Drug prohibition should be interpreted to violate 1st and 9th ammendment rights.

Without the First Amendment, religious minorities could be persecuted, the government might well establish a national religion, protesters could be silenced, the press could not criticize government, and citizens could not mobilize for social change. Most people, at some level, recognize the necessity of religious liberty and toleration, but some balk when a religious tenet of a minority religion conflicts with a generally applicable law or with their own religious faith. Many Americans see the need to separate the state from the church to some extent, but decry the banning of school-sponsored prayer from public schools and the removal of the Ten Commandments from public buildings. The premise of this argument is whether drug prohibition should be interpreted to violate 1st and 9th Amendment rights. The statement suggests that it is expected, practical, and logically necessary that drug prohibition will be found to violate these rights as guaranteed by the Constitution. Since the Supreme Court is the defining authority, the statement suggests that the court will possibly agree. While the court has consistently affirmed that the Free Exercise Clause protects religious beliefs, protection for religiously motivated conduct has waxed and waned over the years. The Free Exercise Clause embraces two concepts—freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is an absolute right guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, but in the nature of things, the second cannot be. The fact is, the court has not agreed! In 1990, in its opinion issued in the case of Employment Division vs. Smith, the court ruled that the free-exercise clause of the 1st Amendment was not violated after two employees were fired after it was discovered that they ingested peyote as part of a religious ceremony. The Court ruled that "an individual's religious beliefs" do not "excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct the State is free to regulate." Religion usually entails ritual or other practices that constitute "conduct" rather than pure "belief." The court ruled that accommodation of such religious practices as the use of peyote must be found in the "political process" and that statutory religious-practice exemptions are permissible, but not constitutionally required. Therefore, the court concluded that the Free Exercise Clause does not prohibit the State from applying generally applicable penalties for the use of peyote in a religious ceremony. I would venture to say that anyone who would start a new religion in the 21st century that would include the use of an illegal substance would be hard-pressed to prove that the action was nothing more than a veiled attempt to circumvent the existing drug laws. In United States v. Ballard, Justice Douglas, writing for the majority, embraced a broad definition of religion: "Freedom of religious belief is basic in a society of free men. It embraces the right to maintain theories of life and of death and the hereafter which are rank heresy to followers of orthodox faiths . . . . Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines of beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others. Yet the fact they may be beyond the ken of mortals does not mean that they can be made suspect before the law." The essence of any workable criteria that the courts use in determining whether an organization is a religion must be comprised of two elements: (1) a sincerely held belief in a sacred or transcendent reality and (2) an organization whose purpose and practice is to express that belief. This approach has the advantage of constitutionally required neutrality. The inclusion of the "sincerity," "purpose" and "practice" criteria would enable the courts to eliminate shams claiming to have a religious character. Any test can be applied in a biased fashion, but the test stresses equal treatment of all organizations claiming to be religions. Shams could be excluded by examining indicia of sincerity, practice reflecting belief, and related purpose. Sincerity is a legitimate inquiry. Inferring that the hippie movement of the sixties was a religion cannot be proven since the movement was more a way of life and did no t hold a widely accepted "belief in a sacred or transcendent reality." In fact, prior to being commonly referred to as the hippie movement, it was the peace movement whose sole purpose was to promote peace and protest the war in Vietnam. The hippies were subject to prosecution for using illegal drugs and none of those who were prosecuted had their convictions overturned by the Supreme Court. While you have the freedom to express yourself artistically as a drug addicted individual, it would still be illegal if to do so you had ingested illegal drugs. There are constitutionally guaranteed rights and then there are privileges granted to us by the legal process. Since you yourself state that the constitution does not specifically guarantee the right to use drugs but the state has legislated that you do not have the right to use drugs it has deemed illegal and these laws have not been found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, it would follow that there is no violation of the 9th Amendment. A debate on whether or not prohibition is a successful tool to use is not relevant to the focus of the debate as outlined in the statement: "Drug prohibition should be interpreted to violate 1st and 9th amendment rights."