A trip to the magic mushroom megachurch

Summary

Planet Money — "A Trip to the Magic Mushroom Megachurch"

NPR · January 24, 2026 · Host: Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

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Overview

This episode explores the rise and operation of Zydor Church, the largest psychedelic "mushroom church" in the world. Host Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi travels to Oakland, CA, to understand how Zydor operates in the legal gray area surrounding psilocybin and other psychedelics, and how its founder, Dave Hodges, frames the church's mission as religious rather than commercial. The episode also delves into the legal strategies behind such churches, the challenge of distinguishing faith from commerce, and the implications for drug policy, religious liberty, and the broader psychedelic movement.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Inside the Zydor Church

• Location and Atmosphere

  • The church is discreetly located in a nondescript Oakland warehouse, with tight security (01:21).
  • Instead of pews and stained-glass, the interior features psychedelic-themed murals: whales, apes, and especially mushrooms (02:13).

• Founding and Beliefs

  • Zydor is not associated with Christianity, Judaism, or other major religions; it’s grounded in the belief that psilocybin mushrooms offer direct access to the divine (02:36).
  • Pastor Dave Hodges describes Zydor as “the largest mushroom church in the world” (02:49).

• Joining and Accessing the Sacrament

  • Membership requires a self-declared belief in the doctrine, a form verifying you’re not law enforcement, a $10 initiation fee, and $5/month dues (03:31, 25:08).
  • Members receive a card allowing them to make donations in exchange for "sacrament"—not sold, but offered after donation (03:58). Sacrament includes mushrooms (multiple cultivars), cannabis, DMT, and edibles in a “psychedelic Willy Wonka situation” (05:16).

2. Legal Tightrope: Religion, Drugs, and the Law

• Introducing John Rapp, Psychedelic Church Lawyer

  • Former corporate attorney, now defends and advises psychedelic churches, often pro bono (08:12, 12:00).
  • Rapp’s journey was personal: transformed after the loss of his son and experiences with psychedelics (09:53).

• Foundations of Legal Protection

  • Religious exemptions for banned substances date back to the Native American Church and its peyote use.
  • Landmark: A 2006 Supreme Court case where a Brazilian Ayahuasca church won protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, setting standards for what counts as a "sincere religion" (12:18, 13:28).

• Risks and the “Myers Test”

  • No full legal protection exists unless the DEA grants a specific exemption (14:33).
  • The Myers Test: federal case law outlining criteria for a legitimate religion, including structure, doctrine, texts, rituals, leaders, and holidays (16:32).
    • Rapp helps clients write “Bibles,” standardize texts, ceremonies, and even create religious holidays (17:12–18:04).

• Real Dangers and Economic Outliers

  • Applying for exemptions can be risky—a denied application provides the DEA with evidence for prosecution (15:29).
  • Most psychedelic churches are small and struggling—except Zydor, which handles an estimated 70–80% of all U.S. psychedelic church revenue (19:33).

3. Zydor’s Economic Model—and Its Controversy

• Origins, Growth, and the 2020 Police Raid

  • Hodges initially ran cannabis organizations before a transformative mushroom experience led him to found Zydor (23:04).
  • A 2020 police raid on the church actually boosted its profile, causing membership to skyrocket (24:01, 25:01).

• Scale and Finances

  • Zydor now boasts over 135,000 members and processes thousands monthly, leading to "several million dollars" in annual revenue (26:02).
  • Critics see the church as a potential money-making front, but Hodges insists the risks, running costs (security, staff, quality control), and inability to use traditional banking undermine the narrative of profit over faith (26:28, 27:07).

• Balance of Commerce and Faith

  • Minimal barriers for joining cause some discomfort, even among other psychedelic churches worried about the appearance of commercialism or recreational use (29:59).

4. Philosophical and Social Implications

• Faith vs. Recreation

  • Hodges posits that all mushroom use is spiritual, and even skeptics might find themselves "converted" by the experience:
    • “Anything they're doing to get closer to the soul is a religious experience from my perspective. And whether or not they understand that that's what they're doing... eventually they will understand.” (29:59 – Dave Hodges)

• Community and Harm Reduction

  • Some critics fear lax standards fuel legal backlash or confusion; others, like John Rapp, see Zydor as both a church and a harm-reduction model.
    • “In the overall world, handing somebody, you know, the high dose of mushrooms versus cocaine or whatever, that, to me, seems like an easy choice... an elaborate and successful exercise in harm reduction.” (31:16 – John Rapp)

