Originally written in 2022 for the ESPD55 volume, updated in 2024

The cactus Huachuma was the sun and stars that illuminated thousands of years of cultural evolution on the coast of what is now called Peru. When the Spanish conquistadors sailed onto that coast and planted a flag, those who carried the knowledge of the plant were violently persecuted, and their practices were driven underground. But Huachuma shone on, the Southern Cross to their ship in the night.

In 2022, the knowledge and traditional uses of the San Pedro Cactus were declared “Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Nation” by the Peruvian government. The declaration recognized “the expression of a systemic and integral vision of a cultural universe” that people and plants have created together since the dawn of civilization in the Andes. It was the biggest legal leap for the cactus and its allies in 500 years.

“At last!” was the overwhelming response from the community of surviving elders in North Peru who still carry San Pedro’s tradition.

The ancestral cultures of Peru unleashed the power of the plant over 3,000 years ago during the rise of Andean civilization – civilization which coalesced around a psychedelic sacrament in a way that no other developed culture on Earth has matched. The cacti themselves were associated with flowers, the cosmos, and the regenerative cycle of water as it moves through the earth, holding a mediating role in a world where unpredictable weather was the limiting factor for human survival. Beginning with the unprecedented rise of Chavín, the “mother culture” of the Andes, in the first millennium B.C., a succession of cultures integrated the plant into the deepest levels of government, politics, health, and artistic expression. Much later, as the Catholic Fathers did their best to annihilate Andean religion, the descendants of those cultures were accused of witchcraft and communion with the devil for the crime of taking the same sacrament. “This is a plant with which the devil had deceived the Indians of Peru… which they used for their lies and superstitions,” wrote Father Cobo in 1631. “Transported by this drink, the Indians dreamed a thousand follies and believed them as if they were true.”

As the remaining San Pedro practitioners – called maestros (masters)or curanderos (healers) in North Peru – emerge from this long night of persecution, standing with pride in the sunrise of governmental recognition, the ruins are plain to see. The renowned healing cults of the plant survive in urban centers throughout North Peru’s coastal areas, where all-night rituals of San Pedro consumption called mesadas are still practiced on Tuesday and Friday nights. These rituals retain their Indigenous roots, but their practice also incorporates Catholic symbolism. Nearly all of the practitioners in the traditional world of San Pedro are over 60 years old, and many of the greats have already passed on. Their children are the first generation in 3,000 years of uninterrupted cultural relationship with San Pedro who are no longer learning to work with the plants. Many live in extreme poverty.

To add insult to injury, hundreds of miles to the south, in an idyllic valley far from the native habitat of the plants, people who are not from the Andes are making millions selling San Pedro to an exploding global community of spiritual tourists. The Ministry of Culture’s resolution makes a point of condemning charlatans who sell San Pedro ceremonies without a connection to the ancestral tradition.

Even so, what was missing from the document stood out more than what was included. There is an obvious hole in the resolution: a threat on the near horizon which puts at risk, more than any other single factor, the integrity of the ship on which traditional healers have sailed through the catastrophe of conquest only to emerge in the equally damaging dawn of the modern world.

The document does not say a word about the fact that the San Pedro Cactus itself is endangered and disappearing in the wild.

Experts have known about the cactus’s conservation issues for fifteen years. All species of San Pedro are considered “endangered in the wild” or “threatened” within Peru. And yet, it appears that reports of endangered cactus populations have had little impact outside government offices, and even less impact outside Peru. Illegal harvest and exportation of the plants has continued to increase exponentially. Even today, the myth persists within Peru and internationally that Peruvian San Pedro is a sustainable source of psychedelic medicine.

The language that the Ministry of Culture uses in their recent declaration leaves no doubt that the direct consumption of the plant is “indispensable” to preserving at-risk cultural knowledge. The document recognizes that “the San Pedro cactus is understood as a vehicle for the knowledge of the spiritual forces that preside over [the Andean] conception of health” and “a medium which allows knowledge of the spiritual world,” and “a guide to achieve a vision of sickness and its diagnosis.” The plant is the center of the “cultural universe” they aim to protect, but the plant itself is poorly protected.

I conducted my PhD research in Peru’s wild San Pedro habitats, surveying their populations and diversity in broad strokes through a swath of the Andes the size of California. When I began, I had no idea of the sustainability crisis that San Pedro was facing. Five field seasons later, I was intimately familiar with the devastation of the plants in so many of these habitats. The story of wild San Pedro is a simple, universal story: that there is always enough of everything until there’s not. Less simple are the many factors that have led to the decline of plant populations over the last fifty years.

My husband Josip was guide, co-researcher, and – occasionally – bodyguard during our sustainability surveys, and he was the reason I understood even half of what I was observing in the field. He also happens to know San Pedro better than anyone I’ve encountered in seven years of immersion in the world of the plant.

Josip was born near Lima, but he lived and studied in North Peru as a teenager. Like most San Pedro maestros, he is mestizo, mixed-race. His name comes from his Croatian father, who was a World War II refugee to Peru. His maternal grandfather was an Andean man from Arequipa, and through his influence, Josip grew up connected with San Pedro. Josip’s lifelong relationship with the plants started when he was a child.

As Josip tells the story:

When I was five, with curiosity and innocence, I ate my first raw San Pedro salad with honey in my family garden. I loved honey, so I ate a lot of that salad. I remember when my grandfather, Don Nicolás Del Río, said to my uncle and sisters: ‘Stop taking San Pedro, it is not a drug!’ He meant that it is a sacred medicine that needs to be taken with respect, with guidance, and with a higher purpose.

I never took a pill in my life until he died. When I was sick, he always came with plant medicine from our garden. Officially Don Nicolás was a marine and a politician, but traditionally he was a curandero naturista. Until the 70’s, San Pedro was not used very much outside of North Peru, except as a drug for young people. Even though San Pedro grew near where we lived in the mountains of Lima, all the traditional use of the plant was in North Peru.

Ten years later I moved with my family to Chimbote in North Peru, and I was fascinated by the legacy of the ancient cultures that worked with San Pedro there: Chavín, Cupisnique, Moche, Sicán. I was understanding how important San Pedro was for them, and how alive the use of the plant was today, in modern society.

