He’s got those multicolored eyes in every goddamn picture
Mauro Morales, a balding man in his 60s, is one of just three “peyoteros” in the country licensed by the government to sell the small green cactus that contains the hallucinogen mescaline. His profession is an old one that used to be more common along the Rio Grande, the only place where peyote grows in the United States. Now it is threatened by the forces of modernity.
His customers are the 250,000 to 400,000 members of the Native American Church, the only people in the United States for whom peyote is legal. The government warily allows them to buy it because it has been part of indigenous religious ceremonies for centuries. The church members think the visions that peyote produces provide enlightenment and that the cactus has curative powers. They reverently call it “the medicine.” (…)
Several factors have contributed to the peyoteros’ dwindling number, but the main one is the growing scarcity of peyote. (…) Urban development and widespread “root plowing,” which scrapes natural vegetation off the land to replace it with grass for cattle grazing, destroyed many of the peyote fields that once sprawled along the U.S.-Mexico border. And more and more peyote land is off-limits because it is being bought by rich Texans who turn it into hunting preserves.
