There's a psychedelic Renaissance underway as psychoactive substances like psilocybin, DMT, and MDMA are making headway into the medical mainstream as tools for the treatment of depression, OCD, PTSD, substance abuse, and other mental health challenges. But for Indigenous peoples around the globe, psychoactive plant medicines have been used for healing, and much much more, for millennia. And interestingly, unlike many of the self-improvement and self-actualization psychedelic "retreats" of today, the focus was less about the self and more helping about the community.
At the BBC News, Dr. David Cox explores "What Western medicine can learn from the ancient history of psychedelics":
…[UC Berkeley Indigenous studies scholar] Yuria Celidwen says that while psychedelic use in the West focuses on the individual, much of the use of psychoactive substances in ancient cultures across the Americas and the Global South has always been based around interacting with the natural and spirit worlds.
"In most of these traditional cultures, we don't have that sense of division between what is human and the natural world," Celidwen says. "We believe we are always interacting with living, responsive consciousness all around us, and when we use spirit medicines, we're looking for communication and to restore balance with that world. So the context is never individual wellbeing or mental health, but the collective wellbeing of the environment as a whole," she says.
[Johns Hopkins University psychedelics and consciousness professor Albert] Garcia-Romeu agrees, saying that among indigenous communities in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, psychoactive substances are used to communicate with their ancestors, access other realms of being, and gain information about the world around them[…]
Celidwen says that one of the key limitations of the Western approach is that it focuses on psychedelic substances as akin to pills that can be patented. She says that if we can learn anything from the many thousands of years of use among ancient cultures, it is that the real power of psychedelics lies in their ability to encourage bonds between people and communities, as part of a collective experience.
"It's not the molecule itself, it is the larger constellation of relationships that are created that brings the healing," says Celidwen.
Previously:
• Drug-taking gorillas may hold secrets of future medicines
• Plant explorer Richard Evans Schultes' Amazonian Travels interactive map
