The Church

There's an altarpiece at every TICo ceremony for a man named Jacob.

Jacob was Lakota. He gave Justin LaPree his first ounce of mushrooms in December 2018. He was not a veteran or a first responder, just a beautiful soul who was struggling, and struggling in the shadows. A chameleon. The kind of person who could mask exactly what was going on while you sat with him for hours.

Justin tried and tried to get Jacob to come work with the medicine. Jacob never said yes.

He killed himself a couple of years ago. Years before that, he had quietly removed the rounds from Justin's gun. Justin pulled the trigger. The gun was empty. He only found out later that it was Jacob who had done it.

"If I didn't meet Jacob," Justin told me, "man, I don't know. It's scary to think about."

That is the thing about this work. The people who save your life sometimes cannot save their own.

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The Defense

Justin LaPree is the founder of The Illuminating Collective, TICo, a multi-sacrament entheogenic sanctuary operating in Austin, Texas. TICo serves ibogaine, iboga, mushrooms, MDMA, ayahuasca, 5-MEO, and cactus, each medicine led by experienced facilitators with deep knowledge of the sacrament. He is doing all of this legally, on American soil, right now.

The legal framework is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993. RFRA was a direct response to a Supreme Court ruling that had stripped minority religious practices of meaningful protection, holding that neutral, generally applicable laws did not trigger strict scrutiny even when they burdened sincere religious exercise. Congress disagreed and passed RFRA to restore the standard: the government cannot substantially burden a sincere religious practice unless it can demonstrate a compelling interest and has no less restrictive means to advance it.

The case that opened the door for entheogenic churches came in 2006. In Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the federal government could not seize the hoasca sacrament of a Brazilian ayahuasca church operating in New Mexico. The Controlled Substances Act did not automatically override sincere religious use. The DEA lost. The church kept its medicine. Since then, the entheogenic church model has expanded steadily, operating in the space between what is practiced and what the regulatory system has gotten around to pursuing.

TICo is structured as one of these churches. The sacraments are the medicines. Justin partners with academics, speaks at universities, and operates with full transparency, not because RFRA requires those things, but because a documented record of sincerity is itself part of the legal defense. He thinks about this framework the way a veteran thinks about a defensive position: he has been building it for years, and by the time anyone comes looking, the wall is going to be too high to breach.

One question almost everyone asks: do you have to join the church to participate?

Yes. Participation does require formal membership in The Illuminating Collective. Before engaging in ceremony, each participant reviews and affirms TICo's Statement of Beliefs and religious framework. Justin is careful about what that means and doesn't mean. It isn't a conversion requirement, and it isn't a demand that someone leave another faith tradition behind. What it reflects, he says, is a sincere willingness to engage in TICo's spiritual practices within the context of the church. The legal protection flows from the First Amendment and the sincerity of the religious exercise. The membership process is how that sincerity gets documented.

They are not alone. Attorneys who specialize in entheogenic church formation estimate that at least 70 such churches have been established across the United States since O Centro. The vast majority operate without formal DEA exemption, which, according to Government Accountability Office data, the agency issued zero times through its formal petition process between 2016 and 2024. Attorneys who work in this space are careful with their language: RFRA makes these operations defensible rather than formally legal. The distinction is real, and the church leaders who understand it build accordingly.

The defense has been tested repeatedly. Since O Centro, churches have been raided, had sacraments seized at the border, and faced criminal prosecution. The track record is instructive. In 2009, a U.S. District Court extended the O Centro logic to an Oregon chapter of the Santo Daime church. In 2024 alone, two churches reached federal settlements affirming their right to use ayahuasca under RFRA, the Church of the Eagle and the Condor and the Church of the Celestial Heart, bringing to four the total number of federally recognized psychedelic churches in U.S. history. In August 2025, a federal judge in Utah halted criminal prosecution of a psilocybin church and its founder, finding the case had been brought "in bad faith as part of a larger effort to harass Plaintiffs for their entheogenic religious practices." The government has not stopped pushing. The churches have mostly won.

