Richard Schultes Interview (page: 4 / 8) The Father of Modern Ethnobotany	Print Interview

Did you ever get lonely or discouraged, all that time that you were in the jungle?

Richard Schultes: No. I had one month vacation a year. I stayed down two years and then came home to Boston in the winter to skate and ski and get fat again for two months. I'd do a lot of identifications of the plants I had brought back, then go right back. In the early days, I rarely got up to Bogotá, the capital city, where I kept a room in a British boarding house. I didn't go often, because it took at least 12 or 13 days to get from where I was up to Bogotá. First by canoe, then by horseback, then by bus, and it was just not worth it. So I'd stay in six months, and one time 13 months in the field, living on native food, which is very good. It's monotonous, but very good.

When you make that discovery, when you find a plant that has uses that nobody had imagined, what are your feelings at that moment?

Richard Schultes: You have a feeling of achievement when you discover a new plant, even a plant that has no use. But if it has an interesting use, it gives you a lift, let's put it that way. It's a "thank you" for any work you put into finding this plant.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I worked a lot with medicine men, or they call them shamans. I like the word medicine man because it is easily understood by people. And I never found them reticent. I read in these books that are written by people who go down for a month or two how you have to pry their secrets from them. I never found this. I was there and I saw what they were using. I could speak with them about their beliefs, especially their super-sacred plants.

I was very much interested, ever since my undergraduate years here at Harvard, when I wrote a paper on the peyote plant. That is a hallucinogen, a cactus of the Southwest and of Mexico. That interest carried through all my work.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Among primitive peoples, I think in most parts of the world, certainly in the Amazon, there is no concept of organically caused sickness and death. It is all done by the invisible arrows from malevolent spirits. And, the hallucinogens are used in magical religious rites by primitive peoples. They're not abused as they are in our country and Europe by "civilized" people who have adopted them and use them without that religious background. The medicine man, and sometimes the ordinary Indians, through these visions that most of them produce, think that they are able to confer with the ancestors, or with the malevolent spirits. And, the medicine man thinks we can diagnose diseases which are caused by these malevolent spirits and somehow -- either with plants, or with mumbo-jumbo, or both, or with certain rituals and dances -- affect cures.

Now, my interest in hallucinogens is purely medicinal. I have never been able to understand the use of hallucinogens to get the religious experience. I don't believe we can get religion through chemical means. In that way we are different from the Indians who have thousands of years of background using these in so-called "magical" religious rites. They have no concept, as I said, of organically caused sickness or death. The Indian has to explain everything to himself. Why, thinking as an Indian,

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Why do these few plants, out of a half a million in the world, have these unearthly effects on the mind, and sometimes on the body that they think and transport into outer realms of space? They have to explain this, and they believe that in these plants there is a resident spirit. We know that this resident spirit is a chemical substance. I have often told my students that I have never been invited at the theological school at Harvard to lecture. I'm a scientist. If I am, I can go and draw the formula of these spirits, and that is more than any theologian can do with his gods.

That's the reason these plants are separated from the ordinary plants that have dyes or are foods, or rubbers, or have other uses, or no uses. These are set on a pinnacle, and they are not abused as they are by many people in our own country and in Europe, civilized people, because these plants are sacred to them.

Do you feel that you have to take a certain amount of risk in the interest of science?

Richard Schultes: It was part of the work, it was part of the whole situation. Conjunctivitis, for example, is very common in the wet tropics. It is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the eye. They have a number of plants that they use to hasten the disappearance of the problem. I had it once, and I used one of their plants, a tea of the leaves of that plant. It happened to be a new plant of the pumpkin family which they cultivate for that purpose. The condition disappeared. Whether this was a natural cure and would have disappeared without a treatment, or it was the treatment that they used, I don't know. This is one of the difficulties of working so far away from laboratories. Another difficulty is when you have to dry leaves or bark to send them out to the States or Europe to a well-supplied laboratory for analysis; you may have changed the chemistry.

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