Holistic well-being or cultural extractivism? Who decides? Questions on the consumption of psychedelic substances and their territorial impacts in Latin America.
- Moderator Frances Paola Garnica Quiñones
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Receipt: June 16, 2025
Acceptance: June 23, 2025
Introduction
The consumption of psychedelics has emerged as a practice that involves the search for mystical and consciousness-enhancing experiences related to the ingestion of psychedelic substances, particularly those originating in natural environments. This phenomenon has gained relevance in places such as Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Peru, where various psychedelic plants and animals are found and are central to the heritage value of some indigenous cultures. Globalization has intensified the circulation of agents that seek to consume or undertake mercantile extractivism of these substances -tourists, spiritual seekers, neo-shamans, pharmaceutical companies-. This also implies the international circulation of psychedelic plants and animals, which deterritorializes and uproots these species from their ecological and cultural contexts. These massive consumptions inscribed in global circuits generate different uses and attributes of these species and their new appropriations have implications and effects on cultural contexts, on the forms of social organization of ethnic groups and on the ecological and environmental preservation of the territories where they are found.
The intensification of this consumption of power plants and animals containing psychoactive substances has generated a series of debates and questions about its impact. While some see it as an opportunity for economic development and the dissemination of ancestral knowledge, others perceive it as a form of exploitation and cultural appropriation and, therefore, as a new form of colonization. In addition to these positions, there is the gentrifying effects that psychedelic or spiritual tourism is having in some towns considered as sanctuaries of consumption that were previously governed by indigenous uses and customs. In addition, the growing demand for access to psychedelic experiences generates ethical dilemmas about welfare, regulation and respect for indigenous peoples, who have kept this knowledge alive for generations, and who have taken care of the environmental balance of their natural territories.
In this context, we seek to open a debate on the implications of psychedelic consumption, considering both its potential as an economic, cultural and medicinal welfare activity, and the risks it could entail for local communities and the preservation of their cultural and natural heritage.
What is psychedelic use and who is it for?
I situate the consumption of natural and synthetic psychedelics in the Western context as the ingestion of substances that modify the central nervous system and, therefore, perception, thought and consciousness. Although the purposes may be diverse - recreational, spiritual or religious - this consumption is crossed by class and racial conditions. Not all people have access to safe consumption, either because of the criminalization imposed from the West, which has generated an educational bias, or because those who tend to have access to these compounds belong, for the most part, to middle and high economic sectors, which facilitates their access to information about these substances.
Motivations also respond to specific social logics. Some approach them from a search for introspection and reflection of the self (Giddens, 1991), shaped by an individualistic and egocentric spirituality that, paradoxically, tries to transcend the limits of Western thought. Others consume them recreationally, in a logic of intensive, accumulative and shareable experience, in which the psychedelic trip is one more form of self-discovery or personal experimentation. Consumption will depend on how these substances are constructed and the access to information about them.
Psychedelic consumption today moves between the recreational, therapeutic, spiritual, economic and intercultural, but it is crossed by deeply extractivist logics. In Western societies, these substances - often reduced to substances that alter the nervous system - are inserted in wellness markets aimed at the white middle classes, in search of healing, self-knowledge or intense experiences.
However, many of these plants, fungi, cacti or beings come from indigenous contexts where they are not "substances" but beings with agency, personality, intention and emotions, inserted in interdependent, relational and political-spiritual systems (Piña, 2025). By medicalizing and/or spiritualizing them from urban consumption, these beings are endowed with other ontological and epistemic statuses, making others invisible (Piña, 2021). This process is extractivist because it translates the indigenous into the language of the market, exoticizes their practices and reproduces inequalities. It is not a question of denying local trade, but of pointing out that the psychedelic market (pharmaceutical companies, universities and philanthropic organizations) imposes other scales, meanings and values, thus violating other relationships and ways of life.
It is all that at the same time. And therein lies one of the characteristics of the complexity of the subject. It is difficult to think of a psychedelic consumption. Instead, there is a multiplicity of practices, agendas and interests. Psychedelics are relational entities. This avoids reducing them to substance, plant/fungus, being, commodity. Instead, they are presented as entities capable of multiple articulations and effects that are specific outcomes of the contexts in which they circulate and enter into connection.
