Psychedelic Churches and Secular Forces

Despite the long history of Indigenous and religious use, the spiritual uses of psychedelic substances (e.g., plant medicines) have not yet been fully acknowledged or integrated into the new “psychedelic renaissance,” which has primarily focused on the medicalization of psychedelics to treat a range of mental health struggles in regulated therapeutic settings.¹ Clinical trials and psychedelic-therapy training programs are typically grounded in a secular worldview of biomedicine and bioethics and aim to integrate psychedelics into psychiatry and psychotherapy. ² At the same time, an underground movement of both lineage-based and newly formed entheogenic churches that use psychedelic sacraments (or “entheogens”) for spiritual growth is quietly growing. This article presents preliminary findings from two research projects focused on psychedelic religions in the United States. The first study centers on a self-proclaimed “post-modern” multi-sacrament psychedelic church. The second study focuses on two lineage-tradition Santo Daime churches, a century-old syncretic ayahuasca religion from Brazil that blends folk Catholicism, Indigenous and African spiritual traditions, and the sacramental use of ayahuasca. All three of the communities in these studies use psychedelics as spiritual technologies (techniques and practices) of self-cultivation.³ This article explores how secular forces—cultural, legal, and biomedical—shape and interact with the practice of psychedelic spirituality and safety in the United States today.⁴ 

The increasing interest in the use of entheogenic substances for spiritual growth is taking place in a cultural context of American secularity, a “project” that revolves around a set of epistemic and ontological claims regarding the nature of reality that are grounded in a scientific and materialist worldview.⁵ One in three Americans now describe themselves as religious “Nones,” according to Fuller and Parsons (2018),⁶ and millions of Americans have no connection with organized religion yet identify themselves as religious/spiritual. Researchers who have tracked the steady rise of the religiously unaffiliated argue that multiple factors are driving this group’s expansion, including processes of secularization, shifts in community organizations, and increasing isolation.^7,8 Our preliminary ethnographic research suggests that many participants in psychedelic churches think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR).⁹ Of the religiously unaffiliated, SBNR describes people who are interested in spiritual development, but primarily seek guidance from spiritual philosophies outside dominant religious traditions. It is perhaps no surprise that our research has found that this group has been drawn to psychedelic churches. 

Secular forces such as U.S. federal policy and the Western biomedical healthcare complex also shape spiritual practices in the context of psychedelics. The Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970 introduced a classification system that deemed many psychedelics as Schedule I, including DMT (present, for example, in ayahuasca), psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and 5-MeO-DMT. ¹⁰ Schedule I restricts the sale, possession, and consumption of drugs considered to have no accepted medical use and a high risk for misuse. As a result, in the U.S., the sacramental use of psychedelics takes place within a broader cultural context of criminalization, even when such use is permitted by exception.  Although psychedelics are Schedule I drugs in the U.S., the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and related policies allow religious communities that use psychedelics as sacraments to obtain exemptions for the use of Schedule I substances if they can prove these substances are an essential component of their sincere religious practice. An important legal precedent was set in the 2006 United States Supreme Court case Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal. In the case, RFRA was successfully used by the União do Vegetal (UDV) to defend the rights of their community to ceremonially consume ayahuasca, arguing that preventing them from doing so would “substantially burden a sincere exercise of religion.”¹¹ In April 2024, the Arizona-based Church of the Eagle and the Condor successfully used RFRA to reach a settlement with the federal government, granting it the right to “import, receive, manufacture, distribute, transport, and store ayahuasca” for religious purposes.¹² As a result of RFRA, entheogenic churches offer a unique space outside of clinical or therapeutic settings where psychedelic substances can be used with legal or quasi-legal protection, ostensibly protected by RFRA but not guaranteed in practice. 

