Peyote, a small cactus that when eaten produces hallucinogenic as well as other psychological and physiological effects, grows within a limited geographic range in North America, mostly within Mexico but encompassing a small portion of the United States along the Texas border. Since colonial times it has been strongly associated with the Indigenous peoples who for millennia used it ritually and medicinally. Peyote also came to be framed by the Mexican Inquisition as a dangerous source of Indigenous (and sometimes non-Indigenous) idolatry. By the later nineteenth century peyote attracted the interest of scientists and policy-makers on both sides of the border, ultimately playing into complex legal and cultural discourses over race, religious freedom and physical and mental health in both countries up to the present.
In The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs, Alexander S. Dawson surveys this latter history in rich detail through a series of chronologically ordered vignettes, each focused on key actors, cases and issues in this unfolding narrative. An established scholar on the history of the cactus and drug, Dawson tacks seamlessly back and forth across the border, along the way uncovering fascinating stories and unexpected connections. Deftly interweaving policies and personalities, he vividly characterises each player as they come across a stage that never lacks for the necessary context to appreciate their significance.
A brief introduction describes the medicinal use of peyote during a cholera epidemic in early post-independence Mexico as marking a new scientific interest in the cactus, distinct from yet not entirely displacing the colonial obsessions with indigeneity and religion. This interest accelerated in the late nineteenth century, as US and European scientists explored the effects of the plant, as well as the drug mescaline purified from it. To varying degrees these scientists experimented with the drug directly or relied on early ethnographic studies among groups such as the Wixárika (Huichol) in western Mexico, whose acquisition and use of the cactus was strongly integrated into their ritual practice. A constellation of literary consumers, consciousness changers and pleasure seekers from Havelock Ellis to Aldous Huxley followed in their wake. More consequentially, so did policy-makers in the United States looking to control the drug in the context of its rapid expansion as a sacrament within the Native American Church (NAC). Officially established in Oklahoma in 1918 after skirmishes between peyotist and anti-peyotist factions played out across a number of reservations, Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the NAC spread rapidly in the early twentieth century just as federal Indian policy was going through a period of rapid transformation. The shifting political tides and legal decisions over the next decades culminated in the well-known exemption to what is otherwise a Schedule 1 controlled substance for the ‘bona fide’ use of peyote for members of the NAC in the second half of the twentieth century.
In Mexico things played out differently. An exemplary figure was Dr Salvador Roquet, who as a young psychiatrist in 1950s Mexico City was experimentally administered mescaline by a fellow doctor. Despite experiencing what was clearly a ‘bad trip’, Roquet eventually came to believe the drug had significant therapeutic potential. Investigating further into the Indigenous uses of the cactus and related psychedelics such as mushrooms, he developed a treatment protocol that incorporated elements of the rituals used by Mazatec shamans (such as the well-known María Sabina), yet remained distinctly clinical. This respectful stance stood at odds with a contemporaneous Mexican policy toward the Wixárika that alternated between neglect and corruption within a nationalist and indigenist logic of modernisation. In 1971 peyote was outlawed in Mexico as part of an expanding ‘war on drugs’, along the way bringing down Roquet's clinic and reputation. Yet ultimately an exemption was carved out for the Wixárika and other Indigenous groups, leaving Mexican law in some ways like the US law.
A central concern of the book is the racial logic and cultural implications of these laws. Dawson is troubled by the way these laws and accompanying Indigenous claims to exclusivity in the use of peyote extend and reinforce the racialist assumptions of earlier periods. While critiquing the ‘white shamans’ such as Carlos Castañeda, who have appropriated peyotism and elements of Indigenous religious practice, some for substantial profit, he nevertheless finds the insistence on Indigenous authenticity problematic in its reliance on arguments of cultural purity. Staking out a more nuanced position, Dawson favours allowing space for the ‘transgressive’ adoption of peyote by Westerners engaged in the critical remaking of their own modern and capitalist subjectivity.
Not all readers will find this convincing. However, even those who are inclined to disagree are likely to find the book and the history it relates relevant to these larger debates about legality, cultural appropriation, race and place. Peyote offers a compelling lens to view Indigenous–White relations on both sides of the border and comparing the drug policies of the two countries in this way is insightful. The book invites further comparison to other drugs strongly associated with Indigenous culture that have recently become the subject of interest by Western outsiders (e.g. ayahuasca), as well as those with similarly long and troubled histories of indigeneity and illegality (e.g. coca). Like those drugs, peyote's effects go well beyond those of its users.
