helping to bridge the digital divide. the river town of iquitos, a launch pad for american tourists looking for a trip to the rainforest. their first stop is often the belen market, where all kinds of exotica are up for sale. vendors here sell everything from vegetables and alligator skulls to snake charms and yes, even ayahuasca. we just asked one of the shopkeepers if they had any ayahuasca, and this woman said, let me just run over and get some. so how much does she sell this for? i have no idea. [ speaking foreign language ]
this substance that s illegal here in the u.s. is going to heal him. we ll see. stan s journey will take him to south america, to the frontier town of iquitos located deep in the amazon. this outpost has become the epicenter of a growing industry of ayahuasca tourism. i m on my way to a jungle retreat, one of many run by ex-pat americans. these forests produce many of our modern medicines. and i want to find out if ayahuasca could someday become one of them. this is el pugero, or the purger, a collection of simple huts tucked away in the forest. it s amazing to me that there are over 100 of these ayahuasca centers in this part of peru. almost all of them are run by
doing. people really are carrying a lot of abuse, so many things are deeply rooted. is ayahuasca a cure for this stuff? i think if you can dislodge that negative energy, if you can glimpse what you could be without it, you can go back home and work on getting rid of it. if you think you re just going to take joy juice and hey, dislodge it, you re nuts. five years of work to get rid of it, and still it can be unhealed. peter settled in iquitos in the 1990s when he witnessed the first wave of ayahuasca tourism. while he endorses psychedelic healing, he s worried about how traditions are changing. traditionally, the shaman drinks. the shaman. he accesses other realms of reality to find out where the dissonance is that if the shaman corrects will eliminate the symptom on this. could be physical, could be emotional. it could be bad luck. we americans come, and we said, we insist on drinking the damn
ayahuasca. what are you hoping happens over the course of the next 12 days? i m hoping to go to resolve that kind of lingering, undefinable dark cloud that follows me around and not have it there anymore, so it s not subverting my life. so i m hoping ayahuasca will help me go inward and have it heal me. we re off to peru where we re going to meet stan. he s someone who has just had this tortured soul for the last 30 years, and he s hoping that this substance that s illegal here in the u.s. is going to heal him. we ll see. stan s journey will take him to south america, to the frontier town of iquitos located deep in the amazon. this outpost has become the epicenter of a growing industry
CNN This Is Life With Lisa Ling March 14, 2015 06:25:45 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.