MARIJUANA AS FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT

Rutherford Fights For Religious Pot Use

The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville-based organization that
defends civil liberties, is currently representing Carl Eric Olsen in
his 30-year struggle for religious freedom. That in itself is not
noteworthy, as The Rutherford Institute specializes in religious
cases. But what is unusual is the particular religious freedom for
which Olsen is fighting. Since the early '70s, Olsen has been a
member of the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church (EZCC), a religious group
that holds that marijuana is a sacrament, and whose members smoke it
all day, every day.

The EZCC has existed in Jamaica since at least the 1940s, and was
first incorporated in the United States in Miami in 1975. In the late
'70s and early '80s, the Church was involved in several major drug
busts, netting as much as 38,000 pounds of marijuana in one raid in 1978.

"I [have been] arrested over and over again," Olsen says from his
home in Iowa, and over and over again he has challenged those
arrests, losing every time.

But things may be different now. Under the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act (RFRA), Olsen, 55, is claiming that the government is
keeping him from practicing his religion. According to the RFRA, the
courts must use "strict scrutiny" in cases involving religion to make
sure that an individual's First Amendment rights have not been violated.

Enter The Rutherford Institute. Despite a seemingly straight-laced
image, defending the right to smoke pot is not necessarily at odds
with the Institute's mission. John Whitehead, Rutherford's founder,
says that the issue is not drugs, but religious freedom. "The
question," Whitehead says, "always comes down to, 'What kind of power
does the government have?'" In the case of marijuana legislation, the
answer for Whitehead is too much. Whole Foods, he says, used to sell
a hemp cereal that he was particularly fond of, but "when Bush got
into office…[the government] went crazy for a while" and pulled the
cereal off the shelf. "I love my hemp cereal," says Whitehead.

In a 1979 case, the Florida Supreme Court wrote, "(1) the Ethiopian
Zion Coptic Church represents a religion within the First Amendment
to the Constitution of the United States; (2) the 'use of cannabis is
an essential portion of the religious practice.'" Nevertheless, the
U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a ruling in 1990 denying Olsen a
religious exemption to smoke marijuana. That ruling meant that he
could no longer be a practicing member of the EZCC.

"Without being able to gather with other people and smoke marijuana,"
says Olsen, "my religion does not exist."