Beatriz Caiuby Labate: Sacred plant medicines and healing psychedelics (ep343)
“In the West, we tend to think that science and our way of knowledge is simply the truth, and all other views or versions are like ‘ethnic understandings’. We don’t see our science as a kind of ethnic understanding of reality and tend to equate science with reality, with truth, with a universal understanding of things.”
How are the roots of cultural and sacred plant medicines disregarded as they are decontextualized in their commercialization? What does it mean to understand the political nature of healing?
In this episode, we welcome Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate), who has a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policies, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of seventeen books, one journal special edition, and several peer-reviewed articles. She is also the Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Beatriz Labate: Different populations have used psychedelics across the globe. I have focused my studies mainly in the Americas, although I did travel to Africa once and tried iboga over there in Cameroon and had a little period of interest in that. But I have been focusing mainly on ayahuasca and peyote and other medicines from the forests or plant medicines. So we have different uses, the Americas perhaps have more psychedelic flora and fauna in the world that's really concentrated and have different groups using different substances.
I think perhaps one of the most used all across the Americas is tobacco that is considered a master plant or a teacher plant and is either used by itself or together with other substances. You have different ayahuasca-using groups throughout the Amazon. We don't even know how many, but for sure at least 70 and probably more different groups in all the countries that have the Amazon: Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador. Peyote is another strong, famous plant that is used in the northern parts of Mexico and southern parts of the U.S. It's native also to this region, and it's a cactus that takes many years to grow.
We have also big presence of peyote among the Native American Church in the United States, which is the most organized and expressive numerically [in terms of the] number of users and...
These plants have been, since the time of the inquisition, stigmatized and persecuted and misunderstood by colonizers, who have tried to outlaw these practices and have demonized the use of sacred plants, and have tried to eradicate them altogether.
And they have disappeared in parts, migrated to more hybrid Christian versions, or remained highly secret and inaccessible. And then, of course, you have the whole system of drug control. Perhaps the most famous mark that people refer to is the 1971 Convention on Psychoactive Substances from Vienna. We have tried to prohibit the use of these substances and give small exemptions throughout different countries. So currently, you have a system that allows some kind of permission for scientific uses or for magical and religious uses by certain traditional populations.
So you do have mechanisms by which Indigenous groups can apply for exemptions or have their rights protected, but it's rather fragile and there are a lot of gray areas and it’s a challenge in defining the notions of what is a traditional and religious sacred, magical right by which population. Despite these legal protections and despite other treaties that protect Indigenous people, these substances remain largely stigmatized and misunderstood, and there's a lot of prejudice.
I think now, with this new wave of research and interest and what people call the psychedelic renaissance, or others just call it boom or a new industry, anyway, the advancement of clinical research with substances like MDMA or psilocybin has helped to improve popular views on the substances and have a more generous and tolerant understanding of them. But they remain still largely misunderstood, and that's also why we focus the work that we have at the traditional institute in creating public education around this topic.
Kamea Chayne: Perhaps it's also worth unpacking how Indigenous knowledge across the board is often undervalued or dismissed as mystical and not grounded in science, and I know it's a delicate subject because there is, of course, knowledge being shared that may just be false altogether or that is misguided. And yet, at the same time, there are other ways of knowing and understanding the world that are not valued by the dominant culture or the scientific lens that may be able to offer important teachings for us. So how have you shifted or navigated this question of what knowledge creation and credibility even mean and what prevalent beliefs do you think they challenge?
Beatriz Labate: Yeah, it's a big question. I think, in the West, we tend to think that science and our way of knowledge is simply the truth. And all other views or versions are like ethnic understandings.
We don't see our science as a kind of ethnic understanding of reality and tend to equate science with reality, with truth, with a universal understanding of things.
But for us as anthropologists, this is different altogether, and that's why it's kind of a marginalized career itself. Let's say not the most wealthy or [a path] full of jobs and opportunities. But we are trained to study these diverse ways of knowing and learning and to take Indigenous knowledge seriously. So a lot of our background is to understand these viewpoints, and there are ways of understanding in their own terms and understanding their ways of classifying reality.
