Indigenous drug use occurs in a variety of ways, including smoking various herbs, or plant materials, ingesting decoctions, or teas, chewing peyote buttons, and (in South America) aspirating powdered materials. Drugs are taken in social groups, as parts of rituals, and alone. At all events, drug use is aimed at promoting spiritual awareness and sensitivity.
In the indigenous world view, the spiritual realm is shared by all and is pervasive. Nevertheless, day-to-day practical life is typically distracted by the physical world; and one may have little contact with the spiritual side of life. Shamans, or potential shamans, are, of course, an exception to this. At any rate, probably beginning with initiation into adult life, a person is guided to an active awareness of the spirit world. Initiations can occur in a wide variety of ways. For instance, in the Plains and, to some degree, in the Southwest, there is a guided practice of exposure. The young man is usually sent out alone onto a mountain top or into the desert where he practices exposure to the elements and remains without food and, perhaps, drink for days. The practice eventually leads to visions (in delirium) and he returns to his village, where adult wise men interpret what he has seen.
In much of California and the Great Basin initiation was the culmination to a term of apprenticeship to an older guide who taught and disciplined the boy. When a group of boys were ready for the culmination of this experience, they were gathered together in a communal enclosure, lead through some acts of bravery or endurance (biting ants being a favorite), and then given a decoction of datura metaloides. The datura quickly put them into a comatose trance which was monitored by the older male guides. When reviving from this trance, the boys (now becoming men) experience hallucinations which they relate later, again, for the interpretation of their guides. In all of these experiences, a specially desirable vision centers around some animal who becomes the person's spiritual guide. When this occurs, the man may nurture his relationship with that animal in a variety of ways throughout his life.
Some individuals may never return to such experiences after initiation; though a shaman will return often. In between, adult men may return to such experiences for enlightenment, cleansing, or good hunting. Smoking and exposure may combine in a sweat lodge ceremony on a regular basis. The purpose, always, is to reach the spirit world so that the individual can tap spiritual power.
An especially nice example of this is the comments made by various Washoe members of a contemporary "peyote cult" in Warren d'Azevedo's book Straight with the Medicine (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 198?). Read especially the chapter "Prayer" because here we see that indigenous spirituality is really work and that it is hard. It takes effort to reach one's spiritual side, to find one's center. Drug use in indigenous society is not "recreational" and, in particular, it is not aimed at dulling the mind or merely extinguishing one's self.
Copyright 1996, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
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