Soul Tribes International Ministries is taking its fight to sell psilocybin mushrooms to Detroiters as a religious sacrament to federal court. The “psychedelic church,” billed as Michigan’s first and located inside Bushnell Congregational Church at 15000 Southfield Road, was raided by the Detroit Police Department on September 22. The City of Detroit later brought a temporary restraining order and nuisance claim against owner Shaman Shu in October, padlocking the church and prohibiting him from occupying the building.
Shu, who is also known as Robert Shumake and Bobby Japhia, filed to have his case moved to federal court on November 6, calling the shutdown an “illegal” violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. As of December 4, the City of Detroit has petitioned to remand the case back to Wayne County Circuit Court. Now they are waiting for a judge to decide whether the case stays in federal court.
Soul Tribes considers psilocybin mushrooms a holy sacrament and was selling them via a “sacrament center” on the church grounds. After a Metro Times cover story on the church in September, DPD officers seized over 99 pounds of mushrooms believed to be psilocybin and over 120 pounds of “material believed to be marijuana” from the church, according to court documents. Officers also encountered a laboratory being used for manufacturing some of the materials.
City officials declined to comment since the litigation is still pending, however, Detroit Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallet said in a statement, “Exercising one’s religious freedom does not give them license to break the law.”
“The subject property is poorly masquerading as a church but instead is a distribution center for unlawful controlled substances,” the city’s original complaint against Shu and Soul Tribes reads.
It continues, “The Subject Property has been the source of numerous complaints from Detroit City Council and neighboring city residents.”
Although Proposal E, which Detroit voters approved in 2021, decriminalized “entheogenic” plants and fungi including psilocybin, the mushrooms are still considered controlled substances under state and federal law. Shu was behind Proposal E along with groups like Decriminalize Nature Detroit.
The city argues in its December 4 petition to bring the proceedings back to the state level that its complaint against Soul Tribes does not involve federal issues.
“Although psilocybin mushrooms are illegal at the federal and state level, the City can prove all elements of their claim without reference to federal law. Further, nuisance law is necessarily regional, the focus is on the harm to surrounding neighbors.”
The city’s case against Shu and Soul Tribes was underway at Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit when Shu filed a petition, acting as his own counsel, to move it to the Eastern District Court of Michigan. He was previously represented by lawyers from Detroit’s Cannabis Counsel, but they withdrew from the case on November 27 after Shu made the move to federal court without their knowledge, according to court documents. Cannabis Counsel also cited an “irreconcilable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship” and unpaid fees for the departure.
Court documents defending Soul Tribes signed by Cannabis Cannabis Counsel attorney Thomas Lavigne argue “Soul Tribe’s free exercise of religion was adversely affected by the unlawful search warrant executed by the City of Detroit Police Department and this subsequent nuisance abatement action pursued on behalf of the City.”
They continue, “Michigan follows the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which requires a compelling governmental interest and the least restrictive way to achieve that interest. Every person in Michigan is at liberty to worship God according to the dictates of that person’s own conscience; and the civil and political rights, privileges, and capacities of any person may not be diminished or enlarged on account of a person's religious belief.”
Shu is now being represented solely by Florida-based attorney George Lake, who is licensed in Texas, Louisiana, and temporarily in the Eastern District Court of Michigan to handle Shu’s case as of December 6. Lake is reportedly considered an expert in “the free exercise of religion and the sacramental consumption of psychedelics/entheogens.” He is also currently representing two ayahuasca ceremony facilitators in North Carolina with similar cases to Shu.
“This raises very substantial questions of free exercise of religion and how we define religion,” Lake tells Metro Times about the Soul Tribes case. “Entheogens, scientifically, have been shown to produce primary religious mystical experiences. If a church or person chooses to consume these substances with those types of intentions, is that a protected religious exercise? That’s really where the fundamental question is for me and what ultimately I want the court to address.”
Soul Tribes points to other cases like Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal as examples of entheogenic substances being used legally in religious ceremonies. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Sante Fe, New Mexico sect of the Brazilian União do Vegetal (UDV) church that served a sacramental tea containing ayahuasca.
The church filed a lawsuit citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act after U.S. Customs seized over 30 gallons of ayahuasca tea that was being shipped to the organization. It was granted a preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from barring its use of ayahuasca in ceremonies from the state of New Mexico, which was affirmed in 2003 and 2004 before the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the decision in 2006.
Lake also authored the 2021 book The Law of Entheogenic Churches in the United States about the legality of churches that administer ayahuasca including the Supreme Court decision on the UDV church.
Shu and Lake have now announced plans for a $1 billion countersuit against the city citing racial and religious discrimination. They also allege Soul Tribes suffered $500,000 worth of vandalism and damage, including stolen plumbing and flooding while the building was padlocked. Shu removed the padlocks from the building with the intent to reopen the sacrament center on Tuesday, December 6 before discovering the purported damages.
“When we talk about religious freedom, how do you really put a price tag on having your religious freedom limited even for like one day?” Lake says. “But also there’s some appreciable economic damages that have occurred since the city got that temporary order and took possession of the building.”
He adds, about the seeming rise in interest in entheogens, “It’s a very new and novel thing, people using plants, fungi, and earth-based entheogens as a religious spiritual practice… it’s not going anywhere and it's growing. So I would urge the federal court to go ahead and take a look at it and address it at the federal level.”
Despite his assertion that entheogens being considered sacred is “new and novel” many indigenous cultures have traditionally used these plants and fungi to connect with the spirit realm far before they became popular in the west.
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