Definition Day: Mescaline & DEA
Two more terms worth slowing down on.
Mescaline: the psychedelic alkaloid found in peyote and San Pedro cacti, with ceremonial use tracing back well before any clinical interest existed. The Native American Church, founded in 1918 out of a peyote ceremony practiced since the 1880s among the Kiowa and Comanche, holds the only federal legal exemption of its kind in the US — see our Peyote Exemption entry for how that carve-out actually works.
DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration): the federal agency that would have to reschedule psilocybin, MDMA, or LSD out of Schedule I before an approved drug based on them could actually be prescribed. It hasn't done that, but in a January 2026 final order it raised the legal research-production quota for psilocybin from 30,000 to 50,000 grams and for 5-MeO-DMT from 11,000 to 30,000 grams — more supply for research, short of rescheduling anything.
Full entries, plus 140 other terms, are in our Encyclopedia.