☁️🍄 Issue No. 005: Psychedelic Churches

Welcome back to Headlines, a weekly dispatch on the latest news in mental health. This week I write to you from the Bay Area, where we’re in the throes of a major winter storm — with some rare snow, even! 

In today’s issue, we’re exploring the new generation of churches preaching the gospel of psychedelics. Down the rabbit hole we go. 🐇

PSYCHEDELIC CHURCHES

Congregations across the US are using psychedelics to experience the divine. 

• Plant piety. Sacred Garden Community holds MDMA, psilocybin, changa, and huachuma ceremonies twice a month for initiated church members. The fellowship runs on $25M of funding from Magic Soap exec David Bronner. 

• From Mormon to mushroom. The Divine Assembly’s 5K members consist mainly of ex-Latter-day Saints; they use psilocybin for their ceremonies.

• Ayahuasca altar. Hummingbird Church offers “sacred and deeply spiritual” ayahuasca healing ceremonies in various locations across California and Utah. 

Others include Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants in California and Psanctuary in Kentucky, with dozens more across the US — and many more likely existing underground. 

How is this legal? Good question. Churches say they’re protected from prosecution under a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, where a New Mexico branch of the Brazilian-based União do Vegetal won the right to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. 

Further, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) outlines substance exemptions for churches under conditions of “sincere religious exercise.” But that doesn’t make all churches immune; in 2020, Oakland police raided Zide Door, seizing $200K worth of cannabis and mushrooms.

Of note, this is no new trend. Psychoactive plants have been used by non-Western cultures in otherworldly rituals for thousands of years. The Bwiti tribes in West Africa use the Iboga tree as a sacrament while the Native American Church, which numbers over 250K, revere peyote as a sacred medicine.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Who attends these churches? The psychedelic faithful break out into two cohorts. 

One on hand, there are those who have tired of organized religion but still want to maintain or enhance their connection to God. Courtney Close, founder of Hummingbird Church, explained: “We just try to create a spiritual experience without any dogma and just let people experience God for themselves.”

Many members of The Divine Assembly (TDA) also fall under this category. Run by ex-Mormons Steve and Sara Urquhart, many TDA members speak of feeling suffocated by the expectations of the Latter-day Saints community, yet still aching for spirituality.

On the other hand, there’s a separate crowd flocking to these churches — one with mental health as their core concern. And as hype around the psychedelic renaissance picks up, these churches may act as an access point to otherwise illegal substances. 

But when churches cross the line from spiritual container to mental health facilitator, concerns abound. Communing with the divine or not, psychedelics are powerful drugs with risks; harm reduction is paramount, but churches don’t often have trained medical professionals on staff. 

Case in point, Florida-based Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth was embroiled in a wrongful death lawsuit in 2020 after a 22-year-old participant passed away after one of its ceremonies. 

ZOOMING OUT

The rise of psychedelic churches is closely linked to a wider trend — the precipitous decline of organized religion. 

• In 2021, US church membership fell below 50% for the first time in Gallup’s eight decades of tracking. 

• Three in 10 US adults are now religiously unaffiliated, nearly double the amount in 2007.

Meanwhile, the loneliness crisis is at an all time high. 36% of all Americans feel “serious loneliness" and half a million older people go for days without seeing anyone at all. 

Filling a gap, psychedelic churches address the resulting void of both spirituality and community. And it shows that the mental health system, largely individualistic and mostly secular, isn’t meeting the full spectrum of our needs. In many ways, healing and spirituality are inextricable. 

Punchline: Take a closer look at the two cohorts making up psychedelic fellowships and you’ll find they’re not all too different. Whether seeking holiness or healing, the common ground here is connection — to each other, to themselves, or to the divine. 

Ultimately, community and spirituality cannot be overlooked in the quest for well-being. As operators craft mental health solutions of the future, that’ll be essential to keep in mind. 

QUICK HITS

• Psychedelic careers. Check out this Q&A with five early-career individuals working in psychedelics. 

• Going mainstream. John Oliver devoted an entire segment of Last Week Tonight to discussing psychedelic-assisted therapy.

• K for coke. Researchers at Case Western University found that ketamine could be effective for treating cocaine addiction. 

• K for BPD. A first-of-its-kind controlled trial pointed to ketamine’s promising potential for treating borderline personality disorder. 

