[EYES WIDE OPEN]

Ayahuasca has an undefined legal status in the UK.

I am not a lawyer, but this is my understanding:

All the constituent plants, both vine and light, are 100% legal. This is not the US; plants are not viewed as mere chemical containers, and unless a plant is specifically outlawed, it is legal to posess no matter what chemicals it contains (see mushroom case law below).

Any brew which contains only the b.caapi vine is also 100% legal, because there is no law against either the vine itself or any of its chemical constituents.

Any alloyed brew, made with light-bearing plants, contains DMT and/or related tryptamine. These substances are illegal Class 1 drugs. As such, any attempt to extract purified tryptamines from such a brew, any possession of purified tryptamines, is definitely illegal.

However, regular brewing, which does not seek to extract purified tryptamines, is less clearly defined.

The situation, I believe, is currently the same as it was for psilocybin mushrooms a few years ago, when there was no law against the mushrooms themselves but psilocybin was illegal. Back then, courts decided that (a) the presence of an illegal substance in a plant did not make it an offence to posess that plant, and (b) a simple preparation of mushrooms as a tea was not sufficient processing to make the result an illegal preparation of psilocybin. This case law is almost certainly applicable to ayahuasca too. Posession of the plants is unequivocally legal, and adding this case law should make plain brews legal too, but it would almost certainly require another court case to establish this - with the attendant risk that the opposite outcome would be achieved, or of other unwanted side-effects such as changes in the law.

When mushrooms began being openly sold in every High Street up and down the land, the predictable consequences, and predictable tabloid hysteria, meant that the government had little choice but to make the mushrooms themselves illegal.

Needless to say, we do not want to see this repeated with ayahuasca. It is admittedly far less likely to happen with ayahusaca, which has very little scope for recreational use, but let's not go there.

Regardless of the precise nature of the legal situation, it is imperative that we do our best to ensure that ayahuasca does not become a "problem" in the eyes of the authorities that they feel compelled to "deal with". So you do not openly flaunt it, you do not sell it, you exercise care and caution when deciding to whom you talk about it and what you tell them, and you take great care that your own use of ayahuasca, should the authorities discover it, is of the kind that they will not care about, rather than the kind that - say - involves a trip to A&E.