Peyote, Pirates, and Prohibitions: The Religious and Legal Control of Psychedelics in Spanish Colonial America

This presentation examines the development of religio-legal regulations on psychoactive plants and fungi in the period following Columbian contact. It investigates how these regulations arose in response to the cross-cultural intermingling of European, African, American, and East Asian communities, particularly within the complex hierarchies of colonial New Spain’s hacienda system. Indigenous and syncretic practices involving substances such as cohoba snuffs, peyote/San Pedro cacti, teonanacatl (Psilocybe mexicana fungi), and ololiuhqui (morning glory seeds) functioned as acts of individual and collective resistance against Spanish colonial repression of religious and cultural traditions.Drawing on analyses of trade routes, records from the Spanish American Inquisition, remnants of Catholic missions, and revolutionary accounts from indigenous peoples, European pirates, and enslaved Africans, this presentation reveals how psychoactive plant and fungi regulations were deployed as mechanisms of colonial control. These measures sought to suppress resistance and maintain order among diverse and often defiant populations under Spanish rule across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.Using historical, linguistic, and legalistic methodologies, this study argues that the regulation of psychoactive substances directly responded to their widespread use as tools of cultural and spiritual defiance. By situating these regulations within the broader framework of Spanish colonialism, it demonstrates how the control of psychoactive plants and fungi became central to subjugating indigenous and syncretic resistance. Ultimately, this presentation highlights how colonial regulations were shaped by historical realities, particularly the transcontinental efforts to curtail the influence of these botanicals during the colonial era.