{"id":71002,"date":"2022-12-13T04:15:47","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T09:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=71002"},"modified":"2023-05-10T06:55:58","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T11:55:58","slug":"denver-drops-drug-charges-against-mushroom-rabbi-who-promotes-religious-psychedelic-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/denver-drops-drug-charges-against-mushroom-rabbi-who-promotes-religious-psychedelic-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Denver drops drug charges against \u2018mushroom rabbi\u2019 who promotes religious psychedelic use"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By PHILISSA CRAMER<\/p>\n<p>(JTA) \u2014 A Denver rabbi who promotes psychedelic use as part of spiritual practice will no longer face prosecution after Coloradans voted last month to legalize psilocybin, the chemical compound found in psychedelic mushrooms.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_71005\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-71005\" class=\"wp-image-71005 size-medium lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-300x203.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"203\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-300x203.png 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-1024x691.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-768x518.png 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-1536x1037.png 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick.png 1834w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/203;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-71005\" class=\"wp-image-71005 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-300x203.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"203\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-300x203.png 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-1024x691.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-768x518.png 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick-1536x1037.png 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Ben_Gorelick.png 1834w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-71005\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rabbi Benjamin Gorelick (Screenshot \u00a9The Sacred Place)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Denver\u2019s district attorney\u2019s office announced last week that it was dropping charges against Ben Gorelick, the founder of&nbsp; Sacred Tribe, a multifaith community that integrates psilocybin use and ideas rooted in Jewish tradition. A spokesperson for the office told the Denver Post that the move was \u201cin light of the voters\u2019 decision\u201d to pass Proposition 122, which makes growing and sharing psilocybin and other related substances legal for adults over 21 in Colorado.<\/p>\n<p>Gorelick had been charged in February with possessing a controlled substance with intent to manufacture or distribute it, a felony that carried mandatory prison time, even though Denver voters had already chosen to decriminalize psilocybin\u2019s use.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s been a long year for the community, it\u2019s been a long year for us, and we look forward to getting back to practicing our religion, which is what the whole point of this is,\u201d Gorelick told the Denver Post this week.<\/p>\n<p>The charges had sidelined Sacred Tribe\u2019s central purpose, although the group continued to hold Shabbat dinners and other activities for its roughly 270 members, who do not have to be Jewish.&nbsp;Gorelick, who was ordained in 2019 as a rabbi by the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute, an online program, had sought publicity and funding to fight the charges on religious freedom grounds.<\/p>\n<p>He argues that there is a longstanding tradition of psychedelic drug use within Judaism, which even other Jewish advocates of psychedelics as part of spiritual practice dispute. Those advocates told the Guardian last summer that Gorelick, who said he screened community members to make sure they sought psilocybin for religious use, had not been known to their tight-knit community before his arrest.<\/p>\n<p>Jewish psychedelics advocates have become more organized in recent years. Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, who was ordained as by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel, founded a group called Shefa during the pandemic that aims to one day make chemically-assisted mystical encounters into a normative part of Jewish spirituality. Last year, the group held a first-ever Jewish psychedelics conference.<\/p>\n<p>Long considered illicit in the United States, psychedelics have been the subject of intensifying research, including about their potential as a therapeutic tool for treating trauma. One of the groups promoting the research, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, was founded by a Jewish man who was inspired by a dream about surviving the Nazis to devote his life to promoting psychedelics as a cure for human ills and an insurance policy against another Holocaust.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m one of the very few people who can say they\u2019ve had a legal experience with psychedelics in this country,\u201d Kamenetz said last year. \u201cTo be able to speak freely about it without the stigma \u2014 because it\u2019s not just people talking about doing illegal things \u2014 it\u2019s allowed people to start having a more open conversation about it. When there\u2019s the opportunity to hear from someone who did this in a legal environment, people will listen more.\u201d<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Denver%20drops%20drug%20charges%20against%20%E2%80%98mushroom%20rabbi%E2%80%99%20who%20promotes%20religious%20psychedelic%20use\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":71005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1884,25],"tags":[206,371,8790,8795,8788,12792],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71012,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71002\/revisions\/71012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}