Who Owns the Pharmacopoeia: Intellectual Property and Sacred Plants

“Schultes documented 24,000 specimens. The communities who guided him have no legal claim to the 78 pharmaceutical compounds derived from his work. The Nagoya Protocol covers new exploitation. It does not remedy old exploitation.”

Richard Evans Schultes's Amazon herbarium represents one of the world's most valuable repositories of traditional botanical knowledge in Western scientific format. The 24,000 specimens he collected, the detailed field notes, the chemical analyses conducted with Hofmann and others, this archive has been the foundation for botanical, pharmacological, and ethnopharmacological research for fifty years.

Seventy-eight pharmaceutical compounds have been derived from or developed in response to plants documented in the ethnobotanical tradition that Schultes represented. The communities whose knowledge guided the documentation have received no systematic benefit from these compounds.

The intellectual property framework that governs this situation has two parts. The first part, historical exploitation, is outside the reach of any current international agreement. The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing covers new commercial exploitation of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, not exploitation that occurred before its entry into force in 2014. The debt to the communities whose knowledge produced the pharmacopoeia has no legal mechanism for remediation.

The second part, new exploitation, is theoretically covered by Nagoya, but implementation is weak. A 2025 Global Health Innovation Center analysis found that the majority of pharmaceutical companies with products derived from traditional plant knowledge had not conducted the prior informed consent and benefit-sharing negotiations Nagoya requires. Enforcement is left to national authorities who frequently lack the capacity or political will to pursue multinational pharmaceutical companies.

The psychedelic industry presents a specific current case. Psilocybin is derived from mushrooms documented extensively by Schultes and others from indigenous Mexican traditions. Ibogaine is derived from the iboga shrub of the Gabonese Bwiti tradition. Both are now the subject of commercial pharmaceutical development programs with patent portfolios and investor backing. Neither program has established benefit-sharing relationships with the communities of origin that would meet the Nagoya standard.

Schultes's work was conducted in the colonial scientific tradition, take specimens, take knowledge, publish in Western journals, build careers at Western institutions. He was personally respectful of the communities he worked with and documented their knowledge with more care than most of his contemporaries. But the structural arrangement was extractive regardless of his personal intentions. The communities remain outside the benefit stream.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Nagoya Protocol (2010)
• Swanson, Biotechnology and the Problem of Property (1994) [Source not found; under review]
• Global Health Innovation Center, Traditional Knowledge and IP (2025)