Oakland’s psychedelic mushroom church makes a cautious return
Despite a police raid and global pandemic, Zide Door has accumulated members and slowly begun to resume in-person sermons.
by Jessica De La Torre
June 10, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXglyaUMKzM
Video produced by Jessica De La Torre and William Jenkins.
Smoke twirls from the lips of a man with a long beard and metal-framed glasses, who is dressed like the Pope with a psychedelic twist: embroidered gold hemp leaves decorate his cloak, and mushrooms adorn his stole.
Dave Hodges is the pastor, preacher, and founder of Zide Door, a nondenominational and interfaith church in Oakland where religious practice centers on the use of natural hallucinogens known as entheogens—mainly, mushrooms containing the psychoactive chemical psilocybin. For Hodges, “Mushrooms are the origin of all religion.”
Hodges founded Zide Door in January 2019 and, until the pandemic forced him to scale back, presided over psyche-altering sacraments and hot-boxed sermons at the church, a nondescript building on 10th Avenue near E 12th Street, every Sunday at 4:20 p.m.
Despite two years of a global pandemic—and some unwelcome attention from local law enforcement agencies along the way—Hodges said interest in Zide Door has grown, and the church is now making a cautious return to hosting in-person gatherings, with plans to do more in the coming months.
A place of worship and a dispensary
A heavy-set, armed security guard grants access to the church through its main entrance on 10th Street, which sits behind a row of thickly rooted palms. Past the gated door there is a metal detector and, beyond that, a small hall where membership is verified.
“We do have fairly strict security at the church, and this is an unfortunate issue with Oakland; We are in a very high-crime area,” said Hodges. “So the thing that keeps us and our members safe is having armed guards at the front door who are constantly watching for anything to happen.”
Once membership is verified, members walk through an open room filled with about five royal-blue pews that Hodges found on Craigslist. A mini stage with a pulpit holds red, yellow, and green candles with an old and tattered printout that reads, “Sermon every Sunday @ 4:20. Free joints for all during the sermon (everyone must be smoking).”
https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/u...t-1568x880.png
A sign on the pulpit at Zide Door advertises the church’s Sunday sermons at 4:20 p.m. Credit: Jessica De La Torre and William Jenkins
Music plays loud in the church. But instead of choir melodies, artists like Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar vibrate the room.
Red-capped mushroom figurines decorate the small stage, offering some cohesion to the awkwardly staged room as a psychedelic sermon area. This is where members once rejoiced with cannabis, before the pandemic, and listened to Hodges preach about safe access and the use of entheogenic plants.
The main attraction, the mushrooms, are in a room adjacent to the sermon area that doubles as a dispensary. There is a large poster that reads “20% off Sacraments” on specific days of the week. Black tubs of mushrooms and cannabis fill a metal storage shelving rack against a wall.
Zide Door is one of the few places in the United States where people can purchase mushrooms without being legally penalized or taxed, as long as they are granted membership, a process that consists of answering an online questionnaire. Among the questions is, “Do you work for law enforcement or any government agency?” Members must also agree to accept entheogenic plants as part of the religious onboarding.
“We’re very private and we want to make sure we know why you’re coming in and make sure that you believe in what we believe in,” said Hodges.
Slowed by the pandemic, and then a police raid
Zide Door began as a cannabis-focused church in early 2019, but Hodges was able to add psychedelic mushrooms to its offerings after Oakland’s City Council approved a resolution in June 2019 that effectively decriminalized mushrooms and other consciousness-altering plants like ayahuasca and peyote.
Although it’s still illegal to possess these plants under federal law, and illegal to sell them in Oakland, the resolution deemed these offenses “amongst the lowest law enforcement priority for the City of Oakland.”
That didn’t stop Oakland police from raiding the church on August 13, 2020. In security-camera footage made public by Hodges on Instagram and later in news reports, officers can be seen forcing their way into the building with guns drawn and pointed ahead, while people exit the church with their hands in the air.
https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/u...m-1568x882.png
Security cam footage from Zide Door shows Oakland police officers entering the building with guns drawn on August 13, 2020. Credit: Used by Jessica De La Torre and William Jenkins, courtesy of Dave Hodges
Recalling the raid recently, Hodges said police entered the church as if they were storming a mafia headquarters, a scene he found both humorous and alarming.
“I was about five minutes away from the church when I got a call that the cops were there. They were still clearing people out of the building when I arrived. I started yelling at them that they’re violating the city’s order, and my religious freedom, and that I’m the one responsible for all of this,” he said. “Basically, I was telling them to just arrest me.”
Instead, said Hodges, the officers, aided by personnel from Oakland Fire Department, insisted on breaking into the church’s safe boxes with the help of rescue tools. After hours of work, they succeeded in tearing open two of them, seizing $5,000 in cash and $200,000 worth of cannabis and mushrooms. Hodges was let go with a fine and a warning. After cleaning up the mess left behind by the raid, he reopened Zide Door 24 hours later.
“This wasn’t about whether we were doing something wrong,” Hodges told The Oaklandside. “It was about how the police can take money from something that they think is wrong.”
The Oakland Police Department did not respond to a request for comment for this story. But following the raid in 2020, Oakland Police Capt. Rendell Wingate told CBS News that the department was acting on a complaint by the Alameda County health department of an illegal business that was “creating respiratory health issues” for children living in close proximity, and questioned the church’s validity based on its dual function as a mushroom dispensary.
“We have several churches in the city of Oakland and they are non-profit and not known to sell cannabis or mushrooms,” Wingate said at the time. “This is the first for-profit religious establishment I’ve seen in my 28 years as an Oakland cop.”
Hodges said he is actively working with an attorney on compiling a legal case against OPD on the grounds that the department violated religious freedom laws. He now views the raid, and the pending legal challenge, as unfortunate but necessary steps in a longer-term effort to safeguard the church and its practices.
“From the day we opened up, I knew we would have a raid, but OPD was the last place I thought it would come from because of the City Council’s [resolution]. I thought it would come from the county, the state, or worst case, the feds,” he said. “It’s always been the expectation. And it’s part of the plan, in the sense that we have to have a raid, we have to have a court case, in order to prove that what we’re doing is right. And I know that what I’m doing is right."