Hey, it's Arielle. We decided to make this, our final episode of the season, a kind of PSA. While reporting our last episode in Utah, we started hearing stories from people who'd experienced harm in the psychedelic scene there. And given how fast the psychedelics church movement is growing in this country, we wanted to just stop and ask, what would it take to minimize that harm? This is Altered States. Cassady Rosenblum takes it from here.
Last episode, I reported on the legal battles of one of Utah's newest psychedelic churches. I've been to Utah a bunch over the last several years to report on psychedelics. And for the most part, I hear so many positive stories of genuine healing. But I've also started hearing a second kind of story about psychedelic facilitators, inside and outside of the church setting, who are sexually, financially, or psychologically abusing participants.
And they're doing this while people are in the midst of a powerful mind-altering journey. It's hard to describe how terrifying this is, unless you've been in an altered state. When you're on psychedelics, you can become vulnerable, kind of like a baby. Even getting a glass of water could feel like a Herculean task, let alone rebuffing a sexual advance or some other mind manipulation.
This kind of abuse can happen anywhere, but it is especially rampant in Utah, where the demographic using these substances are typically former Mormons. And many of them say they are used to giving their power away. Yeah, leaving Mormonism is hard because every action you take is built around the beliefs of Mormonism. Am I supposed to be doing this? Does God want me to do this? How will it reflect on the church? So when you leave that, you're kind of a babe in the woods, you kind of lost.
And, in my case, I see now that I had not developed a moral or ethical code. That's Steve Urquhart. You heard him in the last episode. He's the co-founder of the Divine Assembly, one of the psychedelic churches in Utah. But before that, he had a whole other life as a Republican state lawmaker and a devout Mormon. But after retiring from the Senate, he had powerful experience with ayahuasca and later left the Church of Latter-day Saints.
I'd been handed a list of things to do, things not to do and that was my moral compass. So when that compass was broken, I didn't know what to do. And I was lost. I was hurt. And so I had this hole that I'm trying to fill. And so, you know, I filled the hole with alcohol, with drugs, I had just some torrid affairs, and I was just a sloppy, sloppy human being. Steve eventually got into therapy, which he credits for saving his life and his marriage.
But Steve also says that this intense period of experimentation is common for people who leave the Mormon church as they try all the forbidden fruits for the first time. Add to that sacraments that increase suggestibility and vulnerability. You know, I really think in psychedelic worship we should really expect a lot of predation unless we work against it. In 2023, that kind of predation came to a head in Salt Lake City.
According to Steve, what transpired didn't happen within a psychedelic church, but it became a kind of cautionary tale, a boogeyman story, that has hung over the psychedelic movement, including the psychedelics church movement, in Utah ever since. There was a man named Parth Gandhi, and he was a therapist in Salt Lake City. Like Steve, Parth was another early leader in the local psychedelic scene. He was charismatic, magnetic even. A lot of people admired him. He seemed impressive to me.
He had a ketamine practice, he had some things going, and he wanted to reach our crowd. And he reached out and said, let's do something for bicycle day. Bicycle Day celebrates the anniversary of April 19th, 1943, the day Albert Hoffman first intentionally consumed LSD, a drug he discovered in his lab, and took one very interesting bicycle ride. But shortly before the event, Steve says he received texts from two friends asking, Why are you doing something with a rapist? I'm like, oh, can we talk?
According to his friends, Parth had sexually assaulted multiple individuals. Women, whom Steve's friends knew personally. They were telling Steve second-hand information, but it was enough for Steve to cancel the event. I just cut him off. You know, and I would tell people, I'm hearing bad things about him. Domestic abuse, sexual solicitation, and rape. These are some of the reports we found filed over the years involving Parth Gandhi.
In 2023, Parth murdered his 16-year-old son and then killed himself. At the time, he had a thick file with the police, mostly for custody battle disputes. But he was also under investigation for sexual assault. After the murder-suicide, ABC4 News spoke to a woman who says she was sexually assaulted by Parth after going to him for a ketamine treatment. Like what you don't trust me.". She opened up to him about her trauma. Ghandi gave her a lozenge and a glass of orange juice.
The next thing she remembers is leaving at 2 a.m. She had never filed a police report. But at least two other women had, alleging rape. You know, Salt Lake City, Utah, it is a pretty small village, and especially in psychedelics. And there were a lot of ripples from that, and a lot us asking ourselves, should we have done more? But knowing what more to do can be tricky. And it's a tough situation because he would threaten defamation lawsuits and it silenced a lot of people.
So that is a huge problem in this space. You hear allegations about bad actors and then instantly there are threats of defamation. No one wants to be in an expensive lawsuit. So, it does tend to shut people up. I saw that fear firsthand. For many months, I talked to women who had experienced unwanted sexual advances while on psychedelics in Utah, but they were too afraid to make a police report or go public with their stories. And I get it.
It's not easy to admit to police that you use an illegal substance or be a single mom and face the prospect of being sued into oblivion. And so in the absence of legal accountability... It often falls on individuals to try to come up with ways to protect themselves and each other. I'm Aymee Condie. I live in Utah County, Utah, which is exactly like it sounds. It's pretty Utah. Aymee is a licensed clinical social worker.
When she's not wearing her professional hat, she runs a different chapter of the Divine Assembly in Utah, about 45 minutes from Salt Lake City. Aymee's chapter has developed its own culture around consent. They even have a group creed. Our leadership group took the concepts that are in the 12-step programs, which keep a nonprofit being nonprofit. We took the concept from Burning Man, which is another group process that goes really well and focuses on decommodification.
The motto for Aymee's chapter of the divine assembly is quote, "No Profits, No Prophets", as in no money, and also no Joseph Smith types. We're referring to the FIT kind of profits and the PHET kind of profit. And it's interesting to notice for myself, when I say no profits, no profits I speak the F-I-T profit first. And for other people they speak the P-H-E-T profit first when they speak. For myself, money becomes something that changes our relationships. It becomes an exchange of services.
For this reason, members of Aymee's chapter trip-sit for each other for free. This requires a shared understanding of how everyone is expected to behave. Another community that has really informed a lot of our stuff is the kink community, which has a lot established ways to give consent, that consent needs to be enthusiastic throughout, that consent is something that is agreed to before, during, and at any moment could be revoked.
But also how to tell people no. No can be a hard word for a lot of people, but Aymee says that's especially true in Utah. I don't think I have to really elude that Utah is a Mormon culture. And I think in my culture here in Utah, a lot of women specifically are not encouraged to tell people no. We're actually kind of encouraged to tolerate certain forms of things, because it will hurt people's feelings if we say I'm not interested.
I guess I'll just speak from my own experience, but I do believe it's shared by a lot people. The idea that men are so overwhelmed with sexual desire that they can't control themselves. Aymee says Mormon women are often placed in the role of managing Mormon men. Until this year, women in the faith were not allowed to wear tank tops. They cover their shoulders, because shoulders are, they're too tempting for men. Men can't look at shoulders.
And so in that way, it's up to women to dress modestly so that they're not drawing a man's gaze. It's up women to make sure that they are keeping themselves chaste and pure because men lack that ability. So in that way women are put in the role of being the ones who say no. And who are in charge of making sure that sex doesn't happen. Women confide in Aymee.
They've told her multiple stories about psychedelic facilitators, some who also call themselves therapists, initiating sexual contact during psychedelic journeys. Aymee says this is wrong. Consent can't be given in the middle of a trip. So if you go Into it. Let's say you're with your sexual partner who you have sex with all the time. That's a completely appropriate thing to say, hey, we're going to use some substances together and we'll probably have sexual contact.
And making that your agreement from the start, that is a different experience than, hey let's heal. I have some techniques and strategies that can help you heal. Here's some medicine. And then when you're in medicine saying, AH I find you so attractive. I don't think I've ever been attractive to someone like that. That is a completely different experience and it's changing the expectations and the rules basically. But bad consent culture still happens. And it's not hard to see why.
On one hand, these substances can make people highly vulnerable, almost childlike. On the other hand, some people experience a super inflated ego, a kind of megalomania. Put those two kinds of people together and things can get dangerous. I think some people take psychedelics, and instead of finding God, they believe they're God. The Mormon culture I was raised in, I was taught that you could be a God, that if you kept all of the rules, that you would be given your own planet one day.
And so it's not a far stretch for me to think that some of those things still live inside of people who were raised in that religion. I don't really know how to weed people out and say you're one of the people who found God and spirituality and now believe in it. Like a collective unconscious, and those that believe, now I have the answers. But I do know that there's red flags that we can spot in people, and we can teach people about spotting those red flags in other people.
So what do you need to know to spot those red flags? And how might that information be applied to the growing psychedelic church movement? That's after the break. To find out how these mind-altering substances might play into the abuse of power, I called Brian Anderson. He's a psychiatrist and a professor at UC San Francisco. And in his free time, he volunteers with Sacred Plant Alliance, a non-profit organization of 13 psychedelic churches all over the country.
He's thought a lot about this stuff. When there's a power dynamic where there's someone who's a leader, a guide, there's already the chance that there can be abuse of that alone without any sort of mind-altering substance. Brian is someone with one foot rooted in science and the other in spirituality.
I don't always see these realms as totally separate in part because my path even into working in allopathic or conventional medicine, a lot of that came out of experiences that I had as a young man. When Brian was in his early 20s, he got to spend some time in Brazil, where ayahuasca churches are a normal part of society.
You have generations of families who attend these communities where the grandparents, the parents, and even their young adult children and sometimes maybe even teenagers are part of ceremonies. There's just this deep sincerity about how this is a religious practice. I learned a lot about what it means for people to intentionally come together.
To use psychedelics for what they see as their spiritual practice as a way of connecting with a higher power and to do so in a totally non-medical way that is frankly very often, or at least if it's done well, it can be done very safely and it's not done under the auspice of science and it is not done under the oversight of medical professionals.
But even where it is more normative, it is not uncommon for psychedelic churches to replicate some of the power structures seen in traditional religions. There can be a charismatic church founder, a prophet type, or people seeking some sort of guru. And in many of the stories I've heard, the abuser is in a leadership or guide position. So I asked Brian, as a psychiatrist, how these mind-altering substances might play into that abuse of power.
From a psychological perspective, the abuse of power is something that seems strangely familiar as we can find it in many settings all over the place. As a psychiatrist and someone trained in psychotherapy, it's something that we learn in our training how when you do very deep, close work with someone, there can be what feels like an exchange of romantic energy.
Because if you imagine what psychedelics can do if there's more of a merging of yourself with the self of the person next to you helping you. You feel this intense intimacy and connection. The substance awakens these very sometimes powerful feelings of love, of warmth.
There can be a type of attraction or attachment, and unfortunately we've heard of real cases including in clinical research settings over past years, of where this very intimate, powerful relationship of a helper or a healer and someone seeking care can lead to boundary crossings when a psychedelic is involved. A lot of different organizations over the years have tried to put together safety tips and rules to avoid that kind of boundary crossing.
A psychedelic group called the Women's Visionary Council has 20 safety tips posted on their website that one of their founders, Annie Oak, wrote more than a decade ago. I wanted to talk about number 18 on that list. I read it to Brian. Consensual sexual encounters between ceremonial leaders and participants do occur. These experiences may make the women involved feel special, but such relationships imply an imbalance of power that has the potential to be coercive and potentially abusive.
Consider that the professional ethical standard for therapists in the U.S. is a complete ban on intimate relationships with former clients for two years, after the conclusion of their therapeutic work together. Reflect deeply on the wisdom of this standard if you or your healer are considering sexual intimacy after a ceremony. This is really interesting to me because a lot of the stories I hear do tend to fall into this grayer category.
It's also interesting that this statement implies you can give consent but still be coerced or abused. Can you break that down a little bit? One thing is to say, yes, I consent to this, but another thing is also to stop and step back and try to assess what are all of the dynamics and things that are influencing that decision.
If someone's a very charismatic leader, if there are psychedelics involved, or if people are entering altered states and going through other intense experiences together, there may be ways that someone would make a choice that in another state they may not. I think the most important thing is we're talking about relationships and not just experiences. Are their relationships healthy?
And ideally, are there other people around in that community who can give feedback on what normal, healthy relationships are? I asked Brian, what are his red flags? What sets off his spidey senses?
There's probably a number of red flags actually in the last few years, as it seems that more and more people are maybe encountering psychedelics, not just through a dear friend or a family member or someone that they know who's maybe part of a community, but people are reaching out on their own and they're going out and they are not going through sort of social filters or social connections where you can trust the person. Who introduced you to a community because they were part of it.
If people are going out and finding these on their own, and you want to look for a number of things such as, who's in this community in the first place? Is it consistent? Are there people who've come back? Are there are people who bring their family members and bring their other loved ones there?
And for me, that would be a really helpful sign, knowing that people are invested in making the community better, and they're staying and they are bringing in people close to them because they trust the work there. There is certainly something about intense experiences and how they may be offered to the world, that if done in a very showy way, a dramatic way, will give me pause. When I think of mentors and people I've learned from, they're often more quiet than they are loud.
I'm wondering whether Sacred Plant Alliance has ever had sexual misconduct come up within the context of any of your 13-member churches. Within the Sacred Planet Alliance, yes, we've received some notices of concern over the years. They've involved both dynamics between clergy within a community as well as a congregant or a practitioner within that group having a complaint about a leader. Can you share a little bit more about how Sacred Plan Alliance handles that internally?
So we've been around for five years. We only allow groups to come in that are already formed, have been operating for several years in this country, and have the policies and procedures in place, we think, to do a good job of taking care of the people who are in their community. To be a member church with Sacred Plant Alliance, the church has to essentially agree to make a hotline. That way, if a congregant feels like something has gone wrong, they can reach out to Brian's colleagues directly.
The complaint then goes before an ethics committee made up of representatives from the other member churches. They weigh the complaint against Sacred Plant alliance's code of conduct and vote on whether a violation has likely occurred. Do you have a standard for... Likely or not? Is it 50% or how do you judge that? We just use the standard of 51% confidence that the violation of the Code of Conduct happened. It's not perfect.
We're not going to be able to get it right all the time, but we do have a process of looking into things and trying to give some sense of resolution and support and importantly, a path forward for people to do better. That path forward can look like assigning a mentor to a member church for a lower level offense like financial mismanagement. At the higher end, for an offense such as physical or sexual abuse, the church can be kicked out of Sacred Plant Alliance.
It's an interesting model where the actions of one individual can get the whole group removed, but at least it's a process. By contrast, in Utah, it's little bit more of a free-for-all, with an emphasis on personal responsibility. I asked Brian what he thinks about that. In our country, religious freedom allows people to worship and come together in so many different ways. For me personally, it's a very beautiful thing.
There's not going to be one right answer for how people should and can worship when they choose to enter intense states of consciousness, including those that can be occasioned by psychedelic substances. Brian says a psychedelic church shouldn't just be about psychedelics. It should also be about community. The question I have is, if there are gonna be communities of people that come together, do work together, and pray together, what is the sustainable way of doing that?
What is the way that is gonna keep the most people most safe for the longest amount of time? For me, the models that I have seen to be most sustainable do involve people coming together, and again, not just focusing on an experience, but on being part of something with others. He also made a good point. When psychedelics were more of an underground thing, it's not like there were a million policies or review boards, for better or worse.
People have been governing themselves in this space for a very long time. This conversation about consent and safeguards around psychedelics, it reminded me of this song that I learned as a kid in Montreal. Mon corps, c'est mon corps, ce n'est pas le tien Tu as mon corps à toi, laisse-moi le mien The words go, my body is my body, it's not yours. You have your body, so leave me mine.
Ask any French-speaking kid who grew up in Montreal in the 90s, and they will tell you that Mon Corps C'est Mon Corps was one of the main songs of our childhood. We learned it in school. Protecting bodily autonomy, navigating risk, these are all things that we aren't super great at as a society. But these things are crucial to understand, especially in the psychedelic space. This season, we've explored two worlds that exist within the universe of psychedelics, science and religion.
Both offer a path toward legal psychedelics. One where these substances are sacraments and another where they are prescribed medicines. And each path has its own set of legal and ethical challenges. But you know what struck me the most while making this season? Whether in the context of clinical trials, Native American peyote ceremonies, or former Mormon neo-religions, I kept hearing again and again about the healing qualities of human connection and caregiving.
It's why the UCSF pediatrician wanted her anorexia study participants to have loved ones present with them. Clinical trials are limited and we can only support someone for so long, but they are going to have this set of experiences related to psilocybin dosing. And we want something in their life to be set up to continue to support them. It's why Sughra Ahmed wanted to have her own psychedelic organization for fellow Muslims.
Not all roads have to lead to taking plant medicine, but our community deserves healing. It deserves specialism in this field. It's why Aymee, the therapist in Utah, is trying to create these shared guidelines around physical boundaries and safety, and why the Psychedelic Hotline Fireside Project has received more than 26,000 calls. We are social animals, and there is power in a reassuring and welcoming voice. Because we just do better together, tripping or not.
Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. This episode was reported and produced by Cassady Rosenblum. Adiza Egan is our senior editor. Our executive editor is Malia Wollan. Jennie Cataldo is our Senior Producer and our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum Our associate producer is Jade Abdul Malik and our audio engineers are Terence Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks to Bob Jesse.
Our executive producers are Malia Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzales. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen and Nate Brenner. And I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts. Most well-known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including in the United States, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics with few exceptions.
Altered states does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use.