High court allows sect backed by Kirkpatrick to use hallucinogenic drugs in holiday rituals
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, December 21, 2004
The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily sided with a New Mexico sect – backed by Clifton Kirkpatrick – by allowing it to use hallucinogenic tea this holiday season as part of its ceremonies that worship spirits in plants and animals and encourages ritualistic vomiting.
Justices, while deciding whether the Brazil-based sect is permitted to make the tea a permanent part of its services, on December 10 lifted a week-long temporary stay that the government had won preventing the use of the tea, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
Justice Stephen Breyer had granted the temporary stay, blocking the sect from using the tea, to give both sides time to file more arguments with the court. The full court sided with the sect.
The sect, the Uniao Do Vegetal or Union of the Vegetable in Portuguese, has its U.S. headquarters in Santa Fe. The American group is called O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which is Portuguese for the United Beneficent Spiritual Central of the Vegetable.
The Bush administration contends that the hoasca tea is illegal and dangerous, the Star-Tribune reported. Nancy Hollander, the lawyer for the sect, told justices in a filing that hoasca is not only safe, but to members it “is sacred and their sacramental use of hoasca connects them to God.'”
In 2003, Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA), filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in a lawsuit by the obscure sect that seeks to prevent the United States government from prohibiting the sect from using the hallucinogenic tea in their ceremonies.
The government and the church have been tied up in a legal fight since federal agents raided a church leader’s office in Santa Fe in 1999 and seized 30 gallons of hoasca tea. The tea contains DMT, a controlled substance.
Hollander told justices that since then, sect members have not been able to receive communion to commemorate the birth of Jesus during the church’s annual Holy Days.
In the wake of adverse publicity surrounding the amicus brief filed by Kirkpatrick, a commissioner’s resolution sought to make such legal filings more accountable by bringing them under the oversight of the General Assembly.
The resolution, defeated by the 215th General Assembly, sought to have Kirkpatrick make public the briefs, allow plenty of time for them to be reviewed before filing, and states that the briefs should be “consistent with current adopted policies and confessions of the denomination.”
In another case, in the fall of 2003, Kirkpatrick filed an amicus brief in legal efforts to force the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building.
Kirkpatrick, arguing that the monument was “harmful to religious liberty” and a violation of the separation of church and state, filed an amicus curiae brief in the case against Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore that successfully had the monument removed in November 2003.
At the time of the case, a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans interviewed disapproved of U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s order to remove the monument.