Pubdate: Sat, 10 Feb 2001
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2001 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3
Fax: (604) 605-2323
Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/
Author: Charles Montgomery

HIGH TEA

Think Lsd And Ecstasy Have Devoted Followings? The Next Drug Sliding Down 
The Nirvana Pipeline Has Already Spawned Three New Religions

Javier Arevalo Shehuano did not look like a shaman. He wore a scuffed 
baseball hat and a T-shirt, and carried a schoolboy's knapsack. No trace of 
the beads or braids sported by other urban witch-doctors I had met in Peru.

I suppose that's why I trusted him.

We took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon River. Our plan was to dock at 
a remote lodge and sleep all afternoon, then meet after nightfall in a hut 
at the jungle's edge. We would sip a tea brewed from the bark of a sacred 
vine. Then we would spend the night flying together through the spirit world.

Arevalo smiled, revealing a set of chops fully serrated by rot, and told me 
I had nothing to fear. He was indeed a shaman, he said, and so was his 
father, and his father's father before. He unzipped his knapsack to reveal 
a potpourri of weeds and murky potions. I took his picture.

I had no idea my adventure would take me to the crest of the psychedelic 
zeitgeist, not until the National Post reported last month that Jeffrey 
Bronfman was battling the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for the 
return of his own hallucinogenic tea. Bronfman -- second cousin to Edgar 
Bronfman Jr. and grandnephew to Seagram's dynasty founder Samuel Bronfman 
- -- had joined an obscure Brazilian religion, read the story. The faithful 
would drink Bronfman's foul-tasting tea, experience powerful visions, then 
purify themselves through ritual vomiting. It all took place in the comfort 
of Bronfman's Santa Fe, N.M., yurt -- at least until the day in May 1999 
when dozens of armed U.S. Customs officers stormed the place.

You could sense the glee between the lines of the deadpan story. Here, it 
appeared, was an embarrassing skeleton in the closet of one of Canada's 
most powerful clans. But Bronfman is much more than a New Age black sheep 
of the family. He is an influential leader of an esoteric movement that is 
sweeping the world, and it's all based on that tea.

For centuries, indigenous curanderos, or witch doctors, like Arevalo have 
been harvesting the vine Banisteriopsis caapi from the shadowy depths of 
the Amazon rainforest. They hack away the vine's bark, then beat the bark 
strips with a club until they are soft. The resulting mash is boiled with 
various other herbs, down to the muddy consistency of tomato juice. That 
potent blend, Arevalo told me, gives users the power to travel beyond their 
bodies. To see the future. To move through their own veins, hunting and 
confronting the demons that cause physical and emotional illnesses.

Arevalo called it ayahuasca, which in Quechua, the language of the Incas, 
means vine of the soul. Or vine of death, depending on your translation.

Ayahuasca is now making waves far beyond the backwaters of the Amazon. It 
has generated a lucrative "spiritual tourism" industry in Peru. It has 
spawned three new religions in Brazil. It has been credited with curing 
thousands of alcoholics and drug addicts, and is being studied by 
pharmacologists around the world, who, after 20 years of research 
prohibition, are flinging open the gates of perception and heralding a new 
era of psychedelic experimentation. And, thanks to believers like Bronfman, 
it is coming to a yurt near you.

Author and legendary psychonaut William Burroughs called it yage. He 
tramped through the Colombian jungle in search of it in 1953, where he 
found tidbits for his psychedelic epic, Naked Lunch. He also reported being 
attacked by flocks of flying snakes and squawking larvae while under the 
influence of the tea, and being transformed into a large black woman. 
Burroughs was followed by his friend Alan Ginsberg, who wrote that he drank 
yage with a witch-doctor, then peered through the black nostril of God into 
the mystery of all creation, before being overcome by nausea. "I felt like 
a snake vomiting out the universe," Ginsberg wrote. (The two friend's 
correspondence was later compiled into The Yage Letters.)

