Kyle Norton Riester: Lieutenant LSD

0:08It was an unremarkable August morning in 2024. The air in Springfield, Virginia was humid even at dawn. Automatic sprinklers turned on and watered brown front lawns. Early morning alarms began to rank. The many military families in the neighborhood were waking up, ready to report for duty at nearby Fort Belvoir. Springfield is a bedroom community like any other near the nation's capital. A busy collection of single-family homes, strip malls, stoplights, and Starbucks drive-thrus. On this Monday morning, a commuter's only concern would be beating the morning traffic. Lieutenant Kyle Norton Reister was getting ready to head into work at nearby Fort Belvoir.

0:59He's not what you would expect from someone who would file this lawsuit or be involved in a case like this. You know, he's clean shaven. He has the military bearing. The Blackhawk pilot's morning routine was interrupted when he heard aggressive knocking at the front door. A voice shouted, the FBI was there. And they had a warrant. You find out about people who have two lives going on, two completely different lives. What crime could possibly bring the FBI to a career military man's door? What secret was Kyle Norton Reister hiding?

1:49This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Kyle Norton Reister, Lieutenant LSD. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin.

2:06In this episode, we dive into the story of Kyle Norton Reister, the Blackhawk pilot fighting an indictment from the U.S. government with a defense as unconventional as his crime.

2:32Lieutenant Kyle Norton Reister always looked tidy and orderly. His hair was styled in a tight military cut and his uniform standard issued, sharp and pressed. Black Hawk pilots lived their rigorous training in and out of uniform. He shared his lifestyle with his wife, who was also a Black Hawk pilot at Fort Belvoir. Black Hawk pilots are elite. Flying in high-stakes missions demands intelligence, focus, and nerves of steel. These helicopters support some of the military's most sensitive operations, and only the best are trusted to fly them. Not all married couples are lucky enough to work such an impressive job together.

3:20But there was one thing Reister couldn't talk about with his wife. His unique take on religion. Here is Stephen Losey, a warfare reporter for Defense News and the Military Times. Lieutenant Kyle Reister is a Black Hawk pilot in the Army. He grew up in Vermont. He described it as a non-religious household. And he went to Indiana University on an ROTC scholarship. And while he was there, he took LSD for the first time in 2017. Drug experimentation is a relatively common part of the college experience. That being said, most ROTC recruits don't typically experiment with hardcore drugs. But Reister was different from other students destined for the army.

4:20He loved his psychedelic experience and continued to sacramentally take LSD from 2017 onward. These spiritual experiences, or trips, lasted for 8-12 hours at a time. He later described this as experiences being deeply religious and mystical and felt that it allowed him to directly commune with his creator or God. While under the influence of LSD, Reister was able to, quote, consult divine forces and entities which guide and instruct him on how to live in accordance with his higher spiritual self and higher spiritual path. He kept attending ceremonies that made use of so-called entheogens, hallucinogenic or psychoactive substances that are used for religious or spiritual purposes.

5:23Not just LSD, but mushrooms, ayahuasca, things like that. Reister was careful never to let his extracurricular activities bleed over into his professional life. Because, as you might have guessed, the Army takes a hard line on drug use. The federal government classifies LSD as a Schedule I drug. That means that it's not recognized as having an accepted medical use, and the government says it has a high potential for abuse. The military does not allow LSD at all. And it's had a bit of a resurgence in recent years among some troops. In 2006, it seemed to be used very rarely. The military actually stopped testing for LSD because it was something like four drug tests out of two million tested positive for LSD.

6:22So they felt there was no serious LSD problem. But in the last decade or so, there's been a couple of embarrassing incidents involving LSD that pushed the Pentagon to pay more attention to it. It sounds like Reister wasn't the only soldier with a relaxed attitude on psychedelics. There was a case at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming where some security forces airmen, their jobs were to guard nuclear missiles. They were busted for buying, distributing, and using LSD and other drugs. And a couple of years after that, the Marines realized that some of their troops had a drug problem, including LSD.

