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J Relig Health (2015) 54:287302
DOI 10.1007/s10943-014-9826-2
ORIGINAL PAPER
Marc G. Blainey
Published online: 30 January 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion organized around a potent psychoactive beverage called ayahuasca, is now being practiced across Europe and North America. Deeming ayahuasca a dangerous hallucinogen, most Western governments prosecute people who participate in Santo Daime. On the contrary, members of Santo Daime (called daimistas) consider ayahuasca a medicinal sacrament (or entheogen). Empirical studies corroborate daimistas claim that entheogens are benign and can be benecial when employed in controlled contexts. Following from anthropologys goal of rendering different cultural logics as mutually explicable, this article intercedes in a misunderstanding between policies of prohibition and an emergent subculture of entheogenic therapy.
Keywords Psychotherapy Entheogen Ayahuasca Santo Daime Prohibition
Introduction
Based on stories about traumas experienced by youths during the 1960s, substances referred to as hallucinogens or psychedelics are assumed to be inherently dangerous in mainstream Western society. Popular fears about the hippie countercultures promotion of psychedelics provoked a worldwide criminalization of this class of chemicals, enacted by the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971 (Beyerstein and Kalchik 2003; Spillane and McAllister 2003). Since then, 184 member states have signed this UN treaty, which obliges each signatory to also legislate their own national sanctions.1
1 The total list of signatories can be found here: http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Chapter%20VI/VI-16.en.pdf
Web End =http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Chapter%20VI/VI-16.en.pdf .
M. G. Blainey (&)
Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, University College, 5 Kings College Circle, Toronto, ON M5S 3H7, Canadae-mail: [email protected]
Forbidden Therapies: Santo Daime, Ayahuasca,and the Prohibition of Entheogens in Western Society
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288 J Relig Health (2015) 54:287302
Globally, the International Narcotics Control Board now adjudicates international prohibitions of these psychoactive materials (see Tupper and Labate 2012). Despite this ban, some European and North American citizens have adopted sacred (i.e., non-recreational) uses of these same substances, a custom previously limited to non-Western aboriginal traditions. These devotees reject the terms hallucinogen (which implies that the substance generates delusions) and psychedelic (reminiscent of hedonistic use during the 1960s). Instead, they prefer the terms entheogen or sacred plant. Meaning to generate god within in Greek, entheogen was coined to denote vision-producing substances employed in shamanic or religious rites (Ruck...