A trip to the magic mushroom megachurch

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0:43Just a heads up, this episode contains a couple swear words. This is Planet Money from NPR. Just as every market has its first movers, every religion has its martyrs. The people willing to risk everything for what they believe. You know, Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith, Jesus. And when I recently found out about a church with a leader who might be a little bit of both, I knew I had to make a pilgrimage. So I hopped on a plane to Oakland, California, to visit a place called the Ziedor Church. Hey. You looking for Ziedor? I'm looking for Ziedor. Is this it? Oh, this is Ziedor. From the street, you might not even know the church was there.

1:27It's sort of hidden inside a nondescript warehouse, surrounded by auto shops and row houses. As soon as you walk in, you're greeted by a friendly armed security guard and ushered through a metal detector. You won't find any pews inside of Zydor these days, but there are two ATMs on the premises. And it's next to one of them where I meet the man who founded and runs the church, a guy named Dave Hodges. Hey, Pastor Dave, I presume. Yeah, good to meet you. Good to meet you too, in the flesh. Pastor Dave is a big guy with a long ponytail, salt and pepper goatee, wireframe glasses. Looks a bit like Benjamin Franklin, if he got a job in a corporate IT department.

2:08Give you a little tour of the place. It doesn't really look like any church I've been inside of before. Probably not. Instead of stained glass depictions of saints performing miracles, the walls are covered in a series of trippy technicolor murals. There's a psychedelic whale pod. There are contemplative apes stroking their chins. It feels more like a galactic bowling alley than a sanctuary. And almost everywhere you look, there are giant images of mushrooms. That is because Zydor Church is not a Christian church. It's not Jewish or Hindu. Zydor is a mushroom church. It is organized around the belief that psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms offer direct access to the divine.

2:51Generally, I say I run the largest mushroom church in the world. That's, you know, if we're going simple. That's the elevator pitch. That's the log line. Yeah. Yeah. Zydor is one of a growing number of new psychedelic churches around the country. Predicated on the idea that the principle of religious freedom gives them the right to produce, distribute, and consume substances that might otherwise send you to federal prison. Here, instead of taking communion wafers or wine, parishioners are offered some of the most powerful, mind-altering substances ever known to take home and do with as they please.

3:27To join the church is pretty simple. You have to fill out an application pledging your sincere religiosity. We ask you a few questions of whether or not you accept this as part of your religion, who referred you, what you do for a living. Is there an are you a cop checkbox? There is. There is. We definitely ask if you work with law enforcement. There's even a special piece of paper we have everybody signed that says if you're a cop or working with cops, we're going to sue you for$100 ,000. And once we review that and approve you, then you're given a membership card and you're allowed to come in.

3:59Once you are in, you can check in at the front desk before making your way to the place where the church distributes the drugs, all of which the church calls sacrament. This is the sacrament room where people contribute cash and we give them the sacrament. Now, Dave is very careful to point out you cannot buy mushrooms or anything else in the sacrament room, even though the church is a cash-only congregation. There are very intentionally no sales here. The word sales is kind of a bad word. Instead, you can make a cash donation to the church, after which one of the sacrament providers behind the counter will offer you whatever you think might help you get in touch with your soul.

4:40And the sacrament room contains a lot of different options. All around, there are glass cases filled with pre-rolled joints and cannabis gummies, but also drawers filled with psychedelic mushrooms of various strains and potencies. There's the classics, like the Golden Teachers, Penis Envy, Sun Temple, another strain. For those with a bit of a sweet tooth, there are mushroom confections of all shapes and sizes. Yeah, those are mushroom chocolates, and that's taffy. These are little pressed candies that are kind of like, what is that candy that comes in a little wrapper? Like sweeties? Yeah, sweeties.

5:17They're kind of like sweeties. It's like a psychedelic Willy Wonka situation. Yeah, kind of, kind of. The sacrament room even contains DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, One of the most powerful hallucinogenic compounds known to science. Widely, but maybe dubiously, rumored to be released by your brain when you're being born and when you're dying. We do carry just straight DMT, but also vape pens. And how much would I have to donate to get one of these? It depends. Probably about a hundred bucks for that. I'm visiting the church on a relatively sleepy Monday afternoon. But Dave says on a busy weekend, they can see more than 300 members a day in the sacrament room.

6:00And it is that kind of volume that's made Dave famous and a little bit controversial in the psychedelic movement. I've heard people compare your church to megachurch status. Is that right? Well, through our membership, we now have a little over 135 ,000 members who have all physically come through the church to get sacrament. Wow. If you had asked me when I started the church if we would ever become the largest psychedelic church in the world, I would tell you you were crazy. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. We are in a sort of golden age of psychedelic churches. Over the past couple decades, hundreds of churches built around highly controlled substances have sprouted up across the country.

