Recent developments and discoveries about psychedelics
Ronald W. McNutt, attorney at law, September 2020
Indigenous cultures have used psychedelics or entheogens for sacramental and healing purposes in many parts of the world. They have viewed the plants and fungi as having divine origin. The hallucinogens have been used in ceremonies which maintain a sacred context with guidelines and the participants will would observe taboos against improper usage.
When psychedelic usage is a part of the primary religious practices of a group, such as in Indigenous cultures and traditional societies that support spiritual practices using these substances, a knowledgeable leader will guide participants. The goal of their religious practices is to bring about special states of consciousness with attention on the divine, awakening to a boundless spiritual realm permeated with love and vitality with an awareness of cosmic unity. The leaders enjoy everyone’s respect and will minimize the risk of an accident that could cause long-term harm.
The participants are guided with music and intuitive encouragement to navigate their journeys. They gain benefits that enrich their lives and claim greater access to their true natures, rich in primordial wisdom. Their guides will be people with the benefit of experience who will be able to share their competency and integrity to pursue the goal of helping individuals and society. They will have the capacity to provide a quiet presence, to hold space with reverence, and to provide encouragement to the participants. Afterward, they will help them integrate or assimilate the lessons from their journeys.
When we ingest psychedelics, there is a disruption of self-concept that can foster a deeper sense of connection. Our thought patterns can be challenged. We may receive or sense a deepening of individuality into collective being and no longer see people or animals as how they can benefit us, but as intrinsically wonderful. The substances can shed light on past trauma that limit our capacity to be fully alive, and release our resistance and help us embrace an ethical deepening of conscience to live human lives with sympathy and sensitivity that come from faith and wisdom. The psychedelics can shed upon people powers of discernment and the way of remembering a deeper level of awareness or ground of being. This is now being recognized as a value to be learned from the entheogens, this process of realizing we are an element of nature.
Walter Houston Clark warned of problems in organized religion which he called the secularization of churches, maintaining a code of ethics with no metaphysical inspiration, an ecstatic renewal that is the root of a compassionate life, an experience that points to the meaning, the source, the purpose on a very deep level. Entheogens can offer an ecstatic renewal that gives deeper meaning to our lives and an appreciation of the magnificent rich character within ourselves and in nature and our fellow beings. In order to destigmatize plant medicines and entheogens, we should emphasize harm reduction and how they can improve our world, our lives, culture and relations.
What we in our ignorance have termed primitive cultures have a deeper awareness of how unique and mysterious our lives are. We may not wish to idealize the original religions from centuries ago or seek to insinuate ourselves into their different and unfamiliar social and environmental contexts, and abandon our own traditions and experience. We can, however, reinterpret the traditions of other cultures to adapt ancient wisdom to our society. We also can be intentional about reciprocity and give back to the societies that give us these valuable spiritual tools and the rich traditions that protect them. We can celebrate the evolving and renewing life force that we share with the Indigenous societies.
When American and European society opened up to the potential of entheogens, the larger culture lacked a social context to incorporate the visions and realizations, including the rearrangement of priorities and recognition of our common nature as spiritual beings. The upheaval and resulting culture wars led to the promising research that had taken place in the 1960s and early 1970s being relegated for a while to the files of a ghost town in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Thanks to the pioneers of today and from the past who fanned the sparks, and the underground “psychonauts” who decided to lie low and pursue harm reduction and sustainable practices, the psychedelic renaissance has come about. Hopefully, with the benefit of past experience, the potential benefits will be promoted and the dangerous pitfalls will be identified and avoided.
Recent anthropological research shows that humanity has used entheogens since ancient times. Carl Ruck, working with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, discovered that the ancient Rites of Eleusis employed a potent hallucinogen in the ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries, which helped the participants understand the continuity of life.
