União do Vegetal

União do Vegetal is a Brazil-based church that uses ayahuasca as a sacrament. Its place in the account is defined chiefly by a legal milestone: in 2006, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the church’s right to use the tea in religious practice. The case brought a specific religious community’s sacramental use into the wider debate over psychedelic substances, without reducing that use to a medical treatment or a private experience.

Identity and sacramental practice

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic tea made from plants native to the Amazon basin and has been used sacramentally by Indigenous peoples of South America. It is typically brewed from Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, also called chacruna. The chacruna supplies DMT, whose effects are ordinarily blocked by digestive enzymes unless it is taken with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor such as Banisteriopsis. The book identifies União do Vegetal’s use of ayahuasca as religious and sacramental; it does not detail the church’s internal organization or its particular ceremonial procedures.

Legal recognition

In 2006, the Supreme Court affirmed União do Vegetal’s right to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. The ruling is presented as recognition of the church’s religious use, rather than as a general change in the legal status of psychedelics. Its significance for the organization lies in securing a protected place for its sacramental practice within a legal system that otherwise regulates psychedelic substances.

Connection with CSP

CSP supported the suit that resulted in the 2006 decision. That involvement was part of a broader effort to make direct experience of the sacred more available: CSP also helped organize and fund the first psychedelic research experiments at Johns Hopkins University and published an ethical code adopted by many underground psychedelic guides. The account thus places the legal support for União do Vegetal alongside CSP’s work across religious-use litigation, research, and guidance practices, while keeping the church’s sacramental claim distinct from those other projects.

Place in the wider account

The decision connects religious practice with the book’s broader examination of how psychedelic experiences are framed and protected. Ayahuasca appears both as a sacrament and as a substance whose use has prompted legal and institutional questions. União do Vegetal’s case supplies a concrete example of those questions being addressed through a claim grounded in religious practice.