The Uncertain Future of Ayahuasca: Reflections from the World Ayahuasca Forum
Image source: www.universomultidisciplinart.com
By Ryan Khan
On the weekend of 11 to 13 September 2026, more than 1,700 people gathered in the Catalan city of Girona, Spain, for the first-ever World Ayahuasca Forum (WAF), an event two years in the planning. The forum was co-organised by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and the Nixiwaka Institute, together with ICEERS, who served as the European production partner. It was the largest international gathering of its kind yet, with discussions spanning Indigenous science, clinical research, globalisation, regulation, ethics, law, environmental rights, intellectual property, territory, sovereignty and Indigenous representation. There were 180 speakers, more than 100 of them Indigenous spiritual leaders and knowledge holders from over 30 cultures and 10 nations across the Amazon Basin, wider Latin America, North America and Oceania.
The forum's theme was A New Time of Alliance between Indigenous wisdom and Western scientific paradigms. It was the first global gathering since the 5th Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference, hosted by the Yawanawá people at the Sacred Village within the Rio Gregório Indigenous Land in Tarauacá, Acre, Brazil. In effect, it brought together nearly a decade of Indigenous-led Ayahuasca Conferences held in South America, and ICEERS's own three World Ayahuasca Conferences held in Europe. The forum opened on the Friday morning with Indigenous leaders entering the hall from two sides of the room, dancing in circles of colour, feathers and song, with the sound of whistles and macaws filling the space. When the dancing settled into a long silence, the room broke into a standing ovation.
"There is a strong demand and interest for these dialogues," said Aili Pyhälä, co-director of the forum, in her opening remarks. "There is an urgency. Mother Earth is calling us together, so we can better learn together, to better take care of her."
Nixiwaka Biraci Brasil Yawanawa, a prominent spiritual and political leader of the Yawanawá people, put it directly:
"We want to gather spiritual leaders from every part of the world to open a new dialogue and build a new alliance. I am translating the message of nature. We need to come together."
It is a message arriving at an important moment. Ayahuasca, along with other sacred plant medicines and naturally occurring psychedelics more broadly, has never been more globalised or more studied by Western science, even as the forests and rivers that sustain these medicines burn, dry up and are stripped for timber, oil and minerals. Over three days of ceremony, testimony and discussion, the forum asked two questions. Can the West as a whole, not just its scientists, meet Indigenous peoples with respect and as equals? And if it can't, what happens to ayahuasca, the other plant medicines, and the people and forests they depend on?
Ayahuasca: more than just a psychedelic
“Ayahuasca” is an umbrella term covering a huge range of practices and traditions. Many peoples who work with the plant-based decoction have their own name for it: kamarãpe among the Asháninka in Brazil and Peru, oni among Shipibo-Konibo peoples in Peru or yagé in the Putumayo region of Colombia, among many others.
Protocols around the ingestion of ayahuasca vary as widely as its names, spanning dietas and no-dietas, distinct preparations and diverse ceremonial forms. The term "Indigenous" is equally a broad label covering hugely different nations and cosmovisions. Where possible, this piece uses the terminology of the specific peoples being discussed, rather than treating "Indigenous" as a neutral term across many different cultures.
Even the idea of ayahuasca as a "psychedelic" is arguably a reductive Western framing. It risks stripping the medicine out of traditions that see it as a medical technology, a teacher and a sentient being that guides, disciplines and heals. "Scientists talk about the psychedelic effects of the plant," said Asháninka leader Benki Piyãko. "We don't believe in this."
Amid the so-called "psychedelic renaissance", Western science has continued to take a deep interest in Indigenous knowledge systems and entheogenic plants and fungi. Ayahuasca, alongside compounds from other traditionally used plants and fungi such as ibogaine and psilocybin, is now the subject of growing clinical research, much of it focused on antidepressant, anti-addictive or anti-inflammatory effects, as well as how they act on the mind and brain.
