HIGH TEA

Think Lsd And Ecstasy Have Devoted Followings? The Next Drug Sliding Down
The Nirvana Pipeline Has Already Spawned Three New Religions

Javier Arevalo Shehuano did not look like a shaman. He wore a scuffed
baseball hat and a T-shirt, and carried a schoolboy's knapsack. No trace of
the beads or braids sported by other urban witch-doctors I had met in Peru.

I suppose that's why I trusted him.

We took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon River. Our plan was to dock at
a remote lodge and sleep all afternoon, then meet after nightfall in a hut
at the jungle's edge. We would sip a tea brewed from the bark of a sacred
vine. Then we would spend the night flying together through the spirit world.

Arevalo smiled, revealing a set of chops fully serrated by rot, and told me
I had nothing to fear. He was indeed a shaman, he said, and so was his
father, and his father's father before. He unzipped his knapsack to reveal
a potpourri of weeds and murky potions. I took his picture.

I had no idea my adventure would take me to the crest of the psychedelic
zeitgeist, not until the National Post reported last month that Jeffrey
Bronfman was battling the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for the
return of his own hallucinogenic tea. Bronfman -- second cousin to Edgar
Bronfman Jr. and grandnephew to Seagram's dynasty founder Samuel Bronfman
- -- had joined an obscure Brazilian religion, read the story. The faithful
would drink Bronfman's foul-tasting tea, experience powerful visions, then
purify themselves through ritual vomiting. It all took place in the comfort
of Bronfman's Santa Fe, N.M., yurt -- at least until the day in May 1999
when dozens of armed U.S. Customs officers stormed the place.

You could sense the glee between the lines of the deadpan story. Here, it
appeared, was an embarrassing skeleton in the closet of one of Canada's
most powerful clans. But Bronfman is much more than a New Age black sheep
of the family. He is an influential leader of an esoteric movement that is
sweeping the world, and it's all based on that tea.

For centuries, indigenous curanderos, or witch doctors, like Arevalo have
been harvesting the vine Banisteriopsis caapi from the shadowy depths of
the Amazon rainforest. They hack away the vine's bark, then beat the bark
strips with a club until they are soft. The resulting mash is boiled with
various other herbs, down to the muddy consistency of tomato juice. That
potent blend, Arevalo told me, gives users the power to travel beyond their
bodies. To see the future. To move through their own veins, hunting and
confronting the demons that cause physical and emotional illnesses.

Arevalo called it ayahuasca, which in Quechua, the language of the Incas,
means vine of the soul. Or vine of death, depending on your translation.

Ayahuasca is now making waves far beyond the backwaters of the Amazon. It
has generated a lucrative "spiritual tourism" industry in Peru. It has
spawned three new religions in Brazil. It has been credited with curing
thousands of alcoholics and drug addicts, and is being studied by
pharmacologists around the world, who, after 20 years of research
prohibition, are flinging open the gates of perception and heralding a new
era of psychedelic experimentation. And, thanks to believers like Bronfman,
it is coming to a yurt near you.

Author and legendary psychonaut William Burroughs called it yage. He
tramped through the Colombian jungle in search of it in 1953, where he
found tidbits for his psychedelic epic, Naked Lunch. He also reported being
attacked by flocks of flying snakes and squawking larvae while under the
influence of the tea, and being transformed into a large black woman.
Burroughs was followed by his friend Alan Ginsberg, who wrote that he drank
yage with a witch-doctor, then peered through the black nostril of God into
the mystery of all creation, before being overcome by nausea. "I felt like
a snake vomiting out the universe," Ginsberg wrote. (The two friend's
correspondence was later compiled into The Yage Letters.)

