Editor’s Note: The following article is not a confirmation or endorsement of any test results or the claims detailed in the ongoing legal proceedings that are described in this or prior media coverage as reported.

The Church of Sacred Synthesis has been no stranger to controversy.

The church — formerly known as The Church of Psilomethoxin — has claimed for years it can produce a novel psychedelic drug called “psilomethoxin.” Its founders say that by feeding toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT to psilocybin mushroom substrate, the fungi is coaxed into biosynthesizing the compound. Multiple chemists tested samples of the sacrament, but none could detect it, ultimately putting the church’s reputation on the line and causing the church’s founders to sue its public critics. Psilomethoxin has since remained at the center of a legally contentious saga that’s unfolded since 2023, with the church still trying to prove its sacrament is legitimate today — now with a new round of testing allegedly proving the existence of psilomethoxin and a brand new lawsuit. 

It all started in 2022, when Hamilton Morris — a chemistry consultant for Compass Pathways and former host of the show Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia — tested a sample of the sacrament and found no psilomethoxin. Over the next year, chemists at three more labs tested it and reached the same conclusion: Only the presence of psilocybin was detected. Morris' analysis also turned up ketamine. Now, an Alabama-based forensic toxicologist named Jesse Hines has entered the fray, and he says his lab testing equipment detected psilomethoxin in the sacrament. But verifying the presence of the compound is difficult for a few reasons. One is because there’s no agreed-upon reference standard for psilomethoxin, and there’s only been one instance of a successful synthesis that was documented in the 1960s. Another is because it’s highly sensitive to heat. Even renowned chemist Alexander Shulgin noted its volatility in his seminal text TiKHAIL: Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. 

Even still, the church is citing Hines’ results as vindication. On April 6, 2026, it sued Morris and Alexander Sherwood, the head of medicinal chemistry at the Usona Institute, alleging that their prior public skepticism over the validity of the church’s sacrament was secretly financially motivated. 

“Getting our sacrament allowed [Sherwood] to have a psilomethoxin prodrug that they could analyze at Usona, as they're doing studies on very similar [compounds to psilomethoxin]," claimed Ian Benouis, co-founder and legal co-counsel for the church, in an interview with DoubleBlind. We reached out to Sherwood and Morris, both of whom are personally named in the ongoing lawsuits, to ask whether their respective companies are researching drugs similar to psilomethoxin. Neither provided comment for the story. 

The lawsuit alleges that Morris gave a sample of the sacrament to Sherwood without consent. The church’s legal argument is that Sherwood and The Usona Institute — which it deems competitors — committed a trade secrets violation by freely investigating a confidential and commercially valuable compound, allowing them to mine it for the assumed eventuality of bringing a psilomethoxin drug to market. Contrary to these claims, Sherwood stated in “Fungi Fiction”  — a research paper disputing the presence of psilomethoxin in the sacrament that kicked off this legal saga in 2023 — that the authors have no competing financial interests.

Robert Rush, an attorney who specializes in psychedelics and founder of the Rights and Reason Project, told Doubleblind that after reviewing the contents of the lawsuit, he’s skeptical of the trade secrets-related claims. “My view is that this latest round of litigation attempts to convert a public scientific disagreement into a trade-secret fight,” he said. “The Church publicly promoted and sold the very sacrament it now claims is connected to confidential trade secrets.” 

Rush also noted that the church already litigated their claims in court, and that the presiding judge dismissed the case at the time. “In my opinion, this case looks less like a conventional intellectual-property dispute and more like another effort to chill scientists, journalists, and critics whose analysis the Church did not like.”

Benouis and the church sought out the scientific expertise of Hines, the forensic toxicologist, for a few reasons. One is that he’s a physicist with an expertise in advanced mass spectrometers and owns a toxicology lab called Golden Point Scientific. Another is because multiple previous lab tests failed to detect psilomethoxin in the church's samples. After an inconclusive analysis from a facility at the University of South Florida, Benouis realized that in order to obtain conclusive proof he needed access to better equipment.

Hines suggested using Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography with High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-HRMS) to see if psilomethoxin was present, after learning that previous labs had only relied on Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). Hines offered to analyze the samples free of charge using his Orbitrap Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer, a much more sensitive tool than other labs used, to process the sample as a liquid. Because this method applies almost no heat, the original chemical structure remains intact, allowing UPLC-HRMS to easily distinguish between nearly identical compounds. “What I'm actually doing with a mass spectrometer is measuring the actual weight of the compound at the molecular level,” Hines said. 

In a sworn affidavit filed as part of the Church’s newest lawsuit, Hines and Elizabeth Gardner — a forensic scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — state that they are more than 98% confident that the sacrament contains psilomethoxin. “In our professional opinion, the data proves psilomethoxin is present in the sacrament,” the document says.

Benouis and the church maintain in their new lawsuit that a reference standard is not required to identify a new natural product if the analytical data is sufficiently strong.  

But providing sufficient analytical data for an obscure compound like psilomethoxin is difficult for a couple of reasons: Almost no one has ever made it, and thus, no verified sample of it exists today. The only documented instance of a psilomethoxin synthesis occurred in 1965, when a team of chemists at France's Pasteur Institute successfully synthesized the molecule from vanilla orchids. But they failed to preserve the end product or add it to a reference library, so researchers can’t replicate their work today. In other words, there is no verified sample of psilomethoxin for chemists to check their own against, so even when they try and make it, there is no way to confirm success.

