The old shaman placed a bamboo shoot filled with hallucinogenic
snuff against Mark Plotkin's left nostril and blew into the
tube. Plotkin's head snapped back, he recalls, as if he "had
been hit with a war club." Little men began dancing before his
eyes. He asked the shaman who they were. "They are the hekuri,"
the wise man replied, "the spirits of the forest."
That was 1987, and Plotkin was deep in a Venezuelan rain forest.
Then director of plant conservation for the World Wildlife Fund,
he had heard of a hallucinogen used by Yanomamo medicine men.
Made from the leaves, sap and seeds of various plants, the
potent snuff might have medicinal benefits, he thought. After
all, aspirin came from white willow bark, which North American
Indians relied on to relieve pain. In fact, plants were vital in
the development of 25% of all prescription drugs.
The study of plants used by indigenous peoples is called
ethnobotany, and Plotkin had been steeped in the subject ever
since his college years at Harvard a decade earlier. He had
taken a course taught by Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer
ethnobotanist who had spent years in the Amazon rain forest.
During the first lecture, Professor Schultes showed a slide of
what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark-cloth
masks dancing under the influence of some kind of potion. "The
one on the left has a Harvard degree," the professor said,
pointing out how far some ethnobotanists will go to pursue their
research. That was when Plotkin, now 43, decided he had found
his calling.
After graduating in 1979, he headed for the Amazon and began
visiting shamans, some of whom let him stay for a while as a
student medicine man. He slept in thatched huts, ate delicacies
like boiled rat, suffered vampire-bat bites and was nearly
electrocuted by a giant eel. And he collected, as fast as he
could, hundreds of plants that supplied ingredients for the
shamans' medical arsenal.
He was racing against time, as Western influences seeped into
native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while
shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The
shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in
modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in
the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying
around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers.
Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for AIDS or cancer that
would be lost forever before it could even be discovered.
