Ebook: The peyote effect: from the Inquisition to the War on Drugs

Peyote has marked the boundary between the Indian and the West since it was outlawed by the Spanish Inquisition in 1620. For nearly four centuries, ecclesiastical, legal, scientific, and scholarly authorities have worked to police that boundary and ensure that while indigenous subjects might consume peyote, non-indigenes could not. It is a boundary repeatedly remade, in part because generations of non-indigenes have refused to stay on their side of the line. Moving back and forth across the US-Mexican border, this work explores how battles over who might enjoy the right to consume peyote have unfolded in both countries in the two centuries since Mexican independence. It focuses particularly how these conflicts have contributed to the racially exclusionary system that characterizes modern drug regimes.