Oakland Shrooms Chapel
It’s a dreary Sunday afternoon and the clouds hang low over East Oakland, a neighbourhood that feels worn almost to the bone. Faded Queen Anne homes lean over the street with peeling paint and boarded windows. Weeds poke out of every pavement crevice, and chained guard dogs bark from behind rusted cross-hatched fences. Cars with cardboard “FOR SALE” signs seem frozen in time, and prostitutes line up down the street, approached by black SUVs with tinted windows.
Tucked between the decay sat the Church of Ambrosia - a battered, unassuming grey warehouse scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding industrial blight. On the ground level, boarded-up metal shutters are etched with graffiti. The four of us from England were wondering if this was even the right place - certainly not quite the postcard Bay Area we’d imagined for our road trip. Plastered on a lamppost nearby was an array of psychedelic-looking stickers, including one in all caps - “TRY DMT” - a giveaway for what we were about to enter.
The Church of Ambrosia was one of the first places in the United States openly selling psychedelic drugs. Opened in 2019, it describes itself as a “nondenominational, interfaith religious organisation” centred around entheogenic, or spiritually mind-altering, plants as religious sacrament. They believe these substances are tools for experience of the divine, and may have been the roots for religion itself. They originally opened only selling weed, but after the City of Oakland decriminalised enforcement of psychedelics in late 2019, they expanded operations to include shrooms and DMT.
At the rear of the graffitied up shop front was a boarded up door, half ajar to reveal a fully garbed security officer. I asked him if we were at the Church of Ambrosia, and he silently nodded and ushered us in one-by-one. Inside was a full security setup: TVs hooked up to cameras surveilling the entire property, including one of the outside street view - clearly they’d been expecting us. We emptied our pockets and passed through scanners and metal detectors. Certainly a lot of security for a church, I remember thinking to myself.
We walked down a dimly lit, lavender-coloured hallway to see a few mysterious rooms hidden behind “STAFF ONLY” signs until reaching the reception area. It was a wide open room with factory flooring and whitewashed walls interrupted by tribal-fusion, kaleidoscopic canvas art, giving the impression it had been occupied faster than it had been finished. There were no windows, only the blare of sterile overhead lights. The receptionist spoke in a hazy, unhurried cadence, running us through a pre-screening questionnaire: “how old are you, have you taken psychedelics before, how did you hear about us”... He handed us a clipboard each where we ticked off our answers, and filled in our names and addresses. We handed them back to him and he passed us a small green business card with our names stickered over them: “there’s your membership cards, feel free to tell your friends”... A somewhat perfunctory welcome, half-heartedly bureaucratic and a bit tired.
My first concern was what the hell I’d signed up to. But such is ritual in the psychedelic church: we, as worshippers, were to come to the church to donate (in cash payments only) and in return receive sacred sacrament (drugs). A kind of drug deal repackaged as ritual.
The receptionist ushered us into the deeper confines of the building, into what resembled a chapel. There was a lectern braced by two large plastic mushroom statues, and metal fold-up chairs tucked away to the one side. Airport-style queue barriers meandered us around into a corner door at the back. With the room empty save for the five of us, they served little purpose beyond making us further question what we were actually doing here. We snaked around a couple large ATMs before entering the rear room.
Plainer and more austere than the last, it opened up into a large glass counter characteristic of any California smoke shop. Bongs and fluorescent-coloured gummies were on full display. We were handed a menu brochure by another clerk before being sat down on metal fold-up chairs in the edge of the room.
This all seemed pretty official considering psilocybin and DMT are Schedule I illegal drugs under state and federal law. But the Church of Ambrosia operates in a legal grey area: the City of Oakland decriminalised enforcement of psychedelics in 2019, and with the city facing severe budget deficits and by some accounts the second worst crime in the country, Oakland Police have bigger fish to fry. Since decriminalisation, mushroom churches like this have been popping up all over the Bay: Rising Phoenix in neighbouring San Francisco operates a storefront on Haight Street, one of the city's most recognisable shopping avenues.
“Have you ever taken this kind of substance before?” the glassy-eyed clerk asked me before opening up one of their laminated menus. She ran us through the different substances they offer, including the dosages they offer and at which price points. The menu seemed to have a very exhaustive list of mushroom products: powders, chocolates, candies, and microdose capsules. To quote the brochure we were handed: “if you seek to improve focus, meditation, creativity or reduce anxiety, depression, stress, the microdose protocol can be a great introduction to the path of becoming who you can be.”
From my limited knowledge of street drug prices in the US, I knew they were charging a pretty penny for all of this. But my friend Julian and I, a couple eager 21 year-olds from England, were pretty fascinated by the whole concept. We deliberated through their menu of DMT products, which they sell in these small pods of different sizes to be hooked up to a battery and vaped. The menu read like a wellness brochure crossed with scripture, soft language about an “inner eye” and “the path of becoming who you can be” yet their sacraments of salvation are sold in all kinds of gummies and chocolates. Our clerk could speak at length about the duration and intensity of a DMT hit, yet seemed to know very little about the “Doctrine of Religious Evolution” on the final page of the brochure. It was a strange mix of spiritual aesthetics crossed with corner shop narcotics.
The Church uses the First Amendment to argue its case legally: they have a sincere religious belief, and so banning them would be cracking down on religious freedom. But to win under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, they must also prove the government lacks a compelling interest to shut them down. And that’s what happened in 2020 - Oakland Police raided the church, making no arrests but seizing $200,000 in cash. That was perhaps the only tax the Church ever paid, as religious organisations in the US are automatically exempt from federal income tax.
Following an executive order by President Trump on April 18, 2026 fast-tracking studies on psychedelics for mental health treatment, it seems to be good news for the Church of Ambrosia. But if psychedelics were legalised tomorrow, one might ask if the Church would carry on calling it sacrament.
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