DR. ANDREW WEIL
Interview excerpts and photo by Gregory Ego.
What first got you interested in plants?
Andrew Weil: I think it’s something I got from my mother, which she got from her mother. As far back as I can remember, I was interested in plants—even though I grew up in a row house in Philadelphia and had very little opportunity to grow things. We had a tiny little plot of ground in the back. But I used to grow indoor plants and gardened outside. And I always dreamed of a time when I’d be able to have a really good garden—which I finally do.
Your studies at Harvard brought you into contact with some very influential people. What did you learn from your botany teacher, Richard Schultes?
That was a major formative influence in my life and work. I became interested in the American tropics and Indians in South America, uses of hallucinogenic plants, medicinal plants and unusual food plants. It started me on a career of research in drug plants of all kinds. It’s unusual for a medical doctor to have a background in ethnobotany, and I’m really glad I got that.
One of the medicinal/hallucinogenic plants you’ve written about is yagé. Can you say something about your experiences with it in South America?
Today it is better known as ayahuasca. The
interesting thing that’s happened since the time I was studying it is that
it’s become very, very popular through Brazilian religious movements, and has
also become available up here in North America; members of those groups are
bringing it in and using it.
I took it with a number of shamans in South America and had very variable experiences with it. I had the best experience with one shaman in Ecuador—it was very dreamy, very visual. The visual images were very much influenced by the singing of the shaman. It seemed to be a very powerful psychedelic with many potential uses.
You’ve stated that cultures that use drugs in a ritualistic fashion have a lesser degree of abuse than those that don’t.
I think there’s a lot of ways which societies can protect themselves from the harmful effects of drugs. One is by using natural drugs rather than concentrated ones. Another is surrounding drug use with rituals that everyone accepts. For instance, I’ve written a lot about the chewing of coca leaf in South America and contrasted that with the use of cocaine up here. Among South American Indians, the use of coca is highly ritualized. It’s done at particular times, for particular purposes, people think about it in a particular way. It’s not used casually or recreationally.
In Spontaneous Healing you write about people who have rebounded from various illnesses, from back pain to the most serious cancer. Can you comment on the body’s healing system and why you think it’s understudied?
I think the body has a healing system that is not
made part of current medical thinking. It’s obvious, if you cut your finger
and watch what happens, that the body can heal itself. And just as you can see
that on the surface, it happens at every level of the body. I think whenever
people get better it’s because of the operations of those systems. Whenever
you give people treatments and they get better, the treatments work by
facilitating those systems. And I think it’s important for both doctors and
patients to work from that concept.
I think the reason we don’t take that seriously in medicine is that we’re very focused on disease rather than health and healing. And I think it’s also that Western medicine is very focused on the form and structure of the body, while the healing system is a functional system, rather than a set of structures that you can easily picture.
[Originally appeared in High Times, January 1996.]
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photo © Gregory Daurer 2003.