Aussiewaska: A Cultural History of Changa and Ayahuasca Analogues in Australia. In Beatriz Labate, Clancy Cavnar and Alex Gearin, eds, The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies (Routledge, 2017).

Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis The World Ayahuasca Diaspora Ayahuasca is a psychoactive substance that has long been associated with indigenous Amazonian shamanic practices. The recent rise of the drink’s visibility in the media and popular culture, and its rapidly advancing inroads into international awareness, mean that the ield of ayahuasca is quickly expanding. This expansion brings with it legal problems, economic inequalities, new forms of ritual and belief, cultural misunderstandings, and other controversies and reinventions. In The World Ayahuasca Diaspora, leading scholars, including established academics and new voices in anthropology, religious studies, and law fuse case-study ethnographies with evaluations of relevant legal and anthropological knowledge. They explore how the substance has impacted indigenous communities, new urban religiosities, ritual healing, international drug policy, religious persecution, and recreational drug milieus. This unique book presents classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, providing rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe. Beatriz Caiuby Labate has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Visiting Professor at the Center for Research and Post Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), in Guadalajara, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Drug Policy Program of the Center for Economic Research and Education (CIDE) in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is also co-founder of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and editor of NEIP’s website (http://www.neip.info). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twelve books, one special-edition journal, and several peer-reviewed articles. For more information, see: http://bialabate.net/ Clancy Cavnar is currently a licensed clinical psychologist working with dual diagnosed clients. In 2011, she received a doctorate in clinical psychology (PsyD) from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California, with a dissertation on gay and lesbian people’s experiences with ayahuasca. She is Research Associate of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and co-editor, with Beatriz Caiuby Labate, of three books: The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca (2014); Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use (2014); and Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (2014). She is also author of peer-reviewed articles (at the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and the International Journal of Drug Policy). Alex K. Gearin has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia. His Ph.D. dissertation involves an ethnographic study of ayahuasca use in Australia and focuses on sensory, medical, and ethical themes of ritual practice and social organisation. He currently lectures in anthropology at the University of Queensland and works in the UQ Anthropology Museum, Brisbane, Australia. For more information, see: https://culturaladmixtures.wordpress.com/ Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Vitality of Indigenous Religions Series Editors: Graham Harvey, Open University, UK Afeosemime Adogame, The University of Edinburgh, UK Ines Talamantez, University of California, USA Routledge’s Vitality of Indigenous Religions series offers an exciting cluster of research monographs, drawing together volumes from leading international scholars across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Indigenous religions are vital and empowering for many thousands of indigenous peoples globally, and dialogue with, and consideration of, these diverse religious life-ways promises to challenge and reine the methodologies of a number of academic disciplines, whilst greatly enhancing understandings of the world. This series explores the development of contemporary indigenous religions from traditional, ancestral precursors, but the characteristic contribution of the series is its focus on their living and current manifestations. Devoted to the contemporary expression, experience and understanding of particular indigenous peoples and their religions, books address key issues which include: the sacredness of land, exile from lands, diasporic survival and diversiication, the indigenization of Christianity and other missionary religions, sacred language, and re-vitalization movements. Proving of particular value to academics, graduates, postgraduates and higher level undergraduate readers worldwide, this series holds obvious attraction to scholars of Native American studies, Maori studies, African studies and offers invaluable contributions to religious studies, sociology, anthropology, geography and other related subject areas. Other recently published titles in the series: Religion and Non-Religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples Edited by James L. Cox and Adam Possamai Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity Thomas Karl Alberts Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being Lawrence W. Gross Progress and Its Impact on the Nagas A Clash of Worldviews Tezenlo Thong Religious Change and Indigenous Peoples The Making of Religious Identities Helena Onnudottir, Adam Possamai and Bryan S. Turner Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis The World Ayahuasca Diaspora Reinventions and controversies Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Alex K. Gearin Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Alex K. Gearin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Alex K. Gearin to be identiied as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Photos: Benjamin K. De Loenen Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiication and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-1-4724-6663-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-55142-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis To Erik, Des and their garden. Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Contents Author biographies Foreword: ayahuasca in the twenty-irst century: having it both ways by Glenn H. Shepard Jr. Introduction: the shifting journey of ayahuasca in diaspora ix xv 1 BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE, CLANCY CAVNAR, AND ALEX K. GEARIN 1 If tradition did not exist, it would have to be invented: retraditionalization and the world ayahuasca diaspora 19 ANDREW DAWSON 2 Between ecstasy and reason: a symbolic interpretation of UDV trance 39 ROSA VIRGÍNIA MELO 3 The religion of the forest: relections on the international expansion of a Brazilian ayahuasca religion 57 BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE AND GLAUBER LOURES DE ASSIS 4 Culling the spirits: an exploration of Santo Daime’s adaptation in Canada 79 ELI ODA SHEINER 5 A religious battle: musical dimensions of the Santo Daime diaspora 99 BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE, GLAUBER LOURES DE ASSIS, AND CLANCY CAVNAR 6 Good Mother Nature: ayahuasca neoshamanism as cultural critique in Australia ALEX K. GEARIN 123 Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis viii Contents 7 Aussiewaska: a cultural history of changa and ayahuasca analogues in Australia 143 GRAHAM ST JOHN 8 Disentangling the ayahuasca boom: local impacts in Western Peruvian Amazonia 165 JOSHUA HOMAN 9 The economics of ayahuasca: money, markets, and the value of the vine 183 KENNETH W. TUPPER 10 Global ayahuasca: an entrepreneurial ecosystem 203 DANIELA M. PELUSO 11 A climate for change: ICEERS and the challenges of the globalization of ayahuasca 223 BENJAMIN K. DE LOENEN, ÒSCAR PARÉS FRANQUERO, AND CONSTANZA SÁNCHEZ AVILÉS 12 Ayahuasca in the English courts: legal entanglements with the jungle vine 243 CHARLOTTE WALSH Index 263 Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Author biographies Glauber Loures de Assis is currently a PhD student in sociology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he leads a comparative research project on Santo Daime in the transnational context. He is also Research Associate at the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP) and co-founder of the Center of Sociology Studies Antônio Augusto Pereira Prates (CESAP). He has developed research on Daimista groups from Brazil and Europe, and has also studied the sociology of religion from a wider perspective. His main interests include the ayahuasca religions, the New Religious Movements (NRMs), the internationalization of the Brazilian religions, and drug use in contemporary society. Clancy Cavnar has a doctorate in clinical psychology (PsyD) from John F. Kennedy University. She currently works at a dual diagnosis residential drug treatment center in San Francisco and is a research associate of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP). She combines an eclectic array of interests and activities as clinical psychologist, artist, and researcher. She has an undergraduate degree in liberal arts from the New College of the University of South Florida, a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, a master’s degree in counseling from San Francisco State University, and a certiicate in substance abuse counseling from the extension program of the University of California at Berkeley. Her art is inspired by her experience with psychedelics, especially with the Santo Daime religious tradition. She is author and co-author of articles in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and the International Journal for Drug Policy, among others. She is coeditor, with Beatriz Caiuby Labate, of four books: The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca (Springer, 2014); Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use (Springer, 2014); Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2014); and Peyote: History, Tradition, Politics and Conservation (ABC/Clio-Praeger, 2016). Clancy's art and academic work has been presented both in the U.S. and abroad. For more information, see www.neip.info/index.php/content/view/1438.html and www. clancycavnar.com Andrew Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in Religion at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion of Lancaster University, U.K. He obtained his Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis x Author biographies doctorate at Oxford University and has degrees in Social Science and Religious Studies from U.S. and other U.K. institutions. Andrew’s principal research interest concerns the interface of religion and modern society, which he examines mainly in the contexts of Brazil, Europe, and North America. Focusing chiely upon the Santo Daime religion, he has worked upon the internationalization of ayahuasca religiosity by exploring its ritual, theological, and organizational implications. In recent years he has published Santo Daime: A New World Religion (2013), edited Summoning the Spirits: Possession and Invocation in Contemporary Religion (2011), and authored Sociology of Religion (2011) and New Era–New Religions: Religious Transformation in Contemporary Brazil (2007). Andrew has most recently edited The Politics and Practice of Religious Diversity: National Contexts, Global Issues, published by Routledge in 2015. Benjamin K. De Loenen studied audiovisual media in the Utrecht School of Arts, the Netherlands, where he graduated from the master’s program with honors as ilm director and editor of his documentary Ibogaine: Rite of Passage (2004), which he directed and produced. This documentary focuses on the therapeutic potential of iboga in addiction treatment and its traditional ceremonial use in Gabon. He is the founder of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, & Service (ICEERS), a philanthropic, tax-exempt nonproit dedicated to the acceptance and constructive integration of ayahuasca, iboga, and other traditional plants as psychotherapeutic accelerants and enhancers in Western societies. ICEERS was founded in 2009 in the Netherlands and currently has an ofice in Barcelona, Spain, and in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 2012, Benjamin made the documentary Experience Bwiti: Renascence of the Healed, and he is currently working on a documentary about the legal aspects and therapeutic potential of ayahuasca. