Interview archivos - Plantaforma para la Defensa de la Ayahuasca

“Psychedelic renaissance in Europe is delayed one or two years compared to the United States”

21/03/202321/03/2023Iñaki Berazaluce

Antón Gómez-Escolar (Madrid, 1988) has been involved with psychedelic substances for a good part of his life, first with projects such as Energy Control or Kosmicare (Boom Festival) and, more recently, as a member of the Spanish Society of Psychedelic Medicine, director of the book collection ‘Las guías del psiconauta’, in which he also signs the book ‘Guía esencial del renacimiento psicodélico’ (Essential guide to the psychedelic renaissance) and a populariser in the channel “La Drogopedia de Antón” and the INAWE observatory. It is no coincidence that Gómez-Escolar has become one of the visible faces of the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ in Spain.

We chatted with Antón about the current state of psychedelic-assisted therapy in Europe, about research in Spain and about the eventual (and unlikely) integration of the shamanic model in the future regulatory framework.

Here you can listen to the full interview.

“There is a war to destroy the shamanic model so that biomedical practices can prevail”

27/02/202327/02/2023Iñaki Berazaluce

Francisco Azorín is a veteran in the defence of cannabis clubs, an experience he applies to put recent police operations on ayahuasca ceremonies into perspective. Azorín achieved a landmark court ruling on ayahuasca in the Malaga provincial court in 2021. It recognised that ayahuasca cannot be considered a “toxic drug, narcotic or psychotropic substance”. Only two years have passed, but the current situation of the plant is very different. Nobody would dare to speak today of the “(pen)last judgement on ayahuasca”.

We talked to Azorín, member of the Murcian law firm Brotsanbert, about laws, politics, police strategies and the role of shamanism in the booming ‘psychedelic renaissance’.

Sebastião Salgado: “Paradise exists: it is the Amazon”

12/12/202212/12/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

“For me, the Amazon is the last frontier, a mysterious universe where the power of nature can be felt like nowhere else on Earth. Here, there is a forest that stretches to infinity and contains a tenth of all existing plant and animal species. It is the world’s largest natural laboratory,” writes Sebastião Salgado in the foreword to his new book ‘Amazonia’, which has just been published by Taschen.

“The deeper the mystical experience with psychedelics, the better the therapeutic results”

31/10/202231/10/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

Slowly but surely, the repeal of the ban on psychedelic drugs is progressing state by state, country by country. The normalisation of entheogenic substances raises, however, several questions: who is legitimised to give these medicines: doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, shamans…, what experience does a traditional healer need and how can he or she prove it, can these substances be dispensed as if they were conventional medicines?

To answer these and other questions, we talk to Manuel Villaescusa, psychologist, musician, ayahuasca expert and co-founder of the Plantaforma de Defensa de la Ayahuasca.

“Psychedelics are good catalysts for processes, but they are rarely the end point of anything, they are often the starting point”

11/10/202211/10/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

Marc Aixalá, psychotherapist, holotropic breathing facilitator, founder of the ICEERS Support Centre and now also a writer, has just published a book that looks set to become an instant classic: ‘Integración psiquedélica’, published simultaneously in Spanish by Eleftheria and in English by Synergic Press (with translation by Adam Aronovich), was born “as a ‘self-reflection’ to clarify in writing the ideas of what I had learned in these years”, as Marc explains to us in this interview, which you can watch and listen to in full here:

“Psychiatric pharmacy lags far behind the rest of medicine. Nothing new has been invented in the last 40 years”

12/09/202212/09/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

Ediciones La Llave published in 2021 ‘El viaje sanador’, the first edition in Spanish of a classic book by Claudio Naranjo: ‘The Healing Journey’, published in English in 1973 and, nevertheless, very topical, now that the taboo on therapeutic research with psychedelics, a field in which Naranjo was a pioneer, is finally beginning to be broken.

We spoke to David Barba, editor of La Llave, member of Fundación Beckley Med,and an advanced disciple of Claudio. Through his words, David brings us not only snippets of the master’s wisdom but also his own, after decades of deep personal work with Gestalt, Buddhism and, of course, psychedelics, including ayahuasca.

“Expanded states of consciousness are fundamental to shamanic work”

11/08/202211/08/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

Leo Artese is a free radical within the Santo Daime church. While he follows the official calendar and the original design bequeathed by godfather Sebastian, he also sings his own hymnbooks (‘O Curandeiro’ and ‘Camino das Virtudes’), and performs a powerful shamanic ritual (‘Voo de aguila’), unheard of within the daimist liturgy: “I was a shaman before I was a daimist, just as others are engineers or teachers”, Artese justifies himself during this interview we had in Ibiza as part of his annual European tour.

Besides being a shaman, Artese is a qualified musician and has ‘received’ immortal hymns from the astral, such as ‘Yemanjá’ or ‘Livre’. Leo guides his ‘trabalhos’ by playing the bongos and imbuing the rituals with rhythm and good humour.

«Some people consider themselves shamans because they have taken two weekend courses»

27/07/202227/07/2022Iñaki Berazaluce

The journalist, novelist and documentary filmmaker Alfonso Domingo (Madrid, 1959) tried ayahuasca for the first time in the late 1980s in the Amazon. He had a transformative experience, which was followed by a phase of proselytising, trying to convince others to try this marvellous mixture. Now his attitude is very different: the abuses and “spurious uses” that are being made of the sacred drink have made him adopt a much more discreet attitude, close to mutism, with regard to ayahuasca. In transit, he has published a book about his experiences in the Amazon, ‘La serpiente líquida’ (Punto de Vista Editores, 2018) and a documentary of the same name. In them, ayahuasca is not the protagonist, although it is a constant thread running through Domingo’s story, as if it were the snake of the title.

We chatted with Domingo about master plants, extractivist capitalism, the first steps of ayahuasca in Spain… and about Alfonso Graña, the Galician adventurer who was chieftain of the Shuar Indians in the 1930s and about whom we will talk soon.