Austin has emerged as one of the more active nodes in this network. Texas has the largest veteran population of any state in the country, and the combination of that community with a broader cultural openness to alternative healing has made the region fertile ground. TICo is based in Austin. The All Tribes Medicine Assembly, known as ATMA Church, also serves the Austin area. The Neo-American Church, one of the country's oldest entheogenic organizations, has roots in Austin going back decades. Each operates under its own version of the same legal architecture Justin has spent years reinforcing.

The Container

The narrative he is interrupting goes something like this: ibogaine is a powerful, medically complex treatment that needs to be brought into clinical settings, reformulated to eliminate cardiac toxicity, vetted by the FDA, priced, and dispensed through the healthcare system. The 82 percent success rate for opioid addiction gets cited. Clinical trials get cited. The VA program gets cited. Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals is funding development of a non-cardiac-toxic synthetic ibogaine. Justin does not think the FDA will ever approve the natural compound with the cardiac toxicity issue as-is. He does not think the synthetic version, if approved, will be accessible to most Americans.

"Dude, it's gonna be so expensive. If insurance doesn't pay for it, it's not gonna be accessible. The average American can't afford what they're paying in Mexico."

His objection is not to the medicine. It is to the container.

"Come down for a weekend, do the thing, and you're gonna be healed. You're gonna be cured. I'm here to tell you, it's a lie." Justin LaPree

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What TICo actually does is this.

Before anyone sits with a medicine, they go through eight weeks of structured preparation. The process begins with psychological screening: an assessment with a therapist or psychologist to determine whether this is the right next step. A health intake form follows, reviewed by the clinical team for contraindications: opiate use, Kratom, benzos, SSRIs, SNRIs. Anyone flagged for substance dependence begins a supervised taper while supported with microdosing. Hormone panels, gut biome testing, blood work. Breathwork instruction and meditation practice to give participants a tool they can actually use when the ceremony starts to move. Weekly curriculum modules, a guidebook, group calls, bi-weekly one-on-one sessions with a preparation specialist.

Family members get their own parallel program (five weeks of prep, five weeks of integration), because Justin believes the transformation cannot stay sealed inside the person who sat.

By the time a participant walks through the doors in Austin, they have changed their diet, built a movement practice, spent eight weeks getting emotionally honest about why they are there, and met most of the people they will sit with in ceremony. The shared preparation experience means that when they finally see each other in person, it feels like meeting family.

The ceremony begins on the second day, at 8 p.m. It starts outside, with fire. Justin opens by calling in the spirit of the fire and gives each participant a small amount of actual root bark so they can connect with the spirit of Iboga before the ceremony begins. Buiti music plays. A creation story is told. Then participants move into the sanctuary in silence. They find their mattress in the horseshoe. They come to the altar one by one to receive the sacrament of ibogaine. They return to their bedside with noise-canceling headphones and an eye mask. They are already connected to a wireless six-lead EKG and a wrist telemetry system monitoring blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation. All of that data streams in real time to a monitoring station where the clinical team sits in an adjacent room.

Then the musicians start to play, and they do not stop until 8 a.m.

Justin calls what follows the discovery day. He actively dislikes the term "gray day," which sounds, he said, super depressing. Most of the insight from ibogaine arrives in this phase, while the medicine is still running. Participants are checked hourly through the first half of the day, every two hours after. Most do not sleep. The target is a full night's rest by night three, which is why Justin starts the ceremony at 8 p.m. on day two, keeping the circadian rhythm intact. On day four, participants sit with 5-MEO from the Bufo toad, which Justin describes as one of the most consistently powerful integration tools he has worked with. On day five, they go home.

Then 12 weeks of structured integration begins. Weekly group curriculum calls, bi-weekly one-on-one sessions with the integration director, module tracks for families running in parallel. Justin went through the entire program himself so he could understand what needed to be tweaked.

