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 prison.

There'll be octogods, ego deaths, police raids, and a peek into how the government decides what actually counts as a religion.

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 Rapp.

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.

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 I. 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.

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.

Ah, fuck.