Bottoms Up: knowing the cost of your brew

I've been working with Mama Dina's family in Pucallpa fairly closely over the last several years to gain an insider's perspective over harvesting, cooking, and exporting of medicine. Rare few people are to be trusted in Ayahuasca business, and those who can be trusted ain't doing it for the money alone. Seems obvious, but given overwhelming poverty and hand-to-mouth subsistence with no guarantee of getting by the following day, you will be lucky to get your hands on medicine brewed and harvested in a sanctified fashion simply because it requires pure heart and meditation, which a mind driven by ambition of quick profit cannot afford.

After all, folks fork out an excess of 500 euros to sit in a ceremony in Netherlands. That's an equivalent of three months' salary in Peruvian Amazon, where a man breaks his back for 40 soles a day doing hard labor (equivalent of 10 USD), sweat-pouring in 36-degree heat and soaking wet his T-shirt. An average gringo would pass out long before the midday lugging hardwoods in the jungle. And if you want your medicine brewed to have strength, it is hardwoods you will want to stoke your fire with, capirona, shivavako, etc. so that it burns hot.

Most importantly, the vine must be harvested with all due respect, meaning while fasting on empty stomach and supplicating Ayahuasca spirit beforehand. To cut the vine without asking permission of the spirit residing therein is like busting into someone's house and helping oneself to the food on the table and anything else one wishes to get their hands on. What kind of blessing such ransacking may have?

I've seen Ayahuasca vine piled up several meters high off the ground in long rows. Some pieces six inches thick to be cooked on gas in a cemented kitchen with corrugated iron roof for unscrupulous and anonymous export to god knows where. These are grandmother plants indiscriminately cut down for quick profit and a major part of the vine comes from clearings made by the illegal logging of virgin jungle. Bribes are paid to the corrupt officials and destruction of forest continues business as usual. Loggers can't tell one vine from the other and whoever owns the land kindly allows old woman to crawl over the debris feeding her sacks with that uña de gato since they got paid for their timber anyway.

Harvesting of Ayahuasca as it's taking place around Pacalpa and the rest of Yucayali region is nowhere near sustainable. Furthermore, ayahuasca doesn't grow just anywhere. The price of the brew per liter as sold in Pucallpa hardly allows for the replanting of the vine and barely covers the labor and sweat poured into making the medicine. Terrence McKenna said back in late 80s that "apocalypse is not something which is coming; the apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived.” Peru, indeed, is high on the list of those slave labor colonies milked for all it's worth and it’s been this way for half a millennia.

Today's state of Peru is not to be believed but witnessed. Twenty bucks a day is a standard ongoing rate for doing hard yarns in a sweltering heat bitten by ants, wasps and mosquitoes in the virgin jungle. Kids of primary school age are banging away knee-high in sawdust at camu camu boxes in the sawmill factory next door where I stay with my Jedi Warrior Princess CuddlePants. Less qualified girlfriends don't survive the ordeal in this arse end of town, bothering the swamp, otherwise known as Irapai, for the sole purpose of undertaking shamanic apprenticeship under Cesar Soimetsa (who is famous enough to receive fleeting visitations from a head of one of the biggest oil company in Russia landing on private jet plane for three consecutive ceremonies, but otherwise bobbing up and down on waves of uncertainty lacking in basic necessities to run a highly unlikely semblance of a healing center).

Peru is a kind of place where you bring your own toilet paper to the bathroom to wipe your arse with and sing hallelujah if there is running water in the tap to wash your hands afterwards. Mama Dina, one of a kind of a curandero who cures epilepsy in two five-day healing diets for a hundred soles and a promise of a chicken that never materializes spent better part of her life working with medicine and her house is nothing but a hovel with dirt floor and hardwood planks for a bank to sleep on, a single broken tap dripping into a wash tub used for bathing, washing clothes and doing dishes consecutively or concurrently, depending on the number of visiting family members seeking matriarchal advice and prodigal gringos freshly unkempt from a night of drinking purga that tend to stick their head into the above-mentioned tub seeking instantaneous refreshment and relief from the residual mareación in the wake of the ceremony previously held.

In a sense, all gringos are prodigal, for they crave a return to their natural state, a Paradise Lost, seeking connection to Mother Nature and the Universe at large through the umbilical cord generously provided by master plans, first and foremost ayahuasca, back to the source. Whatever is the price of medicine you pay, amigo, hardly any of it trickles down to those who harvest and cook the vine while living in the front trenches. It is a battlefield for mere survival for them, and I don't mean this in a figurative sense of the word. It is fairly brutal.