6:44Nearly all of them in a legal gray area. Today on the show, we go inside what is likely the largest of these churches. and we'll meet one of the lawyers trying to help keep psychedelic religious leaders out of the prison. There'll be octogods, ego deaths, police raids, and a peek into how the government decides what actually counts as a religion.

7:22opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. I wanted to understand how it's conceivably legal to openly operate a megachurch distributing millions of dollars of Schedule I narcotics to thousands of people every year. And so I called a lawyer named John rap. It's funny because I come off as kind of a, you know, reasonably corporate guy. You know, I worked for Exxon, I worked for Microsoft, I worked for Lockheed and big, big companies. But these days, what I mostly do is I help create, defend, advise, counsel, and warn psychedelic churches.

8:10Over the past few years, John has become one of the bigger names in the world of psychedelic church law. And so in the plant movement, I literally had a couple of people think I was a narc. And then I found out recently that most of the lawyers around here call me a hippie, hippie lawyer now, which I guarantee you I am not. John's path to psychedelics was not an obvious one. He was raised a conservative Christian, and he grew up in the heyday of the war on drugs, when many psychedelic substances were federally outlawed and stigmatized. I tell people sometimes the only word that my parents hated more than Democrat was LSD.

8:48You know, they really bought the whole Richard Nixon routine. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. In 1970, President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act into law, which put psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in a highly punishable category, Schedule 1. And all the messaging around the dangers of these drugs impacted the way a whole generation viewed them, including John. I was scared of all these things, you know, cocaine and LSD, and I thought they were all kind of the same.

9:28John says it wasn't until 2020, after decades practicing corporate litigation, that something happened to radically change his outlook on psychedelics. It had to do with his son. Back in the 2000s, John's son had been prescribed opiates after surgery. That initial prescription led to a more than decade-long struggle with addiction that suddenly ended when he died in 2020. In the depths of his grief, John remembered that one of the things his son had said had given him relief, even in his darkest days, were psychedelic ayahuasca ceremonies. So John decided to give it a try. And he says what he experienced there was deeply moving.

10:06It helped him process the loss of his son and fundamentally changed his mind about the power and possibility of psychedelic drugs. It is impossible to describe the experience of some of these substances at a high dose. It's like having a baby or getting married or, you know, seeing Paris for the first time. You know, it's just not like anything else. And it just seemed inconceivable to me that these things were illegal. You know, it changed my life almost entirely for the better. Hmm.

10:41Ah, fuck. So John decided that he was going to spend the rest of his professional life kind of honoring his son by doing everything he could to protect the people offering safe access to these life-changing substances. He jumped into the legal effort to decriminalize natural psychedelics in Seattle, where he lives. He joined a psychedelic church in his area, and he started to meet more and more people in this world. So I just started getting to know these people at events and things, and then when people had trouble, they would call me. John started to get calls from all sorts of people looking for legal advice when it came to using psychedelics.

11:19From therapists or medical practitioners who wanted to offer psychedelics to their patients but wanted to minimize the likelihood of going to jail or losing their licenses. And from burgeoning religious communities hoping to protect themselves from intervention by law enforcement. And that's most of what I do now is help those churches. Unfortunately, most of them don't have any money. So a lot of it ends up being my pro bono practice. And word gets around when you're mostly willing to work for free. It turns out that's a very attractive price. Now, there is actually a long history of religious exemptions to otherwise forbidden substances in the U.S.

12:00The Native American church started receiving exemptions for the ceremonial use of peyote as early as the 1960s. Since then, a number of international psychedelic churches have found a foothold here. But the big legal case that helped inspire a whole new wave of these churches came in the mid-2000s. There was a branch of a Brazilian psychedelic church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It had about 130 members. One day, the church was importing a shipment of ayahuasca tea from Brazil when the tea was discovered and confiscated by Customs and Border Protection. The church decided to sue the government, alleging that customs had violated their religious rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

12:41The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, and in 2006, the court ultimately agreed. After all, they reasoned, the government had not demonstrated that the church's psychedelics were harmful or that they were likely to spread beyond the congregation. Plus, as Chief Justice John Roberts explained, the Native American church had been exempt for decades. If an exception for use of a controlled substance is permitted for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, we do not see why there can be no consideration of a similar exception for the 130 or so members of the church at issue here.

13:16John Rapp says that case proved that psychedelic churches beyond the Native American church could fight for their rights and win in court. And it helped set the stage for the boom in brand new psychedelic churches that he started noticing a few years ago, as he became familiar with this part of the law and started to get more and more calls for legal advice. And the underlying thing these churches want to know is, what do we need to do to practice our religion without going to prison? The first thing John explains is that unless the government has specifically granted you an exemption, there is no such thing as full legal protection in this world.