"I believe that 90% of transformation is determined by how you prepare for and integrate these experiences. The medicine is only the doorway. It's a powerful catalyst that creates the opportunity for change, but lasting transformation comes from the work that follows. If you don't build new beliefs, new patterns, and new habits, your old programming will eventually take over again. The rose-colored glasses always come off." Justin LaPree

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When critics say TICo cannot be clinical because it is not in a clinical setting, Justin asks what "clinical" actually means. The Mexico retreat houses that get treated as legitimate are, structurally, retreat houses with a doctor and a nursing staff on-site. TICo has a doctor, monitors, EKGs, and blood panels. The difference is that TICo also has ceremony, intention, prayer, and 12 hours of live music. Justin does not see these as contradictions. He sees the clinical infrastructure as table stakes and the ceremonial container as the actual work.

From a legal standpoint, the clinical question is beside the point entirely. RFRA does not ask whether a church has an EKG. It asks whether the practice is sincere and whether the government can demonstrate a compelling interest in shutting it down. That is a much higher bar than certification.

The pharmaceutical model strips the experience down to a molecule. Justin's bet is that you cannot do that without losing what matters most.

"I don't look at these as treatments. I look at these as tools to assist us in our growth and our development." Justin LaPree

The Long Game

He talks about why he does this work the way soldiers talk about why they fought: not for country or ideology, but for the people beside them. The freedom he was protecting, it turned out, was the freedom to build exactly this.

He built his legal castle early and has been adding to it ever since. By the time FDA frameworks solidify and the psychedelic industry fully commercializes, he expects to have six or seven years of experience, proven testimonials, and deep legitimacy.

The same logic applies to supply. Justin grows his own medicines and knows every person in the supply chain: community members, he told me, people who live intentionally and in prayer. He thinks about the energy going into the medicines the way a careful person thinks about where their food comes from.

"I don't want to have to rely on anybody or any supply chain to provide sacrament for our organization, for our members. I'm in this period of sourcing, of growing, of creating an abundant supply so I don't run into any obstacles when this becomes mainstream and it becomes the Wild West. We're building our supply to be abundant so we can have access to medicine without pause — without having to reach out to other cultivators or extractors that may not be in proper alignment with our values and ethics." Justin LaPree

He thinks of it as supply sovereignty, and he is thinking several moves ahead.

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Justin also watches the Austin spiritual community with a particular wariness. He sees people chasing peak experiences without doing the preparation or the integration work, using substances to bypass rather than deepen.

"Enlightened people bypassing the work," he said. "It's dangerous."

He is describing the same failure mode that runs through the pharmaceutical story: the belief that the molecule does the work, that the experience is the destination, that you can get there faster if you strip away the container.

The church, done right, is the opposite of a shortcut.

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Justin runs two retreats a month, about 20 people total. Since founding TICo in 2022, he has served more than 400 veterans and first responders, alongside a civilian program he launched more recently. One mushroom-MDMA-5-MEO retreat, one ibogaine-5-MEO retreat. Ayahuasca four times a year. Pop-up single-night experiences for people with enough prior experience to not need the full structured program.

He is selective about who he works with. Not every medicine is for every person. He has spent years developing discernment about that, and he takes it seriously.

He invited me to come out to Austin: to observe, volunteer as a sitter, drop in for a breathwork session or sound healing gathering, and see what the container actually looks like from the inside.

I am going to take him up on that.

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At every ceremony, the Lakota altarpiece stands at the altar. Jacob is present in every room where someone sits with medicine under TICo's roof. The protocol is as thorough as it is because of him. The integration period runs 12 weeks because of him. Justin does not believe anyone gets healed in a weekend because of him.

Jacob was a seeker who worked with these medicines and had people around him who cared. He still could not make it.

Jacob's sister has come to sit in ceremony with TICo. Justin sponsored her, a way, he told me, to give thanks and honor her brother. He thinks about Jacob every day.

The church exists in part to close the gap between what was possible for Jacob and what he was able to reach. The altarpiece is not sentimental. It is a reminder of what the work is actually for.

The Illuminating Collective operates in Austin, Texas. Information at theilluminating.co.