their poisonous and their medicinal properties. These days we under-
stand this in terms of the effects of certain chemical constituents of
the plants. The conventional view is that this is the whole story—that
it’s all in the chemicals.
Maybe...
For thousands of years indigenous peoples, who have tended to
live much closer to plants than many of us do in the modern world,
have always had among them individuals who cultivated deep re-
lationships with the local plants. They were herbalists, curanderos,
vegetalistas, wizards, witches, medicine people, shamans. Plants were
part of their power source, but more generally these were individuals
who had mastered working with the spirits of nature in many forms.
They used their skills to help and to heal. They were the original doc-
tors and much of what we now call medicine has developed from their
tradition.
The fact that particular plants and particular chemicals can have
profound impacts on mental experience highlights the importance of
psychopharmacology to the study of the mind-brain relation. Drugs
that affect the psyche are powerful probes of how brain physiology is
related to consciousness and mind.
Healing medicine,
and the dark, deathly poison—
are one and the same.