A Cash Crop
Ayahuasca, once worthless in the market, is now at the heart of a booming global business centered in Iquitos. As demand soars, the species declines. Harvested to near extinction across vast stretches of the Peruvian jungle, Monster Vorax seeks solutions to keep the profits flowing: plantations, middlemen, processors, exporters, distributors.
One of the workers at the Temple of the Way of Light, the largest retreat center in Iquitos, harvests one of the vines on the property. Aware of the environmental impact of their activity in the forest, the Temple has planted several hectares of ayahuasca as part of the Ayahuasca Ayni project, which aims for self-sufficiency.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 227 of Cáñamo magazine, November 2017.
In Manhattan or Sydney, in the Alpujarras or in Iquitos. On any given night. They wait in silent anticipation as the maestro extends the small cup filled with the bitter brew. They hold it in their hands, close their eyes, drink, and entrust themselves to Mother Ayahuasca. At some point—after vomiting up that trauma or celebrating this love—they are overcome by an intense sense of connection with nature. They grieve burning forests, overfished seas, pollution, global warming. They proclaim a new ethic in their relationship with other species. They thank the Grandmother for making them more respectful, more aware of everything... except the fact that with every ceremony, with every revelatory sip, they are financing the destruction of the very plants that induce such ecological epiphanies. A masterful irony.
“Near Iquitos there’s none left, and if there is, it’s skinny vines, and people don’t want those,” says Firpo Córdoba, a merchant of various goods traveling the rivers, who discovered a new goldmine ten years ago: ayahuasca, Banisteriopsis caapi. With his small boat, he sails the Napo River from community to community, buying wild-harvested vine, collected ever farther into the forest. “Sometimes I bring a ton, sometimes five hundred kilos. Depends on what they ask me for.”
One of those asking is Hamilton Souther, owner of Blue Morpho, one of the most famous—and expensive—ayahuasca retreat centers in Iquitos: $2,700 for a one-week treatment. In Iquitos, the Mecca of Ayahuasca, retreat centers specializing in traditional medicine have proliferated—foreign-owned businesses catering to foreigners. There are at least forty such establishments; some estimate the number to be twice that. Speculators suggest tens of thousands of visitors, making up 25% of the city’s tourism—figures that may be exaggerated, or not. Here’s a reliable number: ten of these centers received 4,000 people in the past twelve months, each staying for at least a week (often ten, fifteen, twenty days—or even months). Prices range from $100 to $200 per day, though there are luxury and budget exceptions. Simple math: 4,000 visitors × $140 × 10 days = $5.6 million. One can only imagine how many more visit the other centers, or how many tourists (plentiful) include an ayahuasca session in a package deal—between spotting the pink river dolphin and visiting a community where Indigenous people dress up as “Indians”.
Ayahuasca has become a booming tourist business generating several million dollars annually in Iquitos. It is speculated that the brew attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.
cooks for the world
"With the influx of tourists, ayahuasca has become a profitable product." Ron Wheelock, the Gringo Shaman, knows this well. Residing in Iquitos for over fifteen years, owner of a retreat center and proud new owner of three Harley-Davidson motorcycles, he calls ayahuasca his "gold mine"—not only from ceremonies at his lodge, but from brewing the medicine in industrial quantities and shipping it to Manhattan, Sydney, the Alpujarras, and other Iquitos lodges. "It's being overharvested because the plants are collected before they're mature," Wheelock admits, without a hint of guilt or drama. “Why has the Indigenous way of life ended? Because the white man changed everything. All I can say about the ayahuasca business is that everything in life happens as it must.”
