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Church of the Sacred Synthesis vs. Promega/Usona: Unverified Scientific Claims + Fake Science = Defamation

The Church of the Sacred Synthesis has sued Promega/Usona the publishers of Fungi Fiction so-called “scientific” article along with the republishers who reprinted the article as conclusive information without providing any conflict of interest statements nor any context that the article was not peer reviewed nor conducting any of their own research, thereby defaming the church and its leadership in the process.

ChemRvix which published the Promega/Usona opinion piece clearly states:

These are preliminary reports which have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health related behaviour, or be reported in news media as established information.

https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/public-dashboard

Additionally, the republishers did not conduct any investigative journalism of their own to verify the basis of the claims in Promega/Usona’s article nor conduct any additional testing to validate or disprove Promega/Usona’s claims. They did not provide the article with the following disclaimers:

This preliminary report should not be regarded as conclusive. It is inconclusive.
This preliminary report has not been peer-reviewed. It is inconclusive.
This preliminary report should not be reported in the news media as established information. It is inconclusive.
This preliminary report should not guide any health related behaviors like public safety that Promega/Usona claim are a potential risk with the Church’s sacrament.

Nor did they provide the Author’s competing interest statement so that readers could themselves confirm or deny the author’s position that they have no financial interests in keeping 5-Methoxy-Psilocybin (psilomethoxcybin, the psilomethoxin pro-drug) from negatively affecting the ongoing trials of their drug candidate 5-Methyl-Psilocbyin (one oxygen atom different from psilomethoxcybin).

The authors are employed by a non-profit medical research organization that is currently conducting clinical trials with psilocybin. The organization had no role in the design, analysis, or interpretation of the present study. This research was conducted in the interest of advancing scientific understanding and does not directly benefit any ongoing trials conducted by the organization.

https://www.usonainstitute.org/publications/chemoenzymatic-synthesis-of-5-methylpsilocybin-a-tryptamine-with-potential-psychedelic-activity

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00087 (Supporting Information)

Psilomethoxin below

5-Methyl-Psilocin below

As the Church’s attorney pointed out in the most recent hearing Promega/Usona had:

NO chain of custody to protect the transmission of the samples from Hamilton Morris to Promega/Usona after they were sent without the Church’s permission and sent along with a second sample of regular psilocybin mushrooms initially blinded to Promega/Usona by Hamilton Morris.
NO proof of proper storage and preservation of the sample that they had for months.
NO independent third party reconfirmation of their results by testing their extract nor the sacrament.
NO retesting by an independent third party.
NO valid testing methodology to properly extract psilomethoxin from the fruiting body sacrament.

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About Ian Benouis

Ian is a West Point graduate, former US Army officer, Blackhawk helicopter pilot and combat veteran. He is Patient Number One at the Mission Within which treats special operators with PTSD, TBI and addiction using iboga and toad (5-meo-dmt) in Mexico.  He is an advisor there, after being the General Counsel and spearheading the veteran healing program.  Ian has been helping wounded veterans for over 9 years. Ian has moderated numerous veteran’s panels including the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in 2018 in Austin and the World Bufo Alvarius Congress in 2019 in Mexico City. He founded an ONAC church chapter which was later returned to the parent church.  He is a founder of a Santo Daime church which is the US chapter of a Brazilian government approved church and between himself and his law partner Greg Lake, have created over sixty entheogenic churches in the US. Ian participated in Operation Just Cause in the Republic of Panama.  This operation was the largest combat operation in US history focused directly on the War on Drugs and was the largest special operations deployment ever conducted. He was a pilot-in-command and his aviation brigade flew more night vision goggle hours than any unit in the military except for the Task Force 160 Special Operations which his unit was ultimately rolled up into when the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California military base was shut down. Ian grew up in Hawaii in the 1970’s where cannabis and mushrooms were decriminalized and integrated into the culture.  He has been healing himself for over 30 years with sacred medicines, a spiritual practice, and being a student and practitioner of ethnobotany. Ian was a pharmaceutical representative for Pfizer after he got out of the Army witnessing firsthand the rise of the SSRI’s and synthetic opioids in the early 1990’s. He is a casualty of the drug war having been arrested for cannabis while in law school.  Ian is an intellectual property attorney who worked in the corporate world for over 20 years in the primary roles of VP of Sales and Marketing and General Counsel. He is a political activist in the cannabis and entheogenic medicine space nationally and locally in Texas.  Ian was previously the Chairman of the Board for a public policy foundation in Texas for over 7 years. Ian was featured in the Spike Jonze produced episode Stoned Vets on Weediquette the cannabis focused series on Viceland on HBO with a number of other veterans protesting the VA’s policy on medical cannabis and working to end the veteran suicide epidemic. In 2016 Ian organized a trip for six veterans with PTSD to Peru in May for a 10-day plant diet including ayahuasca and other plant medicines with three Shipibo trained shaman brothers.  Ian also took some of the same veterans to Mexico for treatment with iboga and 5-Meo-DMT.  This experience was captured on video and was released as a documentary in March 2017 entitled Soldiers of the Vine. He is member of the team that created the movie From Shock to Awe a feature-length documentary that chronicled the journeys of military veterans as they sought relief from PTSD with the help of ayahuasca and MDMA. Ian is a Co-Founder of the Church of the Sacred Synthesis which offers the sacrament psilomethoxin and he is the first human being to ingest it through bioassay.