"This is a Native American sacred medicine and we don't want people messing around with it," said a Navajo member of the church from a congregation in Rio Grande City, Texas, who asked not to be identified. The Natives people don't like it. White people shouldn't mess around with it.
"The shortage is concerning for members of the Native American Church of North America who practise peyotism, a synthesis of traditional Native American beliefs and elements of Christianity that considers peyote a sacred sacrament and has about 350,000 adherents."
Experts warned last week of a shortage of peyote, a sacred cactus used by Native Americans in religious rituals, which produces the hallucinogenic drug and only grows in limited range across south-western US and northern Mexico.
Demand for the psychedelic drug, which became popular during the counterculture hippy movement of the 1960s, has surged alongside ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive compound, traditionally used by Indigenous cultures and folk healers in the Amazon and Orinoco basins.
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