Mexico

Indigenous and traditional use of psychedelic plant and fungal species in what is now Mexico extends back centuries and forms the clearest historical continuity in the country’s psychedelic record. Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and various psilocybin-bearing fungi have long been used in ritual and healing contexts by groups such as the Huichol, Wixárika (Huichol), and Mazatec peoples. Ethnographic documentation by travellers and scientists in the early twentieth century recorded these practices, and they were foundational to later international interest in psychotropic sacraments.

International attention to Mexican entheogenic traditions intensified in the mid-twentieth century. R. Gordon Wasson’s widely read accounts publicised Mazatec mushroom ceremonies in the 1950s and brought María Sabina and other traditional practitioners to global prominence. At the same time, advances in laboratory chemistry in Europe — notably Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of LSD (1938) and discovery of its psychoactivity (1943) and Sandoz’s subsequent commercial distribution of LSD as Delysid from the late 1940s — meant that mind-altering compounds became available to psychiatrists and researchers worldwide, including in Mexico. Mexican psychiatrists and intellectuals engaged with these substances throughout the 1950s and 1960s within clinical, artistic and ethnographic contexts.

The late 1960s and 1970s brought a period of legal tightening internationally and domestically. The increasing prohibitionary stance embodied by the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances and subsequent national drug-control measures reduced open clinical research with many classical psychedelics in Mexico and elsewhere. Nonetheless, ethnomycology and anthropological study of indigenous practices continued, and the legacy of mid-century encounters sustained a subculture of researchers, clinicians and practitioners.

From the 1990s into the twenty-first century there has been a gradual revival of scientific and clinical interest in psychedelic compounds in Mexico. This has taken multiple forms: academic ethnobotany and mycology at institutions such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), clinical and preclinical neuroscience investigations, civil-society harm-reduction and advocacy groups, and the emergence of private clinics offering interventions such as ibogaine for addiction and ketamine-assisted therapy. The contemporary landscape is therefore heterogeneous, combining traditional ceremonial practice, constrained academic research, and a growing private-sector and NGO activity that navigates complex legal and ethical terrain.