The more contextualized uses in their cultural frameworks of origin are a part of it. At the same time, these contexts are mobile and in permanent transformation through the different ways of circulation of aesthetics, knowledge, people and money. The local spheres of origin are transformed. At the same time, in the cultural configurations in which they are inscribed as novelties, psychedelics produce different tracts. Psychedelic science" (if such a thing exists) advances in obtaining favorable results in relation to the use of some psychedelics in the treatment of specific ailments. In this area, facts such as the refusal of the Food and Drug Administration (fda) to enable the medical use of the mdma (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) in 2024 contribute to "puncturing" a little bit the hype The research on psychedelics, alerting about the need to review research protocols, underline ethical aspects and recalculate efforts and strategies. While research advances, so do regulatory attempts to regulate access to recreational, religious and therapeutic uses of psychedelics. Ayahuasca was a pioneer in problematizing and forcing the revision of the legal frameworks of some countries in terms of religious rights and freedoms. Currently, psilocybin is leading the way in developing regulatory frameworks that enable its therapeutic use.
It is evident the charm that psychedelics produce in the most privileged social spaces. In these social spaces, in addition to spiritual seekers, psychonauts and the curious, there are also those who see the promises of psychedelics with commercial eyes. Although this whole process of strong economic stakes and deep cultural expectations is a notorious fact that builds agendas around psychedelics, it would be a mistake to reduce the complex and heterogeneous global scenario of psychedelic use to the practices and interests of a part of those who are somehow linked to these relational entities; in doing so, we run the risk of depriving (not only) other anchors, in which psychedelics also play a leading role, of their dialogic potential in onto-epistemic and political terms.
They are all of them, depending on the situation and context. The polyvalent nature of plants, animals, mushrooms and molecules with psychedelic qualities in the human being is reflected in the heterogeneous sociocultural field of consumption, which is sustained and legitimized in a web of uses, discourses, narratives and cosmologies. Thus, we can observe from deep ethnography, that globalized consumption circuits cannot be categorized in a rigid way, since the transversality of the direct subjective experience with psychedelic plants and molecules questions and resignifies in a broad sense the structures, categories, concepts, as well as the ways of relating to each other, to oneself and to nature, which have been imposed by the colonial paradigms: religious, moral, political, scientific and capitalist. Therefore, in many cases, recreation and rituals are seen as healing, in terms of social, emotional, mental, spiritual and even physical health. Areas that are suppressed from the current historical context of productivity. However, the establishment of mercantile exchange networks that make plants such as peyote or ayahuasca reach the cities and other countries of the world to be used in new forms of holistic psychedelic therapies and practices, are not exempt from the extractivist capitalist logics at various cultural and material levels. Although it is clear that there is an economic imbalance for the indigenous cultures involved as opposed to the multi-million dollar business of the psychedelic agenda (conferences, associations, retreats), in many cases it is the indigenous people themselves who collaborate to legitimize these global neo-chamanic and psychedelic networks. This new psychedelic agenda is making it possible for psychedelic consumption to expand not only among psychonauts and spiritual seekers, but to all social spheres.
How does the massive consumption of psychedelics impact indigenous communities, their cultural heritages and ecological environments? What are the questions that need to be asked about psychedelic consumption from the perspective of social research?
The massive consumption of psychedelics in Western contexts -driven by their medicalization and growing presence in spiritual and therapeutic markets- has generated profound impacts on indigenous communities, their cultural heritage and the ecosystems they inhabit. Many of these plants -cacti and mushrooms- are considered by indigenous peoples as beings with agency, with whom they maintain political-spiritual relationships rooted in the territory.
The global boom of psychedelics has provoked a multiple extractivism: material, by putting pressure on the ecological environments that sustain their existence; epistemic, by appropriating knowledge without recognition or retribution (beyond the economic aspect); and ontological, by reducing these beings to active compounds that can be administered in capsules or guided sessions. Indigenous ritual practices are reformulated from the logic of the spiritual and therapeutic market, making other realities of the peoples invisible and reinforcing new forms of colonialism.
Social research urgently needs to question these dynamics: what regimes of truth legitimize these consumptions, who benefits from them, and at the expense of what and whom? It is necessary to question the neoliberal logic that instrumentalizes these plants without transforming the structures of violence - such as racism, patriarchy or territorial dispossession - that affect the peoples who have cared for them for generations. Analyzing psychedelic consumption without these critical frameworks is tantamount to reproducing, once again, forms of colonialism.
It has a heterogeneous impact in different regional and national contexts. The classic example of the effects produced by the worldwide fascination with psychedelics is given by what followed Gordon Wasson's encounter with Maria Sabina in Huautla de Jimenez, Mexico, in the 1950s. That encounter with the "magic mushrooms" had very difficult consequences for the entire local community, starting with Maria Sabina herself. In the case of peyote, also in Mexico, things are somewhat different. The ecological impact produced by the extraction of the cactus threatens its very survival, but the socio-environmental conflicts there are not limited to this situation, but acquire another magnitude and complexity given the advance of other extractivist interests far beyond the cactus. With ayahuasca, things are probably even more complex, since its territorial distribution is very broad, involving a large number of indigenous peoples and different nation-state contexts.
