ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the inherent difficulties in reconciling religious ideals under a human rights lens with those highlighted within the current drug control framework. It describes the complex and nuanced nature of human drug use, revealing the limitations and the potential of human rights, as applied to drug control issues, and it considers how a human rights perspective could better recognise the often enmeshed contexts of use. Many international and regional human rights instruments guarantee human rights to religion without explicitly offering a definition of the concept. While both the human rights and drug control frameworks are capable of embracing broad definitions of religion and belief in relation to psychoactive usage, in practice, only certain drug use is legitimised on this basis. The diverse employment of various manifestation tests demonstrates that while human rights are legally and philosophically designed to have universal applicability, they retain a perennial weakness through their westernised, culturally bound conceptions of religion.
