The “Psychedelic Sixties” & Early Seventies (1967–1975)
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 had no comprehensive drug prohibition laws. Marijuana was effectively outlawed in 1937,1 and there were early federal laws prohibiting the use of opium, but prior to the mid-1960s the federal government had expressed little interest in criminalizing the use of most other drugs, perhaps because earlier federal efforts at alcohol prohibition had gone so poorly.
While the early cases were, for the most part, decided within the four corners of the facts in each specific case, the birth of the “psychedelic sixties” and the massive media attention given to the use of LSD and marijuana by America’s sons and daughters, led many courts to express fears that granting any one person a religious defense to drug use (with the exception of peyote-using Indian members of the Native American Church), would prove unmanageable. What would be left of drug prohibition laws if people could evade them simply by claiming that their drug use was motivated by religious belief? This fear reached its highest expression in a case involving Timothy Leary, decided just one year after the federal government outlawed most of the well-known entheogens.
Notes
1 Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, Pub. L. №75–238, 50 Stat. 551 (1937) RGB: need to confirm this.