Psychedelic research and discourse focused on medicalization often focuses on safety and risk mitigation, and efforts have been made to integrate psychedelic use with harm reduction specifically. Harm reduction in the U.S. is a grassroots, community-centered movement to humanize drug use and reduce harms related to use.¹³ Initially started as an underground community-driven effort, harm reduction has increasingly been taken up by the Western medical system as an alternative approach to longstanding abstinence-based interventions for substance use. Yet, limitations with harm reduction exist, including viewing any substance use through a presumption of harm, and acknowledgement and acceptance of drug use for pleasure and enhancement.¹⁴   

To examine how these secular forces—medicalization, policy, and harm reduction—are impacting psychedelic churches in the U.S. this work draws on preliminary findings from two interdisciplinary qualitative and collaborative ethnographic studies on psychedelic church communities in the U.S. Such an inquiry is particularly critical for these settings given the unique intersection of spiritual practice, policy, and healing that meets in these settings. In the following sections, we discuss an emergent theme from each study and examine how these practices function amidst culture, biomedical, and legal norms that dictate acceptable psychedelic use. The first study is based on one year of ethnographic research and 20 semi-structured interviews. This study is informed by medical anthropology and centers on a first-person perspective. The second study, which describes themes primarily derived from semi-structured interviews and brief ethnographic observations, is inspired by approaches used in public health and utilizes a third-person perspective. Our divergent narrative styles highlight important differences in disciplinary traditions and methodologies (e.g., anthropology and psychology). Both studies received approval from their local institutional ethical review boards. 

For the past year, I (Seale-Feldman) have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with a multi-sacrament psychedelic church as part of a larger project titled Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Crisis, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. This project aims to explore the incorporation of mystical experience into the lives of secular Americans through the mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine. The project is multi-sited. Alongside the psychedelic church discussed here, I am also conducting fieldwork in a psychedelic-therapy training program, a clinical trial of psilocybin in palliative care, in psychedelic conferences, and with ketamine providers and patients. As a medical and psychological anthropologist, my work is grounded in ethnographic methods that involve in-depth participant observation over long periods of time, as well as semi-structured interviews. In the context of my work with this church, I attend their weekly community meetings, both online and in person, as well as ceremonies, preparation sessions, integration circles, and other church-related events organized by community members. Research also involves spending time with people outside church activities, meeting them in their homes, at coffee shops, or for a walk. This in-depth participant observation is central to my study, which seeks to understand how secular people are using psychedelics as spiritual technologies of self-transformation and the impact it has on their lives. 

In the Zoom room of the entheogenic church, people connect from their homes in California, Washington, Oregon, and beyond to join the weekly “Satsang,” a Sanskrit term for a form of devotional gathering. Zoom boxes reveal a group of mostly white people spanning multiple generations. One member sits cross-legged outside with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, plants blowing in the breeze behind him. Another has a surreal Zoom background that looks like a psychedelic snakeskin. Most of the participants have joined from rather ordinary-looking domestic spaces, such as kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms. A new member introduces himself to the group and says he has joined because he wants to learn about psychedelics and “how they help to heal and change our perspective.” 

As John (pseudonym), the charismatic pastor, opens the service, he begins by explaining that the church is built around the idea of “least dogma.” “Least dogma” refers to the radical openness of this self-described “post-modern” congregation, which actively welcomes people from all religions, faiths, wisdom lineages, and political orientations. The church promotes a vision of religion as a non-dogmatic, individual, and personal practice. In this newly formed community, there is only one core belief required of its members: that they are “open to the possibility that, engaged through careful and respectful practice, entheogens can connect us to a direct experience of the divine, within this lifetime.” 

The weekly Satsang is a virtual space where members of the church come together to share their experiences with psychedelic sacraments, build community, and learn about sacred plants and molecules. It is not uncommon to hear references to William James, Ram Dass, Aldous Huxley, Jürgen Habermas, or Maria Sabina. Everyone’s favorite part of the service is a presentation known as “Plant Time.” Plant Time involves PowerPoint lectures delivered by Pastor John that cover the Indigenous histories, chemical makeup, identification, preparation, and consumption of entheogenic plants and molecules. During Plant Time, John nimbly tacks back and forth across multiple ontologies while handling cacti, seeds, saplings, and fungi from his garden for the viewers on the screen. In one service, for example, he showed members how to cut, dry, and process huachuma, emphasizing that, depending on their cultural background and belief system, it may contain either a spirit or a chemical compound that binds to serotonin 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, or both. 

