In the Jungle With the Leaf Press

Richard Evans Schultes, Shamanic Knowledge, and MK Ultra

In honour of Indigenous History Month, I am publishing a slimmed-down version of chapter 5 of my book Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains. If you want to check the literature I cite, full references can be found in the book’s bibliography, which you can buy or request via inter-library loan from your local library (or send me a direct message and I’ll send the bibliography to you as a PDF). In this version, I have removed everything specific to my fieldwork in a Guaraní-speaking community in the Bolivian Chaco called Isoso and left in all the reasons I think Richard Evans Schultes is a figure who deserves far more critical scrutiny than he usually gets. What he usually gets is hagiography.

The “father of ethnobotany”, Richard Evans Schultes

 In the second half of the twentieth century (and now well into the twenty-first) it has been an article of popular faith, and one that has had a tremendous impact on policy-making and international funding as it pertains to South American indigenous peoples, that their pharmacopeia is vast, mysterious, woefully understudied, and principally in the hands of shamans.  The person most often credited with “discovering” this set of facts is Richard Evans Schultes (1915 – 2001), hailed as the “father of modern ethnobotany”.  Despite hagiographic biographying (including on the big screen) and no small amount of self-mythologizing, the facts of his story lend themselves to less flattering interpretation.

 Schultes’ first foray into ethnobotany was in the company of anthropologist Weston LaBarre.  In the early 1930s, Schultes and LaBarre traveled together to Kiowa country, in Oklahoma, to study the use of peyote.  LaBarre based his 1937 doctoral thesis on that research.  Schultes, for his part, wrote an MA in 1938 on the basis of the peyote work and then a PhD in 1941 on the identity of botanical hallucinogens referred to in colonial-era chronicles of Mexico.  After finishing the doctorate, he went to the Colombian Amazon to research the indigenous arrow poison, curare.

In a late life interview, Schultes said he traveled with a grant from the “National Academy of Sciences” and the timing was due to the fact that turbocurarine had in the late 1930s been isolated as the active compound responsible for curare’s effectiveness as a muscle relaxant and as a result was beginning to be used in surgical anaesthesia such that it needed to be more effectively sourced (Gorman 1995).  His student and principal biographer, Wade Davis, tells the story slightly differently:  identifying the funding agency as the National Research Council and mentioning the immediately previous work of someone Davis calls Schultes’ “distant comrade, a man with a colourful past” Richard Gill, who in 1938 had brought 25 pounds of properly sourced and identified curare to the United States where they were “introduced into medical practice for a host of muscular and neurological ailments” (Davis 1997: 215) but that “All of this remained unknown to Schultes, who began his own search for arrow poisons on the Putumayo in January 1942” (ibid).

It is unlikely that this is true.  In 1941 Schultes’ old friend Weston LaBarre published a review of Gill’s swashbuckling 1940 account of his expedition, entitled White Water, Black Magic, in the important journal American Anthropologist.  Given their friendship and shared interests, one imagines LaBarre would have discussed the book with Schultes prior to publishing a review of it.  The review is short and worth quoting in full:

“A frankly popular book (and excellent reading on this score), the present work

will be of interest to the ethnobotanist, the ethnologist, and the anthropologist concerned with advances in modern psychiatry. It contains a complete account of the preparation of curare by the tribes of tropical Ecuador, as well as incidental ethnographical notes. Standardized curare has largely been made possible through Mr. Gill’s “functional exploring” of the region. The same substance on the Jivaros’ deadly arrow-point is recently being widely used in conjunction with metrazol shock-therapy of schizophrenia and the affective disorders. Preliminary reports (e.g. those of Dr. A. E. Bennett and Dr William Menninger) indicate that the relaxing action of curare reduces the danger of fracture and dislocation in the tonic phase of the metrazol convulsion, formerly a drawback in this therapeutic procedure.  The book contains maps and an index, and is profusely illustrated with the author’s own photographs.”

These uses of curare – as an adjunct to shock therapy and in psychiatric treatment – are quite different from those mentioned years later by Schultes and his biographer Davis.  They did, however, precede curare’s use as a surgical anaesthetic.  In the early 1940s, LaBarre was working at the psychiatric clinic of the Dr. William Menninger mentioned in the book review, located in Topeka, Kansas.  At the time, Dr. Menninger was serving as the Chief of the Army Medical Corps’ Psychiatric Services Division, where by the end of the Second World War he attained the rank of Brigadier General.  At the Menninger Clinic, one of the treatments in which Dr. (General) Menninger specialized was convulsive therapy for schizophrenia and depressive disorders.  The medical application of curare in the late 1930s and early 1940s was not yet to surgery but instead to psychiatry, where it made the application of various kinds of convulsive or “shock” therapy to psychiatric patients less physically dangerous because it rendered them unable to flail about during its administration.  They otherwise sometimes injured themselves badly.

The National Research Council (founded during the First World War) mentioned by Davis as having funded Schultes’ research was at the time much more closely allied to military and defense purposes than the National Academy of Sciences (to which Schultes referred when interviewed), which is a much older entity into which the NRC was absorbed after the Second World War.  According to Margaret Krieg (whose apposite book goes, as I shall note further on, strangely uncited by Davis), in 1935 there had been “some discussion about using curare as a military weapon” (1964: 225).  At the start of WWII, William Menninger’s brother and colleague Karl was one of the founding members of the “Committee for National Morale” which brought together psychologists and anthropologists to study propaganda and psychological operations in support of the Allied war effort (Chase 2002: 253).  The launch of Schultes’ post-doctoral career, then, was to study a psychoactively useful drug during wartime.