13:53Any one of these churches could draw the attention of law enforcement at any time and end up in court for violating the Controlled Substances Act. So John's job is to help these churches organize themselves in the most legally defensible way possible. While you cannot encourage someone to commit crimes, you can counsel them on the likely consequences of a presumptively illegal course of conduct. So that's a lot of what we do. Now, after that 2006 Supreme Court case, the one with the Brazilian Ayahuasca Church, the DEA did create a formal process to apply for a religious exemption to the Controlled Substances Act.

14:33But the process is pretty fraught. For one, the DEA is notoriously slow on this, sometimes taking years to respond to groups that have applied. We reached out to the DEA, who told us multiple factors can impact the time, including how long it takes a petitioner to submit all their paperwork and scheduling on-site inspections. The process also requires applicants to stop using illegal substances during the petition period, which, for all intents and purposes, means pausing their religious practices. And then John says there's this sort of catch-22. If you apply and you are ultimately denied, you've just given the government detailed evidence they could, in theory, use to bring a drug case against your church.

15:16You're just saying in a public document, you know, here's all the things we're doing and here's our address and this is how we order our sacrament and basically you're confessing to crimes, right? So John's work, he explains, focuses mostly on helping his clients think through a basic litmus test. What makes something a church in the eyes of the law? How do they determine whether something is sincere religion? Now, it's not like the government has provided some definitive list of attributes they used to answer that question. But they have left clues in various places. One of them was a federal case in Wyoming where the reverend of a marijuana church was charged with possession and trafficking back in the 90s.

15:56People like John refer to the criteria the court used there as the Myers test. And it just has a list of what constitutes, you know, a presumptively legitimate religion. Things like, does this alleged religion have a clearly defined founder or spiritual leader? Do they hold regular services and ceremonies? Do they have rituals? Does this religion have a well-developed theology? And are those beliefs codified in some kind of sacred text? You know, I literally help people write Bibles. I mean, that's a big part of what I do. How do you write a new Bible? I say, look, send me everything you've got.

16:31And typically they got a lot. My latest client is like the octogod with like eight personalities appeared to me in a dream. And, you know, sometimes you got to really remember, you know, the early days of Mormonism and a few others had some very odd stories, too. Yeah, all sorts of major religions have elements that might sound outlandish to a non-believer. You know, burning bushes, talking snakes, raining omnipotently over entire worlds in the afterlife. So I typically take all that, and then I'll take things I know from other cases, codes of ethics, bylaws that I've seen work for churches, and we translate that vision, that storyline, into a canon, or, you know, some people actually call it a Bible.

17:15So using this so-called Myers test, you can kind of retrofit your church based on these factors. And John's job is to basically help his clients codify their new religions in ways that should be, in theory, easily legible to a judge or a jury or a curious DEA agent. He helps them standardize their texts, their ceremonies, their religious garb, even things like holidays. That's one of my favorite parts. I just think that's fun. Do you have any you're particularly proud of? My favorite one is April 19th is Bicycle Day, the day we celebrate the discovery of LSD, because Albert Hoffman went out on a bike ride high on LSD through the streets of Zurich.

18:00It was actually the streets of Basel, but you get the idea. One other thing John always tells his clients is that there are some rules they should follow. The DEA has clear protocols for how churches that have gotten exemptions are required to handle and secure their psychedelics, using things like lockboxes and video surveillance to make sure that drugs don't get diverted to people outside the church. Still, nothing is a guarantee. Even if we do the legal work, you're not actually paying for me to eliminate your risk. You're paying for me to reduce your risk. At this point, John estimates there are somewhere north of 300 psychedelic religious organizations operating around the U.S., which sounds like a lot, but most of them are pretty small.

18:44And John says when it comes to finances, most of these churches are barely scraping by. But there is one big exception. A psychedelic church so big and so successful that it's drawn the attention of people far outside the psychedelic community, making it a potential test case for this whole wave of new churches. How much of an economic outlier is the Zydor church? Hard to overstate. I mean, if I had to guess, I would guess that 70 or 80 percent of all the revenue in the United States for psychedelics goes to Zydor. I mean, Dave Hodges is, you know, far and away the most successful financially of the psychedelic churches.

19:29We wanted to figure out how this all works from the inside. So after the break, Planet Money starts its own psychedelic megachurch. Just kidding. NPR's lawyers were really not into that idea. Instead, we dive back into Pastor Dave Hodge's Magic Mushroom Megachurch to hear about the promise and peril of bringing psychedelic religion to the masses.

20:06When I went to visit the Zydor Church in Oakland earlier this month, I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of how it could toe the line between a house of worship and a business. But I wanted to make a good faith effort to understand how Pastor Dave Hodges put all this in the framework of religion. And he told me he never intended to run the largest psychedelic church in the world. To him, a small community of like-minded worshippers was all he wanted. That and greater public access to psychedelics. Zydor, or the Church of Ambrosia, as Dave calls the broader organization, it actually started as a marijuana church back in 2019.

