They don’t have a right to the chemical structure of mescaline though. It’s like saying Chinese tea growers have the right to bar western people from drinking energy drinks because they both contain caffeine.

My dude, what? We’re talking about settlers appropriating the culture of indigenous Americans. I’m not versed in the history of the Chinese Tea trade, but it has historically been exported and shared. The key difference being “Exported and Shared”. Willfully sharing parts of your culture with other people is not at all comparable to having it be appropriated by colonizers despite your express protests.

Would you stop taking Aspirin if Egyptian people said that you were appropriating their use of willow bark?

Willow trees grow worldwide, and people generally use the resources that are available to them. There is definitely a case to be made about the imperialist nature of western medicine, but that is a completely separate conversation from what we’re talking about here.

They have a right to the rituals, images, and other unique elements of culture involving peyote. They do not have a right to the chemical structure itself.

Why are you so intent on determining what parts of their culture they have a right to and which parts they don’t?

Its a thorny issue but I think youre way off the mark. It’s not about a molecule, it is about cultural “capital” built up over hundreds or thousands of years, and then that culture being taken apart, bit by bit, anything of value gets commodified and repackaged to colonizing people, alienating and severing it from its cultural significance, and anything else that can’t be made into a commodity is subsequently destroyed or otherwise alienated from as much of the past and the culture as possible. Its part of a process of domination. Youre basically making the same argument as the above dunk subject, that because this substance has been intentionally, forcefully and painfully alienated from its original cultural significance, that it is inherently alien. Shrouding this argument in the language of science doesn’t work either: in my opinion we should be suspect of the language of science and its seemingly disaffected and intellectually distanced, sanitizing affect. In this case, as in most cases, science is political.

Noone really teaches us the definitions of cultural appropriation and I don’t think that even most leftists have a solid formulation for it. So I don’t blame you but you’re making a big error here.

I use the term “capital” above because that’s what its become, due to the totalizing quality of capital, but the real cultural and historical significance is beyond my ability to comprehend. We have to trust the victims of erasure, otherwise we are just chuds