A Different Medicine

Abstract

In A Different Medicine, Joseph Calabrese presents a case study that challenges many deeply ingrained cultural assumptions and attempts to mediate a centuries-old clash of cultural paradigms. The book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of a postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church. Calabrese describes the Peyote Ceremony as it is used in Native American family contexts and in federally funded clinical programs for Native American patients. He also describes the lives of particular members of the NAC in a way that allows their unique voices to be heard. During his two years of ethnographic field research, Calabrese, who is trained as an anthropologist and clinical psychologist, used an interdisciplinary method that he calls clinical ethnography. He combined immersive fieldwork with a year of clinical practice at a Navajo-run treatment program for Native American adolescents with severe substance abuse and mental health problems. He found therapeutic value in Native American rituals, including the Peyote Ceremony, and discovered an ironic fact: the same government that includes Peyote on its Schedule I list of dangerous substances without therapeutic uses also, in the context of the U.S. Indian Health Service, codes the Peyote Ceremony as a valid therapeutic intervention for substance abuse. Calabrese argues against the War on Drugs and the Supreme Court decision that jeopardized the right of Native Americans to use this medicine. He urges us to recognize the multiplicity of the normal and the therapeutic.