Amazon Tribes Fight Patent On Sacred Vine
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amazon tribes asked the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office Tuesday to revoke a patent granted to an American
businessman on their most sacred plant, a vine that grows wild in the
jungle.
Shamans of the Amazon rain forest believe the vine called ayahuasca
has medicinal properties and they use it to make a potent
hallucinogenic brew for their religious rituals.
``Ayahuasca gives shamans the power to heal our sick, meet with
spirits and divine the future,'' wrote native leader Antonio
Jacanamijoy in a petition to cancel the patent granted in 1986 to
Loren Miller. Jacanamijoy is an Inga from southern Colombia.
``Commercializing an ingredient of our religious and healing
ceremonies is a profound affront to more than 400 cultures that
populate the Amazon basin,'' said the request presented by two
shamans from Ecuador and Colombia who wore headdresses of parrot
feathers and necklaces of wild boar teeth.
COICA, the umbrella organization of Amazon tribes that Jacanamijoy
heads, has been protesting against the patent ever since a Canadian
environmental organization discovered its existence in 1995.
Miller, whose California-based International Plant Medicine Corp.
looks at the pharmaceutical and cosmetic potential of plants, has not
actually marketed any ayahuasca product based on the patent.
Native rights and environmental lawyers said it was the first time
any native group has sought to revoke the patent on a product based
on its medicinal and ceremonial qualities.
The case raises ethical and moral questions, they said, about
intellectual property rights involving the traditional knowledge and
materials of native cultures.
``This patent is utterly flawed and should be revoked,'' said David
Downes, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental
Law.
Canceling it would set a precedent that future patent applicants
cannot simply take knowledge and materials of indigenous people and
claim them as their own, Downes said.
Plant Patent 7,751 issued to Miller in June 1986 claimed rights over
a novel variety of the vine he named ``Da Vine.''
But a leading expert on this plant family, William Anderson, director
of the University of Michigan Herbarium, said the features described
in the patent were typical of the species.
Ayahuasca is a word in Quechua, the language of the Incas, meaning
``vine of the dead'' or ``vine of the souls.''