Troubled times for Texas hallucinogen harvesters

By Jeff Franks

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas (Reuters) - Mauro Morales has chickens in his yard, deer antlers hanging from the fence and a shed full of peyote behind his house.

A slight, balding man in his 60s, Morales is one of just three "peyoteros" in the country licensed by the government to sell the small green cactus that contains the hallucinogen mescaline.

His profession is an old one that used to be more common along the Rio Grande, the only place where peyote grows in the United States. Now it is threatened by the forces of modernity.

His customers are the 250,000 to 400,000 members of the Native American Church, the only people in the United States for whom peyote is legal.

The government warily allows them to buy it because it has been part of indigenous religious ceremonies for centuries.

The church members think the visions that peyote produces provide enlightenment and that the cactus has curative powers. They reverently call it "the medicine."

Morales has never tried peyote because it would be illegal for him to do so. He does not want to risk losing his peyote license, for which the main requirement is that he be law-abiding.

"You have to make sure you don't have a problem with the law, you know?" he said in a recent interview.

In the 1970s, Texas licensed as many as 27 peyote dealers. There were supposedly many more before peyote was outlawed in 1967. One of Morales' fellow peyoteros also lives in Rio Grande City, the other 70 miles north in Mirando City.

The profession seems barely legal in a nation perennially at war with drugs, but in the peyote region there is nothing clandestine about it.

Morales has a big sign out in front of his modest home that proclaims "Mauro Morales -- Peyote Dealer, Buy or Sell Peyote."

It includes his phone number should any prospective customers pass by.

"It's a business," he said with a shrug of the shoulders in a recent interview. "It's the only income I got."

It is not a bad business, either. State figures for 2006 show the peyoteros sold a combined 1.6 million peyote "buttons" -- the term for the harvested cactus -- for a total of

$463,000.