DOWN IN TEXAS SCRUB, 'PEYOTEROS' STALK THEIR ELUSIVE PREY

Rare Cactus Buttons Play Role In Native American Rites; Visions and
All-Nighters

MIRANDO CITY, Texas -- A jackrabbit scrambled through the brush. A
roadrunner scooted across a sandy trail. Spade in hand, Salvador Johnson
paid them no mind.

He was stalking wild peyote.

Slicing through the mesquite and bramble-ridden Texas chaparral, Mr.
Johnson, 55 years old, intently searched a rocky outcropping for the small,
hallucinogenic Lophophora williamsii cactus buttons that to the unpracticed
eye look like round, greenish stones. "You have to let him talk to you," he
said. "If you find one, he'll take you where you want to go."

For 44 years, Mr. Johnson, who sports a white paintbrush mustache and gray
ponytail, has been gathering peyote, which is used by about 250,000
indigenous members of the Native American Church, as the main sacrament in
their religious ceremonies. A 1994 law makes it legal, as long as the user
comes from a federally recognized tribe.

Keeping one eye out for rattlesnakes and wild pigs, Mr. Johnson plies a
backbreaking -- and dying -- trade. There are only four registered peyote
distributors left in Texas, down from nine a decade ago.

While most of the cacti grow in northern Mexican deserts, Texas sports its
own peyote patches straddling the border, mostly between tiny Mirando City,
population 300, the state's peyote capital, and the border town of Rio
Grande City some 100 miles away. But in recent years, farmers and ranchers
have plowed under many of Texas' patches. Increasingly, others are off
limits to peyoteros such as Mr. Johnson, as local ranchers prefer to lease
their lands to hunters or to oil and gas companies for more money.

"It's getting kind of scary," said Mauro Morales, one of two distributors
left in Rio Grande City, squeezing a freshly cut button. "There's not much
around anymore."

On a recent day, Mr. Johnson got lucky. "Mira, Mama!" he yelled, as one
small peyote button led to a virgin patch of wide, fat buttons, some three
and four inches across, growing low to the ground under bramble bushes. He
called two of his brothers over, and they started slicing off the tops of
the cactus, carefully leaving the root, so the plants would grow again. In
three hours his two brothers gathered about five potato sacks, some 4,000
buttons in all.

Mr. Johnson pays his eight brothers and nephews $50 per 1,000 buttons they
collect. After cleaning and sometimes sun-drying the buttons, Mr. Johnson
sells them for about $200 per 1,000. He pays local ranchers about $1,500 to
$2,000 a month to lease their lands. "God put them there and he controls
their destiny," he said.

The Native American Church, which was formed to protect the use of peyote
by indigenous Americans in 1918, is seeking solutions to the dwindling
supplies. James Botsford, a lawyer for the church, is a member of a
recently formed committee of lawyers and church elders mulling the idea of
importing Mexican peyote, where an estimated three-fourths of the plants
grow. After all, mused Mr. Botsford, trade between Mexico, the U.S., and
Canada, whose indigenous peoples also partake of the cacti in religious
ceremonies, has multiplied since the enactment of the North American Free
Trade Agreement a decade ago.

"What can Nafta do for peyote?" pondered Mr. Botsford. "We haven't sussed
it out yet."

But a Nafta side agreement on peyote appears unlikely. In the U.S., peyote
is considered a dangerous drug by law-enforcement authorities in the same
list of controlled substances as marijuana and heroin. While it's not
considered addictive, the Drug Enforcement Administration says it has no
medicinal purposes and has a high potential for abuse. Peyote cultivation
is also banned. The DEA and the Texas Department of Public Safety
periodically check the records of distributors to make sure the peyote is
being shipped only to those who can lawfully receive it.

In Mexico, the situation is more confusing. Peyote originated there, and
has a central role in the religious rituals of at least three ethnic
groups, including the Huichol people. They number some 18,000 and each
spring many make desert pilgrimages of three hundred miles to pick peyote
in sacred deserts close to San Luis Potosi.

Mexico's constitution mandates the preservation of indigenous cultures but
has no specific legislation covering the use of peyote in religious rites.
Still, peyote is classified as a dangerous drug on both sides of the
border. The result: Mexican cops sometimes detain Huichols and others
carrying the sacramental cactus. Most times they are let loose after
appealing to human-rights organizations.

Archaeologists have found evidence of peyote's use in indigenous rituals
dating back 10,000 years. "Those who eat or drink it see visions either
frightful or laughable," wrote Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a 16th-century
chronicler. Spanish priests, for the most part, tried to stamp out its use.
Mexican colonial records yield as many as 90 cases where the Spanish
Inquisition brought charges ranging from heresy to witchcraft against
peyote users.

As early as the 17th century, Apaches spread the use of peyote north of the
Rio Grande. Peyote really took off with indigenous Americans in the U.S.
during the late 1870s. Then, the visions afforded by the sacred cactus gave
solace to indigenous Americans, who, defeated and humiliated by the U.S.
Army, were forced into reservations across the West.

In the U.S., Christian missionaries also tried to stamp out peyote. But in
1918, indigenous Americans, with the help of ethnographers from
Washington's Smithsonian Institution, organized the Native American Church,
obtaining legal status for the peyote ritual. Today, the Native American
Church has members from more than 40 tribes in the U.S. and Canada.

To get it, many make 1,000-mile journeys to Mr. Johnson's home from as far
away as Montana and Canada. In Mirando City, considered by many to be
sacred ground, they sometimes conduct all-night sessions of praying and
singing in a teepee set up on land donated by 99-year-old Amada Cardenas, a
peyote pioneer in these parts. During the dusk-to-dawn sessions, celebrants
usually eat about 10 of the bitter-tasting cactus buttons. But most times,
the worshippers make a peyote guacamole or tea to use in religious rites,
Mr. Johnson says.

Waking up on Mr. Johnson's living room rug after one all-night prayer
session, Tommy Billy, 50, a Navajo ranch hand reflected on the previous
night. "It's very sacred. That's the bottom line," said Mr. Billy. "We get
rejuvenated," he added, readying himself for a "double-header" or a second
back-to-back all-night session.