Is IT RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION?

LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST ENTHEOGENS: Is IT RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION? Eric E. Sterling iton a quiet, sunny beach. Watch and listen to the waves rolling in. Watch and listen to the terns and gulls wheel and dive. Feel the sand blow up against your legs, gritty and rough. Here is peace and exquisite Sbeauty. The wind blows across the dark water, moving the waves along. At points, a gust whips the water to foam, advancing the top of the wave. The top of the wave is blown off and the wave is transformed. The addition of energy is profoundly transformative. The movement of waves is one of the oldest forms of energy in human experience, but when additional forms of energy are applied, a person can see a wave in a new light. Throughout existence, the judicious addition of energy has been transformative, and has exposed God at work in creation, as the Great Designer of the interplay of the forces of life, as the Cosmic Choreographer. While everyone has the capacity to have direct experience of the divine, I don't think it comes easily, or the same way, for everyone. There are many techniques (or what we might fashionably call technologies) for adding energy, for inviting this experience, such as prayer, fasting, chanting, drumming, dance, or medi- tation - and these include the sacramental use of psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, peyote, or other entheogens. All of these practices can change a person's interior chemistry. The plants and chemicals which facilitate awareness of the presence of the divine are called "entheogens," from entheas, inspired, from en + theas (god). Some entheogens may be endogenous - produced or released within the body by prayer or by physical activity. Other entheogens may, when 165 ENTHEOGENS ANDTHE FUTURE OF RELIGION ingested, stimulate the release of internal psychic or spiritual energies that are usually held in check by habit or convention. In a run down neighborhood in an American city - in what used to be called a "slum" - gaunt girls solicit men. They offer a quick, meaningless, and dangerous sex act in exchange for a "rock." One cheap pleasure in exchange for another. Some of these girls have children - but they haven't seen their babies in hours or days or months. Nearby, boys with military weapons patrol the corner drug market or the armored crack houses where vials of crack are exchanged for cash. And the cash, collected in fives and tens and twenties, is gathered, bundled, shipped, trucked, j70wn, and eventually laundered, spreading out around the world in bribes and corruption. From the pathos of the streets and the brutality of the market to the peddling of influence, the buying of businesses and politicians, the greed becomes power - one of the great evil powers of our times. Working to fight the greed and to protect the young - indeed to protect the nation and the economy - policymakers and law enforcement officers are fully engaged in a "war on drugs." With these honorable motives, the agents of the DEA, the FBI, the BATF, the Customs Service, and local police struggle to enforce the law. But the law, written and rewritten by office holders acutely sensitive to public fears - sweeps broadly, ever more broadly, to arm the police and to cover all "drugs," making little distinction among them. Thus the powerful com- pounds used for millennia to seek the divine, including peyote (whose active ingredient is mescaline) and psilocybin and their newer cousins LSD and MDMA, are banned. Peyote, for example, was being used religiously by the Huichol people of North Central Mexico by the second century C.E. In 1620, the Spanish Inquisition denounced peyote as diabolic and made its use illegal. Mexican Indian peyotists were tortured and killed. By the 1880s, religious peyote use spread into North America but was subject to suppression by U.S. authorities and Christian missionaries. However, by the second decade of this century, the use of peyote was organized in the incorporation of the Native American Church. But even though some "sacred fireplaces" of the Native American Church adopted Jesus, the crucifix, the Bible and other Christian elements, many Western states enacted laws against the use of peyote. Peyote was never used "recreationally" or as a "drug of abuse," it was always used in religious practice. Peyote was classified by law enforcement authorities like a narcotic drug, not to stop its abuse, but to stop its religious use. However, because the federal authorities acknowledge the sovereignty of the Indian tribes and have a trustee relationship with them, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and later the Drug Enforcement Administration extended regulatory protection to Indian religious use of peyote. Still, many states continued to prosecute 166 LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST ENTHEOGENS IERIC E. STERLING Indians, as well as non-Indians for use, possession, or distribution of peyote. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Employment Division v. Smith (a case originating with the religious peyote use by members of the Native Ameri- can Church) abandoned well-established standards of protection for the free exercise of religion and ruled that religious peyote use was no longer protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Religious leaders around the nation were shocked and, in response, created the Coalition for the Free Exercise of Religion. America's organized religions spoke with one voice in convincing Congress to renounce Employment Divisionv. Smith by overwhelm- ingly enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (PL 103-141)'. By enacting the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 (PL 103-344), Congress specifically remedied the Supreme.Court's rul- ing in Smith, giving Native Americans (but only Native Americans) the right nationwide to use peyote in their spiritual practices. Congress recognized that use of peyote in ritual settings is not harmful. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (as amended by the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986, PL 99-570, sec. 1202) still broadly prohibits even the controlled use of entheogens for the most sacred and holy purposes. This is because the drug laws neither distinguish the entheogens from drugs like cocaine and heroin, nor their sacramental use from "recreational" drug-taking. In their commit- ment to reducing drug abuse, lawmakers and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its allied agencies in Federal, State, and local governments and around the world are tragically impeding the responsible religious practices of many gentle people and using against them the extreme measures developed to combat gangsters. The world of gangsters, cartels, and mafias - and their law enforcement opponents - is a dark, dark world. It is a world filled with guns, secrets and spies. Among the most valued persons in this world are those who can gather intelligence, those who have mastered the craft of espionage, the Mata Hari's, the seducers, those whose gift or expertise is to win the trust of suspicious people for the explicit purpose of betraying that trust. And of course it is easier to practice this "art" on those who are more trusting, such as those who are peaceful and spiritually inclined. Those who make, cultivate or distribute entheogens have become the training targets for the heavy artillery of the "war on drugs." Having seen the guns of the crack dealers, the skid rows where the junk- ies shuffle, the hospitals where inconsolable babies cry, the men and women of the government forces and their allies are convinced that they are the "good guys," and it is their noble mission to "take out" the "bad guys." Empowered with broad statutes, regulations, and court orders, equipped with surveillance 167 ENTHEOGENS AND THE FUTURE OF REUGION equipment, wiretaps, and techniques of coercion, the drug enforcement world brings these forces to bear not only on gangsters, but on people who produce, distribute, and use entheogens - the generally nontoxic and nonaddictive substances that, when properly employed, can open the way to the higher reality. Many of our government agents were brought up in churches and syna- gogues on Main Street. They learned their Bible lessons. They have a faith and they are comfortable living it. Many of them learned that religious tolerance is a fundamental American value. If someone else goes to a different church, or to a temple or a mosque and worships their God by another name, such as Allah, or with different words or prayers, they have a right to do so. But in practice, the extent of our religious tolerance is oft-en very limited. In conceiving of and approving the First Amendment, the framers of our Con- stitution wanted to avoid the tragic wars of the Seventeenth Century in which one group of Christians warred against another group of Christians. But even with the First Amendment, religious-based violence has been frequent in the United States. Most Christians now recognize that it isn't right, after all, for Christians to threaten or force other Christians (or non-Christians, for that matter) to convert upon penalty of imprisonment or death. Today, there is what some fear is - and others are proud to call- a "cul- ture war" which advocates "preserving judeo-Christian values." The voices for toleration of differences are few, muted or stifled. Every society wants to preserve the values of responsibility and care for others, and of self-respect and care for self. But to foster responsibility and self-respect in entheogenic religious practices, the government's agents have not been content to merely teach or convince - as is the right of any citizen, and by the lights of many of their faiths, their duty.

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