HIGH TEA.(The Talk of the Town)(Company Profile)

The fortune of the Bronfman family, the owner of Seagram's, originated with a Montreal bootlegging business during Prohibition. (The name "Bronfman" means "whiskey man" in Yiddish.) A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court took up a long-running controversy involving a third-generation Bronfman and another mind-altering substance, this one imported from the Amazon rain forest rather than from Canada.

The case began with a small religious group known as O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal ("Central Beneficial Spirit United from the Plants"), which was founded in Brazil in 1961 and has about eight thousand members there. The religion blends traditional Christian theology with indigenous beliefs, and a central tenet of the faith is the drinking of a tea known as hoasca. According to church doctrine, members can fully perceive God only by drinking the tea. Hoasca (pronounced "wass-ca") is brewed from two plants that grow in the Amazon River Basin, and it contains DMT, a hallucinogen that the American government regards as a controlled substance.

In the early nineties, Jeffrey Bronfman, a forty-nine-year-old ecological activist, began making trips to the rain forest. There he became fascinated by U.D.V., as the religion is known, and first drank hoasca tea. "I was very moved and inspired by what I witnessed," he wrote later, in a declaration to the courts. Bronfman learned Portuguese and trained to become a mestre, which is the title given to the clergy in the faith. In 1994, he became the president of the American branch of U.D.V. There are now about a hundred and thirty congregants in the United States, about fifty of them in Sante Fe, where Bronfman lives.

As a mestre, Bronfman presides at twice-monthly Saturday-night services. He gives each U.D.V. member a glass of the tea, and then, after a prayer in Portuguese, the congregation drinks together. The ensuing service involves ritual singing, "individualized contemplation," and "a more informal period of unstructured conversation among the congregants." Bronfman also writes that "U.D.V. sessions are not characterized by entertainment, frivolity, or pleasure-seeking." (Terence McKenna, a Berkeley-educated ethnobotanist who is an authority on DMT, has written that using such a substance brings a person into contact with entities that he calls "self-transforming machine elves"; for Alan Watts, a cohort of Timothy Leary's, using DMT was like "being fired out of the nozzle of an atomic cannon." At ...