1972
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520285422.003.0012 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | Argues that the 1972 Vienna Convention's exemption for traditional religious use of psychedelics, while fitting U.S. law, conflicted with Mexico's view of peyotism as a vice, and that this tension shaped later claims for peyotism as a right to indigenous self-determination, highlighted by the 2009 mining concessions threatening Wirikuta. |
Abstract
The 1972 Vienna Convention on Psychotropic Drugs created frameworks both for an effort to control the international trade in psychedelic drugs and for an exemption for communities (imagined exclusively as indigenous) where those drugs were used for traditional religious purposes in a largely unadulterated state. The exemption was well suited to the legal environment in the United States but made little sense in Mexico, where peyotism had long been seen as a vice, much like alcoholism. The treaty, however, set the stage for a new generation of activists and scholars to reposition peyotism as a right within the larger right to indigenous self-determination. This chapter traces the emergence of that claim in Mexico, and in particular the role that concerns over peyotism played in this shift. Even as self-determination became the guiding ethos of the INI, federal officials continued to treat peyotists as children, incapable of governing their own affairs. This tension came into high relief in 2009, when the Mexican government issued a series of mining concessions that many believed would do irreparable ecological damage to Wirikuta, the desert where the peyote grows.