Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use

Citation

Marcus Day (2015), "Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 175-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/DAT-06-2015-0029

The Editors have made a fine attempt at collating a selection of articles spanning traditional and religious uses of various substances currently banned under international conventions.

They address the use and regulation of natural plant-based substances such as peyote, ayahuasca, coca leaf, cannabis, khat and Salvia divinorum. Despite the continued panic of new psychoactive substances, a challenge created largely by internationally sanctioned prohibition of traditional plant-based substances, the contributors of the first eight chapters largely stay within the confines of natural plant variants.

With the exception of Khat, and despite the global nature of cannabis, the articles largely describe the situation in the Americas, where the indigenous use of plants in shamanic and religious rites conflicted with the influence of Abrahamic religions and especially the Roman Catholic Church. The beginnings of the war on drugs was the war of Abrahamic religions vs traditional, more animist or polytheistic religions. As Klein points out in his chapter on Khat, even the UK seeks to invoke Islamic precepts in “just say no” messaging as a way to dissuade Muslims from chewing khat.

Even the violence usually associated with Cocaine and Coca was absent prior to modern era contact with Europeans. The first incidents of violence recorded around the coca plant date back to the initial contact between the indigenous people of the Andean region and Roman Catholic clergy who sought to stop natives from chewing coca. The priests who accompanied the Conquistadors claimed that these substances were an anathema and impediment to salvation of the indigenous persons the missionaries sought to save. To this day the Catholic Church is opposed to the use of any substance that opens the self to self-examination of how we are part of the global conscious. The official catechism of the Church states “The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Drugs constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.”

The authors weave together the traditional arguments supporting the sacramental use of substances adding a dimension only recently on the scene, the human rights basis for drug policy reform, going beyond a strictly freedom of religion context.

David Courtwright, in the Foreword, points out that “ethno-religious drug use remains stuck in the diplomatic and legal quagmire.” He poses issues such as: who is an indigene; what counts as a religion; how long does it take to establish a tradition; what happens when newcomers borrow a tradition or emigrants take it abroad – all discussed and explored by the assembled authors.

The last four chapters divert a bit from the first eight and take on the wider discussion of religion vs spirituality, the right to use, freedom of thought. Amanda Fielding explores the impediments the Drug Conventions pose to scientific research while making the point that cannabis prohibition is the major underpinning of the drug control system. Without Cannabis prohibition, she claims, the system would collapse, unable to sustain itself with so few drug users.

The final chapter by Coomber and Scott points to the failure of the system that sets global standards for substances whose effect is largely determined by the theory set, setting and dose and thus extremely different between individuals in different settings.

As this is a collection of papers by different authors on a common subject, one should expect a bit of repetition in the preamble of each paper as each set the context as their chapters relate to the international drug control conventions. I found the book informative and well-referenced. It makes for interesting reading and a useful desk-top reference. I highly recommend it.