https://teddit.zaggy.nl/r/Psychonaut/comments/18mth6c/peyote_is_the_darling_of_the_psychedelics/
Honestly this whole thread is a cesspool, pure psychic damage. There are literally functional alternatives, but still these self-enlightened egolords can’t keep their fucking hands off an endangered plant. The prevailing attitude looks to be “Its there, so I i am entitled to plunder it”
Quick aside, why don’t conservationists take some of the plant into a greenhouse and grow a fuck ton of it so it’s no longer endangered?
i actually looked into this and there is a way to harvest peyote sustainably (cutting precisely above the root and leaving some green with a clean and sanitized knife each time) but white techbro psychonauts are fucking idiots and just start whacking at it with a machete haphazardly, there are a lot of researchers that have them in a greenhouse but the key issue is root rot and too much watering, the greenhouse also has to get very hot so setting up a microclimate just for the cacti is expensive (re: capitalists prefer the cheap method of going out and ripping everything out of the ground for free)
imo i dont think there is anything wrong with doing peyote or magic mushrooms or whatever, especially when it serves a medical purpose (like ptsd research), but you should be growing it sustainably so that the people that have rituals about going out in the wild and getting them and maintaining them arent screwed over (which afaik is the main complaint from indigenous groups). the plus side to growing at home is that you are helping preserve biodiversity, esp if you partake in guerilla planting of excess seeds. guerilla planting is the mvp and you ostensibly need to grow it at home to do that.
i guerilla plant all sorts of endangered species in microclimates where they will outcompete invasive ones, its a very important thing to do and getting the seeds isnt actually that hard. whats hard is conservation societies dont have a complex understanding of local microclimates like a local does. ive been able to successfully purge non native grasses from huge swathes of local meadows over the past 10 years. when you do that it leads to a flourishing of native plants and wildlife, the grasses really are a keystone species that bring all the native stuff back in so many areas.
VIRTUE BLACKMAILING
Although Anderson sympathized with the landowners, who wished to make their land productive and protect themselves from litigation by anyone who was injured on their ranch while collecting peyote, the closure of peyote harvesting grounds produced “serious tensions” between indigenous people and the ranchers. According to Salvador Johnson, the largest peyote distributor in Texas, 100 percent of the land in Texas where peyote grows is privately owned, which means that if peyoteros are going to harvest peyote, they need permission from landowners.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmdzbw/the-decline-of-american-peyote-v24n5
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This should apply to magic mushrooms as well. That was NEVER white culture, taking them is a form of expropriation of the exterminated Aztecs and other indigenous cultures.
Basically, if you’re not native, why are you doing the chemical equivalent of putting on a native headdress for fun?
There are psychedelic mushrooms native to other parts of the world, ie England and northern Europe have local varieties.
That and you can grow them with basically clean dirt, water, attention, and an unoccupied shelf.
A lot of psychonauts don’t really respect the mushroom though and treat it as a high rather than an experience. I don’t think we should gate keep the positive effects they have on brain elasticity though.
No offence to any psychedelics users here, but every person who claims that they made them more enlightened, empathetic or understanding in my experience was always a worse human being afterwards, because they behaved exactly like this redditor. “I’m an enlightened empath because of my psychedelics, and that makes me better than you, so shut up and quit complaining, some of us have real problems, like I haven’t gotten high in 20 minutes!”
Meh, it’s a mixed bag. Assholes tend stay assholes with drugs and cool people tend to be cool. I definitely met the worst kind quite a few times though
Yeah, I agree. They just get used by assholes to justify being an even bigger asshole.
