Religious Convictions

Table of Contents to “Religious Convictions”

What happens when religious freedom runs headlong into the mighty “war on drugs?” Learn more about this manuscript.

Far from the polished marble floors and stagnant elevators of American courtrooms, remote from 100-channel televisions and agitprop images…

— A Note on Nomenclature

Entheogens & Early Religion

State v. Big Sheep

For roughly four decades following the Big Sheep decision, the latent conflict between certain drug prohibition laws and the religious…

On the evening of April 28, 1962, a group of Navajo members of the Native American Church of California gathered in the desert near…

On August 24, 1964, the same day that the California Supreme Court issued its decision in the Woody case, it also issued an opinion in…

Less than two years after the California Supreme Court decided Woody and Grady, another entheogen case was decided in California, this…

In 1966, the same year that the Mitchell case was decided in California, an entheogen case reached the Supreme Court of North Carolina.1…

As we have seen, the early US entheogen legal cases were all state or tribal cases. This is because up until 1970, the federal government…

The first federal law to comprehensively regulate entheogens was enacted in July 1965, and went into effect on February 1, 1966.1 The law…

While there was no general discussion of the roles that some of the prohibited entheogens played in ancient and modern religions, a…