Davis is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, and she was first brought to a “peyote meeting” as an infant. When she was older she learned these meetings were religious ceremonies of the Native American Church (NAC), a syncretic religion that blends elements of Christianity and American Indian ritual, including the use of peyote as a sacrament. Over the years, Davis noticed the peyote used in the ceremonies wasn’t nearly as abundant as when she was a child. When peyote buttons reach maturity, they can be several inches in diameter, but at many of the ceremonies Davis attended, it wasn’t unusual for the buttons to be the size of a penny.

Peyote has been a part of Dawn Davis’s life for as long as she can remember. The small, mescaline-producing cactus is native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, but Davis’s first encounter with the plant was on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in southeastern Idaho, where her family would store peyote “buttons” in jars tucked away in the kitchen cabinets. The scientific name of the peyote cactus is Lophophora williamsii, but Davis and her family simply call it “medicine.”

Although she didn’t know it at the time, what Davis observed was the beginning of a deep conservation crisis. Over the last few decades, the peyote supply in the US has rapidly declined because of habitat destruction, illegal poaching, and unsustainable harvesting practices. As she began to look into the issue, Davis realized that she had to take action to preserve this disappearing natural resource that is a core element of the largest indigenous religion in the United States.

Archaeological evidence suggests that peyote has been used by indigenous people in this region for more than 5,000 years, but it wasn’t until the NAC began to take shape in the late 19th century that the plant found widespread use among tribes across the United States. This was largely fueled by the forced relocation of northern and eastern tribes to reservations in the West, who were introduced to peyote through contact with members of southwestern tribes, such as the Lipan Apache, Carrizo, and Huichol. It’s uncertain how or when peyote became incorporated into NAC ritual, but a 1981 DEA memorandum giving the NAC a peyote exemption places its adoption “sometime between 1870 and 1885.”

There’s a narrow stretch of land that covers about 1,250 square miles between El Paso and Laredo along the southern border of Texas that is the only native peyote habitat in the United States. Known as the peyote gardens, this land looks hardly any different from the rest of western Texas to the untrained eye. It’s flat, desolate, and mostly covered in creosote, a shrub common in the American Southwest. In the shade of the creosote, however, a small thornless cactus can be found bubbling from the packed, dry earth.

After receiving her family’s blessing, Davis applied to study peyote conservation as part of her master’s degree at the University of Arizona. Today, she is continuing this research as a doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho and is one of only a handful of scholars researching the crisis. In October I met Davis at Horizons, an annual conference on psychedelics in New York City, to speak with her about how she has spent the past decade working with Texas landowners, government officials, NAC members, and peyoteros (peyote harvesters) to better understand the issue. What she found is a sacred plant on the verge of extinction and a general lack of knowledge about the extent of the problem—but most importantly, she found a way forward.

Today, the NAC has more than 200,000 members from dozens of tribes. They are united by a belief in the “Great Spirit” and follow an ethical code known as the “peyote road,” which encourages strong family relations, self-reliance, and indigenous camaraderie. As the DEA noted in its memo, over the past century the use of peyote has, in fact, become the “sine qua non of the NAC”—it is central to the church’s ritual. As such, the destruction of peyote’s natural habitat amounts to the destruction of the largest pan-tribal indigenous religion in the United States.

By the early 20th century, the indigenous use of peyote for religious purposes had attracted the attention of the US government, which sought to outlaw its use. In Peyote Religion: A History, Omer Stewart details the sustained efforts of prohibitionists in the southern United States to eradicate the consumption of peyote between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This involved seizing and burning tens of thousands of peyote buttons, jailing distributors, and raiding ceremonies. In 1929, peyote was categorized as a “habit-forming drug” by the federal government, but members of the NAC continued to hold clandestine peyote meetings.

The plant’s psychoactive properties were introduced to nonindigenous audiences by the pharmacologist Arthur Heffter, who was the first to isolate mescaline from the cactus in 1897. When preparing peyote for consumption, the peyote buttons on the top of the cactus are cut off and dried. The buttons can then be chewed or soaked in water to drink. Mescaline has very similar psychedelic properties to LSD or mushrooms, including open and closed-eyed visuals, altered thought patterns, a body high, and feelings of euphoria. A typical mescaline experience can last for several hours depending on the dose.

The Texas state government banned the possession of peyote in 1967. After members of the NAC petitioned Texas legislators for an exemption, however, the state amended the law to allow persons with at least 25 percent indigenous blood to legally purchase and possess peyote. That same year, the US granted the first licenses for peyote distribution to 13 peyoteros. The legal recognition of peyoteros in Texas marked a turning point in the history of peyote conservation. Not only did it lay the foundations for a legalized peyote economy, in which NAC members could buy their medicine only from state-sanctioned dealers, but it also meant that there was data on peyote consumption in the US for the first time in history.

Up until 2016, peyoteros were required to report their annual peyote sales to the Texas Department of Public Safety (the state no longer requires peyoteros to submit these reports). When Davis analyzed this data there was a clear pattern: The number of peyote buttons sold each year in Texas had been in steady decline since 1998, the year peyote sales peaked at around 2.5 million buttons. Meanwhile, according to the Texas DPS data, the revenue from these sales was increasing. In other words, the peyoteros appeared to be charging a premium for an increasingly rare product. What was less clear, however, was whether a decline in interest, increased costs, lack of availability, or some confluence of these factors was the driving force behind the decline in peyote sales.

THE LAST OF THE PEYOTEROS

The conservation crisis facing the American peyote population has been recognized at least since 1995. That year, a paper published in the Cactus and Succulent Journal by the botanist Edward Anderson described his return to the Texas peyote gardens 30 years after his original research expedition to the area. Anderson noted a tension between peyoteros and the Texas landowners from whom they must lease land in order to harvest the peyote that grows there.