50
Sandra Lucia Goulart
change in the socioeconomic profile of their believers. This occurs due to different factors. In particular, in contemporary complex societies we can identify a great heterogeneity of behavioral patterns, not only determined by economic conditions, which have a larger or smaller acceptance, according to different situations and historical moments. Regarding the recurrence of therapeutic activities it is possible to identify those generally called alternative therapies in relation to biomedicine. The recurrence of these alternative therapeutic approaches occurs relatively frequently in these ayahuasca religion groups that express an expansion and diversification motion of their socio-cultural followers. Rose[34], for example, studied a group linked to CEFLURIS located in Minas Gerais which has as one of its peculiarities, a strong presence of believers in the health and medicine area who also work with this kind of therapy. The author showed that an intersection between the uses and meanings of these alternative therapies and the daimist spiritual therapies occurs. As mentioned by other authors, nevertheless, the great difference between official medical practices and magic-religious medicines is that the latter offer principles and integrating responses to the misfortunes and illnesses experienced by the subjects, making them more meaningful and bearable. The religious medicine expresses a holistic view of the disease. Instead, the official medicine therapies act from a logic of specialization that separates, divides and classifies the sick body, understood as just a biological entity[12,35]. Finally, it is important to emphasize that the religious medicine expressed through the cults discussed in this article is deeply marked by the use of the psychoactive beverage called Daime or Vegetal in the different groups. As we can see by what has been stated here, for the believers of these cults the referred beverage ranges through a variety of meanings that infer and does not remit necessarily to its psychoactive or pharmacological characteristics. However, mainly from the expansion process of these religions, they are now identified, in the more comprehensive society, to the use of a drug or hallucinogen. At this point it is worth clarifying that in Brazil, the use of the ayahuasca has been under threat of a legal ban in several occasions. In 1985, it was even suspended, and the ayahuasca was on a list of psychotropic substances prohibited for a period of almost one year. In 1987, however, after a long survey conducted by a team of specialists from different scientific areas, the use of the beverage was liberated again, but only for religious and ritual purposes. The last document approved by the Brazilian government on this issue in January 2010 (Resolution No 01, January 2010/CONAD)24, was 24
This resolution was published in the DiĂĄrio Oficial da UniĂŁo (Federal Official Gazette), No. 17 from January 26, 2010, page 58.