THE PSYCHEDELIC MANIFESTO OF THE END
This is a Manifesto under construction.
There's hope of finishing it before the end of the world, though that's not a promise.
Everything that happens, happens.
Everything that, in happening,
causes something else to happen,
causes something else to happen.
Everything that, in happening, causes itself
to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it
in chronological order, though.
Douglas A.
[...] Out there, the fire: the purple chandelier of the red Macambiras and the gold-brown Angel-devils and Thrones, burning away.
The wind blows, the Sertão set ablaze! Dark monsters walk along the Road and, along the Road, among these Monsters, I walk!
Ariano S.
PREAMBLE
Countless specters haunt South America, Brazil, and the world.
They are the specters of the dead of the wars of annexation, occupation, expansion and seizure of territory, of regime change, of exploitation, and of the war on drugs.
Once again, in the corridors of the Trump Regime, in the Global North, we hear and see plans to seize and annex sovereign territories, along with the abduction of South American popular leaders forced to answer in court in another country on, among countless charges, ties to drug trafficking and terrorist organizations, on top of the systematic attacks on Middle Eastern nations that destabilize entire regions in the pursuit of power and the accumulation of material resources. Criminal organizations in South American countries can now be reclassified as terrorist cells, handing Washington its green light to invade and militarily control Brazil, for example. A new paradigm is being imposed on world geopolitics, and we can't dodge the debate: it will decide the course of our time on Earth if we don't act in an organized way. Maybe this is a call like no other in history. Without a doubt, the knowledge of political economists, anthropologists, social scientists and hard science is joining empirical knowledge, sometimes replicable, sometimes not, to explain the phenomena that afflict us. I speak from the psychonautic standpoint - if there is such a thing and, if there is, I have my doubts about how well it can be strung together and then shared in sentences made of subjects, articles, verbs and predicates - where this convergence of often distinct kinds of knowledge comes to a head in a few hours. The Manifesto is that trip. Endless, Herculean, and captivating all the same (to me, at least; it has cost me plenty of good sleep). I've been writing it for two years now, in 2026, as the preamble drops its veil. There's a lot left to build, but here I present the initial structure of what will be the Psychedelic Manifesto of the End, written by Felipe De Nadai, this still-organic being pressing plastic keys. Supposedly, this year I'll finish the delta-shaped course of this Manifesto, which springs from many contradictions seen and lived in the human field, paired with a newborn doubt: when they invade us, will they let our regional practices go on, such as, though not only, ayahuasca ceremonies every two weeks, maybe? History has good data on what happens in places destabilized, civically and militarily, by another nation. Maybe they'll sell us psilocybin in capsules as one of the evidence-based "coping strategies" for collective trauma. It'll surely be something innovative with a catchy slogan. Isn't the future ironically ancestral, even in this?
I see it, simply and directly, as a choice between alternatives: either every power within the established discourse, clinicians and shamans, academics, entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, therapists and spiritual leaders, civil society and the political-legislative body, joins forces to refute this warlike logic, and (i) we overcome the sacred-profane dichotomy of psychedelics vs. entheogens/sacred medicines, calling them what they are: drugs; and (ii) we root out the possibility of abuse in the psychedelic field, with oversight, governance, a place to report, and effective measures, which then also (iii) block biopiracy and the expropriation of practices long established by Indigenous and underground societies, pioneers of this vast field about to be harvested by Capital, by way of (iv) exposing and breaking patents and monopolies, in actions (v) against the commodification of psychedelic treatment, guaranteeing access tied to (vi) a critical debate about its integration into Brazil's SUS and other universal or private health systems, (vii) never losing sight of the fight to decriminalize all drugs, not only psychedelic ones, shifting the focus from security to health while still asking "what kind of health is this?" and where users will be dumped, (viii) by bringing on the overdue debate about how the very existence of the ecosystems where psychedelics live also depends on human subsistence, and what our role will be in this climate and social crisis driven by Big Tech technocracy, (ix) all of it tangled up in the glaring need to bring the concept of matrix into the psychedelic paradigm, leaving behind the asepsis of clinical trials to look closely, plurally and fairly at the many realities out there, and (x) toward an expansion that goes past the overwhelming cosmic consciousness of the psychedelic experience to include social justice, access, and historical reparation for communities stripped of their practices, or we'll meet the same fate as other biological species that have wandered this Earth with far less impact than humans: the dead end of evolution, that is, the extinction of humanity.