Social and ethnographic theory, social research, is key. It is through social research and critical thinking that we can see the profound social, environmental, political and economic implications of the global circulation of psychedelics. Thinking of them in terms of relational entities (as Marilyn Strathern did) helps to go beyond dichotomies (traditional uses-extractivism) and allows us to observe the multidirectionality of effects and negotiation capacities of the impacts. At the same time, it is important to highlight the processes of community organization in terms of resistance and defense of territories and knowledge. The defense of Wirikuta by the Wixárika Regional Council or the Ayahuasca Indigenous Conference are some examples, but there are also other processes through which communities organize themselves to safeguard and disseminate their knowledge and arts, such as the Huni Kuin Artists Movement.
Its impacts are multiple, and it is necessary to have a bidirectional perspective. On the one hand, we find ecological and cultural impacts, to the extent that the demand for such psychedelic resources and all their culturally related elements is massified, which generates natural and social imbalances. On the other hand, these same possibilities of economic and intercultural exchange have also helped to strengthen the identity and subsistence of indigenous cultures subordinated to the dominant colonial system, which increasingly forces them, irreversibly, to relate to and need the tools provided by modernity (means of communication, transportation, work tools). However, it is important to highlight the fact that psychedelic consumption is much less than the environmental impacts of mining and clearing for agricultural crops, as in the case of peyote in Wirikuta, where the habitat of this cactus has been almost irreversibly affected by tomato and mining companies. Territorial control by organized crime networks is another element that has seriously affected the ecocide of species such as the toad. Bufo alvariusIts habitat in the Sonora desert coincides with the territory controlled by the cartels, which means that its secretion has also entered the trafficking circuits, mainly to the United States.
I believe that it is the duty of the social sciences to contribute critical perspectives of economic and epistemological reciprocity in order to generate a balance between existing consumption -which is not going to disappear-, human rights and the rights of native peoples, as well as the ecology of psychedelic plants and animals.
What is your ethical position regarding the dispute between the universal heritage of psychedelic substances and the defense of the heritage of indigenous communities and their original territories? How do you position yourself in this debate?
My ethical and political positioning is based on the recognition that these beings, far from being only psychoactive substances, are political-spiritual agents with multiple ontological statuses. Their reduction to biomedical approaches or individualistic spiritualities constitutes a form of ontological and epistemic colonization that erases the territorial and cosmological links that sustain them.
In the current context of the expansion of the psychedelic arena, it is urgent -as Marisol de la Cadena (2020)- to decelerate modern thought and recognize the politicization of non-human beings. This urgency becomes even more evident when science strips them of their political character in order to neutralize them, subjecting them to processes of purification and translation that allow their incorporation as objects within a regime of scientific truth (Latour, 2001), thus facilitating their displacement towards medicalization.
Although some psychedelic activists speak out against medicalization, and do so from discourses that call themselves decolonizing, it is essential to exercise constant epistemic vigilance. In practice, they often end up reproducing extractivist logics disguised under cultural and philanthropic forms of intervention, which are presented as "aid", "honor" or "collaboration with the peoples". I have observed this contradiction directly in the Mazatec region of Oaxaca, where concepts such as reciprocity, hand back and xa bazen (work in between) are appropriated and instrumentalized by some psychedelic activists. Although they openly criticize the biomedical paradigm, their organizations -many of them foreign- operate from frameworks financed by centers of knowledge-power or entities linked to the global commodification of these plants.
If we really want to talk about care, the ethical and political commitment must be placed in the defense of the territories where these beings live and of the communities that sustain them. Accompanying peoples' struggles does not imply mediating. To mediate is to translate, represent or channel from external frameworks, which often reinforces colonial power relations. Accompanying, on the other hand, is an ethical practice that demands being without directing, listening without appropriating and sustaining without intervening. It implies, in concrete terms, the decentering of the researcher or activist subject, not his or her protagonism.
As anthropologists, our task is not to manage or validate these struggles, but to assume an ethic of active listening and radical respect for self-determination. As the Zapatista peoples have said, it is a matter of walking in time with the peoples, respecting their ways of life and their right to exist with dignity, without turning their knowledge and spirituality into merchandise for global consumption.
