Policy debates concerning our lawful access to drugs rarely begin with the question that matters most: who, exactly, does the law target? Terms like “illegal drugs,” “drug control,” or “substance abuse” circulate so widely — across courtrooms, newsrooms, and legislative chambers — that they have come to feel self-evident. Yet their very familiarity conceals a structural distortion. Laws and policies do not act upon substances. They regulate human actions and relationships connected to those substances — production, possession, distribution, use — under specific circumstances and contexts. When language inverts this logic and frames plants or molecules as possessing an inherent legal status, it doesn’t merely misdescribe the law. It reshapes how the law gets applied, how policy gets designed, and which people bear the consequences.
This is not a semantic distinction. It carries practical weight every time a person faces prosecution for their engagement with a traditional plant medicine, every time a court must decide whether a cultural practice falls within the scope of a ‘drug control’ statute, and every time a legislator frames a reform proposal in terms of what substances to “legalize” rather than what rights people hold and what conditions make certain practices harmful. The choice of frame precedes and constrains every subsequent decision.
The legal fiction of “illegal drugs”
The phrase “illegal drugs” suggests that certain plants or molecules exist in a state of inherent illegality — that their nature, rather than their context, determines their (imaginary) legal status. A drug has no agency. It cannot commit acts or violate norms. What legal systems actually do is evaluate human behavior in specific contexts, drawing distinctions that reflect varying degrees of risk, legitimacy, and social acceptance. To speak of an “illegal drug” or even “legalizing” a drug, is to locate the law in the wrong place entirely. To speak of “legality” is to invoke the language of “legalese,” and one cannot simply re-draft a legal principle with reverse agency pseudo-legalese, as that manifests a perverse misalignment within our powerful and deterministic language.
It is worth pausing on the precise nature of this displacement, because it does not merely locate the law in the wrong place. To attribute illegality — or dangerousness — to a plant or a molecule, as though these were intrinsic properties of the thing itself, is to project a will where there is none, to animate the inert, or to confer intention on what has none, so that it can be treated as an adversary. Neither the substance nor the plants break the law or pose a threat; it is people who clothe them in an agency that is not their own. That gesture — the attempt to re-enchant the object with a perverse will in order to legitimize the war declared against it — is the same one that, in other domains, has turned animals, natural forces, or territories into moral enemies. And it helps explain why the prohibitionist framing proves so resistant to change. It does not record a feature of the world; it institutes one, and once instituted, that feature is experienced as self-evident, requiring no proof.
We are controlled under law with respect to “controlled drugs,” so that human actions concerning them — production, cultivation, importation, supply, possession — may be regulated. The purpose of such regulation is to address foreseeable public disorder and harm. It is not the substance that carries legal status; it is what people do with it, under what circumstances, and with what intent. Formal legal analysis keeps this distinction intact. It is public discourse that erases it, collapsing the law into the shorthand of “legal” and “illegal” substances — an abstract binary the law itself does not create.
The consequences of this inversion extend well beyond terminology. When language frames substances as self-contained sources of risk, detached from the conditions in which people engage with them, policy frameworks default to categorical control rather than contextual assessment. Thus pointing to the supposed harm-scale of different substances, entrenches the false notion that substances are inherently safe or dangerous. Courts may overlook the nuances that distinguish one practice from another. And the people most directly affected — those whose cultural, religious, or therapeutic relationships with plants fall outside the narrow categories that ‘drug control’ systems were designed to accommodate — face a legal apparatus that cannot see them clearly because it has been trained to look at the wrong thing, the object instead of our rights-bearing subject.
Many people believe their medicines, and perhaps everything there is, is connected throughout a universal consciousness, and perhaps these distinctions between our subject and objects is superfluous. Yet we must distinguish between these higher level realizations and the ground-zero of linguistic control mechanisms, the correct alignment of subject and object is a key towards discovering our connectivity with “other.”
The result is a drug policy for people — not a people policy for drugs. That reversal is not merely a rhetorical problem: it is a legal error with structural consequences. The UN Human Rights Office reached a similar conclusion in 2023, when it called on states to replace punitive drug enforcement with laws and practices anchored in human rights.
What “drug laws” actually regulate — and what they miss
International drug control conventions (colonizing conventions), developed largely in the mid-twentieth century within a specific geopolitical and epistemological context, established classification systems that struggle to accommodate practices grounded in relational, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances scheduled DMT as a controlled substance, but — as the International Narcotics Control Board has clarified — did not schedule ayahuasca as a preparation. This distinction is not incidental. It reflects the limits of a system built around molecules rather than practices, around substances rather than the people who engage with them and the contexts in which they do so.
What this means in practice becomes visible at the point of enforcement. National authorities have adopted at least three distinct regulatory approaches to ayahuasca-related practices: some jurisdictions permit or regulate specific contexts for its preparation or use; others interpret domestic ‘drug laws’ as prohibiting those same practices; and a third group leaves the legal situation explicitly unresolved, creating uncertainty that falls disproportionately on the people caught within it. The same plant, the same ceremony, the same people — different legal outcomes depending on jurisdiction, interpretation, and the framing available to courts and prosecutors.
