In a 1968 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, George Bender describes the process of securing plant materials suspected to have medicinal, psychoactive, or pharmacologically compelling properties as “rough and ready research.”1 In the mid- to late nineteenth century, there was a push to find new plants that could be made into medicines, but transportation and communication infrastructure was not half as robust as it is now. Collecting specimens that might serve as the next cancer drug, painkiller, or miracle pharmaceutical often entailed forays into remote areas or developing relationships with people who lived in or ventured to these areas. Scientists studying plants with potentially medicinal properties often had to have knowledge of botany and pharmacology, as well as outdoors skills and physical and mental fortitude. Bender paints early research on the plant later called peyote as an example of this “rugged” research, and he even suggests that compared with those early projects, pharmaceutical research now seems a little “quaint.”
Since Bender’s time, a Redundant body of scholarship has emerged that examines the rugged pioneer-scholar who entered communities around the world to seek out new knowledge and medications—often taking plants already known to Indigenous communities for decades or centuries prior, known now as “bioprospecting.” The historians and anthropologists who study this phenomenon today offer critiques of colonial structures that facilitated and benefited from the work of these early scientists. Research has examined the rationale and logics that helped develop the “rugged” bioprospector and biocolonialism more generally, which in many cases had detrimental consequences to the community the scientist entered—whether it was in Latin or South America, Africa, Asia, or elsewhere. The volume 63, number 2 special issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals called “Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals” featured scholarship of this variety, which offered thoughtful critiques of several types of pharmaceuticals.2
In this article, we dive into a collection of materials held in the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy’s archives about the peyote plant’s introduction into Western pharmaceutical frameworks and offer an overview of the complex relationships and myriad correspondences that led to the first research on and commercial use of the plant. This is not the first work to tell this story, as others, including Mike Jay’s Mescaline (2019)3 and Alexander Dawson’s The Peyote Effect (2018)4 have told parts of this story. This article seeks to provide an overview, supplemented with some of the works in the Bender collection.
The materials detailing the interactions between the scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and outside dealers in psychoactive plants all come from the George Bender Collection at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. Bender was a notable pharmaceutical historian and journalist from Wisconsin. He served as American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP) president and editor of the journal Pharmacy in History, now known as History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. He wrote several well regarded historical articles, including Great Moments in Pharmacy and Great Moments in Medicine.5
Peyote is a spineless, blue-green cactus native to northern Mexico and the Southern United States, used traditionally by Indigenous peoples for ceremonial purposes. Due to the alkaloid mescaline it contains, it has a hallucinogenic effect when consumed. It’s scientifically classified as Lophophora williamsii. Shown are nine of the dried “buttons.” American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
This story begins with John Raleigh Briggs (1851–1907), a Texas physician, who is regarded as the first American or European to find peyote and study its effects. He published an account of his own personal experience eating one of the “Muscale buttons” as he called them, in 1887, and his report caught the eye of the Parke-Davis & Company. Parke-Davis, at the time a major player in the pharmacy industry, endeavored to stay at the forefront by searching for and developing new pharmaceuticals. These cacti seemed like a potential avenue, and they worked with Briggs to try to secure a larger quantity of buttons to study.
The Bender collection at the AIHP contains many letters from Briggs to Parke-Davis written over the course of the summer of 1887. The Parke-Davis letters are not held at the AIHP, but Briggs’s correspondence contains enough context to paint a clear picture of the company’s goals. In the first of these letters, Briggs wrote about samples of these buttons. Parke-Davis had requested he send them as many buttons as he could to run tests on. This request prompted Briggs to return to his original source: a Mexican smuggler who mainly provided the buttons to Indigenous people in Texas. When Briggs struggled to get enough buttons to send to Parke-Davis from the smuggler, he attempted to secure more buttons from a trader. He reported in a June 8, 1887 letter that while he’d had trouble dealing with this trader, he had managed to secure a cigar box’s worth of the buttons.
A reprint of Briggs’s column detailing his experience ingesting the “Muscale buttons,” later known as peyote, appeared in The Druggist’s Bulletin in May 1887. In Briggs’s recount of his harrowing experience, he reported dizziness, an elevated pulse, and rapid breathing. This column caught the eye of Parke-Davis Co., a major Detroit-based pharmaceutical company. American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
With the limited sample of “Muscale buttons” in hand, Parke-Davis enlisted the help of their botanical consultant, Henry Rusby, a professor of botany and medical material at the College of Pharmacy in New York. From Rusby, a larger network of researchers with samples of the buttons developed.
First, Rusby sent samples to Sereno Watson at Harvard, and the samples were later cataloged and placed into the Gray Herbarium. Watson identified in a July 19, 1887 letter that the plant seemed to belong to the genus Anhalonium. A few days later, Rusby and his colleagues started to debate nomenclature; in a July 26 letter, Rusby advocated for the term “Pellote,” rather than “Muscale buttons,” as “Muscale” could easily be confused with the drink mescal. In the same letter, he expressed uncertainty about the true abundance of the buttons. He said that the plant could not be as abundant as the traders in Mexico made it seem, “or it would certainly have been known to science.” He expressed concern that there were too many similar cacti species in Mexico, and they may have stumbled on a small variety with special psychoactive properties.
Briggs’s June 8, 1887 letter to Parke-Davis recounts his experiences attempting to secure more buttons for the pharmaceutical company to study. American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
The samples in the Gray Herbarium came back into play several decades later, when a Swedish team led by Bo Holmstedt analyzed the samples in the 1960s and determined that they were from the peyote cactus, L. williamsii, and Briggs’s “Muscale buttons” were, in fact, peyote.