There I met Maestro Felipe Pereda. He became my elder brother and from him I learned much about the art of curanderismo and the traditional use of San Pedro ceremonially. I worked as the assistant of Felipe for several years, but then I made the decision to follow my own path with San Pedro. At the age of eighteen I was overwhelmed by the amount of commitment and responsibility needed to carry the wisdom of the plant for other people.

As Josip followed his chosen path with San Pedro as a young man, he traveled through many of the plant’s habitats in the 1990’s, before San Pedro became popular outside its traditional world. Perpetually hitchhiking through Lima, Ancash, La Libertad, Cajamarca, Lambayeque, and Piura, he had lots of time to observe the plants. At that time, before paved roads opened access to the interior, crossing the 13,000-ft passes from the dry Pacific coast to the verdant eastern slopes of the Andes took two long days of travel on bumpy, precipitous dirt roads. On clear days, Josip would stretch out on top of the cab of a cargo truck on the way to a cultural festival in Cajamarca or Huánuco and watch the desert give way to rocky landscapes of San Pedro, sprouting like serpents from every crevice in the cliffs. Comuneros call it “San Pedro de peña,” San Pedro of the rocks: wild plants which have grown slowly, with little water, and are therefore extremely potent. They are prized above cultivated plants for ceremonial use because their spiritual power is more concentrated.

 Wild Echinopsis pachanoi, the Northern species of San Pedro, forms great clumps of cacti of up to five meters in height, the columns of which bear modest spines of 1-3 cm that their cultivated counterparts do not. The number of ribs per stalk varies from five to ten, but most bear seven: an auspicious number for curanderos. When swollen with rainwater, the limbs break and fall of their own accord, only to re-root in the soil beside their mother plants and sprout new cacti from their bodies, using the old tissue as compost. Often hundreds of years old, these self-propagating clumps of cactus can expand interminably. As Josip recalls, many zones in the north, tucked in the valleys and folds of the land far from paved roads, were at one time forests of San Pedro.

A decade before Josip’s travels, wild San Pedro was already declining in populated areas. Wade Davis observed the plants in his trip to North Peru at that time, writing “At one time San Pedro grew commonly throughout the valley [of Huancabamba]. By 1981 it was relatively rare, and found almost exclusively in association with house sites, the property of individual families. With the popularity of the healing cult increasing, demand for the plant ran high.”

1981 signaled the beginning of a decade of bloody terrorism which devastated Peru, as guerrilla soldiers in the rural Andes waged war against the Peruvian government. The Shining Path was a violent terrorist group whose philosophy was based in Marxist communism. Its leader, Abimael Guzmán, incited his followers to take up arms against what he called Peru’s “bourgeois democracy,” declaring that “there will be a great rupture and we will be the makers of a definitive dawn. We will convert the black fire into red and the red into light!” Even as many Indigenous Andean people were coerced to join or oppose the rebellion, its bloody wake left 70,000 people dead. No one in rural Peru was untouched by violence and hunger. It was impossible to travel safely in the Andes, and for a decade, only guerrillas and Peruvian soldiers traversed the sierra.

The 80’s displaced hundreds of thousands of rural Andean people and sent them fleeing to the urban centers of Lima, Chimbote, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Piura. Urban populations exploded, and so did San Pedro shamanism in cities.

Though San Pedro had been present in urban areas for decades already, new population growth exacerbated a widening split between people and plants. San Pedro maestros usually worked full time day jobs in addition to their healing practices, and they no longer had time or resources to travel to wild sources to harvest their own plants. Instead, they cooked and served cut lengths of San Pedro purchased from the markets.

The Ministry of Culture declaration describes the importance of the relationship between maestro and the living, growing plants:

The collection of this plant follows a series of ritual procedures, directed by the curandero, which are aimed at preventing its qualities from being disturbed. Since it is conceived as the residence of a spirit with which it is necessary to interact in a relationship of respect, this interaction begins at the moment in which the stems and branches of the plant are collected. Before making this collection, the curanderos must greet it and pay homage with prayers, songs, ablutions with flower-water and tobacco smoke around the plant that will be cut, even blessing the knife used for this purpose…. By these means it is achieved that the cactus allows itself to be used and that it maintains its qualities. It is important that whoever makes the collection follows a correct life according to traditional parameters. This is also the reason why said person is usually the maestro curandero himself.… it is also considered necessary that the person who prepares [the medicinal drink] be the same specialist, or assistant, who collected the plant in order to allow its powers to come to ‘life’ and to assume its therapeutic functions.

The bifurcation caused by the lack of access to San Pedro in urban areas had immediate cultural ramifications for the maestros, for they no longer related to the spirit of the plant as a living, rooted being. The consequences of the split showed themselves more and more in the wild plant populations as the years progressed.

On his 1981 trip, Davis observed, “In coastal markets a one-foot section of about eight inches in girth sold for as much as a dollar. A [large cactus] could feed a family for a month.”The cuttings that he describes are twice as thick as the San Pedro found in northern markets today and could only have come from successive cutting of the old-growth plants that still populated rural areas of North Peru at that time. The people cutting the plants for urban markets were, as Davis suggests, making extra money selling the existing wild plants on or near their land, but they did not know how to harvest it in ways that promote regeneration. Market vendors became the middlemen between harvesters and curanderos, and those who used the plants no longer communicated with those who cut the plants. As a result, most urban San Pedro maestros even today have little idea of the extent of the destruction of San Pedro’s wild populations.

Extensive road construction projects under the administrations of Fujimori, Toledo, and Alan García around the turn of the century cut indiscriminately through the habitats of the plants, opening the Andes to easier travel and allowing paved access to new San Pedro harvest zones. There was a mining boom post-terrorism, and new prosperity meant that urban populations were exploding. More people were drinking more San Pedro than at any point since the Spanish conquest.

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“Take the old man a horse, and you can fill a truck with as much San Pedro as it will hold,” Oscar Cortéz pleaded. “Do him this favor, Josip. He can’t get far enough out to do his rounds anymore, so they’re taking all the San Pedro anyway. Any horse, any good horse will do. It’s a fine trade.”

