Peyote

• 1. Introduction

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  Two dried pieces of peyote, found at an archaeological site called Shumla Cave No. 5 on the Rio Grande in Texas, were put through radiocarbon dating in 2005. The results placed them between 3780 and 3660 BCE. Chemical analysis showed that both still held roughly 2 percent alkaloids, mescaline among them. From that, researchers concluded that native North Americans were probably using the cactus at least 5500 years ago. Few plants have such a long and unbroken relationship with the people who gather them. What is this small, spineless desert plant, and what is inside it? Why do some peoples call it a soul, a medicine, or even a form of Jesus? And why did governments spend more than a century fighting over who may eat it?

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• 2. A Glistening Cocoon

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  The word peyote reached Spanish from the Nahuatl peyōtl, which means caterpillar cocoon. That Nahuatl word grows from a root, peyōni, meaning to glisten.

  The plant behind the name is Lophophora williamsii. A mature shoot stands only 2 to 7 centimeters tall and spreads 4 to 12 centimeters across. It is a flattened sphere with a sunken tip, colored blue-green, yellow-green, or sometimes reddish-green. Low, rounded bumps often form vertical ribs. From each bump rises a tuft of soft yellowish or whitish wool. There are no spines anywhere. Shoots usually crowd together in clusters hugging the ground.

  Flowers open by day, in pink, white, or sometimes yellowish or reddish shades, and measure between 1 and 2.4 centimeters long. The plant blooms from March to May, and occasionally as late as September. Its anthers are thigmotactic, reacting to touch, a trait it shares with the prickly pear genus Opuntia. Small, edible, rosy fruits follow, between 1.5 and 2 centimeters long. At maturity they turn brownish-white and dry out without splitting open. Inside are black, pear-shaped seeds, 1 to 1.5 millimeters long, which need hot and humid conditions to germinate.

  In 1845 the French botanist Charles Antoine Lemaire first described the species, calling it Echinocactus williamsii. The American botanist John Merle Coulter moved it into a new genus, Lophophora, in 1894.

  The cactus grows across northern Mexico and into south Texas, the only part of the United States where it occurs. In Mexico its range runs from Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas in the north down to San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas. Most of it sits between 100 and 1500 meters above sea level in the Chihuahuan Desert, and exceptionally as high as 1900 meters. Desert scrub and limestone hills are its usual home. Tamaulipas, with a milder climate, shelters it in thorn scrub.

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• 3. Fifty Alkaloids

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  More than 50 different alkaloids have been isolated from peyote, although many show up only in minor or trace amounts. Mescaline is the famous one, making up about 30 percent of the plant's total alkaloid content. Pellotine accounts for 17 percent, anhalonidine for 14, and hordenine for 8. Hordenine has a second name, peyocactin.

  The supporting cast is long. Anhalamine, anhalidine, anhalinine, anhalonine, lophophorine, and O-methylanhalonidine are all major alkaloids. Peyophorine is a minor constituent. Isoanhalamine, isoanhalidine, isoanhalonidine, and isopellotine appear only in traces. Tyramine and N-methyltyramine are present too.

  The mescaline itself is thinly spread through fresh cactus, at about 0.4 percent. Drying concentrates it to somewhere between 3 and 6 percent. Within a single button, the highest concentration sits at the sides.

  For psychoactive use, a common dose of pure mescaline runs from roughly 200 to 400 milligrams. In dried buttons of average strength, that equals about 10 to 20 grams. Strength varies so much between samples that an accurate dose is hard to measure unless the mescaline is first extracted.

  Reported effects include rich visual or auditory experiences, with synesthesia, and spiritual or philosophical insights. They last roughly 10 to 12 hours.

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• 4. Buttons and Roots

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  The crown of the cactus, the part above ground, is made of disc-shaped buttons. Harvesters cut these off above the roots and sometimes dry them. Done properly, the top of the root forms a callus and does not rot, so the plant survives. With poor technique, the entire plant dies.

  In the wild, peyote is extremely slow growing. Cultivated specimens are far quicker, sometimes needing less than three years to go from seedling to mature flowering adult. Grafting speeds things further, by attaching peyote to the root stock of a mature San Pedro cactus.

  South Texas shows what happens without such care. Peyote grows naturally there but has been over-harvested, to the point that the state has listed it as endangered. For this species in particular, cultivation is an important conservation tool. Promoting San Pedro as a substitute is another proposed way to reduce demand for peyote itself.

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• 5. The Sacred Medicine

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  In a burial cave in west central Coahuila, Mexico, researchers analyzed further specimens and dated them to between 810 and 1070 CE. From the earliest records, peyote use is tied to the Huichol of northern Mexico and to tribes on the Southern Plains, in present-day Oklahoma and Texas. It was recorded among Southwestern Athabaskan-language groups as well.

  North of Mexico, the Tonkawa, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache were the source or first practitioners of the peyote religion. They also introduced peyote to newly arrived migrants such as the Comanche and Kiowa, who came from the Northern Plains. Traditional Navajo belief and ceremony did not mention peyote until the neighboring Utes introduced it. Today the Navajo Nation has more members of the Native American Church than any other group.

