ICEERS | June 5, 2025
In a world that oscillates between spiritual veneration and criminalization, Jerónimo Mazarrasa — Program Director at ICEERS — has spent two decades exploring a question as simple as it is unsettling: “How can the same plant be medicine for one culture and poison for another?”
The answer, as he reveals in his TEDx talk, lies not only in botany, but in the cultures, rituals, and relationships that societies establish with these plants. His story takes us from the depths of the Amazon to the ceremonial halls of the Global North, exploring the chasm between the sacred and the forbidden.
A journey of discovery
Jerónimo Mazarrasa recalls a profoundly transformative experience that marked a turning point in his career. After overcoming a demanding journey — official permits, a daring flight in a single-engine plane, a landing on a dirt runway, and a five-day trek through the Amazon jungle — he finally reached an indigenous community in the Colombian Vaupés. There, in an enclave where the dances of the Yuruparí are still practiced, he was welcomed as a witness to a wisdom that cannot be learned from books or laboratories, but is transmitted in a circle, body to body, between generations.
That night, under the roof of the great maloka — the communal ceremonial house — Mazarrasa witnessed one of the most moving and eloquent scenes of his life: the collective preparation of mambe, a mixture made from freshly harvested coca leaves, carefully roasted, ground, sifted, and combined with vegetable ashes that were delicately measured out using a feather. The entire process was carried out in an atmosphere of contemplation, beauty, and attention.
Mambe was not simply a substance: it was a bond, a plant memory activated by the ceremony. Once shared, the participants took turns speaking. One by one, without interrupting, without raising their voices. Ideas were not confronted, but woven together. Positions were not contradicted, but refined. Each intervention contributed a perspective, revolving around a common theme as if it were a spiral of shared thought. The result was not a vote or an argumentative victory, but a form of nonverbal consensus, based on mutual respect and active listening.
For Jerónimo, this scene represented not only an ancestral practice, but a cultural revelation. In the mambeadero, he found a tangible expression of what an advanced civilization could be, a collective intelligence rooted in serene dialogue and communion with the plant. In comparison, the models of political deliberation he was accustomed to—marked by polarization, noise, and ego—seemed to him to be merely a rudimentary sketch of coexistence.
That night, in the heart of the Amazon, he understood that “civilization” is not synonymous with technological modernity or urban sophistication, but rather the ability to sustain healthy relationships: with words, with the community, with the environment, and with the living elements that have accompanied human beings since time immemorial.
Medicine and poison
In mambeaderos, both coca and tobacco represent much more than simple substances. They manifest themselves as plants of power, deeply integrated into the spiritual and social fabric of indigenous peoples. They are medicines in the broadest sense of the word: not only physical remedies, but also tools that promote mental clarity, ethical discernment, community cohesion, and connection with the transcendent. These plants allow people to think clearly, engage in peaceful dialogue, and connect with the sacred, as part of living practices that link ancestral memory with everyday life.
In contrast, in the Western imagination — shaped by centuries of prohibition, colonialism, and biomedical reductionism — these same plants are deeply associated with harm. Coca and tobacco, in their industrialized forms disconnected from ritual, evoke images of addiction, crime, disease, and death. Tobacco, in particular, has become the leading cause of preventable deaths globally, while coca, converted into cocaine, symbolizes one of the major failed crusades of our recent history: the “war on drugs.”
The paradox is evident and disturbing. How can we explain that tobacco functions as a channel of prayer and covenant for some, and as a toxic product for millions? What happens when traditional knowledge, transmitted with reverence and care, is replaced by accelerated industrial production processes? What is lost when spirituality is replaced by commodification, and ceremonial respect by compulsive consumption?
The answer points to an uncomfortable but necessary truth: it is not the plant itself that determines its impact, but the way we relate to it. Context, intention, ritual, and respect are as decisive as chemical composition. Stripping plants of their cultural and spiritual dimension not only impoverishes their meaning, but also opens the door to forms of use that generate suffering, dependence, and uprooting.
