The Tourist Economy of the Sacred

A hope for a better path

The small towns and remote villages are changing. There is money, yes, more than before, but also a kind of fever. The roads wind deeper into the forest carrying people who arrive with cash and questions, seeking something their own world cannot give them. For the communities who hold the plant knowledge, the ones who never asked to become destinations, this has meant both opportunity and violation.

The lodges and retreat centers hire locals. There are jobs now such as kitchen work, cleaning, guiding and for some families this has replaced the old dependencies of the logging crews, the coca paste buyers, and the mining camps that ate the hills. But walk through many retreats and you will see the shape of the problem. The buildings often belong to people from elsewhere, the websites are in English, the bank accounts empty into cities far away. The land gives, the people serve, the profit leaves.

In Oaxaca, in Iquitos, in the Sierra Mazateca, wherever the mushrooms grow or the vine is cut, elders are saying the same thing: “This is not right.” This same Indigenous spirit took over and occupied the stage at the closing session of Psychedelic Science in 2023. That same energy was in place at the recent International Conference on Iboga in Gabon. Attendees from the Western hemisphere were clearly told by leaders in Gabon that iboga was a gift to be shared, but it was their gift to give, not something to be taken.

The caretakers of the plants call it spiritual colonization and they are not wrong. The ceremonies that once bound a people to their cosmos are now advertised on Instagram. The curanderos who should be tending their own communities spend their nights with strangers instead, adjusting the songs, softening the rigor, performing a version of the sacred calibrated to what the foreigner expects from “authenticity.” Access for locals dwindles. The rites begin to change shape.

Ayahuasca does not grow quickly, neither does peyote. Neither do the dozens of other plants that now face extraction pressure they were never bred to withstand. The trails deepen. The vines nearest the roads are already gone. Botanists report the usual trajectory of local abundance becoming scarcity and then crisis. Add the necessities deemed necessary from visitors from the Global North, the septic systems, the cleared sites, the diesel generators humming through ceremony, and you have ecosystems folding under a weight they were not built to carry, often in places already fragile from decades of industrial harm.

Money does strange things to a village. Suddenly some families have it and others do not. Tensions grow over who controls the ceremonies, who owns the rights, who gets to profit from traditions that were supposed to belong to the entire community. New values arrive with the tourists, ideas about consciousness, sex, and freedom that do not always align with local norms, and in the unregulated spaces of the retreat economy, where power is murky and oversight absent, this has sometimes meant harm, coercion, abuse, and exploitation dressed up as healing.

This is certainly not true of all retreats. I have witnessed shining examples of how mindful intention to the nuances of this work can be accomplished with minimal damage to the local community. But let’s admit it, there is always damage. At the very least we should strive so that negative impact is balanced by local cultural, social, and spiritual benefit.

There is another version possible. A version in which there is a deep commitment to the lineage of these wonders of nature. The research exists that when communities lead, when elders retain authority, when profits stay local and ecological limits are respected, the outcomes change. Participants leave with something genuine, a felt connection to nature, a shift away from destructive habits, a new political commitment to the places that held them. Some become advocates. Some send money back. Some fight for the forests in ways they never would have otherwise. When the structure is right with local ownership, pay fair, culture protected, land honored, then psychedelic tourism can fund the preservation it might otherwise destroy.

That version requires a reversal of the current paradigm of power to one where the energy flows back to the people who hold the knowledge, humility from those who seek it, and a recognition that the sacred is not a product. The question is whether the hunger for transformation can make space for that kind of discipline, or whether the villages will simply be consumed by the same logic that hollowed out the seekers in the first place.