• Legal Uncertainty and Ongoing Change

  • Legal status of psychedelics is rapidly evolving, with local decriminalization in some cities and incremental progress at the federal level (28:18).
  • With hundreds of small psychedelic churches navigating semi-legal territory, Zydor serves as both standard-bearer and flashpoint for controversy and regulatory attention (19:59, 32:41).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “It feels more like a galactic bowling alley than a sanctuary.”
  —Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi (02:13)

• “There's even a special piece of paper ... that says if you're a cop or working with the cops, we're going to sue you for $100,000.”
  —Dave Hodges (03:40)

• “Generally, I say I run the largest mushroom church in the world.”
  —Dave Hodges (02:49)

• “John says what he experienced there was deeply moving... It changed my life almost entirely for the better. Hmm. Ah, fuck.”
  —Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and John Rapp (10:39)

• “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...”
  —Chief Justice John Roberts (quoted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, 13:28)

• “I literally help people write Bibles.”
  —John Rapp (16:47)

• “My favorite one is April 19th is Bicycle Day, the day we celebrate the discovery of LSD.”
  —John Rapp (18:11)

• On Zydor's revenue:
  “If I had to guess, I would guess that 70 or 80% of all the revenue in the United States for psychedelics goes to Zidor.”
  —John Rapp (19:33)

• “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.”
  —Dave Hodges (26:28)

• “I may believe in your sincere religiosity around this, but the church is so large that how can you be sure that any of these 130,000 plus members are doing this as an act of faith...?”
  —Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi (29:59)

• “Whether they know it or not, they are having a religious experience.”
  —Dave Hodges (29:59)

• “There are people that think that we're just making tons of money and that this ... is just a way to get wealthy, and then there's the ones whose lives we've changed ... people that have got past trauma that 10 years of therapy couldn't touch.”
  —Dave Hodges (32:41)

• Closing image:
  “Dave did what all good evangelists do. He handed me a copy of the church's Bible. On the cover there’s a gorilla sitting in space, stroking his chin and holding a psychedelic mushroom. Dave says the Bible still isn’t quite finished yet ... it really is a living document.”
  —Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi (33:12)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:17 — Host sets up the episode and travels to Oakland to visit Zydor Church.
• 02:36 — Introduction to Zydor’s beliefs and structure.
• 03:31 — Joining process and legal quirks.
• 07:59 — Introduction to John Rapp, the psychedelic church lawyer.
• 13:28 — The 2006 Supreme Court decision shaping the legal landscape.
• 16:26 — The Myers Test: What legally qualifies as a religion.
• 19:33 — Zydor as economic outlier in psychedelic churches.
• 23:04 — Dave Hodges' personal religious vision.
• 24:01–25:06 — 2020 police raid and its impact.
• 26:28 — Finances, risk, and Hodges' defense of his motives.
• 29:59 — Tension between faith, commercialism, and recreational use.
• 31:16 — John Rapp on Zydor as harm reduction.
• 32:41 — Dave Hodges on critics and the changed lives of parishioners.
• 33:12 — Closing: The evolving church Bible as living document.

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Takeaways

• Zydor Church represents the cutting edge—and controversy—of the intersection of religious freedom and America’s changing approach to psychedelics.
• Its legal status is precarious and emblematic of the wider movement, hinging on the sincerity of faith, the ambiguity of federal policy, and economic realities.
• As the largest and most visible psychedelic church, Zydor’s model—open membership, large scale, and broad access—serves both as opportunity and risk for the mushroom church movement as a whole.
• The debate over Zydor’s legitimacy, efficacy, and impact on drug policy and religious liberty reflects deeper questions about the evolving boundaries of faith, law, and the modern economy.

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Episode reported by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. Edited by Eric Mennel. Fact-Checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineered by Kwesi Lee, with help from Robert Rodriguez.

Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

This message comes from the International Rescue Committee. Co founded with help from Albert Einstein. The IRC provides emergency aid and support to people affected by conflict and disaster. Donate today by visiting rescue.org rebuild.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

We'Ve got some big news. Planet Money is going on tour to promote our first ever book. It comes out in April. We'll be celebrating in about a dozen cities. There's a limited edition tote bag included with your ticket while supplies last. Details dates and how to get your [e-mail] you can click the link in the show notes. Just 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 Zydor Church. Hey, you looking for zy door? I'm looking for Zydor. Is this it?

[Dave Hodges]

Oh, this is Zeid Door.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

From the street, you might not even know the church was there. It'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 Zydoor 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.

[Dave Hodges]

Hey, how's it going?

[John Rapp]

Hey.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Pastor Dave, I presume?

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, good to meet you.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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.

[Dave Hodges]

Give you a little tour of the place.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

It doesn't really look like any church I've been inside of before.