The exception that gives hope
Faced with the repeated pattern of extraction, distortion, and degradation that many sacred plants have suffered upon entering the global circuit, Jerónimo Mazarrasa identifies a notable exception that offers a glimmer of hope: ayahuasca. Unlike its predecessors in this process of intercultural contact, its contemporary expansion into the Global North has been accompanied, in many cases, by an explicit desire to preserve its ceremonial dimension. Instead of being marketed as just another substance in the wellness or alternative therapy market, ayahuasca has begun to be integrated as a collective practice, with a strong ritual, musical, and ethical component.
Ceremonies outside the Amazon, although diverse, tend to preserve central elements of traditional practices: the role of the guide or facilitator, the conscious selection of the dose, the use of songs or music to contain the experience, and the importance of the group as a support. This phenomenon represents something historically unprecedented: for the first time, an indigenous medicine is globalizing as a context, not just as a substance.
However, Mazarrasa does not idealize the process. He recognizes that this emerging path is far from perfect. At ICEERS, we identify and address urgent challenges on a daily basis: cultural appropriation without recognition or reciprocity, commercial pressure that threatens the sustainability of species, legal loopholes that create legal uncertainty for practitioners and facilitators, and the lack of shared ethical standards and care structures to manage difficult experiences or psychological risks.
Despite these challenges, the fact that there are communities, collectives, and networks striving to preserve the integrity of the bond with the plant is, in Jerónimo’s words, a “sign of significant cultural change.” A sign that another way of encountering worlds is possible: more horizontal, more respectful, more willing to learn rather than impose. And that, in a global landscape marked by spiritual extractivism and the commodification of the sacred, represents a truly luminous exception.
The gift of the gods: myth and warning
To conclude his reflection, our program director draws on an ancient myth: at the beginning of time, the gods offered humans a powerful gift. If used with reverence, it would bring blessings; if manipulated with ignorance or greed, it would become a curse. That “gift” could be a plant, fire, or even a technology, such as artificial intelligence.
The message of this myth resonates with particular urgency in our time: it is not simply about the substance or technology in question, but about the kind of relationship we establish with it. Do we approach it as learners or as conquerors? As guardians or as consumers? Through dialogue or imposition?
Jerónimo proposes that perhaps the time has come to abandon the arrogant certainties that have historically guided industrialized societies in their relationship with the natural world. Perhaps the path to a more just and sustainable future requires a radical shift: listening with humility to those who, for generations, have cultivated an intimate, reciprocal, and ceremonial relationship with these living entities we call plants.
In the words of some indigenous peoples, it is about learning to be “in good relationship” with our surroundings — whether a plant, a technology, or even a foreign culture. And that, he concludes, could be one of the most urgent skills we need to develop collectively in these fast-paced and vulnerable times.
A paradigm shift
For Jerónimo, restoring the link between humanity and master plants requires an ancestral pedagogy, where plants do not act as objects of consumption, but as agents of teaching. This collective learning challenges us on multiple levels: it forces us to review our notions of health, our relationship with pain and suffering, our forms of authority, our structures of care, and even our idea of progress.
The transition from fear and prohibition to a conscious, responsible, and transformative relationship will not be immediate or easy. It requires dismantling decades — even centuries — of prejudice, epistemic racism, and cultural extractivism. It involves ceasing to view these plants as threats or products and beginning to recognize them as living teachers, embedded in webs of reciprocity, memory, and spirituality.
The history of these plants is not set in stone. Their fate in our cultures can still be reoriented. But for that to happen, more than legislative reforms or clinical protocols are needed. What is needed is an ethical and emotional disposition: the willingness to listen without imposing, to learn without appropriating, to protect without domesticating. Ultimately, it is not just about the plants. It is about us. It is about how we want to inhabit the world, what kind of relationships we are willing to sustain with that which is powerful, sacred, and different. And for that — more than certainties or solutions — what is most needed is humility.
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Tags:
ayahuasca
, traditional medicine
, coca
, psychoactive plants
, Amazon rainforest