It was 2004, and Oscar was bartering the last of the roadside San Pedro from the Laquipampa Wildlife Refuge in North Peru.

Josip declined the offer. He preferred his plants from Arequipa and Lima, the lands of his grandfather and father, and more importantly, what Oscar was proposing – plant extraction from a protected area – was illegal. The plants that grow in Laquipampa make up one of the last remaining populations of the most renowned variety of San Pedro of all, the famed Chiclayo plants.

In 2015, a master’s student named Lenin Joel Vera completed a survey of San Pedro in Laquipampa, the same zone where Josip had been offered a truckload of San Pedro eleven years earlier. He noted that populations outside of the protected area had already been devastated to such an extent that Laquipampa was the only place he could find to do his survey. In the 687-hectare protected reserve of prime San Pedro habitat, Vera counted a total of just 2,578 individual San Pedro cacti, most of which were growing in areas inaccessible to harvest.

Vera notes that in Laquipampa, “The human pressures to which the populations of San Pedro are subjected are diverse… the deterioration of habitat due to modification of vegetation by cattle entering the area; likewise, areas of extraction of the resource for commercialization were evident….” He clarifies that San Pedro is “…suffering pressures from a part of the [human population who]… enter the area to take pieces of these individuals (stems) to commercialize them and thus generate their income, with the risk that this species could be considerably reduced in number in this protected area due to extraction…. they are cut both at the top and bottom of a distance from twenty to twenty-five centimeters long, which in many cases does not ensure regeneration.”

Vera’s conclusions were similar to what we found in our own investigations. Our windshield surveys of San Pedro populations in North Peru were carried out from 2020-2022. We assessed the number and density of plants from the roadside and supplemented those observations with walking surveys in areas that were inaccessible by road.

The first task was to distinguish endemic plants from cultivated ones. Anyone who has seen cultivated San Pedro growing in Peru can attest to the plants’ prolific nature, and we suspected that the visible presence of cultivated plants near roadsides contributed to the widespread illusion of sustainability. San Pedro is ubiquitously planted by the front doors of houses in Peru. Popular knowledge says that the plants whistle to alert the owners of the house when thieves or delinquents appear. Since guardian plants in front of the house are seen as protectors which repel or neutralize negative energy, these plants are rarely cooked or used as medicine.

Grandma’s plant in the back garden does not have the same restrictions. Planted behind homes with the intention of attracting good fortune rather than repelling negativity, these older cultivated plants are often harvested for market. However, the people who have watched their plants grow through the years know their value. It costs more for harvesters to buy cultivated plants than to cut them from the wild. Most had chosen the second option for as long as there were still wild plants to cut.

Decades of this practice had made wild San Pedro scarce. As we searched valley after valley of the rural North in vain, the extent of the damage to endemic populations became clear. Locals confirmed that even thirty years ago, San Pedro was everywhere in these mountains. Today, the only remaining endemic San Pedro plants were growing in the middle of cliffs, reachable only by binoculars. Here and there we found an old, gnarled San Pedro which was obviously wild, but which had been preserved by its enclosure in a garden or a field. Even these, though, showed evidence of successive harvest over a period of many years, and they were dramatically reduced in size.

There was one account which spoke to the true scarcity of endemic San Pedro in North Peru more than any other. In the rural outskirts of Cajamarca, housewives reported that Chiclayo-based harvesters were in recent years making the seven-hour trip across the spine of the Andes to buy the remaining wild San Pedro from their agricultural lands. These notoriously “soft” plants would only be used by Chiclayo shamans as a last resort, once they had already exhausted their local stocks. This detail was the nail in the coffin for endemic Echinopsis pachanoi.

By the time we arrived in the North for our surveys, we were a decade too late. The demise of the bulk of the wild plants was complete. As we would soon learn, it didn’t take long for the pattern to repeat further south.

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In the early 2000’s, a new threat to the wild cacti of Peru’s central coast emerged. The San Pedro in this area is known to botanists as Echinopsis peruviana, and the English-speaking world calls it the Peruvian Torch Cactus. A foot in diameter, loaded with mescaline, and covered in finger-length spines, the plants are impressive. Their traditional cultural uses by people in the area were lost due to colonial and religious forces, and the plants were still fairly abundant here because of a lack of local use.

Though the wild plants have been disturbed in many places, Andean people often integrate San Pedro into cattle grazing and agricultural landscapes in this part of Peru. Fast-growing and spiny, the plants form effective fences that both cattle and cattle thieves are loath to cross. These living fences of San Pedro grow quickly and are pruned back whenever they become overlarge. The cuttings from the pruning of the mature plants are propagated to create new sections of fence. In the areas where this cultural practice still exists, the damage caused to the plants by the presence of cattle is mitigated.

We guessed there is something – conscious or subconscious – about the plants’ energy of protection that these communities were tapping into, in the same way that Northern Peruvians plant San Pedro by their front doors as guardians. Perhaps it was this protective quality which kept their populations intact longer than any other wild San Pedro in Peru. Once discovered, though, it didn’t take long for these powerful plants to become the medicine of choice for the budding “spiritual tourism” industry of Cusco.

Josip remembers:

I started to live part time in Pisac [near Cusco] in the early 90’s. There was no exotic retreat center in Cusco or the Sacred Valley then. No yoga, no ayahuasca. There was Coca. Coca is the most important element of ancestral Andean spirituality. It is the vehicle of social and cultural cohesion in the Andes. Cusco is the center of the world of Coca, and without Coca, nothing exists.

But tourists were just starting to ask about San Pedro in the 90’s. I would always answer, ‘do you want to have a real San Pedro experience? Go to North Peru.’ But people came looking for the superficial charm of psychedelics, not for real rituals.

By the year 2000, more and more tourists were visiting Cusco and the interest in having a psychedelic experience to connect with Andean spirituality became trendy. The only two stalls in the Cusco market that sold San Pedro for local use suddenly received a high demand for cactus.

