I wrote a book, especially for psychedelic religious groups, entitled “Creating the Visionary Sanctuary – a Legal and Personnel Guide for Psychedelic Religious Groups.” In it, I share the knowledge I’ve gained over many years as a federal public defender, an Oregon state prosecutor, and as general counsel for a major ayahuasca church and an interfaith union of psychedelic churches. I’ve faced off against the US DOJ in about 60 criminal cases and spent five years fighting the GOJ on behalf of psychedelic churches. I distilled everything I learned from these experiences into a compact guide that teaches what I call the third way to deal with the challenge of using psychedelics to foster spiritual growth.
The challenge, of course, arise from the federal and state Controlled Substances Acts, that criminalized the possession, sale, or use of all the psychedelic substances in Timothy Leary’s medicine chest, period. The federal CSA was enacted by a panicked Congress trying to keep a lid on the campus rebellion sweeping the nation’s colleges and universities. Anti-war, anti-establishment lifestyles, bra burnings, draft card burnings, all seem to be evil sprouting from the psychedelic brains of the psychedelicized brains of the youth.
Now, those young people are my age, and some of us form the bedrock of support for the eradication of these prohibition laws that have always been a form of big brother mind control. Given government hostility to the freedom of consciousness that embraces psychedelics for religious, therapeutic, and research purposes, people who want to use psychedelics usually see only two paths, that of the criminal and that of the saint. The criminal relies on stealth and hopes to evade prosecution. The saint places faith in their good intentions in using psychedelics to give them karmic protection against prosecution.
In my view, neither way provides a proper basis for the positive mindset that is beneficial to psychedelic practice. Feeling like a felon, knowing your safety is based on stealth or faith, places your psychedelic experience on an unstable foundation, because you lack an understanding of your relationship to the state, and you simply hope on the favorable odds that you won’t get caught.
So what is the third way? Call it the middle way. It’s the way followed by a person who knows that their psychedelic use is protected by the First Amendment. People who know they’re not criminals, because their use of psychedelics is protected, free exercise under the First Amendment. But also, people who are aware of the legal risks, and know how the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and the Fifth Amendment right to counsel are the perimeter guards of their First Amendment free exercise rights. Such persons will rely on their right to counsel in any interaction with law enforcement, and will already have hired their attorney long before the need to call them arises.
In addition to sharing my lawful approach to the religious use of psychedelics, I reveal the entire personnel structure of a functioning church that shares a psychedelic sacrament, and explain the process of growing such an organization. Purchase a copy of Creating the Visionary Sanctuary using the Amazon link below.