About “Religious Convictions”
What happens when religious freedom runs headlong into the mighty “War on Drugs?”
Nearly two decades ago, in an effort to answer the question, “how have the courts handled religious freedom claims by entheogen users?” I spent hundreds of hours carefully collecting, reading and analyzing all the published US legal cases in which a person presented a religious defense to criminal “drug” charges.
Despite the many hours devoted to the project, it’s long been abandoned to the dark recesses of my hard drive. Supposedly, Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” I don’t consider this manuscript to be “art,” but the general sentiment is fitting.
Despite its abandoned raw form in many places, I have decided to “publish” it as it stands. While rough-hewn, it may be of some value to others as we enter what some have called a “psychedelic renaissance.”
The manuscript will be published serially here on Medium. The first post was made on September 15, 2020, and a new section will be posted each week. All sections can be found in the table of contents.
Thanks to Kevin Feeney, who assisted me in some of the early editing circa 2004. As noted above, however, this is an unfinished work. If you are interested in helping to fix mistakes and/or bring it to a more “finished” state, please contact me.
In the pages to follow, I do not advance a grand theory that claims to make sense of this genre of cases. For years, I thought such a unified theory would emerge upon close inspection, and I delayed the publication of this book for decades, struggling to tease out such a theory, or to shape it around the cases like a copper smith might hammer a bowl around a complex form. The result was sometimes an interesting bowl, but it never held water. In other moments of energized disgust — particularly after the Smith decision, which was “handed down” during my final year (1990) at U.C, Berkeley’s School of Law— I struggled to wring a legal theory from my own set of predilections and personal grievances.
Although I do not believe that there is any legitimate cohesive theory that can explain these cases, this book is much more than a cabinet of legal curiosities. Our national identity has, in large part, been shaped by our loudly pronounced commitment to religious freedom, and (for many of the recent decades), by an equally loud declaration of war on drugs. On the macro level, the cases examined in this book are like a prism that refracts both of these aspects of our collective identity. At the same time, the experience of “religion” and the experience of entheogens (aka psychedelics) are deeply individualistic and individuating. Both can be fundamental forces in the shaping of our individual personalities and world views, sounding another major chord in the archetypal concept of America’s embrace of individualism and self-determination.
Thus, the cases at the center of this book, are cauldrons that have been asked to contain two immensely powerful and important forces — forces that affect everything from the quantum level of deeply personal consciousness to the macro level of national identity and social organization.
= Richard Glen Boire, 2020