While Burroughs and Ginsberg were mind-tripping in Peru, ayahuasca was
giving birth to a new kind of spirituality in another neck of the jungle.
Gabriel de Costa, a Brazilian rubber tapper, was introduced to a
particularly powerful blend of ayahuasca by Bolivian Indians He experienced
visions in the forest telling him to establish a new religion, with the tea
he called hoasca as its sacrament. Mestre Gabriel, as de Costa came to be
known by followers, assembled a new faith from the building blocks of
Christianity, shamanism and Afro-Brazilian rituals. He called his church
Uniao do Vegetal. Roughly translated as "union of the plants," the name
bears homage to a recipe that combines Banisteriopsis caapi and leaves from
the plant Psychotria viridis.

As it turns out, it was one of at least three new ayahuasca-based religions
to emerge from the Amazon this century.

Jeffrey Bronfman was not looking for religion when he arrived in Brazil in
1990. According to court depositions (Bronfman isn't keen to talk to
journalists during his court battle with the DEA) he was there to help
establish a rainforest sanctuary: an admirable plan, spearheaded by none
other than the Uniao do Vegetal church.

By the time Bronfman hit the jungle, the UDV had grown to 7,000 members.
Bronfman shared their tea and their ceremonies, and was so inspired he
returned to Brazil four times in the next two years. He joined the church
and learned Portuguese. In the tea, he felt he had found a liquid
manifestation of the divine. "It has the effect," he later wrote, "of
allowing the UDV members a direct, personal, intimate re-connection with
the Absolute." A shortcut to God.

Bronfman was named the UDV's "Representative Mestre," or leader, for the
U.S., where he has guided the church to a membership of 130 faithful in
five congregations. Over three years, Bronfman imported more than 1,000
litres of tea into the U.S., all of it passing Customs and FDA inspection.
That all ended on May 21, 1999, when two dozen armed Customs officers and a
crowd of police raided Bronfman's Santa Fe office. They took church
records. They got the tea, too, then dropped in on other UDV congregations
around the country. You could hardly blame them. After all, the tea is a
veritable psychoactive broth, with traces of endogenous dimethyltryptamine
(DMT) and harmaline. DMT has been called the most powerful hallucinogen
known to man, and is classified in the U.S. as a Schedule 1 substance, a
designation reserved for drugs the DEA considers dangerously open to abuse,
and having no medical value. (Both DMT and harmaline are prohibited under
Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act).

Then again, the Brazilian government had its own suspicions about the
spread of ayahuasca use back in the '80s. Leaders of Santo Daime, another
ayahuasca-based religion, had established several utopian retreats in the
jungle. Suburban parents were complaining their children had been seduced
into the church by drug use and ritual brainwashing. One young man tried to
immolate himself on a campfire while under the influence.

The Brazilian Federal Narcotics Council (Confen) temporarily banned the
mysterious tea in 1985, then investigated the churches involved. It didn't
find the scandal and drug abuse that had been reported by the Brazilian
press. In fact, the Confen team noted that ayahuasca exerted an
overwhelmingly positive influence on the lives of users, particularly when
taken in a religious setting. They documented hundreds of cases where drug
addicts, alcoholics and the wayward were somehow transformed into healthy,
upstanding citizens by their involvement in the UDV. Team members went so
far as to down a few cups of tea themselves. Ayahuasca has been perfectly
legal in Brazil since 1992.

Regulators in North America have not been following Confen's tea-sipping
lead. We, of course, have had our own rocky relationship with
hallucinogens. In the late '60s, psychiatrists hoped that LSD could be used
to cure all kinds of psychological illnesses, from addiction to depression.
(Canadian researcher Humphrey Osmond experimented with treating alcoholics
with mescaline and LSD. He found that the treatment worked best when
patients reached a transcendent and mystical state of consciousness,
similar to the delirium they sometimes experienced during alcohol
withdrawals. For this state he coined the now-common term psychedelic.)

But hallucinogens were also heartily embraced by the free-loving,
war-hating, hair-growing counter culture. Not surprisingly, the drugs were
blamed for contributing to the upheaval and havoc that seemed to be
spreading across North America. It didn't help when Timothy Leary taunted
the establishment with predictions that "the effect of
consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human
nature, of human potential, of existence. The game is about to be changed,
ladies and gentlemen."