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance (GITA), and of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council (ESC), an organization that ICEERS helped incubate, which is dedicated to the safe use and sustainability of traditional plants. Alex K. Gearin has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia. His PhD dissertation involves an ethnographic study of ayahuasca use in Australia and focuses on sensory, medical, and ethical themes of ritual practice and social organization. He currently lectures in anthropology at the University of Queensland and works in the UQ Anthropology Museum, Brisbane, Australia. For more information, see https://cultur aladmixtures.wordpress.com/ Joshua Homan is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Since 2005, he has conducted extensive ethnographic ieldwork among indigenous (Shawi, Kukama, and Quechua) and mestizo communities throughout the western Peruvian Amazon. He is currently conducting ieldwork among the Inga of the Pastaza watershed in the northwest Peruvian Amazon, examining the relationships between information Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Author biographies xi and communication technologies (ICTs), such as shortwave radio and indigenous political action. For more information, see www.runashimi.org and www. amazonianist.org Beatriz Caiuby Labate has a PhD in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Professor at the Center for Research and Post Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), in Guadalajara. She is also co-founder of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and editor of NEIP’s website (www.neip.info). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of 13 books, one special-edition journal, and several peer-reviewed articles. For more information, see http://bialabate.net/ Rosa Virgínia Melo earned her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Brasília (UnB), Brazil, where she was an adjunct professor. Currently, she is a postdoc researcher and professor at the Federal University of Paraíba. She has developed ethnographic research on gender and violence, cultural heritage, and popular culture. Her most recent interests include Brazilian religions, religion and the public sphere, mutual help, and religion and mental health. She has published articles on mediumistic trance within the Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Òscar Parés Franquero studied philosophy and anthropology at the University of Barcelona, after which he earned a master’s degree in drug addiction at the same university. He is currently Assistant Director/Social Network Coordinator of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, & Service (ICEERS) Foundation (and coordinates drug policy projects. He trained as a volunteer at Energy Control (ABD) and later was hired to facilitate educational harm-reduction workshops with youth. For more than seven years he has collaborated as a consultant with the government of Catalonia in coordinating risk-reduction programs in the area of nightlife and in the ield of the regulation of the activity of cannabis social clubs in Catalonia. He is founder of the Instituto de Políticas de Drogas y Sostenibilidad (IPDS). Daniela M. Peluso is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been working in the Peruvian and Bolivian Amazon Basin since the 1980s. Her current Lowland South American research focuses on indigenous urbanization and relatedness. She works in close collaboration with indigenous organizations and has been involved in various local efforts on issues relating to health, gender, and land rights. Daniela also conducts research in the U.K. and the U.S. on business organizations. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2003 and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. Constanza Sánchez Avilés is a political scientist and holds a PhD in international relations and international law. Her work focuses on the political economy of illicit drugs, transnational organized crime, and national and international drug Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis xii Author biographies policies, issues on which she has published several papers and book chapters. From 2007 to 2013, she worked at the Department of International Law and International Relations at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Miami (2010), the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego (2012), and Research Assistant at the Global Drug Policy Observatory at Swansea University (2013). She did ieldwork on drug policies in Peru, the United States, Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican border, and collaborates with several drug policy research institutions. In 2013 she joined the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service Foundation (ICEERS), where she coordinates the law, policy, and human rights activities, including legal defense for ayahuasca practitioners who are prosecuted; policy reform activities; and the development of reports about this subject matter. In this frame, she coordinates the Ibiza Expert Committee for the Regularization of Psychoactive Ethnobotanicals created at the World Ayahuasca Conference in Ibiza in September of 2014. Eli Oda Sheiner is a graduate student in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He studies the internationalization of the ayahuasca religions, with an emphasis on Santo Daime. Eli’s research focuses on the ethical and political issues arising at the intersections between Santo Daime, First Nations and Aboriginal people, and contemporary Canadian society. He is also interested in the politics of ontology, or the way worlds, worldviews, and attendant power dynamics are navigated in an ontologically plural environment. His indings will trace the similarities and dissimilarities in discourses between South American ayahuasca traditions and geographically removed communities in Canada, and explore the conlicts and conluences between ayahuasca as it is understood by the Canadian government and by the Canadians who employ it as a sacrament. Graham St John, PhD, is an anthropologist specializing in dance movements, event-cultures, and entheogens. He is the author of several books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books, 2015); the monographs Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox, 2012) and Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox, 2009); and the edited collections The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Routledge, 2010), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn, 2008), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004), and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Commonground, 2001). He is currently editing Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures (Bloomsbury). Dr. St John has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships in Australia, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, where he has recently begun researching the global Burning Man diaspora. He is founding Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. He is Adjunct Research Fellow at the Grifith Centre for Cultural Research, Grifith University. For more information, see www. edgecentral.net Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Author biographies xiii Kenneth W. Tupper is Adjunct Professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, where his research interests focus on the cross-cultural and historical uses of psychoactive substances; public, professional, and school-based drug education; and creating healthy public policy to maximize beneits and minimize harms from currently illegal drugs. Kenneth has a PhD in educational studies from the University of British Columbia and an MA degree in education from Simon Fraser University. For more information, see www.kentupper.com Charlotte Walsh (LLB; MPhil) is a legal academic at the University of Leicester School of Law, England, where she runs an undergraduate course on criminology, largely concerned with drug policy. Her main research focus is on the interface between psychedelics and the law, viewed from a liberal, human rights-based perspective, and she has published widely on this subject, both in edited collections – such as the recently published Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use – and in leading journals such as the Criminal Law Review, British Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Drug Policy, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, and International Journal of Human Rights. She believes that drug prohibition conlicts with our fundamental right to cognitive liberty. Charlotte is involved with advising people who are being prosecuted for activities involving plant psychedelics. She is a member of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, & Service (ICEERS) Expert Committee for the Regularization of Psychoactives, a group concerned with coordinating a common defense strategy in ayahuasca cases and with the development of a global strategy of normalization for ayahuasca. Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Foreword Ayahuasca in the twenty-irst century: having it both ways The genie is out of the bottle, tweeting about the next shamanic bodywork leadership seminar, and the bottle; well, check and see if it isn’t in the back of your fridge by the vegan TV dinner. Who would have ever imagined that ayahuasca, the enigmatic jungle potion William S. Burroughs once referred to as “the secret” (Burroughs & Ginsberg, 2006 [1963]) and whose very botanical identity was a matter of debate through the mid-twentieth century (Schultes, 1957) would, within a matter of decades, become a household (or at least, yoga-mat) word; the subject of hundreds of scientiic, anthropological, and medical studies; a magnet for international tourism; the motor behind a global religious diaspora; and the victorious plaintiff in absentia of an historic Supreme Court case? The rhyme “herbal brew”/“bamboo” in Paul Simon’s 1990 ayahuasca-inspired song “Spirit Voices” already rings of kitsch, but there is still something, if not fresh, then at least compelling about Sting (2005, p. 18), in his biography Broken Music, revealing that “ayahuasca has brought me close to something, something fearful and profound and deadly serious.” But by the time Lindsay Lohan conides to a reality TV host in April of 2015 that ayahuasca helped her “let go of past things . . . it was intense” (Morris, 2014), Burroughs’s “inal ix” has inally entered the realm of cliché. How did this happen? What is the special appeal of this bitter Amazonian brew in the post-post-modern global village toolbox of self-realization? How has it fared in the bustling marketplace of New Age spiritual entrepreneurism and on the battleground of the War on Drugs? And what does it all mean for the multiple, religiously and socially diverse, communities and individuals who consume ayahuasca, as well as various ayahuasca-like analogs, around the world? We can think of the global ayahuasca expansion of the past two decades as a kind of second wave to the psychedelic revolution, following upon that other, “fantastic universal . . . inevitable . . . high and beautiful wave,” Hunter S. Thompson describes as cresting in the mid-1960s only to crash so quickly, and so disappointingly: So now, less than ive years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the highwater mark – that place where the wave inally broke and rolled back. (Thompson, 1998 [1971], p. 68) Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis xvi Foreword Many of those who sought out ayahuasca in the Amazonian rainforests in the 1970s and 1980s were indeed spiritual orphans, in some sense, of this failed revolution that, though inspired by natural psychoactive substances and indigenous medico-religious rituals of the Americas, relied heavily on synthetic substances like LSD and mescaline, often consumed in informal or recreational, rather than ritual, settings. In its initial expansion, beginning in the 1980s, ayahuasca came, irst, to non-Amazonian urban centers in tropical countries, and later, to dozens of countries across the globe, in much the same form as it was consumed in its place of origin. Traditional practitioners and religious groups still export ayahuasca, brewed from the rainforest vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the dimethyltryptamine (DMT)-containing shrub Psychotria viridis and related species, to adepts in many world countries, who risk and sometimes face prosecution under international controlled substance laws. Freelance enthusiasts operating at the fringes of legality may also obtain raw ingredients and make their own preparations. But, due to chronic problems of supply, transport, and storage, not to mention legal restrictions, a growing number of people have experimented with various ayahuasca analogs, using alternative plants or pure pharmacological substances (“pharmahuasca”) with essentially the same chemical constituents, to produce brews that have similar experiential effects, at least according to some enthusiasts. And yet, by all indications – and despite the myriad contexts of international use, from commercially adapted indigenous rituals in ecotourism lodges in the Amazon to weekend workshops at yoga academies around the world – the ayahuasca diaspora seems to have resisted what Thompson and others saw as the recreational denouement, hedonistic failure, and political marginalization of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. Instead, wherever it is used, imported, or reinvented, ayahuasca seems to quickly, almost automatically, elaborate around itself a protective cloak of ritual and social control, from the Christian-inluenced doctrines of Brazilian ayahuasca religions to the idiosyncratic neoshamanic ceremonies emerging in North America, Europe, and Australia. Whether this is due to a changing social milieu of use, or something about the ayahuasca experience itself, remains to be seen. Setting aside the hype, and respecting the cultural and individual variability inherent in such powerful subjective states, one constant element of the ayahuasca experience, attested across different cultures, spiritual traditions, and personal backgrounds, is its ability to propitiate encounters with radical otherness. Speaking myriad languages, through dozens of religious and spiritual idioms and within ininite possibilities of individual variation, ayahuasca drinkers across the globe have described visions of celestial landscapes beyond comprehension and encounters with awe-inspiring, alien intelligence that alternately tantalizes and terrorizes them with healing and bodily degradation, spiritual salvation and ego disintegration, ecological wisdom and universal apocalypse. The ayahuasca experience deies ordinary notions of causality, space, time, and logic. Indeed, in its intensity and fundamental strangeness, the ayahuasca experience can feel like the cognitive equivalent of the far side of a black hole, spewing out new space-time tunnels and parallel universes with utter disregard for the laws Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Foreword xvii of cognition, if not of physics itself. It is perhaps the very intensity of the cognitive, bodily, and spiritual disassociation produced by ayahuasca that calls so desperately to the structuring powers of ritual, ideology, and social control to impose order, provide meaning, and even extract advantage from the boiling foam of ecstasy. Trance associated with altered consciousness of all kinds is characterized by symbolic visual imagery and nonlinear thought processes that can result in revelatory insights or intuitions about self, others, nature, and the cosmos (Winkelman, 1986). Gregory Bateson’s (1972) cybernetic theory of mind sheds light on the adaptive functions of trance and altered states. In his reformulation of Freud, Bateson suggests that, for reasons of sheer economy, mental processes that are repetitive or that surpass the boundaries of the individual self become “sunk” into the subconscious. Bateson (1972) views art and certain kinds of religious beliefs as serving a corrective function, allowing integration of the narrow, individual consciousness with larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental “ecologies of mind.” In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants like ayahuasca can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological context (Shepard, 2005). By amplifying the unexpected, nonlinear associations of the subconscious, this “ecstatic mode” of consciousness allows for the perception of new patterns and relations among things, experiences, and events. Although trance states emerge for the individual through speciic alterations in brain function, these personal experiences become framed and imbued with meaning by the social group, often in a ritual context. Victor Turner’s (1974) classic writings on ritual, structure, antistructure, and the countercultural movement of the 1960s provide a framework for understanding what several authors call the “re-traditionalization” of ayahuasca (Labate & Cavnar, 2014). For Turner, people participating in rituals occupy a liminal or transitional social state, clearly distinguished in space and time from ordinary social life. During ritual, social structure is temporarily suspended and replaced by an undifferentiated comunitas of equal individuals who share a mutual sense of identity and belonging. The social distinctiveness of ritual is accompanied by a distinctive cognitive state in which ordinary logic is suspended and replaced by the nonlinear, inductive, combinatorial logic of symbols. Thus, ritual itself represents a kind of altered state of consciousness that, when ampliied through trance techniques or the use of psychoactive substances, only reinforces the social, spatial, and temporal distinctiveness of the ritual state (Shepard, 2005). Though he began his work studying rites of passage in a Zambian village, Turner realized that these concepts could also be used to understand the social upheavals of the 1960s. Although serving to maintain the functional stability of “institutionalized and preordained” social structures, liminality and communitas can also emerge in moments of “radical structural change” (Turner, 1974, p. 248). The difference, for Turner, is that institutionalized rituals, when they conclude, facilitate the orderly return of individuals from liminality and comunitas back into the social order, whereas revolutionary and countercultural movements attempt to create permanent liminality: not a passage, but rather a constant state (1974). Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis xviii Foreword Perhaps ayahuasca is the contemporary world’s way of having it both ways; of being both traditional and modern, ecstatic and scientiic, heterodox yet messianic, transgressive but safe and (eventually) legal, altruistic and selish. It is precisely around this set of contradictions – or dialectics, or challenges – that the current volume is organized. Moving beyond the ethnological purists’ snubbing of neo-ayahuasca practices as mere drug tourism, and yet also avoiding the intellectual pitfalls of naïve enthusiasm, the authors in this volume apply the classic tools of critical sociocultural analysis to the universe of the global ayahuasca diaspora. The chapters present a multitude of voices, from “Aussie-huasca” (a native Australian analog) enthusiasts hoping to save the planet from the evils of capitalism, to indigenous Amazonian communities torn apart by rivalries and economic disparities brought on by the “ayahuasca boom.” Though sympathetic to this diversity of experiences and opinions, the authors take an unblinking look at the legal and social conlicts and ideological contradictions produced as indigenous shamans and Brazilian ayahuasca churches have entered the global marketplace of New Age spiritualism. Contributions discuss troublesome emergent issues, including the commodiication of ayahuasca practices, the reconiguration of shamanic worldviews to attend to the modern self-as-project, health and safety concerns (drug interactions, ayahuasca-related accidents, sexual harassment), legal disputes, the “bureaucratization of enchantment” in ayahuasca religions, and the sanitization of darker aspects of traditional Amazonian shamanism, such as witchcraft and attack sorcery. Will the “re-traditionalization” of global neo-ayahuasca ceremonies provide adequate social controls and ideological coherence to ensure that this “second wave” psychedelic revolution doesn’t crash and dissipate somewhere between the headwaters of the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef? Will the contradictions of the modern self and the temptations of capitalism undercut the radical vision of individual and planetary healing that some neo-ayahuasca enthusiasts prophecy? Will ayahuasca become another battleield casualty in the global War on Drugs, or will legislation evolve to protect ayahuasca as a religious sacrament, as a medicine, as a tool of experiential freedom? We don’t yet have all the answers to these questions, but the authors of this book are on the crest of the wave, and if anyone can see ahead to the far shore, it is they. Glenn H. Shepard Jr. Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi References Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burroughs, W. S., & Ginsberg, A. (2006). The yage letters redux. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. (Original work published 1963.) Labate, B. C., & Cavnar, C. (2014). Ayahuasca shamanism in the Amazon and beyond. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Morris, B. (2014, June 15). Ayahuasca: A strong cup of tea. The New York Times, p. ST1. Retrieved July 1, 2015 from www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/fashion/ayahuasca-a-strongcup-of-tea.html Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Foreword xix Schultes, R. E. (1957). The identity of the malphigaceous narcotics of South America. Botanical Museum Lealets, Harvard University, 18, 1–56. Shepard, G. H. Jr. (2005). Psychoactive botanicals in ritual, religion and shamanism. In E. Elisabetsky & N. Etkin (Eds.), Ethnopharmacology: Encyclopedia of life support systems, Theme 6.79. Oxford, UK: UNESCO/Eolss Publishers. Retrieved March 17, 2016, from www.eolss.net. Sting. (2005). Broken music: A memoir. New York, NY: Dell. Thompson, H. S. (1998). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. New York, NY: Random House/ Vintage Books. (Original work published 1971.) Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, ields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winkelman, M. (1986). Trance states: A theoretical model and cross-cultural analysis. Ethos, 14(2), 174–203. Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 7 Aussiewaska A cultural history of changa and ayahuasca analogues in Australia Graham St John1 Introduction While the complexities of the global ayahuasca proliferation have drawn the attention of scholars in recent years, the cultural career of DMT (N,Ndimethyltryptamine) remains conspicuously under-researched. Most known for its role in the ayahuasca brew – where it is orally potentiated by beta-carboline harmala alkaloids contained in the liana Banisteriopsis caapi – the tryptamine compound DMT has made an independent, if gradual, release into the modern cultural bloodstream. DMT’s psychopharmacological actions were discovered in 1956 (Szára, 1956) after which it was identiied within psychiatry as a “psychotomimetic,” before its appearance as a recreational drug in the 1960s and subsequent classiication as a “dangerous drug” with “no medicinal value.”2 Given these developments, along with its recognized occurrence throughout world lora and mammals (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1997), its “coming out” in the 1990s–2000s as an “entheogen” (Ott, 1996) enabling access to higher dimensional “hyperspace” (McKenna, 1991), and its role in customizable “ayahuasca analogues,” DMT has had a complex career of its own (see St John, 2015a). DMT is responsible for sudden and short-lasting (20- to 30-minute) effects ranging from complex geometric patterns and synesthesia to out-of-body states and encounters with disincarnate beings, and its impact is apparent within a networked cultural movement of experimentalists, artists, and alchemists. While today recognized as a serotonergic neurotransmitter that crosses the blood-brain barrier, where it has an afinity with various receptor sites (Hanna & Taylor, n.d.), and where its endogenicity to humans has prompted its veneration as “the spirit molecule” (Strassman, 2001) and “the brain’s own psychedelic” (Strassman, 2008), the ubiquity of DMT throughout nature and its purpose within the human brain remain a mystery. The enigmatic character of DMT has helped nourish the ambivalent status it has earned vis-á-vis ayahuasca – from which it has grown independent and to which it remains attached. This tension has dynamized innovation and characterizes debates that are the subject of this chapter. Addressing the career of an Australian invention, this chapter explores the characteristics and implications of this in/dependent tension. Promoted as a “smokeable ayahuasca,” enabling the “ayahuasca effect,” and thereby inheriting the troubled logic of the “ayahuasca Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 144 Graham St John analogue,” changa (sometimes referred to colloquially as “aussiewaska,” and explained in greater detail below) is found to be as much, if not more, a vehicle to facilitate an accessible DMT effect. While the pharmacological synergy endogenous to ayahuasca – and indeed its iconic vine – is implicit to changa, the existence of this innovation is reliant on independent, esoteric, and enigmatic features characteristic to the use and effects of DMT. Before discussing changa and its purported association with ayahuasca, I irst outline interrelated practices characterizing DMT use within the entheogenic movement. Enigmatic DMT and entheoliminality In this chapter, I recognize DMT user practices under three broad and interwoven use modalities: gnostic, neoshamanic, and ludic. To begin with, DMT use has been closely associated with the deeply personal experience of gnosis, where the experient as seeker or “traveler” arrives at an awareness of the intrinsic nature of reality (i.e., as “it” truly is), a truth-bearing destination to which they may have been previously occulted. As “entheogens” enabling the awakening of the divine within (Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott, & Wasson, 1979), DMT and other tryptamines inaugurate transparencies typically involving a realization of disconnection or alienation from one’s higher self, nature, and relations. Enabling such an “awakening,” DMT is often approached as a sacrament and, in this way, it can be likened to the use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, mescaline, or indeed ayahuasca in nontraditional contexts, as explained by Wouter Hanegraaff: Entheogenic sacraments like ayahuasca are credited with the capacity of breaking mainstream society’s spell of mental domination and restoring us from blind and passive consumers unconsciously manipulated by “the system” to our original state of free and autonomous spiritual beings. . . . They are seen as providing gnosis: a salvational knowledge of the true nature of one’s self and of the universe, which liberates the individual from domination by the cosmic system. (Hanegraaff, 2011, p. 88) As an integral component of ayahuasca, but also as a distinct agent, DMT carries this liberating potentiality, and it can be studied within the context of what Hanegraaff (2013) has identiied as “entheogenic esotericism,” which takes its previously neglected place in the history of Western esotericism. Among the unassuming igureheads of “entheogenic esotericism,” psychonautical raconteur Terence McKenna is notable here, not least because he championed the gnostic signiicance of tryptamines (McKenna, 1993), reporting that DMT facilitates a near-death experience. McKenna was renowned for his formative experiences with the “machine elves from hyperspace,” bearers of gnosis possessing scienceictional personas not inconsistent with Erik Davis’ perception, as reported in Rolling Stone, that “there’s something about the televisual, hyperdimensional, data-dense grandiosity of the DMT lash that seems to resonate with today’s Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 145 globalized, hyperreal culture” (Grigoriadis, 2006). While Davis’ experiences are consistent with the effects reported from smoking synthetic DMT, they appear to contrast with the experiences reported by pharmacognostic technician D. M. Turner. Bioassaying harmala alkaloids mixed with DMT in smoking blends that prolonged the effects by up to 30 minutes, Turner reported: I often feel that my body and Being are ‘embraced’ by an ancient earth spirit. And this earth spirit is instructing me to become aware of, and open up, many lines of communication that exist between my mind, body and the external world. (Turner, 1994, p. 78) While DMT use is characterized by a range of techgnostic and alchemical practices, it has also been adopted as a self-therapeutic tool in the neoshamanic practice of psychotechnology. In research on out-of-body and contact experiences among Australian DMT users, Des Tramacchi (2006, p. 29) documented practices of “self-shamanizing,” where modern subjects become “their own clients and their own healers,” seeking remedies for alienation and “soul loss” compatible with desired liberation from dependence on biomedical solutions. Finally, since its adoption among small circles of users in the 1960s, DMT is used recreationally, with smoking blends using DMT and other compounds (including B. caapi) derived from botanical sources becoming pivotal to this development. Here, DMT space, or “hyperspace,” may be accessed as much or more for its pleasurable, playful, or virtual effects than for divinatory purposes and curative outcomes. But while a “recreational” trajectory could be conlated with usages that are trivial or inconsequential, it seems sanguine to follow the lead of Jonathan Ott, who, circumscribing the modern extramedical use of DMT and other entheogens, preferred the term ludibund and its variant ludible – deriving from the Latin ludere meaning, literally, “playful, full of play” (1996, p. 16). Such terminology recognizes that, if not strictly entheogenic, use may be no less serious, particularly given that “play” transgresses boundaries (e.g., those separating consciousness from unconsciousness, the material from the spiritual, and lawful behavior from its antithesis). In the age of prohibition, in which DMT is classiied as a “dangerous drug” with abusive potential, play is suffused with danger; that is, where DMT is forbidden, players are outlaws. But, lest playfulness be made consonant with abusiveness to one’s health and well-being, it serves to be reminded that DMT, like other psychedelics, and unlike those drugs with which they are typically classiied and scheduled (e.g., heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine), is nonaddictive. These use modalities do not necessarily live together peacefully. For instance, adherents of the entheogenic/gnostic modality will caution that the potential for commercial exploitation increases as accessibility expands. These cultural trends affect the proliferation of DMT as their integrated actions modulate the adoption of changa. As perhaps best illustrated by the user community at the DMT-Nexus,3 DMT culture crystalizes at the juncture of these gnostic, shamanic, and ludic trends, which are at the same time integral to a networked entheogenic movement Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 146 Graham St John where Psilocybe cubensis, San Pedro, Salvia divinorum, iboga, and, of course, ayahuasca, among others, are venerated as “plant allies.” Collaborating with these allies, movement participants research and develop techniques of synthesis; identify botanical sources; share methods of extraction, cultivation, and propagation; augment delivery techniques; build guidelines for safe practice (Nickels, 2014); create visionary art and music; and forge rhetorical strategies for explicating phenomenological experiences (Doyle, 2011). This disparate user-culture has fashioned a variegated ritual practice, quite distinguished from ayahuasca rituals, even the neoshamanic variations. While DMT trance may inaugurate “cultural critique,” like that identiied among ayahuasca drinkers in Australia (see Gearin, Chapter 6 in this volume), compared with ceremonial and purgative ayahuasca trance, the typical DMT trance ritual