We now know that one of the great entheogens, peyote, has been in use since primordial times. While peyote is in short supply and should be protected for American Indians to use in their practices, peyote’s relative, the San Pedro cactus, is very plentiful and easy to cultivate. Articles in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology on October 3, 2005 titled “Prehistoric Peyote Use: Alkaloid Analysis and Radiocarbon Dating of Archaeological Specimens of Lophophora From Texas” (El-Seedi, De Smet, Beck, Possnert, and Bruhn) and in The Lancet on May 25, 2002 (vol. 359, p. 1866), have chronicled how team of scientists from Sweden and the Netherlands proved that use of peyote goes back 5000 years. Ancient societies recognized the value of the psychotropic qualities of peyote. The articles described the chemical analysis of two dried peyote buttons in the collection of the Witte Museum in San Antonio thought to be from the Shumla Cave number five on the Rio Grande. Using radiocarbon dating and alkaloid analysis, their age was identified as being between 3780 to 3660 B.C.E. The analysis with thin-layer chromatography found that 2 % of the alkaloids were mescaline. By comparison, fresh peyote buttons have 8 % of the total alkaloids are mescaline. These samples are regarded as being the oldest psychoactive plant material and show that Native Americans used peyote as long as 5700 years ago. Some samples from an archeological site in Coahuila, Mexico showed peyote with radiocarbon testing dated to 810 to 1070 C.E., about 1000 years old.
The Huichols of Mexico have the oldest current usage of peyote. They have a tradition of going from their various mountain villages on annual pilgrimages by groups to harvest peyote and visit their sacred ancestral land. They call it the little deer and they ceremonially hunt it. They offer prayers to it and thank it for its body and its spiritual essence. The pilgrims would take on alternative or backwards identities. They would dress very traditionally and strive to be united in a spiritual presence and make contact with their ancestors. They communicate through the fire and they undergo purification through long chanting near a fire. They do careful introspection around a fire and there was a time for private vision.
When Frederick Law Olmsted traveled to San Antonio before the Civil War, he recorded how the Indians at the Alamo Mission would use peyote, to the displeasure of the clerics. American Indians continue the tradition more formally. The Native American Church of North America has a sacrament with sunset to sunrise, taking peyote and having sustaining visions and love that draws the community together. Many in the circle lead chants and prayers as they take turns under the guidance of the roadman, a guide to encourage their minds to see the spirit. It was founded in 1870 by the Comanche warrior Quanneh Parker received a visit from a spirit who told him his people should lay down their arms and turn to themselves for salvation. The spirit said “I have left my flesh in peyote, unite in this and your people will outlast the white man.” They embrace the unknown and also an ethical system of mutual respect through their vision. The ecstatic renewal is the root of lives of love and service.
There was a recent discovery in Israel showing ancient ritual usage of marijuana, which sometimes is considered to be a minor psychedelic. A 2700-year-old temple about 59 miles south of Tel Aviv in the Negev Desert was excavated. It was part of a hilltop fortress around the southern frontier of the Kingdom of Judah, which had two limestone alters buried within the shrine. One had frankincense and one was found with cannabis, and the archeologists concluded that cannabis was burned ritually for ancient Jewish worship ceremonies.
Ancient glyphs and sculptures show that sacred mushrooms were used in central America and Mexico for thousands of years, as early as 1000 B.C. and that San Pedro cactus was revered by South American cultures as early as 1300 B.C.E. In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson was the first westerner to participate in the sacred mushroom ceremony, and he revealed in a seminal Life magazine article in 1957 the historic usage of psychedelic mushrooms among the Mazatec Indians of the western Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, and the shaman Maria Sabina. He also showed through careful research that the sacred medicine, Soma, in the Rig Veda from Hinduism, was in all likelihood the Amanita muscaria mushroom, and that its use later died out and practices of yoga and meditation took its place.
