Peyote is the only entheogen in this atlas with a specific statutory protection in United States federal law. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 provide that 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 shall not be prohibited. That protection was won, not granted: it followed decades of state prosecutions and a Supreme Court decision in 1990 that had gone the other way.
The wording matters and is frequently misreported. The exemption is tied to membership and to traditional ceremonial use, and it does not make peyote generally lawful.
The pressing problem now is not legal but biological. Lophophora williamsii grows extremely slowly, takes many years to reach a harvestable size, and is confined to a narrow range in south Texas and northern Mexico. Habitat loss, root ploughing for agriculture, and harvesting that cuts too deep or takes immature plants have all reduced wild populations, and demand from outside the protected traditions has grown sharply. The peyote gardens that supply the Native American Church are finite, and the people with the strongest claim to the plant are the ones most exposed to its decline. Conservation and religious access are, unusually, the same argument here rather than opposing ones.
Sources American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-344)United States Congress with The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its ApplicationsChristian Ratsch