-Caveat Lector- Colombian Shaman Now `Fashionable' By JARED KOTLER .c The Associated Press BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Taxis honk on the avenue below and venetian blinds block the glare of street lamps in the midtown loft where urbanites gather for a ritual until recently practiced only in the Amazon jungle. Candles and incense are lit, and the disciples take seats as an aging Indian medicine man starts hissing, spitting, chanting and stabbing at the air with a dried branch. One by one, jean-clad men and women kneel before the shaman in his striped poncho, parrot-feathered crown and boar's tooth necklace. Each downs a cup of bitter brown tea, then awaits its psychedelic effects to set in. When a middle-aged schoolteacher begins shaking with fright, the healer rustles the branch in her face. For good measure, he spits a mouthful of licorice-flavored ``firewater'' over Beatriz's curled-up body. ``I scared away the evil spirits,'' explains Antonio Jacanamijoy, the 78-year-old shaman from the Inga tribe of Colombia's Amazon, later explains. For decades, intrepid westerners trekked to the Amazon to find the reclusive men who made yage (ya-hey), the tea brewed from a jungle vine, Banisteriopsis Caapi. Anthropologists, botanists and drug enthusiasts braved the wilds for the drink also known as ayahuasca (eye-ah-wah-ska). Beat generation writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs published a book, ``The Yage Letters,'' about their often-frightening episodes under yage's influence in Colombia and Peru in the 50s and 60s. Nearly a half-century later, the shamans are reaching out to the West, taking their healing rites to urban living rooms. In Bogota, they've built a following among artists, intellectuals and professionals as well as some doctors who believe in the tea's potential for treating maladies. General practitioner Fabio Ramirez takes patients regularly to a shaman and has become the medicine man's apprentice. He calls yage a ``great catalyst'' capable of helping people see emotional problems at the root of their illnesses. ``It's not a panacea. It's a great tool,'' Ramirez said. Users claim yage gives them visions, of jungle cats and technicolor landscapes. Colombia's leading news magazine, Semana, has declared the shaman-led yage sessions a Bogota ``fashion.'' Among those taking it with Beatriz one Saturday night were a publicist, a medical intern and Andrea Echeverry, the nose-ringed lead singer of Aterciopelados, Colombia's top rock group. For many of its new urban groupies, the weekly sessions may prove just a temporary fad. For the shamans - mostly elderly men spending months on end in a foreboding metropolis - they are a matter of personal and cultural survival. ``They saw their culture was dying, and some of them thought it was time to open up and change this and accept white men as apprentices for the sake of preserving yage,'' said Jimmy Weisskopf, an American journalist writing a book about the subject. Weisskopf traces the cultural threat to oil exploration and the cocaine trade, which opened up communication to once-remote Amazonian communities. Exposed to modern life, younger Indians began losing interest in folk medicine and rituals. Paradoxically, members of Colombia's establishment began to embrace native cultures. In 1992, the anthropology department at the National University hosted the first-ever lecture by a shaman, or ``Taita,'' former Bogota mayor Antanus Mockus said. ``The Taita said he'd been told in a dream to go out and proselytize,'' recalled Mockus, the university's president at the time. Mockus took yage twice that year. Jacanamijo charges $15 a person for yage sessions in Bogota where up to 30 attend, and hands out business cards proclaiming himself ``The King of Botany.'' ``If you want to make money you have to go where you can get it,'' says Jacanamijoy, who treats poor patients for free in his depressed southern homeland. Shamans using yage have spread beyond South America, holding frequent sessions in California, Colorado and the southwestern United States, said Dr. Andrew Weil, the U.S. alternative health guru, who tried the beverage in Colombia during the 1970s. ``There's tremendous usage of it in North America,'' he said. But with side effects including severe vomiting and diarrhea, yage isn't likely to spread as a street drug. ``For some people the experience is too strong,'' said German Martinez, a 33-year-old publicist who, like many yage enthusiasts, calls the bodily purging a vehicle for opening up the mind. Many people try it just once, he said. Jacanamijoy, who began as his grandfather's apprentice at 15, is convinced yage helps him diagnose and cure diseases. Though the drink's purported health benefits are unproven scientifically, UCLA psychiatry professor Dr. Charles Grob thinks it is worth studying. ``We might learn more about how to treat depression and other mood disturbances,'' said Grob, who led a 1996 study that found enhanced mental functions among users in Brazilian religious cults. In a recent paper, however, Grob warns that patients on anti-depression medications could suffer tremors, convulsions, loss of consciousness and even death if they consume yage. 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