Drugs Vs. Religion:

8 Pages 2076 Words

Drugs vs. Religion:
The Battle Over the Legalization of Peyote

Deification of peyote, a small and spineless cactus, is likely to have begun soon after its discovery by Native Americans over 10,000 years ago. Peyote, found in southern Texas and northern Mexico, causes psychotropic affects when ingested. This altering of sensory perception led Native Americans to the sacramental use of peyote and has since been a part of their native religion. With white settlement and acculturation, this so-called “peyote cult” transformed into The Native American Church, an organization based on a combination of Christian and traditional native beliefs. Officially founded in 1918, The Native American Church is an integral part of over 250,000 Native American’s lives. Through the church and peyote, natives have found a means of religious expression by which they could identify themselves and obtain a degree of personal security while being faced with the enormous variety of experiences in the white man’s world (Anderson 33). Peyotism, as it is also called, has helped to resolve the conflict of cultures through the integration of native religious practices with Anglo-Christian beliefs.
Today, the Native American Church of North America has eighty chapters and members belonging to some seventy Native American Nations. In the continental United States, every state west of the Mississippi River has at least one chapter. The steady proliferation of its membership among diverse North American tribes has made it Native America’s largest religious organization (Snake & Smith 173).
It is assumed that for millennia natives used peyote for a variety of reasons and in the same manner as they did in early historic times: as a medicine to be taken internally or as a poultice on sores; to foretell the future; to find lost objects; as a stimulant during strenuous activity; and in group religious ceremonies (Stewart 17). These group religious activities...