Ayahuasca is a major psychedelic which has been used for centuries, a mixture of a vine growing in the Amazon jungles with leaves from plants growing there, which activates dimethyltryptamine so that it is not quickly metabolized as it would be otherwise, due to the presence of an enzyme in the body, and produces the psychedelic state.
Plants for ayahuasca brews are the vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, called ayahuasca and other names, and the leaves of chacruna: Psychotria viridis, or chagropanga: Diplopterys cabrerana. In May of 2019, scientists collaborating from several countries authored an article in Science magazine of the first archeological evidence that the components chacruna and ayahuasca were used together. They examined the contents found in a pouch of fox snouts from a burial site about ten years earlier, located 4000 meters high in the Bolivian Andes. The contents were remarkably well-preserved in arid conditions and under llama waste, and contained yopo, a snuff with dimethyltriptyimine, as well as the ayahuasca components.
The site suggested a usage of the plant materials that were quickly inhaled, blown, or snorted. There were 1000-year-old tools of bone to crush seeds, wooden tablets with jewels to crush seeds, and a snuffing tube. The Science magazine article showed that the ingredients recently were identified, and included harmine and dimethyltryptamine, bufotenine, benzoylecgonine and cocaine. The scientists showed that the plants would have had to be gathered from the lowland Amazonian areas and been transported quite far, as an item of trade or personal property. This revealed the reverence and significance of the plant medicine to these peoples thousands of years ago. The scientists speculated that the psychedelic plants may have been for initiations, funerals, or for medicinal use.
As early as the 1600s and 1700s, histories of Jesuit activity in the Maranin River area near the upper Amazon described ayahuasca drinking ceremonies among the tribes. Prior to that time, DMT was consumed by snuffs and smoking. In 1852, Richard Spruce, an English botanist, collected ayahuasca and observed a ceremony among the Tukano on the Vapes River in northwestern Brazil. He later saw it used along the upper Orinoco in Llanos in Venezuela among the Guahibo, who would chew it rather than brewing it. In Peru, Spruce heard the name ayahuasca among the Zaparo on the Pastaza River at the border of Ecuador and Peru.
Dr. Richard Evans Schultes was a professor in the botany department at Harvard University for many years who greatly expanded the field of ethnobotany and contributed to scholarship about traditional cultures using plant medicines. He was inspired by Spruce’s studies and became a great source of information about the biology and chemistry of plant hallucinogens. Dr. Schultes and Dr. Hofmann helped discover the mysterious chemistry of ayahuasca, how it has DMT or dimethyltryptamine, and a mono amine oxidase inhibitor, meaning it blocks an enzyme that would ordinarily make it metabolize quickly and have little effect.
Anthropologists have shown that there were some Amazonian tribes that were unaware of ayahuasca and yet they were living side by side, or not too far, from other tribes that showed they used ayahuasca as a central part of their spiritual life. In the 1900s, ayahuasca religions became widespread in South America, and recently its use has become global. The Peruvian Amazon cities of Iquitos, Pucallpa, Tarapoto and Lamas have numerous practitioners of a traditional vegetalista ayahuasca tradition which is very traditional. Beginning in the 1980s, ayahuasca retreat centers began to draw large numbers of seekers and now they are in abundance in Peru, other parts of South America, and all over the world. Many Europeans and Americans became excited about the potentials of this potent plant medicine.
Ayahuasca or yage ceremonies also have continued in Ecuador and other parts of South America. In the Brazilian Amazon, ayahuasca churches formed in the 1930s and 1940s. Raimundo Itineu Serra originated an ayahuasca religion with Christian influences called Santo Daime. Daniel Pereira de Matos formed the Barquinha ayahuasca religion which also has Christian orientation. Jose Gabriel de Costa formed the Uniao do Vegetal religion in Brazil in the 1960s, which is a more independent ayahuasca religion and has branches in many countries, as does the Santo Daime ayahuasca church. The taitas of the Putumayo-Coqueta region of Columbia also observes a traditional use of ayahuasca.
