Shrooms 4 Voters

*Mycopreneur Incubator Invite At Bottom*

Dave Hodges has inspired a lot of conversation and spirited debate since the establishment of Zide Door and the Church of Ambrosia. His Bay Area megachurch currently boats almost 120,000 members, and is on course to substantially increase that number with his latest enterprise.

Dave announced the ‘Shrooms 4 Unity’ pledge this week in the run up to the controversial and divisive U.S. elections next week.

“Dear fellow Americans, in this election, we need things that will bring us together instead of tear us apart. With this in mind, and to counteract the divisions being created by billionaires like Elon Musk, I've decided to do my own giveaway. Every eligible voter who signs the pledge at showrooms for unity income before Election Day will get a free a the magic mushrooms from my church.” says the larger than life mushroom megachurch pastor.

Dave isn’t the only one centralizing mushrooms as a core issue for the upcoming ballot.

Question 4 on the Massachusetts state ballot has provoked a spirited debate among psychedelic advocates in the press and across social media with a flurry of accusations and often flip-flopping perspectives from stakeholders directly involved in the campaign process.

 A "yes"vote supports this initiative to:

• create a Natural Psychedelic Substances Commission and Advisory Board to regulate the licensing of psychedelic substances and services, including the administration of psychedelic substances to individuals 21 years of age or older under licensed supervision;

• authorize individuals 21 years of age or older to grow, possess, and use a personal amount of psychedelic substances;

• impose an excise tax at a rate of 15% on the sale of psychedelic substances at licensed administration facilities, and

• authorize localities to levy an additional tax of up to 2% on psychedelic substances and regulate the time, place, and manner of the operation of natural psychedelic substance licensees.

While a “no” vote opposes this initiative to provide regulated access to certain psychedelic substances and authorize the personal use of limited amounts of psychedelics by individuals 21 years of age or older.

(source: Ballotpedia)

The most interesting thing about this ballot measure is it’s provision to allow for “12×12” home grows of psilocybin mushrooms. While critics argue that the potential regulated access model for legal psychedelic therapy that will roll out if Question 4 receives a majority ‘Yes’ vote will usher in an era of Leviathan psychedelic capitalism (too big to reign in), the 12×12 home grow protections and elimination of the possibility of arrest for personal use and possession is an obvious step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

On the global stage, as the U.S. goes, so do many other countries and territories around the world. The U.S. and UN were the original architects of the Drug War, a doomed enterprise launched in 1971 with Nixon’s declaration of a ‘War On Drugs’ and the enactment of the Scheduling System coordinated in tandem with the United Nations’ 1971 ‘Convention on Psychotropic Substances’ in the same year.

In the last 50 years, the main objectives of the Drug War have been by and large achieved albeit in a way that arguably does nothing to actually accomplish the stated goals of keeping the public safe from ‘illicit drugs’. The ulterior motives that were never outright promoted were to disrupt political opposition, jail the minority populations and anti-war protestors, and to consolidate government power over individual liberties. In this way, the Drug War has been remarkably successful as a means of ballooning police and military budgets and funding the prison industrial complex by virtue of a never-ending stream of non-violent drug offenders and drug users. The seemingly arbitrary line drawn between ‘legal’ vs. ‘illegal’ substances (example: Amanita muscaria mushrooms, Salvia, intoxicating hemp with THC, etc. are legal and unregulated while psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and ‘cannabis’ are still highly illegal at the federal and most state levels in the U.S.) are - and who gets to decide what a drug is and who gets to consume them, has reached a breaking point that requires policy reform.

And then there’s the question of enforcement of official policy - which many legacy market operators, smoke shops, gas stations, pop up vendors and a whack-a-mole assortment of online retailers representing various points on the spectrum of quality control will tell you is virtually non-existent or at best highly arbitrary and inconsistent.

As adult use recreational cannabis industry operators often remark, ‘Regulation without enforcement means nothing.’

The two primary models of campaigning we see around mushrooms in the lead up to the 2024 election offer an interesting legal basis to interpret future policy reform with -

Dave’s campaign represents an interesting ‘appeal to divinity’ that so far has withstood any legal incursions by authorities intent on infringing upon what Dave and many other psychedelic churches claim to be a religious exemption as outlined by the First Amendment while Question 4 leaves the possibility of drug policy reform and a regulated access program in the hands of the official voting process.

My take on it is this: Let’s vote for mushrooms every day by actively designing the future and the systems that we want. That’s the driving ballot issue at the heart of Mycopreneur - and with that, here’s the invite to this week’s Incubator.

Shoutout to William Padilla-Brown for showing us the way with this one:

Lastly for this week, I’m headed to Denver on Friday for the 2nd Annual Colorado Psychedelic Cup. This event features over 500 samples of psilocybin mushrooms that have been tested - including for minor alkaloids that are not even part of the conversation nationally or internationally yet - as well as DMT and mescaline samples. There is an absolute treasure trove of incredibly technical, specialized, and cutting edge intel being routed into this cup via the extensive testing and data collection by the world-class Tryptomics Elevated Product Research lab. Scope more info on the cup below - I’ve seen the data and results for this, and they are nothing short of game changing.

I could write 10 newsletters based on the intel that’s coming out around this cup - but I’ll put a pin in it for now until after this week’s incubator and the cup itself this weekend before unpacking more of it.

 Mycopreneur Incubator

Time: Oct 31, 2024 04:00 PM Mountain Time (6 pm east coast U.S. / 3 pm west coast)

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84105609691?pwd=aVuioNCQo4VrQd8Unn7AH2WrENafQM.1

Meeting ID: 841 0560 9691

Passcode: 708470

Thank you for reading the Mycopreneur Newsletter and if you’d like to throw in for the Incubator, hit me up at

Venmo: @mycopreneur

PayPal: [email protected] 

Peace and Love,

Dennis