It was a crazy plan, and it blew up in their faces. Meanwhile the cult was riven with factional disputes and internal poisoning plots as well. Before too long the Oregon State Police were searching the ranch and the cult’s leader was in federal custody. But before the end, the cult sent out a team of assassins with orders to kill the U.S. attorney, a prominent reporter, and Dave Frohnmayer, the attorney general. They failed; but being the target of an assassination plot can, as Samuel Johnson said in another context, serve to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

That concentration explains what happened next. During the final days of the cult, the Oregon agency handling unemployment insurance received a low-key claim from two drug-abuse and alcohol counselors in Roseburg, a small town 250 miles away from the dispute. The two—Galen Black, an Anglo and Al Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribe—had been fired from their jobs for participating in a ritual of the Native American Church. Though peyote religion is not drug use (any more than Catholicism is alcohol abuse), their employer refused to pay unemployment. The two claimants appealed to the state’s administrative tribunal, where they won on narrow grounds—grounds that had almost no implications for Oregon law.

At this point the attorney general’s office entered the fray with barely concealed fury. Though the dispute was a very ordinary one—the leading religious freedom cases of the 60s and 70s were unemployment cases—Oregon now drew a line in the sand. “Drug use” was misconduct. “Drug use” was illegal. “Drug use” was a threat to social order. If peyotists got their payments, then pot users and acidheads would be next. When the State Board of Pharmacy issued a rule providing that peyote was not a “drug,” the attorney general convened an emergency meeting and forced the Board to back down. When Native American advocacy groups from outside the state tried to arrange a settlement, the state insisted on terms so punitive that the two plaintiffs refused to sign.

There was no need for any of this. Peyote religion has roots nearly 10,000 years olds, and is mostly centered in the American Southwest and the north of Mexico. In its present form it has coexisted with American society for more than a century. It is the most tightly regulated religion in America: no one can grow, harvest, sell, or possess peyote without the approval of state and federal governments. Peyotists cooperate with the system and seek to avoid conflicts with the law. They agree that the sacrament is not to be eaten by children; they object to illicit use of “Grandfather Peyote” far more strongly than does law enforcement. A major aim of peyote congregations nationwide is to help worshipers recover from alcoholism and drug addiction.

But these explanations fell on deaf ears, and it’s easy to see why. Frohnmayer and the Oregon state officials had heard all that before. Freedom of religion is the American way. We pledge to obey the law. We seek only a small accommodation. Those who criticize us are bigots. That was the refrain of the Rajneesh cult, while it transformed itself over and over into new and deadlier forms, cold-bloodedly broke the law, used state power aggressively against outsiders, and violated all its pledges of good behavior. To state officials, it seemed, peyotism—a faith thousands of years old—was no more to be trusted than a New Age cult. Assurances could be broken; church doctrine might change. Today peyote, they reasoned, and tomorrow it might be marijuana or LSD. Oregon dug in on the Maginot Line to fight the last war. The state took the case to the Supreme Court not once but—despite anguished pleas from clergy and legal groups—twice.