For years, anyone trying to understand how the U.S. government actually thinks about ayahuasca ran into the same wall. Lots of seizures at the border. Lots of denied religious exemptions. Very little paperwork explaining the reasoning. Then, in early 2023, a single document slipped out — a Drug Enforcement Administration report titled Ayahuasca: Risks to Public Health and Safety, dated July 2020. It surfaced only because a small church and a research nonprofit filed Freedom of Information Act requests and waited two years for a response that, by law, should have arrived in weeks.

If you're researching an ayahuasca retreat — or wondering whether the brew might one day be regulated more like cannabis than like heroin — this document matters. It's the closest thing we have to an official federal position. And honestly? It's not great. The reasoning is thin in places, conflates a few different things, and reads like it was written to justify a conclusion rather than reach one. Let's unpack what's actually in it, what it gets wrong, and why it still shapes the legal landscape for plant medicine in the United States.

How a single document ended up doing so much work

The backstory is brief but telling. The Church of the Eagle and the Condor, working alongside the Chacruna Institute, submitted FOIA requests to the DEA and the Department of Justice asking for every record the government holds on ayahuasca. The requests went unanswered for years — a quiet violation of federal transparency law that, in fairness, is depressingly common when psychedelics are involved.

When the DEA finally responded, it released exactly one document. That document had already been quietly cited in a 2021 denial letter rejecting another church's bid for a religious-use exemption. So the same report that no member of the public had read was being used to deny religious freedom claims. That's a striking detail. The government's entire articulated position on ayahuasca risk fits in a handful of pages, and until recently nobody outside the agency had seen the reasoning.

This matters because ayahuasca occupies a strange legal corner. The brew itself isn't scheduled — DMT, one of its components, is. Two religious groups (the União do Vegetal and Santo Daime) have won Supreme Court and federal court protection to use it as a sacrament. Every other group seeking that same protection has to argue from scratch, and the DEA's risk assessment is now part of what they're arguing against.

What the DEA report actually claims about ayahuasca

The report's headline conclusion is that ayahuasca poses a risk to public health and safety. To reach that, it leans on a few main arguments — and this is where the reasoning gets wobbly.

First, the document repeatedly treats ayahuasca and pure synthetic DMT as if they were interchangeable. They aren't. Ayahuasca is a brewed decoction of two plants — usually Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis — that produces a long, oral experience moderated by MAO inhibitors in the vine. Smoked or injected DMT is a brief, intense flash with a completely different pharmacological profile. Conflating them is roughly like writing a risk assessment of beer by citing data on grain alcohol. The substances overlap, but they don't behave the same way in the body, in ceremony, or in the data.

Second, the assessment catalogs adverse events without much context. Vomiting and diarrhea are listed as concerns. Anyone who has sat in a ceremony will tell you these are not side effects in the conventional sense — they're part of how the medicine is traditionally understood to work. The term la purga exists for a reason. That doesn't mean the discomfort is trivial, but framing it as evidence of public-health danger is a bit like calling a sauna unsafe because people sweat.

Third, the report leans on case reports of psychiatric crises and a handful of deaths. These do happen and shouldn't be brushed aside. But the document doesn't weigh them against base rates, doesn't account for whether the participants had medical or psychiatric contraindications that responsible screening would catch, and doesn't compare the risk profile to substances the same agency considers acceptable.

What's missing from the assessment

Here's what the report doesn't do, and the gaps are arguably more important than what it does include.

• No engagement with the benefit side of the ledger. There's a growing body of peer-reviewed research on ayahuasca's effects on depression, addiction, and PTSD. Studies from Brazil, Spain, and elsewhere have shown signals worth taking seriously. None of this appears in the assessment.
• No distinction between contexts of use. A ceremonial setting with experienced facilitators, medical screening, dietary preparation, and integration support is a fundamentally different risk environment than someone sourcing brew off the internet and drinking it alone in a hotel room. The report flattens these into one category.
• No comparison to baseline risks of accepted activities. Skiing kills people. So do peanuts, in the wrong body. Risk assessments only mean something in context.
• No acknowledgment of the indigenous traditions from which the practice emerged, or the centuries of accumulated practical knowledge about who should and shouldn't drink, what dietary preparations matter, and how to manage difficult experiences.

None of this means the DEA was obligated to declare ayahuasca safe. It does mean the document reads less like a balanced scientific review and more like a brief written for one side of an argument.

Why this matters if you're considering an ayahuasca retreat

You might reasonably ask: how does a federal report I'll never read affect my decision about whether to fly to Peru or Costa Rica and sit in ceremony? More than you'd think.

The U.S. government's position drives a lot of downstream consequences. Customs and Border Protection seizures of ayahuasca have increased noticeably in the last few years. Practitioners have been arrested. New religious groups seeking the same legal protection as the UDV and Santo Daime are being denied based on reasoning that traces back, in part, to this very document. If you've ever wondered why your friend's facilitator suddenly stopped doing ceremonies in the U.S. and now runs them in Mexico, this is part of the answer.

For the practical retreat-goer, a few takeaways. Drinking ayahuasca in countries where it's legal — Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, and others — sidesteps the U.S. legal question entirely while you're abroad. Bringing brew back into the States is a different matter, and not one I'd recommend testing. And if you're attending a U.S.-based ceremony, it's worth knowing the legal posture of the group hosting it. Some operate under recognized religious exemptions. Many don't, and the risk profile is real, both for facilitators and, occasionally, participants.

The bigger picture: secrecy, due process, and what comes next

The most damning thing about the FOIA episode isn't the report itself. It's that the government sat on these records for two years, in violation of its own transparency obligations, while citing the unreleased document to deny religious freedom claims. That's not how administrative law is supposed to work. Decisions affecting fundamental rights are supposed to be made on a record the affected parties can see and contest.

The good news is that the document is now public, which means it can be critiqued, rebutted, and — eventually — replaced by something better. Advocacy groups are actively pushing for a more honest federal conversation about ayahuasca, one that distinguishes plant medicine from isolated compounds, weighs benefits alongside risks, and respects the diversity of traditions that have safely used the brew for generations.

For now, if you're weighing whether plant medicine has a place in your own life, the most useful thing you can do is get specific. Read the actual research, not the headlines. Talk to people who have done the work — both the ceremony and the integration afterward. Ask hard questions of any retreat you're considering: who screens for contraindications, what medications conflict with the brew, what their aftercare actually involves. The federal posture is what it is, but your decision is yours.

If something in this piece resonated and you want to look at what's actually out there, a curated selection of ayahuasca retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Pick the place carefully, prepare seriously, and treat the experience with the respect it asks for.