Ethnopharmacology as a scientific term seems to have had its first impetus in 1967, when an international symposium was held in San F’rancisco to highlight the historical, cultural, anthropological, botanical, chemical and pharmacological aspects of traditional psychoactive drugs (Efron et al., 1967). Its right of existence was established more definitively with the appearance of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 1979 (Rivier and Bruhn, 1979). A workable definition of ethnopharmacology was not available until 2 years later, when its advocates Bruhn and Holmstedt (1981) described it as “the interdisciplinary scientific exploration of biologically active agents traditionally employed or observed by man”.