Spiritual highs and legal brows: the power and peril of religious exemptions from drug prohibition

Reason, June, 2007 by Jacob Sullum

ON FEBRUARY 22, 2006, U.S. Border Patrol agents noticed a minivan and a sedan traveling close together on Interstate 10 near Lordsburg, New Mexico.After going east for about 10 miles, the two drivers turned onto New Mexico Highway 113, traveling south, then turned around and headed north, moving in tandem. Based on "a totality of the circumstances," the agents pulled over both vehicles. The minivan was occupied by Dan and Mary Quaintance, a middle-aged couple from Pima, Arizona. Timothy Kripner, a 23-year-old from Tucson, was driving the sedan, a rented Chrysler 300 in which the agents found I72 pounds of marijuana in three plastic-wrapped bundles, two in the trunk and one in the backseat. Kripner also was carrying a walkie-talkie, which he apparendy had been using to communicate with the Quaintances on the road, and a certificate, signed by Dan Quaintance, identifying him as a "courier" for the Pima-based Church of Cognizance. "I am the head of my church" Dan Quaintance declared, "and I have the right to have that marijuana."

That remains to be seen, although the initial signs are not promising. In late December a federal judge rejected the Quaintances' claim that, because cannabis is their church's sacrament, their right to possess it is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). They were scheduled to be tried in May at the federal courthouse in Albuquerque on marijuana charges that carry penalties of up to 40 years in prison. But their religious freedom claim, which the judge considered for several months after oral arguments last August, was by no means frivolous. The Quaintances were arrested just a week before the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that RFRA protects the American branch of the Brazil-based Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) from government interference with its rituals despite the fact that the group's sacramental tea contains the otherwise illegal psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT). If UDV deserves an exemption from the Controlled Substances Act, why not the Church of Cognizance ?

Answering that question is no simple matter. It requires considering not only the Quaintances' sincerity but the nature of religion and the aims of the war on drugs. Pleas for tolerance from groups like the Church of Cognizance, pleas that will be heard more and more in the wake of the UDV ruling, pose an obvious challenge to drug warriors who claim to value religious freedom. But they also pose a challenge to critics of the war on drugs. It's not clear how the demand for protection of psychoactive sacraments will affect the broader cause of drug policy reform, a cause these religious groups do not necessarily support. Meanwhile, vetting their claims involves an unseemly official inquisition into people's most heartfelt beliefs, aimed at distinguishing real religions from phony ones. Even if some groups manage to pass the test, the victory for freedom of conscience is mixed, since the flip side of granting exemptions to people who consume controlled substances for religious reasons is that other drug users are punished, in effect, for having the wrong beliefs.

Tea Breaks and Peyote Privileges

One reason to hope the UDV case will undermine the war on drugs is that the Bush administration clearly feared it would. After customs agents seized UDV's sacramental tea in 1999, the group filed a lawsuit asking for it back and seeking a protective injunction under RFRA, which requires strict scrutiny of government actions that impinge on religious freedom. The church won the argument every step of the way. In 2002 a federal judge in New Mexico, where UDV's American branch is based, issued a preliminary injunction telling the government to stop harassing the church, an order that was upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 2003 and by the entire court in 2004. The supposedly faith-friendly Bush administration, parting company with religious conservatives who supported UDV, refused to leave the tiny sect alone until the Supreme Court insisted that it do so.

That attitude stands in sharp contrast with government policy in Brazil, where Uniao do Vegetal (Portuguese for "Union of the Plants") was founded in 1961 by a rubber tapper named Jose Gabriel da Costa. Working in the Amazon, Gabriel encountered natives who introduced him to the mysteries of ayahuasca (also called hoasca and yage), a tea typically made with Psychotria viridis leaves, which contain DMT, and the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, which contains chemicals that make the DMT orally active by preventing enzymes from breaking it down before it can reach the bloodstream. Amazonian tribes have used the tea--whose name means "vine of the soul," "vine of the dead," or "vision vine" in Quechuan--for thousands of years as a means of divine communion and a cure for physical and spiritual ills. Gabriel combined the ritual use of ayahuasca with Christian theology and an emphasis on living in harmony with nature. UDV holds that "ecology and spirituality are indivisible" and describes itself as "a religion based on the superior Christian values of love and fraternity among men, in full communion with Nature through the tea Hoasca, a vehicle synchronising it with the Divinity." The group's ayahuasca ceremonies, which usually are held a few times a month and last several hours, feature chanting, singing, discussion of Gabriel's teachings, and long periods of silent introspection.