Once in Colombia, across January and February 1942 Schultes collected several other psychoactive plants (the stimulant yoco, the intoxicant chiricaspi, some “roots cooked to relieve hysteria”) and he also tried the hallucinogen yagé and recorded local information about plant admixtures said to vary its mental effects.  In March, he had the fortuitous good luck to “run into Colonel Gomez-Pereira, the Columbian army officer responsible for security in the borderlands” (Davis, 219).  Somehow Schultes persuaded this Colombian military man to mount a frontier patrol, and “escorted by the Colombian army, Schultes headed upriver into Kofán territory” (ibid).  Davis’s accounts suggests a kind of jolly serendipity to all of this, but it is astonishingly implausible that this kind of military cooperation would have been forthcoming on the basis of Schultes’ personal charm alone. According to Davis’s account, as soon as they arrived to a Kofán village the local shaman emerged in full headdress to greet them whereupon they were immediately offered a hallucinogenic brew:  they were now among “a people who evidently took the drug as casually as Englishmen take tea” (Davis 222).  Although during his time with the Kofán Schultes did not in fact collect any arrow poison species new to science, he did collect “dozens of folk remedies, stimulants, hallucinogens, fish poisons, and wild fruits” (Davis 225).   After a bit more riverine exploration on a military launch, “quite unexpectedly” (Davis 227) the services of a military plane were made available to Schultes in May 1942, to courier his collections to Bogotá.  He travelled with them, then returned to another Colombian naval base on another Amazonian river, on another military plane.  In July 1942, again using military transport, he returned to Bogotá.

In Bogotá, Schultes was told to abandon the curare research in favor of collecting rubber for the war effort to replace Southeast Asian sources that had fallen into Japanese hands.  As it turned out, synthetic rubber production obviated the need for natural rubber.  Though Schultes did collect many potentially blight-resistant varieties of rubber and establish test plantations in Costa Rica (since, unfortunately, destroyed according to Davis, 369), in fact very little Latin American rubber was put to use during the war (Davis 334).  For some reason, though, Schultes was exempted from conscription – according to Davis, due to the wartime importance of the rubber work (ibid.).  Schultes stayed on in Colombia after the war ended, ostensibly to continue his important research on rubber.   Although a prolific scholar, for whatever reason Schultes never did publish his supposed planned opus on South American rubber plant species.  On into the late 1940s and early 50s, in Davis’s account Schultes continued to manage to avail himself of military transport in the Colombian Amazon on a regular basis.  Despite this obliging relationship with the Colombian military, according to Davis Schultes was more or less totally unaware of the outbreak of La Violencia in Colombia in 1948 (408).  Not all observers of the period affirm this obliviousness: Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett say “his [Schultes’] reports [to U.S. officials] included descriptions of the politics of various individual Colombians during the civil war” (1995: 505). 

In Davis’s version of events, however, Schultes spent almost all of his time with “the Indians” (this very general descriptor appears frequently).  Davis claims that Schultes spoke “two indigenous languages… fluently” (1997: 476) though it is difficult to see on the basis of the evidence in Davis’s own book how this could possibly be true, and is a feat almost unmatched in the history of South Americanist anthropology and would be rare even amongst missionaries who spend their entire lives working in indigenous communities.  Schultes’ time in the field amounts to perhaps two weeks among the Kofán, ten days as the guest of a Catholic mission priest among the Huitoto (Davis 1997: 232), and eighteen months (interrupted with returns to both Bogotá and Boston) at one of two Colombian trading posts for the commercial exploitation of rubber in the establishment of which Schultes was involved in ways that Davis does not make great effort to elucidate (1997: 465 – 466; 478), which recruited Indian labor of diverse linguistic origin, and in expeditions from which Davis admits “[Schultes] would not spend a great deal of time in any one village” (1997: 479).  In a collection of Schultes’ photographs from the Amazon, posthumously edited by Davis, he says, “It is perhaps no accident that so many of Schultes’s finest photographs were taken at only four localities, all relatively brief interludes during his many long years in the forest” (2004: x).  Yes, perhaps not.

A striking feature of Davis’s account of Schultes’ time in the Amazon is ­that – despite all the U.S. federal funding behind it, the Colombian military boat and plane trips facilitating it, the series of local men Friday accompanying it – Davis’s overwhelming emphasis is on Schultes’ autonomy and self-sufficiency during it.  For Davis, Schultes is always setting off with a minimum of gear, assistance, guidance, spending long periods of time alone in the forest, paddling up and down hundreds of kilometers of rapids practically unassisted and eating almost nothing along the way, turning up his nose at most of the human company on offer (though Davis assures us Schultes had a kind of magical rapport with “the Indians” – astonishingly rarely specified by individual names, however).  In response to a set of queries I sent about One River, Davis replied (in part):  “He was conservative in terms of his notion of the role of government in the lives of people. But he was a total libertarian who far before his time could care less about someone's sexual orientation [an attentive reader of his life story would not imagine so – KL] or interest in drugs. He was one of the most inspiring explorers of the century. What he accomplished ought to make all of us feel very humble indeed.”

