Indigenous traditions, sacraments at risk of cultural appropriation by Western 'Psychedelic Renaissance'

The Texas-Mexico border is speckled with peyote — a small psychedelic cactus that, to the Wixárika people, is a sacrament that serves as an intermediary with the divine. But peyote — and with it, thousands of Indigenous people’s sacred religious ceremonies — is endangered, and even more so by “drug tourists” and the booming psychedelics industry in the United States.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 protects Indigenous peoples’ use of psychedelics, but plants such as peyote are threatened by overharvesting and land development. Psilocybin mushrooms are also sacred to some Indigenous peoples, and when psychedelic tourism brings crowds to places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where shamanic mushroom ceremonies have been held for thousands of years, with it comes the risk of cultural appropriation.

“I really appreciate Indigenous perspectives when it comes to psychedelic medicine because there is an understanding or a belief that plants and mushrooms do have consciousness and that you can form a relationship with a plant or a mushroom. And that these are, you know, living entities,” said Joseph La Torre, who earned a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and researches psychedelics.

Studies and clinical trials continue to prove psychedelics are promising in treating mental health conditions — so much so that researchers and companies have begun processes of synthesizing and patenting the substances. But Indigenous perspectives have been marginalized from the Western psychedelic industry.

Compass Pathways, a biotechnology company, created a synthetic version of psilocybin, COMP360, which “has performed well in patients with treatment-resistant depression,” according to an article by science journalist Ashleen Knutsen.

Knutsen told me companies are “engineering” a synthetic version of ketamine — “editing the drug itself,” she said. With the synthetic version, users could potentially enjoy the mental health benefits and “still have a functional day,” she said.

“It doesn't have the chemicals or compounds that affect the parts of your brain that trigger the hallucinations — that mind altering substance part,” she said. “But it still maintains the parts that trigger the calming, the soothing sensations that allow you to address some trauma, or just not judge yourself when you're talking about such things.”

When synthetic versions of psychedelics are created in laboratories, the derived product has a slightly different chemical makeup from the organic plant and produces similar effects. These synthetic substances can be patented.

“You can’t patent a plant. That's why natural medicine is, like, counterintuitive. There's no space for natural medicines in Western science. You know, it's very at odds,” La Torre said.

La Torre criticized the Western scientific method's inclusion of “things like, ‘Hey, let’s take the most psychoactive molecule out of this plant and throw out the rest of the plant and then give it to people like it’s a pharmaceutical drug,’” he said, since Indigenous peoples honor the plant in its entirety.

“That's something that I've always felt was quite problematic with the Western approach to psychedelic research — ‘Let's take that molecule and throw the rest of the plant out,’” La Torre said.

Indigenous Americans have used peyote in sacred rituals for more than 5,000 years, but worry is growing around an “imminent” peyote crisis — Indigenous groups such as the Native American Church hold concerns that the sacred cacti are being exploited, as they are currently monetized for pharmaceutical and recreational use.

Nidia Olvera Hernández, a historian and anthropologist from Mexico City, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University. Her research is centered around the “modern history of psychoactive substances and drug policies,” she said, and she is currently researching peyote, ayahuasca and coca leaves across Latin America.

She said the main problem with peyote now in Mexico is that the land is being destroyed by mining and extractivism which, according to the St. Columban Mission for Justice, Peace and Ecology, is a “short-sighted” model of economic development that “exploits natural resources on a massive scale.”

“I think it's a lot of cultural appropriation … they’ll just take these plants and it doesn’t matter what that means for Indigenous peoples or for other cultures,” she said. “There are just a few people that really dialogue with Indigenous people and … try to work and really give something to these Indigenous persons that have a lot of knowledge.”

We R Native defines cultural appropriation as “when someone from the dominant culture (i.e. the most visible and accepted culture in a society) takes aspects of an oppressed culture (one experiencing any form of repeated or prolonged discrimination) without permission.”

The Western psychedelic industry does exactly that to Indigenous cultures and their religious sacraments.

yuki cat | Flickr

Art by the Wixárika people, who are native to parts of northern Mexico, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Only members of the Native American Church can legally use and possess peyote, the Los Angeles Times reported. For some Indigenous people, preserving peyote means battling those who seek to legalize the use of the cactus along with other psychedelics.

“Now that I work with Indigenous people, I can support the revelation of peyote because there is a power of conservation first — you can regulate this plant,” Olvera said. “If there are not enough plants, we're just going to destroy the plant.”

La Torre, whose research explores psychedelic phenomenology, shamanism and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, said while synthesizing and patenting Indigenous sacraments is problematic, it could be helpful in mitigating the peyote crisis.

“It's being harvested by white folks who, you know, are coming onto people's lands and taking it and so if we could offer some kind of alternative synthetic mescaline, that could maybe deter people from stealing Indigenous medicine,” he said.

Now, in this “Psychedelic Renaissance,” Olvera said, more and more people are trying to think about reciprocity — giving back to Indigenous communities.

“This is important because if you are taking it’s important to give something back, but you also really need to dialogue with these people and ask them what they need,” she said.

Olvera has written several articles for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, which established the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas (IRI) in 2023. The IRI seeks to solve “local problems in the regions that are scarred by historical injustice as well as the inequalities brought about by psychedelic tourism itself,” according to its website.

Dominic Sisti is an associate professor in the department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania whose research explores ethical issues in the clinical application and research of psychedelics. He thinks it’s an “ethical obligation to at least provide or offer recognition and credit, as well as respect, for the substances,” he said.

“We have to think about and attribute some of our knowledge to the Indigenous peoples that helped bring psychedelic medicines to Western consciousness,” he said.

It's a challenge to combine Indigenous traditions with Western psychedelic research, he said, because “it’s a different kind of knowledge.”

“It's not scientific evidence that's been based on randomized controlled trials and things like that. It's more of a subjective, real, religious, spiritual kind of knowledge that isn't exactly compatible with our medical model,” Sisti said. “I think it is nonetheless important to acknowledge and then recognize that we've learned a lot about these medicines from Indigenous peoples.”

Sisti said that in a “hyper-capitalist” society where medicine and drug development is part of profit-making, the notion that “companies should try to do more for Indigenous persons” is not necessarily incentivized unless it’s “forced” by regulators or public sentiment. However, he said “the entire psychedelic sector” should take this ethical obligation seriously.

“We all need to be cognizant of the fact that (psychedelics) are not novel discoveries by white men. We need to diversify the field. We need to incorporate other ways of being and different epistemologies, different ways of knowing, and approach the scientific model critically. I’m not saying throw it out, but let’s check our biases. We all have implicit biases, we all do, and we need to be constantly reflecting,” La Torre said.