Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is the Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants?
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Just a heads up, this episode contains a couple swear words.
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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 Zyde Door Church. Hey. You looking for Zyde Door? I'm looking for Zyde Door. Is this it? Oh, this is Zyde Door. 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 Zyde Door 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. Hey, Pastor Dave, I presume.
Yeah, good to meet you. Good to meet you too, in the flesh.
Pastor Dave is a big guy with a long ponytail, salt and pepper goatee, wire-framed glasses. Looks a bit like Benjamin Franklin, if he got a job in a corporate IT department.
Give you a little tour of the place.
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Chapter 3: How does Pastor Dave Hodges define his role within the church?
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.
It's funny because I come off as kind of a, you 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. Over the past few years, John has become one of the bigger names in the world of psychedelic church law.
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.
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.
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-ry routine.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What legal challenges do psychedelic churches face?
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.
That's one of my favorite parts. I just think that's fun. So... Do you have any you're particularly proud of? 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. 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 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.
At this point, John estimates there are somewhere north of 300 psychedelic religious organizations operating around the U.S., 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 Zydor Church?
hard to overstate. I mean, if I had to guess, I would guess that 70 or 80% of all the revenue in the United States for psychedelics goes to Zydor. I mean, Dave Hodges is far and away the most successful financially of the psychedelic churches.
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 Hodge's magic mushroom megachurch to hear about the promise and peril of bringing psychedelic religion to the masses.
When I went to 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.
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Chapter 5: How does the sacrament room operate in the Zydor Church?
And rather than put Zydor out of non-business, Dave says the raid actually made them a national news story. So the raid ended up kind of catapulting the church into the public eye in some way.
Absolutely. Without the raid, you might not ever know we existed.
No raid, no megachurch.
Yeah, basically.
Pretty soon, Zydor's membership started to take off. And I should say, this is the point where Zydor 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 month in membership fees. And if each of those members donates, 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.
That if you wanted to make a lot of money, you 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.
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