The world’s appetite for transcendence is endangering the very organisms that once mediated it. From the Sonoran Desert to the Amazon Basin, plants and animals that produce psychedelic compounds—peyote, ayahuasca vine, iboga, and even a toxin-oozing toad—are under pressure. As psychedelic therapies move from ritual to clinic, their biological sources are succumbing to overharvesting, habitat loss, and the cultural extraction that accompanies demand.
Peyote, long sacred to Native American communities, grows so slowly that it takes years to recover from a single cut. Yet its crowns are sold by the million each year to supply religious ceremonies and, increasingly, seekers chasing a fashionable “plant medicine” experience. The ayahuasca vine, once limited to Amazonian forests, now fuels a global wellness industry whose retreats multiply faster than the lianas they depend on. In Gabon, the iboga shrub, central to the Bwiti spiritual tradition, is being uprooted to feed the global market for its anti-addiction alkaloid. Even the Sonoran Desert toad has not escaped commodification: its secretion, rich in the hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT, is collected by “milking” wild toads—often fatally.
The authors of a new review, published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, call for a “biocultural” approach to conservation, one that treats these organisms not merely as raw material for pharmacology or spiritual tourism but as parts of living ecosystems and cultures. They urge long-term ecological monitoring, sustainable cultivation, and policies rooted in Indigenous stewardship. Synthetic chemistry may ease pressure, but it cannot replicate the entwined cultural and ecological relationships that have evolved over centuries.
The modern psychedelic renaissance has revived interest in substances that reveal hidden connections between self and nature. Ironically, that very quest for unity now threatens the species that make it possible. Unless reverence is matched by restraint, the next frontier of consciousness may arrive only after its natural teachers are gone.
Phyllomedusa bicolor, an Amazonian tree frog, produces a skin secretion, known as Kambo or Sapo, which used for cleansing rituals. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
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