is virtualized, private, and accelerated. Participants typically comport themselves as traveler-initiates who “break through” into DMT “hyperspace” – a quintessentially liminal space-time. Dreadful and wonderful, afirmative and subversive, occasioning veridical aesthetics arriving with a compelling familiarity, the DMT breakthrough is a potent threshold for travelers. Given the complex range of variables involved (i.e., “set” and “setting”), including the modalities of use described above, the outcome of DMT use is notoriously uncertain. And yet, what remains common to its use is the abrupt potency of the experience, with “travelers” reporting varying “returns” – e.g., beliefs shaken, novel dispensations, patterns of responsibility, like those evident in Oroc’s Tryptamine Palace (2009). While Oroc assumed the status of a “modern mystic” who found “G/d” – on DMT relative 5-Me0-DMT milked from the venom of the Bufo alvarius toad – and delivered the word, for a great many tryptamine travelers, the “goal” is a liminal condition enabled by venerated alkaloids and their synergistic effects. This is typically not the liminality native to conventional curative or divinatory rites, nor a traditional rite of passage where the neophyte will assume a status at the terminus of a symbolic pathway (van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1967). It appears that DMT’s modern users value its analogues more for threshold effects than for the medicinal outcomes that have been documented in a range of ethnobotanical contexts (Schultes & Hofmann, 1979; Ott, 1996), and which are typical of ayahuasca shamanism (Labate & Cavnar, 2014). Not simply awakening divinity within, entheoliminality augments and prolongs the inner divine, constituting a set of practices which, often sans intended telos, is directed at that which is happening now (e.g., being, grace, existence). This appears consistent with the optimization of liminal being within psychedelic electronica (see St John, 2015b), where the interventions of disc jockey/producer technoshamans are devised not to orchestrate the transformation-of-being and status, but a superliminal state of being in transit (St John, 2012; Forthcoming), and where sensory technologies, visionary arts, and shamanic plants are adopted to shatter social conditioning and augment visionary experiences; this is not dissimilar to that which is available to participants within the “New Edge” milieu (see Zandbergen, 2011). While possessing an independent identity and enigmatic liminality characteristic of its modern and contemporary use, DMT remains most known for its role Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 147 as a component of ayahuasca. As Oroc (Tryptamine Palace, n.d.) comments, ayahuasca use has become “the most commonly available method for individuals to experience both the psychotropic qualities of DMT and the shamanic metamorphosis of death-and-rebirth.” While the identity of DMT is then tied to ayahuasca (like a child to its mother), it is a relationship fraught with ambivalence, echoing DMT’s enigmatic status and perceived de/evolution from ayahuasca. This complex dynamic was apparent at the outset of the “countercultural” gravitation toward yagé, principally through the agency of beat outlaw William Burroughs, for whom yagé (and DMT) assumed a grail-like function. For Burroughs, ayahuasca was “the secret,” a magnetic force that held an occult promise to bestow shamanic/sorcerous powers (e.g., “telepathy” and “divination”); his approach became an amalgam of transgressive adventure and spiritual journey, an ambiguity partly documented in epistolary narrative with Allen Ginsberg in The Yage Letters (Burroughs & Ginsberg, 2000 [1963]). This “secret” compelled the desperate “junk”-addicted Burroughs to journey to the Amazon in the early 1950s, originally chasing yagé and eventually injecting a crude DMT synthesis called “Prestonia” in Tangier in 1961 (Harrup, 2010). For more details on Burroughs’ motives and experiences, see St John (2015a, Chapter 2). It had been discovered that the vapors of freebase crystal DMT could be smoked with powerful effect by underground chemist Nick Sand in early 1960s Brooklyn (Hanna, 2009); by 1965, it would astonish Terence McKenna, and subsequently his brother Dennis McKenna, who together trekked to the Putumayo region of Columbia in 1971 in search of “the secret” (McKenna & McKenna, 1975; McKenna, 1993). In subsequent decades, while Terence became an international emissary for the “machine elves” as a renowned ethnopharmacologist, Dennis mapped the psychotropic role of DMT in ayahuasca’s synergistic mechanism. Throughout this development, interwoven interests in the sacramental, instrumental, and transgressive characteristics of DMT are apparent; a mosaic found in subsequent experiments. The ayahuasca effect and experimental anahuasca Integral to the story of entheoliminalization recounted in this chapter is the development of practices invested in knowledge of ayahuasca’s unique alchemy. As Ott has commented, the “ingenious discovery by South American Indians of the ayahuasca effect – conceivably the most sophisticated pharmacognostical discovery ever made in the archaic world – bids fair to revolutionize contemporary, nontraditional entheobotany of visionary shamanic inebriants” (Ott, 1999, p. 176). While plant synergies have been implicitly understood among Amazonian ayahuasqueros for millennia, it was not until the late 1960s that ethnobotanists hypothesized that monoamine oxidase (MAO)-inhibiting4 beta-carboline alkaloids were affecting the activity of DMT in snuffs and ayahuasca (Holmstedt & Lindgren, 1967; Agurell, Holmstedt, & Lindgren, 1968). Even then, it wasn’t until a series of experiments with rats (McKenna, Towers, & Abbott, 1984), human bioassays (Gracie & Zarkov, 1986; Ott, 1996) and systematic psychonautical experiments with “pharmahuasca” – using precise measurements of pure DMT Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 148 Graham St John and beta-carbolines (Ott, 1994; 1999) – that this hypothesis was conirmed. For his experience on a threshold dose of 120 mg of harmine combined with 30 mg of DMT, Ott found that “effects were quite similar to what I have enjoyed with genuine Amazonian ayahuasca potions in Brasil [sic], Ecuador and Peru” (1999, p. 173). Once the “ayahuasca effect” (Ott, 1999, p. 172) had been discovered, non-Amazonian botanical and chemical sources were experimented with, and the results were referred to as “ayahuasca analogues.” The Entheogen Review (1992– 2008) was renowned for promoting ayahuasca analogues, especially those found and cultivated in temperate zones: Creating an approximation of ayahuasca using analogue plants was as simple as making a pot of coffee. A few plants were potent enough to simply run through a wheatgrass juicer, dry, and smoke. In addition, acid–base extraction procedures geared toward enthusiasts with no chemistry background were published. Most chemicals needed to perform extractions were available at hardware stores. (Hanna & Taylor, n.d.) Temperate-zone analogues supplying sources of DMT and MAO inhibitors (MAOIs) were referred to by Dennis McKenna (in Ott, 1996, p. 245) as “ayahuasca borealis,” while Ott has used “anahuasca” for analogues of ayahuasca (Ott, 1994; 1995; 1996). With the discovery of DMT and MAOI alkaloids in increasing numbers of botanicals, the “ayahuasca effect” seemed poised for an illustrious future. As Ott (1999, p. 174) recognized, since there were more than 70 each of MAOI and DMT-containing plants known at that time, there were several thousand possible combinations, each yielding a unique psychedelic effect; and each of these combinations were compounded by a variety of social, environmental, and personal factors. The staggering array of possibilities and concomitant effects calls attention to the troubling appeal of “ayahuasca analogues,” a problem ampliied where commercially available botanicals (e.g., tryptamines and harmala alkaloids) are promoted to facilitate an “ayahuasca effect.” While recent studies, the current volume included, illustrate that dynamic experimentalism is implicit to the phenomenon of ayahuasca, both in its globalizing practices and at its foundations, an apparent “smokeable ayahuasca” is an advent testing the limits of “ayahuasca.” Aussiewaska Terence McKenna’s visit to Australia in 1997 would be among the last international adventures of this champion of the neopsychedelic movement. It would be a itting destination for McKenna’s mission, considering that a self-entitled commitment to leisure, pleasure, and mobility is particularly advanced among Australia’s European descendants. By the time he stepped from the airplane, an underground milieu with an evolved leisure apparatus of its own greeted the man whose message was to open one’s life to chaos and become part of the “will of the Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 149 world soul.” In a lecture at the Beyond the Brain club at the Epicentre in Byron Bay, McKenna shared the wisdom that DMT can be extracted from species of local Acacia, referred to colloquially as the “wattle.” As he commented at the time, “the national symbol of Australia is the wattle. It’s an Acacia. The Acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT.”5 Perhaps McKenna had been reading a review copy of TIHKAL: The Continuation, where Alexander Shulgin digresses “into a bit of ‘Down-Under’ history,” fascinated as he was with the identiication among Australians with the genus Acacia (there are over 700 species of Acacia native to Australia), and especially the “golden wattle” (A. pycnantha): The irst Wattle Club was formed in 1899, and in 1910 the irst national Wattle day was celebrated in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne on September 1. Songs and poems were written, and sprigs of Wattle were worn on lapels. The movement grew like topsy. It was used for fund-raising for charities and for public morale connected with the World War I war efforts. There were Wattle queens elected and crowned, Wattle Day badges were worn, and every one pinned on a small sprig of it to wear to school. On the irst of September, 1988, at a ceremony in Canberra, the Golden Wattle was oficially proclaimed Australia’s national loral emblem. (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1997, p. 264) Shulgin then quotes a nursery rhyme recited by a host on a visit he made to Sydney: Here is the Wattle. The emblem of our land. You can stick it in a bottle Or hold it in your hand (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1997, pp. 263–264) This slice of history had already been remixed by local psychonauts, as apparent in the opening lines of “The Pipe Song,” written in 1996 by Neil Pike for his band, The Pagan Love Cult: This is the wattle symbol of our scene you can smoke it in a bottle or eat with harmaline. These repurposed lines blink in sharp-hued neon at a critical juncture in the formation of an Australian ethnobotanical synergy, sometimes referred to as an “ayahuasca analogue,” but also designated colloquially, and less contentiously, as “aussiehuasca” or “aussiewaska.” These designations refer to brews and smoking blends where the DMT is sourced from local Acacias, with the harmalas sourced typically, but not exclusively, from B. caapi. As