Neuroscientists Fernanda Palhano-Fontes and Sara Burguete Ojer discussed how ayahuasca appears to produce less convergent and more divergent, symbolic thinking, in addition to the brew's purported neuroplastic properties. But as researcher Nicole L Galvão-Coelho noted, ayahuasca's potential antidepressant effect "is not a single mechanism, but a coordinated biological response, which is only part of the whole picture". José Carlos Bouso compared looking for a single mechanism to judging a football match by watching one player rather than the whole pitch.
This is where the idea of the "biocultural" comes in: a framework, contested in academia for decades, that understands health through culture, territory and social reality, not biology alone. The WAF defined "biocultures" in similar terms - the ways different peoples relate to plants, animals and ecosystems, and the knowledge born from those relationships - built on the premise that "biological life and cultural life aren't separate" and that "every plant carries histories, protocols, and systems of knowledge." A message repeated by participants throughout the forum was that a plant taken out of its ethical and ceremonial context can do more harm than good. Tobacco and coca, both revered in Andean-Amazonian cosmovision, make the point: stripped of context and commercialised, both have caused significant harm. It's a warning that applies directly to ayahuasca's fast-growing global use.
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Paradigm shifts
One of the forum's core discussions was about who gets to define knowledge in the first place. "Who decided what science is?" asked Adana Omágua Kambeba, leader of the Kambeba people, as one of several leaders to challenge the West's assumed monopoly on empirical rigour. "The history of ayahuasca and medicine did not start in the lab," she told the audience. "It started in the garden."
"Our science does not wait for validation," Adana continued. "Our knowledge is alive." The problem many speakers raised was not Western science itself, which has given the world vaccines and transplants, but the institutions and companies sitting on top of it, deciding who is included, whose knowledge counts, and how any benefits get shared out.
Researcher Sara Burguete Ojer put the epistemological case plainly: "Some questions remain beyond current scientific testing through observable, measurable and testable methods." As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Burguete Ojer continued:
"Science needs philosophy to question assumptions and recognise the limits of what we can conclude. We must employ curiosity without credulity, rigour without dismissal."
Even the vocabulary of Western psychiatry doesn't always translate cleanly into Indigenous knowledge systems. "How do we even define the constructs we are measuring?" asked WaiFung Tsang, clinical psychologist and co-founder of Onaya. "Depression may mean different things in a Western vs Indigenous context." Several speakers argued that Western psychiatry often treats symptoms produced by living in a disconnected system as faults in the individual, rather than as signs of a broken relationship between people, land and community.
"Rather than just thinking about how we study the ceremony and ayahuasca, it's also letting ceremony and ayahuasca change the way we do science and approach questions," Tsang continued.
Dennis McKenna, the ethnopharmacologist and long-time advocate for psychedelic research, offered another stark account of the divide. The worldview that emerges from Western science, he argued, is analytical and reductive, often simplifying nature into something that can look dead, devoid of spirit or intelligence. Many Indigenous worldviews, by contrast, understand nature as interconnected, intelligent and holistic. McKenna doesn't see the two as opposed, though. Psychedelics, he suggested, are one way to step outside a rigid scientific worldview and encounter nature differently. On that view, the two paradigms can complement each other rather than compete.
Anne Schlag, Head of Research at Drug Science, made a similar point:
"The problems facing humanity today cannot be met by a single reductionist paradigm. The boundaries of the biomedical paradigm are evident - we need the social sciences, humanities and Indigenous wisdom to widen out our view of science and healing."
Brazilian researcher Glauber Loures de Assis offered a sharper caveat: "Replicating a failed model of health care with new drugs cannot shift the paradigm." In other words, the paradigm can shift, but not if Western science just folds psychedelic medicines into the same broken system.
The ramifications of colonisation, neo-colonisation and exclusion
The paradigm gap described above is not an abstract disagreement. It is the direct, ongoing legacy of colonial violence and oppression of land, culture and people. Indigenous speakers came back to it again and again, often with open anger.
"We want to be involved in the questions, as well as the answers," said Shipibo-Konibo leader Panshin Nima Walter López. It is a modest-sounding demand that, historically, has rarely been met. Indigenous peoples have suffered land theft, murder, ecocide and near-total exclusion from the research and policy processes now being built around their own medicines and knowledge.