7:06And the DOD started allowing commanders to once again test troops for LSD. Reister had everything to lose. If the Army found out he was dosing LSD, his career would be over. And yet, Reister was willing to risk it all for the spiritual highs he believed only psychedelics could deliver. Here's Salvador Rizzo, a reporter covering federal courts at the Washington Post, who first broke this story. He believes that by consuming LSD, he can commune or communicate or have a connection that he feels is authentic with an entity that he recognizes as a god or a deity or the source of creation. It's not very clear what the religion is called or what the deity has said to him or anything like that, but he says that he began to consume LSD as part of communal religious groups with like-minded people.

8:08While most of us know LSD as a party drug from the 60s, it has also been the subject of legitimate research, including medical, therapeutic, and yes, even spiritual applications. Some people find that it has therapeutic applications, and other people find that it may have a spiritual component, that it may enable people to go into what's called a noetic state. Your perception is sort of heightened a little bit and you're more open or, you know, more sensitive to spiritual experiences. It's actually something that professors have put forward as a theory of something that is possible and that has been observed with people and that has been real and documented.

8:56Somehow, Riester managed to balance military duty with his psychedelic spirituality without raising suspicion. For years, Reister spent weekends chasing noetic states, then showed up ready to pilot a 7-ton helicopter Monday morning. He saw an opportunity to defy the army rules and regulations, and still get what he wanted within the system. Reister wasn't just skirting the rules, he was navigating them with intent, tripping on weekends without tripping any alarms. But he couldn't keep the plates spinning forever. Reister's double life came crashing down around him when the FBI raided his home in Springfield, Virginia in August of 2024.

9:44He had finally taken one step too far into the dark world of psychedelics. And it had turned criminal.

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13:13Kyle Norton Reister was not your average soldier. On one hand, he played the role of the model Blackhawk pilot. Disciplined, dependable, by the book. On the other hand, after hours he was dosing acid in secret, chasing divine visions he believed would guide his spiritual awakening. So what brought the FBI to his door in August of 2024? His extracurriculars escalated from dosing to dealing. After the COVID-19 shutdown upended the world. The world hit pause, and with it, Reister's access to his spiritual realm. Here's Salvador Rizzo, the reporter from the Washington Post, again. It was impossible to get together with other people to share this communal religious experience that we'd all become accustomed to and commune with this creative.

14:16The pandemic drove us all a little crazy. Isolated, scared, maybe even desperate. But Reister saw it as an opportunity. He said, like, I then felt under the influence of LSD that the divine presence was telling me that I needed to find a way to spread what he calls the holy sacrament, LSD, to my co-religionists. And so I started going on the dark web to marketplaces. At least three or four of them is what federal prosecutors found that he used and he had accounts on. Reister's attorneys frame his dark web dealings as spiritual outreach. According to them, he vetted buyers to ensure they shared his belief in LSD as a path to enlightenment, not just a recreational high.

15:38He says, transactions. Reister didn't consider himself a drug dealer. In his mind, he was a missionary, spreading the divine presence through holy sacrament of LSD, one hit at a time. All in all, that sounds like a pretty small niche operation, doesn't it? I mean, it would take some time to vet every seal for religious authenticity, right? How many people could possibly be part of this rigorously vetted religious community. Well, according to the indictment, Reister made 1 ,800 sales. That's right. Kyle Norton Reister is facing an indictment from the federal government for selling up to$120 ,000 worth of LSD on the dark web between September 2022 and May 2024.

16:351 ,800 shipments of LSD orders is very significant. Reister is alleged to have shipped all of these orders through the U.S. mail in Mylar bags, you know, these plastic sealed bags that prevent smell from seeping out or liquid from seeping out. He must have spent a lot of time, if these allegations are proven, constantly monitoring for orders, processing orders, preparing product, shipping the orders. By blending his business school precision with army-honed strategy, Reister quietly built a small LSD empire from his own home. But, you know, with an order volume like that, he was bound to make mistakes.