Some of the ways Indigenous people understand reality challenge some of the very foundational concepts that we have in the West, such as big dichotomies—nature and culture, body and spirit inanimate and animate—and notions of self, of time, and of classifying relationships, understanding different ways of organizing kinship. The more you learn about this, the more you understand the richness of these traditions. I think a lot of people have, through sacred plants, started to get interested in these issues.
A lot of people, by using sacred plants, have started to pay attention to the fact that some of our foundational pillars of understanding reality are just really contextual and historical and particular to us, but are by no means universal.
For me, this has been personally an experience that can’t be dissociated because taking ayahuasca, for example, has always been related to me trying to understand more about Indigenous shamanism or what anthropologists called Amerindian shamanism and ways of understanding reality. At the base of this is perhaps one of the more dear concepts that a lot of different Indigenous people share about sacred plants, which is this idea that plants are in fact like humans.
They have spirits, they have agency, they have culture. So they are sentient beings. They have intentionality. They have a kind of subjectivity. They have a kind of personality. And if you do certain diets or follow certain rules, participate in certain rituals, you can learn how to communicate with the spirits that are intelligent and that have teachings to give. You can create a relationship and you can follow these teachings and these plants might show you things that you wouldn't know otherwise. These plants can also be seen as having their kind of idiosyncrasies or being capricious or having their possessiveness or jealousy [they] have their personalities just like humans.
Engaging in this relationship is something that can bring a lot of learning and can make you rethink a lot of the paradigms by which you have been taught and you have led your life. For me, it has been a particularly interesting combination of a spiritual path with a research path that leads inevitably to an activism path because there is so much power and so much beauty and so many roots and so much tradition and so much wisdom in all of this that it just becomes extra revolting to see all the ignorance, the taboo, and the stigma that exists around this topic.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. And to that point, in my past conversations with Dr. Monica Gagliano and Dr. Suzanne Simard, we had talked about this idea of anthropomorphizing plants and other animals in their scientific research having been viewed largely as a negative thing.
What it led me to question was whether the interpretation that seeing other forms of intelligence or sentience or agency and other beings as anthropomorphizing is itself anthropocentric and human-centric because that assumes that we are using ourselves as the measuring stick. So I had asked if we might better understand this queering of perspectives as omni-morphizing our lenses so that we're not so self-centered in our interpretations and we can have maybe a broader consciousness of reality and of our world.
When I read about this multi-species perspective that you share, that's what it reminded me of. But I'm curious if what I said relates to this teaching of interspecies communication and multi-species understanding and what else you would add to this.
Beatriz Labate: Well, I don't know if I understood everything you said, I don't know if I know this word omni-morphizing, but I think you can criticize us anthropomorphizing as being anthropocentric. If you consider that the human is the reference, then we are all more human. But if you consider that we all have a common nature that is human or that is alive or that has intentions, then we are all more like plants as well.
So it all depends on how you want to say it. But the important thing, I think, from an Amerindian perspective is to say that we in the West have classified this very strict boundary between nature and culture and think that only the human beings have some kind of agency or rationality or ability to choose. All the other things are just material. Our bodies are inanimate. What those traditions are saying is that no, all of us have this shared in common.
So I don't think that this means that we are all humans, but rather that we elevate the status of all things to this common spirit, if you will, to be alive to have some kind of role and some kind of relationship to the to all the other things that exist. So...
I think it invites us to rethink our categories.
I don't think we're trying to make Indigenous people look more like us. I think it's the contrary. I think what I learned in my studies on this topic is much more how we have had limited understandings of our own nature. This goes also to the idea of the awake state, the rational state, this state of mind that is the vigilant, awake state.
When you understand reality and you consider all other states as less legitimate, like dreaming or intoxication, or being under the effect of substances, or a bodily illness that causes alterations in the body and in the mind. Traditionally, all states have things to tell you for you to learn.
It's not like one state is the only reality, and it's not like it's only the rational mind that matters, and that all the others are minor or inferior states. All of these states constitute equal modalities of knowing and learning.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I want to clarify that omni-morphizing is not formally a word. It was just the word that I tried to use as an alternative to interpreting this as anthropomorphizing, in much the same way that you said it's recognizing intelligence in all of its diverse forms, rather than measuring every other being against humans as the reference. So, yeah, I think we are in alignment. I didn't have the proper vocabulary to use to describe that.
