God & Peyote

The art of deciding constitutional questions commonly means weighing competing values. The balance is often delicate, as the California Supreme Court has just shown in answering yes to a weird question: Can a man beat a narcotics rap by pinning it on God?

While performing a religious ceremony in a desert hogan near Needles, Calif., three Navajo Indian members of the Native American Church were arrested for possession of peyote, a non-habit-forming cactus derivative that stimulates visions for those who chew it. Convicted, the Indians carried a novel appeal to the state's highest court. As honest seekers of spiritual hallucination, they claimed exemption from California's drug laws under the First Amendment clause guaranteeing free exercise of religion.

Did the drug laws really abridge the defendants' religious freedom? Yes, found the court. "Peyotism" goes back to at least 1560; it is the central sacrament of a semi-Christian church whose members (estimated at anywhere from 30,000 to 250,000) believe that peyote puts partakers in direct contact with God. As the court put it: "To forbid the use of peyote is to remove the theological heart of Peyotism."

Even so, the Supreme Court has long held that government can abridge religious practices (but not religious belief) when a "compelling state interest" demands it. In 1878, the court thus upheld the banning of Mormon polygamy as antisocial (Reynolds v. U.S.). California's attorney general marshaled a similar argument against Peyotism. It not only subverts narcotic-law enforcement, he said, but also "obstructs enlightenment and shackles the Indian to primitive conditions."

Ruling that California has no right to make Navajos conform to "mass society," the court added that peyote is harmless, is permitted in other states and is religiously more crucial than polygamy, without which modern Mormons are thriving. Since Peyotism "presents only slight danger to the state," the court voided the Navajos' convictions. Balancing its dictum, the court simultaneously rejected the appeal of a white, "selfstyled 'peyote preacher'" who made the same claim as the Indians. He must stand trial again, ordered the court, because he "has not proved that his asserted belief was an honest and bona fide one." How far a court should go in exploring the good faith of religious belief may itself raise further legal perplexities.

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