Regional practice
Preparations combining Banisteriopsis caapi with DMT-containing admixtures are used across parts of western Amazonia, with substantial variation in recipe, purpose, song repertoire and social role. There is no single Amazonian ayahuasca tradition.
Brazilian churches
Santo Daime, União do Vegetal and Barquinha are twentieth-century Brazilian religions with legal recognition, hymnody and church structure. They are not Indigenous traditions and should not be described as such.
The retreat economy
International demand has produced a large service economy: real Indigenous practitioners, trained mestizo vegetalistas, self-declared foreign facilitators, and outright fraud all occupy the same market with little means for outsiders to tell them apart.
Documented harms
Reported harms include sexual abuse by facilitators, deaths involving drug interactions and pre-existing conditions, psychiatric decompensation, and financial exploitation. These are documented facts of the contemporary scene, not anti-Indigenous claims.