As Davis describes it, in fall 1953 “Schultes returned to his beloved Harvard and accepted a job as curator of the Orchid Herbarium of Oakes Ames at the Botanical Museum” (1997: 369).  This curiously passive phrasing suggests that somehow, positions at Harvard are sort of perpetually on offer, if only someone comes along to “accept” them.  Schultes remained at Harvard until his retirement, increasingly lionized and occupying ever more prestigious berths at the institution and producing a fascinating crop of acolytes, of whom more anon.

The timing of this underexplained fall 1953 hire is at the coming together of several interesting astrological houses.  Davis says that in September 1952, two amateur investigators into Mexican magic mushrooms “received a letter from Robert Graves, who somehow had stumbled upon Schultes’ 1939 paper identifying teonanacatl” (1997: 118).  This is less serendipitous than Davis makes it sound.  Although Davis does not mention it, Schultes had travelled “numerous times to the south of Mexico” in the late 1930s in the company of engineer Robert Weitlaner and Weitlaner’s anthropologist son in law Jean Basset Johnson (Hagenbach and Werthmüller 2011: 92).  Johnson was a student of linguist Morris Swadesh.  Swadesh would go on to work for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) during the Second World War.  The mushroom researchers (staunch anti-communist Gordon Wasson – friend of CIA head Allen Dulles – and Wasson’s Russian wife Valentina) who “somehow stumbled” across Schultes’ work in the early 1950s were on at least one later trip to Oaxaca, in the mid-1950s, accompanied by the CIA-funded researcher James Moore (Reidlinger 1990: 203).

John D. Marks, in his well-known account of the founding of the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s notorious MKULTRA program devoted to researching methods of human behavioural modification and so-called “mind control” via specialized methods and materials, mentions something that certainly sounds relevant to this story.  He says that the director of the ARTICHOKE project (the immediate precursor to MKULTRA) arranged in late 1952 “for a young CIA scientist to take a Mexican field trip and gather samples of piule [teonanacatl] as well as other plants of ‘high narcotic and toxic value of interest to ARTICHOKE… [the scientist] assumed cover as a researcher interested in finding native plants which were anesthetics.  Fluent in Spanish and familiar with Mexico, he had no trouble moving around the country, meeting with leading experts on botanicals.” (Marks 1979: 114 – 115).  Marks does not identify the young researcher, although these attributes (note the interest in anesthetics) align well with Schultes’. 

In April 1953, the United States Central Intelligence Agency established MKULTRA.  Psychoactive drugs were of course of tremendous interest and had been since at least 1949, when the CIA became convinced that the Soviets and the Chinese were already in possession of “truth drugs” and America was falling behind in the mind control race (Chase 2002: 270).   According to John Marks, “[CIA Director Allen] Dulles ordered the Agency’s bookkeepers to pay the costs blindly on the signatures of Sid Gottlieb and Willis Gibbons, a former U.S. Rubber executive who headed TSS [the Technical Services Staff]” (Marks 1979: 61; emphasis mine). Gibbons was, in fact, “research director” for U.S. Rubber (Albarelli 2009: 65) while Gottlieb, for his part, had previously worked for the National Research Council (the entity that funded Schultes’ first foray to Colombia) where he was “exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens” (Albarelli 2009: 103).  TSS, the Technical Services Staff, was a part of the Agency “full of PhDs with operational experience” (Marks 1979: 32) and which was according to Marks closely involved in behavioural work after 1953.  As this research expanded, “money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits or ‘cutouts’ such as the Geshickter Fund for Medical Research, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation” (Lee and Shlain 1985: 19-20).

According to Davis, Schultes had no involvement whatsoever in MKULTRA; Davis says that Schultes “was once asked if he had been associated with the agency. He famously replied something along the lines of no, but I would have been delighted to help out if I could” (Davis, personal communication).   Schultes made no secret of his reactionary politics, though admirers like Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, and Andrew Weil tend to treat this set of attitudes as having been a harmless foible.  For whatever reason, though, the concerns of MKULTRA were all around Schultes.  He co-authored a book, Plants of the Gods, with LSD chemist Albert Hoffman; his Harvard colleague Timothy Leary was at the centre of the popularizing of LSD use and William H. Burroughs once travelled to the Colombian Amazon to try ayahuasca in Schultes’ company.  Schultes’ student Andrew Weil – who went on to become an alternative medicine guru – took his first class with Schultes in 1960 and in 1962 wrote a “sensationalized” article in for the Harvard Crimson about faculty opposition to Leary’s radical approach to LSD research that contributed to Leary’s firing (Lee and Shlain 1985: 87).  In 1963, Schultes – always careful to distance himself from Leary – became Weil’s thesis advisor.  According to at least one researcher, the “CIA was less than pleased about the activities of Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard.” (Albarelli 2009: 361).  The psychedelic researcher Alexander Shulgin, in a tribute to Schultes, recalled “I remember a couple of trips to London with him, to small, intimate conferences at the Macy Foundation House” (Shulgin 2001).  This is the same Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation that was a “sometime Agency conduit” for funding into psychoactive research (Marks 1979: 127).  According to chroniclers like Davis, however, Schultes was merely elegantly bemused by all the drug culture nonsense of the 1960s and felt very removed from it all.