A reductionist approach to “drug policy” tends to categorize plants that may induce psychoactivity solely by their active chemical components. Ayahuasca, for instance, becomes DMT — its ceremonial structure, its knowledge systems, its community roles, and its therapeutic dimensions rendered legally invisible. The law, as currently interpreted and applied, encounters a preparation of Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis and sees a scheduled alkaloid. It does not see the Amazonian Indigenous medical systems that developed this practice over centuries, the ethical frameworks governing its transmission, or the accumulated evidence of its effects when used in traditional ceremonial contexts. Scheduling a plant or substance ultimately means scheduling ourselves, not the thing itself.
Addressing this gap requires legal flexibility, yes — but it also requires a shift in the language through which these practices enter legal and policy discourse in the first place. The outcome of articulating this properly, is to reveal the polarizing separation inherent within the objectifying language and thinking that we are talking about just mere objects, “drugs” are a very important part of our ecosystem, and our relationship with them is one of profound inter-connectivity, we exist in a continuum with substances via our biological permeability and neural networks, and these substances are a conduit to different modalities of conscious experience. That is what we are regulating, that access route.
Ayahuasca and the limits of binary framing
“Is ayahuasca legal?” remains one of the most common queries people bring to search engines when trying to understand their situation. The question itself reveals how deeply binary framing has misshapen public understanding. Imagining a plant, or even a preparation of plants could be “legal” or “illegal” is a reversal of legal reality, replacing the Subject (ourselves) with a substance. In any event, our relationship with ayahuasca does not carry a universal legal status — it cannot, because legal outcomes depend on how laws are interpreted and applied in specific contexts: cultural use, religious practice, preparation methods, jurisdictional frameworks, and the evidentiary standards applied by courts and administrative authorities.
In several jurisdictions, courts have recognized that categorical applications of “drug control” statutes may conflict with protections for freedom of thought, religion and cultural rights, certainly with respect to equality and proportionality principles. The US Supreme Court’s unanimous 2006 ruling in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal established that religious freedom could take precedence over federal drug law with respect to ceremonial ayahuasca use. Brazil’s CONAD resolution of 2010 affirmed the legitimacy of religious ayahuasca use on constitutional grounds. Peru recognized ayahuasca as national cultural heritage — a framing that reorients the legal question entirely, from what the substance “is” to what role the practice holds within a living cultural system.
These cases do not simply create exceptions. They reveal structural tensions within “drug control” frameworks — and they show that the application of law involves interpretation, balancing, and, at times, recalibration when legal categories encounter practices that fall outside the assumptions on which those categories were built. ICEERS’ legal defense program — formerly known as the Ayahuasca Defense Fund — which has engaged with criminal cases across dozens of countries, consistently finds that the most consequential variable is not the pharmacology of the plant, but the framing available to the people defending their practices in court.
Understanding this interpretive space therefore requires more than legal literacy. It requires language that accurately describes what the law actually does — and what it fails to do — when it encounters practices whose complexity exceeds its categories.
How language produces policy outcomes
Terminology does more than reflect policy — it helps produce it, and when drafted into law, acutely deterministically so. When discourse centers on “dangerous drugs,” risk appears as an intrinsic property of substances. This framing tends to justify generalized control measures without requiring a detailed assessment of context or proportionality. The burden shifts from the state to demonstrate harm to the individual to demonstrate legitimacy — a reversal with profound consequences for the rights of people whose practices fall outside mainstream acceptability.
Language choices relating to psychoactive substances are particularly fraught owing to the significant normative, moral, and political biases to which substance use is often subject. Research published in the International Journal of Drug Policy has documented how the terminology used in academic writing, clinical settings, and public discourse shapes not only how people who engage with substances are perceived, but also which policy responses appear rational or proportionate. Structural interventions — including the revision of how laws are administered and applied — may prove more effective than linguistic ones in isolation, but changing how practices are named and framed remains a critical point of intervention.
In its sharpest form, this idea implies that “drug” does not name a natural kind that the law merely encounters in the world, as it might a chemical element or a biological species. It is the product of an act of classification — historical, cultural, and backed by relations of power — that decides which substances enter which categories and which are left out, according to criteria that are rarely pharmacological or grounded in scientific evidence. To recognize that the category is constructed — not discovered — does not make it arbitrary or irrelevant, but it does put the question back where it belongs: not what a substance is, but what we decide to do with it, whom we single out when we draw the line, and with what consequences.
Peyote makes the point concrete. Since 1994, federal law criminalizes peyote use for most people, yet exempts members of the Native American Church performing the very same ceremony. The chemistry hasn’t changed — what changed is whom the law recognizes, and under what circumstances. Ayahuasca makes the same point in a different jurisdiction. Both Brazil and the United States list DMT in their most restrictive drug schedule, yet Brazil’s National Council on Drug Policy (CONAD) has authorized ritual and religious use of ayahuasca since 1987, and in 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court held, in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, that members of a Brazilian church could import and drink the same tea as a sacrament under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The compound hasn’t changed; what the law tracks is who is drinking it, in what context, and for what purpose.