Since the publication of Michael Pollan’s bestselling book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, in 2018 and the decriminalization of entheogenic plants in cities across the U.S., interest in psychedelics as tools of self-transformation has quickly grown among a secular American public.¹⁵ While people are drawn to the church for a range of reasons, a dominant theme I’ve encountered in my research has been the desire to use psychedelics as tools for healing, self-transformation, and spiritual development in a legal setting. It is not uncommon for people to seek out the church after embarking on “journey work” either on their own or with underground therapists and guides.¹⁶ As one man in his 50s explained during an interview, “I really do believe that these are sacred substances,” before adding, “I don't really want to do ’em with someone in a white coat in some clinic somewhere…and along with that is…I prefer not to go to jail. And at this point, the only way you can use these substances is either with a doctor or in a sincerely religious context.” In this way, the church is seen as providing a safe, legally protected space for people to use psychedelics in community outside of the medical model. Here, as in many religious settings, the desire for healing, transformation, and spiritual growth is often indistinguishable.¹⁷  

I see the church as an experiment in what historian Jeffrey Kripal has described as “American mysticism.”¹⁸ The church operates with “modern democratic principles, individualist values, a celebration of science, and secular notions of religion as primarily a private affair of personal choice and creativity” that Kripal associates with American mysticism.¹⁹ The idea of “least dogma” offers a form of religious practice in secular terms that celebrates unique individual mystical experiences of the divine and welcomes people with all beliefs or none, as opposed to adhering to a shared set of religious tenets. Such practices are a product of secularity, not only because they are taken up by people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” but also because they are positioned in opposition to “religious dogma,” which is seen as domineering. Here, the one “least dogma” that is agreed upon is the possibility of having a direct experience of the divine through the careful use of entheogenic sacraments, yet the concept of “the divine” is purposefully left undefined. “Each of us has our own individual relationship with the divine,” explained a church leader during Satsang. “We each have our own special flavor of god and the sacred.” By embracing “least dogma” as a guiding framework and ethical principle, the church hopes to foster a diverse community without domination.  

In this church of individuals, each person is invited to create their own definition of the divine, based on their personal lineage and tradition. This is closely aligned to American psychologist William James’ definition of religion as “feelings, acts, and experiences of individual[s] …  so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine,” ²⁰ a quote that Pastor John has cited during services. Such “mystical secularism” is not new.²¹ However, the church’s celebration of “least dogma” and devotion to the subjective, lived-experience of an individually-defined “divine” suggests that in the unique cultural and legal context of US protections for religious freedom, the popularity of psychedelic substances among secular Americans may inadvertently usher in a new era of religious practice. While Kripal has described such practices as a “religion of no religion,” ²² Pastor John suggests that a better conceptualization may be “a religion of real religion” in the sense of religare (Latin for “re-bind” and root of the word “religion”), for work with entheogenic sacraments ultimately helps people reconnect to the divine.             

“Safety and Harms in U.S. Psychedelic Churches: A Community-Based Participatory Research Study (CUPS 1)” is one study within a larger project, the “Community Uses of Psychedelics and Safety” (CUPS) study. The study is funded by a contract with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA; 2022-2024) and conducted through the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). CUPS-1 is a qualitative, community-based participatory research study that uses brief ethnographic observations, focus groups, and interviews to understand better how U.S.-based entheogenic church communities engage in safety practices. The study team collaborates with a Community Advisory Board (CAB) comprised of church affiliates to develop the study protocol and engage and recruit community members. Study participants include church members who regularly administer psychedelic sacraments, monitor effects, and maintain a safe ceremonial setting. The pilot data (n = 9) used in this article were collected at two distinct Santo Daime church communities located in the Pacific Northwest and on the West Coast. These communities hold ayahuasca ceremonies following prescribed structures, including recitations of prayers, uniforms, dancing, and other prescribed ritual acts. Members often participate in several ceremonies each month. Pilot data collection was conducted to explore these communities’ safety practices using a semi-structured interview guide. Interview transcripts were de-identified, professionally transcribed, and coded, and preliminary themes were explored through thematic analysis.  