17:24There was an instance where a prosecutor said that they traced one of the sales to a 15-year-old. And they actually included a report of the interview with that 15-year-old. Two FBI agents interviewed him in Maryland in the presence of his mother and grandmother. And the 15-year-old said that he would sometimes go online to buy drugs. And separately, according to these court documents, an undercover law enforcement officer also managed to make a purchase from Reeser on the dark web market called Abacus. and was not asked any questions about his religion or her religion or spiritual needs or anything like that, according to these court records.

18:09If Reister was trying to build a sacred community, selling to a teenager and an undercover cop means that he either failed miserably or he never really tried. This fast, loose, and lucrative side hustle is what brought the FBI to Lieutenant Reister's door three years after he started his dark web account. But why does it matter who he sold LSD to? Isn't distributing psychedelics just flat-out illegal? According to Reister and his attorneys, not necessarily. At least, not if you're doing it for the right reasons. In their view, his actions weren't criminal. They were constitutionally protected.

19:00And Reister and his legal team are making headlines with their unconventional defense. They claim that because Reister used and sold LSD in accordance with his personal religion, his activities are protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And they don't stop there. In court filings, they claim the government is causing Reister quote, ongoing irreparable harm to his religious exercise, conscience, and reputation. But federal prosecutors and judges disagree. The district court judge who denied his request for an injunction to prevent prosecution simply stated, it's far from clear the sincere religious belief would extend the indiscriminate selling of LSD on the dark web.

19:54Okay, but what is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and what does it mean for this ongoing legal case? Here's Salvador Rizzo again with the details. RFRA, as it's commonly known, is, I think, a law that was enacted during the Bill Clinton administration, 1993, and it's often litigated in court. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act gives people who feel that their religious needs or beliefs are being violated by some government policy to file lawsuits to challenge those policies. If they can prove that their religious exercise is being substantially burdened by the law, then they might get a dispensation from the courts saying like you don't have to follow that part of the law because freedom of religion is in our constitution.

20:44It's or Bill of Rights. The RFRA, as it's called, is meant to give force to that in practice and in the courts and in actual practical settings in society. To invoke RFRA, you have to prove that following the law would prevent you from practicing your religion and that your belief is both sincere and substantially burdened by that law. As you might imagine, that's a high bar, and it's rarely met. But haven't we already established that some legitimate religious communities do use psychoactive substances in worship? So what makes Reister different? There are several court decisions mentioning ayahuasca, peyote, marijuana, they'll get together they will have a physical place of worship right and they will consume the drug as part of a ritual in that physical space or barring a physical space they will gather somehow and it's recognized by multiple members of a group and there's some kind of code some kind of you know, writing a scripture of some sort that they follow in some cases, or there's ancient traditions in the case of some of these native tribes that just go back a thousand years or more, and it's been consistent throughout that timeline.

22:15All of these things plausibly give rise to a valid refer claim and have in the past, according to some court rulings. Riester and his lawyers saw this glimmer of opportunity within the law. There have been cases where courts allow the use and even distribution of controlled substances as long as it was done in a religious context. Lieutenant Reeser, of course, claims that Riffer protects both his consumption of LSD and also, interestingly enough, in a novel sort of twist, what the judge calls his indiscriminate sale of LSD on the dark web. And, of course, the judge in his case, Anthony J. Trenga, who is a federal district court judge in Alexandria, Virginia, he did not buy that.

23:08The judge said that Lieutenant Reister is taking the steps necessary to restrict the distribution to his co-religions. It seems to me that he's selling to just anyone who solicits him on. Judge Trenga conceded that RFRA might protect certain religious drug use. But he wasn't convinced it covered Reister's case. The fact that the sales had happened on the dark web didn't exactly help his argument. The defining nature of the dark web is anonymity. Transactions take place on encrypted marketplaces, on secret forums with throwaway usernames. You could argue that the entire point of operating there is to hide who you are and what you're doing.

