Last April, I posted that the Federal Government were attempting to block members of a church in New Mexico from drinking hallucinogenic tea as part of a ritual. The sacred tea, hoasca, contains the powerful hallucinogen dimethyltrptamine (DMT). Today, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government has no business messing with the church’s method for communicating with god. They then sent the case back to a federal appeals court. From the Associated Press:
(Chief Justice John) Roberts said that the Bush administration had not met its burden under a federal religious freedom law to show that it could ban “the sect’s sincere religious practice.”
The chief justice had also been skeptical of the government’s position in the case last fall, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a “zero tolerance approach.”