Last Friday the U.S. Attorney for Hawaii announced grand jury indictments of 14 people for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Not earthshaking news, but for the fact that the individuals freely admit what they are doing, and claim their activity is protected because they are part of a church, called the “THC Ministry.” THC is the abbreviation for the active chemical in marijuana; the THC Ministry proudly uses marijuana smoking as a sacrament.

Roger Christie, age 61, is the chief minister of the church. “We provide cannabis sacraments and we’re happy to do so. And it’s a sacred thing to us. I think that I am a legitimate, exempt ministry,” Christie said. “We’re standing for religious freedom, using cannabis in private, at home or church. And it’s a blessed, beautiful thing.”

U.S. Attorney for Hawaii Florence Nakakuni is unmoved by this argument. “There is a state medical marijuana law. There is no law that protects his allegations of using marijuana religiously,” Nakakuni said. But Nakakuni must know (or if she doesn’t, she should be disbarred) that the Supreme Court of the United States as recently as 2006 unanimously ruled that it was perfectly ok for a group claiming to be a South American Indian religion to import and use a hallucinogenic tea containing an illegal drug called dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Not only is there substantial scientific evidence of the brain damage caused by DMT, but the United States has entered into an international treaty in which we promised the rest of the world to ban it. Doesn’t matter. Every major religious authority, from the Southern Baptists to the Anti-Defamation League, lined up in favor of special breaks for drug abusers, because they (correctly) saw the issue as one of enhancing their own power against that of the elected civil government. So if you or I get high on DMT, we’ll be thrown into prison; because these people say they are God experts and God wants them to break the law, they go free. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict what kind of defense THC Minister Christie is going to present.

To get around the Supreme Court case, the prosecution will have to argue that THC Ministry is not a religion, but a fraud. And what exactly is the difference? A Toronto court is wrestling with exactly this question right now, in a case involving an organization strikingly similar to THC Ministry that calls itself the “Church of the Universe.” Just last month a government expert witness presented a report listing ten factors common to religions, and finding the Church of the Universe lacking in most of them. Defense attorneys quite properly ridiculed her, though, when she admitted that she had never actually spoken to anyone belonging to the Church, but had just read its website. They also quoted William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, who wrote that religion simply “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.”

What none of the reports about either case mention is the Rastafari movement centered in Jamaica, which probably scores pretty well on the ten-factor list. It’s as old as the religion involved in the 2006 case, it has something around a million followers worldwide, and its principal sacrament is the smoking of marijuana. Why don’t the Church of the Universe and the TMC Ministry just claim to be Rastafari affiliates?

The connection between religion and drug use is actually older and deeper than the THC Ministry may imagine. Rock paintings from 7,000-9,000 years ago preserved in the Sahara desert depict religious rituals involving hallucinogenic mushrooms. In one of the scenes, masked dancers hold a mushroom-like object in the right hand, with two parallel lines coming out of the object to reach the central part of the head of the dancer, apparently showing the effect of the mushroom on the mind. Rock paintings from the Stone Age period in eastern Siberia show mushroom gatherers with ornate earrings and an enormous mushroom on their heads, and figures with the stance of people trying to keep their balance. Stone carvings found in Guatemala also point to a mushroom cult which flourished there as long as 3,500 years ago.

When the Aryans moved into the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE, they worshipped a plant they called “Soma,” with hymns indicating their regard for the plant itself as a God. No one knows exactly what plant they were referring to, but some modern scholars are convinced that it was the amanita muscaria mushroom, which produces powerful hallucinogenic effects (although it also might kill you). The urine of a person who has eaten these mushrooms can produce a similar effect. Ancient rites involving drinking the urine from mushroom-drugged priests were common; we can only speculate how many enduring religious revelations had a purely chemical origin.

The Greeks celebrated the “mysteries of Eleusis” at an annual festival a few miles northwest of Athens. Those who had been initiated in the deepest secrets of the mysteries partook of a special potion of barley water, followed by bizarre behavior of which we have only sketchy accounts. Revealing the secrets of the potion or the mystery rites was punishable by death. A plausible explanation accepted by some modern scholars is that the kick in the potion came from ergot, a fungus that grows on cereal grains, which produces chemicals similar to today’s LSD.

The food of the Greek Gods was a mythical substance called “nectar.” Philologist John Allegro speculates that this word derives from “nem-tar,” the Sumerian word for the sacred mushroom.

Zoroaster’s religious visions, which formed the basis of Judaism and from there were incorporated into Christianity, may have been achieved with the assistance of hallucinogenic drugs extracted from the sacred haoma plant. Zoroastrian priests, called “Magi,” had the responsibility of preparing the haoma plant for human consumption.

There are possibly references to hallucinogens in the Bible as well. Adam and Eve get in trouble for having eaten of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil, … for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” [Genesis 2:17]. We are told now that this is just a euphemism for sex, but nowhere else are the Old Testament authors squeamish about calling the sex act what it is. It is entirely possible that the “tree of knowledge” meant a plant that allowed one to “know God” by stimulating hallucinations, but could just as easily kill you.

The “small round thing” called manna that appeared overnight from the dew while the Jews were escaping from Egypt [Exodus 16:14] appears to be a mushroom sent from God, which may or may not have been of the hallucinogenic variety. The “gourd” which grew up overnight to shade Jonah’s head, but withered away the next day [Jonah 4:6-7], also exhibits the characteristics of a mushroom. The New Testament Book of Revelation, with its wild images of monsters and signs in the sky, gives every indication of having been written under the influence of something more powerful than your morning coffee.

A 2006 Johns Hopkins University study of psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, found that 22 of 26 middle-aged subjects experienced a “complete” mystical experience as a result. Two-thirds judged it to be among their five most profound life experiences, equal to the birth of a first child or death of a parent. Some people who have used hallucinogenic mushrooms are convinced that they are a divine gift to enable man to see and understand God more clearly. Some preach that certain mushroom spores literally are God, wandering through the universe, enlightening whatever species they encounter. The leading prophet of the spores-wandering-through-space religion died of brain cancer in 2000, at the age of 53.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether marijuana, mushrooms, and other consciousness-altering substances should be legal. I am quite certain of this, because I have had different views at different times, making me a reasonable person who disagrees with himself. If there are going to be rules, though, they need to apply to everybody. Drug use, military service, taxes, even routine zoning matters – God experts always get special breaks denied to humanists. If anyone should be getting special treatment, it’s us, because we’re the ones who don’t spend our days trying to defraud the rest of humanity. It’s wrong, it’s got to stop, and the TMC Ministry deserves our thanks for making the whole sordid structure look ridiculous.