Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Evelyn Doering-Silveira, Charles S. Grob, Marlene Dobkin De Rios et al.
122 citations
Adolescents who use ayahuasca in a religious setting show similar lifetime drug use compared to those who never use it, but they consume significantly less alcohol. In the previous year, 46.31% of ayahuasca-using adolescents drank alcohol versus 74.4% of the comparison group; recent alcohol use was 32.5% versus 65.1%. The findings suggest religious affiliation may protect against alcohol use, and that early exposure to ayahuasca in a controlled ritual context does not lead to broader drug misuse.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Dartiu Xavier Da Silveira, Charles S. Grob, Marlene Dobkin De Rios et al.
111 citations
Adolescents who consume ayahuasca in a religious setting show lower rates of anxiety, body dysmorphic concerns, and attentional problems compared to matched controls, despite similar overall psychiatric profiles. The study compared 40 adolescents from a Brazilian ayahuasca sect with 40 controls matched on sex, age, and education. Screening scales for depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, attentional problems, and body dysmorphic disorders found considerably lower positive scores for anxiety, body dysmorphism, and attentional problems among ayahuasca-using adolescents. These low frequencies may reflect a protective effect of religious affiliation, though further research on other variables is needed.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Evelyn Doering-Silveira, Enrique Lopez, Charles S. Grob et al.
70 citations
Adolescents who use ayahuasca in a religious context show no significant differences in neuropsychological performance compared to matched controls. A battery of tests measuring speeded attention, visual search, sequencing, psychomotor speed, verbal and visual abilities, memory, and mental flexibility found no impairment among ayahuasca users. The groups were matched for sex, age, and education. Statistical comparisons using independent t-tests indicated no significant differences on any measure. The authors suggest further studies are needed to confirm these findings.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
January 1, 2002
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Charles S. Grob, John R. Baker
58 citations
Drug substitution using hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, ibogaine, peyote, and LSD can help people recover from addiction to substances like alcohol and opiates. A redemptive model, drawing on data from the U.S., Brazil, Peru, and West Africa, proposes that using one psychoactive substance in a spiritual or clinical setting frees individuals from addiction and restores them as functioning community members. Two mechanisms are proposed: psychological suggestibility aids in achieving abstinence, and neurophysiological and neurochemical changes support substitution efficacy. Research with the Uñaio do Vegetal Church in Brazil illustrates this model.
Journal of Drug Issues
January 1, 1992
Charles S. Grob, Marlene Dobkin De Rios
49 citations
In three tribal societies—Australian Aboriginal males, Tshogana Tsonga females, and Chumash youth—adolescents ingest hallucinogenic plants during initiation rituals as part of a managed, short-term socialization process led by elders for religious and pedagogical purposes. This contrasts with abusive drug patterns among American adolescents. The analysis highlights hypersuggestibility as a cultural technique used to normalize youth in these societies, in contrast to the pathological drug ingestion patterns seen among American adolescents.
Journal of Travel Medicine
July 1, 2009
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Roger Rumrrill
48 citations
A hallucinogenic tea made from a giant Amazonian vine, ayahuasca (meaning spirit vine), has been used as a religious sacrament for centuries across several South American cultures. Spiritual leaders and shamans consider it enlightening and healing, but it is viewed as an illicit drug by officials in South America and the United States. The book examines the history, realm, and arguments surrounding ayahuasca, including its movement into the U.S., where church groups have fought for legal use and drug tourists travel to South America, often risking exploitation by charlatans. It also covers U.S. scientific investigations into ayahuasca's potential healing properties and includes the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances and interviews with Amazonian shamans.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
January 1, 1989
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Michael Winkelman
37 citations
Shamanism and altered states of consciousness (ASC) are reviewed across cultures and disciplines. Despite varied uses of these terms, conceptual and empirical grounds exist to distinguish different types of trance practitioners. Shamanism is argued to be a cultural adaptation of hunting and gathering societies to the biological potential for ASC, with its manifestations changing as societies become more complex. The role of ASC in shamanic phenomena, religious experience, and modern trance is examined. Western cultural avoidance of ASC has inhibited understanding and prevented integration of shamanistic and trance perspectives into psychology, consciousness, and knowledge of the world.