Given all this, I'll start with the central point.
What are psychedelics, after all? Chemical molecules often split into phenethylamines and tryptamines.
What would entheogens, master plants, teacher plants, forest medicines be?
How could it ever be palatable that psychedelic use (psychonautic, exploratory, recreational, "entheogenic", ritual, therapeutic, healing, or even accidental) is drug use?
CHAPTER I: THE REALITY OF PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCES; DRUGS ON THE PLANET OF THE PROHIBITIONISTS
The history of every drug policy that has existed so far is the history of denying materiality in favor of potential experience and, above all, I'd point out, of denying which bodies get to have the experience of using these drugs.
Psilocybin mushrooms, for instance, were used before the Spanish colonization only by spiritual or administrative leaders, and usually for diplomacy. In other words, the Aztec commoner most likely had no access to the medicine, much like what happens in the third decade of the third millennium, when paradise islands in Central America sell stays at psychedelic resorts while their own people can't get to the island's beaches. Observable knowledge about the danger, treatment and handling of each substance gets thrown out in the name of supposed public health control, by sorting "hard" substances from "soft" ones as a way of subjugating populations through their practices (the Chinese with opium, Mexicans with marijuana, Africans with liamba). Inside the psychedelic field, meanwhile, there's a refusal of the word "drug", an insistence on distinctions like "entheogen vs. psychedelic", in a supposed sacralization that would put some substances above others and, in turn, their users in completely opposite categories: the junkie and the enlightened.
State authorities, public security forces, and courts don't recognize semantic distinctions between entheogen and psychedelic, between sacred medicine and recreational drug, between expanded consciousness and psychotropic alteration. For the officer who stops a citizen, the judge who orders pretrial detention, or the prosecutor who files trafficking charges, all of these substances are drugs. Refusing to recognize that fact doesn't change the reality of the legal, social, psychological, and political consequences of the classification.
When a young man from the periphery is caught with psilocybin mushrooms, it does no good to argue they were a religious sacrament, a traditional entheogen, an ancestral medicine, or a clinical recommendation. The same goes for marijuana. In fact, Brazil in 2026 holds situations that are contradictory and complex: you can order cannabis by mail, with a prescription and a dosage, while you can also be arrested with small amounts of marijuana, depending on your phenotype and your zip code. The substance is essentially the same, so the war was always against maconha, liamba, diamba, pito, and not against cannabis. Plenty of people stepped onto this prohibitionist treadmill in the last few seconds and never noticed it's been running for a long time: in fact, we exported Brazilian medical knowledge, presented at the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress in Washington in 1915, linking marijuana to Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race people of the "lower" classes.
Bans on psychoactive substances go back to a huge pile of political decisions with nothing to do with security or public health. Caffeine, coffee above all, sold today in every corner store and every global chain, was once a target of the prohibitionists. You can buy filters, whole beans, ground coffee, arabica, catuaí, bourbon, from Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Italy, pressed, espresso, or drip. But someone living in Sweden in 1746 couldn't buy it, or even have it, without risking prison. Japan, one of the world's biggest tobacco consumers, banned growing and smoking it in the 17th century, as China had done three centuries earlier, and Russia too, the latter on pain of flogging. Our recent example, Prohibition in the United States, was a disaster: in less than 15 years there was a thriving black market running through the country's big cities. The use of psychoactive substances is, and always has been, subject to the political tensions of its time. A ghost of its era, haunting the decisions of those in power, whether emperors or democratically elected officials.
THE BEAN ON THE COAT OF ARMS
There's a country that wears the leaves of two drugs on its coat of arms.
