Alexander Dawson has produced a stellar piece of comparative scholarship on the history of peyote and its uses in both Mexico and the United States. He opens his book with an 1833 cholera epidemic that plagued a small town in northern Mexico and the attempt by a pioneering doctor to use local remedies to solve the crisis. This introductory chapter paves the way for the multifaceted remainder of...
Book review of Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. £18.99. ISBN 978 0 3002 3107 6.
This paper presents a reflection on the implications of the use and trade of peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and the challenges associated with its conservation in a religious and binational (Mexico and the United States) context. Our main focus is on a controversy raised by the Native American Church before the Mexican government, via an application submitted to the General Directorate of...
Abstract Unregulated cacti from the genus Echinopsis are used recreationally as mescaline‐containing alternatives to the outlawed peyote. Echinopsis ‐derived plant materials appear in a variety of nondescript forms, making rapid assessment of whether they are mescaline‐containing materials or simply innocuous plant‐derived food products, very challenging. Reported here is a DART ‐ HRMS approach...
This paper explores the complex evolution of the role anthropologists have played as cultural experts in the regulation of the entheogenic use of the peyote cactus throughout the 20th century. As experts of the “peyote cult”, anthropologists provided testimonies and cultural expertise in the regulatory debates in American legislative and judiciary arenas in order to counterbalance the...
A chronicle tracing the drug’s ancient roots and role in research grips Alison Abbott. A chronicle tracing the drug’s ancient roots and role in research grips Alison Abbott.
OBJECTIVE: Some American Indians legally use hallucinogenic substances as part of religious and spiritual ceremonies. Research to date has either failed to differentiate spiritual versus recreational use or has categorized hallucinogen use in an "other drug" or "illegal drug" category. This approach could contribute to ineffectual models of prevention and treatment intervention and limit...
Characterizing plant ingredients has been the main topic of chemical research at the University of Vienna since the beginning of the last half of the nineteenth century, especially at the IInd Chemical Institute (founded in 1870). The remarkable success in many fields of natural organic product structure elucidation was in part the result of the discovery of important identifying reactions of...
Background: In recent years, there has been increasing scientific interest in the effects and pharmacology of serotonergic hallucinogens. While a large amount of experimental work has been conducted to characterize the behavioral response to hallucinogens in rodents, there has been little systematic investigation of mescaline and its analogs. The hallucinogenic potency of mescaline is increased...
As is well known large parts of native North America with the Prairies and Plains in the middle of the continent as the centre of diffusion have constituted, since the end of the last century, the scene of a nativistic Indian movement, the so-called peyote cult. The peyote cult—or, as it should have been called, the peyote religion — is named after its central cultic action, the consumption (by...