03/26/2025
Red Rock Formations near Sedona
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There are deeper concerns about turning pe**te and mescaline into an on-demand drug. Members of the Native American Church of North America, an inter-tribal religion that revolves around the ancient practice of peyotism, are alarmed by pharmaceutical ventures seeking to create mescaline in a lab, in much the same way o***m from the poppy flower was synthesized to create fentanyl.
Non-Indigenous leaders in the psychedelic space insist they are respecting Native American spirituality by using synthetic mescaline instead of the real thing. Dozens of Indigenous Americans see it otherwise.
“How would Christians feel if Jesus Christ was cloned?” asked Justin Jones, a Diné pe**te practitioner and legal counsel for NAC “And while the real Jesus is protected, people could do whatever they wanted to the clone.”
At its core, the push to medicalize and mass-produce pe**te and mescaline goes against the Indigenous American worldview of interconnectedness. There are no English words that describe how the spiritual character of pe**te is inextricably intertwined with its hallucinogenic properties, the land where it grows and the Indigenous Americans who consume it, says Jones. In the Navajo language, Jones describes this harmonic oneness as ‘azee’ hinááh biníłch’idiyin, be’adínídíín’.
Creating synthetic mescaline in a lab or growing pe**te in a greenhouse is a violation of natural law, and interrupts the unique symbiotic relationship with the plant. “What western scientists call mescaline is for us the essence of the medicine,” said Jones. “It is the soul of it and what makes it holy.”
– Pe**te is the darling of the psychedelics renaissance. Indigenous users say it co-opts ‘a sacred way of life’ , Annette McGivney in Window Rock, Arizona
📸 by .chiappino
Sedona, Arizona
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