery, and how American, to pluck a single practitioner from the many and portray her as though she was in possession of rare idiosyncratic genius. The fetishization of María Sabina as holy martyr is a problematic trope that infuses her with the spirit of Western individualism, while her role among the Mazatec people becomes a side note.

Reducing Sabina to nothing more than the woman who connected Wasson to his “discovery” of mushrooms is both very neoliberalist and very American. Western culture encourages and is complicit in colonialism so much so that even the tools used to remember Sabina by were constructed by the very man who exploited her. Erasing and rewriting indigenous people into narratives that center white men as the founders of psychedelics exemplifies the tired old saying of, “history is written by the victors.” The neoliberal ideologies that permeate the motivations of leading institutions like Harvard Law School to internationally renowned magazines like The New Yorker result in the layman's knowledge and perception of psychedelics to hinge on the experiences of white men and their personal understandings rather than thousands of years' worth of traditional knowledge. But for these indigenous practices, the West would not have the widespread knowledge that exists today about the functions and healing properties of these plants. For some groups, like Wixárika and NativeAmerican church, it is antithetical to remove the culture from the plant because they are one in the same. There cannot be one without the other because their connections have been intertwined for over a millennia, with ceremonies passed down, built upon, and transformed as the population progressed. Capitalizing off such knowledge will lead to the continuous asterisking of indigenous stories, perspectives, and livelihoods for the sake of capitalistic exploits.

Such danger is further illustrated by the immediate aftermath of Wasson's article. The influx of superficial attention following the publication of Seeking the Magic Mushroom brewed resentment among many of the villagers in Huautla de Jimenez. Wasson's publicization of his exploits resulted in Sabina's ostracization from the only community she had ever known. She was briefly jailed, her home was burned down and her son, the same one depicted in the photographs of Wasson's article, was killed. In 1970, a musical inspired by Sabina debuted at Carnegie Hall. The same year, an anthropologist found her impoverished and living in rags.

Mexican-American novelist and writer, Chloe Aridjis, who had met Sabina as a child, reflected on the life and death of the curandera, “[h]er final years were marred by poverty, illness and misfortune ... Death was approaching, she was aware of her suffering; she was born poor and would die poor.”

In 1985, María Sabina died in a hospital in Oaxaca from old age exacerbated by bronchitis, malnutrition, and pneumonia. It is but a cruel twist of fate that forty years later, psychedelic mushrooms are being utilized “in a manner much closer to what María Sabina considered to be their true purpose: to heal the sick.”

Economic and social incentives do not always align, but positive goals are not necessarily fiscal goals. Western complicity is never more prominent than when taking into account the original impacts of colonialism on Mesoamerica coupled with the new wave of colonization brought on by Wasson's article. Both the primary sources in psychedelic literature and Western culture serve to uphold generations of purposeful ignorance when it comes to how the West has detrimentally affected indigenous cultural property and knowledge. Following an interminably long history of violence and opposition, the acts of benefit sharing, prior informed consent, centering indigenous voices, and embodying ayni are only some of the ways emerging psychedelic pharmaceutical companies may be able to proceed.

Constitutional law professor Konstantin Gerber warns of the industry's vulnerabilities and potential for exploitation, asking “Why is the so-called psychedelic renaissance, including commodification, almost exclusively benefiting nonindigenous Western businessmen?” For psilocybin in particular, it is crucial to accentuate how intimately intertwined it is with Mazatec cultural heritage. It is equally important to remember how Western colonial forces ranging from Cortes and the Spanish to J.P. Morgan executive R. Gordon Wasson suppressed such practices. Gerber feels compelled to ask, given “[t]he motivations behind a highly profitable business selling psilocybin as a panacea for this century ... will this treatment really be affordable to all social stratum, or only for a privileged part of society?” Perhaps just as importantly, we ought to inquire whether this new era of modern medicine will retain the traditional communal values under which it originally flourished.