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, probably not.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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 Zaidor Church is not a Christian church. It's not Jewish or Hindu. Zaidor is a mushroom Church. It is organized around the belief that psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms offer direct access to the divine.

[Dave Hodges]

Generally. I say I run the largest mushroom church in the world. That's, you know, if we're, if we're going simple.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

That's the elevator pitch, that's the log line.

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Zidor 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. To join the church is pretty simple. You have to fill out an application pledging your sincere religiosity.

[Dave Hodges]

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?

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Is there an are you a cop checkbox?

[Dave Hodges]

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 the 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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Once 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 Sacramento.

[Dave Hodges]

This is the sacrament room where people contribute cash and we give them the sacrament.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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 sale 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. And 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.

[Dave Hodges]

There's the classics like the Golden Teachers, Penis envy, Sun Temple, another strain.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

For those with a bit of a sweet tooth. There are mushroom confections of all shapes and sizes.

[Dave Hodges]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

A little wrapper like sweeties?

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, Sweeties. They're kind of like sweeties.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

It's like a psychedelic Willy Wonka situation.

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, kinda. Kinda.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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 were being born and when you're dying.

[Dave Hodges]

We do carry just straight dmt, but also vape pens.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And how much would I have to donate to get one of these?

[Dave Hodges]

It depends. Probably about 100 bucks for that.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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. And it is that kind of volume that's made Dave feel famous and a little bit controversial in the psychedelic movement. I've heard people compare your church to mega church status. Is that right?

[Dave Hodges]

Well, through our membership, we now have a little over 135,000 members who have all physically come through the church to get sacrament.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Wow.

[Dave Hodges]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. 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, nearly 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 Moscow. There will be octagons, ego deaths, police raids, and a peek into how the government decides what actually counts as a religion.

[Narrator/Announcer]

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[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Understand how it's conceivably legal to openly operate a megachurch distributing millions of dollars of Schedule 1 Narcotics to thousands of people every year. And so I Called a lawyer named John Rapp.

[John Rapp]

It's funny because I come off as kind of a, you know, 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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Over the past few years, John has become one of the bigger names in the world of psychedelic church law.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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.

[John Rapp]

I tell people sometimes the only word that my parents hated more than democrat was lsd. You know, they really bought the whole Richard Nixon routine.

[Dave Hodges]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

In 1970, President Nixon signed the controlled substances act into law, which put psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms rooms 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.

[John Rapp]

I was scared of all these things, you know, cocaine and lsd, and I thought they were all kind of the same.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

John 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. It helped him process the loss of his son and fundamentally changed his mind about the power and possibility of psychedelic drugs.

[John Rapp]

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. Ah, fuck.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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.

[John Rapp]

So I just started getting to know these people at events and things, and then when people had trouble, they would call me.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

John started to get calls from all sorts of people looking for legal advice when it came to using psychedelics. From 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.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Now, there is actually a long history of religious exemptions to otherwise forbidden substances in the US The 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. The 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.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

John 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, 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. Any 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.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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. But 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.

[Narrator/Announcer]

And.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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.

[John Rapp]

You'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?

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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. People like John refer to the criteria the court used there as the Myers test.

[John Rapp]

And it just has a list of what constitutes, you know, a presumptively legitimate religion.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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?

[John Rapp]

You know, I literally help people write Bibles. I mean, that's a big part of what I do.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

How do you write a new Bible?

[John Rapp]

I say, look, send me everything you've got. And typically they got a lot. My latest client is like the Octo God 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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Yeah, all sorts of major religions have elements that might sound outlandish to a non believer. You know, burning bushes, talking snakes, reigning omnipotently over entire worlds in the afterlife.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

So 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.

[John Rapp]

That's one of my favorite parts. I just think that's fun.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

So do you have any you're particularly proud of?

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

It 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.

[John Rapp]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

At this point, John estimates there are somewhere north of 300 psychedelic religious organizations operating around the US which sounds like a lot, but most of them are pretty small. And 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 Zidor church?

[John Rapp]

Hard to overstate. I mean, I would. If I had to guess, I would guess that 70 or 80% of all the revenue in the United States for psychedelics goes to Zidor.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Wow.

[John Rapp]

I mean, Dave Hodges is, you know, far and away the most successful financially of the psychedelic churches.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

We 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 Hodges magic Mushroom megachurch to hear about the promise and peril of bringing psychedelic religion to the masses.

[Narrator/Announcer]

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[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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 worshipers was all he wanted. That and greater public access to psychedelics. Zidor, or the Church of Ambrosia, as Dave calls the broader organization. It actually started as a marijuana church back in 2019, the 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.

[Dave Hodges]

It ended with these three golden beings sitting down with me and telling me everything that I 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 is 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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Did you feel at the time like you were receiving a kind of divine revelation of some sort?

