Note 51 — BOTANICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF PEYOTE

For mescal (the agave-drink distilled from pulque) and peyote are mixed and used together in northern Mexico. Yet Mooney often and at length produced this argument with regard to alcohol; Skinner said it destroyed the desire of tobacco as well (see appendix on the Native American Church). But peyote, physiologically and culturally, is only one more means of achieving the culturally valued state of psychic derangement, and such fundamentally deep-rooted patterns as this one is in native America do not change over-night. Even so, is the cure any better than the disease? The writer was a little startled when a Kiowa friend, an ardent peyote user, suggested that we go to a neighboring town one mid-week to drink. When I sought to discover his attitude on this he soon made it clear that it was no matter of moral sentimentality but purely one of physiology: there wasn’t another peyote meeting until Saturday, so what was the harm? One can eat lobsters one day and ice-cream the next, but one ought not eat them the same day. This informant conceived of the antagonism as a fight between liquor- and peyote-power, a matter-of-fact attitude probably not universal, and by no means as cynical as it seems.