Supreme Court to review sect’s use of drug in rituals
The Layman Online, April 18, 2005
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a circuit court decision that allowed a sect with a U.S. headquarters in New Mexico to use hallucinogenic tea in its religious services.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver voted 8-5 to allow the sect – the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal – to import and use the hoasca tea while the case was appealed. The circuit court had declared that the sect had shown a “substantial likelihood of success” in winning religious exemption.
Hoasca tea contains the drug dimethyltryptamine, a substance that is barred from importation by the 1971 U.N. Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The United States is one of 160 signatories to that treaty.
The case has been of interest to Presbyterians because Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, in an amicus curiae brief, supports the sect’s argument that it should be allowed to use the hallucinogenic tea during its rituals. Also supporting the sect were are two evangelical organizations, the Christian Legal Society and the National Association of Evangelicals.
O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal is primarily a Brazilian group with 8,000 adherents worldwide, about 140 in the United States. The sect is a blend of Christian beliefs and traditions rooted in the Amazon basin.
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had held that the church had shown a ”substantial likelihood of success” in winning religious exemption and rejected the government’s request to temporarily ban use of the drug at the church, whose U.S. operations are based in Santa Fe, N.M.
In its Supreme Court appeal of that order, the Bush administration argued it has a ”compelling interest” to prevent an illegal market for the drug.
Allowing the tea’s use ”directly impairs the effectiveness of international narcotics law-enforcement efforts, frustrates intergovernmental cooperation, and weakens the government’s ability to insist that other countries adhere to their treaty obligations,” the government filing states.
Lawyers for the church countered that the tea’s use by law-abiding citizens practicing their religious beliefs does not constitute drug abuse or put worshippers’ health in danger.
In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that states have a right to criminalize the use of peyote, which contains the hallucinogen mescaline, rejecting a challenge by Native Americans seeking a religious exemption under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.
”We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. ”The record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.