The Leaf & deVine Church is committed to full transparency about the legal landscape our sacraments exist within. We believe our members deserve to understand both the protections and the risks involved in this work.

 

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) protects the sincere religious use of controlled substances from federal interference unless the government can show a compelling interest and that its restriction is the least restrictive means of achieving it. This is not a blanket protection.

 

​​In 2022, Colorado voters passed Proposition 122, the Natural Medicine Health Act (later codified through SB23-290). This law decriminalized personal use for adults 21 and older of five natural substances: psilocybin, psilocin, DMT, ibogaine, and mescaline (excluding peyote, which remains protected separately for use by members of the Native American Church). Under this law, adults may grow, possess, use, and share these substances without state or local criminal penalty, provided there is no sale or compensation involved. Because state decriminalization does not override federal law, our sacramental use of these medicines rests on religious freedom protections, not on Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act alone.

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The Leaf & deVine Church affirms the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in Resolution 1994/45 (August 26, 1994), and ultimately ratified by the member states of the United Nations, becoming part of international human rights law.

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We hold this Declaration as foundational to our practice, not as a distant legal document, but as a living affirmation of the truth our tradition is built on: that all people, as children of the Creator, hold an inherent and inalienable right to their own spiritual path. This includes the freedom of thought, religion, and conscience; the freedom to gather in worship and community; the freedom to speak, teach, and be educated in one's own beliefs; the freedom to move and assemble without persecution; and the sacred right to seek healing through the methods, medicines, and traditions passed down by one's own lineage.

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We recognize that the traditions we practice, and the sacraments we hold sacred, originate with Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and beyond, many of whom have faced centuries of suppression, criminalization, and forced separation from their own spiritual and medicinal practices. In affirming this Declaration, we commit ourselves to practicing with humility and reciprocity toward these lineages, rather than treating their knowledge as something to extract or claim as our own.

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We extend this same principle to our own community: the right to worship according to one's own understanding of the sacred, to seek healing through traditional and plant-based methods, and to live free from persecution for doing so, so long as that freedom does not infringe upon the equal freedom of others.​​​