Court allows church's hallucinogenic
tea
Yahoo News/USA Today
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
February 22, 2006
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that adherents of a small
Brazilian-based religion practicing in New Mexico may continue to use a
hallucinogenic tea. The court rejected arguments by the Justice Department that
the communion ritual undermines federal anti-drug law.
The court broadly interpreted the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act,
intended to protect people from U.S. laws that appear to be neutral but can
impinge on sacramental practices. (Related item: Opinion:Gonzales v. O Centro
Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal)
Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion for the court that Congress
sought "a workable test for striking sensible balances between religious
liberty and competing ... governmental interests."
The religious society, O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, known
as UDV, is a Christian Spiritist sect with origins in the Amazon
rainforest.
Its U.S. branch has about 130 members in the Santa Fe area.
Adherents receive communion by drinking hoasca, a tea made from plants
unique to the Amazon that contain dimethyltryptamine, which is considered a
mind-altering drug under the controlled-substances law.
The case began in 1999, when U.S. Customs intercepted a shipment of hoasca.
The sect sued to block the government from interfering with the shipments.
Lower federal courts sided with the UDV, based on the 1993 religious-freedom
law.
Lower courts rejected the administration's claim that the UDV should be
stopped from using the tea based on a "compelling interest" in uniform
enforcement of anti-drug law.
Roberts noted that federal law has an exception for the use of peyote by the
Native American Church.
"If such use is permitted ... for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans
practicing their faith," Roberts wrote, "it is difficult to see how those same
findings alone can preclude any consideration of a similar exception for the
130 or so American members of the UDV who want to practice theirs."
Roberts said the long-standing exception for peyote undercuts the
government's broader contention that the federal anti-drug law allows no
exceptions based on religion.
Several mainstream religious and public-policy groups had supported the
UDV's position. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint
Committee, praised the ruling.
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