Starting in 1998, church members of Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, Brazilian syncretic religions that brew and drink the sacrament Ayahuasca have been arrested in the United States, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, Italy, Australia, Ireland, and England. Misinformation in Western nations has led to the classification of Ayahuasca as a destructive, hard drug. Ironically, Ayahuasca has been known to cure heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and other substance addictions.
If people were being healed of everything from dyslexia to terminal cancer and making years of psychoanalytic progress in a single session – and were experiencing these miracles within the context of a legal church in Brazil – why should this elixir that facilitates communion with the divine be worthy of punishment by numerous governments? What impact do the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest have on a modern world that seeks to burn the last untouched gifts on the earth? Critically acclaimed filmmaker, Maxi Cohen, began to ask these questions and seek the truth behind this sacred concoction.