Did you know that Detroit has a psychedelic mushroom church?
In 2021 Detroit voters approved Proposal E, which decriminalized entheogenic plants and fungi in the city. Detroit’s Per Ankh Entheogenic Church is a non-denominational house of worship that incorporates psilocybin mushrooms and cannabis into its service.
On Sunday, it will host Kendis Gibson, an Emmy-winning journalist who details his personal journey using psilocybin to treat depression in his recent memoir Five Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health, Psychedelic Healing, and Saving a Life.
Though the church building has been operating for about a year, according to the Per Ankh founder and director Moudou Baqui the movement behind it in Detroit goes back many years.
“We operate under the definition that the church is a body of people,” Baqui says. “So we’ve been operating as a body for about 15 or more years. We’ve been at this location for around a year now.”
Entheogenic churches have been a hot-button issue in Detroit in recent years. In 2023, Soul Tribes International, another entheogenic church that billed itself as Michigan’s first, was raided by Detroit police. While Proposal E and federal laws protect the use of entheogenic substances for cultural purposes, the city accused Soul Tribes of “poorly masquerading as a church” and being “a distribution center for unlawful controlled substances.” Soul Tribes has sued the city for what they say is infringement on their rights.
Last year, Detroit police raided the Psychedelic Healing Shack on Woodward Avenue for selling mushrooms and cannabis.
Read more at Metro Times
