We Were Arrested the Same Year Indiana Promised Us Religious Freedom

Long before anyone signed the Declaration of Independence, people came to this land fleeing kings and churches that told them how to worship. By 1776, that same instinct — that conscience shouldn't answer to a crown — had become a political revolution too. Two hundred and fifty years later, that document still carries both threads: a claim that certain rights don't come from government, and government doesn't get to take them away.

I've thought about that claim a lot over the years. Never more than the year Courtney and I were arrested for practicing the only religion either of us had ever really believed in. Ironically, this was the same year that Indiana, on paper, doubled down on its support of religious freedom.

The Raid

Many of you know what happened to us in 2015. I'd spent the better part of a decade on a farm outside Paoli, growing mushrooms — gourmet varieties for restaurants and grocers across Louisville and southern Indiana, and, quietly, psilocybin for myself and the people who came to me looking for something they couldn't find anywhere else. Courtney joined me on this mission in 2013 with her homegrown kombucha and a love of healthy living.

On July 2^nd, the same day I am publishing this blog, but 11 years ago, we were arrested for holding ceremony for a friend. That ceremony changed our lives forever. I spent 4^th of July 2015 behind bars experiencing that painful irony. Thank God Courtney made bail after one night in jail, but one night too many.

The Orange County Drug Enforcement Unit came with a warrant. They searched the house and the buildings where Magnificent Mushrooms operated and eventually found what they were looking for — psilocybin mushrooms. Courtney and I were both arrested. We were put on house arrest for eight weeks, and because we were named as co-defendants, the courts decided we weren't allowed to be under the same roof while it played out. We lost the farm not long after. And the life we were building there.

Eric and Courtney's mugshots after arrest in Paoli, IN for psilocybin mushrooms

The Law That Didn't Reach Us

Like a legal slap in the face, that same March, three months prior to our arrest, Governor Pence signed Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law. A law explicitly written to stop the government from substantially burdening someone's exercise of religion, unless it could prove a compelling reason to do so.

I knew that the law ultimately applied to us, but also that we weren’t organized enough to leverage it. Yes, we were quietly using sacred mushrooms to commune but we had none of the structure that would support our claim. We weren't a recognized faith. We weren't organized. We were just two people with a farm and a conviction, and conviction alone made us convicts.

After two and a half years of probation, the felony charges against us were reduced to misdemeanors. But that's not vindication. That was survival. And it taught me something I couldn't unlearn: religious freedom doesn't protect you just because you believe it should. It protects what's been organized, documented, and claimed with sovereignty.

What Religious Freedom Actually Means, Legally

The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act — the law Indiana's was modeled on — was signed by President Clinton in 1993, after the Supreme Court ruled that a Native American man could be denied unemployment benefits for using peyote in a religious ceremony. Congress wrote RFRA specifically to restore a higher bar: the government must show a compelling interest before it can burden someone's sincere religious practice.

President Clinton signing the RFRA into law

That law has already protected a sacrament very much like ours. In 2006, in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a small Christian Spiritist church could continue using ayahuasca in its ceremonies, because the federal government failed to prove a compelling reason to stop them.

That ruling is the legal lineage Psanctuary stands on today. Proof that the law has already recognized what we've always known: that a sincerely held religious practice involving a sacrament (deemed by the government as a "scheduled substance") can be protected when the people practicing it are organized enough to claim that protection.

We weren't organized in 2015. We are now. Our history, the lessons learned and battles won are what we bring to Psanctuary with the hope that you don’t have to experience what we did.

From Wound to Mission

It took six years after that arrest for Psanctuary to exist. Six years of reflection and rebuilding. Six years of asking what it would take to do this work in a way that was not only protected but better served those who sought our sacrament out. The answer wasn't greater conviction. It was structure — a registered church, a documented practice, a community that could stand behind its own sacrament instead of one person standing alone in front of a warrant.

That's what Psanctuary is. Not a loophole. Not a workaround. A church that exists because the law didn't show up for us once, and we decided to build the thing that could claim it the next time.

Members at our May 2025 ceremony

Sustaining the Progress We’ve Made

The founders who signed that Declaration 250 years ago didn't win religious liberty once and walk away from it. They built institutions — courts, congregations, constitutions — to sustain it, generation after generation, because they understood that a right no one maintains is a right that no longer exists.

We're asking the same of you now. Not a single act of belief. An ongoing one.

This July, we're inviting 100 people to become Sustaining Members of Psanctuary at $100 a month — the level that keeps our ministry, our legal standing, and our ability to hold ceremony safely intact. If you've completed Levels 1 and 2 with us, you can step into Sustainer Membership directly. If you haven't yet, you can commit to the same $100/month through a recurring gift, and it counts toward the same goal: 100 people, sustaining this church, together.

If you're not ready for a monthly commitment, you can start where Courtney and I started all those years ago — by learning. My Mushroom Map is a six-part course built from everything this path has taught us, the decade before Psanctuary and the six years since.

And if this story moved you, the simplest thing you can do costs nothing: share it with one person who needs to hear that religious freedom is still worth fighting for. As time has shown, we cannot do this alone. We need your participation and support.  What we are building here is more than just a church. It is a movement that is changing the landscape of religion and psychedelic wellness. If you are not already, you can be an essential part.