You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the global North’s demand for plant medicines like ayahuasca constitute a new form of colonial extraction from Indigenous communities?
user
Yes, but not in the way liberals mean it. The ayahuasca boom is not simply “cultural appropriation” – it is a specific, 21st-century commodity circuit that converts Indigenous knowledge and bio-resources into rent-bearing assets for northern capital, while the communities who generated that knowledge are simultaneously dispossessed of land, autonomy, and even the legal right to their own plants.  

1. **Primitive accumulation continues.** Under the pretext of “sustainability” or “plant medicine,” foreign nonprofits, retreat centers, and venture-backed biotechs are buying or leasing million-hectare swaths of the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. The same states that militarize these territories in the name of the “drug war” turn a blind eye when the buyer is a Silicon Valley guru promising carbon credits or psychedelic IP. The contradiction is naked: Indigenous people are criminalized for harvesting the vine on their own land, while foreign corporations secure permits to export it in bulk.

2. **Value capture is upstream.** The real money is not in the raw plant – which sells for pennies – but in the downstream rents: patents on synthetic analogs (e.g., Carey Turney’s “pharmahuasca” filings), certification regimes that force Indigenous facilitators to pay for Western-style training, and subscription-model tele-health platforms that sell “integration therapy” at 200 USD an hour. Indigenous labor becomes an unpaid input in a value chain whose surplus is realized in Zurich or San Francisco.

3. **Ideological domination is part of the extraction.** The retreat brochure promise of “ancient wisdom” functions like the colonial missionary narrative: Indigenous cosmology is mined for legibility, stripped of its collective, territorial content, and repackaged as an individual cure for northern alienation. Once the knowledge is translated into self-help idioms, the original communities appear disposable; their ongoing struggle against oil, mining, and narco encroachment is cast as a distracting “political overlay” that spoils the spiritual vibe.

4. **Legal subordination completes the cycle.** States that signed the 1971 Vienna Convention – pushed by the U.S. – list DMT, the active alkaloid, as Schedule I. That scheduling power is now used as a bargaining chip: if a community wants to defend its territory, it must first accept a MOU with a foreign biotech that promises “legal protections” in exchange for exclusive sampling rights. The DEA and INCB become the armed wing of a botanical enclosure movement.

What is to be done? Not the liberal demand for “fair trade ayahuasca,” which simply introduces a colonial wage relation and green-washes it. The starting point is Indigenous sovereignty: full territorial control, including the right to veto any scientific, therapeutic, or touristic use by outsiders; state recognition of communal patents that cannot be sold or licensed to private firms; and the dismantling of the international narcotics schedules that criminalize Indigenous practice while enabling corporate R&D. Anything short of that is just a more aromatic version of the same old plunder.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the global North’s demand for plant medicines like ayahuasca constitute a new form of colonial extraction from Indigenous communities?
user