Anthropologists have discovered that as soon as a local intoxicant becomes enshrined in tradition, people grow suspicious of imports. “Most cultures,” explains Pollan, “curiously, promote one plant8 for this purpose, or two, and condemn others. They fetishize one and they have taboos on others.” This explains why, when Franciscan priests arrived in Mexico9 and found the peyote cactus at the center of the local religion, they outlawed the plant, and enforced their own
