Learnings from ayahuasca legal journey
During the World Ayahuasca Conference held in Girona (Spain) in 2019, Adrian Freedman talked about his legal journey with ayahuasca and what were the lessons he learnt from this experience.
While he was in Japan, Adrian met a Brazilian group from Santo Daime, and he began to attend their ceremonies. “The Santo Daime revealed to me that I had this healing path. A deep process of healing was opened for me. So I began to commit to that as a practice which ran in parallel with other practices, and meditation, and Buddhist practices,” Adrian said.
Then, he began to travel frequently to Brazil in order to live with Santo Daime communities, becoming fully immersed in their tradition. Later, at the end of the 1990’s, he moved back to the United Kingdom and they began the first Santo Daime private group there with four people. “We didn’t promote anything, we weren’t looking for anyone else to join this. It was our spiritual practice, and we took it seriously,” he added.
Ayahuasca legal journey
However, the group began to grow. “What initially was a personal path of healing revealed more as a path of service,” he stated. After ten years, they were regularly holding sessions with eighty or even a hundred people. One day, “without any warning, in September 2010 […] a lot of police suddenly turned up with flashing lights, and police vans, and cars. A lot of policemen came to my door in my house. […] They found 85 liters of ayahuasca.”
That was the beginning of Adrian’s legal journey with ayahuasca. Watch the video below to learn about the end of the story.
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Categories:
ADF
, AYACONFERENCE
, HUMAN RIGHTS
Tags:
legality
, ayahuasca
, Santo Daime
, Ayahuasca Defense Fund