Mary Carreon, with a shocking story for DoubleBlind:
At 1 pm on Thursday, August 13, Zide Door—an entheogenic church in Oakland, California, that recognizes cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms as religious sacraments—was raided by Oakland Police Department (OPD) during parishioner visiting hours.
In 2004, Oakland voters passed Measure Z, making cannabis the lowest priority for law enforcement. Oakland also happens to be one of the several localities around the United States leading the psychedelic reform movement. In June 2019, activist group Decriminalize Nature convinced the city council to pass a resolution to make entheogenic plants and fungi the lowest priority for Oakland law enforcement, while defunding police action targeted at those cultivating, foraging, or giving away these substances.
Like the article says, Oakland decriminalized psychedelic plants and fungi last year. So why was Zide Door raided?
“The only activities covered under the resolution are grow, gather, gift—not a store front,” explains Carlos Plazola, chair of the board of Decriminalize Nature. Moreover, while the resolution was modeled after Measure Z, it does not actually cover cannabis—since cannabis, already, is encompassed by another set of state and local regulations.
And what’s more, the search warrant for Zide Door didn’t even mention psilocybin mushrooms, but only mentioned cannabis. Plazola suspects that other dispensaries in the area may have tipped off the police to Zide Door because it was operating without a permit. Hodges argues, however, that Zide Door didn’t need a commercial cannabis license because it was a church—not a dispensary. “It’s not possible to get a state permit to do what we do.”
According to Oakland officials, the police raided Zide Door because they saw it as a cause for an uptick in shootings in the area. But Hodges sees it differently: Across the street from Zide Door is an illegal gambling hall, where shootings have gone down. In fact, he says he didn’t even know the gambling hall was there until OPD asked him for outdoor surveillance footage that might have captured those shootings.
Indeed, the Zide Door raid has taken place amidst a tenuous moment for Oakland in regard to local crime. Legal cannabis retailers have been “under siege” of violent robberies—including the murder of a 33-year-old woman during an attempted robbery at an alleged legal dispensary—as recently as July 17, 2020. Since the riots in early June, dispensaries have experienced a massive spike in vandalism, in addition to robberies.
So according to Oakland police, Zide Door is an illegal cannabis dispensary, not a psychedelic church, and thus it is running afoul of the laws regulating cannabis in California. If you ask me, that’s quite a loose interpretation of what’s going on, but either way it’s going to be interesting to follow this case to see what happens.