Within three or four years, the cultivated, mature plants that were coming from Arequipa in South Peru were used up. Then the market was filled with leftover baby sprouts from Arequipa. The strength of the medicine from these babies was lower. New practitioners were disconnected from the traditional way to use these plants, and their answer was to use more and more cactus for dosage.

By 2005, the demand for high-mescaline plants opened the doors for wild plants from Lima and Ancash to come to the market. Hundreds of wild plants started to be shipped to the Cusco market and retreat centers. I knew these new plants. They were endemic to the place where I grew up, near the land of my father, where I had some of my first experiences at age twelve and thirteen drinking San Pedro in the mountains with my friends. These were old mother-plants, which is why they give people such powerful experiences.

And so, I realized in 2005 that what was happening was going to create a problem with the sustainability of the plant.

Josip’s intuition about the sustainability situation in Lima proved apt. The plants began to be harvested en masse from community lands in Lima, where living fences of San Pedro suddenly became a hot commodity,and they were transported south twenty-four hours by truck to Cusco. A stroll through Cusco’s San Pedro Market today will reveal an abundance of these plants, recognizable by their 8-12” girth, shiny green and leathery skin, and holes where their long spines have been pulled off with pliers.

In 2006, Dr. Carlos Ostolaza, the top cactus expert in Peru, recommended that Echinopsis peruviana – the very plants that were being harvested for shipment to Cusco – be considered “endangered.” Unfortunately, ceremonial use in Cusco was not the only new threat to the plants of Lima. The Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (MINAM) published a report in 2013 called ‘El San Pedro’ or ‘Achuma’: The genus Echinopsis, Taxonomy, Distribution and Commerce. The report was the first to definitively list both Echinopsis peruviana and Echinopsis pachanoi as “endangered in the wild.” MINAM had noticed an increase in the export of desiccated San Pedro out of Peru, and they surveyed Lima markets to learn where it was coming from. They found that there was a steady supply of packaged “San Pedro powder” available in Lima which was made from wild E. peruviana.

 MINAM reports that from the years 2009-2013, over 40 tons of San Pedro cacti were harvested, dried, and exported legally with permission from CITES, the international authority on endangered species. Of course, they were unable to put a number on how much illegal export was happening under their radar. Though it is impossible to track the harvest that happens illegally, there have been more and more seizures in recent years of unregistered shipments of San Pedro to and from the mountains of Lima. SERFOR, the Peruvian Forestry Service, has road checkpoints in ecologically sensitive areas which manage to stop at least a tiny fraction of the illegal export of wild San Pedro. The recovered shipments are often sent to a cactus nursery in Cieneguilla.

More and more, companies are getting around the problem of transporting large shipments of cactus by having the San Pedro processed and dried on-site in the communities where it is harvested. The resulting product is more compact and easier to transport. Indigenous community members who are employed by these companies to harvest and dry San Pedro tell us that the going rate for a kilo of dried San Pedro there is 10 soles, or the equivalent of about $3 US dollars. According to the MINAM report, each kilo of San Pedro powder takes 46.5 kilos of fresh cactus to make. Add to that the work of processing – pulling off the spines and the skin, slicing the outer green layer from the inner white pith, and sun-drying the tissue into “chips,” and the resources and work that goes into each bag becomes monumental. The companies who buy dry cactus for $3 per kilo package the product and sell it for $60-120 a kilo in Peru, and even more internationally. As was the case in North Peru, we observed that declining numbers of mature plants in high-harvest zones of Lima means that the remaining plants are being cut down to their roots, harming their ability to regenerate.

These exploitative practices are only possible because the Indigenous Andean communities who process and sell the plants have lost their cultural connection to the plants after 500 years of colonial and religious onslaught. In one village at the heart of E. peruviana’s habitat, a decoction of the plants is used today to “lower fevers in cows… and children.” San Pedro no longer holds a spiritual value above that of aspirin, and so the plants are sold for a pittance with little care for how or whether they will regenerate. More than any other factor, it is the loss of culture which allows the blatant destruction of the plants to happen.

Today, Josip and I live 45 minutes from Lima’s most active harvest zone. During one of our trips to visit the communities and survey recent harvests, we were gifted a large head of blue-green San Pedro to plant in our garden. It was crowned with a stunning flower in full bloom and several newly sprouting buds. We shimmied the plant into a tote bag to carry it home, getting only slightly bloody from the 4” spines, and the tip with its delicate flower peeked out the top of the bag. We boarded a nearly empty bus, the last of the evening. Dusk was falling quickly in the Andes. An older woman sat alone in the first seat of the bus. She sat up straighter when she saw us.

“Huachuma.”

Josip paused. “Not many people call the plant Huachuma around here, Señora. Espino, we call it. Where are you from?”

“Of course.” She chuckled a little, crossing her arms. “Only gringos call it that. We Peruvians call it San Pedro. I am from here, too. Used to live up there by the orange bridge.”

“Rosa Saavedra,” she introduced herself. “La Reina del San Pedro.”

An involuntary shiver crawled up my spine. The Queen of San Pedro, she had called herself.

“I sell more San Pedro than anyone,” she boasted. “Sell it to all the gringos in Cusco. I used to only take it down to the markets in Lima once a month or so. All my life. Then, one day, maybe fifteen years ago, I get there, and there’s this man, a French man. He has been waiting three days to meet me. He wants me to send my plants directly to Cusco. Now I send 200 big heads every month to that foreign woman, you know the one. Have for years and years. It’s my sons and I who supply a lot of the retreat centers.”

She and Josip conversed in quiet tones as we descended from the Andes. Night had fallen black and moonless outside the windows of the bus when Josip asked at last, “Do you drink the plant, Señora Rosa?”

“No, I’ve never drunk it, it’s a drug. They say it makes you see devils. My mother told me, ‘Don’t you smell that white flower, because it has a worm in it that will enter through your nose and eat your brain.’” Rosa paused, then finished in a voice so low it was almost a prayer. “God forgive me for the business I do.” She crossed herself, suddenly self-conscious.

Josip gave her his number when we parted ways. “Señora Rosa, the day that you would like to meet the spirit of the plant and listen to the voice of the plant, you know where to find me.”