Be that as it may, somehow his students consistently focused on psychoactive plants.  His most beloved protégé, Timothy Plowman, who died young, carried out work on coca.  In 1968, Plowman and another of Schultes’ students made riverine collecting trips in Peru under the auspices of the Amazon Natural Drug Company.  According to Davis, this collaboration was a naïve mistake and Plowman and his companion ended the collaboration once they twigged that ANDCO was not a legitimate entity and that its “research director… displayed less interest in plants than in the whereabouts of Che Guevara” (1997:  25).   Amusingly but allusively put.  ANDCO’s founder J.C. King was “involved in chemical and biological warfare after he retired as chief of Clandestine Services in Latin America” (Colby and Dennett 1995: 497) and had been the “CIA’s former Western Hemisphere chief” in the 1950s and 1960s (Albarelli 2009: 173).  That would cover the latter part of the period Schultes spent meandering around Colombia, hardly aware of La Violencia in Davis’s telling but turning in reports to the U.S. government about individual Colombians’ political inclinations according to others.  Marks, for his part, says Plowman was “unwitting of the CIA involvement” (1979: 218).  It’s a problem unlikely to find definitive resolution – John Marks wrote his book on MKULTRA using the available sources. Most of the files relating to the program were destroyed in 1973 on the initiative of its director Sidney Gottlieb and the man who was then stepping down as director, Richard Helms, in part because of Gottlieb’s desire to “protect the reputations of the researchers with whom he had collaborated on the assurance of secrecy” (Marks 1979: 220).

Schultes loved Davis’s 1997 account of his life, with all its glorifications and elisions, so much that he began to use it as a reference for improving his own memory about himself:

“In Schultes’s last years, Davis has reported, the book took on a sort of ‘magical reality’ for Schultes.  He would open the book at random, and use passages to index forgotten episodes and conversations. In Davis’s words, ‘the book had become his life’. Davis (2004),p.xi.” (Davis quoted in Sheldrake ms: 4, fn. 15). 

From Davis’s account, Schultes delighted in self-invention, happily allowing himself to be described as a “Boston Brahmin” after he had become enough of a Harvard fixture to pass for one, though in fact he was of humble, East Boston immigrant origins (Davis 1997, 63 – 65).  Margaret Krieg – the author of a 1964 book that goes notably uncited by Davis in his 1997 one – describes how at her first meeting with Schultes he was kitted out in a suit and top hat, with his commencement day regalia in view (Krieg 1964: 71).  This was, she supposed, happenstantial; Schultes had not realized at the time they made the appointment that the day for her interview coincided with Harvard’s graduation, when he’d be draped in his ceremonial garb.  Maybe. 

During the sixties Schultes took to wearing a white lab coat during lectures, the instrumental utility of which is dubious but the message in the context of the decade’s sartorial politics quite clear.  By all accounts, exotica were always on full display in his environs:  no one who visited his office failed to mention the impressively long blowpipe prominently on show in it.  These details about Schultes, and what they reveal about his attention to others’ impressions, go a long way to explaining his charm.  There’s often something rather flattering about humbug.  It pays a lot of attention to impressions made, and ipso facto to impresees.  Andrew Weil’s memorial remembrance of Schultes, from his foreward to Davis 2004, is worth quoting at length:

“I first saw Dick Schultes in September 1960 in the Nash Lecture Hall of the Harvard Botanical Museum.  He wore a long white lab coat, and he looked and acted every bit the Harvard professor.  Though only forty-five at the time, he appeared rather stiff and stuffy, and his style of lecturing was very formal.  Yet he had a twinkle about him that suggested something far livelier.  He felt very familiar to me from the moment I first saw him, as if I had known him before.  I sensed a connection with him that held my interest.  His face fascinated me.  His elegant patrician air, the resonant voice:  both seemed so familiar and comfortable.  I knew that I wanted to spend time with him.  He had this effect on people.   For those who fell under his spell, he was the ultimate mentor.”  (in Davis 2004: xiii).

Plants, patriarchs, parthenogenesis, and projection

Dr. Schultes produced several loyal academic sons.  Pre-eminent among these is the Boswell to Schultes’ Johnson, Wade Davis, Schultes’ student and biographer.  In a manner comically isomorphic to the shambling, stumbling, accident-prone gait with which in Davis’s telling of it Schultes and his students moved through the world, Davis’s doctoral thesis was on the ethnopharmacology of Haitian zombies.  Davis argued that zombies were not mere creatures of fantasy, but that through a combination of drug dosing, psychological trauma, and cultural belief that it was in fact be possible to create these eminently biddable persons.  The specifics of his argument, having to do with the presence of neurotoxins derived from puffer fish, entombment and disinterring, and subsequent psychic capture by a witch-doctor (supplemented by use of the poisonous plant known as the “zombie cucumber”) have been subjected to withering critique on scientific grounds (Yasumoto and Kao 1986, Booth 1988, Kao and Yasumoto 1990) and his fieldwork challenged on its ethical merits – during the course of it, he paid informants to dig up the body of a dead child for use in preparation of one of the zombie powders he sought (both his 1986 dissertation and 1987 book include photos of the disinterred small girl).  Since the production of a very lurid Hollywood horror movie on the basis of a popular book by Davis on the subject, this study has been treated (not least by Davis himself) as something that began as an earnest inquiry, was made silly by others, and from which he has now distanced himself as befits a serious academic.  After a long and peripatetic career, Davis since 2011 holds an endowed chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and has intimated he sees a future for himself in Canadian politics (Macdonald 2014).