  In the 19th century, American Indians across wider regions to the north took up peyote in their religious practice, as part of a revival of native spirituality. This movement came to be known as the Native American Church, or Peyotism. Its members call the cactus the sacred medicine and use it against spiritual, physical, and social ills. Some tribes also use the plant in folk medicine, for a range of ailments.

  Many followers personify peyote as Peyote Spirit. They describe it either as God's equivalent of Jesus for Indians, or as Jesus himself. Ceremonies seek a closer understanding of the spiritual world, communion with God and the spirits, including the deceased, and spiritual power, guidance, reproof, and healing.

  The all-night healing ceremony takes place inside a hogan, a traditional Navajo building, or inside a tipi. It begins around 8 P.M. on Saturday. Prayer, singing, the sacramental eating of peyote, water rites, and contemplation follow. A communion breakfast on Sunday morning ends it.

  For the Wixarika, also called the Huichol, the cactus sits inside a larger pantheon. Their religion has four principal deities, all descended from their Sun God. They are Corn, Kayumari the Blue Deer, the Eagle, and Hikuri, which is peyote. The scholar Schaefer reads this to mean that peyote is the soul of Wixarika religious culture. It is a visionary sacrament that opens the pathway to the other three.

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• 6. Outsiders Take Notice

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  Since 1846, the official Mexican Pharmacopoeia had recommended peyote extract, in a microdose, as a tonic for the heart. Western science took longer to pay attention.

  John Raleigh Briggs, who lived from 1851 to 1907, was the first to draw the attention of the Western scientific world to the cactus. In 1888 Louis Lewin described a related plant under the name Anhalonium lewinii.

  Then came the self-experimenters. The British sexologist Havelock Ellis tried peyote on Good Friday in 1896 and published details of the experience in 1898. The researcher Arthur Heffter conducted his own experiments on its effects in 1897.

  The Norwegian ethnographer Carl Sofus Lumholtz studied and wrote about peyote use among the Indians of Mexico. He also passed along a wartime story. During the American Civil War, he reported, Texas Rangers captured by Union forces had no other intoxicants. They soaked peyote buttons in water and became "intoxicated with the liquid".

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• 7. What the Studies Found

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  A study published in 2007 found no evidence of long-term cognitive problems from peyote use in Native American Church ceremonies. The researchers stressed that this might not hold for people who use it in other settings.

  A four-year, large-scale study followed Navajo who regularly ingested peyote. It found only one case in which peyote was associated with a psychotic break in an otherwise healthy person. Other psychotic episodes were blamed on peyote combined with existing substance abuse or mental health problems. Later research agreed that people with pre-existing mental health issues are more likely to react badly.

  After religious use, peyote does not appear to be linked to flashbacks, formally called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. Nor does it seem to cause physical dependence, though some users may experience psychological dependence. Among the Huichol of central-western Mexico, who have taken peyote regularly for an estimated 1,500 years or more, research found no chromosome damage in men or women.

  The risks are real, though. Peyote can have strong emetic effects, causing vomiting. One death was attributed to esophageal bleeding from vomiting after peyote ingestion, in a Native American patient with a history of alcohol abuse. It is also known to cause potentially serious changes in heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and pupil size. Poisoning is uncommon but has been recorded.

  A harsher claim comes from 1916. Gertrude Bonnin, a member of the Sioux tribe, stated that peyote had directly caused the deaths of 25 Utes over two years.

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• 8. Peyote and the Law

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  Between the 1880s and the 1930s, U.S. authorities tried to ban Native American religious rituals involving peyote, the Ghost Dance among them. Their concern was the drug's psychoactive effects.

  The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 later codified an exemption for non-drug use in religious ceremonies of the Native American Church. A federal regulation, section 1307.31, says that peyote's Schedule I listing does not cover the non-drug use of peyote in bona fide ceremonies of the Church. Members so using it need not register. Anyone who manufactures or distributes peyote to the Church must register every year. The Fifth Circuit's 1991 ruling in Peyote Way Church of God, Inc. v. Thornburgh made the exemption part of the common law.

  In 1990, the Supreme Court decided Employment Division v. Smith. It held that laws banning peyote, without any religious exemption, do not violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. US jurisdictions responded by enacting specific statutory exemptions.

  The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 then protected the harvest, possession, consumption, and cultivation of peyote in bona fide religious ceremonies, under federal law and many state laws. The federal statute covers only Native American persons. The 1991 case of U.S. v. Boyll, in federal court in New Mexico, widened the exemption to everyone engaged in traditional Indian religious use, regardless of race.

  States differ. All except Idaho, Utah, and Texas allow use by non-native, non-enrolled persons in Native American Church ceremonies. Arizona additionally exempts any bona fide religious activity or spiritual intent. Even so, the DEA lists peyote as a Schedule I controlled substance.

  Canada takes a different line. Mescaline is a Schedule III substance under its Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, but peyote is specifically exempt, and possession and use of the plant is legal. The US military bars inductees for prior drug use, yet past peyote use is allowed if it followed Native American cultural practices.

  In 2019, after a campaign by Decriminalize Nature, the city of Oakland decriminalized peyote, together with other naturally derived psychedelics.

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