It was indeed. In the late '60s, increasingly stringent restrictions were
placed on research using hallucinogens. Finally they were classed as
Schedule 1 drugs, and research all but ground to a halt.

After nearly a quarter of a century, that's changing -- partly because of
hallucinogens' potential for treating addiction, according to Charles Grob,
a UCLA professor of psychiatry. In the last decade, a half-dozen studies
have explored the pharmacology and sociology of ayahuasca. In 1993, Grob
led a mulitdisciplinary research project to study the effects of the tea on
UDV members in Brazil.

The study found that church members who drank ayahuasca regularly were more
open, optimistic, energetic, without stress, without inhibitions, and had
more self-esteem than members of a control group who never drank the tea.
What's more, two-thirds of the UDV members studied had histories of
alcoholism and psychological problems, which ended when they joined the UDV.

Grob's team found that the tea wasn't addictive and it didn't physically
harm users, as long as they weren't taking certain types of antidepressant
drugs at the same time. As for the vomiting and diarrhea the tea frequently
triggers, well that actually acts as a check against abuse, suggests Grob.

Gastrointestinal distress aside, ayahuasca is now all the rage among the
alternative health and spirituality set. A conference on the tea in San
Francisco last March drew more than 500 scientists, consciousness
researchers, indigenous healers and "shamanic explorers." A recent issue of
the unwaveringly sincere and occasionally breathless journal Shaman's Drum
was devoted to healing with ayahuasca.

Tea activists abhor the words psychedelic and hallucinogenic, and the
recreational drug culture they imply. Ayahuasca, they say, is not about
fun. It is an entheogenic, or 'god-generating," sacrament, providing an
"ecstatic doorway into cosmic consciousness and taping into the wisdom of a
benevolent transpersonal spirit," according to Shaman's Drum editor Timothy
White.

Contributors to Shaman's Drum (available at Capers, naturally) have
described being transformed into birds, jungle cats and snakes after
drinking the tea with shamans in the Peruvian jungle. One American,
desperate to save his son from what seemed to be acute kidney failure,
reported travelling through a terrible void in order to wrap strands of
light around his son, thereby protecting him. (The boy, he wrote, was
released from hospital the following week.)

Ayahuasca journeys are shaped by the philosophy and environment in which
the tea is taken. For generations of Amazon shamans, ayahuasca provided
guidance on how to prepare herbal remedies and gave hunters clues as to
where to find game. For New Age searchers, it offers metaphorical tours of
their own psyches. And for the syncratic faiths now spreading around the
world, it offers one-on-one sessions with God.

That's the thing I like best about this tea. For hundreds of years we --
mainstream Christians, at least -- have been expected to communicate with
God through intermediaries of our churches. Our God, it seemed, stopped
addressing us personally 2,000 years ago. Well, the ayahuasca-based
churches cut out the middlemen.

The divine -- be it God, forest spirits or Ginsberg's God-nostril black
hole -- is waiting to present itself to us within that murky brew. No
wonder thousands pilgrims now follow Burroughs' footsteps to Peru, eager to
be transformed by the ayahuasca experience. I certainly was -- but
discovered that ayahuasca shamanism has put on a decidedly industrial face
in the Andes.

Cuzco, one-time heart of the Inca empire, is evolving into Peru's own
Kathmandu: a mecca for lovers of mountains, mysticism and T-shirts. It pays
to be -- or at least to resemble -- a holy man here. Hotels warn tourists
about the con artists who, armed with feathers and beads, become instant
ayahuasca "healers." Some shamans have agents in North America and Europe
who charge as much as $10,000 for three-week "mystical tours."

Vulnerable foreigners are regularly duped. One middle-aged American woman
told me she had paid $500 to take part in ayahuasca ceremonies. She was
certain a shaman had cast a spell on her in order to lighten her wallet.
The only true ayahuasceros, she said, were deep in the Amazon Basin, where
the vine twists its way through shady forests, and where shamans still tend
to the health of their villages.

