CONFEN/CONAD/GMT
Commendation
The most important rules of government concern action. When, how, and within what limits should one act? The answer to this question constitutes, entirely, the art of politics. Dr. Gustave Le Bon — La psychologie politique.
Thanks to a superior level of creativity, perhaps forged in confronting the difficulties of asserting itself as a great nation in a world of rivalry, the Brazilian government, in an unparalleled and pioneering, historic attitude, decided to investigate and probe the reality and the social consequences of a prohibition or authorization before acting and legislating in favor of authorization. Today, I never tire of praising the decision, along with a great number of intellectuals and researchers scattered across the five continents. We are certain that a prohibition would only serve to throw into illegality thousands of productive and orderly people; it would have swelled the list of those awaiting opportunities for profit by breaking the law, it would have disseminated the use of what was meant to be prohibited. A prohibition would create a series of new crimes overloading the already overburdened judiciary; it would open new spaces and opportunities for corruption. Taoist wisdom teaches that persecuting people does not change their opinions, that the exiled of the past tend, historically, to become the government. A frivolous prohibition would open space for the dissemination of 'pharmaco-ayahuasca', a mixture of the synthetic components of the substance; it would reinforce illegal, potentially dangerous research, that is, it would generate a trafficking.
On the other hand, it is certainly possible that a psychoactive agent (today considered harmless to health when used in a ritualistic context), a medicine like Ayahuasca, may have an important function in the survival and evolution of our civilization and species. Continuity and success in the evolutionary scenario depend greatly on our talent in reconsidering our own convictions, knowing how to receive the other as a brother, recognizing that we are all kin, correlated in the same experience of life. Ayahuasca is a practical and effective remedy teaching us to recognize that we are a single phenomenon, a oneness, being a sacred agent of union and peace.
This medicine, formerly disregarded by the forces of the medieval inquisition, among the indigenous peoples, is today officially authorized, and may come to be the remedy we need to take our place as homo sapiens sapiens. A humanity capable of understanding politics, economics and science as sacred activities.