As we stepped off the bus, it occurred to me that Rosa had expressed the same disconnection that had been evident in North Peru. The harvesters did not drink San Pedro, which made it easy to cut hundreds of plants as though they were bucking firewood. The users in Cusco and around the world did not grow or harvest their own plants, cutting them off from the reality of San Pedro as a living being.

Josip, like the most traditional of Northern maestros, believes that in that lost connection lies the true medicine of San Pedro.

The importance of growing your own plants comes with the teachings that no human maestro, facilitator, or shaman can give you. Only San Pedro’s spirit, who is the Great Master, can teach you the most important things.    

I had been drinking San Pedro with different maestros for twenty years. On the night of the full moon in January 2012, I was drinking in my garden in Pisac, with a plant from Arequipa there on the mountainside that was blooming. She was one of the first I ever planted, from 1999.

When the flower opened her mouth and spoke, it was the voice of an old lady that came out. I said, “Why did you never speak to me before?”

The Old Lady said, “I have been speaking all along. Why did you never listen to me before?”

The Old Lady told me many, many, many things that night. She showed me every way that I had caused harm to others in my life. She showed me the ways I was still hurting the people that I loved. At last, I asked her, “If I am so terrible, what hope is there for me?”

“Well, you’re the only one who takes care of me.” The flower showed me every San Pedro I had planted in my life. How happy they were. How much medicine they held for the people. And then she reached into me and touched the deepest place in my heart and healed what still hurt there. It was the last time the plant ever made me vomit. And the air I breathed in was like springtime.

After the Old Lady spoke to me, I started to serve medicine to other people. It was only at that time that I felt ready to make the commitment to the plant and I understood how to not kill her spirit when I cook her.

Cooking is the traditional way to prepare San Pedro medicine. When we cook medicine with care, we use the four elements: Water in the pot; Fire under the pot; Wind in the words of our prayers, and in the steam that evaporates; and Earth, which is the body of the plant. The four elements become one when you add the fifth element, Love.

These elements are the way to keep the spirit of the plant alive in the medicine. When people use San Pedro powder they lose this alchemy and connection of growing-harvesting-cooking. The powder does not have the whole organic material of the cactus, so its use does not represent the maximum power of the plant. It is not full spectrum the way that traditional cooking is. San Pedro powder kills the spirit of the plant.

When people treat the plant like only a way to make money, without respect, without prayers, without music, without dancing, without strong connection, the plants don’t like to show their full power. It doesn’t matter how much you take; the plant will not show her face to you.

Like North Peru’s “cultural universe” on a different scale, San Pedro tourism in Cusco has generated its own small world over the last twenty years. It is a world fed entirely by the bodies of the last endemic old-growth San Pedro on Earth. For every kilogram of San Pedro powder that someone buys in Peru or online, a poacher cuts down a cactus that weighs as much as a human being and has been alive much longer. Meanwhile, the plant’s rising international popularity is fed by the myth that San Pedro is a sustainable medicine.

Not long after we met Rosa on the bus, I happened to see the social media post of a young foreign woman living in the Sacred Valley of Cusco. She posed with legs twisted into the full lotus position, holding an impressive trunk of old-growth cactus that was scarred along its length where the spines had been torn off. Dear friends, the caption read, I have been blessed to humbly serve 108 cups of Grandfather Huachuma this year. I would like to plant 108 Huachuma seeds in the wild, in reciprocity to the spirit of the medicine. Does anyone have seeds to gift me for this pilgrimage of love? Though her intentions were good, she expressed in a concise way that she had never seen a San Pedro seed, never germinated one or cared for a seedling as it grew, never come into contact with a San Pedro fruit. If she had, she would have known that cactus seeds only germinate and mature in the wild under specific and rare circumstances, and that even if by some miracle one of her seeds managed to survive, it would take fifty years at the very least – that is, twice as long as she’d been alive – to grow as large and potent as the wild plant whose arm she cradled in her photo.

The post was an example of the earnest interest coupled with total lack of connection that is common among people newly discovering the plant. The cultural universe that San Pedro and the ancestors of the North created together was developed over thousands of years of reciprocal relationship in which the plants were cared for by the people, and the people by the plants. Ignorance of that ancient world is widespread, and it is not harmless.

Foreigners in Cusco make millions donning ponchos and serving San Pedro with a side of appropriated Andean spirituality. Meanwhile, the children of the Northern maestros, for the first time in 3,000 uninterrupted years, are not learning to work with the plant. Andean communities in the Lima highlands are economically and environmentally exploited for San Pedro, while their own cultural traditions have been ruptured by violent colonialism.

The Ministry of Culture’s recognition of the traditional knowledge and uses of San Pedro as Immaterial Cultural Heritage is a vitally important first step in safeguarding the plant’s cultural world for the future. The second step is protecting the wild populations of San Pedro on which the survival of that cultural world depends.

For maestros, the natural diversity of endemic San Pedro and the land in which it grows is key to the medicine’s spiritual power. In the art of ancient cultures spanning thousands of years, Huachuma is depicted rooted in its natural environments, surrounded by the other members of its ecosystem: serpents, pumas, birds, and sacred mountains. This relationship of the plant’s spirit to place still lies at the heart of contemporary practices. The renowned curanderos of Huancabamba never import San Pedro for their rituals; they work only with their local varieties, which carry and channel the powers of the nearby highland lakes. In Cajamarca the “soft” San Pedro is prized for the high mineral content of the soil in which it grows, and it is used to induce purging for the purpose of curing physical ailments of the stomach and organs. In Chiclayo, the San Pedro from in and around Laquipampa puts practitioners in contact with the gentiles and encantos, the spirits of waterfalls and springs that have animated their mountains for a hundred generations. Further south, one population of San Pedro is used specifically for its connection with the generous spirit of the Virgin Mary. The Lima plants may be undervalued by locals today, but they once inspired the magnificent nature-based artwork of cultures such as Nazca, Paracas, and Wari.

How much cultural memory would be lost if even one of these populations became extinct in the wild? How many have already been lost? Josip sums up what is at stake when he says:

The Great Spirit of San Pedro is made up of all the plants, in their endemic habitats, over time. This Great Spirit lives in the wild, in the places the plants grow that humans never touch.

