Lawyer-turned-shaman creates a formula to cure crack and alcohol addicts in São Paulo

09/16/2009
Text by Arthur Guimarães

“We were seven bodies. Some naked, some not, diving like cannibal fishes in a chilling lake during the winter. Submerged in mud, in the middle of the Atlantic Forest of São Paulo, we were, with all strength, dipping old tin cans in the bottom of the swamp to get the mud to our ritual. Out of the water, still under the guidance of our guru, we began to frantically stomp the muddy ground while singing an Indian cry. We soiled one another and laid down in the woods for a different tanning. We ‘solidified’ in the sun like statues nailed to a timeless psychoanalytic couch. If the skin was stiff, the mind was sharp. Next step: to be whipped with branches of devil's tongue.”

The scenes are part of a ritual led by an attorney from São Paulo, Walter de Lucca, 67, who since the early 90 carries out a subversive work of rehabilitation of the homeless and crack addicts in downtown Sao Paulo. The idea is to promote the purification of the body using ayahuasca, a brew that is the essence of the Daime religion. But the advocate-shaman does not follow the doctrines of the official religion. He is a dissident of the Flor das Águas, one of the first Daime churches in Sao Paulo.

In many cases his work is effective, freeing users from addiction. Trip Magazine took part in one of these sessions at the end of August at a small ranch in São Roque, interior of São Paulo state. The experience is ecumenical: a mix of Indian tradition, mestizo history, Acre’s culture, catholic remnants, psychedelics, personal experience and swing.

That afternoon, in addition to the mud and the lashes with devil’s tongue, we drank ayahuasca that came from Rondônia in a ceremony of four hours around a campfire. All of us in silence, only broken by the sound of animals and drums, flutes, maracas and the bells of the shaman.

There were also in the gathering led by De Lucca and recorded by the photographer John Wainer, besides me: Luiz Antônio Leite (friend and trusted aide of the shaman); Bruno Ramos, a psychologist who works with damage reduction in Cracolândia*; Paulo Martins, a former heavy drinker in downtown that was recovered by the brew and Rogério Guimarães, one of the more complicated cases that have attended the sessions. Being an ex-addict, a former drug dealer and ex-convict - after being arrested with 200 stones of crack in the Luz neighborhood -, he wildly smoked for ten years and was considered a hopeless case. “He used to fight and hit other people’s head with a club. In his first ritual with the brew he cried incessantly, like a devil. It was total madness. To help, I sang a hymn that says 'I am going to tie you'. And mentally I did tie him. He spent four hours crying and laughing like a demented, but he seemed to be glued to his seat”, recalls De Lucca.

*Cracolândia is a popular name given to an area in downtown São Paulo where the crack is openly sold and smoked.

Rogério is the living proof that the experimental process can work. “Ayahuasca turned me into a new man. I started to think about my faults and virtues and I corrected myself. I've changed.” Rogério works today as a security guard in a recycling center in the Glicério neighborhood, where he still is a homeless, living under an overpass. “I don’t feel like getting high. I'd rather drink the brew, a natural thing. I do it much less frequently and in a much more positive way,” he argues in an articulated speech of someone who really seems to have being healed.

Runny noses

The initiative of Walter De Lucca began about 15 years ago, when he and his friends helped to found the “Associação Minha Rua, Minha Casa” [Association My Street, My House], a space that still operates at the overpasses of the Glicério neighborhood.

In that area they attended the homeless, the drug addicts, paper pickers and other kinds. The routine was very different from that seen in shelters. There was more freedom, camaraderie and space for group activities, usually related to the arts. It was there that the first people with interest were recruited. “It was anarchic,” reminds the shaman, who had his training perfected in journeys into the Peruvian Amazon and Acre.

In his work at the institution De Lucca had to cover the whole downtown area providing assistance, finding people in need and often submerged in alcohol and crack. In these wanderings he would ventilate his proposal for those who showed interest. The word of mouth in the streets also spread the news about a new alternative treatment. “We did not have to look for them. People would come looking for us. There are always the repentant ones, tired of the street ordeal. It doesn’t look that way, but there are a bunch of people wanting to get out of this degrading life. But it lacks vacancy and trained social workers in the city programs,” he argues.

