ICEERS
International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service
The plant kingdom sustains animal and human life, while providing countless material products, cultural artifacts and medicines, as well as pleasure of the bouquet, garden, meadow, forest and grand landscape. Nonetheless, despite everyday relationship and peoples’ unconditional dependency on the botanical realm, the social history and exceptional role of particular plants—specifically those with beneficial psychoactive properties—are generally misconceived or poorly understood.
Psychoactive plants were put to ritual and religious purpose by pre-industrial societies from the earliest times. Their properties, impacts, social functions and implied valuable potentials are of importance to modern psychology, sociology, polity, religion and spirituality. Richard Evans Schultes, father of ethnobotany, indicates hundreds of plant species with psychoactive organic constituents, of which 20 are of major importance among 60 currently utilized by primitive and advanced cultures.
Iboga is a West-African shrub with a long history of ceremonial use in healing and rites of passage. In modern society, a growing body of research and reports propose Iboga as a highly promising tool in the therapy and recovery from drug dependence, promptly alleviating opiate withdrawal and reducing craving for substances such as stimulants, opiates, alcohol and nicotine, for several weeks to several months, and is used as a catalist in psychotherapy.
Ayahuasca is an Amazonian brew of two or more botanical species which has played a major role in indigenous societies throughout the Amazonian territory of South America. Ayahuasca is also used as a sacrament in religious practice. Today it is gaining increasing recognition for its therapeutic effects.