The deep ayahuasca journey, like other psychedelics, can reveal a threshold between life and death, an awareness at times with consciousness beyond personality, and also can reveal trauma and details with personality side by side. Practitioners call it the vine of the soul, and it can go beyond the rational mind and reveal states of awareness beyond the ego.
Recent scientific research:
Psychedelic or hallucinogenic plants and drugs are now experiencing wider acceptance in the U.S. and Europe because of their ability to help with psychotherapy and to help promote spiritual experience. Recently, there has been a psychedelic research boom in Europe and the United States. Many centers to research and administer therapies are being opened in England and the United States. New York University’s psilocybin cancer anxiety study demonstrated the benefits of psilocybin for people facing the anxiety of serious illness. In April of 2019, the Centre for Psychedelic Research opened at Imperial College London. In September of 2019, the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research opened at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
A great deal of important research took place before the 1970s, but it would have to meet more rigorous standards to be accepted in today’s scientific setting. Because of unsettling enthusiasm in an unfamiliar society, the dangers of these medicines were not carefully considered by influential pioneers like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. The potential for a breakthrough was lost in the concern for safety, and the fear and suspicion led to the drug wars.
Scholars such as Huston Smith, Ram Dass, and Gordon Wasson have been among the advocates for the transformative potential of psychedelics from the 1960s. Dr. Stanislav Grof and numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists and other scientists, remained interested in the science and healing potential of psychedelics. Dr. Grof’s books remain some of the most well-researched in the field, and he has a vast amount of experience. His work clearly demonstrates the ability of psychedelics to play a positive role in encouraging neuroplasticity, spontaneity, and a desire to live in accordance with good principles and priorities that afford deeper meaning.
In 1979, there was a great book that came out by Lester Grinspoon, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and James B. Bakalar, an attorney, called Psychedelics Reconsidered. Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, an ethnobotanist, frequently wrote with Albert Hofmann, the chemist. But the actual experience with human beings using psychedelics suffered a long absence.
As Michael Pollan’s recent book, How To Change Your Mind, describes, some of the work the underground psychonauts, those who had decided to continue working and participating without legal authority. Ralph Metzner, one of the enthusiasts for the spiritual potential for psychedelics, explained in Allies for Awakening that he did so despite the risks, due to his conviction that the psychedelic plants and drugs offered physical, mental and spiritual healing.
There were some psychiatrists in Europe, including about thirty Swiss psychiatrists, who were doing clinical work with LSD and MDMA, which also had become illegal in the U.S. in 1985, for treatment of various psychiatric conditions. Basically, however, there was a hiatus in research into the potential of psychedelics to help promote spiritual experience and wellbeing for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, in South America, the indigenous peoples of Peru, Columbia and Ecuador pursued religion using ayahuasca, a naturally-occurring psychedelic brew. As their practices drew thousands of European and American people who experienced the healing potential of ayahuasca, and the ayahuasca churches of Brazil also began to flourish, their practices became protected by law. These practices did not present an impression of social upheaval or disruption of social order and they have managed to grow in influence.
The pioneer scientists and advocates of today built upon the work of the devoted scientists from those of the past, and elicited their participation in the exciting new projects. Hopefully, with the benefit of past experience, the potential benefits will be promoted and the dangerous pitfalls will be identified and avoided.
Recent studies have begun to find exciting results about the neuroscience of psychedelics. Psychedelics seem to promote neuroplasticity, the vital connections with neurons, and help enhance communication within the brain. This helps people recover from trauma, overcome addiction and repetitive thought patterns that can lead to depression. Psychedelics also seem to offer deeply meaningful experiences. We are at the threshold of understanding about how the psychedelics work and what they can do.
