Advocates of peyote say it actually reduces alcoholism among Indians, a serious health problem in most tribes.
With fewer lands available to harvest, the supply of peyote is shrinking even as church demand increases.
They can make much more money from renting their lands to big-game hunters than to peyote harvesters.
Justin Theroux plays the resident stud, Seth, the essence of every creepy sex-and-drugs hustler since peyote hit Northern California.
Until recently, the legal status of peyote was a headache for church members.
He employs up to a dozen labourers, most of them relatives, to pick peyote buttons all year round on about 30, 000 acres.
Then, in 1990, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect the religious use of peyote by the Native American Church.
But Mr Johnson says he would be willing to put up with that if it meant an increased supply of peyote for congregants who need it.
Indirectly, that legislation also ensured that the small band of predominantly Latino peyote harvesters, or peyoteros, in south Texas would be able to continue their trade.
Although some of the ranchers whom Mr Johnson and his fellow-peyoteros work with have been leasing them peyote-rich land for decades, others are increasingly unwilling to do so.
There is an easy solution: using peyote stocks that stretch 300 miles or more into Mexico, a reserve that might produce twice the output of the United States.
Congregants who wished to avoid being stopped for possession of peyote were obliged to drive through a loose patchwork of states in which church-sanctioned uses of peyote were legal.
If Mexico were to liberalise its peyote laws, or if the Native American Church were to buy land and harvest its own peyote, America's seven licensed peyoteros could suffer from falling prices.
Four years later, Congress backed by the Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal law-enforcement officials rebuked the high court by reaffirming the right to use peyote in religious ways, and by preventing states from cracking down on the transport of peyote.
Yet, ironically for a government that has often run into trouble with American officials for enforcing drug laws too weakly, Mexico continues to stand firm on peyote, preventing any harvesting or possession of the cactus on its side of the border.
In addition to affording the harvesters a living, the peyote business helps funnel the dollars of Indian peyote-seekers to restaurants and hotels in large cities like Laredo as well as small towns like Rio Grande City, which is home to five of the seven licensed harvesters.
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