Amazonía y Pueblos Indígenas

(Texto en Inglés y castellano) Ayahuasca Track Opening Speech at the 2013 Psychedelic Science Conference. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (*). April 19th, 2013, Oakland. I am very pleased to be here today. I want to thank the conference organizers for their openness to the topic of ayahuasca, and the participants of the Ayahuasca Track for accepting my invitation to join our gathering. I also would like to thank my University, CIDE (Center for Economic Research and Education), in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and thank you all for coming. I am happy to stand here and see this big audience, more than 275 years after a Jesuit missionary first reported on ayahuasca use in Peru, more then 150 years after botanist Richard Spruce identified Banisteriopsis use among the Indians of the Northwest Amazon, 90 years after its active principles were isolated, 80 years after DMT was synthetized in a laboratory for the first time, 50 years after Burroughs and Ginsberg published their classic book Yagé Letters, 37