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 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.

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

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 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?