The THC-Ministry isn't free from persecution. Members of the Ayahuasca church are prosecuted under law all the time, even Natives using peyote legally in the Peyote Church are subject to government raids. Rastafarians can still be arrested for smoking marijuana as well. I don't remember the date exactly, but Religions are required to have been in existence so many years before the drug laws were introduced, to be protected under law. Otherwise, people could *gasp* form a religion around any substance, thus causing dire risk of human beings straying outside the government regulated narrow boundaries of acceptable consciousness.