Arno Adelaars

Arno Adelaars is a writer, lecturer and activist in the field of drug-legalization, based in Amsterdam. He wrote the first book on MDMA-users in the Netherlands in 1991 and the first Dutch book on psilocybin mushrooms. In 1998, he co-organised Psychoactivity, a Multidisciplinary Conference on Plants, Shamanism & States of Consciousness, which featured some of the most prolific psychedelic researchers such as Albert Hofmann, Alexander Shulgin and Benny Shannon amongst many others.

He got in touch with ayahuasca in 1995 and has since then devoted his life to this Amazon plant brew. He has been drinking ayahuasca many hundreds of times in very different circumstances in Europe, the Americas and Asia. After countless sessions where he, in his own words, faced all his demons, a Columbian shaman Kajuyali Tsaman inaugurated him in the ayahuasca tradition in 2007.

In 2006, together with the art historian Dr.Claudia Mueller-Ebeling and ethnobotanist Dr. Christian Raetsch, Arno co-wrote the book Ayahuasca: Rituals, Potions and Visionary Art from the Amazon - an authoritative discourse on the use, history, culture, and the art of the sacred plant medicine Ayahuasca. In 2016 he gave a talk about the economics and future of Ayahuasca, at ICPR (Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research) in Amsterdam.