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, well, I mean, these are best described as spiritual visions.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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. 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 rad 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. The 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. And 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 store. So the raid ended up kind of catapulting the church into the public eye in some way.

[Dave Hodges]

Absolutely. Without the raid, you might not ever know we existed.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

No raid, no megachurch.

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, basically.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Pretty soon, Zydor's membership started to take off. And I should say this is the point where Zidor 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. Just 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 fees. And if each of those members donate, say $60 a visit, multiplied over the year, that's several million dollars in revenue. And all that scale has raised some eyebrows. How do you respond when, 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.

[Dave Hodges]

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, this is not a situation where you can build wealth out of.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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. He'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.

[Dave Hodges]

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.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Dave likes to say Zidor 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.

[Dave Hodges]

To 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 can take.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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.

[Dave Hodges]

So anytime there's extra cash, you know, I look for things in the community that we can support.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

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 US 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. And in those places, it's become relatively easy to get these substances with or without a church. But that doesn't mean churches are in the clear. For example, in Zydor's case, there were ultimately no charges filed after that raid. But Dave says he never recovered the things that were taken. And these drugs are still illegal according to many state laws. And everywhere federally over the past few years, there have been several cases brought against psychedelic churches. For example, an ayahuasca church in Florida and its owner were found guilty of negligence after a participant died following a ceremony. Other churches have been rated as fronts for drug distribution. And it's this tension that I'd really been wondering about from the beginning. Like, are a ton of people just using Zydoor as a way to get drugs regardless of what they believe? What would you say to somebody who's like, okay, I may believe in your, you know, sincere religiosity around this, but the church is so large that how can you be sure that any of these 130,000 plus members are doing this as an act of faith as opposed to a kind of recreational exploration?

[Dave Hodges]

Yeah, for me, the perspective is that whether they know it or not, they are Having a religious experience. So when I talk about how the mushrooms work, they affect the border between this world and the next. And anything they're doing to get closer to the soul is a religious experience from my perspective. And whether or not they understand that that's what they're doing, as they do more, eventually they will understand. It's, you know, they. They end up converting themselves.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

In other words, Dave believes that no matter your intention, consuming mushrooms opens up a kind of spiritual communion with your own soul. It is an inherently religious experience, and so he is fulfilling his church's religious mission by providing them. But even other psychedelic churches can be a bit apprehensive about the scale of Dave's operation, his relatively permissive approach to membership, and his focus on very high dosages. One pastor told me he's grateful that Zidor has provided an entry point to psychedelic spirituality for many, but he worries that it also risks confusing the public and law enforcement. I asked the psychedelic lawyer John Rapp about this.

[John Rapp]

What I would say to people who have problems with Dave Hodges is, well, if you don't help people make some better decisions, most people are going to end up with alcohol and cocaine and, you know, opiates that killed my son. And in the overall world, handing somebody, you know, the high dose of mushrooms versus cocaine or whatever, that, to me, seems like an easy choice. So in many ways, I see Zidor not just being a true church, which I believe it is, but also an elaborate and successful exercise in harm reduction.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

After all, there's an argument that Zidor is providing a kind of market service by supplying more consistently vetted psychedelics than stuff you could get on the black market. John says in the long run, what he and other members of the psychedelic movement hope to see is a shift in how these substances are treated by the federal government. And they hope to see things like psilocybin make it through the FDA's clinical trials. There have been some recent wins for the psychedelic church movement in court. And just recently, a church in Washington state became the first psychedelic church to be granted a DEA exemption without having to go to court. So it's a balancing act. And until any of this becomes settled law, it's going to be people like John and Pastor Dave Hodges who are taking on the risk and making the case.

[Dave Hodges]

There's definitely people who don't believe that this should be a religion, and there's. There's people that think that we're just making tons of money and that this, this is just a way to get wealthy and then there's the ones whose lives we've changed. And people that have got past trauma that 10 years of therapy couldn't touch, and people that can answer questions of why they're here and what they're supposed to do. To me, these are some of the most important questions anybody could have answered from themselves.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

After my time visiting Zaidur, on my way out of the church, Dave did what all good evangelists do. He handed me a copy of the church's Bible. On the COVID there's a gorilla sitting in space, stroking his chin and holding a psychedelic mushroom. Dave says the Bible still isn't quite finished yet and it really is a living document. On the back cover it reads Draft V2. This episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler and edited by Eric Mennel. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Kwesi Lee with help from Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. This story was reported with support from the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. We got the recording of that 2006 Supreme Court case from Oye. I'm Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. This is npr. Thanks for listening. Listening.

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