While several preliminary themes emerged, we focused on one: challenging the conceptualization of safety, which included a more diverse understanding of what safety means in these communities and how safety was assumed within the community context. Participants defined and discussed safety in three conceptual frames—spiritual, physical, and psychological—and often revealed a tension between these frames, notably between spiritual and biomedical understandings of safety. For example, some participants presumed that psychedelic sacraments and ceremonies are inherently safe and do not require “harm reduction.” Furthermore, they explained that the facilitation of profound, plant medicine-induced experience and healing may include effects (e.g., intense emotional reactions, stupor) and experiences (e.g., revisiting challenging memories) that challenge the Western biomedical perception of safety. 

This theme emerged as early as the first Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting, when researchers and affiliates from five U.S.-based churches gathered virtually to begin the study. CAB members shared their concerns about the potential medicalization of psychedelics and the emerging institutional interest in psychedelics. They noted how perceptions of mainstream safety differ from perceptions within their own communities. They expressed how effects related to the consumption of ayahuasca that may be perceived as “adverse” or harmful in a clinical trial were expected within this setting and were not considered problematic or unwanted. They went on to tell us that community support, such as the community container and shared trust, and not medical intervention, is the most appropriate and helpful way to support people having such experiences. One participant elaborated on this, discussing how leaders and Guardians of the ceremonies (the “practitioners”) were able to facilitate participants’ experiences working with the sacrament (or “medicine”): 

Sometimes the person, had they not received the care of the practitioner, [they] could have an adverse outcome, because the practitioner is the one skilled in this medicine. Had they gone to the hospital, it may have made it worse because the hospital isn't practiced in how to support somebody through a situation where they feel like they’ve lost their mind or they’re on another planet or they’re having a heart attack... And all these [are] things that can come up. But to also just see, that intervention by the hospital could actually create a further outcome that would not be beneficial. 

This theme further crystallized during visits to the church sites. Researchers were invited to attend ceremonies at both sites and meet members of the communities. Informal conversations with church members during this visit revealed that elements of the research question were particularly salient to them. Members frequently commented on the importance of being in community and how the collective provided a container and a way to process different experiences in a safe and supportive setting. Members indicated that the community container provided safety. They pointed to specific strategies and efforts essential to ensuring safety in the ceremonial experience, such as orientation processes for new members, the presence of Guardians during ceremonies, and integration groups after ceremonies. These community-provided safety measures were ubiquitous in our conversations and represented key approaches to safety discussed by community members. This suggested to us that participants held an underlying presumption that they would feel safe working with the sacraments.  

The contrast with biomedical frameworks was also exemplified through our observations of the Guardians. Guardians are members of the church who are trained to maintain the physical, emotional, and spiritual safety of the group before, during, and after ceremonies. Follow-up individual and focus group interviews consistently conveyed that safety was not just a strategy but a cultural norm for these entheogenic communities. One interview with a longtime Guardian highlighted the different ways that Western biomedical models conceptualize safety and shows how these communities understand, and in fact assume, safety when working with plant medicines. This Guardian also told us about the importance of language and how accepted medical terminology, such as “harm reduction,” may still be limited in the entheogenic context: 

I just feel so much basic trust that when these practices are implemented, people can have very positive experiences using this sacrament…and when I say that…we don’t use language like, how can we reduce harm? We do us the word safety I guess, but I don’t even really think about harm because my basic assumption actually is that, as long as you have all of these things [established traditions] in place, the risk of harm is next to none…it helps people to heal from harm…so harm really is not like a word that I use…. The way we tell the story in the Daime is the Daime itself is a divine consciousness. And so how could taking a divine conscious into one’s self create harm? 

Others similarly described the profound impact of the sacrament, facilitated through this presumption of safety. Similar to the CAB members, many ceremony participants who also served as Guardians pointed out that a component of the plant medicine is experiencing intense, emotional, and sometimes uncomfortable sensations, including revisiting past traumatic or difficult experiences. If observed by a typical Western practitioner, these effects might prompt concerns about safety and lead to medical intervention. Yet, the church members we interviewed viewed these experiences not as a cause for concern but as the very things that facilitate catharsis, insight, and healing. Guardians are trained to allow this healing to happen, to differentiate between an expected effect and unexpected effects, and to respond accordingly as needed, such as sitting with a participant or monitoring them more closely. This approach is not considered to be a harm-reduction strategy but is instead aligned with how the medicine is understood to work. 

