Indigenous peoples and public policies on psychoactive substances

Abstract

The present study carries out a historical-critical reading of the consumption of psychoactive substances in indigenous contexts. A cut of reality is made - with authorities, teachers, students and caregivers - about the knowledge, relationships and practices located in Sipirra on psychoactive substances. Through collective mapping, community actions, collaborative and intercultural learning in the territory are reported. Stories emerge abgenosout master plants or entheogens that heal. Traditional medicine with plants such as tobacco, coca, cannabis, poppy, floripondio, yagé, among others, emerges in the voices of those who collaborate in mapping the consumption of psychoactive substances. In the stories of the Sipirra educational community, tensions are found when meaning the knowledge, practices and relationships between medicinal plants and drugs. The government discourse is also put in tension by identifying a contradiction between promoting intercultural studies in public policy that promote autonomy and the safeguarding of cultural identity in indigenous peoples and, in opposition, promote from the National Survey of the Consumption of Psychoactive Substances (2020) the idea that yagé is an illegal psychoactive substance, ignoring it as a master plant in ancestral territories. It arises as an initiative of the Cañamomo Lomaprieta reservation to plant and care for a «school garden of entheogens» in the educational institution as a «pedagogical space» to signify from the ancestral knowledge of the community, relationships with plants and contribute to the care and in prevention with ancestral practices, to the contemporary problems of consumption in urban contexts.