• DMT patch. PharmaDrug and PharmaTher are joining forces to develop a transdermal DMT patch. 

• Green light. Beckley Psytech received the first-ever Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the FDA for a study of 5-MeO-DMT.

• Cuts. Cybin, a psychedelic biopharma company, slashed 15% of its staff. 

NEWS & TRENDS

1) Psychedelics research breakthrough 

A new paper published in Science is causing quite a stir in the psychedelics community. Researchers at Delix Therapeutics and UC Davis found that psychedelics appear to go under cell surfaces and interact with receptors directly inside neurons to induce neuroplasticity (help the brain rebuild/rewire neural connections). 

This paper overturns prior thinking and may explain why serotonergic psychedelics like DMT and psilocybin work differently from serotonergic antidepressants, which don’t cross into cell membranes.

And it’s a major leap forward for understanding how psychedelics work — why exactly they seem to be such a powerful mental health treatment. → Read more

2) 2C-B or not 2C-B

A lesser-known psychedelic, 2C-B is derived from mescaline and sought after for its euphoric effects, with a trip anecdotally described like a candy flip (combining LSD and MDMA). 

There aren’t many studies out there on the substance, but researchers from the Netherlands’ University of Maastricht recently ran a clinical trial comparing the effects of 2C-B and psilocybin, investigating subjective experience, mood, and cognition.

Findings: Negative emotions like mood disturbance, confusion, fatigue, and levels of depression were noticeably higher for psilocybin than 2C-B. Meanwhile, those taking 2C-B reported feeling less impaired, despite showing similar outcomes to psilocybin on cognitive tasks. They also reported a “lighter” experience than that of psilocybin. → Read more

DEALS & DEBUTS

🔮 Transcend Therapeutics, a mental health-focused biotech company, closed a $40M Series A led by Alpha Wave Global and Integrated Investment Partners. The company is studying how its lead compound, methylone (a psychoactive comparable to MDMA), can treat PTSD.→ source

🧠 EuMentis Therapeutics, a neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorder treatment developer, closed a $40M Series B round from a private family office. The platform will direct the funds towards therapeutics for autism spectrum disorder, Tourette syndrome, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). → source 

🩹 Healium, a stress and meditation tool leveraging VR, AR, and generative AI, raised a $3.6M seed round and entered a know-how agreement with Mayo Clinic. The tool uses real-time data from fitness trackers to create a virtual reality where users can see and interact with their EEG brain patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, and more.→ source 

💊 Irwin Naturals, a nutraceuticals company, completed its acquisition of Serenity Health, a ketamine clinic in Kentucky. As we covered in Issue No. 001: Down the K-Hole, Irwin is on a clinic buying spree; this move is the latest in a series of acquisitions and is expected to add an estimated $3M in projected EBITDA to Irwin’s financials. → source

⏰ Awakn Life Sciences, a ketamine-assisted therapy provider, signed its first licensing partnership in Europe —  an agreement with a Portugal-based healthcare consortium currently operating in stealth mode. → source

👾 Innerworld, a new virtual reality mental health platform, launched virtual avatar peer support groups and announced musician Jewel as co-founder and chief strategy officer.→ source

🔬 Algernon NeuroScience, a psychedelic pharmaceuticals developer, initiated a new clinical research program using DMT as a treatment for traumatic brain injury. → source 

🤝 AIA, a Singapore-based life insurer, and WhiteCoat, a telehealth company, teamed up to offer digital corporate mental health solutions. → source

WHAT I’M READING

• You and me. Psychotherapy often skews more individualistic than relational. What if that’s limiting our healing? “In order to understand and heal mental distress, we must see our minds as existing in relationships, not inside our heads.” One of the more interesting reads I’ve come across in a while. → aeon

• What ever happened to mescaline? Derived from cacti like the North American peyote and the San Pedro of the Andes, mescaline is the oldest known hallucinogen in human history. But it has been largely overshadowed by psychedelic fan favorites like psilocybin and LSD in both coverage and research. Here’s why. → Slate

Speaking of relationships, I had some fun this week on Twitter weighing in on attachment theory. 

Lots to be explored in that realm! Stay tuned for more. For now, thanks a ton for joining along this week; always a pleasure to have you.

-Mel

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PPS. I’m nomading around for a few months and will be in Manoa/Oahu for most of March. If you’re in the area, would love to connect! 🌴