On November 19, 1889, four days after it was proclaimed, the Republic decreed its arms: a blue shield with the Southern Cross, a sword pointing up and, around it like a wreath, a branch of fruiting coffee and another of flowering tobacco. Caffeine on the right, nicotine on the left, tied with a blue ribbon the way you'd tie a bridal bouquet.
The Empire already had both branches, and the Republic, which came to change everything, figured it was better to leave that alone. No other national symbol says so frankly where the money came from.
Let's call a narco-state a territory whose economy, labor, public finances and politics are captured by the production and export of a psychoactive substance. Apply that test to 19th-century Brazil and the diagnosis comes easy. The only thing that changes is who got to decide which substance would be a crime.
It starts with smuggling, like almost everything worth anything and almost everything worth nothing. In 1727, Sergeant Major Francisco de Melo Palheta is sent to Cayenne to settle a border dispute. He comes back with something else: the coffee seedlings the French kept under lock and key. Legend has it the governor's wife gave him a farewell bouquet with the seeds tucked among the flowers. Biopiracy with a love story. It already sounded like a slogan.
The seedlings reach Belém and barely take. They move up to Maranhão, down to Rio by the end of the century, and from there they spill across the Paraíba Valley, Minas Gerais, western São Paulo. Wherever they go, they cut down Atlantic Forest and use up people. Brazilian coffee was picked by enslaved hands until the last day the law allowed it, and a little after. By around 1840, Brazil was already the world's largest producer.
From then on, coffee writes the history, and it writes with the hand of whoever's paying.
The São Paulo Republican Party is born in Itu, in 1873, at a meeting of coffee planters. In 1888, abolition comes with no compensation for the masters, and some of those still holding people in slavery discover, within months, a republican faith they never had: the so-called Republicans of May 14. The Republic is born with the branches on its arms because it's born from the coffee farms' cash box.
And it wasn't just here. Around 1900, in most of Central America, whoever grew coffee governed. Each coffee oligarchy had its own way of carving up the land, all of them on the same ground: ground an Indigenous people had been driven off to make room for the Ethiopian shrub. In El Salvador, two laws, one in 1881 and another in 1882, abolished communal lands and hit a quarter of the territory in one stroke. The history of coffee in the Americas is an open-air laboratory of how the world sorts itself into center and periphery, who plants and who drinks, who picks and who profits. Brazil was that laboratory's biggest experiment, and its most successful.
Then comes the coffee-with-milk politics, São Paulo and Minas Gerais taking turns at the presidency like passing a thermos around. Then the Taubaté Agreement, in 1906: the coffee states borrow money abroad to buy up the surplus crop and hold the price up overseas, and pay the bill with a tax on every bag exported. Public money guaranteeing the margin of people who produce a drug. And when 1929 breaks the world, the Brazilian state buys and burns, between 1931 and 1944, more than 70 million bags of coffee. It was done by decree, with statistics and minutes: year after year, on average, more than a quarter of the stocks went up in smoke, and the smoke rose from the port of Santos day and night.
Meanwhile, out there, the Brazilian bean was keeping the English factory worker and the New York longshoreman awake. Not by chance. Coffee, tea and cocoa landed in London less than five years apart, between 1652 and 1657, right when time was starting to be counted in minutes. The stimulant and the clock got married there and never split up. Coffee fooled hunger, squeezed a few extra hours out of the body, and had the added moral advantage of passing itself off as the opposite of drunkenness: the drug that called itself sobriety. Time is money, and money needed somebody awake to count it.
But the stimulant also does something to whoever takes it, and that part is harder to see. It narrows. It sharpens focus, pulls everything to the center of the eye, and whatever was around it, the periphery, the corner, the detour, the play with no purpose, just disappears. The task stays. The goal stays. Brazil didn't sell the world a commodity and nothing more: it sold the rhythm of industrial capitalism, the ten-minute break that hands the body back to the machine. And a whole country organized to produce that drug kept losing its own periphery too. The first to go were the other plants.
Because caffeine didn't arrive here with Palheta. It was already here, in other plant bodies, in other hands, at other hours of the day.
