Okay, Here's an Answer I Gave Someone

Here's an answer I gave someone who asked what I felt the impact of ayahuasca tourism has been, and when it started, in Iquitos, Peru. It's not impossible that I've had a couple of glasses of wine with ginger ale right now and when I wrote this, so if the spelling is off in places, tough luck. HA!

I'm here and noticed your thread. I'm just under the gun with story deadlines and so have not responded yet. But I mean to.
I can tell you that in 1984 there were 2 very major and successful tour outfits in Iquitos, neither of which offered ayahuasca, as well as Carlos Grande, Moises Torres Vienna and a few other good jungle guides.
By 1990, Paul Wright and Peter Jensen, who had the two most successful outfits, came to me to say "thank you" because they claimed that my stories on ayahuasca had added more than 10 percent volume to their tour groups. And by 1993, when Shoemaker came and began his current tour of duty, they both claimed that their groups had gone up by 20 percent.
And once that ball started rolling, there was no stopping it.
The biggest single mark was Alan Shoemaker starting the Shamanism Conference, but there were other marks: The National Geo article on Blue Morpho, a couple of movies, and so forth.
And most of it has been a mixed blessing. There might be 30 places out on the road from Iquitos to Nauta, each of which has cut down primary jungle to make a lodge type place for gringos. That's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees cut down, thousands of bands of monkeys displaced in the name of saving the rainforest. And each of those require probably thousands of more trees next year.
The first big time operator out there that I know of was Don Francisco Montes. He is from a great line of Shipibo healers and was basically kicked out of Pucallpa in about 1993 and sent to live in Iquitos by his family, who bought him a 20 hectare spread. He organized himself, took his work seriously and I love the guy. He is terrific. And his place, Sachamama, is certainly the most beautiful place anywhere. I think Alan S, was the first to get him a grant of $500 from a woman who was a client of his. And that money was the seed money for the Sachamama plant identification work. Francisco has earned his stripes in the years since.
During the last 4 years we have seen an unprecedented number of newbies come to Iquitos with a few bucks, fall for a curandero, and build them a place on the road to Nauta. Most of those places will disappear because of the costs. But they will have killed wildlife, stunted vegetation and done a host of harms in the name of good. The one constant in the third world is that all of the bad men have never done near the harm of those who meant well,. That's just life, and it stinks but that's the way it is. Bringing curanderos out of their river villages hurts those villages. Bringing gringos in large numbers into those villages hurts those villages. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Better to just get healed and walk away.
HA! This from one of the people who accidently promulgated the whole thing. But I saw early on, in 1987-1988 that my teacher Julio Llerena's (Jerena) only true apprentice, Salis Navarro, when hired by Peter Jensen's outfit to give ayahuasca to gringos once a week let it go to his head and was subsequently killed by a Matses man, my friend Antonio, after he seduced one of Antonio's wives while Antionio was out hunting. The alarm bells went off that I was doing something wrong. I knew it was important to write about ayahuasca, to bring or help bring it to the world, but I also knew I would have to hide the people I worked with better, so that they would be protected, from themselves and others.
So what's with aya tourism? Well, it's brought enough gringos to Iquitos to keep several gringos making money in gringo restaurants. It's brought enough money to take a dozen legit curanderos off the rivers where they worked and bring them into the city to work with gringos, or into lodges to work with foreigners to the detriment of their own people. It's brought enough money to cut down thousands of hectares of primary forest in the name of making aya retreats that are aimed at making gringos money and to share the knowledge. It's brought enough money to have at least two dozen people who never even drank ayahuasca three years ago into the realm of being "curanderos" because they've learned a few songs and have sycophantic acolytes. And it's brought enough seekers to have obscured the value of the true ayahuasca experience, what with the rules, regulations, and so forth that many of the curanderos now put forth.
So, end result? Do gooders should stay the heck out because they spawn other do gooders. Evil men are identifiable and therefore not much of a threat.
There are, seriously, many many good people out there working their hearts to the n'th degree. To denigrate them would be wrong. They're doing good, important work. But there are also people who do not understand the culture, people who mean well, but who do not have the experience with the culture to know where and how to encourage legit growth, and therefore are unwittingly encouraging non-legit growth.
Which is which I am not going to get into. But there is certainly a part of me that is sorry for having unwittingly encouraged it all. Iquitos and the northwest Amazon was fine the way it was. It didn't need help. And all the help we've meant to bring has not been a real help at all, I don't think.