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Book: Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes

Chapter: 58. Is Peyote a medicine or a drug?

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.43173

Blurb:

According to some Indigenous peoples, non-human powers offered humans the peyote cactus as a medicine. But most non-Indigenous peoples think peyote’s psychoactive alkaloids demand its regulation as a dangerous drug. Indigenous practitioners of ritual peyote ingestion have struggled against this view since the earliest colonial encounters. They affirm, instead, that communal peyote rites heal both body and spirit.

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