Must read article by Truffle who write..
t turns out psychedelic patent squabbles are not as new a phenomenon as some might think. Jocelyn Bosse, a lecturer in Intellectual Property at King’s Law School UK, recently tweeted a thread discussing the ‘infamous plant patent’ for ayahuasca — a South American entheogen used as a spiritual medicine — granted in the 1980s in the United States.
In 1986, Loren Miller, director of California-based International Plant Medicine Corporation, acquired a patent on Da Vine (ayahuasca) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), allowing exclusive rights to trade and breed the sacred indigenous plant. It has been claimed that Miller acquired a sample of the plant from an indigenous tribal leader in Ecuador a decade before filing the patent application.
The news of the ayahuasca patent soon reached the indigenous tribe in question, and the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA) — an umbrella organization of over 400 indigenous groups in the region. The Amazon coalition filed a petition in 1999 arguing the existing prior art — or evidence that the substance is already known — for ayahuasca that Miller claimed to be novel as Da Vine.
Read more at https://www.truffle.report/psychedelic-patents-nature-ip-structural-exclusion/
