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Science has been a powerful way of understanding the universe and the human. However, its advancement has been dominated by a conservative look that has promoted the criminalization and marginalization of conventional indigenous medicine and other ancestral knowlege, especially those cultivated by women. Practices such as herbal or piería were stigmatized as “witchcraft” or “superstition” from standards established under the rigor of a plural group. Today, that knowledge begins to be claimed for its cultural and medicinal relevance, and some recent advances demonstrate it.
As a relevant milestone, the COFEPRIS recently authorized the installation of the first indigenous medicine office in Sonora, within the IMSS-Bienestar of the Yaqui Nation. Space in charge of the Sanadora Francisca Rosario Matuz, heiress of the healing knowledge of her mother and guardian of knowledge that transcends allopathic medicine.
While this news may surprise some,the opening from the IMSS is part of a state recognition of ancestral medicine. Even though little is disseminated, the National Psychiatry Institute has a direction of research in neuroscience, on which two phytopharmacology laboratories depend for interdisciplinary research on active ingredients of Mexican plants used in traditional medicine.
Perhaps we are facing a more resolute approach from the health sector to take advantage of the ancestral knowledge of our grandmothers and grandparents that, with the use of plants, temazcal, fungi and others, in many cases promise to be a good response to the mental health crisis through which our era crosses.
In this context,it is striking that last week,the first room of the Supreme Court did not achieve the necessary vote to resolve a trial in which an indigenous person requested that the consumption of psilocibious fungi be allowed. Fungi that are popularly known as hallucinogens because their intake temporarily alters a critical network of brain areas responsible for reflexive thought, thereby producing an altered state of consciousness. Neuronal alteration that, according to various scientific studies, if carried out in therapeutic spaces, insurance and contents, can cause positive and permanent changes in human behavior.
So, the project of sentence that was put to consideration of the First Chamber recognized that the current prohibition limits the decision on one’s own body, the mind and spiritual experiences, especially when they are part of an indigenous worldview or a therapeutic treatment. additionally, the proposal indicated that psilocybin fungi have shown proven clinical benefits to treat resistant depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and anguish in terminal patients and even countries like the United States (Oregon), Australia and Canada already allow their therapeutic use under medical control.
However, the first room of the current Supreme Court preferred not to enter the bottom of the matter and left it as pending for the next generation of ministers, who will have to opt for prohibition, for allowing their consumption or for gradually opening the door towards investigation before establishing adequate regulatory framework.
The importance of this case represents an opportunity both to repair a historical debt with indigenous communities and to provide possible comfort to the mental health demands of the public sector in Mexico.Opening research on psilocybin constitutes a meeting point between scientific evidence, traditional knowledge and human rights.