20:45The latest in a string of weed organizations Dave had run as a sort of quasi-anti-war-on-drugs business activist. But then in July of 2019, he had a life-altering vision while on mushrooms that he says turned him into a true believer. It ended with these three golden beings sitting down with me and telling me everything that I'd went through in my life and what I was supposed to do. And what they told me was that they needed me because I was somebody who was capable of understanding them, but also I fought a lot of court cases and all the experience that I learned through the cannabis industry was things that they needed me to do and fight to protect this tool and this movement.

21:29Did you feel at the time like you were receiving a kind of divine revelation of some sort? Yeah, well, I mean, these are best described as spiritual visions. So Dave re-centered the church around psychedelic mushrooms, specifically around the practice of taking much higher doses than people usually do recreationally, like 10 times more. At first, growth was relatively slow, mostly people who'd heard about the church on Reddit. But something happened in August of 2020 that would end up radically accelerating the church's trajectory. One day, Dave was checking up on one of the church's marijuana grow houses when he got a call from one of his employees.

22:07The Oakland Police Department was at the door. They were raiding the building. According to Dave, over the next few hours, the police swept the sacrament room and cut into one of the church's safes, in the end confiscating some$200 ,000 worth of mushrooms and marijuana and several thousand dollars in cash. But Dave says he'd been preparing for this kind of thing since he started the church. He'd done his research, understood things like the Myers test of religious sincerity. In fact, this was in some ways the point. He welcomed the chance to stand up against the law, to help defend the religious right to do all of this.

22:42And so by the very next day, Dave was serving sacrament again. And rather than put Zydor out of non-business, Dave says the raid actually made them a national news story. So the raid ended up kind of catapulting the church into the public eye in some way. Absolutely. Without the raid, you might not ever know we existed. No raid, no megachurch. Yeah, basically. Pretty soon, Zydor's membership started to take off. And I should say, this is the point where Zydor really becomes an outlier in the world of psychedelic churches. Unlike other prominent psychedelic churches that make prospective members do interviews and tests to double-check their mental and physical health and steeping them in church theology, Zydor's barrier to entry is relatively low.

23:29Just a form agreement stating that you believe in their doctrine and that you're not a cop, along with a$10 initiation fee, and$5 a month after that. Now,$5 may not sound like that much, but after the raid, Zydor's membership exploded. Over 135 ,000 members have come through the church at this point. These days, Dave estimates about 4 ,000 members come into the church to get sacrament each month. That means a minimum of$20 ,000 a month in membership fees. And if each of those members donates, say,$60 a visit, multiplied over the year, that's several million dollars in revenue. And all that scale has raised some eyebrows.

24:09How do you respond when people say, you know, well, this just looks like a way to make a lot of money on otherwise extremely kind of controlled illicit substances? That if you wanted to make a lot of money, you'd do a business where you didn't have to worry about the cops coming in and knocking down the door and taking everything. You know, this is not a situation where you can build wealth out of. Dave says for those who think he's some sort of fungal kingpin, the margins are slimmer than they may appear. Dave's got a lot of costs to cover. There's rent for the church and a separate house where they do high dosage ceremonies.

24:51He's got payroll. He says at least half of the money Zydor takes in goes to supplying all that marijuana and mushrooms and DMT from secure suppliers, and then doing potency and quality control testing. Security is really expensive. Again, we're in Oakland, so it's, as you saw, a fairly hard area. And without armed guards at the door, things would happen. Dave likes to say Zydor is kind of caught between the cops and the robbers. Just like marijuana dispensaries, the church can't use the normal banking system because they're dealing with federally outlawed substances. The whole place runs on cash.

25:29To me, if there's a pile of$100 ,000 in cash sitting around, I'm freaking out going, well, who do I give this to so that the cops don't come take it? Because the more assets that you have, the more assets they can take. Dave says the money from the church does afford him a comfortable life. It means he doesn't have to work several days a week that he can instead spend with his young son. Without a forensic dive into Dave's finances, we can't know for sure. But it doesn't seem like he's splashing out, given how much attention that would draw, and the fact that the police have already confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff from the church.

26:09So anytime there's extra cash, you know, I look for things in the community that we can support. Dave says that in addition to doing charitable churchy things like toy drives, a portion of this money also goes to other psychedelic churches, helping them prepare for their legal tangles with the government. Which gets to the strange collective limbo that all of these churches are in at this moment. When it comes to mushrooms, at least, the U.S. is a legal patchwork. There are these legal islands of relative safety, places like Oakland and Seattle that have decriminalized mushrooms. That means that local governments have directed their law enforcement to treat mushroom crimes as their lowest priority.