the historical detail above Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 150 Graham St John implies, Acacia is iconically Australian, a circumstance relished by those who cultivate alternative – and sometimes more ancient – visions of “country.” While the “golden wattle” is not itself a widely used source of DMT, phytochemical analyses have purportedly identiied DMT in its phyllodes.6 While the idea that DMT could be sourced from the Australian loral emblem illed McKenna with enthusiasm, locals had been bioassaying acacias prior to his arrival. Recognizing that harmala inhibited MAO, and thereby potentiated DMT when taken orally (and smoked), they had been discovering botanical sources and combining alkaloids to this end since at least the early 1990s. Entheo-cogniscenti were already aware of what they might stumble across in their own backyard – i.e., more DMT-bearing plants (at least 150 species) than anywhere else on the planet. In fact, “big joints of wattle were being passed around the audience” during McKenna’s Beyond the Brain appearance (Neil Pike, personal communication, December 8, 2014). The protean culture hero in this story is a brilliant, experimental, and anonymous University of Sydney chemistry student who uncovered crucial botanical information in a 1990 CSIRO publication, Plants for Medicines, guiding him to northeastern New South Wales, where he extracted DMT from locally sourced Acacia maidenii. The student reported bioassays in an article published in the student newspaper, Honi Soit, in 1992, with extraction methodology subsequently leaking to the Internet via alt.drugs newsgroups, the visionary plants forum The Lycaeum, and Erowid (Sputnik, n.d.). Among those who read the Honi Soit article was Nen, a then-recent graduate of psychology and ancient history at the University of Sydney, who befriended the chemist and learned his extraction method. Highly motivated, Nen set out in January 1993 on a journey to locate the DMT tree. Scouring the scrub for days, he intuited that he was “on the edge of something massive and unprecedented,” and then, “one day a beautiful tree just shone and whispered to me.” Small branches were pruned, and he returned home to perform the extraction. “My irst experience was more profoundly spiritual and enchanting than I could ever have imagined, including a direct addressing by the spirit of the tree, to which I have felt allied with ever since” (Nen, personal communication, July 25, 2014). As it turned out, the tree Nen found was not A. maidenii as initially believed, but Acacia obtusifolia, previously unrecognized as a DMT-bearing species of the genus. A. obtusifolia was found to contain multiple alkaloids: e.g., 2/3 NMT (N-Methyltryptamine), 1/3 DMT, and a small amount of beta-carboline. The effects of the “full-spectrum extracts” cooked up from this tree had a profound impact on a small cohort of pioneers. Nen found the effects of pure synthetic DMT lackluster compared with that of A. obtusifolia. “The synthetic DMT was to me like ‘virtual reality’ while the plant extract was like ‘reality.’ ” The “full spectrum plant extract,” he recalled, “just did more, had more directions and depth.” Nen realized that he and his friends were undergoing a kind of self-induced “initiation.” In a culture where traditional rites of passage, like coming-of-age rituals, had been reduced to getting wasted on alcohol at the age of 21 (the gateway to adulthood), it was a “profound and rare gift from the bush” that marked a beneicent transit into a whole new way of being human. “You die shamanically, you Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 151 reconnect to the ancestors and the spirit world, you see the existence of more than the material, you have a profound mystical vision which makes you see that there’s more beyond death” (in Razam, 2013). Since this and other acacias possessed a wide variation of alkaloids (and not simply DMT), there was a perception that they supplied a next-level DMT experience. “A few who saw the acacias as a unique tryptamine gateway developed a folklore of deep respect for the plants and, echoing animist traditions, they accepted the alkaloid variations . . . as a ‘teaching’ of the plant” (Jamie & nen888, 2014, p. 9). In the early years of use, initiates showed great respect toward the trees themselves, recognizing that taking tree bark (but not branches and leaves) kills the teacher. Working intimately and sustainably with acacias over the years, Nen formed a relationship with what he believed was the spirit of the tree, a “plant teacher” with a uniquely diverse internal alkaloidal potency. With A. obtusifolia promoted in the mid-1990s as a source of DMT, commercial exploitation of an exhaustible resource soon followed. Over the subsequent decades, as the market for DMT grew, disenchantment advanced with the impact of larger-scale harvesting and trade (Nickles & Nickles, 2014). Backyard alchemists, “changaleros,” and “smokeable ayahuasca” Downstream from the early acacia research and in the wake of McKenna’s visit, there emerged a vibrant ethnobotanical scene in Australia – as chiely expressed in the appearance of ethnobotany conferences and symposia, namely, Ethnobotanica and, later, Entheogenesis Australis (EGA). In 2003, this development was given considerable publicity through the efforts of freelance writer Kate Hamilton and Fairfax Media. Melbourne’s newspaper The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald published in their Good Weekend supplement a hysteria-free condensation on the subject of DMT and its growing popularity connected to acacias in the New South Wales’ Northern Rivers region. With spreads in two of the nation’s most widely read newspapers, the story, “The Freakiest Trip,” served as an entry point for those whose interests may have been piqued by how DMT, according to one commentator, enabled access to an “intergalactic telepathic gateway, through which I could commune with ‘higher’ alien life forms” (Hamilton, 2003). This period saw the emergence of an ethnobotanical solution with a unique symbiosis: changa (pronounced chāng-uh). A story of homegrown experimentation, changa is a smoking blend involving a variable synergy of DMT and harmala alkaloids, often identiied, sometimes rather speciously, as a “smokeable ayahuasca.” In changa, which is typically extracted from Acacia (and originally obtusifolia), DMT is combined with harmalas (traditionally B. caapi) via customized infusion and blending techniques to create a smoking mix at a range of ratios normally between 20 and 50% DMT by weight. Changa was created by Australian Julian Palmer as an alternative to smoking or vaporizing DMT crystal, which often left users mind-blown at ground zero with no desire to return there. This practical objective inspired much earlier innovations as well. Since the discovery of the freebase vaporizing method in the early 1960s, underground users Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 152 Graham St John subsequently regulated dosages in smoking blends using synthetic varieties of DMT with a variety of herbs, including cannabis and parsley, in practices that surfaced in Australia by the early 1970s. But the acacia-sourced DMT plus harmalas combination enhanced the experience markedly. Flying countless sorties into the ineffable, beta-testing techniques of extraction, Palmer and his compatriot bioneers became thoroughly convinced by the transformative power of the botanical synergetics they were working with. Over a few years, through trial and error, Palmer grew committed to functionality, learning how to extract alkaloids, optimize blends, and undertake better living through alchemy. An advocate for “intelligent” blends (chocobeastie, 2011), Palmer’s innovation responded to several interrelated concerns. A chief concern was the harrowing confrontation common to using DMT, known as “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family” (Leary, 1966), that initiates would typically show little desire to repeat. It would also address the impracticalities associated with smoking crystal DMT, and the elitism characterizing the use of DMT and ayahuasca before changa’s emergence. Prior to the original changa mixes of mid-2003, regional experimentalists were smoking what they called “luxury joints” – acacia-sourced DMT sprinkled in cannabis joints or mixed with popular herbs like passionlower and damiana, accessible in dried form from herb shops and at festivals. The most popular of these experimental smoking mixes was commercially available as “Dreamtime.” This mix was sold under-the-counter at Happy High Herb shops, where franchise founder Ray Thorpe endorsed it. An herb crusader and drug law reformer, Thorpe held DMT in high regard, not least of all given its origins in the “wattle,” the nation’s own herb. He was committed to dispensing DMT mixes that were less potent than crystal and more appropriate for social-festive contexts (Ray Thorpe, personal communication, December 19, 2014). When Palmer and friends began smoking 100 mg of DMT sprinkled onto “ayahuasca vine joints” (20% DMT) at small gatherings, the effect it had was qualitatively different from earlier blends. When reports came in of users “giving up decades-old meth or coke addictions,” it conirmed to Palmer that he was onto something. The herbs in the original changa blend included passionlower, peppermint, mullein, and blue lotus, but as knowledge of potentiating, lavoring, and coloring DMT expanded, herbal mixologists experimented with aromatic bouquets by dissolving blends in solvent-soaked herbal infusions like lemon balm, lavender, and spearmint, or lavender, muna, and pau d’arco. The harmala alkaloids present, typically shaved B. caapi bark or leaves, but also Syrian rue (a less effective MAO inhibitor when smoked), enabled an experience longer in duration – sometimes up to 40 minutes – to DMT, yet softer and with a more “pleasant afterglow.” This was essential for Palmer, a promoter of the “sub-breakthrough” experience that he believed was a necessary modiication on the sometimes-brutal impact of DMT. While users had been regulating doses with smoking blends since the 1960s, the new blends appeared to be an advancement in optimization. Without typically facilitating the visionary out-of-body impact of DMT, changa’s medicinal effects are purported to be consistent with the function of ayahuasca. With a therapeutic agenda underlying this approach, changa was designed to transport users “to places of grace (universal love, total peace), to catharsis, where old patterns, emotions Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 153 and beliefs can come up to be released” (Julian Palmer, personal communication, April 26, 2013).7 The innovation assisted users to overcome a set of anxiety-inducing impracticalities typically confronting the DMT smoker. By varying blends and ratios, users could effect smoother entries and prolong selected states of intensity by periodically taking more hits, effectively personalizing their experience. “You have the ability to fully customize your blend to it your exact preferences. You can create a harmala-heavy blend, a one hit breakthrough blend, or anything in between, with various aromas and lavors infused” (Mon, 2014, pp. 48–49). The accessibility of the experience contrasts with the standard