Two psychiatrists, Charles Grob, who is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Rick Strassman, who is affiliated with the University of New Mexico, obtained permission to use psilocybin and DMT for alleviating pain and depression for end-stage cancer patients around 1996. They also had successful results from a Phase I pilot study on psilocybin for treatment of anxiety in cancer patients. Dr. Strassman researched the effects of hallucinogens on neurotransmitters in the 1990s, which led to his very successful book in 2001, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
Dr. Grob has published works about research using major psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca in 1996 and in 1998. In 2005, he published work showing positive results from research with psilocybin involving people suffering anxiety from advanced-stage cancer for MAPS. Dr. Grob has stressed that when psychedelics are used in socially-sanctioned settings, consistently with community standards and as part of culturally cohesive practices, the potential of entheogens can be observed, and the substantial risks of adverse reactions can be minimized. Dr. Grob and colleagues published results of successful studies with psilocybin in 2011, in the Archives of General Psychiatry, that showed the ability of this psychedelic to ease anxiety about death in subjects with advanced-stage cancer.
In 2006, there was a major development in the field, which has helped it flourish since then. The journal Psychopharmacology published an article in July of 2006 by Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and other researchers, William A. Richards, U. McCann and Robert Jesse. It was titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” (187: 268–383). Research was promoted by Bob Jesse of the Council for Spiritual Practices, a former executive at Oracle. Mr. Jesse has been a very influential source of information and scientific funding that has shed light on the beneficial use of entheogens. He produced a 2015 documentary film, A New Understanding; The Science of Psilocybin.
David Nichols founded the Heffter Research Institute, which advocates for more research into psychedelics. One study that Heffter funded at the University of Arizona around 2013 concluded that psilocybin therapy had helped relieve symptoms for a small sample of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Around 2014, Mr. Nichols began consulting with Compass Pathways, founded by George Goldsmaith and Dr. Ekaterina Malievskaia, which are providing experience and protocols and standard dosages of psilocybin, for a therapeutic system of psychedelic therapy. Compass had success with 216 patients in its Phase 2B trials, and planned to follow up with results by early 2021, hoping to have the treatment on track to seek FDA approval a couple of years later.
Rick Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in 1986 to help promote the potential for psychedelic therapy. It receives funding from the Psychedelic Science Founders Collaborative, which also funds the Usona Institute. Dr. Doblin states, “The rise of the for-profit psychedelic pharma efforts are a sign of our success over the last 33 years in changing the political dynamics at the FDA, changing the public attitudes toward this, and making it possible.”
The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative has helped raise $ 63 million for drug trials, and will fund research through Usona Institute and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Some of the research into the potential benefits of psychedelics includes a review of studies published online in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by a team of researchers from Brazil and Spain. They analyzed 18 studies into personality changes with use of psychedelics that were conducted between 1985 and 2016. They focused specifically on the serotonergic drugs, drugs that have structures similar to that of the neurotransmitter serotonin, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and ayahuasca. They found that people using these psychedelics, even as few as one time, would report higher rates of “openness” which is one of the five main personality traits in psychology. It includes appreciation of new experiences, attentiveness to inner feelings and intellectual curiosity.
In 2016, a Johns Hopkins University study led by Dr. Roland Griffiths released results of research studies that had an 80 % success rate with use of psilocybin to help reduce anxiety around death and help people be open to perspective of an afterlife. The Johns Hopkins work enlisted the help of Bill Richards, a psychologist in Baltimore who had been involved in the earlier psychedelic research, to work as a clinician and train guides to make certain that harm would be minimized and the potential breakthroughs promoted.
Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March, is a philanthropist and the founder of the Beckley Foundation. Ms. Feilding was a consultant who helped Jamaica decide to make psychedelic mushrooms legal. There is a psychedelic mushroom research facility operated by Field Trip Ventures at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.
The Beckley Foundation has helped fund research on psychedelics in therapy at Imperial College London and King’s College London. Ms. Fielding has been active with her foundation beginning in 1996 to advocate and fund initiatives involving psychedelics. She has emphasized the need to ensure that these experiments would have strict methodology to evaluate the efficacy of the therapy. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Division of Brain Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London. Dr. David Nut, a neuropharmacologist at Imperial College London, is the deputy head of the project and has been involved with helping run the clinical trials.