Meanwhile, at Parke-Davis, scientist Frank Thompson also attempted to determine the properties of the sample, separately from Rusby. Through his analysis, Thompson learned that the plant contained a high amount of alkaloids.
In a July 19, 1887, letter, botanist Serrano Watson from Harvard identifies the buttons as belonging to the genus Anhalonium, “of which five species are known in Mexico.” American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
Parke-Davis sent samples to Dr. Lewis Lewin, a Berlin-based pharmacologist, as a letter dated July 3, 1887, acknowledges. Lewin studied the alkaloids in the plant and determined that mescaline caused the hallucinogenic properties. He also sent the plant to his colleague P. Henning, a botanist in Berlin.
Henning hypothesized that the plant, while closely resembling A. williamsii, seemed to be an entirely new species in the Anhalonium genus, and he named it Anhalonium lewinii, after his colleague. Lewin reciprocated the gesture and attached Henning to the name, calling it Anhalonium lewinii, Henning.
However, over in New York, Rusby wasn’t content with Henning’s decree that the plant was a separate species from A. williamsii, and he continued to debate the plant’s taxonomy.
To get more insight into the buttons, Parke-Davis reached out to A. Blanc, a Philadelphia-based botanical expert. In an 1888 letter, Blanc pushed back against Lewin and Henning’s claim that the buttons were a separate species from the williamsii and affirmed that they were all the same plant. Blanc even sent Parke-Davis some williamsii buttons to compare and said that even though the buttons are expensive, they could supply them in bulk for a cheaper rate. Blanc also mentioned that some Mexicans used the cactus’s root to treat rheumatism, affirming its potential for medicinal use.
Parke-Davis Co. sent a few buttons to A. Blanc for an opinion about the plant’s origin. Blanc wrote back on July 13, 1888, that they believed the plant was Anhalonium williamsii, rather than a whole new species as Lewin and Henning claimed. American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
Meanwhile, as Briggs’s issues with the trader worsened, Parke-Davis attempted to find a more reliable supplier. Briggs found himself caught between the trader and Parke-Davis, as the trader demanded more compensation up front and Parke-Davis refused. Paffrath, the trader, reached out to Parke-Davis directly and attempted to pressure them into buying more buttons by saying that he would start selling them to competing companies. He reached out to the R. V. Pierce company in New York on October 12 and offered to sell them buttons, but they forwarded the message to Parke-Davis. Parke-Davis’s letter responding to this action has been lost, but based on Paffrath’s defensive and rambling next letter, it must have been incendiary.
Parke-Davis Co. reached out to a variety of cactus and ornamental plant dealers to secure more buttons to study. One, Anna B. Nickels, wrote to them in May 1888 and provided the buttons for $4 per pound later that year. Shown on the top is an address label from Nickels in Laredo, Texas, to Parke-Davis in Detroit, Michigan, from May 29, 1888. Shown on the bottom is a memo for H. Wetzel, a Parke-Davis employee, from October 18, 1888. American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, George Bender Collection.
Parke-Davis also reached out to Anna Nickels, an ornamental cactus supplier based in Laredo. The Bender collection contains correspondence between Nickels and Parke-Davis about securing more buttons, in which Nickels said she already sells the buttons to local Mexican Texans, who use them to make a beverage for treating headaches. The Parke-Davis employee to whom Nickels was writing expressed concern that if people could consume the plant regularly enough to cure headaches, it must not be the same plant that Briggs had originally consumed that had caused such intense anxiety and dramatic psychoactive side effects. Nickels responded that she was sure the buttons are the same.
The next year, 1889, Parke-Davis released a tincture called Anhalonium Lewinii made from the buttons, which they sold to doctors, wholesalers, and the public. Articles about the plant suggested that it could be used to treat abdominal pain, headache, coughs, asthma, hysteria, and convulsions, that it could be an opium substitute for delirium and irritability, or that it could be a stimulant for those experiencing fatigue of hypochondria. In 1895, Lewin wrote an article about the plant, then called Anhalonium lewinii, in the Therapeutic Gazette. Early in 1896, two more articles about the plant appeared in the Gazette, written by D. W. Prentiss and Francis P. Morgan, as well as James Mooney. These articles detailed some initial human trials of the buttons and the psychoactive effects participants experienced.
Today, peyote is considered a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States, although the plant is still legal for use in Indigenous religious ceremonies and is used in Indigenous communities across North America. In addition, many companies are currently attempting to patent natural and synthetic versions of mescaline for treating a variety of mental health conditions.6 However, overharvesting in some regions have led the International Union of the Conservation of Nature to list the cactus as “vulnerable” to extinction. The same globalizing forces that Bender said shepherded out the era of rough and ready research have contributed to the decline of the plant across its native range, but the peyote buttons continue to provide powerful spiritual benefits for Indigenous communities.
Footnotes
↵1. George A. Bender, “Rough and Ready Research—1887 Style,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 23 (1968): 159–66.
↵2. For more on this, see “Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals,” History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 63, no. 2 (2021).
↵3. Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). See also review of this book in this issue.
↵4. Alexander S. Dawson, The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
↵5. William Zellmer, “Remarkable Pharmacists,” American Journal of Hospital Pharmacy 33, no. 10 (1976): 1035.
↵6. Journey Colab Corp., Mescaline for the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders (Patentscope, 2022).
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