He began selling out of necessity—struggling to feed and clothe himself in his early curandero years, relying on patients’ modest donations. “It was never my intention, but the opportunity came up. Someone suggested I send the brew regularly to Mexico. A door opened, and I walked through.” Soon, demand outpaced supply. For a decade, he exported between 400 and 900 liters a year. Starting at $75 per liter, he later learned in California that ceremonies were charging $150 to $400 per participant. Simple math: a liter yields around twenty doses, worth $3,000 to $8,000 per ceremony. He raised his price to $250 and became a wealthy man. “My standard of living certainly improved,” he says with Southern U.S. calm—mustached, tattooed, long-haired, yet speaking like an aristocrat, with sincere elegance. And since he paid better than most for fresh vines—“All foreigners exploit the locals, but I pay a little more,” he says bluntly—his doorstep was constantly visited by suppliers. “Some days, three or four people showed up, with two sacks or forty. I bought everything, out of respect for the plant: once it’s been harvested, it must be used.” He estimates over 100,000 kilos of ayahuasca have passed through his backyard. But then, one day last year, the ayahuasca boom… went bust.
Ron Wheelock became a wealthy man by exporting up to 900 liters of ayahuasca per year, at 250 dollars per liter.
ayahuasca boom
¿Could it be true that Ayahuasca has a will of Her own and that everything happening around Her is part of a strategy to influence the unhinged human consciousness? If so, what was She trying to communicate when She triggered the explosion of numerous bottles in which She was being transported to various parts of the world? Was She perhaps expressing its reluctance to be exported? Did She want to gain popularity at any cost? No. It was simply the implacable and prosaic logic of fermentation.
“Here, liquid products bottled in their natural state ferment due to the heat. As they ferment, they generate gas, and eventually they explode,” explains José Fasanango, the supervisor of Postal Services in Iquitos. It happened several times: the calm of the hot Amazonian morning shattered by the boom of a bottle of ayahuasca in the warehouse. “Fortunately, it happened when the worker wasn’t here. If he had been, he might have been hit by the blast.” Shipments from other customers—boxes and letters—were left stained with ochre liquid, and eventually, the warehouse walls had to be repainted. The issue grew to such proportions that the Civil Aviation Authority ordered Serpost to stop accepting liquids: they posed a serious threat to flight safety. A major blow for the world’s most productive ayahuasca brewer: Ron Wheelock was left high and dry.
But Wheelock is not the only one preparing the brew for export. Dozens of people in Iquitos are doing it, on larger or smaller scales, and someone found a solution: reduce the ayahuasca to an almost solid paste, ship it that way, and have the customer rehydrate it upon receipt. In this way, the Dutchman Bowie van der Kroon plans to export the equivalent of 300 liters of brew this year, at a price of 220 dollars per liter. In the large backyard of his beautiful house, on the day I visit, he stores a ton of fresh ayahuasca. “It was brought to me from the Marañón River, a week’s journey by boat. A man I work with calls me from time to time and asks if I need any,” he says with the friendly, singsong inflection of the Spanish spoken in Iquitos, where he has lived for fifteen years. A portion of that ton will be cooked, another resold to local retreats, and another dried, shredded, and shipped abroad—sometimes in small amounts to individuals who brew it themselves, sometimes in bulk, up to half a ton, to wholesalers or grow shops that retail the brew. Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, Spain… his shipments are rarely intercepted or returned.
The ayahuasca Bowie works with is “natural,” wild, the kind preferred by local brewers, retreat centers, and shamans, believed to be more potent. Until a few years ago, he could find those vines on the outskirts of Iquitos. “I had people I’d call: ‘Do you have ten kilos?’ ‘Sure, no problem.’ Now you won’t find anything. You have to go farther and farther, they look in new areas, strip them clean, then move to the next patch. I say: ‘Leave the mother plant, don’t pull it out with the root, so it can grow back again. Think of your children, of the product—people will want ayahuasca in the future.’” But harvesters also take the root, which is usually large and rich in active compounds. When I ask Bowie how he feels about being just another link in the ayahuasca overexploitation chain, he sighs, as if poking at an old wound. “People all over the world have the right to know this medicine. What I do is tell suppliers: ‘In a few years there won’t be any of this left in the forest. Plant it—you’ve got four or five hectares of land, plant one.’ Little by little, they’re starting to listen. I myself am planting about a thousand vines on my property.”