All the individual San Pedro cacti on earth are like scales on an enormous winged dragon. The wild populations of San Pedro are its vital life force, and the diversity and spiritual power of all the individual plants is fed and protected by this great dragon.

If wild San Pedro is extinguished, the Great Spirit of San Pedro will be extinguished.

There is a narrow band of effective habitat for wild San Pedro in the Andes. The plants grow in very specific zones which meet their precise elevation, temperature, and water needs. Many of those habitats have already been compromised by agricultural encroachment and road construction. In the majority of active harvest zones, the plants are being harvested at a faster rate than they are able to regenerate, and where old-growth plants still exist, they are being harvested disproportionately.

From our preliminary windshield and walking surveys, we estimate that among all San Pedro’s endemic habitats in Peru, less than a quarter are still well-stocked. At this rate, Cultural Heritage declaration or not, Peru is perhaps a decade away from losing the very roots which sustain its living culture: the wild source of Huachuma which built the ancient empires and watched them fall.

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“I thought you were dead!” shouted the old lady. A wrinkled face appeared at the window of the whitewashed house, then disappeared just as quickly.

From somewhere in the back came the sound of latches and bolts sliding. A door creaked open, and a cane carried by someone in a hurry rang through the yard.

“Mi querida Doña Hermilda,” Josip called from the garden gate, his hands folded politely behind his back, “I am a young man yet. If one of us were going to die since we last saw each other, it would have been you.”

“Well, I’ll drop dead here and now if you didn’t bring me toasting corn from Cusco. All the corn here in the Arequipa market is tough.”

A tiny woman limped around the corner, wrapped in a colorful knitted sweater that reached her knees. She must have been in her nineties. She flung open the gate, scattering magenta husks of bougainvillea on all three of us. Josip bent nearly double to wrap her in a hug, and she planted two kisses on each of his cheeks.

“Of course I have the corn, and the coca, and the cacao too, Doña Hermilda.” He patted the bag slung over his shoulder. “Everything you like.”

Doña Hermilda sat us down at her kitchen table and served chamomile tea in cracked floral china, along with her infamous toasted corn canchitas. Josip emptied his bag and she opened her gifts one by one: three colors of quinoa; two pounds of coca leaves from Qosñipata; knitted alpaca gloves, hat, and scarf for the frigid Arequipa winter; maca; a kilo of cacao; three fat wheels of queso Andino to eat with the corn; and bulging sacks of two kinds of toasting corn, chullpi and blanco.

“And the coffee?” she asked sweetly.

“Ahhhh, no, the coffee! In four years my memory must have failed. Maybe I am getting old, as you say. My deepest apologies, Doña Hermilda. Next time I will bring your coffee, you have my word.”

Josip reached into the left breastpocket of his jacket and produced one more packet, smaller than the rest. In it were the creamy white dried petals of San Pedro flowers, with their profuse tentacle-like anthers.

“Maybe this can make up for the coffee. These are the flowers from the plants that we harvested together from your garden in 2007. Today, those plants in Chaclacayo are twice my height, and they make flowers every year. They are your plants, but now they grow in Lima soil. Please, take these to use for your tea when your flowers are not in season.”

Doña Hermilda accepted the bag, inhaled the delicate dried scent of the petals, and then pressed the packet to her heart with both spotted hands as she exhaled deeply.

“The plant has bloomed more than ever this year. I use the flowers like you showed me, seven petals in my tea each night. Oh, how they calm me! How they enchant me! I feel sadness, you see, so much sadness about my son. But the flowers help me.”

She stood, stowed the dry flowers in a once-transparent plastic Tupperware, and patted me roughly on the back.

“Now it’s time to see the plant. Vamos.”

Out back of the kitchen, between a pair of feathery huarango trees, towered a sleek, blue-green San Pedro plant with no spines at all. It had obviously been pruned and shaped over the years, and looked like a stately tree, shining with health. The thick trunk that formed the base of the plant belied its age: sixty years old at the very least, perhaps eighty. Josip approached it as though greeting an old friend.

“How beautifully she has grown these last four years!”

“That’s what love does,” said Doña Hermilda. “The plant protects the house. But you know, an arm fell this summer. My grandchildren play here, and it’s getting too tall. It’s dangerous. Please take quite a lot this time. Start with that arm there. And this one!”

Josip produced more coca along with a bag of fresh rose petals, and together he and Doña Hermilda showered the plant with them – “…for good luck, for prosperity, for health, for protection, for flowers, for love, for strength, for happiness….”

The offerings joined a pile of dried garden flowers and grains already scattered at the base of the plant, quiet evidence of regular offerings.

Then Doña Hermilda rested in her lawn chair and directed the pruning with vigorous gestures of her cane. Josip carefully separated each arm she pointed to by hand, refusing to use a knife or machete on the living plant. We packed the arms into newspapers, then sacks, then cardboard boxes, and loaded them into the waiting car outside. The work took all morning, and by the time we finished, the high-altitude sun was straight overhead and blistering. The old plant looked lighter but no less impressive, and I guessed that in another four years it would be bigger than ever.

“Are you sure you won’t come out to lunch, Doña Hermilda? For a bit of guinea pig chactado?”

“No, my son is bringing the children this afternoon, and I don’t want to miss them. God bless you. May He light your path and protect you from harm during your travels.” She slipped a plastic bag of her toasted corn into Josip’s now-empty tote. “For the road home.”

The gate swung shut behind us before I heard her shout.

“Don’t forget my coffee next time!”

Josip had been growing San Pedro in Pisac since 1999. But in 2007, he took what he had learned on a small scale and began to plant in earnest. He purchased what remained of his father’s land in Chaclacayo, east of Lima, and began to fill it with San Pedro. He started with 133 of his most beloved plants, those which came from Doña Hermilda in Arequipa, the birthplace of his grandfather Don Nicolás. Over the years, more San Pedro joined the first group of plants, and today there are thousands of heads comprising at least forty varieties from around Peru.

