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HIGH TEA --THE BENCH
by Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker Magazine, December 20, 2004
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.”ALSO
UDV Case Archive |
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