medicine man

Salvador Chindoy, Colombian Medico

(excerpted from THE MARRIAGE OF THE SUN AND MOON by Andrew Weil MD, 1980, updated 1998 and once more. My purchase made in 1999, per fly-leaf notation.)

.....Salvador asks to be called a medico, and has a certificate from a botanist at the National University in Bogata announcing to whom it may concern that he is a skilled practitioner of herbal medicine, and, especially, an expert on the preparation and administration of yage.

Now, yage is a native of the hot country; it does not grow anywhere near the Valley of Sibundoy (where Salvador lives). Consequently, the Ingas and Kamsas who have learned its use have had to cross the mountains to the east and descend into the Amazon basin to study with men of tribes who live in the area where Banisteriopsis grows. When they want to use yage, they must make the same long trip to get a supply of the bejuco to bring back to their valley.

Salvador lives with his family and animals in a thatched house not far from the town of Sibundoy. To get to it, one must tramp through fields that are quite wet in the rainy season and cross several mildly ticklish log bridges over small ravines. Eventually one reaches a sort of dense thicket of strange plants, in the middle of which is Salvador's house.

It is said that the inhabitants of the Valley of Sibundoy use a greater variety of intoxicating plants than any other people. Most of those plants grow right in Salvador's garden. Perhaps the most eye-catching are the Tree Daturas, or Brugmansias, relatives of our own Jimsonweed. They are mostly smallish trees, almost always in flower, and the flowers are quite spectacular: foot-long trumpets that hang straight down from the branches. Some are tubular and red, others flaring and white, with a thick, heady fragrance. All parts of these plants are intoxicating, if not actually poisonous, but local brujos use them regularly to induce altered states of consciousness. The Tree Daturas are known collectively as borracheras, a name that indicates their intoxicating power, because borracho is the Spanish adjective for "drunk."

Like many other members of the Solanaceae, or nightshade family (such as Belladonna and Henbane), daturas contain mixtures of the so-called tropane alkaloids that cause delirium and amnesia. Two of these alkaloids, atropine and scopolamine, are used in orthodox medicine; scopalomine is the "twilight sleep" that is still used to make women amnesic for the experience of childbirth.

Plants that contain tropane alkaloids are associated with witchcraft in many societies. A common sensation of people who consume them is that of flying through the air.