While Burroughs and Ginsberg were mind-tripping in Peru, ayahuasca was 
giving birth to a new kind of spirituality in another neck of the jungle. 
Gabriel de Costa, a Brazilian rubber tapper, was introduced to a 
particularly powerful blend of ayahuasca by Bolivian Indians He experienced 
visions in the forest telling him to establish a new religion, with the tea 
he called hoasca as its sacrament. Mestre Gabriel, as de Costa came to be 
known by followers, assembled a new faith from the building blocks of 
Christianity, shamanism and Afro-Brazilian rituals. He called his church 
Uniao do Vegetal. Roughly translated as "union of the plants," the name 
bears homage to a recipe that combines Banisteriopsis caapi and leaves from 
the plant Psychotria viridis.

As it turns out, it was one of at least three new ayahuasca-based religions 
to emerge from the Amazon this century.

Jeffrey Bronfman was not looking for religion when he arrived in Brazil in 
1990. According to court depositions (Bronfman isn't keen to talk to 
journalists during his court battle with the DEA) he was there to help 
establish a rainforest sanctuary: an admirable plan, spearheaded by  none 
other than the Uniao do Vegetal church.

By the time Bronfman hit the jungle, the UDV had grown to 7,000 members. 
Bronfman shared their tea and their ceremonies, and was so inspired he 
returned to Brazil four times in the next two years. He joined the church 
and learned Portuguese. In the tea, he felt he had found a liquid 
manifestation of the divine. "It has the effect," he later wrote, "of 
allowing the UDV members a direct, personal, intimate re-connection with 
the Absolute." A shortcut to God.

Bronfman was named the UDV's "Representative Mestre," or leader, for the 
U.S., where he has guided the church to a membership of 130 faithful in 
five congregations. Over three years, Bronfman imported more than 1,000 
litres of tea into the U.S., all of it passing Customs and FDA inspection. 
That all ended on May 21, 1999, when two dozen armed Customs officers and a 
crowd of police raided Bronfman's Santa Fe office. They took church 
records. They got the tea, too, then dropped in on other UDV congregations 
around the country. You could hardly blame them. After all, the tea is a 
veritable psychoactive broth, with traces of endogenous dimethyltryptamine 
(DMT) and harmaline. DMT has been called the most powerful hallucinogen 
known to man, and is classified in the U.S. as a Schedule 1 substance, a 
designation reserved for drugs the DEA considers dangerously open to abuse, 
and having no medical value. (Both DMT and harmaline are prohibited under 
Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act).

Then again, the Brazilian government had its own suspicions about the 
spread of ayahuasca use back in the '80s. Leaders of Santo Daime, another 
ayahuasca-based religion, had established several utopian retreats in the 
jungle. Suburban parents were complaining their children had been seduced 
into the church by drug use and ritual brainwashing. One young man tried to 
immolate himself on a campfire while under the influence.

The Brazilian Federal Narcotics Council (Confen) temporarily banned the 
mysterious tea in 1985, then investigated the churches involved. It didn't 
find the scandal and drug abuse that had been reported by the Brazilian 
press. In fact, the Confen team noted that ayahuasca exerted an 
overwhelmingly positive influence on the lives of users, particularly when 
taken in a religious setting. They documented hundreds of cases where drug 
addicts, alcoholics and the wayward were somehow transformed into healthy, 
upstanding citizens by their involvement in the UDV. Team members went so 
far as to down a few cups of tea themselves. Ayahuasca has been perfectly 
legal in Brazil since 1992.

Regulators in North America have not been following Confen's tea-sipping 
lead. We, of course, have had our own rocky relationship with 
hallucinogens. In the late '60s, psychiatrists hoped that LSD could be used 
to cure all kinds of psychological illnesses, from addiction to depression. 
(Canadian researcher Humphrey Osmond experimented with treating alcoholics 
with mescaline and LSD. He found that the treatment worked best when 
patients reached a transcendent and mystical state of consciousness, 
similar to the delirium they sometimes experienced during alcohol 
withdrawals. For this state he coined the now-common term psychedelic.)

But hallucinogens were also heartily embraced by the free-loving, 
war-hating, hair-growing counter culture. Not surprisingly, the drugs were 
blamed for contributing to the upheaval and havoc that seemed to be 
spreading across North America. It didn't help when Timothy Leary taunted 
the establishment with predictions that "the effect of 
consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human 
nature, of human potential, of existence. The game is about to be changed, 
ladies and gentlemen."