The defense of territory is the defense of life. Territory is the condition of possibility for life to be possible. But life in the singular is somewhat abstract. What really exists are singular forms of life, situated, making their own trajectories, precisely, territorialized. Therefore, the defense is not of life in the abstract, but of situated lives, therefore, of geographical and existential territories. And what defends these territories is the result of particular multi-species relations, such as those generated around mushrooms, peyote or ayahuasca; but also around coca or tobacco. I would not want the way in which a specific relationship with coca or tobacco was globalized to be a one-way street for peyote or ayahuasca. The territories become interlocutors of a great conversation in which, hopefully, one can "take others seriously", as Tim Ingold put it. But this taking others seriously implies, I believe in this case, not only to move away from the anthropo-capitalocentric place, but also not to fall into essentialisms that reduce otherness to mere romantic and neocolonial projections. In this sense, the dialogue should not be directed only to the search for epistemic justice (a condition sine qua non), but also of access to and distribution of the resources produced by the global interest in the knowledge that emerges from these disputed territories.
Thus, the only possible universal heritage that I see here is that of the defense of territories, that is, of the multiplicity of situated forms of life, to take them seriously in these two dimensions: the recognition of difference and their integration into the distribution of resources that are produced from the very existence of that difference.
The roots of this paradox lie in the prohibition paradigm. I believe that it is urgent for Mexico, as one of the countries with the greatest psychedelic cultural biodiversity, to begin to generate its own knowledge from deep ethnography that leads to decolonize the way in which the problems of psychedelic consumption are dichotomized (with a certain aura of morality) and posed. Going beyond generic concepts such as "drug" or "psychedelics" to study each resource in its own context and possibilities, as well as analyzing its cultural framework, which cannot be purified, may be analytical points to glimpse what new frameworks of preservation and multicultural legal regulation may be possible, in which the ancestral rights of the land and cultures are respected. However, there are also possibilities for those interested in its consumption as a form of cognitive freedom and free development of the personality, which does not have to be criminalized and uninformed. Understanding its nature as a field of knowledge and a realm immanent to human life is vital to begin thinking about integrative ethical models.
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Sarai Piña Alcántara holds a master's degree in Social Anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas) in Mexico City, where she is currently a doctoral student. D. in Ethnology from the National School of Anthropology and History (enah). His main lines of research include the anthropology of tourism, cultural consumption, transnationalization, globalization and political ontology. For more than twenty years he has worked in the Mazatec region, where he has investigated phenomena related to tourism, neo-shamanism and the transnationalization of the ndi xij'to (the "little ones that sprout"), known in the West as psilocybe mushrooms. His research has been presented at colloquia and conferences both in Mexico and abroad. Currently, she focuses her work on issues related to territory and Mazatec political ontology, from an activist and committed anthropological perspective. His publications address topics such as the sacred and the political, neo-shamanism, psychedelic tourism, the psychedelic arena and territorial defense processes. She has collaborated in collective publications together with colleagues and autonomous and self-managed Mazatec collectives, with the aim of strengthening the defense of the territory against extractivist projects. She has also worked as a reviewer of academic articles on shamanism and sacred plants, both for national and international universities.
John Scuro is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences (fhce), Universidad de la República, Uruguay. He is a researcher of the National System of Researchers (sni) of the National Agency for Research and Innovation (anii). He is co-coordinator of Arché, Núcleo Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Psicodélicos and is a member of the editing team of the Uruguayan Journal of Anthropology and Ethnography (ruae) of the fhce. D. and M.A. in Social Anthropology from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In that framework, she conducted fieldwork in Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Mexico, which resulted in the thesis "Neochamanism in Latin America. A cartography from Uruguay" (2012). Her most recent research project is a comparative study of the Neo-Pentecostal model and the Neo-Shamanic model of approaching addictions through the life trajectories of its users.
Ezequiel Alí Cortina Bello is a Mexican researcher specialized in the line of the "social dimension of knowledge", with emphasis on master plants and psychedelics. He studied History and Anthropology at the Universidad Veracruzana and holds a master's degree in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa. He is the author of several articles and book chapters in different countries; he has participated in forums and conferences at national and international level.
Frances Paola Garnica Quiñones is a postdoctoral researcher at the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (sehciti) at El Colegio de San Luis (colsanHer current project focuses on the implications of the exploration of the therapeutic potential of peyote from a biocultural territory defense approach. Her lines of research are the perception and social imaginary of spaces and the methodologies and applications of visual anthropology in social research. She is co-director of the documentary ...And I'm not leaving the neighborhood! (2019), author of research articles in Visual and Urban Anthropology, and has held photographic exhibitions in Mexico and the UK. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester, UK. She has been a broadcaster for the science outreach program Coincidences and divergences on radio Magnética 107.1 fm. She is a member of the Audiovisual Anthropology Research Network and the Mexican Network of Visual Anthropology and co-founder of the Visual Anthropology Laboratory (lavsan) of El colsan.
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