The respect towards the patients was another key to success. Everything was done voluntarily by the homeless and the only rules were: do not take drugs or drink during the process. “There wasn’t even an interview to find out what was each one’s problem. They were treated equally as human beings who realized the need to improve,” he says.

The expectancy to drink the brew, which only occurred as the last step, also helped to hold the group together during the recovery. “The last step was the session with the brew and they knew that the deep insight caused by the drink would be the real tool. Therefore, they would strive to behave,” believes De Lucca.

Some 200 people, of about one thousand that was assisted by De Lucca, reached that last stage. During the ritual the shaman would see their weaknesses. “I cannot explain, but you look at the person and you see where the weakness is. One had cirrhosis, others had cancer or AIDS.” The users of cocaine and its derivatives were soon identified. “At the moment of catharsis the nose begins to drain incessantly. It remains that dirty thing and they keep cleaning it up all the time. They stick the whole finger in there and, still, they don’t settle.”
In these moments of despair, to complete the treatment, De Lucca made use of procedures learned in the dealing with the people from the streets. “I would pray a rosary if the guy was very Christian. We had to be guided by what made sense for them. There are times in which an Indian prayer is useless for someone who is a churchgoer.”

Waterfall and mother Oxum

When the treatment sessions were more frequent, the excluded, the paranoid and drifters would leave the Glicério neighborhood, the Cracolândia and the Praça da Sé to first arrive at the Chapel terminal, in the south, led by Luiz Antônio Leite, the shaman's aide. It was 15 to 20 people per weekend. They would all get into a bus on the way to the original site, in São Lourenço da Serra, at the kilometer 301km of the highway Régis Bittencourt. “At this point there were still 12 km of dirt road that they walked barefoot, feeling the ground for real. Some would go back and others would begin to drink and take drugs. To the remaining ones we would give, on the way, a first bath in a waterfall on behalf of mother Oxum [a spirit of the waters],” explains Leite.

After the walk they would arrive calmer to the ranch. Initially they would sing, play guitar and eat (usually vegetarian). “Even being addicted they would stay, especially because half of them had gone back already. It was for those who really wanted,” says De Lucca.

In 95, a more integrated group gave shape to the model of treatment. “It would start with the mud bath, which is a cool thing: you take your clothes off and gets naked in front of one another. And gets bathed, which breaks this unsympathetic behavior of the beggar. Then, within the Indian tradition, we sing songs and leave them in the sun. Imagine what means immobility to people who are talking all the time, spending the whole day under the overpasses, discussing, coping with the noise of cars and fighting. It's a shock.”
Blood of the Amazon

The ones taking the challenge seriously would spend the week over, going deeper into the ritual. Massages were made, meditation and sweat lodges in which a boiling pot with a mixture of herbs is placed under a chair without a seat. The patient also builds a hut with several blankets. At this point we also use more demanding processes with laxative and vomit inducing herbs, like the yawarpanga, a vine known as “Blood of the Amazon.” Macerated it gains a red color, and if eaten it generates a slight change of consciousness. In this state, the person drinks large amounts of water. I, for example, drank and purged more than 2 gallons. “It would come a point of having 20 guys throwing up simultaneously,” comments De Lucca. The enemas were another crucial moment for any trace of the urban underworld to be eliminated. A colonic washout was made with water. “They feel cleaner and it creates a vision of cleanliness that starts to dominate the person. And this is how they leave the alcohol and the crack,” explains the shaman.

After these steps the residents would remain in the woods for days, in tents, under a diet of unsalted brown rice only. In the final stage, for those who were firm in the purpose, were made the ayahuasca sessions. Not everything, however, worked just fine. To quit heavy drugs is complex, especially when it comes the time of the highly hallucinogenic brew. Some would begin to run, some to scream. “It was almost an exorcism, when the dirtiest impurities surfaces. They would see demons and report to be plunging into pools with snakes. We had to grab those guys so they would not wander lost in the dark.”