State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan was in Byron Bay Courthouse on Friday afternoon to deliver her findings in the inquest into the death of Natasha Lechner, who died after taking kambo in Mullumbimby in 2019.
Derived from an Amazonian frog, kambo was criminalised in Australia not long after this, which didn’t stop it contributing to another death currently being investigated by the coroner, that of Jarrad Antonovich.
The three day inquest into Ms Lechner’s death took place in Lismore in May 2023. Her father Frank Lechner remembered her then as ‘an old soul in a young body’, close to her twin brother, and having travelled widely from her origins in Wollongong before she settled in Mullumbimby.
There was evidence that she’d been suffering from a range of chronic health problems for years, and had been declared medically unfit to practice her previous profession of hairdressing in 2019.
Kambo
Ms Lechner had been interested in kambo since 2015, reportedly finding it beneficial for her back pain and other issues.
61 lesions from previous kambo sessions were found on her body in the autopsy (the skin is burned before the kambo is applied). At the time of her death, she’d recently completed her own training as a kambo practitioner.
The other woman at the centre of this inquest, Victoria Sinclair, known as ‘Maestra Victoria’, had been training as a kambo practitioner since 2014, with experience in Central and South America as well as Europe. In March 2019 she was visiting Australia from Ireland when the women decided to administer kambo to one other in a private ceremony at Ms Lechner’s share house in Mullumbimby.
On 8 March, the session began with both women taking the traditional South American plant medicine ‘sananga’ via eye drops, before Ms Lechner gave Ms Sinclair the kambo, and she vomited, as is common, and then recovered.
Ms Sinclair testified that Ms Lechner then requested kambo to be applied over her heart, but Ms Sinclair said she applied the substance to her arm and below the clavicle area of her chest instead. Five ‘points’ were applied altogether, not an unusual number.
Bad reaction
Ms Lechner felt faint and lay down, but did not purge. After two minutes she sat up, grabbed Ms Sinclair’s arm and said ‘something’s not right’ or ‘this isn’t good’, before losing consciousness.
From here things went from bad to worse, with Ms Sinclair making various attempts to revive the other woman, all of which were unsuccessful. She said she tried to use Ms Lechner’s phone to ring an ambulance, but didn’t know how to use the phone, or which number to ring (she was not a resident of Australia).
The coroner noted that ‘she did not run outside the house to get help’.
When housemate Kelly Green returned to the house at 11.10am she commenced CPR on Ms Lechner and called 000, with paramedics arriving soon after. The coroner said that, ‘Sadly, it was clear that she had already passed away’ before they arrived.
Coroner O’Sullivan was unequivocal about kambo’s role in Natasha Lechner’s death, with the evidence of toxicologists and other medical experts leading her to conclude that she died ‘as a result of an adverse cardiac event, triggered by the administration of kambo, which involves scraping poisonous secretions on to burns in the body.’
She took pains to describe the victim as a clever, independent, educated woman who was searching for a way to cure herself from her chronic health issues.
Although she lacked the power to recommend any legal actions against Victoria Sinclair for her role in the death (Ms Sinclair is not an Australian citizen and kambo was not illegal at the time), the coroner suggested that at the very least those involved should have had a proper plan if something went wrong, with Ms Lechner appearing to have a better chance of survival if an ambulance had been called much earlier.
She said she supported the TGA’s decision to ban kambo in Australia.
The coroner further said, ‘While regulators must balance risk of harm with personal liberties, it appears to me that a number of vulnerable people are drawn to using kambo in circumstances where those who administer it may hold themselves out as part of a healing profession, and yet lack basic training in first aid.
‘Like Ms Sinclair, those persons may not prepare themselves for what to do in an emergency,’ she said.
There were only media representatives in court to hear the results of the inquest. Ms Lechner’s father was present via video link, but didn’t make a statement. The related inquest into Jarrad Antonovich’s death will return to Byron Bay in May.
Good decision. Vulnerable fools should be protected.
Fair enough but hopefully the chief coroner also recommends banning a range of legally available over the counter and prescription pharmaceuticals that injure and kill many thousands of people every single day across the world. These proven harmful, sometimes fatal drugs continue to make trillions $ profit for shareholders and supported by Governments and if in this case, Kambo has been decided as dangerous after the death of 1 or 2 people over years / decades, then using the same principle should be applied to pharmaceuticals which should therefore be banned.
That’s just silly. Quite lot more people use dodgy pharmaceuticals that those who use Kambo. I’m sorry for the need to state the obvious, it’s depressing.
Exactly.
So called kambo ceremonies represent the most decadent side of the ‘alternative’ culture. Anyone who supports the more extreme practices, such as this, should be having a good hard look at themselves..
The people who profit from this so called therapy and hold themselves out as healing professional, which they clearly are not. Need to be charged with negligence in the very least. Otherwise these dodgy charlatans will continue with their self created poor practice, false hope unsafe snake oil crap.
I experienced 3 kambo ceremonies, including one that took place shortly after this rare and tragic fatal incident, at a time when its use in Australia was still legal. As a practice that has its origins in the traditions of the Kaxinawa tribe in Brazil, I’m curious how the armchair experts here came to conclude that it is unsafe ‘snake oil’ without even trying it.
There is the potential for risks to arise when transplanting indigenous practices out of their traditional cultural milieu into the West. This includes deviating from the recommended number of treatment points. It is also necessary to ensure that kambo is extracted humanely. Unlike my experience with the trained shaman whom I dealt with, since kambo has become illegal (as it was at the time of the Jarrad Antonovich tragedy), I have not considered doing it again in Australia.
Both of these two fatalities have one thing in common, in that both lives could probably have been saved by a combination of first aid knowledge, and calling 000 in a timely manner. Kambo is a powerful substance that is safe for nearly all those who use it, and as the commenter above observed, if it were a pharmaceutical drug it would not have been withdrawn from circulation.