Steve,
Thanks for the link.
What follows is a bit of a rant, but this is the rsf….
My main criticism of the "legalize it" crows for most things is their intentionally leaving out the risks involved and what happens when it goes bad.
Frequently, this same group will come up with a false equivalency argument such as "alcohol kills far more people every year." While technically true, (a) I've never heard of anyone dying, or suffering from an irreversible and untreatable disease like schizophrenia, from taking a single drink, (b) people can be functioning alcoholics for long periods of time and assuming they never drank so much as to cause liver failure or malnutrition (which causes brain damage over time) if you dry them out they are fine, and (c) alcohol is used by a far larger group than any of the illegal substances by virtue of it being legal.
My problems with things like ayahuasca include the fact that a single exposures can result in severe damage to people that is frequently impossible to treat and frequently the issue it professes to treat has other less dangerous options.
The fact that most of the groups pushing this stuff are really just using it to get high further annoys me. All of the "plant based medicine" people I've ever met were either junkies, drug dealers hiding behind hippie bullshit or both. While legitimate, and qualified practitioners, may be out there, all of the ones I've met were bullshit artists who didn't care if they hurt someone as long as they got their money. I'm very suspicious of documentaries on this not only become of the often blatant biases of the people making the documentary, but also due to selective editing/presentation of those being presented. There is a reason why no one respects the Kardashians.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of the societies that used these compounds "for thousands of years" didn't really care if it killed or permanently disabled a certain percentage of the people who used it. I've never been around any tribal society that values human life in the way the modern Western democracies do. If you die doing something, well it's general viewed as sad, but "meh." All of them are hyperviolent societies by modern standards in which people frequently die for any variety of reasons that the locals can do nothing about. I cannot imagine that was any different in the past.
And finally, as a long term meditative practitioner, I find the use of hallucinogens completely unnecessary and almost always a tool of the lazy who are unwilling to do the work.
All of this may come across as unnecessarily harsh and I am happy for those that benefit from a successful application of these compounds. But the people pushing this stuff are never there to clean up the pieces when it goes bad. Those broken people wind up on my doorstep. And frequently I can do nothing for them.