Bowie van der Kroon kept as a relic a piece of one of the largest vines he has ever processed. For the past fifteen years, he has been sending dried plants and brewed remedy to individual clients and wholesalers on five continents.
SOphisticatioN
Agricultural engineer Elizabeth Bardales, a native of Iquitos, encouraged her sister to plant the vine. They let it grow for ten years, so it would reach a more than acceptable maturity. The day they went to harvest, they discovered all the plants had been stolen. “The local Peruvian, the Loretano, waits for his neighbor to plant so he can steal,” she laments bitterly. That’s why she has limited her work to the processing and commercialization of the plants, which she obtains through a network of suppliers spanning the entire Peruvian lowland jungle. Ayahuasca, of course, but also master plants used by healers in their diets such as ajosacha, chiric sanango, or toé; remedies like dragon’s blood and cat’s claw; superfoods like huasaí and macambo.
Behind her house, located in a peripheral neighborhood of Iquitos, an unexpected small-scale industry emerges, with several employees, warehouses, and different processing areas, equipped with machines specially designed for her needs. “I started seventeen years ago, with a little display case at my mother’s stall in the market. But now there’s marketing for the Amazon and natural medicine, and that’s when we started selling a lot to people who come for health tourism.” Five or six retreats recommend Bardales’s products to their patients: dried and shredded plants, solid extracts in bars or powder, in different presentations and sizes, all neatly packaged and labeled.
Bardales processes several tons of ayahuasca each year. First, she chops it manually and dries it in a large room covered with transparent plastic sheets, protected from frequent rains. Once dried, it goes through a powerful shredder. Turned into shavings, part of it is bagged, labeled, and put up for sale. The rest is cooked in large pots over fire, the first step in producing the extract. “Shredded is the most efficient, and it doesn’t require much boiling, so we save on firewood.” The resulting liquid, after being strained, is reduced for hours in industrial cookers at low temperature until it becomes a paste-like extract. “When we used to do this over fire, it would burn at the bottom. In this machine, it’s in constant motion and the heat is uniform, so there’s no risk of burning. We just leave it on and go work on something else.”
After the ayahuasca’s postal boom-boom, her business took on a new dimension: various brewers now bring her the prepared brew to reduce it to a solid state for postal shipment. Thanks to her, Ron Wheelock went from dead in the water to full sail. Every ten kilos of dried ayahuasca Bardales processes yields one kilo of extract, which she sells for $200. From her industrial experience, she has reached the same conclusion as traditional masters: the thicker the ayahuasca, the more potent it is. “It really matters. If I have twenty-five kilos of thin vine and cook it, it’ll yield less extract than twenty-five kilos of thick vine. That’s why we always insist our suppliers bring thick ones.” But suppliers can’t perform miracles. “Now they bring thin ones,” she says, resigned, looking at a sack of slender vines she bought that morning. “The plants are disappearing more every day, there’s scarcity.” Overexploitation, scarcity, and their offspring: inflation. “Four years ago we paid 30 or 40 soles [10–13 dollars] per sack [30–35 kilos]. We thought 50 or 60 [17–20 dollars] was very expensive. Now we pay up to 150 soles [50 dollars].” The price has quadrupled in four years, and the threat looms large. “If we don’t plant, it’s going to be super expensive, we’ll be using very thin vines, and it will eventually disappear. We tell all our suppliers: ‘Please, plant.’”
