What I find interesting in this debate is how terms and topics cristallize:
ayahuasca
UdVs have their own terms for their tea, hoasca being the most frequent. It is important for them as it is a way to differentiate them from other traditions of ayahuasca ritual uses, notably from the ayahuasqueros, the (mostly) Peruvian shamanistic mestizo healers.
But it is also important from ethnobotanical, ethnopharmacological, and legal points of view: if UdV's hoasca always contains the substance that infuriates drug warriors, the situation may be different with some ayahuasca teas that are made with ayahuasca only and are perfectly legal in most nations accross the world. What is overlooked here is that ayahuasca is the Quechuan name of a liana, which components are legal (in Canada excepted), and, by extension, of the tea prepared with it and, generally but not always, admixture plants.
hallucinogenic or psychedelic
It is assumed that these adjectives are sufficient to characterize hoasca. In fact folk pharmacognosy and scientific studies show it is only part of the picture: being a pharmacologically complex mixture, hoasca and ayahuascas also have distinctly non-visionary psychotropic properties. An extract of the liana is currently evaluated as alternative treatment in Parkinson's disease with "promising" results, daily low doses of hoasca are used to ameliorate ageing-related cognitive and psychomotor decline, and its pharmacodynamical profile also is the one of an efficacious antidepressant, in addition to possible neuroprotection.
So drinking hoasca is not simply drinking a so-called "hallucinogen", it's also extremely highly likely absorbing an antidepressant, a nootropic, and a neuroprotectant. There are objective reasons for it to be called sometimes "la medicina".
religion vs WOSD (war on some drugs)
As in The Netherlands 3 years ago (where another but similar hoasca-using neoreligious group originating from Brazil won the case and the right to import and use the tea), in the US case it is the religion aspect that is put to the forefront. Yet in two other legal cases, in Spain and France, it is the legal status of the tea itself that has been judged, and in both cases it was concluded that hoasca is not something illegal because what is controlled according to the 1971 UN Convention is one purified, isolated substance, not the plants and crude preparations made with them. So at least two trials have demonstrated that tea legal status is much more complicated and subject to interpretation than US governmental rhetorics currently suggests.
Furthermore, putting religion at the centre of the debate obliterates an important point: for many ethno- and psychoscientists (e.g. anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, ethnopharmacologists, psychiatrists, psychologists) what is important is not that it is a religion, but that it is a highly ritualized and codified use, i.e. something claimed by the same to have lacked in Western "drug uses", leading to "unstructuration". "Ritual" is the commonsense and scientific relevant keyword here, not "religious": what about existing atheist or shamanic/animistic rituals, that are as safe settings as the ones of UdVs?
In the same vein, religion introduces here a bizarre criterium: why should neoreligious groups that have decades of existence be allowed to use hoasca and not mestizo and indigenous ayahuasca experts, which less evidently religious traditions have centuries, when not for some millenia?
This said, I've learned with interest that US UdV and its hoasca are reportedly making advocacy of bigotry and advocacy of WOSD colliding in the same heads. Let's see what exotic particles may emerge from this...