When attention shifts toward people, contexts, and practices, different questions become possible. What conditions give rise to harm? How do social, economic, and cultural factors influence outcomes? Which rights are engaged, and how should they be weighed? These questions invite a more differentiated form of analysis — one that recognizes variability rather than assuming uniformity, and that holds open the possibility of proportionate responses rather than categorical ones.
Language, in this sense, operates across multiple levels simultaneously: it shapes legislative drafting, guides administrative interpretation, influences judicial reasoning, and determines how individuals understand their own practices — whether as legitimate, stigmatized, or presumptively criminal. The words used in drug policy determine who gets criminalized, which practices get delegitimized, and which knowledge gets rendered invisible. Over time, these effects accumulate, contributing to the stabilization of certain policy approaches while foreclosing others before they can be meaningfully considered.
The digital infrastructure of dominant narratives
These dynamics do not operate only in legislative chambers or courtrooms. They play out continuously in the digital environment — and this is where the informational dimension of drug policy language becomes most visible, and most consequential for how people actually access knowledge.
Search engines index, rank, and prioritize content based on the terms people use. A query like “is ayahuasca legal” reproduces the same conceptual frame embedded in dominant policy discourse — framing a plant as the bearer of a legal status, rather than asking what rights a person holds or under what conditions certain practices attract legal consequences. Consider the contrast between two queries: “is ayahuasca legal?” and “what uses of ayahuasca are legal?” The first asks the plant to disclose a status it does not possess. The second asks the right question: which practices, under which circumstances, receive legal protection. The results that rise to the top tend to reflect that framing back at the user, reinforcing it as common sense. Websites built around harm-reduction content or contextual legal analysis — the kind that more accurately reflects how law operates — compete for visibility with content that reproduces the binary, and often lose.
This creates a feedback loop in which prevailing assumptions about drug policy language become embedded not only in institutional discourse but in the informational infrastructure through which millions of people first encounter these questions. Language directly influences the design and implementation of public health policies — and the language that dominates search results functions as a kind of policy in itself, shaping what people believe to be possible, legitimate, or worth pursuing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is typically approached as a technical discipline. Understood from a human-centered perspective, it functions as something more: a site of discursive intervention. Engaging with SEO critically means recognizing that search behavior reveals not just informational needs but underlying conceptual frameworks. The challenge is not to abandon widely-used queries — which represent genuine entry points — but to work within them in a way that gradually reframes them, introducing more precise and context-aware language that reflects legal and social realities more accurately.
This means, concretely, moving from “Is ayahuasca illegal?” toward explanations that clarify how laws apply to people”s practices and contexts, rather than to substances in isolation — and doing so in forms that search engines can surface. It means producing content that addresses the questions people actually ask while refusing to reproduce the misunderstandings those questions often embed. And it means recognizing that editorial decisions about keyword choices and content structure are not merely technical choices: they determine what knowledge becomes discoverable, and therefore what options people can imagine.
Three proposals illustrate the method. First: structure legal pages with subheadings that reproduce, verbatim, the queries people type (“Can I be arrested for attending a ceremony?”, “What happens if ayahuasca is found in my luggage?”), so that each can surface as a featured snippet in search results. Second: keep the question as typed in the subheading, but correct the frame in the first line of the answer; “Can I be arrested for attending a ceremony?” is answered with: “Attending, in itself, is usually not an offense; what the law targets is possession, transport, or facilitation, and the consequences depend on the country and the context.” The query preserves the misunderstanding; the answer undoes it. Third: organize tags and categories by practice — importation, ceremony facilitation, therapeutic use — rather than grouping everything under a single generic legal tag, so that each real-life situation has its own point of entry in a search engine.
Toward a human-centered language of drug policy
A more precise language does not require dismantling existing legal systems. It requires describing them more accurately — and, in doing so, opening analytical space that categorical framing tends to close.
Instead of asking whether a plant is “illegal,” it becomes more meaningful to ask: under what conditions do certain practices attract legal consequences for the people who engage in them? Whose rights are implicated? How do they impact upon cultural rights, cognitive and religious freedoms and the right to health? Indigenous rights to traditional medicines are recognized under UNDRIP Article 24 and ILO Convention 169? How do courts, when they encounter these questions, balance competing legal frameworks? What evidence exists about actual outcomes for people who engage with these practices in traditional ceremonial contexts — and how does that evidence compare to the categorical risk framing built into scheduling systems?
These questions align more closely with both legal reality and lived experience. They also open the door to policy approaches that move beyond binary classifications toward evidence-based and rights-oriented frameworks — the kind of frameworks that the UNDP International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy have begun to make available to courts, advocates, and policymakers working in this space.
Revisiting this language does not merely refine communication. It helps reshape how law gets understood, interpreted, and applied — influencing what appears legally possible, politically acceptable, and socially legitimate. What is ultimately at stake in these debates is not the supposed legal status of a plant. It is the rights, practices, and possibilities of the people who engage with it.