The trajectory is continuous from curare in the 1940s to the “zombie cucumber” in the 1980s:  the focus by Schultes and, later, his students on plant-derived psychoactive substances.  According to Albarelli, the CIA’s ARTICHOKE program hoped to find means of producing “chemical lobotomy” (2009: 294) – zombification, in essence.   In the course of researching his book on MKULTRA, Jonathan Marks learned “a good deal of the human testing on new psychoactive drugs was done in Haiti” (cited in Albarelli 2009: 369).   Davis’s research journey into Haiti began when Schultes put him in touch with psychiatrists Nathan Kline and Heinz Lehman.  These two men, in turn, recommended the young Davis to one of their former students, Lamarque Doyon.  Dr. Doyon was working at the time as the head of a psychiatric centre in Port au Prince. 

Dr. Doyon had done his psychiatric residency at McGill University during the Ewen Cameron years, and at Dr. Cameron’s urging had done some preliminary work on the so-called zombie cucumber (Davis 1987: 58).  Dr. Cameron headed a CIA-funded program of human experimentation at McGill involving heavy LSD dosing and intensive electroshock “therapy” that has since become notorious (Dyck 2007); he also made extensive use of curare to immobilize test subjects on whom he was performing his unsuccessful “psychic driving” experiments (Gillmore 1987: 88, 128).  Davis mentions Cameron’s association with McGill, but only to insist that Cameron’s “dark” practices ended with his retirement in 1964 (1987: 59).

This is not true.  Everyone supporting Davis’s Haitian foray had extensive ties to the same sort of research done by Cameron.  Dr. Nathan Kline also carried out CIA-supported LSD research at his Rockland Institute (Albarelli 2009: 370); Lehman, at McGill, pioneered the use of thorazine among psychiatric patients at very high dosage levels (Swazey 1974).  The person who eventually analyzed Davis’s “zombie powder” samples (and was the only researcher to document their zombifying effect on animals, in unpublished personal communication to Davis [1987: 147] – these effects were never independently reproduced by other investigators) was Dr. Leon Roizin.  Some of Roizin’s best-known work was on the brain-damaging effects of electroconvulsive therapies (Ferroro and Roizin 1949).  With this we come full circle:  Davis has Kline offering the same justification for sending him after zombie drugs as Schultes and Davis do for Schultes’ curare research in the 1940s: that these were to be used in surgical anaesthesia (Davis 1987: 23).  In both cases, however, this is misdirection; the motivating interest was psychiatric. 

Davis actually makes a joke about CIA funding in his 1987 popular account of his zombie research:  he has a technician working on one of his puffer fish samples ask,

“’Schultes have you working for the CIA, or what?’  He laughed out loud.” (134).

This technician-character then launches into a story involving the greatest of all fictional cloak and dagger men, James Bond.  The way Davis raises this possibility, joins it to laughter and fantasy, and dismisses it is rather good.  Less adroitly, in his original doctoral thesis he makes a series of statements about the role of voodoo in Haitian society that purport to explain the rise and hold on power of Papa Doc Duvalier in terms of voodoo and secret societies, saying these latter “explain the rise and fall of the Tonton Macoutes” (1986: 16) and as he elaborates in his conclusion:

“In the end, one might almost ask whether or not Francois Duvalier himself did not become the symbolic or effective head of the secret societies… One thing is certain.  The members of the secret societies will continue to function as an underground government with their emperors, kings, queens, presidents and cabinet ministers, army officers, soldiers and diplomats and their leaders will continue to engage in local and national politics” (1986, 427 – 430).

Davis ends resoundingly:

“In outlining the sociological role of zombification within the peasant society, this research reveals the political and legal dimensions of an understudied belief system.  The network of power relations that this investigation has revealed relates to all levels of Haitian political life, and as such sheds light on many recent aspects of Haitian political history which have yet to be explained adequately:  in particular, the meteoric rise under Francois Duvalier of the Tonton Macoute” (1986: 433).

Other commentators have suggested that the rise to power of Papa Doc Duvalier and his employment of a brutal personal disciplinary force in Haiti are not actually that mysterious and certainly not endogenous to Haiti.  Early on in his rule, in 1958, a coup attempt was made against Duvalier which he faced down with U.S. military support; in the years after that, U.S. Marine military advisors came and trained the forces that would become his Tonton Macoutes (Sprague 2012).  In fact, the “secret society” the role of which goes most consistently under-explored in understanding Haitian dynamics cannot be traced back to West African religion but instead to North American imperialism. 

From cold warrior to eco-warrior

In 1990, Schultes published his crowning opus, The Healing Forest.  For a work of science, it is surprisingly derivative:  a list of plants from the Northwest Amazon purported to be medicinally useful, each paired with an overview of other sources referring to them, and a note as to when plants were tested for the presence of alkaloids (which could potentially correlate to applied usages, but only at the level of an extremely crude preliminary screen).  It repeats, in many places, data already presented in a previous book co-published with the Swiss discoverer of LSD Albert Hofmann and entitled The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens.  This earlier book was first put out by a commercial publisher in 1973 and in a second edition in 1980, ostensibly to “update” the information contained therein, though the 1980 edition does not bring readers up to speed about the fact that the series editor, the spectacularly monikered Isaac Newton Kugelmass, whose introduction appears in both versions, had had his license to practice medicine revoked by the State of New York in 1978 for being “guilty of practicing the profession fraudulently, with gross incompetence, and with gross negligence, and of unprofessional conduct” and had died in 1979.

