From Brooklyn to Australia, there's a growing demand for ayahuasca, a tribal, hallucinogenic tea said to have both spiritual and curative properties. But, like any globalization fairy tale, the world's embrace is threatening to suffocate the tradition at its source.

This is the second of three dispatches from the 2016 World Ayahuasca Conference in Rio Branco, Brazil. The first one can be found here .

The herbal tea, made by combining a rare vine and shrub found in the thick of the Amazon, has become the "it" drug for celebrities like Sting and Lindsay Lohan, who rave about its spiritual properties. But for the Amazonian tribes that have used ayahuasca for 5,000 years to communicate with God on matters ranging from politics to medicine, the trend is dangerous.

"The sacred art of Indians has been transformed into entertainment," said Moises Pianko, a member of the Ashaninka tribe of northern Brazil.

Sudden local and international demand for the brew has put the ayahuasca vine used to make the tea at risk of eradication in parts of Peru, and tripled its price in the last seven years to $250 a liter. The vine is almost impossible to plant, as it only thrives in the thick of the jungle and takes four years to grow, so the natural reserves are limited.

Meanwhile, several centers popping up around the world are freely offering ayahuasca with little regard to the safety of its users or the sacredness of the tea, according to tribal leaders.

"Ayahuasca is no joke. The white man wants to patent our ritual, to use it as one more way to make money, but the spiritual world is not for sale," Pianko said.

The ayahuasca tourism industry says otherwise. An estimated 40 therapeutic retreats around the world now specialize in ayahuasca, according to Carlos Suarez, an independent researcher who writes about economic development and cultural change in the Amazon. These centers host more than 4,000 people a year and charge up to $400 a night. Some also offer mud baths, yoga sessions and excursions to Machu Picchu.

"The white man wants to patent our ritual, to use it as one more way to make money, but the spiritual world is not for sale."

Andy Metcalfe, who owns and operates the Gaia Tree center, an ayahuasca retreat in Iquitos, Peru, said the days when the tea was exclusively brewed by tribes are long gone. "It has outgrown the original tribal origins," he told me, adding that most shamen in the region are no longer directly affiliated with tribes. "At the end the day, ayahuasca comes from nature. I don't believe in people owning or controlling nature."