[42] An editorial _Paradise or Inferno?_ (Editorial, 390) sharply rebuked Ellis for the attractiveness which he had ascribed to mescal intoxication, basing the criticism on grounds of medical ethics. [43] Letter to Schultes, Feb. 21, 1936. My own experience leads me fully to endorse Hrdlička’s careful statement. Elsewhere in the text are cited numerous cases of natives who, in good faith I believe, gave up the use of peyote entirely upon the rising of special or acute anxieties. My informants, on the other hand, quite as frankly admitted that there were some individuals who showed signs of addiction, in the sense that they consumed the plant often and abundantly, but these are not clear uncomplicated instances of drug-addiction; I trust such native candor implicitly. Besides, peyote is not wholly pleasant (“You must suffer to peyote”). [44] The issue of the native religious use of the drug is indeed a complex one. But whatever else may be said, it is only fair to the Indians to state that the bitterest and most unmeasured condemnations of the drug have issued from quarters which are scarcely disinterested. Whatever the merits of the case, those persons are concerned with the deculturation of the Indian, and see in the peyote religion a formidable obstacle to their progress in inducting the native into modern life. The doubtless good intentions of such persons have on occasion, however, led them into errors of judgment when, for instance, they would argue that peyotism is merely out-and-out drug addiction in religious guise (e.g. Daiker, Hughes, Newberne and Burke, Seymour, Watermulder, and the writers in the Indian Rights Association and Literary Digest articles;) Lindquist, for example, feels free to commit numerous errors of fact yet still pontificate on the “false gods” of “the cult of Death” which is “nothing but an evil” (_The Red Man_, 72, 73, 75). For, given the Plains religious and ideological background, the peyote cult is entirely plausible as a religion, and the issue is properly one of religious freedom. The intellectual “authority” in west European culture is, of course, the empirical and pragmatic (or putatively), while that of the Indian in this religion, as elsewhere, can correctly be termed mystical, if we understand by this a super-normal knowledge-technique transcending ordinary epistemological considerations. For there can be no shadow of a doubt concerning the deep and humble sincerity of the worship and belief—and sincerity perhaps, even in the absence of other ingredients, is the chief component of a living religion. And if the chief function of a religion is the liquidation of the anxieties and the solution of the fears and troubles of its adherents, then surely the peyote religion eminently qualifies as such.