A few months back, a Spanish YouTuber spent nine months pretending to be a sincere seeker inside a Santo Daime church. He filmed ceremonies with a hidden camera, edited the footage into something theatrical, and posted it to an audience of hundreds of thousands. The video framed ayahuasca, master plants, and the people who drink them as a brainwashing cult dealing illicit drugs to the vulnerable. Talk-show appearances followed. So did police raids on two unrelated neoshamanic groups. And just like that, public opinion in Spain on one of the world's oldest plant medicines tilted sharply backwards.

If you're reading this while weighing whether to book an ayahuasca retreat — in Peru, Costa Rica, Portugal, anywhere — episodes like this matter. Not because they reflect what ceremonies actually are, but because they shape the legal landscape you'll be walking into, the headlines your family will read while you're away, and the broader cultural conversation around psychedelics and addiction recovery. So let's talk about what's actually happening in Europe, why it keeps happening, and what an honest reader should make of it.

What just happened in Spain?

The short version: one person with a camera, a serious appetite for clicks, and a sensational framing managed to do more damage to the public image of ayahuasca in Spain than a decade of clinical research has been able to repair. He also filed a complaint claiming attempted kidnapping after members of the church confronted him about the secret filming. Whatever the legal merits of that, it gave news producers a juicy hook — and they ran with it.

Spanish media has historically struggled with ayahuasca. The scientific literature on the brew — its safety profile in ceremonial settings, its effects on depression and addiction, its centuries-long ritual use — exists, and is mostly ignored when a tabloid story breaks. Instead, the framing defaults to the same tired script: a dangerous sect, a charismatic leader, gullible victims, illegal substances, money changing hands. It's a story shape that sells. It's also, in most cases involving established ayahuasca communities, wrong.

The fallout has been real. Raids. Arrests. A chilling effect on groups that have been quietly operating for years without incident. And, importantly for you as a reader, a renewed debate about whether ayahuasca should be legal in Spain at all.

Italy, France, the Netherlands — a pattern

Spain isn't an outlier. It's part of a pattern that's been unfolding across Europe for nearly twenty years.

France banned ayahuasca and its constituent plants in 2005 — three months after a Santo Daime group in Paris was actually acquitted of trafficking charges. The acquittal should have been a turning point. Instead, the Ministry of Health, with input from MIVILUDES (the French government's cult-monitoring body), pushed through a prohibition. The same Santo Daime leader who was cleared in 2005 was arrested again in 2019 and is still awaiting trial. He could face years in prison.

Italy followed suit in March 2022, when the Ministry of Health issued a decree banning ayahuasca, the plants used to brew it, and its active compounds. Italian Santo Daime members were so caught off guard they held ceremonies drinking water instead of the brew — a quiet protest echoing what the União do Vegetal did during their US court fight years earlier.

The Netherlands had been the European exception for almost two decades, tolerating religious ayahuasca use after a 2001 court decision. That tolerance ended in 2018, when Dutch courts reversed course and effectively closed the door.

Notice what unites these cases. None of them turned on new scientific evidence of harm. None followed a wave of medical emergencies. They followed political and cultural anxieties — about cults, about drugs, about religious minorities doing unfamiliar things in candle-lit rooms.

So is ayahuasca legal anywhere?

Yes, and the contrast matters. Brazil, where ayahuasca religions like Santo Daime, Barquinha, and União do Vegetal were born in the 1930s through 1960s, has gone the opposite direction. Way back in 1987, a federal Brazilian commission studied the religious use of ayahuasca and concluded there was no evidence of health risk or social harm. Subsequent rulings in 2006 and 2010 formally recognized religious ayahuasca use as constitutionally protected. The country is now in the process of recognizing the brew as intangible cultural heritage — moving it out of drug policy entirely and into the realm of cultural protection.

Peru recognized ayahuasca as national cultural heritage to protect traditional and Indigenous use. Colombia has no formal regulation, but Indigenous communities have built self-regulation frameworks, and administrative rulings have legitimized the ceremonial use of yagé. In the United States, two religious groups — the UDV and certain Santo Daime branches — won the legal right to use ayahuasca after Supreme Court and federal court decisions. Costa Rica operates in a gray zone that has, in practice, allowed retreats to flourish.

If you're booking an ayahuasca retreat right now, this geography is the reason most reputable centers are in South America. The legal infrastructure that took fifty years to build there is what allows ceremonies to happen openly, with safety protocols, screening, and accountability.

Why the backlash now?

The simplest answer is also the most cynical: ayahuasca got popular. Once a brew known mainly to anthropologists and a handful of religious congregations, it now circulates in global wellness conversations, celebrity interviews, podcasts about psychedelic healing, and serious clinical trials for depression and addiction. The psychedelic renaissance has pulled master plants into the mainstream.

Whenever something sacred goes mainstream, three things happen at once:

• Demand outpaces the supply of well-trained facilitators, so under-prepared operators rush in.
• Sensational stories — sometimes true, sometimes invented — find a much bigger audience.
• Governments, often reacting more to media noise than to data, look for ways to assert control.

You can hold two truths at the same time. Bad actors exist in the plant-medicine world; some retreats are unsafe, some facilitators are predatory, some ceremonies cause harm. AND the response from several European governments has been wildly disproportionate, ignoring decades of evidence about responsible ceremonial use and lumping centuries-old religious traditions in with sketchy weekend retreats.

What this means if you're thinking about a retreat

Here's where I'll get practical, because that's probably why you scrolled this far.

First, know the law of the country you're traveling to, not just the country you live in. Drinking ayahuasca in Peru is legal and culturally protected. Bringing it home is not. If you live in France, Italy, or Spain right now, your retreat itself isn't the legal risk — what happens at the airport on the way back, if you tried to bring anything home, very much is. Don't.

Second, choose retreats with histories you can actually verify. The Santo Daime church being filmed by that YouTuber has decades of documented practice, theological literature, and international branches. That's a different category from someone who learned to pour ayahuasca on a six-month trip and started a center in Tulum. Both might call themselves legitimate. They aren't equivalent.

Third, screening matters. Reputable ayahuasca retreats — and reputable centers working with master plants in general, whether that's San Pedro, kambo, or psilocybin — will ask you serious questions before accepting your booking. Medications you take (SSRIs are a real interaction risk). Mental health history. Cardiovascular conditions. If a retreat doesn't ask, that's a red flag the size of a maloca.

Fourth, think hard about why you want to go. Plant medicine has shown real promise for addiction, depression, PTSD, and the kind of stuck life patterns that talk therapy alone often can't shift. It's also not a magic eraser. The people I've watched get the most out of ceremony work tend to share two qualities: they came in with a specific question or wound, and they took integration seriously afterwards. The ones who treated it like an extreme sport mostly got an extreme experience and not much else.

The bigger picture

The European crackdowns are real, and they're not going away tomorrow. But they're also not the whole story. Indigenous federations in Brazil have been organizing conferences since 2017 to defend their ancestral use of ayahuasca. Researchers across multiple countries are publishing on its therapeutic potential. Clinical trials for psilocybin and MDMA are quietly normalizing the broader conversation about psychedelic healing. The cultural pendulum, despite the headlines, is still moving — just unevenly.

For someone deciding whether to drink ayahuasca, the takeaway isn't really about politics. It's about doing your homework: pick a country where the practice is protected, pick a center with a track record, prepare your body and mind seriously, and treat the days after the ceremony as more important than the ceremony itself.

If something here speaks to you, the available ayahuasca retreats and broader plant-medicine ceremonies can be browsed and booked on our marketplace here. Take your time with the choice. The plant has been around for centuries. It can wait a few more weeks while you find the right place.