many explorers, botanists and others — von Martius, Orton, 
Crevaux, Koch-Grunberg, to name only a few — referred to 
ayahuasca, caapi, or yaje, usually quite casually and without 
citing botanical material: stating merely that the drug came 
from ‘‘a jungle liana’’ (Schultes, 1957; Friedberg, 1965). 
Of outstanding interest was the work in 1922 of Rusby in 
Bolivia. Rusby vouchered all of his collections of drug plants, 
but we have been unable to locate a specimen of Banisteriopsis 
in his material (Rusby, 1923). Another contribution of major 
importance was the publication in 1931 by the American 
botanist Conrad V. Morton of the detailed field notes made by 
the famous Peruvian botanical collector Guilielmo Klug in the 
Colombian Putumayo (Morton, 1931). The second of the two 
major sources of the hallucinogenic drink, Banisteriopsis ineb- 
rians, was based on Klug’s collection. Similarly, the collec- 
tions of the Russian botanists Varanof and Juzepezuk in the 
Caqueta area of Colombia in 1925-26 added valuable data based 
upon botanical material (Schultes, 1957). The field work of the 
Colombian botanist Hernando Garcia-Barriga has added ap- 
preciably to our knowledge (Garcia-Barriga, 1958). In 1957, I 
published a review of the then known sources of the hallucino- 
gen, incorporating my own field studies in the Colombian 
Amazon witha review of the literature that had grown up onthe 
problem (Schultes, 1957). This was followed in 1965 by an 
exceptionally complete ethnobotanical survey of the drug by 
the French ethnobotanist Claudine Friedberg, who had carried 
out field work in Peru (Friedberg, 1965). In the meantime, the 
taxonomist José Cuatrecasas of the Smithsonian Institution 
had provided, for the first time, a firm basis for classification of 
ethnobotanical and phytochemical problems with his mono- 
graph of the Malpighiaceae of Colombia, published in 1958 
(Cuatrecasas, 1958). 
But serious complications early arose in attempts to identify 
the hallucinogen. In 1890, a missionary confused the tree- 
species of Datura or Brugmansia employed by the Jivaro with 
their malpighiaceous narcotic — a confusion that quickly 
entered the pharmacological and chemical literature. Unfortu- 
nately, it has persisted. And at one time, yaje was attributed 
even to the Aristolochiaceae (Rouhier, 1924)! 
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