First time I came to know Dina, she lisped atrociously and could not chew on anything harder than a boiled egg and a mashed plantain for having knocked all her teeth out while bouncing off the branches when she fell from some 30-odd meters having climbed a massive tree to cut ayahuasca, some three months before her son Jack recruited her help and expertise for a cooking expedition in the virgin jungle outside of Masisea to showcase the artisan way of preparing the medicine (I have previously published the whole unabridged account in the price of medicine blog, which you can find among early entries).

Apart from Dina still recovering from almost falling to her death and spending a month bedridden, being paralyzed and drinking renakilla to mend the bones, we had a small but stout and incredibly strong ashaninka fellow called Chino, who lugged loads of provisions I could barely lift off the ground for miles coming back to camp in complete darkness navigating his way through the jungle with no headtorch or illumination of any kind and climbed trees like a monkey. Well, he fell on the first day of the climbing and looked fairly dead with gushing opening on his skull and unnaturally twisted body lying motionless while Dina hovered above him and I ran around in circles shouting for our commander-in-chief, Captain Jack, who was scouting for more ayahuasca vine to cut down.

Long story short, Chino compromised all healing work Dina was giving him and repeatedly broke his dieta in the following six weeks, never walked again and died a year later in the care of his adopted family who didn't care for him a bit. Myself and Jack cooked some twenty liters of exceptionally strong and super healthy, super healing medicine while Dina tended to Chino and washed his soiled blankets every morning by hand in a murky pool of stale water that was used both for bathing and cooking.

We cut and humped all the vine back to camp from several miles away following hardly seen jungle tracks, smashed it to shreds with hardwood mallets made up for the occasion and stoke the fire for three consecutive days and nights of continuous uninterrupted cooking kept awake by the medicinal vapors entering through our skin pores with our breath while stirring the brew and draining the pots of their dark-red contents for further reduction and refinement.

For your reference, a liter of drinkable medicine is reduced to about half a kilo of honey-thick brew that was previously sent to overseas recipients and, as of late, is further reduced to 1/4 of a kilo of ayahuasca paste which is thick enough to comprise a solid substance like shoe polish or cacao butter which doesn't move inside the container and therefore is eligible for international air shipping.

Dina has given birth to twenty-two kids, seventeen of which have survived. All of them work with the medicine one way or another, be it harvesting the vine or cooking it. Jack has excelled at the alchemical side of preparing medicines, not just ayahuasca which can be mixed with a variety of other plants to prolong the medicine effect, enhance the visionary side and so forth, but even with his experience at manufacturing rapé, bark remedies, his unbounded enthusiasm, hard-working ethics and helpful insights and revelations bestowed to him in his vigils and his sleep, still he is barely making ends meet while dreaming of prosperity and being able to cultivate a garden of Eden in his jungle paradise.

There are always bundles of ayahuasca vine in Dina's place, always hundred-litre aluminum pots on the fire, always a quiet hassle going on for the benefit of a client requiring x-amount of wine, leaf or a brew, and a sound of old Nestor hammering away day in and day out in his 70s powered by Dr. Manchinga flowing in his veins from drinking the milky resin. Yes, it's all for nothing. If I didn't fork out for a new set of teeth, Dina would still be lisping and away mashing her plantain cooked on the old rusty fire grill. No matter how much they hassle, it’s still rotten planks of wood ripped out of the wall of the howl to cook chapo with, same leaking roofing iron in every corner of the house, no change. Same Gerardo's rusty, falling apart motorcar that can't be trusted on a sunny day to deliver his loads, so he makes the runs either late at night or 3am in the morning to avoid idling in the traffic and zoom through red lights like a runaway bandit (besides, he looks like one, covered in scars from false gunshots, stabbings and metal chain fighting in his jolly days of violent discontent before his first child was born). The whole family is worth an epic novel of seventeen chapters just to give you an idea of what these people go through on a daily basis to deliver the medicine and their commitment and effort for which they see not even peanuts coming their way, just peanut husks.

There are no doubt other folks doing much better financially by supplying the goodies from the jungle to well-connected importers across the world, dishing out hefty bribes to corrupt authorities and hooking up with submarine-owning drug cartels to deliver their stuff to whenever it needs to go. Where do you think your money go? And do you know where your brew comes from? Do you really? Because the family I am intimately familiar with surely does not benefit from making the medicine available to an odd dozen of well-to-do ayahuasca businessmen and businesswomen. Some are less scrupulous than others and nobody is willing to pay a single centimo more if they can help it.