In a study conducted by Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London has conducted psilocybin research showing outstanding success in treatment of patients with severe depression that had been resistant to therapy. The research showed that all of them reported scores below the level of moderate depression afterward, and a significant reduction that lasted until the five-week follow-up evaluation. Even six months later there were significant benefits from that one psychedelic therapy session, averaging slightly above the threshold for moderate depression. Before this trial, however, they all had shown little to no improvement with the benefit of more traditional treatment.
The Imperial College London research on the neuroscience of psychedelics has included fMRI scans of patients’ brains after taking psilocybin showed reduced blood flow and resting activity in the amygdala, which is often overactive in depression and anxiety. The imaging studies also showed greater flexibility in the connections between brain networks. The medicine seems to help part of the brain sort of reintegrate into less confined patterns on psilocybin, or “reset” itself.
Published articles on psilocybin in peer reviewed medical journals have increased in recent years. Dr. Francisco Moreno M.D. Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine was the primary author of a study published in 2006 investigating the potential use of psilocybin in the treatment of people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. He states that in 2018, there were 76 published articles on psilocybin in peer reviewed medical journals. There were already 15 journal articles in early 2020 published on the topic of psilocybin and listed on PubMed.
In 2016, studies led by psychologist Anthony Bossis at New York University Medical School, and Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, showed promising results in clinical trials in patients with terminal cancer.
In September 2019, Johns Hopkins University announced its Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Johns Hopkins University has published good results from a pilot study in 2014 on using psychedelics to help people quit smoking, and Phase II of the study was begun in 2015. New York University’s Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study is being led by Stephen Ross, M.D., Anthony Bossis, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Guss, M.D., and is producing careful studies into research on using psilocybin to help people with serious cancer diagnoses facing the anxiety of death. It also had similar findings of success in trials to determine the potential for psilocybin to help reduce anxiety around death. There have been hundreds of trials with psilocybin at New York University and at Johns Hopkins University. There was a study showing psilocybin was efficient in treating depression at the University of Texas Science Center at Houston.
The journal Scientific Reports reported a study by researchers at the University of Exeter and the University College London that showed people who had used ayahuasca in the prior year reported higher levels of well-being than individuals who did not use psychedelics, and lower levels of problematic alcohol use than those who had taken other psychedelics. The research is showing the benefit of psychedelics in helping with resistant depression and promotion of spiritual experience, to ease the fear of death, and limit the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Some of the people who benefit from psychedelic medicines may overcome past trauma, or they may live lives more fully invested in the activities that bring joy or the work that manifests greater creativity. Individuals using psychedelic medicines outside therapeutic may serve to promote “the betterment of well people,” to use the term of Robert Jesse. The experiences can help people feel inspired to contribute to their communities, participate in sustainable projects, raise families and deepen relations, and humbly devote themselves to positive socially-responsible work.
In July, 2020, the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation announced a multi-site clinical trial to be led by Dr. Grob and Dr. Bossis to study the effects of psilocybin to ease existential distress for patients with serious illness. It will be funded by a $ 1.75 million donation by an anonymous donor. In February, 2021, Dr. Grob and Jim Grigsby will release the first formal textbook on psychedelics in medicine, which they have edited, titled Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens.
Legal analysis of religious use of psychedelics:
To understand the constitutional protection available in the United States for religious use of entheogens or psychedelics, we should remember the social upheaval that caused the first culture wars of my generation, as a reaction to the anti-war and civil rights movement, and look a little at what happened to the law.