In the upper Amazon, between the Napo and the Putumayo, the Secoya and their neighbors still scrape the inner bark of yoco into a gourd of cold water before dawn, knead it by hand until the water turns cloudy and bitter, and drink it before hunting and before working the fields. For the Airo-pai, yoco is a plant that gives advice. Nobody takes advice in a hurry.
The Sateré-Mawé domesticated guaraná. They roast the seed, shape it into a stick, and grate it on a stone over water, an everyday drink and a drink for every gathering, passed from hand to hand until it reaches the tuxaua, the chief.
Farther south, the Guarani drank caá, Ilex paraguariensis, and in 1616 Governor Hernandarias tried to ban it, ordering the leaves burned in the public square and a hundred lashes for any Indigenous man caught carrying them. The Jesuits called it the devil's herb too, at first. By the next century, they held the monopoly on growing it. Up in the north of the continent, the peoples of what is now the southeastern United States brewed a black drink from another Ilex and took it in rites of purification and friendship. Guayusa, cacao, and plants whose names nobody bothered to write down. Different botany, same molecule. And a use that had little to do with the clock: the caffeine of counsel, of gathering, of ritual. Not the caffeine of the shift.
Coffee didn't ban any of it. It did something more efficient: it made the rest irrelevant.
The mass spread of an exotic bean, planted on plantation scale and packaged for the world, took over the word itself. In Brazil, breakfast is called café. A tip is money "for a little coffee." Guests are welcomed with a coffee, and turning it down is an insult.
Guaraná survived as soda, sugar and fizz carrying the name of a fruit a people domesticated, the same fate as Coca-Cola, which was born with kola nut and coca leaf and today keeps the leaf without the cocaine and almost nothing of the nut, the gap filled with lab-made caffeine. Mate retreated to the South as a regional custom. Yoco became an ethnobotany footnote. There was no war on these practices. There was abundance, and the abundance of one substance is also a way of erasing the others.
The other branch on the coat of arms tells the same story inside out.
Tobacco is the most ordinary and most lethal plant in the West, and it's also, in the forest, one of the shaman's strongest allies, blown as rapé, smoked in doses that would kill outside the ritual, the plant that teaches about death because it lives close to it. The flowering tobacco the Republic put on its arms wasn't the healer's. It was the twisted rope tobacco of the Bahian Recôncavo, which from the late 17th to the 19th century served as currency for buying people on the Mina Coast: in Porto-Novo, a person was worth eight to twelve rolls. The two leaves on the coat of arms: one kept the world awake, the other paid for the arms that harvested it.
Today rapé is coming back to the cities as forest medicine, in ceremony, at retreat prices. Cigarettes are still on the bakery shelf, right next to the coffee. Both are tobacco. Only one of them got incense.
That's what I mean when I say Brazilian coffee overturned what drug use could be. It set the yardstick. The high of a stimulant everybody takes can't be seen, because it's the landscape, the very air of the office, the factory, the waiting room. And from there, "drug" came to mean other people's habits: the enslaved man's liamba, the Andean's coca, the periphery's powder.
It was this same Republic that produced the doctor who, in 1915, took marijuana to Washington as the vice of Black, Indigenous and mixed-race people from the lower classes. One drug got a coat of arms, the other got a cell. The difference was never pharmacological.
And if anyone really wants to know what coffee does, who it doesn't serve, what it keeps quiet, there's only one way. Quit. Few people try.
Good morning. Had your coffee yet?
I therefore start from the following non-negotiable premises:
Psychedelics are drugs.
And entheogens are drugs.
Forest medicines are drugs.
Ancestral sacraments involving psychoactives are drugs.
And therapies assisted by psychoactive substances use drugs.
Let's dig into the field of power relations that decide who can use which substances, in which contexts, under which conditions. This is the recognition that the battle isn't fought on semantic ground. The word "drug" carries stigma precisely because the prohibitionist apparatus turned it into a tool of social control, selective criminalization, and the genocide of marginalized populations.
