Plants with Soul

Kneedler mounted a tripartite argument: first, that the active ingredient in ayahuasca, dmt, posed a genuine danger to human health, leading to anxiety, dissociative states, and psychosis; second, that if udv were allowed to import the brew, some portion of it might be diverted and used for recreation outside of controlled spiritual settings; and finally, that importation would violate both the US Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, to which the US is a signatory. Allowing lower-court rulings to stand, Kneedler maintained, would undermine US drug policy. Open that door, he said, and who knows what groups might claim a religious use for drug activity—for example, Rastafarians with marijuana.

In response, Nancy Hollander, the lawyer representing udv, argued that in Brazil, where hoasca is legal and where the udv has been active for decades, and in New Mexico, sacramental consumption of the tea has caused no significant adverse health consequences and has not been diverted to illicit use. Nor has there been any evidence that peyote—used by the much larger (250,000 members) Native American Church—has been diverted to non-religious uses. As for the 1971 UN convention, the lower courts had already found that it does not apply to plants or to infusions, concoctions, or teas made from them. Moreover, the convention expressly permits religious-use exemptions, such as for peyote.

The Supreme Court largely agreed with Hollander. Justice Stephen Breyer noted “a rather rough problem under the First Amendment” and argued that if it was permissible for Congress to make an exception to the Controlled Substances Act for peyote, why not for hoasca Chief Justice John Roberts objected to the government’s “totally categorical” approach, saying it would apply even if a single member of a single udv group consumed a single drop of the tea once a year. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative who might have been expected to support the federal side, seemed skeptical. It was Scalia who wrote the 1990 opinion that had allowed states to ban tribal use of peyote. That decision was effectively overturned by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—and the results of the reversal, he suggested, were a demonstration that “you can make an exception without the sky falling.” When Kneedler protested that making such an exception would effectively turn decisions about federal drug laws over to 700 district court judges, Justice David Souter observed, “Isn’t that exactly what the act does”

The Supreme Court rendered its verdict in February, voting unanimously in favour of udv’s position, with one abstention. In his written ruling, Chief Justice Roberts noted, “Everything the Government says about the dmt in hoasca—that, as a Schedule I substance, Congress has determined that it “has a high potential for abuse,’ “has no currently accepted medical use,’ and has “a lack of accepted safety for use...under medical supervision,’ applies in equal measure to the mescaline in peyote, yet both the Executive and Congress itself have decreed an exception from the Controlled Substances Act for Native American religious use of peyote.”

What impact the US decision will have on other jurisdictions remains to be seen. In Canada, the use of ayahuasca remains, at least for now, illegal.

After completing his Ph.D., Jeremy Narby returned home to Switzerland and joined Nouvelle Planète, a Swiss ngo dedicated to promoting bilingual education and securing property rights for South American Indians. At the same time, he started writing a book, seeking to reconcile shamanic wisdom with scientific knowledge, and to explain how plants might, in fact, communicate. He read dozens of books and scholarly articles, made copious notes, and went for long ruminative hikes, but after some months felt no closer to postulating a theory.

It was a footnote in an article by another anthropologist, Michael Harner, that finally provided the spark. Harner had taken ayahuasca with the Conibo Indians in the Amazon in 1961 and, like many others, had been transformed. In his vision, he had seen giant dragon-like creatures, which spoke to him in a kind of thought language. They showed the earth as it had existed before life had formed. Then, thousands of black specks with wings and whale-like bodies descended from outer space. He was told they were embedded within all forms of life, including humans. Harners footnote said, “In retrospect, one could say they were almost like dna, though at the time I had no knowledge of dna.”

dna (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, of course, the language of life itself. Informing every living thing on the planet, every microbe, plant, and animal, it is a miniature coded text that has survived, virtually unchanged, for at least 3.5 billion years. The only difference between a bacterium and a human being, with respect to dna, is the amount of genetic information carried and its sequencing. In an average human being, there are enough strands of dna to cover 125 billion miles—enough to wrap around the planet five million times. Moreover, dna contains coding for an unfathomable amount of genetic data. Think of the largest, most sophisticated data-storage device: dna contains 100 trillion times as much information. A single cell contains more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopdia Britannica put together, yet weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram.

Poring over his notes, Narby suddenly had an epiphany: the shape of the dna molecule, discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953, is the double helix, a serpentine form that twists endlessly upon itself as it replicates. It’s like a sinuous ladder, consisting of four chemicals—adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T)—that bond repeatedly in pairs (A always with T, C always with G). That same shape, he realized, is precisely the form described by shamans the world over to explain the origins of life on earth. On every continent, from ancient Sumer to Scandinavia, from Amazonia to Australia, creation myths speak of twinned serpents, twirling ladders, twisting ropes, spiralling staircases, intertwined vines, or trees that stretch from heaven to earth, the so-called axis mundi. Even the Old Testament’s patriarch Jacob dreams of a ladder touching heaven “with the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” In Amerindian terms, ladders, ropes, vines, and trees are the means by which shamans ascend to the heavens or descend to earth to communicate with spirits.

Narby was staggered. “It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links between the “myths’ of “primitive peoples’ and molecular biology,” he says. On the contrary, the wisdom of indigenous peoples was typically discounted and their knowledge of pharmacology deemed an accident. But the parallels were striking. Like the serpents of myth, dna is both incredibly long and infinitely small, lives in salt water, is both single and double, and capable of complete transformation while remaining the same.