Sigh. There are already herbal cancer drugs (i.e. taxol from yew) and heart disease (digitalis from foxglove). It's all well and good to wish for a miracle drugs, but things like exercise and safe sex still work best. Boring, isn't it?
Incidentally, it's also worth noting that the archeologists now think that the Amazon (at least along the main, whitewater rivers) was home to a lot more people than we thought even a few years ago. I'm venturing into speculative territory, but I'm guessing that one reason there is this sophisticated use of hallucinogens throughout the Amazon is that it used to be more, well, civilized, and they had the time and numbers of experimenters to work out the drug interactions that Davis talks about. Diseases brought by the Spaniards and Portuguese probably wiped out most of the river cultures, and the tribes we see now are the isolated remnants after 500 years.
Something similar may have happened in the Congo, too, since there's plentiful pottery remains and former cultivated fields in the upper basin, in areas that were once thought to be virgin rain forest.
Anyway, getting off topic. Fun stuff!
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