But the flood of spiritual tourism has washed right to Iquitos, the capital
of Peru's vast jungle state, Loreto. One jungle lodge owner told me that
tourist demand for ayahuasca was so high, he had built a hut at the edge of
his compound for shamans to use.

Javier Arevalo Shehuano was one of his regulars. Word around Iquitos was
that Arevalo mixed a potent ayahuasca, and was a gentle guide to the
spirit world. So we took a boat into the jungle: me, Arevalo and his
knapsack of medicine, a couple of English spiritual tour operators and the
two young women they had picked up in Iquitos.

As we sat by the cracked pool of the Amazon Rainforest Lodge, Arevalo told
me that city doctors had never visited Nuevo Progresso, his home village on
another lonely tributary of the Amazon. He and his father had used forest
plants -- including ayahuasca -- to cure neighbours' stomach aches, skin
rashes and arthritis. But the nature of his work had changed since he had
moved in with his wife's family in Iquitos. The spiritual tourists had
found him.

"The foreigners don't come for physical problems," he said. "They have
illness in their heads and in their hearts -- psychological problems."

For those maladies, he added, ayahuasca was a strong medicine.

We met after nightfall in the grass hut at the edge of the forest. One Brit
had obviously done this before: he was in pyjamas, and carried a blanket
and pillow. "Go easy on me tonight, Javier," he said. "I am bloody stressed
out."

Arevalo had changed. Baseball cap and shorts were replaced by a grass crown
and a floral frock. He took long drags from hand-rolled cigarettes and
began to chant, shaking a bouquet of dry leaves in the air. "Good evening
sirs, spirits of the forest" he sang in Spanish with his eyes closed, "We
are waiting for you to join us."

From a mineral water bottle, he poured a brackish liquid into a wooden cup
and turned to me. "My friend, whatever your questions are, you should give
them to the ayahuasca now."

I poured the tea into my mouth and swallowed hard. It went down like a
puree of cigarette butts, grapefruit juice and day-old coffee. The shaman
chanted, and gradually the lights of the fireflies began to blur. When I
closed my eyes, I found myself immersed in an ocean of paisley swirls. They
all moved to the rhythm of Arevalo's chanting.

Now bear with me here. I did have a few questions for the ayahuasca, and
they are none of your business. But over the next few hours, they were
indeed answered in a series of Technicolor metaphors, writhing monster
squids and fantastic cities of Lego. Vomiting? Um, yes, in fact I saw the
face of all my doubts etched like an Aztec sun into a pool of my bile. And
later there was a church, a soaring cathedral, constructed entirely of
giant Hallmark greeting cards in pink, blue and pearl. Each card was
inscribed with floral letters declaring: "I love you." So much for objectivity.

I opened my eyes to see the pyjama-clad Brit, crawling into the Amazon
night, inhabited, I learned later, by the spirit of a dog. The local girls
giggled. So did Arevalo.

I'm not certain I conversed with the divine that night, or with anything
other than the scrambled signals of my own neurotransmitters. But the
experience had the same effect of reading a stack of self-help books.
Memories, dreams, anxieties and my own suspicions of the supernatural were
somehow transformed into instructive metaphors.

Three months later, I still have questions. I'm trying to track down
ayahuasca here in Canada. The tea activists have gone underground since
authorities began investigating UDV and Santo Daime branches across the
U.S., Holland and Spain. I get strange phone calls from Washington, New
Mexico or Hawaii, from people who say the truth must be told -- but they
can't tell it, or tell me where ayahuasca can be found. I called Jeffrey
Bronfman, but he hasn't had a drop of tea since the Santa Fe bust, and
still isn't speaking to the press or strangers.

The magic tea, however, is still crossing borders -- just not in the hands
of church members. After our jungle session, the English spiritual tour
operators flew home to London with two pop bottles of Arevalo's blend. This
spring they will fly Arevalo across the Atlantic too, so that he can call
the spirits to their own yurt in the countryside.