23:57So is there any plausible way that Reister could have known the motives of his buyers and controlled his sales? That's the uphill battle, proving that between September 2022 and May 2024, Reister was carefully vetting buyers on the dark web for spiritual alignment. It would be a hard sell for any defendant, but Reister's case got even messier when the news broke that he was tied to yet another crime. This went unfolding across the country. Suddenly, the spiritually motivated good guy argument became an even tougher pill to swallow.

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26:59In August of 2024, the home of Blackhawk pilot Kyle Norton Reister was raided by the FBI, who were searching for evidence of a suspected LSD distribution enterprise. Reister had no issue confessing to his LSD sales. In fact, he felt good about it. In Reister's view, what he's doing wasn't a crime. It was a calling. Something done not for profit, but out of altruism. He claimed that he did it in the name of his religion and that his actions were protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Here's Salvador Rizzo from the Washington Post. Reister had his apartment raided by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

27:52And then he began to cooperate with federal law enforcement. He would give them information on Bitcoin transfers and what he claims are fentanyl and human traffickers that he had somehow encountered online during these activities of his. After the FBI raid, Reister agreed to cooperate with the FBI on a dark web intelligence operation, perhaps to position himself for a better plea bargain. The reported results of this month-long operation are mixed, to say the least. Reister claims his assistance led to the arrest of dangerous international criminals, But his commanding officer called the results perfunctory.

28:43It can't be both. When the operation ended, Reister was offered a deal, but not the one he was hoping for. You can see that even though he was offered a deal and he cooperated for several months, prosecutors were not very willing to let him off scot-free. The plea deal still would have entailed several years, at least, of prison time, right? It would have been a significant prison sentence for someone who has never done any crime or never been convicted of any crime or never been prison time, who's in the army. You know, so it may have seemed unpalatable to him that after his cooperation for those months, he was offered a plea deal that still would have sent to prison for a long time.

29:28Firm in his religious convictions and bitter over the less than ideal sentencing offer, Reister wasn't going to prison without a fight. His legal team threw everything they had at the courts, two motions to halt prosecution and a preliminary injunction in civil court, all invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in an attempt to shut the case down. Federal District Judge Tringa denied all of them, without ceremony and without hesitation.

30:23distribute a controlled substance LSD, more than 10 milligrams, and the other is what's called the substantive count of distributing LSD. He's appealing the denial of the injunctions separately. In retrospect, Reister comes off as exceptionally motivated. While serving full-time as a Blackhawk pilot, he managed to make over$120 ,000 in online LSD sales. Next, he found time to assist the FBI in a dark web intelligence operation, one he claims led to the takedown of serious international criminals. And if that wasn't enough, he's filed four and counting lawsuits, injunctions, and appeals to avoid criminal responsibility for what is, at its core, a very well-known offense, selling drugs.

31:22But Reister is an overachiever. Maybe he just has more hours in the day than the rest of us. It's the only way to explain how, while fighting one federal case on the East Coast, He's also facing a completely separate charge in Texas, this one involving a money laundering scheme. According to prosecutors, Reister and a group of co-conspirators used a spoofed email account to incept a wire transfer between a British company and an American one. The British company was supposed to receive the$285 ,000 wire transfer from the American company. Reister and his co-conspirator somehow got wind that this deal was happening.

32:08What they did was they created a fake email account, a spoof email account, and then somehow like latched onto this impending deal, posed as the company that was supposed to receive the money, gave them sort of fake information for them to wire the money, got the money, and then Reister allegedly converted those funds into cryptocurrency. And now he says that he was duped. I think I heard his attorney say or put in a court pleading that he was not aware that the fraud was going on. So he was maybe duped by all this, but obviously prosecutors say that he was instrumental. It's a bad scheme.