 From the beginning, Josip has held the vision for this land as a place of protection for the plants. It has been a safe space for San Pedro to grow up and grow old, relaxing into its natural diversity and abundance, connected with the sacred mountains of Santa Inés, the rumble of the Río Rimac, and the sea air rushing inland from the coast each morning. The plants have received space and care, sunlight and moonlight, and they bloom flowers each summer. Over the years they have given thousands of cups of medicine to people who need it, but it has never been necessary to cut plants to cook. They fall naturally from the weight of their own arms when a gust of wind comes in the evening, or when the cats use them as jungle-gyms.

Cultivating San Pedro is the single most important part of Josip’s relationship with the plant. He explains:

When I harvest medicine, I can see the eyes of San Pedro. I can take his body in my two hands and ask him if he wants to be cooked to help somebody. Is there anybody in the world who can see the eyes of San Pedro and hold the body of San Pedro to talk with him when he is already dry powder inside a plastic bag? There, the spirit of the plant dissolves like powder in water.

When we plant a cactus, we are growing medicine, a medicine of relationship and reciprocity. A medicine of freedom and love. Every San Pedro cactus is unique and has something to teach us.

When after years of care and trust a plant blooms flowers at last, the gifts we receive are pure medicine. We can witness how a thorn can become a flower, carrying a powerful message of transmutation. When a plant blooms, he can be ready to be cooked and become medicine himself.

After all this process of connection with the plant as it grows, we can be ready to serve medicine. We can understand at last the sacrifice the plant makes for us. We can take responsibility for harvesting and cooking a living being and keeping his spirit alive when we do it.

And this is why I say: grow medicine, serve medicine.

Grow medicine. And then. Serve medicine.

By 2020, the natural abundance of the cactus was overflowing the garden walls. The heads that naturally fell from the mature plants became gifts to friends, neighbors, and local archaeological sites. Josip’s twenty-three years growing San Pedro had led us to the logical next step. It was time to plant on a larger scale.

In the midst of discussions about how to address the plant’s sustainability crisis, we paid a visit toJosip’s first San Pedro maestro, Felipe Pereda. Felipe is the Cultural Advisor and Wilka Umo Shaman of the Chimbote and Coishco Indigenous Community in North Peru. An activist for Indigenous rights and cultural preservation for over forty years, Felipe clarified and directed our initial ideas about gifting San Pedro and providing support for cultural heritage in Andean communities.

In 2021, Felipe, Josip, and I formalized our shared work to create a non-profit association in Peru. Huachuma Collective exists to empower Andean communities to plant San Pedro and conserve their cultural heritage, and to support organizations, communities, and individuals who are protecting the wild plants.

Within 18 months, we had donated a thousand cacti from endangered populations to communities in North Peru. Josip took time in each habitat we visited to teach propagation and sustainable harvesting techniques. Felipe taught workshops on the traditional cultural uses of the plants. Community elders recalled stories about San Pedro from years past. Teenagers showed interest in the plants for their subversive potential. Just as Josip was inspired as a 15-year-old to become Felipe’s apprentice because his San Pedro experiences led him to fascination with Peru’s ancient cultures, young people today are similarly provoked by visions and intuitions received from San Pedro which connect them with their ancestors.

These early collaborations showed us how much the connection with living, growing Huachuma means to people in Andean communities. Cultivating the plant gives it value in the eyes of the people. The vast majority of people who grow San Pedro in Peru never drink it, but they recognize the value of its presence as a protective spirit which attracts good fortune. For them, the living plant has a value, an energy, even an aura which transcends mere beauty or utility. It was a sacred, protective plant of the ancestors, more auspicious when gifted than purchased.

San Pedro as a vehicle of connection to cultural heritage is not a new idea. Living cacti are often featured in archaeological sites and pueblos which make their living on cultural presence, such as Moche, Magdalena de Cão, and Huancabamba, where the plants are recognized as a living connection to the ancient world. In fact, San Pedro’s role as a protector, guardian, and carrier of memory is so established in North Peru that it made us wonder about the wider implications of planting so many cacti, particularly in lands that ancient peoples held sacred. Could the very presence of San Pedro help to protect the memory of knowledge and cultural practices associated with it through the bottleneck of modernity and development? Could growing as many plants as possible in as many places as possible act as an almost mystically protective force to cultural heritage?

Planting, cultivating, harvesting, cooking, and drinking Huachuma takes on revolutionary dimensions when considered this way. The plants themselves become the vessels which protect and carry forward the memory of the past through difficult times. Most of what San Pedro once was to humanity is already gone, and what is left is held only in the living memory of the oldest plants and the wisest maestros. The tide of modernity drowns all but the sturdiest ships. These elders have made it through centuries of cultural and environmental loss, holding on as more and more was stripped away and forgotten, losing precious things that the world did not know how to value until they were gone.

Now, the future of wild San Pedro and its living cultures is in the hands of every single person who knows, loves, and listens to the plants. Advocating for the needs of the plants means preserving their cultural legacy in the Andes, and in turn, fortifying Andean culture means protecting the plants against extinction. As the masses froth for psychedelics, communities and individuals will rebuild reciprocal ways of relating to the plants and demonstrate them to the world. What has been lost cannot come back, but perhaps if we protect the roots and seeds that survive, they can regenerate and sprout once the danger has passed. San Pedro is nothing if not built for renewal.

In the days that followed the launch of Huachuma Collective, I fell into a fever. For three days in a mountainside motel in San Pedro habitat, I did not leave bed. Scenes from our travels flitted through my awareness. The plants visited in their creature forms: turquoise serpents, golden dragons, sharp-eyed pumas, bears that were also stars. I shivered and tossed, alternating between the sensation of floating high above the earth and of being sucked deep inside it, awake or asleep I did not know, in the present or the future I did not know. Behind closed eyes, my visions were flooded with colors.

A single San Pedro, purple-black and silent, stood at the head of the Valley of the Dragon. Its spines shone blood-red and translucent in the setting sun. The sky was shot with light, white and golden with pink at the edges, filling every crevice of the sleeping mountains. It was the only one. The only one left. I looked around in disbelief, deep grief filling my chest. The Last Guardian. The last.