The manuscript of The Healing Forest was completed during a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study Centre at Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy (Schultes and Raffauf: 38) and it does rather better than Isaac Newton Kugelmass for prefatory matter.  It features a foreword from HRH Prince Philip, then President of the World Wide Fund for Nature.  The Prince mentions the award by the WWF in 1984 its Gold Medal for Conservation to Schultes (since Prince Philip’s retirement in 1996 it has been renamed the Duke of Edinburgh Medal for Conservation in his honor). 

As it happens, the Rockefeller family has contributed considerable funding to the cause of “alternative and integrative medicine”, endowing a Laurance S. Rockefeller Chair in the same at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York.  The WWF’s Prince Philip’s eldest son Charles is similarly boosterish about alternative medicine in the United Kingdom (Barker 2013).  Canada is home to the world’s largest prize for complementary and alternative medicine, the $250,000 Dr. Rogers Prize annually awarded for “excellence” in it.  As Michael James Barker notes, “Providing placebo therapies for patients is much cheaper than providing real medical treatment. Thus alternative medicines offer a cheap alternative to those members of the ruling class intent on gutting existing health services” (2013). 

Can’t Indians and the environment save themselves and pay for it too while they are at it?

In the field of health care provision, the World Health Organization’s 1977 Declaration of Alma-Ata proclaimed an agenda of “Health for All by 2000” which directly guided ethnobotanical research in Isoso (Gallo Toro 1996: 1).  Part of its plan was to incorporate “traditional medicine” into systems of health care provision in parts of the world where this was the only kind of medicine to which people had access.  Devoid of cynicism though this call may have been at the outset, it fit a global aid and development agenda emergent across the 1980s and 1990s that was cynical in the extreme in the context of aid from donor nations dropping between the 1960s and 2010 from 0.5 % to 0.3% of Gross National Income (OECD 2012).  The appeal of a narrative in which diversity (cultural and biological), properly investigated and appreciated, could be turned to the twin ends of capitalist profit (obviating the need for external aid) and “cure”, thereby ending “dependency” (financial, social, physical, moral, and spiritual), was gargantuan.

The profoundly confused notion that shamans are “like doctors” or “like scientists” had some very powerful policy consequences during the 1980s and 1990s.  Articulating a condescending tribute made by modern Western rational-technical utility to a diverse cultural array of phenomena and practices that take magic seriously in a way that the West does not, it intersected during those decades with the tremendous expansion of funding to international non-governmental organizations all clamoring for support in the name of promoting somebody else’s self-sufficiency (usually very, very vulnerable somebodies).  

In all of these projects, very poor people have to promise a fealty to future states of non-dependence in order to have immediate dependency needs addressed.  NGO workers (and external funders) are not required to design farcical plans for their own eventual emancipation from salary earning or grant pursuing, although it must be said that the entire expanding universe of NGOs is premised upon its own abolishment on that happy future day when all of the projects everywhere throw aside their external funding crutches and walk.  A kind of performance is the price of entry to the world of projects, in which one must disavow the motives for playing along.  You must make-believe that you have no dependency needs in order to get those very needs met.

Shamans and plants

In 1975, Schultes’ friend and colleague, the Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, published a study entitled The Shaman and the Jaguar.  It makes an analysis of a by now familiar type:  that the work of the shaman is to embody and manage native neurosis, and that these neuroses are internal crises projected on to the external world.  To reiterate, then:  “natives” are neurotic and prone to projection; you can tell by looking closely at shamanism. 

Schultes writes in his invited foreword to his friend Dolmatoff’s book:  “Man in primitive societies lives in a much closer and more personal association with his ambient vegetation that man in our modern technological cultures.  Shamanism depends in great part on the supernatural powers resident in certain plants” (p. xiii).  The first sentence is indubitably true; the second, just as certainly, untrue.  It is true that shamanism in a few places (and, perhaps even more delimitedly, only in a few time periods:  see Gow 1996) depends on plant hallucinogens.   In the overwhelming preponderance of instances about which anthropologists know, and collect in one way or another under the header of “shamanism”, it does not.  Why, then, would Schultes say something so easily disproven and wildly at odds with the empirical facts, and why would this false statement become so widely circulated, repeated, and believed? 

 Schultes, who went into Indian territory in search of plant sources of psychoactive mind control in the service of dealing with a collective white society neurosis (worries about the spectre of Communism and various liberatory social agendas – anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist – after the Second World War), ends up asserting that his own particular agenda is a key feature of Indian existence.  He repeats the idea in The Healing Forest, saying “the shamans or medicine men who are repositories of tribal lore and almost always men with impressive knowledge of the properties and uses of vegetation” (p. 17).  Again, while the first part of the statement is generally true the second is generally false.

