Peyote dispute divides Diné practitioners as psychedelics industry grows
PIÑON, Ariz.
For the people who carry it and protect it, the conversation about peyote does not begin in a hearing room. It begins at the kitchen table, over food, while someone quietly plans a ceremony, with no fixed date and nothing announced.
That quiet is now colliding with a fast-moving psychedelic industry.
States have been legalizing or decriminalizing psychedelics at a pace that has unsettled many Native practitioners. In the middle of that movement sits ‘azee’, a slow-growing cactus that the Native American Church and Navajo medicine practitioners regard as a living sacrament.
The dispute has divided Navajo peyote communities over a central question. How do you protect something sacred when the rest of the country has decided it is medicine?
At Psychedelic Science 2025, an industry conference held in Denver in June 2025, Sam Chapman, who managed Oregon’s first-in-the-nation psilocybin ballot measure and now runs the Center for Psychedelic Policy, told attendees that 38 states and Washington, D.C., have introduced more than 220 psychedelics bills in five years.
To read the full article, please see the June 4, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.
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