Peyote, Lophophora williamsii, is a small spineless cactus of south Texas and northern Mexico containing mescaline. Its ceremonial use in that region is ancient: specimens from the Shumla caves on the Rio Grande, tested and found to contain mescaline, have been radiocarbon dated to around 3700 BCE. Its use in the modern all-night meeting north of the Rio Grande is much younger, from the 1870s onward.
Opposition was immediate and continuous. Indian agents, missionaries and later temperance organisations sought prohibition from Congress repeatedly from the 1880s; bills failed, but states passed their own bans and agents suppressed meetings administratively. Incorporation was the defensive answer: the church was chartered in Oklahoma on 10 October 1918 to place peyote inside a recognised church, where the free exercise clause might reach it.
Federal drug law classified peyote in Schedule I in 1970, with a regulatory exemption for Native American Church use. The constitutional question reached the Supreme Court in Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, in a case about unemployment benefits denied to two drug counsellors, one a church member, dismissed for taking peyote at a ceremony. The Court held that a neutral, generally applicable criminal law does not violate free exercise merely by burdening a religious practice. The decision was a defeat for the church and, because it lowered the standard for everyone, alarmed religious groups across the country.
Congress responded twice. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 restored a stricter test generally. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994, Public Law 103-344, signed on 6 October, addressed peyote directly: the 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 is lawful and may not be prohibited by the United States or by any state. Agencies may set limits for safety-sensitive posts only after consulting traditional religious representatives.
The protection is therefore statutory rather than constitutional, and is drawn in terms of Indian identity and bona fide ceremonial use. Groups outside that definition claiming peyote as a sacrament are on markedly weaker ground, and courts have generally said so.