This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 20th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

American courts have long had trouble reconciling the freedom of religion and drug use,

but recent decades indicate that courts, as they should, defer more readily to religious

groups that achieve better faith through chemistry.

Eric Sterling is executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation.

We talked about the tension between free exercise of religion and the drug war last month.

In the mid-80s, there became a fear of what were known as the designer drugs and DEA said we need

the authority to ban substances on a sped up basis.

Regardless, we have to, we can't simply comply

with the requirements of the eightfold factors of the Controlled Substances Act.

Give us this emergency scheduling authority.

And so I was involved in writing the legislation that DA wanted then in 84.

They also were concerned about drugs that had not yet been discovered.

Can we ban substances that are not yet defined?

It's a hassle for us to at all. Try to ban a substance using any scientific

basis, any evidence basis. Let's ban drugs on a conceptual basis.

And so I was involved in that conflict.

And part of the question was what kinds of standards you would create.

Does the drug have to both mimic some harmful effects of Schedule I drugs? Does it have to be chemically

similar in some way or are the alternatives sufficient and so we were involved in that kind of battle as well.

And so when the, what was known, we became known as the analog law passed in the 86 legislation, DEA then instead

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