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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Denver drops drug charges against ‘mushroom rabbi' who promotes religious psychedelic use |
| 2022-12-15 |
| [Jpost] A Denver rabbi … that should be “rabbi” in this particular case… who promotes psychedelic use as part of spiritual practice will no longer face prosecution after Coloradans voted last month to legalize psilocybin, the chemical compound found in psychedelic mushrooms. Denver’s district attorney’s office announced last week that it was dropping charges against Ben Gorelick, the founder of Sacred Tribe, a multifaith community that integrates psilocybin use and ideas rooted in Jewish tradition. A spokesperson for the office told the Denver Post that the move was “in light of the voters’ decision” to pass Proposition 122, which makes growing and sharing psilocybin and other related substances legal for adults over 21 in Colorado. Gorelick had been charged in February with possessing a controlled substance with intent to manufacture or distribute it, a felony that carried mandatory prison time, even though Denver voters had already chosen to decriminalize psilocybin’s use. “It’s been a long year for the community, it’s been a long year for us, and we look forward to getting back to practicing our religion, which is what the whole point of this is,” Gorelick told the Denver Post this week. The charges had sidelined Sacred Tribe’s central purpose, although the group continued to hold Shabbat dinners and other activities for its roughly 270 members, who do not have to be Jewish. Gorelick, who was ordained in 2019 as a rabbi by the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute, an online program, had sought publicity and funding to fight the charges on religious freedom grounds. He argues that there is a longstanding tradition of psychedelic drug use within Judaism, which even other Jewish advocates of psychedelics as part of spiritual practice dispute. Those advocates told the Guardian last summer that Gorelick, who said he screened community members to make sure they sought psilocybin for religious use, had not been known to their tight-knit community before his arrest. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #1 There is this little relative of a common weed from the denser rain forest in central America... one that actually requires > %90 humidity to grow... that contains real LSD. There is a "Church" in LA that uses it as part of it's communion. There is no evidence that congress-critters or even the DEA have any idea this plant exists. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2022-12-15 13:19 |