Bulletin from the medicine man:

The appeal of eating cacti

In 1938, Richard Evans Schultes—the father of modern ethnobotany—wrote: “For more than fifty years, there has been a growing interest in the peyote-cult among American anthropologists. An extensive literature has appeared concerning the ceremonial use of Lophophora Williamsii in the United States as well as in Mexico, where its use extends back probably for more than twenty centuries.”

While attracting the attention of anthropologists, peyote has also occupied a distinguished place in popular culture; at times banalizing the general public's view of research on hallucinogens, at other times stimulating renewed interest and healthy fascination.

Schultes, too, inspired more than his fellow scientists. Here's our favorite:

In 1953, when the writer William Burroughs went looking for Yage in the Amazon jungle, he met up with Schultes and his colleagues. Burroughs later inserted a disguised portrait of Schultes in his book—gave him the alter ego Doc Schindler, and fed him some rather Burrough-esque lines: “Bill, I haven't been fifteen years in this sonofabitch country and lost all my teeth in the service withouth picking up a few angles” (In search of Yage, 1953 and The Yage letters, 2006).

Many years earlier, as a Harvard undergraduate student, Schultes had done fieldwork in Oklahoma. Also taking peyote himself, he studied how the cactus was eaten in the rituals of native Kiowa and Comanche Indians.

Read about it here, in one of Schultes' earliest works: The appeal of peyote (Lophophora Williamsii) as a medicine.