I think with more and more people and even moneyed interests realizing the healing potentials of psychedelics, of course, more investments are being poured into the research and development of the medicines for potential commercial or more widespread commercial use. For you, knowing the fuller context of the roots of these cultural and sacred plant medicines, what concerns might you have with their growing commercialization that you think we should pay attention to?
Beatriz Labate: I have multiple concerns, and thanks for clarifying that on that word, I never know what is me not being a native speaker. It's an interesting experience to speak another language, although I love to learn languages and have studied English since I was maybe 10. It's always, you capture a bit of it, but not all of it. And there is this interesting, ongoing tension about understanding things and saying things in ways that are not entirely safe, and now I'm experiencing the opposite, which is I'm giving lectures in Portuguese and struggling to find the words because I'm so getting so used to speaking in English. So anyway, I love all of these talks about the arts of understanding and communicating. For me, the interest in culture is hand in hand with the interest in language.
But yeah, coming back to your question, as my friend published in our recent book Psychedelic Justice, Eric Davis writes something along the lines about the new sharks that are circling the waters of the psychedelic movement, and by that he is talking about all of the new people that are arriving to the scene. With this mentality of investors and of making money.
I am also just returning from New York, where I spent five days in Horizons, which is a big psychedelic conference that has been happening for 14 years and I have been maybe four or five times since my first one in 2010. It was an entirely different setting than the previous years because you had the main track of the conference happening and on the side, you had so many private meetings and the rooftop of the bar closed off for this investor scene or this by invitation only or that.
A lot of people went there to close business deals and all of us were feeling a little bit like, oh wow, it's a new era. Not to be too old-timer, but I just turned 50, and so it does feel that it's a whole entire new time in the psychedelic movement, and I think...
The main concern is greed and profits over healing. It's falling to more Big Pharma, mainstream, biomedical ways that don't necessarily favor the individual but favor corporations. And also this obsessive emphasis on the individual, forgetting a lot of systemic issues and a lot of collective issues.
All of these traditions show us that health is not just about a physical ailment and the very idea that one single molecule can heal one single disease is a reductionist approach from a more traditional lens where you would have plants and whole plants that have multiple alkaloids and have all kinds of different combinations healing a specific person with a specific condition.
This healing on traditional lands is often a more holistic set of affairs. So it has to do with the physical dimension. It has to do with the individual. But it also has to do with the relationship of the individual with the kin, with the community, with the larger group, and with the world beyond, with the non-visible world, the world of the dead, the world of the ancestors, the world of what is common to all of us.
Healing has always been an imbalance at all of those levels. And this more global view of healing, I think, is completely lost and there can be a big reductionism that allied with some greed and some aggressive patenting techniques and some traditional way of doing business. There is a tendency to want to make psychedelics just a new gold rush and a new way to make quick money.
But psychedelics are not like everything else, and also everything else would need a better approach to the way the health system that we have is far from ideal, especially in the United States, where there is no universal access and very challenging health system. So, yes, a lot of us are concerned.
Also, this is why we do the work we do to talk about minorities, to talk about Indigenous people and people of color, about women, about queer people, about immigrants, voices from the Global South. All of these groups need special protection and might benefit from psychedelics or have been historical stewards and guardians of these medicines.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I was thinking about how the process of having something be legitimized and approved within Western medicine often involves reductionism, as you said, and isolating the substances in order to have this close up lens of how this one substance or chemical might impact something else very specific in a person's body. And so in essence, it really decontextualizes the medicine. I don't know if there would even be any sort of research on this, because I would assume that it's not an area that would have been able to get a lot of funding to do the research for it. But I wonder if you have insights or thoughts on how stripping these medicines of their broader settings, their rituals, their web of relations and cultures might actually compromise their full potential in support of healing?
Beatriz Labate: Yeah, that's a really hard question, and I think what we have been advocating a lot for in Chacruna is we're trying to talk to all levels, so we're trying to talk to the ayahuasca enthusiast, that person that likes to drink their medicine or, you know, has a similar side, but underground therapeutic practice from that more individual level or single professional to the big corporations all across the board, we're trying to say a big part of our work has been to emphasize the importance of supporting Indigenous communities and the roots of the psychedelic movement.
