Hoasca & UDV: Hallucinogenic Tea as a Religious Sacrament

In Brazil, O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) is a religious group which uses hoasca, a plant with hallucinogenic properties, as a sacramental tea. Use of this plant is exempted from Brazil's drug laws and followers of UDV want the same in America - but the government is fighting this right to the Supreme Court.

Americans United explains what's going on:

U.S. District Judge James A. Parker issued a preliminary injunction against the federal government, concluding that officials had failed to satisfy the compelling interest test. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on two occasions refused to invalidate Parker’s action. In its second ruling, Circuit Judge Stephanie K. Seymour described the church’s case as “unique in many respects because it involves a clash between two federal statutes.”

But in a concurring opinion, Seymour decided that the dispute between the church and the federal drug law was “not about enjoining enforcement of the criminal laws against the use and importation of street drugs. Rather, it is about im­porting and using small quantities of a controlled substance in the structured atmosphere of a bona fide religious ceremony. “In short,” Seymour continued, “this case is about RFRA and the free exercise of religion, a right protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution.”

The U.S. Justice Department, then under Attorney General John Ashcroft, now Alberto Gonzales, couldn’t disagree more. ... In urging the high court to take the case, Acting Solicitor General Paul D. Clement argued that the 10th Circuit’s decision “has mandated that the federal government open the Nation’s borders to the importation, circulation, and usage of a mind-altering hallucinogen and threatens to inflict irreparable harm on international cooperation in combating transnational narcotics trafficking.”

Conservatives pushed hard for the FFRA, believing that religious behavior deserved special protection not afforded to the same actions when done for non-religious reasons. Now that the law is being used to challenge something near and dear to conservatives’ hearts, anti-drug laws, things look awfully different. Conservatives are willing to exempt religion from all sorts of other generally applicable laws, but when it comes to drugs something’s different... but what? And why?

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News