Manufacturing the Entheogenic Underground
Psychedelic Intersections January 17, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.70423/0001.04
Summary
People in the United States are increasingly gathering for religious or spiritual experiences, often using illegal substances like psychedelics and cannabis, referred to as entheogens. While many operate without government exemptions from drug laws, this paper argues that the state plays a significant role in shaping these underground communities. It will explore the legal frameworks affecting entheogenic churches and the attorneys who support them.
Study at a glance
| Population | individuals participating in entheogenic practices in the United States |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The state is both a primary curator of the underground entheogenic community and its influence pervades these groups. |
Abstract
Ethnographic research suggests that people across the United States are increasingly gathering to commune with their creators, to interact with their ancestors, to enter the spirit world, to gain supernatural insights, and to engage in what they otherwise describe as religious or spiritual experiences. In this regard, their actions are not particularly revolutionary or novel. What distinguishes these people is not their desire to have religious or spiritual experiences. Instead, it is the means they employ to occasion these experiences that set them apart, as their rituals and ceremonies involve the consumption of illegal drugs, specifically psychedelics and cannabis, substances they frequently term entheogens. The United States government has granted select groups an exemption from drug prohibition, thereby allowing them to legally consume what are otherwise illegal substances. The vast majority of these practitioners, however, operate without this exemption, thereby confining them to what scholars often term the underground, or the sociocultural, political, or economic spaces thought to operate outside the influence or purview of the state.4 This alleged “absence” of the government is the topic of this paper, which argues that the state is both the primary curator of the so-called underground and that the state’s influence pervades these “underground” communities. To demonstrate this, this essay will discuss the legal structures and case law impacting entheogenic churches in the United States, paying particular attention to the attorneys who advise these churches.