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The Decline of American Peyote (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: An investigation into the decline of America's peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus that is critically important to the rituals of the Native American Church, the largest pan-tribal religious organization in the U.S. Motherboard spoke with Dawn Davis, a researcher using satellite data to track the destruction of peyote's habitat, as well as Salvador Johnson, one of only four people who is licensed to harvest and sell peyote in the U.S. by the DEA. "In 2011, Davis traveled to the peyote gardens for the first time and met with Johnson," reports Motherboard. "Davis said that Johnson was following many conservation best practices, such as cycling through the areas where peyote is harvested, but this hadn't slowed the steady decrease in the size and quantity of peyote buttons in his harvests. Today, the biggest threats to peyote continue to be rapid land development, poaching, and rooting by feral pigs -- problems that responsible harvesting by peyoteros can't solve."
While there has been an increase in the number of indigenous people growing peyote in greenhouses, this is only a temporary solution to the conservation crisis. Davis is advocating for conservation easements or tax breaks for landowners to encourage the protection of peyote. She also said it will be necessary to push for the DEA to reschedule peyote, which is still considered a Schedule I substance that has "no currently accepted medical use." This makes it exceedingly hard for individuals to become licensed peyoteros.
While there has been an increase in the number of indigenous people growing peyote in greenhouses, this is only a temporary solution to the conservation crisis. Davis is advocating for conservation easements or tax breaks for landowners to encourage the protection of peyote. She also said it will be necessary to push for the DEA to reschedule peyote, which is still considered a Schedule I substance that has "no currently accepted medical use." This makes it exceedingly hard for individuals to become licensed peyoteros.
HOW is this news for nerds? HOW??
As an enthusiastic psychedelic drug user and self-professed psychonaut, who also happens to be a college-educated Mensa member who works in Silicon Valley and makes comfortable money, who also knows tons of other computer programmers, intellectuals, and nerds from many places and can speak for them....
I assure you this is news for nerds. You may be too straight-edged to have ever opened your mind to the other places it can go and find out what other types of thinking exist, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us have done the same. I've broken my mind, gotten lost in it, found beauty where I had never seen it before, comprehended things that can't be put into words, then put my mind back together again, and then gone to work again on Monday. I can't emphasize how important and useful exploring these other planes of thought has been for my psyche, my character, my disposition, my attitude, and my capacity for love and understanding. I am a deeper, smarter, more efficient...and here's the big one: MORE CREATIVE person than I was before, and more than I ever would have been without this in my life.
So yeah, peyote and its history and its chemical effects on the mind are very fucking important to some of us. And not because we're lazy escapist losers who want to kill brain cells. That is a stereotype dreamed up by squares who want to justify living in their safe spaces and never really tasting life. It is important to us because the human mind is the most powerful and interesting and useful thing in all of science. Maybe it should be explored and understood, huh? Ya think?