The Fresno Bee reports
A Native American Church affiliate in Southern California says a sheriff’s department seized and destroyed “thousands” of psychoactive plants revered as sacred, interfering with members’ religious practices. In a lawsuit against the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Shannon Dicus, California Evergreen Farms Native American Church says officers raided the church’s place of worship in the Mojave Desert, in violation of their right to practice religion freely, in November and January. Members of the Native American Church, as part of centuries of spiritual tradition among Indigenous people, use “sacred plant medicines such as peyote, cannabis, and other entheogenic sacraments,” according to the lawsuit, which was moved to federal court on May 21. The use of peyote and cannabis as entheogens, psychoactive substances used religiously and ceremoniously, are “essential to (the Native American Church’s) worship,” a complaint says. “This case is about protecting the constitutional right to religious freedom — specifically, the right of sincere minority faiths to practice their sacrament without government interference,” attorney Daniel S. Miller, who is representing the case, said in a statement to McClatchy News on June 2. The sheriff’s department is actively investigating the church after responding to the church’s site in November and January, public information officer Mara Rodriguez said to McClatchy News on June 2. The department said in a statement that an investigation “resulted in evidence of criminal activity associated with an illegal marijuana cultivation operation where multiple arrests were made, and additional evidence was seized.” The agency didn’t comment on the lawsuit, which accuses it of intimidating church members and failing to recognize their sincerely held religious beliefs, in violation of the First Amendment.
Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/news/california/article307717570.html#storylink=cpy