The structures of the communities we have described have important differences. The psychedelic church in Study One that Seale-Feldman works with is a radically open, public-facing, multi-sacrament church that welcomes everyone who arrives “as a gift.” As opposed to operating through invitation only, many people find out about the church through news articles or word of mouth. In conversation, Pastor John once described his vision for the future of the church as becoming “the big church on the corner,” a place where people can find community amid the atomization of the city. However, this vision and mode of operating come with challenges. As John pointed out, operating a church that is radically open means that more and more people might be sitting in ceremony with “unprocessed trauma, with no prior experience, and no understanding of transference or projection.” “We need health and safety,” he explained. “There are people coming in with heart conditions,” asking to use sacraments.  In the context of this particular entheogenic church, the secular biomedical framework of “health and safety” is embraced as an important part of their practice and dream of becoming a popular, accessible, above-ground church capable of offering the possibility of a direct experience of the divine to those who yearn for it. While churches in the second study come from a more traditional Daime lineage, they too have adapted and implemented health and safety strategies, such as screenings, orientation for new members, and follow-up integration with Guardians, for practice in the U.S., where community participation may be more variable.  

The way these three psychedelic churches navigate the secular is also reflected in their different relationships with cultural and religious lineage. Whereas the church community in the first study exemplified the concept of “least dogma” and represented a postmodern approach to religion, the church communities in the second study were more strongly aligned with their traditional Daime lineage. The Daime lineage includes elements of Catholicism, hymn singing, and the symbol of the double-armed cross, all of which feature prominently in these churches’ rituals and iconography. One church in the second study follows the practices of its Daime lineage closely, with select members chosen and invited to practice with leaders from Brazil and to bring teachings back to the local community in the U.S. The second church also follows a traditional lineage and references spiritual pilgrimages to important landmarks associated with it, but it also incorporates practices from other entheogenic traditions, such as smudging and dancing. Nonetheless, both churches underscore that consistent community participation is essential to building trust and rapport.  

Both studies discussed here showed that biomedical and secular forces of legality and sociocultural context are relevant to these entheogenic church communities. In particular, the law is a dominant factor impacting these churches’ formation and existence. The second study included one church that has the legal right to practice with entheogens, whereas the other church in the study does not. Members of both these communities were aware of the complex policy landscape and the legal and social risks associated with operating an entheogenic church in the U.S. Members of one church recounted the challenging process of obtaining legal freedom to practice, which has not gone unnoticed by other entheogenic communities who are considering whether or not to engage in the legal battle to pursue an exception under RFRA themselves.  

The complex legal landscape of entheogenic churches in the U.S. also shapes the dynamics of conducting this particular research study—primarily, how researchers presented themselves to church communities as representatives of a federal funder (the FDA) and an academic institution (UCSF). Researchers considered the ethical and historical implications of engaging with these communities in this context, which, in turn, shaped the research process, particularly through the insight and collaboration of the CAB. In contrast, Seale-Feldman has found that being a researcher from the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, and funded by a foundation known for supporting research on the relationship between science and religion, has been welcomed by the church, which sees itself as “science positive” and seeks to become part of a more mainstream American religious landscape.  

Taken together, both of the studies discussed here illustrate how secular forces interact with psychedelic spiritual practices in the U.S. While current interpretations are limited due to the preliminary nature of these results, ongoing work will continue to explore and expand on the themes presented here. These findings will inform our current understanding of entheogenic communities in the U.S. and provide critical insights about safety, spiritual practice, and self-transformation.

¹ Beatriz Caiuby Labate et al., “Navigating the Mainstreaming of Psychedelics,” Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2025, https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/aop/article-10.1556-2054.2024.00429/article-10.1556-2054.2024.00429.xml. [Return to Section]

² Roman Palitsky et al., “Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Training in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis,” PsyArXiv, July 10, 2025, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ecybk_v2  [Return to Section]

³ Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (The New Place, 1997). [Return to Section]

⁴ Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003). [Return to Section]

⁵ Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. [Return to Section]

⁶ Robert C. Fuller and William B. Parsons, “Spiritual but Not Religious: A Brief Introduction,” in Being Spiritual but Not Religious (Routledge, 2018). [Return to Section] 

⁷ Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000). [Return to Section]

⁸ Ryan Burge, The Nones (Fortress Press, 2021). [Return to Section]

⁹ Gregory A. Smith, “About Three-in-Ten US Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated,” Pew Research Center 14 (2021), https://www.apostolicplanning.com/s/Religious-affiliation-in-the-United-States-2021.pdf. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. § 801 et seq. (1970). [Return to Section]

¹¹ Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União Do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418, No. 04-1084 (United States Supreme Court 2006). [Return to Section]

¹² Psychedelic Alpha, “The Church of the Eagle and the Condor Settles with Federal Agencies, Can Continue Importing and Using Ayahuasca,” Psychedelic Alpha (blog), May 8, 2024, https://psychedelicalpha.com/news/the-church-of-the-eagle-and-the-condor-settles-with-federal-agencies-can-continue-importing-and-using-ayahuasca  [Return to Section]

¹³ Pat O’Hare, “Merseyside, the First Harm Reduction Conferences, and the Early History of Harm Reduction,” International Journal of Drug Policy 18, no. 2 (2007): 141–44. [Return to Section]

¹⁴ David Moore, “Erasing Pleasure from Public Discourse on Illicit Drugs: On the Creation and Reproduction of an Absence,” International Journal of Drug Policy 19, no. 5 (2008): 353–58. [Return to Section]

¹⁵ Tehseen Noorani, “The Pollan Effect: Psychedelic Research between World and Word,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, July 21, 2020, https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/the-pollan-effect-psychedelic-research-between-world-and-word. [Return to Section]

¹⁶ The church is clear that their assisted meditations are not offering psychotherapy or therapeutic healing but rather are intended to open the way into direct experience of the divine. [Return to Section] 

¹⁷ c.f. Thomas Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (University of California Press, 1994). [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6. [Return to Section] 

¹⁹ Ibid., 8. [Return to Section] 

²⁰ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (The Modern Library, 1902), 31. [Return to Section]

²¹ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2011). [Return to Section] 

²² Kripal, Esalen, 10. [Return to Section] 

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press, 2003. 

Csordas, Thomas. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. University of California Press, 1994. 

Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Place, 1997. 

Fuller, Robert C., and William B. Parsons. “Spiritual but Not Religious: A Brief Introduction.” In Being Spiritual but Not Religious. Routledge, 2018. 

Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União Do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418, No. 04-1084 (United States Supreme Court 2006). 

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. The Modern Library, 1902. 

Kripal, Jeffrey J. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. University of Chicago Press, 2011. 

Labate, Beatriz Caiuby, Henrique Fernandes Antunes, Jamie Beachy, Jordan Sloshower, and Clancy Cavnar. “Navigating the Mainstreaming of Psychedelics.” Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2025. https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/aop/article-10.1556-2054.2024…. 

Moore, David. “Erasing Pleasure from Public Discourse on Illicit Drugs: On the Creation and Reproduction of an Absence.” International Journal of Drug Policy 19, no. 5 (2008): 353–58. 

Noorani, Tehseen. “The Pollan Effect: Psychedelic Research between World and Word.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, July 21, 2020. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/the-pollan-effect-psychedelic-resea…. 

O’Hare, Pat. “Merseyside, the First Harm Reduction Conferences, and the Early History of Harm Reduction.” International Journal of Drug Policy 18, no. 2 (2007): 141–44. 

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon and Schuster, 2000. 

Smith, Gregory A. “About Three-in-Ten US Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated.” Pew Research Center 14 (2021). https://www.apostolicplanning.com/s/Religious-affiliation-in-the-United….

Mian, Maha N. and Aidan Seale-Feldman. “Psychedelic Churches and Secular Forces.” In Psychedelic Intersections: 2025 Conference Anthology, edited by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. © License: CC BY-NC. https://doi.org/10.70423/0004.08