It gets quite ridiculous, in fact. I was present at Dina's place once when her older daughter came in pleading for several hundred soles demanded by police who held a cargo of freshly cut ayahuasca vine as ransom at the roadblock. Now, the cargo was ordered by Mr. X and contained over twenty bundles of ayahuasca, some four hundred kilos altogether. Mr. X, an owner of a well-established medicine center and living in a mansion, rather than a house with four brand-new vehicles parked up in a garage, who has known Dina for many years, would not advance a single sol to recuperate the harvest. We are not talking about finger-thick vine that takes two to three years to grow. The ayahuasca from virgin jungle is thick as an arm and won't be replaced anytime soon, even if replanting is underway, which is not happening. Yes, there is folks like Alonso del Rio and Brazilian Church of Santo Daime who is doing it, being able to afford both the land and the labor, but if you want semi-affordable medicine, it won't be these guys supplying it to you.

And so I had to pay the ransom that time around, too, as Dina never has any money on her. None of the family does (apart from Huan Carlos, whose rhetoric I came to distrust after being swindled one too many times. He recorded me and Rachel to promote his medicines once and we hereby withdraw our recommendation). Trust is the main issue in the jungle due to the presiding chaos and perpetual state of flux with vigorously spawning themselves emergencies popping up like mushrooms in the rainy month of summer. Even the best intentions in the most honorable of hearts often do about-turn in the face of the brutal post-apocalyptic reality of Peruvian Amazon.

Mama Dina, ‘pura medicina’ as we call her for her pure-hearted generosity of sharing both her healing medicine and her knowledge of plants out of sheer compassion for human beings, regardless how well-off or destitute poor they are, or how faithful or lacking in religious zeal they may be, has been genuinely meaning to give us a dieta for at least six months in a row and continuously unable to get away from tending to sick-and-dying family members and friends of friends, midwifing her pregnant daughters about to give birth, trying in vein to save her chakra with medicinal plants and flowering chakruna bush from fires purposefully set by jealous neighbours wishing to see their own corn sprouting on the charred land.

(which in turn would give them rightful ownership of the property since the municipal law is on the side of productive agricultural development, so-called, and encourages land take-overs) and harvesting ayahuasca vine in the virgin jungle in between the ordeals to put food on the table and pay the bills to connect her water again. Until she fell again just before Christmas climbing the vine flat on her back, which left her once again paralysed for six weeks in bed getting soaked by the dripping roof at the start of the mighty downpours since all the roofing iron in her hovel is crinkled up and full of rust and holes.

Chino’s dead, Dina nearly twice dead, all her teeth knocked out, walking hunch-backed and going through long months of dieta to recover, several of her sons having fallen and suffered accidents from turning-over motor taxies loaded with ayahuasca vine on the way back to town, living hand-to-mouth with a huge heart and a prayer to be well and have the blessing of the spirits, that’s the long and short of what I’ve seen in two years I’ve been running around figuring out how to help the situation and generate income for the family that will allow semblance of human existence. They don’t know on what they are missing out because their entire life is poverty-stricken.

My question is, what kind of healing benefit one expects to receive drinking medicine which has been obtained as such crippling cost on behalf of the people who harvest it? What kind of blessing will come of it if the offering is misplaced and benefits the middleman and middleman only? Do you know where your medicine comes from? If you bought medicine from Cielo, may she rest in peace, guess whom she’s been calling to get the vine from?

Everybody knows who Cielo was and nobody ever heard of Dina. Dina who lifted from her deathbed twice, who healed hundreds with miraculous healing powers of master plants she worships and which gifted her visions, who lives in a hovel and is used to playing soccer games in her sixties, who is still alive and kicking against all odds, who has the discipline, the will and the faith - nobody ever heard of her.

Here is a call to honour the medicine, now that you know what’s at the bottom of that glass you’ve been praying to. Place you offerings into right hands, amigo. I’ve invested a better part of my savings, some fifty thousand soles, between my Shipibo family and Dina’s family over two years to make things happen and my conscious is clear when drinking the medicine. My offerings protect me.

Ignorance is not as much a bliss as it is a holiday from knowing the truth. Truth comes with responsibility, same as power. Unless you are able to respond to the truth, you no longer walk in the truth nor dance with it and the blessings slip between your fingers like fine sand.

Medicine in itself is priceless. Your willingness to make the offering to those who make it available to you is what brings the healing and the enlightenment. Medicine is generous, it's full of heart and forgiveness. It will gift you a glimpse of pure ecstasy and bliss, a taste of immortality and infinite light, but one will need to work hard to stay in the world of magic. One will need to undergo alchemical transformation and shed the impurities in order to know true gold. It ain’t about the money, never was and never will be. Money, however, is a form of energy and the flow must come back all the way down to nurture the roots of the family tree. When we feed the roots the growth happens, blossoms open and fruit comes in plentiful abundance.

Thank you for understanding! Blessings from the Amazon and please by all means get in touch. I am here to make friends and help the medicine family to do their work and share their goodness with those who value and appreciate genuine connection.