An Extra-Disciplinary Approach to an Interdimensional Plant: Peyote Criminology

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Environmental Crime and Injustice: Developments in Green Criminology

Abstract

Lophophora williamsii, or peyote, is a small cactus native to southern North America. Its psychoactive alkaloids contribute to its criminalization and poaching. Criminologists approach this phenomenon differently depending on the theoretical lens applied. This paper maps the different approaches to demonstrate the direction and implications these lenses create. Conservationists utilize an interdisciplinary framework and situational crime prevention to prevent poaching and habitat loss. Political-economic approaches can question the malleable legal status of these plants through the medicalization and patenting of other hallucinogenic alkaloids. An eco-global perspective may analyze peyote’s legality, cross-border poaching, and cultivation in SE Asia. However, they also interrogate some of the dialectic between nature and culture. Finally, Southern criminology identifies the need to reorient studies away from Western theories. A decolonial analysis of peyote examines the quasi-legality of peyote in the religious use of the Native American Church and the empowerment of Southern knowledge systems. Though these cases demonstrate interpretations of the same phenomenon, the extra-disciplinary nature of green criminology allows the most meaningful understanding of ontology, axiology, methodology, and epistemology. For example, combining these approaches reveals psychedelic orientalism that fetishizes Lophophora williamsii, preventing broader cultural shifts concerning nature and the political economy.

Author

• Alexander Hagan, University of Illinois Chicago