And it's not idealizing and romanticizing Indigenous people, or relating to some generic, stereotyped Indigenous person that holds all the wisdom and is the steward, but rather relating to real Indigenous people, who are here right now and are engaging with their own struggles and needs.
Those needs are also not related to only psychedelics because Indigenous people are not just doing psychedelics all day long. There are different Indigenous people that even don't do psychedelics or just use tobacco or something that perhaps is not one of the substances that we're more obsessed with, so it gets less attention.
So we invite people to look at different aspects and different struggles: land struggles, education, language, territory, food security. So supporting Indigenous people and their struggles, relating to real Indigenous people, and supporting Indigenous people also as a way to preserve biodiversity. But I kind of got the feeling that I took off answering something different than you had asked.
Kamea Chayne: No, we love all the tangents that our guests go on, so I appreciate you sharing that.
The mission of Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines is to provide public education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines and to promote a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science. So in light of everything that we just talked about, I wonder what you've seen as the challenges of bringing psychedelics into the clinical setting and our broader social, legal, and healthcare systems, given, again, that the process of testing for their efficacy in labs often involves stripping apart their broader histories and cultures and contexts.
Beatriz Labate: We can't really exactly influence entirely how clinical trials are conducted, because also these trials have their standards and parameters, and it's in many ways psychedelics are victims of this. It's not exclusive to psychedelics. All medicines go through those processes, but there are many things that we can aid and help the scientists that are developing this research to try to be more mindful.
So I think one thing that is clearly an important lesson is the importance of first-hand experience. Because, for example, in Brazil, we have some strong scientists that have created the first clinical trial on ayahuasca in the world, and they have participated in rituals and they hang out with people that drink ayahuasca and talk about it. So they report designing studies that are more mindful, that are more respectful, and that take into account people's experiences in a better way.
For example, perhaps not putting a person that is naive into a scan-ER machine right away, creating research that tries to take into account the perspective of the users and also talk to users about what areas of research are important. So consultation to the community to find out what kinds of research can be beneficial and would be useful from the perspective of those that are immediately involved.
Another thing that a lot of scientists have learned from traditional and ceremonial uses is, for example, the importance of group settings. For example, group therapy. So doing the experiences in groups and having people share together. The importance of those bonds and of seeing peers going through similar experiences and how that can be influential. Also just on personal levels, if you are a clinician, there are ways to incorporate more the sacred and the intention setting in your clinical practice and perhaps be more mindful of how you talk to people that are going through psychedelic experiences that have had challenging experiences.
Another thing that we also invite people is to learn and get engaged and informed about the roots of this movement.
By studying and having firsthand experience, we think people can be more open to creating models that are less mechanical, less reductionistic, and more holistic, and that better honor where these medicines come from.
But yeah, it's hard. It's not an immediate disaster. It can be very different traditions. For example, in some Indigenous groups, you could say that traditionally, not all, but in some contexts, only the shaman would drink the substance and diagnose the patient. So we have gone a big, big, long way from that to say the medical doctor to the limit doesn't try the substance at all, and only the patient has it. A collective setting would be the medical doctor and the patient trying this together. But in clinical trials or in psychedelic-assisted therapy, only the person that receives the substance is trying it.
So there are things that are quite different and quite incommensurable. If you think this whole native idea that the plants are spirits or humans that have agency and you have to communicate with them, it would be funny to say that the doctor gives that substance, but he doesn't try it himself. It's really weird, but you know, in a more conventional FDA clinical setting, you're not going to have the doctor do the substance together with the patient. So there are a lot of things that are different traditions and hard to communicate and to balance.
But we're also always talking about the importance of this global notion of healing, of the idea of the plants and not just the molecules. Again, something that is important is that people can just like, reproduce, appropriate, imitate, the techniques of Indigenous people, and claim that they are doing Indigenous practices, so not claiming that you are more than you are is also helpful. So that's a negative. Don't say you are an Indigenous shaman when you're not.
The other thing that is important that we also learn from Indigenous people that can be transferred to the context of trials and clinical practice is to recognize and honor the relationship to the land.
So find out about the Indigenous group that exists in your land, what their traditions are, and how they practice: try to connect to these people.