International Journal of Social Psychiatry
December 1, 1971
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
36 citations
Ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian brew, shows promising effects in psychological healing. In a study involving 200 participants, 70% reported significant reductions in anxiety and depression after consuming the brew. Biochemical analysis revealed that compounds in ayahuasca may enhance neural connectivity, potentially explaining its therapeutic benefits. These findings highlight ayahuasca's role in medicine and psychology, suggesting that psychedelics could be effective tools for mental health treatment. The vine's unique properties continue to intrigue drug studies, paving the way for future exploration.
American Journal of Public Health
October 1, 2002
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
35 citations
A medical anthropologist and licensed psychotherapist draws on a database of 700 Latino immigrant families she has treated to show that psychotherapeutic interventions can be derived from shamanic roots in the immigrants' original cultures. Congruences may exist between shamanic techniques from coastal and Amazonian Peru and three Western psychotherapy techniques: hypnosis, behavior modification, and cognitive restructuring. By using historic links with Hispanic culture and these techniques, psychotherapists can acquire cultural competence to effectively reduce mental illness symptoms in US Latino immigrants in clinical practice.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Charles S. Grob, Enrique Lopez et al.
34 citations
In Brazil, adolescents who consume ayahuasca as part of the União do Vegetal religion appear to be healthy, thoughtful, considerate, and strongly bonded to their families and religious peers, based on qualitative comparisons with non-using peers. The study examined 28 ayahuasca-consuming teens and 28 non-users, using vignettes to measure moral and ethical concerns. The findings suggest that, within a legal, structured religious context with elder facilitation, ayahuasca-using youth do not differ from their non-using counterparts in these qualitative measures. This work helps clarify the effects of hallucinogenic plant use in a socially sanctioned setting.
Journal of American Folklore
July 1, 1971
Fred Katz, Marlene Dobkin De Rios
30 citations
During ayahuasca healing sessions in the Peruvian Amazon, whistled melodies serve a specific function in guiding the patient's hallucinatory experience. Whistling, rather than singing or instrumental music, is used by the healer to structure and direct the visions induced by the psychedelic brew. The authors analyze how the acoustic properties of whistling—its piercing, continuous sound and lack of semantic content—allow it to cut through the auditory environment and anchor the patient's attention. This musical element helps shape the emotional and visual trajectory of the session, facilitating therapeutic outcomes by providing a sonic framework for the altered state of consciousness.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
January 1, 1989
Oscar Janiger, Marlene Dobkin De Rios
29 citations
In a unique experiment from the late 1950s, artists drew and painted a Kachina doll before and one hour after ingesting LSD. An art history professor evaluated the works and found consistent style shifts: artists whose usual style was representational or abstract moved toward more expressionistic or nonobjective approaches. Other changes included larger size, involution, movement, altered figure/ground boundaries, more intense color and light, oversimplification, symbolic depiction, and fragmentation. Many artists judged their LSD-influenced works as more interesting and aesthetically superior, believing they were creating new meanings for an emergent world.
J Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Charles S. Grob
22 citations
This editorial introduces a special issue examining ayahuasca use across different cultural contexts, from indigenous Amazonian traditions to contemporary global therapeutic settings. It highlights how the visionary brew, traditionally used as sacred plant medicine for spiritual and personal growth, healing, and ritual purposes, has increasingly attracted Western interest for consciousness expansion, psychological well-being, and emotional wellness. The introduction sets the stage for exploring cross-cultural healing practices, ethnobotanical knowledge, and the integration of indigenous medicine into alternative and global therapeutic frameworks, emphasizing both the potential benefits and the need for respectful, informed engagement with these traditions.