"This knowledge is not only ours. People who want to take our medicine: Why don't you speak to us? Why don't you establish a dialogue? When you establish a dialogue, you breed new consciousness," remarked Roseli Nogueira. "I challenge the scientists, the developers, to listen: We came here with an open heart. We don't want royalties; we want respect," added Nixiwaka Biraci Brasil Yawanawa.
The forum's reach extended well beyond the Amazon. Māori (Aotearoa) and Canadian First Nations representatives, among them Anna Leigh Hodge, Dr Essie Van Zuylen and Jor'el McQueen, spoke to a version of the same story playing out under different settler-colonial histories. Jem Stone, an Australian First Nations woman and director of Indigenous Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy (IPAT), gave a recent case study. Stone co-founded IPAT in 2023 with clinical psychologist Bianca Sebben, after Australia rescheduled MDMA and psilocybin for clinical use without consulting a single Indigenous-led body.
"The horse has already left the gate," Stone said. "We are trying to generate cultural accountability." According to Stone, legal psychedelic therapy in Australia "remains completely inaccessible to Aboriginal people", and has so far been designed, funded and regulated without cultural protocols or Indigenous representation built in from the start.
Plant medicines in a time of environmental extractivism and escalating violence
"That's why we go to the forest," Benki Piyãko told the forum. "The forest is our university." For the Asháninka and many other peoples, knowledge of plants - what they treat, how they are prepared, what doses are safe - comes from a direct relationship with a living forest, built up over generations, not from laboratory research.
Meanwhile, those same forests are under increasingly direct attack. Drug traffickers, illegal loggers, miners and natural resource companies were named repeatedly as the immediate threats to Indigenous territories across the Amazon.
"Our territories are being destroyed by the oil and mineral industries," one speaker said. "Our lives are being threatened, and we are being threatened. We want respect for our lives."
Putanny Yawanawá, one of the first female shamans (pajé) of the Yawanawá people, reaffirmed the stakes on the ground: "We cannot flee anymore, we cannot go away. Violence in the territories is increasing alongside a lack of protection from the states."
Over the past 50 years, it is estimated that 17-18% of the Amazon forest has been lost, pushing the forest close to a critical tipping point. Approximately 35% of the remaining Amazon rainforest lies within Indigenous territories, but protecting it comes at a heavy cost to the people who live there, and states often offer them little protection in return. In 2025, there were more than 100 reported murders of nature and land defenders across Latin America, with the highest tolls in Colombia (39) and Brazil (26). Almost 75% of the killings documented that year were of Indigenous people and small-scale farmers targeted for defending their land.
There is pressure from another direction too. As global demand for ayahuasca rises, so does the strain of harvesting the two plants (Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis) it is brewed from, often with no oversight at all. As an increasing number of tourists travel to the Amazon and ayahuasca ceremonies continue to pop up across the world for therapeutic, religious or spiritual purposes, over-harvesting may be stripping some areas faster than the plants can grow back. Beyond the plants themselves, "increasing consumption in nontraditional contexts raises concerns about ancestral knowledge being commodified for the market," said Carlos Minuano, editor of Psicodelicamente, who recently reported on the topic.
Piyãko also raised a deeper concern: what happens to knowledge once it leaves its context entirely. "Here people are talking about psychedelics, about a plant being discovered by the world, as many others have been discovered, which brings us big concern," he said. "They study cells and properties of plants, but whatever they discover has an owner. Behind that wisdom are people who have studied it, learned from it, and carry it - the true owners of that wisdom." Extracted into a lab, he argued, that knowledge is severed from the people and the land that produced and protected it over generations.
The transmission of that knowledge is itself fragile, resting increasingly on a shrinking number of elders. And the language used throughout the forum to describe the Amazon's ecological state was unambiguous: a point of no return, a system that "cannot sustain anymore." Ultimately, the threat to ayahuasca is not simply about regulation, biopiracy or medicalising ancestral knowledge; it is about whether the forests and peoples it comes from survive long enough for any of those questions to matter.
