Ian Benouis is either a wizard or a fraud, depending on who you ask. He claims that by feeding mushrooms 5-MeO-DMT, he created an elusive tryptamine called psilomethoxin even Sasha Shulgin never cracked. As for the alleged fraud… well, we’ll get there.
We asked Ian which mistakes get entheogenic churches shut down, how his own obscure psychedelic sacrament sucked him into scandal and litigation, and why he’s hoping for a citizen science revolution.
https://www.tricycleday.com/p/ian-benouis
What led you into entheogenic church law and religious freedom work?
I grew up in Hawaii, where natural medicines were embedded into the surroundings. Mushrooms grew on cow patties around my high school, and cannabis was grown locally. I knew those things were part of the natural ecosystem.
When I got out of the Army, I didn’t think I had trauma. I just knew I needed to get my spiritual life in order to be a good husband and father. So I went to law school in 1994 and did medicines the whole way through. Law school is also where I met my mentor Jerry Patchen, a Houston attorney who represented the Native American Church for 30 years and helped draft and pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
I got reconnected to the veteran community in 2014, at the first NORML conference in Texas for veterans around cannabis. I sat there crying the entire time while people talked about suicide, PTSD, and all the horrible things done to them and by them. From then on it wasn’t just about the healing. It was about protecting the medicine and protecting the people taking it.
In 2015, I was part of an underground ayahuasca church in Texas. Someone came to a ceremony without disclosing their medical history, and they had a psychotic break. Thank God they ended up okay, but their brother was an attorney, and his message was basically that they were coming after us. That’s how I became an entheogenic church attorney, by stepping up for my own community.
You and your law partner have helped create 60+ entheogenic churches in the US. What does it take to build one that holds up legally?
A lineage is helpful, because you can rely on precedent. To make it official, though, you form a not-for-profit corporation in one state, get an EIN, and open a bank account. That’s the actual paperwork you file. Your federal tax status is separate from that process. As a church, you’re automatically a 508(c)(1)(A), which requires no application and no annual return. You still have to follow all the 501(c)(3) rules, which cover religious, charitable, scientific, and educational work, but you don’t have to file anything to get that status.
The common mistakes people make are selling sacraments instead of taking donations, or fumbling disclosures with members and putting their safety at risk. Also don’t call your church the Church of Tripping Balls on Magic Mushrooms. That won’t help you get a bank account.
As a church founder, you have to decide if you want to go on the offensive or defensive. If you’re proactive and go get a declaratory judgment, it’s the government’s burden to disprove your religious sincerity. But if you’re a defendant instead—say you get pulled over with mushrooms in your car—now you’re the one claiming you’re part of a mushroom church, and the burden is on you to prove it. That’s a lot harder with a much higher burden of proof.
Your own Church of the Sacred Synthesis has been at the center of a public controversy over whether its sacrament, psilomethoxin, is real. Where does that saga stand today?
The controversy traces back to a preprint (never submitted for peer review) article called “Fungi Fiction,” published by Alex Sherwood from Usona Institute, right before our public Entheogenesis launch party. The article’s core claim wasn’t that psilomethoxin (or 4-HO-5-MeO-DMT) isn’t a real compound. Marc Julia synthesized it in 1965, so that’s not in dispute. The claim was that our sacrament doesn’t actually contain it.
The criticism Fungi Fiction leaned on was that we can’t prove it conclusively without a reference standard and NMR, the tests labs typically use to confirm a molecule’s identity. Fair point, except people proved chemical compositions before reference standards or NMR existed. The Supreme Court itself talks about “orthogonal proof,” which means nothing remains to contradict the conclusion.
We had our sample tested at USF and found the compound’s weight, which wasn’t conclusive on its own since 10 to 20 different molecules can sit at that weight. But it was apparently enough to raise alarm bells. After that, Alex Sherwood from Usona called the lab directly to prevent our data from being released. Incidentally, Usona was developing its own version of this molecule, 4-HO-5-Me-DMT, only a single oxygen atom apart from ours. That’s when we understood how big the machine actually was.
Peter Hendricks then connected us with Jesse Hines (and Elizabeth Gardner, a published expert on distinguishing isomers of identical molecular weight). With Jesse’s work, it’s my opinion that we’re 98% of the way there on orthogonal proof. We still want the reference standard and NMR, and we hope to have it by the end of the year.
What’s never been covered, though, is who’s actually behind this church. Everyone says psychedelics are supposed to help veterans and first responders. We are veterans, several of us with combat-related disabilities, including a Purple Heart recipient. If anyone had done their homework, they’d have realized this is what the psychedelic movement is supposed to be about. Instead they said we were a bunch of fakers, and our story never got out.
What’s so special about psilomethoxin to you? What compelled you to build a church around it?
I was looking for a way to make oral 5-MeO when I found a recipe from Sasha Shulgin, in a 2005 post on Cognitive Liberty. Someone had asked him why psilomethoxin wasn’t in his books, and he said he’d give you 50-50 odds that combining mushroom spores, 5-MeO-DMT, and cow manure would make some. This is a guy who published every formula he had, and here he was giving a coin flip.
I treated Shulgin’s instructions as a treasure map. I had someone already growing mushrooms for me feed 5-MeO-DMT, dissolved as a salt in water, into the substrate. I tried the resulting product for the first time in October 2021. Ben Moore showed up the next day, and we went on a five-day dieta.
Based on our experiences, it was clear that what we had was effectively oral 5-MeO. The effects were non-visual. We could tell that the sacrament was acting on the 5-HT1A receptor, rather than the 5-HT2A receptor psilocybin hits. To paraphrase Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper, 5-HT2A changes your perspective on the things you can change, while 5-HT1A helps you accept things as they are. Normally we walk around with an ego telling us we’re responsible for the weight of the world, and then you take 5-MeO or psilomethoxin and realize you’re safe. You remember you are energy that can’t be created or destroyed.
A few months later the DEA moved to schedule five tryptamines nobody was even using, one of which was 5-MeO-MiPT, a substance very similar to 5-MeO-DMT in structure and activity. That’s when the church made sense. If they came for psilomethoxin next, they’d have to rule on our DEA exemption first, and the burden would fall on them to disprove our sincerity. It also meant we’d be sitting on safety data, and emergency scheduling requires a public safety concern. We’ve never had a reported adverse event.
What’s the endgame for psilomethoxin?
My goal has always been to get medicine to the people. I wanted to launch a citizen science revolution. My hope was that people would go to their local GNC store, buy amino acids, pour them into their mushroom substrate, and see what came out.
Mushrooms naturally add a hydroxyl group to certain compounds, a modification that can make them orally active. Jochen Gartz proved mushrooms would do this to synthetic tryptamines back in the 80s. (Shulgin called this reaction putting the Mickey Mouse ears on.) I couldn’t understand why nobody else was trying it. Then people got put off by the Fungi Fiction article, which I suppose was the whole point of it.
Anybody who wants to make this sacrament can do it themselves. I don’t want people waiting five years for a company to deliver a 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray, or stuck in the ketamine clinic model where you go once a quarter if you have insurance. That’s what happens when a company owns the molecule, and nobody owns this one.
Want more from Ian?
Connect with the Church of the Sacred Synthesis, or check out his personal website.