The right answer to that stigma isn't to build hierarchies among psychoactive substances, declaring some worthy (entheogens, medicines) and others profane (drugs, narcotics), but to fight the very production of stigma.
Disputes over terminology (entheogen vs. psychedelic, sacred medicine vs. recreational drug) burn political energy that could go toward confronting the structures of oppression already at work. While Indigenous nations, shamanic, neo-shamanic and spiritualist communities fight with psychedelic therapy trials over cultural appropriation, while advocates of decriminalization fight with advocates of medicalization over which strategy works better, while academics fight over which epistemology is more respectful, the State keeps locking people up, the system keeps killing, and inequalities of access keep deepening, pushing people away from the care they could get if their use ever turned abusive.
The attempt to move what was first called psychedelic over to the name entheogen was also a strategy used by Ruck, Wasson and Ott. The maneuver was supposed to work by distancing these substances from popular culture and crediting them with something that invoked the semantics of the divine, long attributed to them.
Still, an epistemic war inside academia, from anthropology to psychology, from physics to neurobiology, does nothing for the urgent debates of our time. Some of them, which I'll explore further on, include the very survival of our species. The utopian idea that psychedelics could save the world falls apart when we look at our reality: the most powerful techno-financial people on the planet, in this first quarter-century of the third millennium, have already had contact with some psychedelic substance. DMT, psilocybin (4-HO-DMT, always worth remembering how structurally close it is to DMT), ibogaine, or dissociative anesthetics like ketamine, among countless other new psychoactive substances with psychedelic, that is, mind-expanding, potential, have been used by names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and plenty of other multibillionaire technocrats, and still there's no global change in the exploitation of man by man, or in human sustainability on Earth. In fact, the solutions these beings have found (read: sold) are to build bunkers in New Zealand, to colonize Mars, or to open up Arctic and North Pole waters to new trade routes, condemning the world's population to daily climate swings while rivers are drained for data centers, making aridity the norm, with the service-providing population of Earth living underground or in mass graves.
I therefore propose a new strategy ("from the Greek, ΣΤΡΑΤΗΓΙΑ,…"), which begins in this chapter and will run through ten instances over the pages ahead, one for each of the ten points laid out in the preamble, and surely without exhausting itself. These are the worries of our generation, and there may not be many more generations left to fix our choices and our inaction. I begin, then, by affirming that, whatever the epistemological, ontological or spiritual differences about the nature of psychoactive substances, there's a shared materiality that obliges us to coordinated political action. Psychedelics are drugs in the eyes of the international state apparatus. There are timid moves in a few countries, or even in some U.S. states, where a small bubble of decriminalization/legalization exists. This is the inescapable material reality that shapes the conditions of possibility for any use: ritual, therapeutic, recreational, spiritual, and adult use.
Insisting on the distinction between entheogen and drug, sacred use and profane use, medicine and recreation, only works as an exclusion device that decides who deserves access and who deserves prison. When companies like Compass Pathways, ATAI Life Sciences and other up-and-coming pharma firms try to patent synthetic formulations of psilocybin, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT for "legitimate medical use", they implicitly establish that other uses (communal, ritual, recreational, self-exploratory) are illegitimate. I'll get to that topic later, in Chapters IV and V.
While debates at conferences, symposia, groups, associations, and companies focus only on the possible benefits of psychedelics, now in their so-called renaissance, we look neither inward nor outward. The next chapter, then, is about looking inside the movement itself, which grows by creating characters and personalities to be followed.
Either we solve the drug problem and how we see drugs, how we treat them, or everything will be poisoned by the moralizing, prohibitionist root of public policy.
You, psychonaut.
You, praying with rapé, sananga, kambô
You who go every week
and you who use once in a blue moon.
You who use at the rave or at home,
the txaizão and the expansion house
You who buy cannabis with a prescription...
You're a drug user. And that's okay.
Welcome to the world. It's ending.
CHAPTER II:
INSTITUTIONAL VIOLENCE AND STRUCTURED ABUSES OF POWER IN THE PSYCHEDELIC FIELD
[...]
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