A working model of Indigenous-led science: OIOC's programme
Drug Science shared one of the forum's stages with members of the Organisation for Indigenous Outreach & Conservation (OIOC) to discuss the importance of reciprocity and Indigenous-led science. The presentation highlighted the forthcoming Indigenous-Led Plant Medicine Science Program (ILP), developed in collaboration with Drug Science and Kamëntšá and Kofan knowledge holders. Said Melany Zarate, who runs the programme's operations:
"The programme reinvigorates ancestral knowledge held in community, and teaches ecology, reciprocity and consciousness studies, offering a new paradigm of intercultural sciences. Thanks to the programme, an important contribution was made to purchase two hectares of land that now house ten families, and a two-month programme for the local language school, currently revitalising an endangered Indigenous language."
The programme is one of an increasing number of attempts to build the kind of reciprocal relationship Indigenous speakers were calling for throughout the forum.
Anne Schlag argued that alongside standardised ethical and educational guidelines for the safe use of psychedelics, there need to be equivalent standards for reciprocity and for giving back to the traditional knowledge carriers of ancient plant medicine. That need is only growing more urgent as pharmaceutical companies continue to commercialise compounds derived from naturally occurring psychedelics and sacred plant medicines, and are poised to generate large revenues from psilocybin or 5-MeO-DMT-based treatments, with "few, if any, benefits accruing to Indigenous peoples," according to Schlag. "Reciprocity needs to be the new diversity," she added. The development of psychedelic medicines, she argued, must be co-designed, with benefit-sharing, mutual respect and Indigenous peoples as equal decision-makers rather than just a source of information. Indigenous-led programmes can help close that gap by fostering "an intercultural educational model in which Indigenous leadership is foundational - not an addition to a conventional scientific programme," Schlag noted.
The ILP brings researchers, academics and practitioners directly into Indigenous-led plant-medicine spaces, offering a hybrid model pairing monthly online study with a 10-day immersion in Putumayo, Colombia, over six months. The first cohort is due to begin in November 2026, with a second opening for applications on 1 January 2027.
The principle repeated throughout the forum, as a requirement rather than an aspiration, was involving Indigenous peoples in the science from the very beginning, not consulting them once the research or a study design is already fixed.
Beyond diplomacy and dialogue: a new alliance
Strip away the science and the policy debates, and what the forum's Indigenous participants were asking for was simple: to be listened to, respected, and trusted with their own medicines.
Benjamin De Loenen, founder and executive director of ICEERS, framed the forum itself as a vehicle for that kind of co-creation rather than a conventional conference: not a space to talk about Indigenous knowledge from the outside, but one in which Indigenous spiritual leaders, cultural custodians, scientists, policymakers, funders and community builders could ask, together, what future partnership requires.
Nixiwaka Biraci Brasil Yawanawa put the invitation plainly:
"In a time when humanity is ill, and we know it, our plants may help heal disease in this world. We're bringing here an opportunity for a dialogue with the scientific world for the common good."
Dennis McKenna offered perhaps the broadest possible frame for why that matters. Seen from the distance of the moon, he reminded the audience, "we are all Indigenous to planet Earth." It echoes what astronauts call the overview effect, which some argue a psychedelic experience can recreate. "As our planet is burning," said Melany Zarate, "we are ever more reminded of the close connection we have with the natural world."
The forum closed as it opened, with song and the whole plenary hall on its feet. The point was the same throughout: neither ecological nor scientific progress can be left to one side alone. As one Asháninka leader put it: "We all have a duty to make our voices heard, so the forest is not destroyed. That we unite to protect nature." Or, more starkly still, from another speaker: "If the forest dies, ayahuasca dies with it."
The forum's name made the point, and plenty of speakers repeated it over three days in Girona: this is the time to build these alliances. Not just because it would be good for Indigenous peoples and everyone else, but because there may not be another chance.
Note: Many Amazonian and other Indigenous peoples with deep ancestral relationships to ayahuasca and other plant medicines were not present for this global conversation, a reminder that even an unprecedented gathering of this size is not a complete one. Additionally, several quotations in this article come from the forum's live interpretation from Spanish and Portuguese, so may not be word for word.