Greenwood Publishing Group Inc. eBooks
January 1, 2008
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Roger Rumrrill
19 citations
Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea made from a vine native to the Amazonian rainforest, has been used as a religious sacrament for centuries across several South American cultures. Spiritual leaders and shamans consider it enlightening and healing. The book explores the history, realm, and debates around ayahuasca, which some view as a sacrament and others as a scourge. It covers its movement into the United States, leading to legal battles and rulings from the United Nations, and the rise of drug tourism to South America, where charlatans put tourists at risk. Opponents fight its use while scientists investigate its potential healing properties for physical and mental health. The book includes text from the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances and interviews with Amazonian shamans.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
19 citations
A Shipibo urban shaman in Pucallpa, Peru, distinguishes between authentic folkloric shamanism and the current vogue of drug tourism, where urban men and women offer foreigners paid tours for drug-induced mystical experiences in Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador. He views these touristic practices as attempts to resolve personal problems, reflecting a spiritual and psychological crisis in European and North American societies. He laments the misuse of toxic plants added to ayahuasca potions, which harm unsuspecting tourists who receive no real value from inexperienced, dishonest shamans lacking proper preparation and capability.
American Anthropologist
December 1, 1970
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
17 citations
Among mestizo folk healers in the Peruvian Amazon, the effects of the psychedelic vine ayahuasca are shaped by cultural expectations and beliefs about illness. The subjective personal experience of the drug is influenced by cultural factors, which strongly determine the content of hallucinations.
Medical Anthropology
January 1, 1984
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
15 citations
In the Peruvian Amazon city of Pucallpa, healers called videntes (seers) use the plant hallucinogen ayahuasca to divine the future and treat magical illness. Fieldwork in 1977 and 1979 focused on an urban healer, don Hilde, who drew on a long shamanic tradition. Patients drink ayahuasca in rainforest clearings, believing the plant's spirit enters them. Don Hilde also joined a mystical-philosophical organization to enhance his personal power and access altered states of consciousness. The healer's reputation as a seer is continually reaffirmed through daily interactions with patients, for whom access to the supernatural realm is central to healing.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 1, 2005
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Charles S. Grob
5 citations
In a November 2004 telephone interview, Jeffrey Bronfman, representative mestre for the União do Vegetal Church in the United States, discusses the church's legal battle after U.S. authorities seized a large quantity of ayahuasca tea intended for sacramental use. The case, which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, pits the church's claim to religious freedom against federal drug laws that classify ayahuasca as a scheduled substance. Bronfman describes the church's efforts to seek remediation through the courts on this freedom of religion issue.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
December 1, 2009
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
1 citation
The article examines evidence that the San Agustin culture, which lived in Colombia's Magdalena River area from the third century BCE to the sixteenth century CE, used plant hallucinogens such as Brugmansia, Brunfelsia chiricaspi, Desfontainia R., Anadenanthera peregrina, Banisteriopsis species, Psychotria viridis, and Virola theidora. Using a cross-cultural survey of plant hallucinogens, the author analyzes themes in the culture's monolithic sculptures, focusing on man-animal transformations and shamanic motifs linked to hallucinogenic plant use.
European Psychiatry
January 1, 2010
Evelyn Doering-Silveira, Enrique Lopez, Charles S. Grob et al.
Adolescents who consume ayahuasca in a religious ritual setting perform well on neuropsychological tests, but not as well as non-using peers on complex tasks that require more cognitive functions. The study compared 40 ayahuasca-using adolescents with 40 matched controls. Both groups performed well overall, but controls outperformed users on the more demanding tests. The authors suggest ayahuasca may have subtle effects on cognition observable only during highly demanding tasks, while noting that other variables could have influenced the results.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
April 1, 1993
Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Charles S. Grob
This work reviews the book 'Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, Their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia,' which examines the traditional use of psychoactive plants, particularly ayahuasca, by indigenous medicine men in the Colombian Amazon. The book documents the cultural, ritual, and medicinal contexts of these practices, emphasizing the role of plant-based knowledge in indigenous healing and spiritual traditions. The review highlights the book's contribution to ethnobotany and the understanding of Amazonian shamanism, noting its detailed descriptions of rituals and the relationship between plants and healers.