IN DEEP SOUTH TEXAS, PEYOTE HARVEST DWINDLING

MIRANDO CITY, Texas - In the heart of Rio Grande brush country, Salvador
Johnson works a patch of land just east of the Mexican border that is
sacred to Native Americans.

Spade in hand, eyes scanning the earth as he pushes through the spiny
brush, Johnson searches the ground carefully. "This is good terrain for
peyote," he says. "There's a low hill - the rain starts on top and goes
down to water this - and there's a lot of brown ground."

He stops, points the tip of his shovel at a 3-inch spot of green that
barely crests the soil under a clump of blackbrush and announces: "This is
what you look for. You look for something that is not ordinary on the
terrain. I saw that green."

One of the last remaining "peyoteros," Johnson, 58, has been harvesting the
small round plant in and around this tiny community for 47 years - long
before the hallucinogenic Lophophora williamsii cactus was classified as a
narcotic and outlawed by federal and state governments. Then as now, it is
for use by Native Americans as the main sacrament in their religious
ceremonies.

Johnson is part of a nearly extinct trade of licensed peyote harvesters and
distributors, at a time when the supply of the cactus and access to it is
dwindling. The plant grows wild only in portions of four southern Texas
counties and in the northern Mexico desert just across the Rio Grande.

But some Texas ranch owners have stopped leasing land to peyoteros and now
offer their property to deer hunters or oil and gas companies for
considerably higher profits. Others have plowed under peyote, and still
others have never opened their land.

On the ranchland that is worked by peyoteros, conservationists are
concerned about the overharvesting of immature plants as the Native
American population and demand for the cactus grows.

"Will there be peyote for my children and my children's children?" asked
Adam Nez, 35, a Navajo who had driven 26 hours with his father-in-law from
their reservation in Page, Ariz., to stock up on peyote at Johnson's home.

That question and possible solutions to the problem - such as trying to
legalize the importation of peyote from Mexico, and creating legal
cultivation centers in the United States - are being studied by members of
the Native American Church, Indian rights advocates and conservationists.

There are an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 members of the church in the
United States. Although 90 percent of the peyote in North America grows in
Mexico, the number of ceremonial users there - mostly Huichol Indians - is
a small fraction of the number in the United States and Canada.

"In effect, you have a whole continent grazing on little pieces of south
Texas," said Martin Terry, a botany professor at Sul Ross State University
in Alpine, Texas, who specializes in the study of peyote.

The church was incorporated in 1918 in Oklahoma to protect the religious
use of peyote by indigenous Americans. Its charter was eventually expanded
to other states, and in 1965, a federal regulation was approved to protect
the ceremonial use of peyote by Indians. In 1978, Congress passed the
American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

But subsequent conflicts between federal policy and state drug laws
precipitated the passage of a federal law in 1994 to guarantee the legal
use, possession and transportation of peyote "by an Indian for bona fide
traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a
traditional Indian religion."

The law extends protection against prosecution for the possession and use
of peyote only to members of federally recognized tribes.

"Over the last 40 years, there have been lots of equal-protection defenses
to criminal prosecution thrown up, with people saying 'my use of this
controlled substance is religiously derived,' " said Steve Moore, a senior
staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund.

Though not considered addictive, peyote is included in the Drug Enforcement
Agency's list of Schedule I controlled substances along with heroin,
lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana and methaqualone.

Although the DEA acknowledges the importance of the hallucinogenic cactus
to the religious rites of Native American peyote users, the agency says the
drug has a high potential for abuse and has no accepted medicinal purpose
in the United States.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has licensed peyote distributors
since the mid-1970s, when the number in the state peaked at 27. It dwindled
to four last year. State records show that only three distributors have
harvested and sold peyote so far this year.

For the past five years, an average of almost 1.9 million peyote buttons
have been sold annually, according to state records.