Seven notes whistled, full and low. An ancient woman wrapped in woven cloth rocked by the fire, singing, remembering. Remembering. Bright jewels of songbirds and insects, long vanished, flitted around the edges of the firelight. The warm bulks of mammals that no longer walk the earth moved in the shadows. Extinct. Gone forever, except in San Pedro’s memory. Except in San Pedro’s song. The song came years ago, years before I knew what it meant.

Now, here on the mountainside with the last cactus, I knew. I could feel the vibration of it in my bones, bittersweet and unmistakable. A song of mourning. A song of honoring. A song of all that is long gone. Not a matter of bringing it back, but of remembering, so that something of its essence remains on earth, even to the end. All of the medicines together, singing their song at the end of the world.

Images from North Peru flashed before my eyes. Land mafias, gunning down Indigenous people for their properties. Tractors, flattening archaeological sites in the night so the corporations could keep growing tomatoes without interference from the Ministry of Culture. Uniformed children marching in lines while mining executives applauded. Money, so much money, passed under the table. Concrete and dust. Machetes and knives. The wisdom-keepers hiding. Fleeing. Silenced.

I staggered outside and vomited until there was nothing left.

The image of the Last Guardian stayed with me, a sentinel blinking a warning from the future. But in the days that followed, Josip and I made a discovery which forever changed how we understood the plants. We were surveying a new habitat in a region where San Pedro is heavily affected by climate change. Most of the plants, even those that were very old and established, looked yellow-brown and desiccated, as though it had been years since they had received enough rain. Discouraged, we stopped at a makeshift market in the front room of a community member’s home, hoping for a cold drink and conversation. Near the garden wall, encased on three sides by roughly poured concrete, was an ancient, spiny E. peruviana. We guessed it had been there before the house was built. By the account of the woman who sold us frigid Coca-Cola and crackers, the plant was at least a hundred years old. It was already a large adult in her earliest memories, and she was in her seventies now.

Today the plant was in full bloom, fifty flowers shining like bright-white egrets perched in a tree.

“May we take photos?”

Her eyes shone. “Por supuesto que sí, adelante!”

I stepped closer, touched the plant, introduced myself as I always did before raising my camera. Instead, I stayed frozen, hand pressed to the trunk, unable to believe what I was seeing.

Nestled like baby birds in the crevice between branching arms of the plant were thirteen tiny San Pedro seedlings, all less than a year old. A triad of thick branches formed a sort of platform where many husks of spent flowers and fruits had fallen and were now black and decaying. Long, woody spines crisscrossed over and around the platform of composting flowers, making it nearly impossible to see the delicate plants that were rooted there.

Silent tears flooded down my face, wetting my already sweat-soaked t-shirt. In all our surveys, we had previously found only two plants that were evidently seed-started. The poppy-seed-sized cactus seeds were so delicate and sensitive that we had believed their success rate in the wild to be one in a million, if that. I turned to Josip, unable to draw breath to speak.

He crossed the distance between us in two long strides. “Laurel, what is it? What’s wrong?”

I pointed wordlessly.

“Que- ahhhh. Ay, Dios mío. No puede ser. It can’t be.”

“It is. Amor. Huachuma is a mother. She raises her own babies.”

“I have never seen this before.”

Two days later and a hundred miles north, we found another nest of San Pedro sprouts. And then another. Seedlings at every stage of development, hidden in the deepest recesses of the largest wild plants. I bloodied myself more than once, crawling inside sprawling San Pedro limbs like tree trunks to get a look at the little ones that grew there.

Perhaps it had been happening all along, all around us, this quiet raising of babies in the compost of flowers. But in those grace-soaked days, it felt as though Huachuma had decided at last to show her womb, her nursery, her secret rearing of life in the invisible places.

She had revealed herself as the Ark, quietly carrying the delicate sprouts of the next generation of plants in her protected center. She asked only that we care for her as she does what she has always done: buffer the extremes of change, and shield the most precious knowledge, memories, and visions of the future of life on Earth from those who would harm them.

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This article was originally written in 2022. Since then, Huachuma Collective has become a nationwide nonprofit organization. We hold monthly cultural events in Andean and Coastal communities, manage a garden and seedling nursery, and recently opened the doors to the first Huachuma Conservation Center in old-growth San Pedro habitat in collaboration with the local Andean community. To date, we are the only Indigenous-led nonprofit organization caring for San Pedro and its Peruvian communities of origin.

To learn more about what you can do for San Pedro’s communities, read the “Collective Statement from the Curanderos and Curanderas of North Peru on the State of Conservation of the San Pedro Cactus, their Traditional Knowledge, and the Use of Wild San Pedro by Foreigners” at huachumacollective.org. In the statement, over 60 traditional practitioners and allies from the Huachuma / San Pedro Cactus bioculture in North Peru have drafted guidelines for foreigners about how to engage with their medicine. This statement is their response to the mistreatment of Huachuma in Peru and around the world. It makes their position clear about the exploitative practices used to produce commercial “San Pedro powder” and urges practitioners to give back financially to Andean communities.

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Ostolaza, Carlos, Aldo Ceroni, Natalia Calderón, Esther Alvarez, Jonatan Zapata, Johanna Cortéz, and Lourdes Salinas. 2006. “Cacti of the Pativilca river basin, Lima, Peru.” Cactus World. 117-128.

Ostolaza, Carlos, Aldo Ceroni, Jonatan Zapata, Johanna Cortéz, Lourdes Salinas, and Emilia García. 2007. “Cacti of the Cañete river basin, Lima, Peru: a research and conservation study.” Cactus World 25, no. 4: 215-226.

Sharon, Douglas G., and Christopher B. Donnan. 1977. “The magic cactus: Ethnoarchaeological continuity in Peru.” Archaeology New York, NY 30, no. 6: 374-381.

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Vera Chilcon, Lenin Joel. 2016. “Estado de conservación de las poblaciones de trichocereus pachanoi, ‘San Pedro,’ en el refugio de vida silvestre Laquipampa, 2015.” Universidad de Lambayeque.

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