The Expansion of Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions: Law, Culture and Locality Kevin Feeney and Beatriz Caiuby Labate In the spring of 2006, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in Gonzales v. O Centro Espı ´rita Beneficente Unia˜o do Vegetal opening the door for the Unia ˜o do Vegetal (UDV), one of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions (Labate et al. 2009; Labate and MacRae 2010), to import ayahuasca for their religious ceremonies. Ayahuasca is a decoction of two Amazonian plants, Psychotria viridis and Banisteriopsis caapi, which has historically been used by indigenous and mestizo Amazonians in shamanic and healing rituals, among other contexts. In the twentieth century, the use of ayahuasca was adopted by several Christian religious groups which have since become well established in Brazil, and which currently have a presence throughout Europe, and North and South America (Labate and Jungaberle 2011). The expansion of these religious groups has drawn attention due to their use of ayahuasca, which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an internationally con- trolled substance (Labate and Feeney 2012; Tupper and Labate 2012). The response to the international expansion of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions has been one of unease among states where these groups have emerged. However, the suppressive responses to these groups, based on “illicit drug use and drug trafficking,” raise complex questions about law, culture, and locality in a world that is increasingly marked by transnational cultural flows and mobile populations. So far, these responses have found support in international law like the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which allows limited use of controlled substances by geographically bound “traditional” groups, but prohibits use that falls outside of these groups and their territories. K. Feeney (*) Washington State University, College Hall #215, Pullman, WA 99164, USA e-mail: kevinmfeeney@gmail.com B.C. Labate Center for Economic Research and Education - CIDE Regio ´n Centro, Circuito Tecnopolo Norte s/n, Col. Hacienda Nueva, 20313, Aguascalientes, Ags, Mexico e-mail: blabate@bialabate.net B.C. Labate and C. Cavnar (eds.), Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-40957-8_6, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 111