ayahuasca ceremony that Palmer and others have expressed their reservations about – given the expensive fees involved, and the perceived constricting, even oppressive, format of rituals that were not infrequently of dubious quality and often held in big cities with large numbers of participants crowded into single sessions. Affordable, shorter in duration, without heavily structured ceremonies reliant on a shaman, changa use had advantages over ayahuasca. These differences are considered appealing in a culture where many “are afraid of facing themselves, their own soul, intelligence and shadow nakedly” (Palmer, personal communication). Responding to ayahuasca ritualization, Palmer expresses a spiritual anarchist sensibility which insists upon the opportunity afforded to individual drinkers to lose control of their minds, “to really face their fears and go into the multitude of so many different levels of reality that can be very confronting to an individual’s cultural programming” (Palmer, 2014, p. 109). But, while loosening the reigns on the mind is reckoned essential to the work of healing, to surrender control (and one’s mind) to others is troubling within scenes where self-knowledge and responsibility are vaunted as the ultimate goals of growth and development – a paradox signaling the ambivalence with conventional forms of shamanism expressed by the likes of Burroughs and Terence McKenna. All this said, Palmer has also conveyed that there are now “changa circles” in Australia, South Africa, Norway, and elsewhere. He spoke to me of “Swiss people doing big circles of 100 people in Chile” (Julian Palmer, personal communication, January 13, 2015). How these groups negotiate this paradox would be the subject of a comparative ethnography that is beyond the scope of this chapter. While ayahuasca rituals provided a point of departure for changa use, the association with ayahuasca and its purported “effect” was pivotal to the identity of changa from the outset. It was during a mid-2004 ayahuasca session that Palmer facilitated when the “changa” name “came through” to him. As Palmer clariied to me: The ayahuasca spirit is engaging with the human organism and doing what is essential healing work on different layers of the human bio-electrical system – which can often be clearly experienced by those attuned to this experience. You simply will not have this same feeling when smoking DMT crystal – the experience will perhaps feel more empty and less integrated. Over the last decade, changa may well have become the most widely traveled route to an effect debatably analogous to “ayahuasca.” It would inspire a pharmacopoeia of custom smoking blends, including those in Australia like the stronger “nanga” (acacia-sourced DMT 50% and matured B. caapi vine shavings 45% by Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 154 Graham St John weight) or the variety of blends referred to on web forums like DMT-Nexus as “enhanced leaf,” or “10X changa,” with users extolling the eficacy of B. caapi (i.e., its ability to inhibit MAO) and its therapeutic “afterglow” effects. “If you make changa with a high enough maoi concentration,” commented one user on DMTNexus, “it becomes more than just a DMT experience and becomes an ayahuascaesque experience, I mean you are taking ayahuasca . . ., only smoked . . . much more beneicial in my experience as compared to just DMT . . . it’s more euphoric, interactive, healing and lasts longer” (Jamie, 2009). Palmer claims that from the mid- to late-2000s, he and his friends: . . . initiated the smoked DMT crystal experience to hundreds of people, and we learnt a lot about how to make sure that people smoked it properly, how to support people to be in the most conducive mindset, to ensure the best physical environment for them to go deep, present to them in a space of witnessing and also, after they had smoked the DMT, listen to their debrieing. Smoked in bongs, pipes, and joints in living rooms, by rivers, on mountaintops, under wattle trees, and at festivals around the globe, changa use has proliferated. With Australia’s Exodus Cybertribal Festival, Rainbow Serpent Festival, and Entheogenesis Australis event, plateaus of exchange and experimentation, psychedelic dance, visionary arts festivals, and entheobotanical symposia became primary vehicles of changa transmission. As these contexts suggest, changa use has a noticeably social proile by comparison to DMT, which is typically an extremely personal and often private journey of self-discovery (Palmer, 2014, pp. 39–40). Smoother effects facilitated in blends using herbs, notably B. caapi, have made for an experience shared in homes or at social gatherings, like underground outdoor parties and music festivals or “doofs,” where users claim the experience is highly optimized for dancing (i.e., individual “trance” dancing rather than partnered dancing). While social in character, the contexts of changa use (e.g., festive, small groups of two to four people) are decidedly different from those of ayahuasca (e.g., ceremonial, dieta, shamanic guidance, large groups) and require fewer ritual preparations. Further study may reveal otherwise, but I have noted few divisions between ayahuasca and changa users and, while not a noticeable trend, some drinkers will smoke changa following ayahuasca sessions, occasioning a softer return. In 2006, changa entered the slipstream for inner circles at Portugal’s Boom Festival, after which it took root in far-lung locations, including Brazil, where, according to Palmer, DMT has been extracted from Mimosa hostilis to make changa, quickly gaining appeal within the psychedelic trance scene in that country. According to Palmer, since the ambient heat in the region melts DMT crystal, Brazilians developed a preference for changa over DMT (although he added that Brazilians often do not use B. caapi, or other sources of harmalas, in their changa). Intriguingly, many Brazilians think changa is an “ancient indigenous traditional blend.” Given that Anadenanthera peregrina (or “yopo”) beans (a source of DMT) are known to have been smoked in Jujuy Province, Argentina, some Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 155 4000 years ago – based on the discovery and analysis of smoking pipes made of puma bone at Inca Cueva (Pochettino, Cortella, & Ruiz, 1999) – this belief might be based on conlation with historical practices. By 2008, Jon Hanna had introduced the blend on the Erowid website, and one could buy “changa” or “xanga” – sometimes pronounced “chan-gah” – in Camden, U.K., head shops for around £20–30 per gram (Hanna, 2008). Changa developed commercial appeal from this period, a circumstance apparent at psychedelic festivals in Europe. In July 2013, I attended VIBE, a psytrance festival in the Czech Republic. Near the main dance loor, I fell into conversation with disc jockeys billed at the event, one of whom acquired a bag of changa from a passing dealer offering “acid, MDMA, and changa.” The Russian novice lunged at the opportunity and bought a half a gram for €50 (the regular price for a gram). “This is one of the things I really want to do right now,” the Russian novice said. Changa has gained currency in the world of psychedelic electronica (St John, 2015a); it even motivated a short-lived commitment to establish psytrance as a “religion.” The initiator of that idea was inspired by an experience at the U.K.’s Glade Festival in 2009, where he smoked changa and saw . . . the most amazing alien beings dancing, lirting at me, a couple kissing and exploding into a lood of multicolored tessellated tiled fragments, the Egyptian sun god Horus erupting from a foam of seething fractals. I saw Homer Simpson eating a doughnut and cathedrals of extreme beauty and color. It was the most amazing 15 minutes of my life! Far better than any CGI visuals or computer graphics could generate.8 Reports such as this read like advertisements for a temporary religious experience, which also appears to convert the assumed authenticity of ayahuasca into a commodiiable product. While its advent has facilitated an unprecedented semipopular desire for repeat DMT experiences, as Huston Smith (2000, pp. xvi–xvii) has long observed, “religious experiences” (e.g., the “psychedelic theophany”) do not amount to a “religious life.” Changa appears to offer an optimizable spiritual technology without the cumbersome weight, and obligations, of religion. And yet, lest this advent be dismissed as pure entheotainment, Erik Davis offers another view upon his exposure to “smokeable ayahuasca.” At Boom Festival 2008, up on a hill facing across Lake Idanha-a-Nova toward the ancient town of Monsanto, he wrote: The smoke was sweet, and the entrance into the vestibule of the tryptamine palace was smooth but strong, and I slid gently along DMT’s inside-outside Mobius strips of sentient energy with more clarity and with less anxiety than usual. My ingers folded into spontaneous mudras and the breath of ire sparked without will. Then the vibrating weave of nature’s alien mind luttered and unfolded us and set us gently back on the scraggly hillside, where the crickets and their ambient chirp-track trumped the distant thump of machines. Boom! (Davis, 2008) Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 156 Graham St John While this description evokes the gnostic potential of DMT and other entheogens, the apparent Disneyication of hyperspace worries those lamenting changa as a front for the recreationalizing (and commercializing) of DMT (as “smokeable ayahuasca”). The Entheogen Review founder Jim DeKorne, for whom DMT is a molecule to be revered and respected, forecast the mood: “I can’t imagine it ever becoming a recreational drug – its nature is to sear away our illusions down to the core of being – a process few would describe as ‘recreational’ ” (DeKorne, 1993, p. 1). Out of the jungle The advent of “smokeable ayahuasca” ignited debate between ayahuasqueros and changaleros. An article published on web magazine Reality Sandwich, “Changa: The Evolution of Ayahuasca” (Dorge, 2010), fuelled the controversy with changa convert Chen Cho Dorge, implying that ayahuasca had “evolved” into the smoking blend – a position he later retracted. For Dorge, the blends exempliied the way psychointegrator plants can “aid in human synergistic relationships with place just as these plants have done for the peoples of the Amazon.” Just as ayahuasca and its effect were migrating “out of the jungle,” changa was being lauded as the “next evolutionary step for the synergistic shamanic technology” (Dorge, 2010). Dorge claims that changa smoking shows inluences from South American vegetalismo and curandismo practices: A new form of shamanry is being practiced and learned from practicing with these plant teachers. A new entheogenic healing modality, new rituals, new ways of relating to ceremonial structure and the role of the healer as well are beginning to shift and transform – each adapting to the authentic needs of those working with this medicine. (Dorge, 2010) But, while ayahuasca was purportedly enjoying a facelift, the natives were getting restless over at Ayahuasca.com. Purist drinkers are typically suspicious of DMT users – who lack a certain legitimacy, if not virtue, so far removed from the cultural and theologically sanctioned traditions of brews and snuffs. In debates