Schultes and the Native American Church

“Schultes testified on behalf of the Native American Church's right to use peyote in religious practice. He described it as a sacrament, not a drug. His testimony helped establish the scientific and ethnographic record that eventually supported legal protection.”

The Native American Church's peyote sacrament is one of the oldest and most continuously practiced religious uses of a psychoactive plant in North America. The Huichol and other indigenous groups in Mexico have used peyote ceremonially for at least five centuries; the pan-tribal peyote ceremony that became the Native American Church in the early twentieth century extended this tradition across dozens of nations.

Schultes was one of the most important scientific voices defending this practice against legal challenge. In testimony, in published writing, and in the direct authority of his field research, he consistently described peyote use within the Native American Church as a sacramental practice, not drug use in the sense that warranted criminal sanction, but religious practice warranting First Amendment protection.

His argument was both ethnographic (the practice was ancient, embedded in ceremonial tradition, and pharmacologically managed through cultural knowledge) and pharmacological (peyote's safety profile in the sacramental context, low doses, controlled setting, experienced guidance, was fundamentally different from the abuse scenarios that motivated federal drug law).

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 formally protected indigenous religious practices, but court decisions in subsequent decades threatened peyote use. The Employment Division v. Smith decision (1990) held that the AIRF Act did not protect peyote use from prosecution under neutral drug laws. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 specifically exempted Native American Church peyote use from the Controlled Substances Act.

Schultes's testimony and published work contributed to the evidentiary record that supported these legal protections. The distinction he made consistently, between sacramental use embedded in cultural tradition and recreational or experimental use, was the distinction that legal frameworks eventually codified.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Wikipedia, Native American Church
• American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978)