Some of what Schultes ends up saying is toweringly ludicrous.  He calls ayahuasca “the most important medicine of the Amazonian Indians” (1992: 12) which it certainly is not.  Most Amazonian Indians do not use ayahuasca at all.  He says “hallucinogens… become the firm basis for ‘medical’ practices of most, if not all, aboriginal societies” (1992: 14) which is not remotely borne out by the ethnographic and ethnohistorical literature.  He projects these ideas on to the history of Europe, describing how among medieval witches “one concoction containing belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and the fat of a stillborn child was rubbed on the skin or inserted into the vagina for absorption” (1992: 89).  Here an obviously misogynistic psychosexual poison fantasy from the era is subjected to a double twist:  earnestly noted as fact and then processed through a separate (but equally perverse and elaborate) set of fantasies about the ur-nature of “primitive man”, giving premodern Europe a history invented in Cold War America by way of a fabulated version of Red Injun lore.

All of this reaches its apogee when processed through the ethnohistorical speculations of Schultes’ erstwhile travelling companion, Weston LaBarre.  Their research relationship of long standing began of course with that joint trip in 1936 to study the so-called “peyote cult” among the Kiowa in Oklahoma.  The use of peyote in the United States is associated with the emergence and expansion of the Native American Church, which combines features of Protestant Christianity with Amerindian practices of diverse origin (usage of peyote, ceremonial tipi, drumming, and gourd rattles).  The history of the Native American Church is intertwined with the spread of settler colonialism in the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It is precisely not a window into a prehistoric Amerindian past, still less a primeval human past. The same may well be true of ayahuasca shamanism, which plays such a key role in Schultes’ accounts of Amazonia (Gow 1996).  There is, in fact, a fascinating investigative project to be had here, taking the cases of peyote, ayahuasca and cannabis and their respective associations with anti-colonial religious movements (Rastafarianism in the last case).  LaBarre dismisses this inconvenient circumstance by asserting that although peyote usage did not spread to the North American Plains and Prairies until after the 1880s, the indigenous people there were “aboriginally pre-adapted to peyotism” (1972:  277).

The rather fantastic conclusions at which Schultes and LaBarre arrive are worth quoting at length.  These are taken from an edited volume published in 1972 entitled Flesh of the Gods:  The ritual use of hallucinogens to which both Schultes and LaBarre contributed essays.  La Barre says, “Like the paranoid schizophrenic, the vatic personality pretends to be talking about the grandiose outside cosmic world but he is really talking grandiosely in symbolic ways only about his narcissistic self and his inner world” (1972: 265) and “A neurosis or psychosis is the pathological operator of the defense mechanisms of a confused and troubled individual under stress.  A religion is in origin the defense mechanism of a society in confused and crisis-torn times” (ibid) and, most deliciously, “The unreal omnipotence of the shaman is the reciprocal of the unreal helplessness of the cultist” (207).  These descriptors of shamanism are not just insulting, they do not resemble the actual practice of shamanism in indigenous communities at all.

What LaBarre’s statements do resemble rather perfectly, however, is the entire faux edifice of pseudo-shamanism puffed up by Schultes and his devotees.  They postulate the existence of a primeval body of knowledge and associated practitioners who can heal all ills, bodily and ecological; and they do so from a position of “unreal helplessness”:  that is, a position that in actual fact is, without hyperbole, allied with the CIA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the gilded World Wildlife Federation, and the stuffiest male members (in a stiff competition, hee hee) of the British Royal family.  The charges of craziness and paranoia that fly off the pages of LaBarre, directed at superstitious Indians, are manifestations of white chicanery that support quite seriously the cartooniest of conspiracy theories.  By now when I read a LaBarre saying something like “shamanism is, so to speak, culturally programmed for an interest in hallucinogens and other psychotropic drugs” (272), well, I reach for my blow gun.

 Trudging, as I have in the course of researching this book, up and down the mountains of bad faith with which its landscape is lousy, the faux-folksy earnestness of certain Schultes devotees begins to wear very thin.  One last exorcism, and then I’ll stop.  Mark Plotkin is the author of the popular 1993 book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice:  An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest.  Plotkin was not a favored son of Schultes in the way that Plowman or Davis were.  Slightly younger, he grafted himself on to Harvard and the Schultes legacy but he obtained his PhD at the much less prestigious Tufts. 

Plotkin cites some of the precursor popularizing accounts of ethnobotany much less obliquely than does the more successful Wade Davis, who is probably more alert to what this somewhat embarrassing older literature means for its present prospects and so more cautious about invoking them.  Two important such texts are Nicole Maxwell’s 1961 Witch Doctor’s Apprentice: Hunting for Medicinal Plants in the Amazon (to which Plotkin’s title pays very direct homage) and Margaret Krieg’s Green Medicine: The Search for Plants that Heal (1964).  Davis cites the first book as being about “medicinal plants, especially of the Iquitos area” (1997: 513) and gives as its publication date that of its third edition (1990).  This is a telling bit of misdirection.  The Krieg he does not cite at all, which is flatly dishonest, considering how many Schultes-related anecdotes which appear in Davis’s 1997 One River first appeared in her 1964 text.  A story about Schultes being forced to play endless rounds of chess with an isolated military commander in the Colombian Amazon that appears in both books suggests Schultes himself was not above plagiarism in telling the story of his own life – this incident is inescapably reminiscent of one that appears in Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust.

