Nobody wants to start a conversation about ayahuasca with the word abuse. The brew is sacred to the people who carry the tradition, and life-changing for many who sit with it. But if you're weighing whether to fly to Peru or Costa Rica and hand your nervous system over to a stranger in the dark, the most useful thing a writer can do is tell you the truth — including the parts the glossy retreat brochures skip.

A few years back, a community-led survey took on exactly this taboo. The findings are sobering, occasionally hopeful, and genuinely useful for anyone considering an ayahuasca retreat. I want to walk you through what came back, what it means for your decision, and how to use the information without either dismissing plant medicine or romanticising it.

Why a Survey on Sexual Abuse in Ayahuasca Settings Even Exists

For years, whispers circulated through the plant-medicine world about facilitators crossing lines — touching participants inappropriately during ceremony, soliciting sexual contact under the guise of healing, taking advantage of people in deeply altered states. Some stories made it to journalism. Most didn't. The combination of remote jungle settings, language barriers, power asymmetry, and the assumption that a shaman is somehow above reproach made it remarkably easy for misconduct to go unreported.

In response, a working group within the broader ayahuasca community drafted a free, downloadable safety guide — translated into fourteen languages and distributed across retreat centres, tour agencies, and tourism offices in Peru. The companion legal resource breaks down, country by country, what your rights are if something happens in Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, Bolivia, or Mexico. By early 2023 the guide had been downloaded nearly 29,000 times. That's not a niche document. That's a quiet movement.

The survey came next. Launched in 2020 in English and Spanish, it asked a simple question: are people in the community aware that this happens, and is the safety guide actually changing how they behave?

The Numbers, Without the Spin

Out of 2,071 people who started the survey, 745 completed it in a way that allowed their answers to be analysed. The drop-off is normal for online surveys, especially on sensitive subjects — some people don't have skin in the game, some find the questions uncomfortable and bail. Of those who finished, roughly 60% identified as female, 38% as male, and the rest as something else.

Here's the figure that stopped me when I first read it: 83.1% of respondents already knew that sexual abuse can and does occur in ayahuasca settings. Only 16.9% had no idea. That's a community that has, at least at the level of awareness, accepted there's a problem.

More uncomfortable: 52.1% had direct or indirect experience with sexual misconduct in these settings. Either it had happened to them, to someone they knew, or they'd heard credible accounts of it happening to others. About half. Let that sit for a second.

The pattern of what people reported is worth understanding. The more covert behaviours — verbal sexual advances, hands lingering where they shouldn't, the ambiguous touch a facilitator might brush off as healing work — turned up far more often than overt sexual assault or rape. That's consistent with what we know about predatory behaviour generally. It rarely starts with the worst-case act. It starts with small boundary tests, in a setting where the person being tested is too altered, too disoriented, or too culturally deferential to push back.

Did the Safety Guidelines Actually Change Anything?

Around 94% of respondents said the guide gave them clear, helpful examples of what abuse in these settings can look like. That's a strong response to an educational document. More interesting is the behaviour question: 32.8% said reading the guidelines actually changed how they approach ayahuasca ceremonies.

If a third sounds modest, consider what's being measured. A consultant in the sexual-violence field noted that in forensic psychology, even a 5% behavioural shift from an intervention is considered significant. Getting a third of respondents to admit — in writing, on a survey about a taboo subject — that they're doing things differently is, by the standards of the field, a serious result.

The 169 people who wrote in their own words about what changed gave us the most useful map. Here's roughly how the themes shook out, in order of how often they came up:

• Heightened awareness and caution. Most common by a wide margin. People started watching their environment, reading the room, noticing whether a facilitator's behaviour seemed off.
• Talking about it openly. Sharing the guide with newcomers, advocating for survivors, breaking the silence that protects abusers.
• Doing actual research before booking. Looking into specific centres and specific facilitators, not just trusting a slick website.
• A shift in how they see shamans. Recognising that a healer is a human being with a personality, ego, and capacity for harm — not a deity above reproach.
• Setting and communicating boundaries. Both before ceremony and during it.
• Going with trusted friends rather than arriving alone in a foreign country.
• Rethinking consent entirely — recognising that in a setting with a massive power differential and an altered participant, the usual definitions get murky fast.

A small but striking group — about 4 out of 130 — said the guidelines made them question whether they wanted to do ayahuasca at all. That's a legitimate response to honest information. Not every reader of this article should book a retreat. Some shouldn't.

What This Means If You're Researching a Retreat

You're probably here because something in your life feels stuck — addiction, depression, trauma, a pattern you can't seem to break — and ayahuasca keeps coming up in your reading. That's a real and valid reason to be looking. Plant medicine has helped a lot of people. It has also been the setting for harm. Both things are true. The job is to filter for centres that take the second part seriously.

From the survey and from my own time reporting on this, here's what to actually look for when you're vetting a place:

1. Written policies on conduct and consent. A centre that has thought about this will have language on its website or in its pre-arrival materials about facilitator boundaries, what's acceptable in ceremony, and how to report concerns. If you can't find anything, ask. The answer you get tells you a lot.
2. Multiple facilitators in the ceremony space. One shaman alone with twenty disoriented participants in a dark maloca is structurally unsafe. Centres with co-facilitators, helpers, and visible oversight are harder environments to exploit.
3. Female staff present at ceremonies attended by female participants. This came up repeatedly in the survey themes for good reason.
4. Reviews that mention safety, not just visions. Search beyond the centre's own testimonials. Look for accounts on independent forums. Note whether anyone mentions feeling protected or feeling exposed.
5. A clear no-touch or limited-touch policy during ceremony — or, at minimum, a conversation about touch before it happens. Some traditions include physical contact as part of the healing work. That can be legitimate. It can also be a vector for abuse. The difference is whether you knew what to expect and consented to it sober.
6. The vibe when you ask hard questions. If you email a centre asking about their safeguarding policies and the response is defensive, dismissive, or accuses you of disrespecting tradition — walk away.

The Bigger Picture: Trust the Medicine, Verify the Container

One of the more thoughtful responses in the survey came from people who'd started seeing shamans as humans rather than gods. That reframe matters. The plant itself doesn't care about your money or your status. The human pouring it for you might. Cultural reverence is a beautiful thing, and it's also exactly the dynamic predators exploit. You can hold deep respect for a tradition while still treating any individual practitioner as a person who needs to earn your trust.

Bringing a friend is underrated. So is staying somewhere with other participants you can talk to between ceremonies. Isolation is the abuser's friend. A buddy who'll notice if something seems off — and who'll back you up if you need to raise a concern — is one of the most effective safety measures available, and it costs nothing.

And one more thing the survey hinted at but didn't quite name: integration matters here too. If something happens that doesn't sit right, you need somewhere to bring it. A therapist who knows about psychedelic experiences, a trusted integration circle, a friend who'll listen without trying to fix it. Don't sit alone with a confusing memory for months. That's how harm calcifies.

Where to Go From Here

The point of all this isn't to scare you away from ayahuasca. Plenty of people have profound, safe, transformative experiences every week. The point is to make you a harder target — informed, skeptical of the right things, and clear about what a reputable container looks like. The community is, slowly, getting better at this. The survey itself is evidence of that. Awareness is up. Conversation is up. Some behaviour is genuinely changing.

If you've read this far and you're still drawn to the work, take that seriously — both the pull and the responsibility to choose well. For readers who want to take this further, a range of vetted ayahuasca retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Read carefully, ask the hard questions, and trust your gut when something feels wrong. The medicine will still be there once you've found the right place to meet it.