on Ayahuasca.com, defenders voice claims that DMT is “the crack of ayahuasca,” that the beings it summons are “Mickey Mouse spirits,” and its users little more than reckless individuals. Ayahuasqueros adopt stances long taken against abuses (and abusers) of psychedelics, especially those who measure their experience in acts of psychedelic bravado and leeting moments of tryptamine tourism. The accumulation of religious experience and spiritual capital without entering a religious life is disquieting for those whose use of ayahuasca is characterized by a commitment to ceremony, community, and ethos – and not simply “effect.” Among committed ayahuasqueros and daimistas, those who smoke for “effect” and promote their practice or liken the experience to ayahuasca are appropriating and even expropriating tradition. Eyebrows are raised when practices appear Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 157 directed more toward peak experience than integrative returns, where experience is not adequately integrated within an ethos by which one lives and acts in the world, and where deep insights do not become the basis for the transformation of self, relationships, and the world. Responding to Dorge, visionary artist Daniel Mirante got down to brass tacks: Ayahuasca is the indigenous Amazonian name for the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, where it has been used for thousands upon thousands of years in healing, sorcery, and cleansing. The vine is used as a gatekeeper to the realm of a myriad of medicinal plants, such as Ajo Sacha and Tobacco, which are ‘dieted’ in close proximity to the Vine. Furthermore, Mirante stated, Ayahuasca lives within a unique complex of customs, traditions, knowledge and wisdom which are strong to this day, and continue to develop within syncretic communities and movements. (Mirante, 2010) While Mirante consented that analogues have facilitated profound healing and visionary states not unlike that associated with traditional ayahuasca brews, these analogues should be respected as unique ethnobotanical phenomena and not conlated with ayahuasca. Furthermore, and this underlines the insult felt by many a drinker, “the Ayahuasca vine is not merely a facilitator for a DMT experience. It is a profound entheogenic plant teacher in its own right” (Mirante, 2010). The status of the ayahuasca vine as “an ambassador of the plant kingdom” is corroded when it becomes little more than “a delivery system for DMT” (Mirante, 2010). The advent of changa forced to the surface an underlying resentment over claims that DMT is the active component of ayahuasca – the result of, according to Mirante (2010), a wave of “DMT-centric” entheogenic literature in the early 1990s. By staking claims to the “ayahuasca effect,” users were effectively lauding the “DMT effect,” and the implication that changa was an evolutionary improvement upon, or successor to, ayahuasca, was like pouring gasoline on the ire. Critics like Mirante were concerned that the champions of changa and other custom products with an ostensible “ayahuasca effect” were usurping the cultural power of ayahuasca: To claim any plant combination that enables DMT to become orally active is ‘Ayahuasca’, or more, that the DMT effect = ‘Ayahuasca effect’ = Ayahuasca itself, is trouble on grounds of cultural appropriation, because it ignores a living indigenous tradition, language, etymology, folklore, taxonomy. (Mirante, 2010) All of which appears to overlook the circumstance where “ayahuasca” (i.e., typically, B. caapi + Psychotria viridis) is itself a construction that has been inlated into a sacred cow in its expansion beyond the Amazon in the last decade. Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 158 Graham St John While beyond the scope of this chapter, it would be useful to compare the presumed threat posed by DMT-centric sensibilities in the time of “ayahuasca analogues” to the threats to “tradition” imagined to follow the advent of that which has been castigated as “drug tourism” in the Amazonas (de Rios, 1994; 2006), or with the impact of post-traditional urban and New Age ayahuasca practices suspected of being “inauthentic” (Labate & Cavnar, 2014). I suspect that, just as “shamanic tourism” involves a complex ecology of motivations and outcomes (Winkelman, 2005; Fotiou, 2014), so, too, does neoshamanic pharmahuasca, and speciically those practices promising an ostensible “ayahuasca” effect. The conceit of “smokeable ayahuasca” warrants scrutiny as an “ayahuasca affectation,” possessing tenuous associations with that which is valued in ayahuasca shamanism, and appears native to its global diasporic practice – its role as a facilitator for communicating with the dead. And yet, the synchronistic mechanism native to ayahuasca is widely reputed among users of changa to be responsible for an effect produced by “analogue” botanical combinations, an effect modulated by the gnostic, neoshamanic, and ludic intentions common to the use of DMT and other entheogens. Palmer has motioned that it is unnecessary to validate changa through an association with ayahuasca-using traditions. In a response to Dorge and Mirante (as online commenter “carpedmt”), in Palmer’s opinion, changa is primarily an augmentation of DMT. It is an optimal vehicle for an “analogue” experience that not only makes DMT accessible but also facilitates the DMT/MAOI mechanism for more users worldwide than ayahuasca (carpedmt, 2010). Referring to changa as a “mini-ayahuasca” experience, Palmer stated that ayahuasca “is not always readily available in every country. Good luck inding ayahuasca in Skopje, Macedonia! However, you may well be able to ind people there smoking changa” (Palmer, personal communication, April 26, 2013). Furthermore, he stated that smokers, once adapted to changa, often elect to “go deeper with the brew [ayahuasca].” Neither constituting an evolution from ayahuasca, nor serving as a substitute for it, changa and its own proliferating analogues would then seem to grease the mechanisms of use, even becoming an accessory to the ayahuasca experience. “Smokeable ayahuasca” and the more general “ayahuasca effect” are conceits received with caution among recent commentators. Given that many plants substituted as “ayahuasca analogues” are known to contain a variety of alkaloids other than the harmalas/DMT (and speciically the standard B. caapi/Psychotria viridis) synergy, they are recognized to possess varying modes of action. Nen is particularly vocal about this, clarifying that the source of DMT in the original changa (i.e., A. obtusifolia) contains multiple tryptamine alkaloids, and that it thereby has “a very different proile to the ayahuascan, with it’s own subjective effects.” Nen likens these multi-tryptamine acacias to snuffs like yopo and hekula more than ayahuasca (Nen, personal communication, July 25, 2014).9 Relatedly, he and compatriots cultivate a respect for the “signature, spirit, or energy” of each plant in ways not dissimilar to the animistic traditions of world plant medicine systems. To promote these plants as “ayahuasca” is then reckoned disrespectful to the plants and those given the brews and the smoking mixes (Nen, personal communication, July 25, 2014). Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis Aussiewaska in Australia 159 Conclusion The troubling appeal of “smokeable ayahuasca” has been explored in this chapter. While being neither DMT nor ayahuasca, changa connotes both pharmacognostic practices and “traditions.” As a hybrid phenomenon, it is a “perfect embodiment of ambiguity,” the phrase used to describe ayahuasca, which Saéz (2014, p. xxi) has suggested “owes its success to being located midway along a scale running from substances that produce light inebriation to others causing a deeper and more dangerous plunge into other worlds.” While changa shares this hybrid variability in common with ayahuasca, it is not simply a transplanted version of ayahuasca. Emerging from the highly active Australian entheogenic movement, where it would facilitate a “friendlier” and accessible “DMT effect” while at the same time reformatting the therapeutic-visionary eficacy implicit in the “ayahuasca effect,” changa is a unique phenomenon. This conluence of “effects” has resulted in a variable mechanism, the optimizability of which it shares with ayahuasca itself, but which can also serve as an accessory to ayahuasca. As Palmer has stated, changa “is already its own tradition, that sprang out of a certain milieu and allows people to go deep with the plants” (Julian Palmer, personal communication, November 13, 2014). As a fully customizable tradition suited to the contemporary entheogen user, it appears that, with changa and its variations, the DMT/ ayahuasca effect will continue to evolve. With variations of its aromatic vapors recognizable in locations worldwide, further investigations are warranted on the career and effects of this “smokeable ayahuasca”/“accessible DMT” hybrid. Notes 1 Adjunct Research Fellow, Grifith University, Australia. 2 DMT and preparations containing it are subject to restrictions laid out in the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, to which most governments are parties, and where DMT is a Schedule I (i.e., most restrictive) controlled substance. Australia is a signatory to this Convention, similarly outlawing DMT under Schedule I of its own Psychotropic Substances Act of 1976, and DMT is currently a Therapeutics Goods Administration (TGA) Controlled Drug. 3 The DMT-Nexus: www.dmt-nexus.me/ 4 MAO (monoamine oxidases) are enzymes that normally neutralize the psychoactive effects of tryptamines. 5 These lines were deployed as a voice sample on “Geometric Patterns” by Australian psytrance musicians Dark Nebula & Scatterbrain (2004). 6 While several underground reports have claimed success in the range of 0.5% DMT from the phyllodes and bark of A. pycnantha, these claims remain unsubstantiated. 7 Subsequent Palmer quotes are from the same interview unless otherwise indicated. 8 www.psytranceismyreligion.com is now ofline (accessed July 1, 2010). 9 While ayahuasca has become the paragon of entheogenic tryptamine folk medicine, a discussion at the DMT-Nexus has served to uncover a world of folk DMT and tryptamine use that existed before ayahuasca and continues in a myriad of evolving forms. Changa is among innovations that “present fertile ground for new modes of personal healing, relection, and insight, beyond just ayahuasca and the curandero” ( jamie & nen888, 2014, p. 10). Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 160 Graham St John References Agurell, S., Holmstedt, B., & Lindgren, J. E. (1968). Alkaloid content of Banisteriopsis rusbyana. American Journal of Pharmacy, 140(5), 148–151. Burroughs, W. S., & Ginsberg, A. (2006). The yage letters redux. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. (Original work published 1963.) carpedmt. (2010, May 24). Notes on the Western paradigm of ayahuasca [comment]. Ayahuasca.com. Retrieved June 8, 2015 from www.ayahuasca.com/botany-ecology/aresponse-to-the-reality-sandwich-article-changa-the-evolution-of-ayahuasca-or-noteson-the-western-paradigm-of-ayahuasca/ chocobeastie. (2011, September 2). Changa: A smoking blend containing ayahuasca and other herbs. DMT-Nexus. 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