It was indeed. In the late '60s, increasingly stringent restrictions were 
placed on research using hallucinogens. Finally they were classed as 
Schedule 1 drugs, and research all but ground to a halt.

After nearly a quarter of a century, that's changing -- partly because of 
hallucinogens' potential for treating addiction, according to Charles Grob, 
a UCLA professor of psychiatry. In the last decade, a half-dozen studies 
have explored the pharmacology and sociology of ayahuasca. In 1993, Grob 
led a mulitdisciplinary research project to study the effects of the tea on 
UDV members in Brazil.

The study found that church members who drank ayahuasca regularly were more 
open, optimistic, energetic, without stress, without inhibitions, and had 
more self-esteem than members of a control group who never drank the tea. 
What's more, two-thirds of the UDV members studied had histories of 
alcoholism and psychological problems, which ended when they joined the UDV.

Grob's team found that the tea wasn't addictive and it didn't physically 
harm users, as long as they weren't taking certain types of antidepressant 
drugs at the same time. As for the vomiting and diarrhea the tea frequently 
triggers, well that actually acts as a check against abuse, suggests Grob.

Gastrointestinal distress aside, ayahuasca is now all the rage among the 
alternative health and spirituality set. A conference on the tea in San 
Francisco last March drew more than 500 scientists, consciousness 
researchers, indigenous healers and "shamanic explorers." A recent issue of 
the unwaveringly sincere and occasionally breathless journal Shaman's Drum 
was devoted to healing with ayahuasca.

Tea activists abhor the words psychedelic and hallucinogenic, and the 
recreational drug culture they imply. Ayahuasca, they say, is not about 
fun. It is an entheogenic, or 'god-generating," sacrament, providing an 
"ecstatic doorway into cosmic consciousness and taping into the wisdom of a 
benevolent transpersonal spirit," according to Shaman's Drum editor Timothy 
White.

Contributors to Shaman's Drum (available at Capers, naturally) have 
described being transformed into birds, jungle cats and snakes after 
drinking the tea with shamans in the Peruvian jungle. One American, 
desperate to save his son from what seemed to be acute kidney failure, 
reported travelling through a terrible void in order to wrap strands of 
light around his son, thereby protecting him. (The boy, he wrote, was 
released from hospital the following week.)

Ayahuasca journeys are shaped by the philosophy and environment in which 
the tea is taken. For generations of Amazon shamans, ayahuasca provided 
guidance on how to prepare herbal remedies and gave hunters clues as to 
where to find game. For New Age searchers, it offers metaphorical tours of 
their own psyches. And for the syncratic faiths now spreading around the 
world, it offers one-on-one sessions with God.

That's the thing I like best about this tea. For hundreds of years we -- 
mainstream Christians, at least -- have been expected to communicate with 
God through intermediaries of our churches. Our God, it seemed, stopped 
addressing us personally 2,000 years ago. Well, the ayahuasca-based 
churches cut out the middlemen.

The divine -- be it God, forest spirits or Ginsberg's God-nostril black 
hole -- is waiting to present itself to us within that murky brew. No 
wonder thousands pilgrims now follow Burroughs' footsteps to Peru, eager to 
be transformed by the ayahuasca experience. I certainly was -- but 
discovered that ayahuasca shamanism has put on a decidedly industrial face 
in the Andes.

Cuzco, one-time heart of the Inca empire, is evolving into Peru's own 
Kathmandu: a mecca for lovers of mountains, mysticism and T-shirts. It pays 
to be -- or at least to resemble -- a holy man here. Hotels warn tourists 
about the con artists who, armed with feathers and beads, become instant 
ayahuasca "healers." Some shamans have agents in North America and Europe 
who charge as much as $10,000 for three-week "mystical tours."

Vulnerable foreigners are regularly duped. One middle-aged American woman 
told me she had paid $500 to take part in ayahuasca ceremonies. She was 
certain a shaman had cast a spell on her in order to lighten her wallet. 
The only true ayahuasceros, she said, were deep in the Amazon Basin, where 
the vine twists its way through shady forests, and where shamans still tend 
to the health of their villages.

