The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

there were holdouts. Two significant holdouts who refused to forfeit their psychedelic sacrament, forever altering the course of history. First, the American Indian. Over time peyote moved north into the territorial United States, where the Eucharist of the New World retained just as much honor as it had in the Mexico of 1629. Taking a cue from the Vatican, the Protestant missionaries and Washington, D.C., joined forces to take the very first federal action banning the use of a drug. It wasn’t opium or cocaine, which were banned by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. It wasn’t cannabis, which would remain unregulated until the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Yes, they all preceded President Nixon’s official War on Drugs of the 1970s as some of the first modern prohibition laws on the planet. And they were all inspired by an American Episcopal bishop named Charles Henry Brent, who formed the so-called Brent Commission in 1901 to combat opium addiction, resulting in the first international drug control treaty in 1912. But none of those substances was the genuine priority of the Christians and the bureaucrats who invented the War on Drugs as a latter-day Inquisition for purely religious reasons. The object of their hunt was peyote.