Both Maxwell’s and Krieg’s books, properly considered, are rather depressing indicators for the contemporary ethnopharmaceutical enterprise because their rhetoric, projections, and commitments are so identical to everything said 30, 40, 50 years later – with no new results in the interim (Estes 1994).  A further embarrassment in Krieg’s book is that Schultes is one in a series of “plant hunters” interviewed with great seriousness and admiration by Krieg (as is his Healing Forest co-author, Robert Raffauf).  Another is Bruce Halstead, convicted in California in 1986 of administering fraudulent “natural” therapies for cancer.  Small wonder that Davis let this text and the associations it suggests pass quietly unremarked.  Maxwell’s book, for its part, in 1961 writes of the amazing properties of sangre de grado and uña de gato, which continue to be trotted out right up to the present as worthy of “further” investigation, as if anything new could be discovered about either after fifty more years.  Worst of all, both of these early 1960s authors were women – saying and doing the same things years earlier but to almost no acclaim that Schultes’ acolytes reprised decades later as swashbuckling male adventure (to much greater popular success). 

Maxwell amusingly reports, as later works fail to do, on the enthusiasm of her informants for remedies derived from animal sources.  This absence is especially telling of the vastly more intense scrutiny the entire ethnobotanical enterprise ought to receive than it has.  The arguments for ethnobotanical investigation would apply equally well to traditional remedies derived from animal sources – the jaguar and red teyu (lizard) fat mentioned by my informants in Isoso, or, say, the bear bile and rhino horn advocated in some quarters of Chinese medicine.  Mutatis mutandis, the same people pressed for plant wisdom should have their suggestions about lizard fat taken seriously on the same grounds:  they have known their environment for years, have experimented over many generations with the possibilities afforded by its flora and fauna, such that both their plant and animal derived ideas ought to merit solicitation, documentation, and screening.  Yet I have yet to read the memoirs of a celebrated collector of bear bile lore and harvester of lizard grease, nor met an undergraduate who aspires to become one (all anthropology professors have met dozens of undergraduates interested in “traditional plant medicine”).

Returning to Plotkin, his book about himself is reminiscent of Davis’s book about Schultes in that it is full of telling elisions, but they are more notable for appearing in a first-person account.  There are things Davis couldn’t know about Schultes’ past, but surely Plotkin remembers his own life.  Nevertheless, Plotkin does not explain how he arranged his first extended fieldwork in Suriname, but mentions political upheaval upon his arrival in December 1982: “the politics of the situation were obscure… no one really knew the details” (Plotkin 1993: 81).  This is a peculiar way to describe the notorious “December murders” under the military dictatorship of Dési Bouterse, the details of which certainly were well known by the time Plotkin was writing his book.  According to Plotkin, he “hung around” an airplane hangar until he met a pilot planning to go to an Indian village the next day (1993: 82).  Upon arrival, finding that it is inhabited by people of several origins – Trio, Waiwai, and Apalai – he is delighted to have “stumbled on to an ethnobotanical gold mine” (1993: 85).  Anyone who has done fieldwork in an indigenous community in South America knows that this story is at best undertold, and at worst egregiously obfuscatory.  Plotkin spent two months in the community, Kwamala.  When he went back for a month in 1983, he refers to a man whom he nicknames the “Jaguar Shaman” as his “mentor” (1993: 135); in 1984, on another month-long trip, he meets a shaman from a different village whom he says “obviously considered me a student or apprentice” (1993: 212).  In 1986, under auspices again not specified, he visits a Yanomami community in Venezuela for perhaps two weeks.  In 1988, he returns to Kamala in Suriname, allegedly finding it drastically transformed in the lapse of three short years by “civilization”, which somehow had not reached it in the lapse between the beginning of time and 1985. 

When I contacted Plotkin while researching this book, he told me I would not be able to obtain a copy of his doctoral thesis because he had made special confidentiality arrangements in order to protect the valuable indigenous knowledge contained within its pages from prying Western eyes.  I was, in fact, able to obtain it via the usual university inter-library loan arrangements.  What I wanted to know was if the thesis was any more forthcoming about the logistical details of his research than was the book.  It was not.  He did at one point in the thesis mention, with disgust and relief, that he’d managed to do all of his fieldwork without once sampling manioc chicha, a staple of Amazonian diet.  This alone raises questions about the seriousness of his time in the field.  It’s akin to asserting that one did fieldwork among the Nuer whilst avoiding all beef and dairy products or lived for years in the suburbs of Canada whilst managing never to discuss ice hockey.

How did such a silly and dishonest set of ideas come to be so influential?  Why did Susan Sarandon narrate a documentary about Plotkin’s book and why do so many undergraduates, thirty years on, parrot its assertions uncritically?  Plotkin simplifies and amplifies Schultes’ claims when he says:

“shamans are not only the crucial link between the tropical rain forest and our neighborhood pharmacy: I believe they are our greatest hope for finding cures to currently incurable diseases (cancer, AIDS, the common cold)” (1993: 14).

The lapse of time has not borne this hope out even remotely (Dalton 2004).

Reading the literature in ethnobotany, many of its most exalted claims refer back to the authority of Schultes himself.  The trappings of power and authority serve as their guarantee in his case.  That he was a Harvard man, that he was lionized, that his magnum opus featured a foreward from British royalty, seem to have dazzled everyone about the less credible portions of his own story, the fishier dimensions of the careers of his mentees, the way his most fundamental assertions about the value of ethnobotanical knowledge have never been validated, and, most fundamentally, that his assertions about the intimate connection between shamanism and esoteric plant knowledge in South America are simply fraudulent. Worse, all of this is classic misdirection about why Schultes went “into the forest” to live with “the Indians” in the first place, and what he was looking for there.