In the past decade, clinical research has been the vanguard of the psychedelic renaissance. But in recent years, many have sought to widen another pathway for legal psychedelic use: religion. Under the auspices of religious freedom laws like the Religious Freedom for Restoration Act (RFRA), many psychedelic users across the nation have taken to forming churches in hopes that religious freedom laws will provide refuge from national and local drug laws.
Use of entheogenic substances in religious or spiritual worship is, of course, not new. Not even close. Indigenous peoples have used entheogenic plants for millennia, long before the idea of a War on Drugs preoccupied public consciousness. What is new, however—and what has been rapidly accelerating—has been use under a claim of right: that freedom laws provide a shield against the War on Drugs. Hence, a “Mushroom Rabbi” grows “ceremonial psilocybin” for his congregation, and weekend ayahuasca retreats are publicized on the internet.
This is an untested and highly uncertain area of law. Law is inherently uncertain, but typically, after a short period of application, courts formulate precedents and agencies promulgate regulations to concretize and refine the law and guide the regulated public. For a variety of reasons, this has not happened yet with RFRA and psychedelic use, despite the fact that the law has been around since 1993. For this reason, in November, 2021 Chacruna published the Guide to RFRA and Best Practices for Psychedelic Plant Medicine Churches to fill this gap, which is a good start.
What Is RFRA?
Congress enacted the Religious Freedom for Restoration Act to protect those engaged in sincere religious exercise from government laws. According to the statute, the federal government shall not substantially burden a person’s “exercise of religion” unless the government shows that that application of the burden to the person furthers a “compelling governmental interest” and is the “least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
All this leaves a lot open to interpretation. For example, what is “religious exercise” or an “exercise of religion”? What makes a government interest “compelling”? Strong precedents to answer these questions in the context of entheogenic plant use are sparing—most past cases present bad facts and therefore are not benchmarks to rely upon.
Our two best data points are cases involving the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, União do Vegetal and Santo Daime, which are both recognized as legal religions by the Brazilian government. In these cases, the religious adherents successfully defeated DEA’s claim that prohibiting use of ayahuasca as a sacrament was the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest in preventing abuse and diversion. The UDV case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the Court unanimously held that DEA could not categorically prohibit the UDV church’s bona fide religious use of ayahuasca.
Read full article at https://www.lucid.news/dont-count-on-rfra-to-protect-psychedelic-churches/?mc_cid=147a99a7c5