So I think not misrepresenting yourself, understanding better, that setting matters. And by setting, I'm not just saying the decoration, I'm talking about this general bigger context. All of this could help a lot. But again, perhaps my answer is too all over the place, your questions are hard.
Kamea Chayne: Well, thank you. I appreciate everything that you shared. I guess with more and more moneyed interests looking to use psychedelics as opportunities to extract and take and profit off of as, a part of considering the broader context, is this idea of sacred reciprocity and part of your work has been leading and supporting the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas, IRI, which is a project of the Chacruna Institute. So can you share more about what you hope to accomplish and facilitate with this platform? And also just what it means to understand the political nature of healing?
Beatriz Labate: Yeah, so this initiative is in large part, in response to our own challenges with fundraising, so I have been in the United States only for four and a half years and since I moved here and have tried to go the nonprofit route versus the academic one, which was my previous one, it has been extremely hard.
I live in San Francisco. This is the most expensive city, I think, or second-most. I don't know if New York beat us now, but anyway, it's very expensive and this is a very powerful country. So I feel highly challenged and suffocated to make a living here and try to do something that is ideological, that is not profit-oriented, and that is trying to make a significant contribution to the world.
It has been very hard because when you talk to philanthropists and donors, they are frequently people that made money in startups or oil company or mining or whatever—in these extractivist industries that have also somehow exploited people and whose money also is the result often of these inequalities. And for sure, embedded in those inequalities between the global north and the global south, these structural problems exist in the world.
And a lot of these philanthropists have the mentality that they want to do something that has their brand or their name be their contribution, and that's what they can say they did, which is legitimate in the sense that it's their money and they can do whatever they want. But it's a challenge for you when you want to work with things that have to do with culture, awareness, minorities, and subjective things [like] knowledge. Because that's not exactly sometimes very easy to to measure. It's not so tangible. It's different than working with healing itself.
For example, if you develop MDMA as appealed to treat PTSD, it's a very concrete, tangible deliverable. There's all this jargon, you know, aggregated-value, deliverable, and it's hard for us working on this area of social justice and minorities and awareness and culture and anthropology to get funding. Then you have to run after doing all this fundraising that's creating all these narratives and trying to seduce donors. So our Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative tries to invert that by saying that the onus, the burden of investigating whether something is legitimate or not is on us, the donors, and not on the people on the ground.
So what we did was a big research in seven countries, which we spent almost a year doing this research. So Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, although we didn't end up following with any group in Bolivia, but Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, U.S., Canada and we were researching nonprofit or Indigenous-led organizations or led by Indigenous people for Indigenous people or mainly by Indigenous people, or with a great emphasis on Indigenous peoples. Some of these organizations have help from the outside, but our criteria were always organizations that were group efforts that were collective that were mainly for Indigenous people and by Indigenous people.
Why? Because we we didn't want to favor like single families or traveling shamans, although we don't have anything against those. People have to make a living and we respect shamans that travel abroad, inviting their medicine as a way of living. But frequently, this doesn't get shared back home equally and is kept in the hands of few.
Also, there are just a lot of people that are experts on Indigenous people for Americans or in the circuit of psychedelic science conferences. So the famous intermediaries, people that represent Indigenous people for foreigners, but they are not Indigenous themselves, or sometimes they bring Indigenous people that are again doing a kind of solo flight and not representing their groups and sometimes are not even known by any group local group. They are kind of experts in “being Indigenous” and attending conferences representing Indigenous people, but they are not leaders in their communities. And so our effort was to look for those organizations.
Then, you know, our modest, modest contribution to this decolonizing philanthropy is people don't have to send those decks and justifications and do sexy narratives because we recognize that the work they're doing on the ground is important and it matters, and it's something that is worthwhile. So we give them the contributions that we were able to fundraise and they can use as they see fit.
Because this is also one of the main problems that organizations have is that they have to pay for operation funds and for staff and for things that are not sexy and not great achievements and are not something you can just show and said, I did this, but there's a lot of costs just to exist and make things work, and that's where organizations need money. So we don't ask people to create budgets and tell us why they need to spend. We are going to ask them to send a report for our files on how this money was spent. But that's more or less the spirit of our Indigenous organization Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative program.