Agricultural engineer Elizabeth Bardales runs a small-scale industry that processes tons of medicinal plants each year, which she sells to the clients of shamanic retreats. In the image, she is finalizing the preparation of the ayahuasca extract.
planters
And planting is happening. Local healers have traditionally done so in their gardens or fields to have the remedy on hand without having to venture deep into the forest. Now, locals seeking additional income, entrepreneurs spotting a promising market, and retreats aiming to secure their supply are also planting. However, it remains unclear whether these early plantations will meet future demand. A similar situation occurred some time ago with chacruna (Psychotria viridis), the plant most commonly mixed with ayahuasca and the one that provides the visionary DMT. Practically extinct in the wild, the chacruna used in Iquitos today is cultivated. Because it grows slowly and its cultivation is not always successful, demand has far outstripped supply, and prices have soared to 25 soles—8 dollars—per kilo. But money can’t buy what doesn’t exist, so many retreats and local healers have turned to chagropanga (Diplopterys cabrerana) as a DMT source—a vine that grows easily and is reputed to be even more visionary than chacruna.
A remarkable response to this dizzying evolution comes from the Temple of the Way of Light, the largest retreat center, the most conscious of the impact of its activities, and the most consistent with its ecological and social values. The Temple works with Shipibo shamans from Pucallpa, several hundred kilometers from Iquitos, and uses medicine prepared there by a close collaborator. To cook the thirty liters of brew the retreat needs each month, Don Segundo requires half a ton of ayahuasca and 120 kilos of chacruna leaves. The chacruna comes from cultivated plants, but the ayahuasca must be sought farther and farther away. “There’s no more ayahuasca near the villages. Too many people harvest it, foreigners come looking for it. That’s why locals have to walk a whole day to find it.”
Silvia del Águila, one of the coordinators of the Ayahuasca Ayni program, launched by the Temple of the Way of Light retreat center, which aims for self-sufficiency in the plant species used to prepare its medicine. In the image, she is seen in the Temple’s chacruna plantation.
“One of the pillars of our work is reciprocity,” say the leaders of the Temple of the Way of Light, aware that the ripple effects of the ayahuasca boom are reaching ever more remote regions. “We have received much from this medicine, and obviously the best way to give back is to replant.” With this spirit, the Ayahuasca Ayni program was born—an ambitious initiative that seeks self-sufficiency and a balanced relationship with the environment. On the Temple’s large estate, several hectares have been dedicated to the cultivation of ayahuasca and chacruna. They have also encouraged nearby community members to grow these plants. In a few years, they hope to become fully self-sufficient.
Santiago “Gato” Palacios has different goals. A businessman involved in land trading, handicraft exports, and the production of ayahuasca, chacruna, and chagropanga for brewers and retreat centers, he says, “It’s a profitable business—one that doesn’t ask much from you: you plant it, leave it there, keep it semi-clean, and you’ll see your money in the long run.” His plantation is typical: one hectare of secondary forest cleared of undergrowth, with a segment of vine buried next to each tree so it can climb. In three years—or sooner, if fertilized—a vine can yield dozens of kilos. It’s a good deal even for the neighbor. “Last time, they stole twenty thick vines. They used to never steal, but now they know it pays well. They use a handsaw so it doesn’t make noise, because the machete makes a sound.”
Wealthy retreat centers, savvy entrepreneurs, and humble locals—like Abraham Guevara, a passionate ayahuasquero for thirty-five years—are all part of the changing ayahuasca landscape. “Ayahuasca is a marvel. People criticize it as demonic. I’ve never seen the devil, but I have seen saints, divine places.” Guevara never imagined that the plant he reveres would become a business. He maintains a modest but well-kept plantation of beautiful specimens that he uses personally and occasionally sells—though he receives only crumbs from the feast. Living in a riverside community and unfamiliar with the intricacies of the commercial networks, he sells at a low price, which grows exponentially as the product passes through the ever-lengthening chain of middlemen. For Guevara, this commercialization is no sacrilege. “It goes to other people, to others who also need healing.” He fasts before harvesting, blows tobacco on the plant, and mentally makes a request: “We’re going to take you and sell you, because we need to survive.”
Survive. A dramatic word in a forest that for millennia provided abundantly—meat, fish, building materials, medicine… everything humans needed for a good life. Today, the people of the forest must adapt to new times—times of scarcity and dissatisfaction, times of the Ravenous Monster.