But the flood of spiritual tourism has washed right to Iquitos, the capital 
of Peru's vast jungle state, Loreto. One jungle lodge owner told me that 
tourist demand for ayahuasca was so high, he had built a hut at the edge of 
his compound for shamans to use.

Javier Arevalo Shehuano was one of his regulars. Word around Iquitos was 
that Arevalo  mixed a potent ayahuasca, and was a gentle guide to the 
spirit world. So we took a boat into the jungle: me, Arevalo and his 
knapsack of medicine, a couple of English spiritual tour operators and the 
two young women they had picked up in Iquitos.

As we sat by the cracked pool of the Amazon Rainforest Lodge, Arevalo told 
me that city doctors had never visited Nuevo Progresso, his home village on 
another lonely tributary of the  Amazon. He and his father had used forest 
plants -- including ayahuasca -- to cure neighbours' stomach aches, skin 
rashes and arthritis. But the nature of his work had changed since he had 
moved in with his wife's family in Iquitos. The spiritual tourists had 
found him.

"The foreigners don't come for physical problems," he said. "They have 
illness in their heads and in their hearts -- psychological problems."

For those maladies, he added, ayahuasca was a strong medicine.

We met after nightfall in the grass hut at the edge of the forest. One Brit 
had obviously done this before: he was in pyjamas, and carried a blanket 
and pillow. "Go easy on me tonight, Javier," he said. "I am bloody stressed 
out."

Arevalo had changed. Baseball cap and shorts were replaced by a grass crown 
and a floral frock. He took long drags from hand-rolled cigarettes and 
began to chant, shaking a bouquet of dry leaves in the air. "Good evening 
sirs, spirits of the forest" he sang in Spanish with his eyes closed, "We 
are waiting for you to join us."

 From a mineral water bottle, he poured a brackish liquid into a wooden cup 
and turned to me. "My friend, whatever your questions are, you should give 
them to the ayahuasca now."

I poured the tea into my mouth and swallowed hard. It went down like a 
puree of cigarette butts, grapefruit juice and day-old coffee. The shaman 
chanted, and gradually the lights of the fireflies began to blur. When I 
closed my eyes, I found myself immersed in an ocean of paisley swirls. They 
all moved to the rhythm of Arevalo's chanting.

Now bear with me here. I did have a few questions for the ayahuasca, and 
they are none of your business. But over the next few hours, they were 
indeed answered in a series of Technicolor metaphors, writhing monster 
squids and fantastic cities of Lego. Vomiting? Um, yes, in fact I saw the 
face of all my doubts etched like an Aztec sun into a pool of my bile. And 
later there was a church, a soaring cathedral, constructed entirely of 
giant Hallmark greeting cards in pink, blue and pearl. Each card was 
inscribed with floral letters declaring: "I love you." So much for objectivity.

I opened my eyes to see the pyjama-clad Brit, crawling into the Amazon 
night, inhabited, I learned later, by the spirit of a dog. The local girls 
giggled. So did Arevalo.

I'm not certain I conversed with the divine that night, or with anything 
other than the scrambled signals of my own neurotransmitters. But the 
experience had the same effect of reading a stack of self-help books. 
Memories, dreams, anxieties and my own suspicions of the supernatural were 
somehow transformed into instructive metaphors.

Three months later, I still have questions. I'm trying to track down 
ayahuasca here in Canada. The tea activists have gone underground since 
authorities began investigating UDV and Santo Daime branches across the 
U.S., Holland and Spain. I get strange phone calls from Washington, New 
Mexico or Hawaii, from people who say the truth must be told -- but they 
can't tell it, or tell me where ayahuasca can be found. I called Jeffrey 
Bronfman, but he hasn't had a drop of tea since the Santa Fe bust, and 
still isn't speaking to the press or strangers.

The magic tea, however, is still crossing borders -- just not in the hands 
of church members. After our jungle session, the English spiritual tour 
operators flew home to London with two pop bottles of Arevalo's blend. This 
spring they will fly Arevalo across the Atlantic too, so that he can call 
the spirits to their own yurt in the countryside.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart