Utah News Dispatch
In magic mushrooms case, Utah County argues religious freedom doesn’t cover substance use
Dried mushrooms. (Stock photo by Akchamczuk/Getty Images)
After a federal judge sided with a Provo faith group that uses psychedelic mushrooms in its spiritual practices last December, Utah County is fighting back in court, arguing that state law around drug use applies to everyone, even religious organizations.
The case followed a search warrant Provo police executed at the Singularism Spiritual Center in November 2024, seizing the group’s psilocybin — also known as magic mushrooms — and membership records. With an appeal in a federal court, Utah County is seeking to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed the use of psilocybin in religious settings without facing criminal prosecution.
Singularism isn’t entitled to Utah Controlled Substances Act exceptions, attorneys representing Utah County said. And, another state law allowing for a psilocybin study in the state won’t change that.
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“The line the state drew is based on risk,” Caroline Olsen, an attorney for the county said. “Unregulated use of psilocybin without any government oversight or controls is just fundamentally incomparable to the use for exploratory and research purposes in a hospital governed by regulations, government oversight and subject to civil liability.”
That was part of oral arguments presented to a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judicial panel on Tuesday. Attorneys representing Utah County pushed hard against the Singularism Spiritual Center’s argument that the center is comparable to a healthcare organization while managing psilocybin use.
But that’s a characterization attorneys for the spiritual center contested.
“It is not a highly controlled, regulated medical exception. It is not a research exception. It is the creation of a standalone, independent and unique behavioral health treatment program,” Tanner Bean, an attorney representing the Singularism Spiritual Center said.
The case put a 2024 state religious freedom law to test, by determining how Utahns could challenge government regulations that may interfere with their “sincerely held” religious beliefs.
The Singularism Spiritual Center offers guided “psychedelic therapy journeys” with the use of a psilocybin-based tea, a practice the group has advertised on its website as “conducted under federal legal exemptions for religious and ceremonial use of entheogens.”
U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Federico asked Bean, what’s the limit? What could stop a church from using substances like morphine or fentanyl in their spiritual practices?
The line is drawn in a past court decision establishing that the religious organizations must conduct a risk analysis on whether their activities could go against government interests, and result in things like drug diversion or drug abuse issues, Bean said.
“There are other threshold factors they’d have to get through, such as sincerity, religiosity, which are not at issue in this appeal to get there,” Bean said. “But they’d also have to conduct this risk analysis. There might be many circumstances in which the risks are simply not comparable, but here they are highly comparable.”
Psilocybin hasn’t “ever left the sacred center,” and there hasn’t been any indication of drug abuse, Bean said.
Judges assigned to the case haven’t issued a decision yet. However, they had questions for both parties, including whether Utah County had acted in bad faith at declining an invitation from the center to see their practices and then sending an undercover officer to investigate the group’s use of psilocybin. And whether that caused irreparable injury to the spiritual center.
Bridger Jensen, the founder of the center, successfully sued the county citing religious freedom protections. However, according to a brief filed by attorneys representing the county, the ruling from a lower court “erroneously assumes that use of a schedule I drug at Singularism has equivalent safety assurances as Utah’s two largest healthcare systems.”
“Singularism’s psilocybin ceremonies are administered by unlicensed ‘facilitators,’ most of whom lack medical training. Singularism does not even have uniform criteria for dosing,” the attorneys for the county wrote.
