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Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: southern New Jersey
Posts: 3,183
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From the New Yorker, Dec 20-27ec
THE BENCH
HIGH TEA
Issue of 2004-12-20 and 27
Posted 2004-12-13
The fortune of the Bronfman family, the owner of Seagram’s, originated with a Montreal bootlegging business during Prohibition. (The name “Bronfman” means “whiskey man” in Yiddish.) A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court took up a long-running controversy involving a third-generation Bronfman and another mind-altering substance, this one imported from the Amazon rain forest rather than from Canada.
The case began with a small religious group known as O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniăo do Vegetal (“Central Beneficial Spirit United from the Plants”), which was founded in Brazil in 1961 and has about eight thousand members there. The religion blends traditional Christian theology with indigenous beliefs, and a central tenet of the faith is the drinking of a tea known as hoasca. According to church doctrine, members can fully perceive God only by drinking the tea. Hoasca (pronounced “wass-ca”) is brewed from two plants that grow in the Amazon River Basin, and it contains DMT, a hallucinogen that the American government regards as a controlled substance.
In the early nineties, Jeffrey Bronfman, a forty-nine-year-old ecological activist, began making trips to the rain forest. There he became fascinated by U.D.V., as the religion is known, and first drank hoasca tea. “I was very moved and inspired by what I witnessed,” he wrote later, in a declaration to the courts. Bronfman learned Portuguese and trained to become a mestre, which is the title given to the clergy in the faith. In 1994, he became the president of the American branch of U.D.V. There are now about a hundred and thirty congregants in the United States, about fifty of them in Sante Fe, where Bronfman lives.
As a mestre, Bronfman presides at twice-monthly Saturday-night services. He gives each U.D.V. member a glass of the tea, and then, after a prayer in Portuguese, the congregation drinks together. The ensuing service involves ritual singing, “individualized contemplation,” and “a more informal period of unstructured conversation among the congregants.” Bronfman also writes that “U.D.V. sessions are not characterized by entertainment, frivolity, or pleasure-seeking.” (Terence McKenna, a Berkeley-educated ethnobotanist who is an authority on DMT, has written that using such a substance brings a person into contact with entities that he calls “self-transforming machine elves”; for Alan Watts, a cohort of Timothy Leary’s, using DMT was like “being fired out of the nozzle of an atomic cannon.” At any rate, it’s no Chivas.)
On May 21, 1999, federal agents raided Bronfman’s office at the church and seized about thirty gallons of hoasca tea. No one was arrested, but the group had to stop using the tea. In response, the U.D.V. and Bronfman sued the federal government, charging that the prohibition on hoasca violated their right to freedom of religion.
Through almost five years of litigation, which has produced hundreds of pages of decisions from several different courts, the U.D.V. has won nearly every round. “This Court cannot find . . . that the government has proven that Hoasca poses a serious health risk to the members of the U.D.V. who drink the tea in a ceremonial setting,” Judge James A. Parker wrote in an early decision. Last month, with all of the active judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit present, the court ruled, eight to five, that U.D.V. could continue to use hoasca. Last month, though, the Bush Administration filed an emergency application for a temporary stay of that ruling, arguing that it could open the door for religious-based claims for marijuana, LSD, and heroin. On December 1st, Justice Stephen Breyer, who supervises the Tenth Circuit, granted the government’s request for a stay. “It’s maddening,” Nancy Hollander, one of U.D.V.’s lawyers, said last week. “We keep winning, but we can’t win.”
Bronfman writes in his declaration (he declined to be interviewed) that the investigation, and the consequent loss of hoasca, “has been a time of almost indescribable stress and sadness for me. The effect of all this has produced tremendous strain on my family, my personal health and, to some degree, my religious faith.”
For all Bronfman’s passion, it seems unlikely that even a victory in the Supreme Court will lead to a surge in the tea’s popularity as a recreational drug. “I tried it three times in Brazil,” Richard Glen Boire, who is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, a libertarian-leaning think tank that has closely monitored the case, said last week. “It just tastes horrendous. Almost everyone who drinks it throws up. Ninety per cent of the people who try it will have the most horrendous physical experience that they have ever had in their lives. It’s terrifying, but kind of profound, too.”
— Jeffrey Toobin
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
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