Regulation of medicine began in many ways with the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906, which prohibited adulteration and mislabeling of foods and drugs. Many patent medicines were falsely labeled and had undisclosed ingredients. The Eighteenth Amendment was adopted in 1919, banning the sale, transport, manufacture or consumption of alcohol, and was enforced by the Volstead Act. Public health programs and regulation of the practice of medicine developed by the mid-1920s, leading to a standard level of practice, and helped reduce infant mortality and improve health. By 1930s, improved hygiene and an emphasis on medical training and service led to an increase in life expectancy.
Psilocybin and other psychedelics remain in the most restricted category today under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the US 1970 Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 UK Misuse of Drugs Act, among others. The Vienna Convention of 1971 suggested a scheduling system for all 131 agreeing countries to follow, classifying drugs into categories of harm and the laws controlling psychotropic substances are part of that. The Vienna Convention was directed toward the manufacturing of synthetic substances, but most countries have applied it broadly to psilocybin, mescaline-containing cactus plants, and the plants composing the natural psychedelic ayahuasca. Places like Oakland and Denver have had success in passing ordinances to remove enforcement of restrictions on psilocybin, which is a schedule I drug under federal law, imposing unreasonable and harsh punishments for its possession and sale.
In 2006, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous (8–0) decision, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), which upheld the right of practitioners of a religious group that had a branch in New Mexico to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. The Court held that a church, a branch of the Brazilian Uniao do Vegetal church, was properly granted an injunction under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act against criminal prosecution for its sacramental use of a hallucinatory substance, because the federal government had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in prohibiting that use under the Controlled Substances Act. The state interest in regulation was not deemed to be sufficient to burden the right to religious experience due to practices that help minimize the potential for harm in supportive settings.
The Supreme Court refused to recognize protection for use of peyote as a sacrament in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). Two members of the Native American Church of North America brought suit when they had been disqualified from receiving unemployment benefits on the basis of misconduct because their use of peyote was illegal. There was a departure from the traditional protection of activity, even when it is declared to be criminal conduct, when it unduly intrudes upon a fundamental right, such as the right to freedom of worship and religious observance. The majority of justices found that the state’s criminal prohibition of use of peyote was a legitimate basis for prosecuting and otherwise burdening the sincere religious conduct.
In the dissenting opinion of Justice Blackmun, the minority emphasized the traditional requirement in constitutional cases that a reviewing court strictly scrutinize any state action that unduly intrudes on a fundamental right, and that the state’s action was unjustified. The minority recognized that in enforcing prohibition the state was advancing an interest “in refusing to make an exception for the religious, ceremonial use of peyote.” Id. at 910. The judges in both the majority and in the dissent recognized that peyote had an important role in the religion, although the dissent did not require the usage of the sacrament to be central to the religion in order to be afforded constitutional protection.
The dissenting opinion in Smith noted that studies and treatises, and previous court decisions had identified the beneficial role of peyote, including strengthening the members’ sense of purpose and their community standing. The dissent stressed that peyote offered an essential ritual of their religion and that “the peyote plant embodies their deity, and eating it is as act of worship and communion.” It offered healing of body, mind and spirit, a means to communicate with the Great Spirit, and was a teacher which “teaches the way to spiritual life through living in harmony and balance with the forces of creation.” Id. at 919 (quoting O. Stewart, Peyote Religion 327–330 (1987)).
The dissenting opinion in Smith emphasized the “carefully circumscribed ritual context in which respondents used peyote,” which was “far removed from the irresponsible and unrestricted recreational use of unlawful drugs.” Id. at 913. It carefully distinguished its use from the state’s purported interest in abolishing drug trafficking. The dissenting opinion observed that the sincerity of the adherents had never been at issue. The state had not prosecuted the individuals and most states, and society in general, had chosen to protect the use of peyote by the Native American Church. It noted that the Drug Enforcement Administration exempted the Native American Church from the application of Schedule I drug laws and registration requirements for use of peyote, and that the state offered “no evidence that the religious use of peyote has ever harmed anyone.” Id. at 911–12.
