A San Francisco church with reverence for entheogenic plants is closing its doors due to alleged harassment from officials in the city’s Planning Department.
Dave Hodges, founder of the Church of Ambrosia, says that the authorities are picking on his organization because they are not open-minded enough to appreciate it. He feels that their targeting of his place of worship constitutes religious discrimination.
“It’s obviously hostility from people in the Planning Department,” he said in a news release on the matter. The department has been going out of its way to find structural flaws in the church’s building ever since the psilocybin mushroom worship commenced, Hodges says. They would cost up to US$200,000 to fix.
“ The building has been inspected by the Planning Department many times, and it wasn’t until we opened up that all these problems started to be big issues,” Hodges explained at a press conference this week.
He thinks the universe is telling him to get out of the city and do God’s work elsewhere. There is a great deal of crime in the area where the building resides too, which is rather unpleasant. Somebody got stabbed outside the church’s back door recently.
“I never had any problems with the planning department until Dave opened the church,” the building’s owner, Tatiana Takaeva Shiff, confirmed. “It was fine.”
The Church of Ambrosia will now be solely conducting sermons at its primary location in Oakland. It has over 120,000 members who partake in the consumption of magic mushrooms, cannabis and DMT.
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Chief of staff’s comments reflect bias
The head of San Fran’s Planning Department, Daniel Sider, recently made comments clarifying that he has a negative perception of psilocybin.
“It seemed to me like we were dealing with a bunch of people on mushrooms that were trying to convince us that they weren’t hosting bunches of people on mushrooms,” he told a journalist in a recent interview, according to the church.
Some leave their heart in San Francisco, as the song goes, but Hodges appears to just be leaving an unsuitable environment for psychedelic worship.
His organization believes that mushrooms were significantly responsible for human evolution, similar to the “stoned ape” theory. A membership with the Church of Ambrosia only costs US$5.
“We believe that the magic mushroom itself is what sparked the first religious experience of our species, catalyzing the evolution of our physiological, communal, neurological and spiritual attributes.”
Many California cities decriminalized natural psychedelics in 2019
Natural psychoactive substances like psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote and DMT have been decriminalized in several cities within the state. These include Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Berkeley.
A bill aimed at legalizing psychedelics for therapeutic use was introduced in California this year, but it has not progressed due to opposition from certain groups and budget concerns.
California’s number one research institution for entheogenic plants is the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
rowan@mugglehead.com
