Recognized Churches and Psychedelics

In the United States, a few select groups can legally use an entheogen in their practices. Indigenous people can use peyote in traditional Indigenous religious ceremonies, including those of the Native American Church. (Note: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments, which grants Indigenous people that right, uses the term “Indian” rather than “Indigenous.”) The União do Vegetal can use ayahuasca during its ceremonies. The Church of the Holy Light of the Queen, a church in the Santo Daime tradition in Ashland, Oregon, can also legally use ayahuasca in the United States.

Native American Church

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Native American Church (NAC), which uses peyote as a key component of its religious ceremonies, formed in the Oklahoma Territory. The practice of peyote use spread from southern Texas, where it grows wild, across the United States and eventually into Canada. During a time when many Indigenous groups were losing their land and being forced into residential schools, peyote became a way to heal trauma and maintain cultural autonomy. 

The National Council of Native American Churches describes the purpose of the practice as a way to build community: “[w]hile peyote plays a central role in the [NAC] service, it is not to induce visions (per the common misunderstanding), but to bring people closer to their creator and to facilitate healing and fellowship.” An estimated 250,000 NAC practitioners in eighty chapters are spread across North America. 

Since its founding, NAC groups have been targeted by prohibitionists, and NAC members have repeatedly been arrested or had their peyote confiscated. Practitioners have won several legal battles affirming their right to use peyote for religious purposes.

Recently, however, NAC’s access to peyote has been threatened by a shortage of the cactus. Peyote is a slow-growing plant, and it can take a decade or more for a seed to develop into a cactus with enough mescaline for an effective dose. The species has been decimated by a growing demand from non-Indigenous users who want to experience the drug; cattle ranching, agriculture, and oil and gas development on the desert land where peyote grows; and poaching and unsustainable harvesting practices. Because of this, peyote is designated a vulnerable species, and NAC members are trying to save it. The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative owns six hundred acres of land in Texas to grow peyote, promote Indigenous health, and support a sustainably harvested crop that can last generations.

Some members of the NAC have also asked non-Indigenous people to abstain from using peyote. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2020, NAC member Steven Benally said, “Peyote is sacred medicine crucial to our religious identity and the survival of our community. The spiritual healing power it offers is only attainable through Native American protocol. It is intended to nourish the soul in troubled times and inspire our children to become responsible men and women.”

União do Vegetal

The União do Vegetal (UDV) church was founded by José Gabriel da Costa in 1961. Da Costa, also known as Mestre Gabriel, grew up in a largely Catholic society in Bahia, Brazil. (“Mestre” means “teacher” in Portuguese.) As an adult, he became a rubber tapper and moved to a camp in the western Amazon, where he first encountered ayahuasca. Da Costa blended elements of his Catholic upbringing with Judaism, Afro-Brazilian religions, and teachings by the nineteenth-century French spiritist Allan Kardec. Followers often associate da Costa with Jesus, and the UDV defines itself as a “Christian reincarnationist religion.”

In 1965, da Costa moved the UDV to the city of Porto Velho and created a structure for the religion. The UDV is organized around núcleos, congregations of fewer than 150 people led by a representative mestre. During services, members of a núcleo drink ayahuasca, which they call hoasca, and achieve burracheira, an altered state that the UDV compares to religious ecstasy and believes brings practitioners closer to a god-like “Superior force.”  

After da Costa’s death in 1971, the UDV church has continued to grow and operate as a centralized religion. It now claims to have more than twenty-one thousand members in eleven countries around the world. In 2006, in an 8–0 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of UDV church members to use ayahuasca during its ceremonies.

Santo Daime Religion

The Santo Daime religion was founded in the city of Rio Branco in the 1930s by Raimundo Irineu Serra, an Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper who is now referred to as Mestre Irineu. Like the UDV church, Santo Daime theology is a mix of Christianity, Kardecist Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religious practices, and Indigenous shamanism. 

As the rubber industry collapsed in the early 1900s, the economy in the Amazon declined. Many people, including tappers like Irineu Serra and Indigenous people from the Amazon, migrated from the rainforest to urban centers where ayahuasca and Catholic traditions mixed. Irineu Serra believed that after drinking ayahuasca he encountered the Queen of the Forest, whom he equated with the Virgin Mary. Santo Daime sprang out of this content, combining the Indigenous belief that plants have spirits with Christian ideas that teachings originated from the Virgin of Immaculate Conception.

After Irineu Serra’s death in 1971, Santo Daime split into several sects. Some churches follow the teachings of his disciple Sebastião Mota de Melo, known as Padrinho Sebastião. 

Although Santo Daime has a different set of beliefs from those of the UDV church, both use ayahuasca during their ceremonies. Santo Daime followers call ayahuasca daime and believe it’s the blood of Christ, just as wine in the Catholic eucharist is believed to be Christ’s blood. Daime is drunk in group settings where practitioners pray, sing hymns (called icaros), and dance. These rituals are called trabalhos, or works, because they are physically and psychologically demanding. The visions that practitioners experience are understood to be guidance from the spiritual or astral plane.

Santo Daime began to spread throughout Brazil and internationally in the 1980s, and can be found in at least twenty-three countries across the world. In the United States, only one Santo Daime-related group, the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen, has federal permission to import and use ayahuasca.