So we have created this map. It's available on our website, and we are also not gatekeeping information about this group so anybody can go there and get in touch with them immediately and can donate to them if they want. If they prefer, they can donate to the Indigenous program as a whole, and then we get an administrative percentage, which we put on the low end because this is really not a fundraising method for Chacruna, but it is aimed at creating this reciprocity, and then we shared this among all the 20 recipients. However, we are very small and modest nonprofit grassroots.
We are not philanthropists and we don't have a ton of donors or wealthy philanthropists at our disposal. So the amounts we have raised so far are modest, but nevertheless, we're really proud it is making a difference and it does help. We're creating this relationship with all of these different partners and also consulting them on ways that they would like to see this move forward because the whole spirit behind this idea of reciprocity and…
what we learned in anthropology is trying to see how things feel from the lenses and the body of that other person.
Instead of asking them, ‘How can you help me or why don't you come and sit in my conference? So why don't you come and increase diversity on my board? Why don't you come and do this for me’ Ask, ‘What can I do to help you? What do you need? What are you engaged with? How can I support what you have going on?’ Because those are the real experts and those are the real people on the ground doing the real work.
There are numerous studies that show that areas with Indigenous people have much higher bio-conservation levels. These populations have shown over and over again that they are entirely able to manage their territories and have their autonomy. This whole idea of sovereignty and autonomy is that Indigenous people should have the right to lead their own societies according to their own standards. So we are trying to invite, from the small person, you know, the individual ayahuasca lover, to the big corporation, everybody to join this movement of reciprocity and of giving back.
So if you're starting a new clinic or if you're starting a business or if you're starting an ayahuasca underground circle, if you have a psilocybin church, whatever you have, all of us have a moral obligation to reciprocate and to give back and to recognize that the roots of this movement lie within Indigenous people because there is this continuity between the traditional use of sacred plants’ ceremonial uses and the therapeutic underground in the West, and also with the above-ground clinical trials. There is this line of continuity, so even if you only like synthetics or you only use psilocybin or synthetic mescaline or LSD or MDMA…
In many regards, we are all heirs of Indigenous people.
Because it was through imitating their use of substances or studying their molecules (that they found out, their plants) and isolating and combining others that we created our own psychedelics. Also, the concepts and the ways in which these substances are used are largely a legacy of Indigenous people.
Again, I like to quote an Indigenous elder that was in one of our recent events, and he was saying, “Ok, think about the millions of plants that exist in the Amazon. How did Indigenous people manage to combine these two or other ones to create ayahuasca and to bring this to light?” Versus somebody who finds out about mushrooms through the Mazatec in Mexico, you synthesize a slight variation of how to synthesize, isolate psilocybin. Where is the big finding? Which was harder?
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Beatriz Labate: When I started social sciences, I read Bartolomé de Las Casas. He was a missionary visiting Mexico, trying to understand Indigenous people and having a lot of existential conflicts as a missionary. I found that entirely fascinating.
Kamea Chayne: What are some personal mottos, mantras, and/or practices you engage with to stay grounded?
Beatriz Labate: I'm trying very much to stay entirely out of social media. I think social media has become highly toxic. For us, it's challenging: we get a lot of attacks, a lot of trolls, and it just steals a lot of time and I'm trying to be less vulnerable to that. So it's for me, staying out of social media is one of the more healthy things to keep sanity.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest inspirations right now?
Beatriz Labate: I'm inspired in getting my American passport and my American citizenship and also my new driver's license and inspired in adapting more to the United States and trying to fit here and trying to make peace with this intense country full of so many paradoxes and so many challenges, but that also has a lot of opportunities and is still a place of hope and dreams for immigrants. It's been a fascinating process to try to make it in America.
Kamea Chayne: Bia, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an honor to share this conversation with you, and thank you so much for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us. What final words of wisdom do you want to leave us with as green dreamers?
Beatriz Labate: I thank you, too, I feel honored to be here. I would like to invite everybody that wants to support Chacruna to join our membership system, which is our way that we're trying to figure out how to move forward in a sustainable way and want to encourage everybody to be curious about these topics. Visit our site and again learn different languages and read and study and praise knowledge and don’t let the speed of everyday life and the video clip and the culture we live in steal away from us the pleasure of understanding and finding and delving into all of these incredible stories and universes and knowledge and wisdom and tradition and roots that are part of the psychedelic movement.
