The legal status of peyote is a precarious one, one that is exacerbated by diminishing supplies of the cactus in the United States and by the appropriation and exploitation of Native American religious practices by non-Natives seeking legal protection to both use and profit from peyote. Peyote continues to play an important role within various tribes as a religious sacrament, a medicinal treatment for addiction, spiritual maladies, and historical trauma, and as a source of indigenous confidence and pride. Peyotism, the religious use of peyote, emerged among the Plains tribes during the mid to late-1800s and spread rapidly on the reservations where peyote came to be revered as a holy medicine, a symbol of resistance, and also helped to rebuild communities broken by ethnocide. laws on peyote remain clouded by misunderstanding and stark divides in notions of sacrament, religious practice, addiction, medicine, and general differences in worldview. While exemptions have been established for the religious use of peyote by Native Americans, U.S. Conflicts between colonial powers and indigenous peoples over the use of peyote have continued into the present with peyote access and possession strictly regulated in the United States. During the Spanish Conquest the first law prohibiting peyote’s ceremonial use was introduced. Peyote, a psychoactive cactus native to parts of Texas and Mexico, has been used in human rituals in North America for several thousand years.

Crescent city book