Global Ganja Report

Health Canada is threatening to prosecute a Vancouver physician who says he has successfully using the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca to treat addiction. In a two-page letter sent last week, Johanne Beaulieu, director of Ottawa's Office of Controlled Substances, reminded Gabor Maté that possession of ayahuasca is illegal under Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The letter warned that unless he immediately ceased the treatments, the RCMP would be notified. Dr. Maté, a family practitioner who specializes in addiction, said he will reluctantly comply with the order.

On Oct. 19, while en route to leading traditional ayahuasca ceremonies in Oregon, indigenous Colombian healer Juan Agreda Chindoy was arrested at Houston International Airport by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for possession of his traditional medicine. He is being charged as a federal criminal and faces up to 20 years in prison.

For 25 years, journalist Peter Gorman has been traveling to Peru and experimenting with the jungle hallucinogen ayahuasca, a mind-bending brew prepared from vines, bark and leaves. Gorman picked the Peruvian side of the Amazon, the city of Iquitos, as the base for his studies that he writes about in Ayahuasca in My Blood.

Brazil's Santo Daime church, which uses ayahuasca as a sacrament, is under fire following the March 12 slaying of Glauco Villa Boas, a prominent cartoonist for the influential Folha de São Paulo newspaper. Villa Boas was killed along with his son, Raoni, outside his outside São Paulo home. Glauco, as he's known in Brazil, was a leader at a Santo Daime church, and his alleged killer had frequented the church, police say. Media speculation links the suspect's motives and state of mind to the church and its psychoactive sacrament.