The Vine and the Law
Ayahuasca Churches and Religious Freedom in America

About this book:

In 1999, federal agents seized three drums of a dark Amazonian tea from a Santa Fe church—contraband to the DEA, but holy communion to the congregants of the União do Vegetal. What followed was a seven-year constitutional siege that pitted the full force of the War on Drugs against the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court victory that stunned legal scholars and rewrote the boundaries of the First Amendment. *The Vine and the Law* is the definitive account of that landmark battle, tracing the improbable journey of two Brazilian ayahuasca churches—UDV and Santo Daime—from the rubber camps of the Amazon to the marble corridors of the highest court in the land.

Drawing on sealed court records, private church archives, and intimate testimony, this narrative nonfiction masterpiece reveals how ordinary citizens—truck drivers, professors, grandmothers—risked prison to defend their sacrament, and how government lawyers were forced to confront the limits of their own authority. You'll witness federal judges grappling with ethnobotany and theology, the DEA tangled in its own bureaucratic contradictions, and a conservative Court ruling 8–0 that religious liberty cannot be sacrificed to drug war absolutism. It is a legal thriller, a spiritual history, and a constitutional drama all at once.

Today, as psychedelic therapy surges and cities decriminalize plant medicines, the precedent forged by these churches remains the bedrock of legal psychedelic practice in America. *The Vine and the Law* tells the story of how a vine from the deep forest cracked open the Controlled Substances Act—and what that victory means for the future of spiritual freedom in an age of prohibition's retreat. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the First Amendment, the drug war's true costs, or the strange, stubborn power of faith to move the law.