Brugmansia spp.
Whenever possible, Microcosms: The Sacred Plants of the Americas seeks to highlight the potential connectivity between ancestral knowledge about medicinal plants and contemporary Western scientific models for the study of botany. In this sense, one of the most notable cross-cultural collaborations occurred when Kamentsá healer Salvador Chindoy shared his plant wisdom in the 1940s with Richard Evans Schultes when the renowned Harvard ethnobotanist hoped to learn more about the psychoactive and healing properties of the rare Brugmansias that grow only in Colombia’s Sibundoy Valley.
Now, many decades later, Bernardo Chindoy, who has preserved what he learned from his grandfather Salvador and both his parents, is working with Federico Roda, a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá), who specializes in the evolutionary genomics and metabolisms of the same Brugmansias that so intrigued Schultes. Together, they will share paradigms for a fuller understanding of these extremely potent members of the Solanaceae family, mysterious cultivars with names like Amarón, Biangán, Buyés, Culebra, Dientes and Quinde. In conversations with Roda, taita Bernardo has spoken of the crucial importance of creating on his family’s land a garden of these medicinal Brugmansias, also known collectively as borracheros. He mentioned that when he was younger, he did indeed cultivate and conserve just such a garden. Tragically, however, the U. S. government’s entirely misguided War on Drugs with its catastrophic ecological consequences destroyed the shamanic plants thriving under his skilled care. He watched as the revered vegetal beings that he used to heal his patients burned and shriveled after the aerial spraying of herbicides containing glyphosate. Bernardo Chindoy and Federico Roda are hopeful that a new beginning is possible and that the international community will donate to this worthy cause. Read an essay by Federico Roda here.
Alistair Hay, one of the authors of the truly exquisite book Huanduj: Brugmansia, affirms that “the Incan people were relative newcomers to the Peruvian scene, bringing diverse Indigenous groups under their domination, and they came late in their history to embrace the sacred plants which had long been a central part of the religious cultures of those they conquered: the hallucinogenic brugmansias were among the most important to them.”
He goes on to say that brugmansias “are without question the elite South American entheogen, usually reserved for the ultimate in shamanic training, the most difficult cases of divination and healing, for the fiercest of warriors and the most courageous and skilled of shamans.”
Confirming this idea, anthropologist Glenn H. Shepard, Jr. maintains that, according to what he has observed in the Peruvian Amazon, “A larger, vision-inducing dose of Brugmansia infusion may be given orally as a last resort to treat people with incurable illnesses, witchcraft or severe accidents. This preparation is considered to be the most intoxicating (kepigari) and strongest of all medicines…Brugmansia is the open-heart surgery of the Matsigenka—a final resort to the highest medical authority, reserved only for the most drastic cases.”
In an article by Arteaga de García from the specialized academic research publication Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Químico-Farmaceúticas on Brugmansias as a promising species for the production of tropane alkaloids, especially scopolamine and atropine, which are used in anticholinergic drugs to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and overactive bladder as well as to alleviate the nausea associated with motion sickness and chemotherapy treatments, the leaves and flowers of Brugmansia sanguinea were found to have especially high concentrations of these compounds.
Current research in Brazil led by Sandro Pinheiro da Costa adopts a global perspective on the therapeutic uses of Brugmansia suaveolens, citing by country where the preparations made with different parts of the plant are used to treat asthma and bronchial problems, gastric disorders, infections, wounds, ulcers, rheumatic pain and vaginal infections. There is also a section dedicated to toxicity related to Brugmansias in the form of hallucinations, hysteria and other anticholinergic symptoms. Included here is a brief analysis of the essential oils in Brugmansia suaveolens flowers that vary as the blossoms mature and change color from yellow to white to pink over a 24-hour period.
