High court affirms lower court ruling that permits sect to use drug in rituals
The Layman Online, February 21, 2006
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed a lower court’s ruling that a sect with a U.S. headquarters in New Mexico may use a hallucinogenic tea in its religious services.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver previously 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.
The high court, in its first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church’s religious practice, the Associated Press reported.
In the decision, Roberts wrote that federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the sect’s hoasca tea. 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 tea is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies, according to the Associated Press.
The case has been of interest to Presbyterians because Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, in an amicus curiae brief, supported 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.
In its case, the Bush administration argued that 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 stated.
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.
Roberts said the Bush administration had not met its burden under a federal religious freedom law to show that it could ban “the sect’s sincere religious practice,” the Associated Press reported. He had been skeptical of the government’s position in the case last fall, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a “zero tolerance approach.”
The justices sent the case back to the federal appeals court, which could consider more evidence.