Critics of the church say that without conducting further complex testing, Hines’ findings are theoretical rather than confirmed.

“Claiming the discovery of a new chemical typically requires confirming it against a verified reference sample or using a technique like nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to directly confirm the atomic structure,” said Manesh Girn, scientific director for The Center for MINDS and host of The Psychedelic Scientist Podcast. “They did not appear to do either, yet the affidavit assigns very high probabilities and even claims certainty ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’ That level of certainty would be unusual in a scientific context without the above-mentioned checks."

In other words, standard scientific methodology demands independent verification. "If the goal were truly to conclusively demonstrate the compound’s presence, one might expect a more thorough approach,” Girn said, “including comparison to a verified reference sample, structural confirmation by NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance], and, ideally, independent replication by a third-party laboratory.”

Both Sherwood and Morris have argued that the compound's absence in their own analyses proves it does not exist in the tested samples. Hines contends that it’s plausible Sherwood’s Mass Spectrometer might not have been tuned to the highest level of sensitivity possible, according to the testing protocol Sherwood documented in his pre-print research paper.

Hines tells DoubleBlind that the 98% certainty metric cited in the sworn affidavit is because, “[Ian] is putting together the percentages for a legal defense” and is not rooted in any specific standard of proof required to establish undeniable evidence of a novel scientific discovery. But two things can be true at once: Hines also stands firmly by his conclusion that the elusive and highly volatile psilomethoxin compound is present in the samples he’s tested.

“I've conducted about a dozen tests,” said Hines, “I have no doubt about it. I'm kind of more surprised that somebody hasn't discovered it before now.”

The Church of Sacred Synthesis first gained notoriety back in 2021 after Benouis and Greg Lake, who is a co-founder of the church and also an attorney, announced the creation of their novel psychedelic compound. Marketed online as a "mail-order mushroom church," the organization offered their sacrament to members while aiming for broader mainstream accessibility. The sacrament was sold as capsules for $300 an ounce, tallying the church’s monthly income to almost “$100,000 in membership fees and sacrament sales,” according to Benouis. 

In 2022, the church contacted Hamilton Morris and sent him a sample of their sacrament for testing. He performed the analysis and privately informed Benouis that testing with a Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) had not detected the presence of psilomethoxin in the sacrament. In 2023, chemists from at least three other laboratories tested different samples of the church’s sacrament and came to the same conclusion. Sherwood was among those who conducted testing in 2023 using a mass spectrometer with UHPLC technology (similar to Hines’ machine) and at the time asserted that no psilomethoxin was present in the sample.

The findings were published in a paper called “Fungi Fiction,” and at the time Sherwood implied that the church was essentially distributing traditional psilocybin-containing mushrooms. In response to the backlash online, the organization rebranded itself as “The Church of Sacred Synthesis” and filed defamation lawsuits against their critics. 

Other experts in the field were also highly skeptical at the time. For example, Purdue University's Dr. David Nichols described the alleged cultivation process by members of the church as “nonsensical and nonscientific."

But Hines counters Sherwood’s testing assertions, pointing out that “Fungi Fiction” was never subject to a thorough peer review process, as Sherwood’s test results were only published as a pre-print, meaning the initial research findings did not undergo rigorous review by subject matter experts, a requirement for full publication in a reputable scientific research journal. “I think on peer review somebody would go ‘well you didn't see [psilomethoxin] but you also… didn't use the full capabilities of this machine.”

The Usona Institute, Sherwood, and Morris filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit altogether on June 15, 2026, citing an array of legal statutes and precedents arguing that even beyond the alleged legitimacy of the new test results, the church’s trade secrets claims are null and void due to the potentially illegal nature of their sacrament commercialization efforts.

“Long ago,” the motion reads, “the Texas Supreme Court held that ‘no action will lie to recover a claim for damages, if to establish it the plaintiff requires aid from an illegal transaction, or is under the necessity of showing or in any manner depending upon an illegal act to which he is a party. This admission dooms this lawsuit because the trade secret misappropriation claim is intertwined with Plaintiffs’ illegal acts.” 

Furthermore, the motion to dismiss highlights Benouis and the church’s rejected Trademark application for “Psilomethoxin” with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), of which the USPTO noted that the Church had, “no bona fide intent to use [the trademark] on lawful goods, that is, because the applicant does not have a bona fide intent to lawfully use the applied-for [trade]mark in commerce.”

The motion also says the “trademark office held that psilomethoxin is ‘structurally and pharmacologically similar to Psilocybin,’ a Schedule I drug, and thus is also a Schedule I drug under [The Controlled Substances Act].”

Benouis and the Church of Sacred Synthesis have drafted a motion for partial summary judgment, but Benouis says he expects the church to file it in roughly 1 to 2 months.

On July 15  Presiding Judge Melissa Andrews dismissed “all claims against Defendant Hamilton Morris for a lack of personal jurisdiction.” At the time of publication, Sherwood, The Usona Institute, Compass Pathways, and other defendants remain in the case.

The question of whether the church was operating commercially is further complicated by a contract with a biotech company called CB Therapeutics Inc. The deal is held by Psilosynth — a private company also founded by Benouis — which would help the church manufacture psilomethoxin for commercial sale.

Psilosynth signed the Master Services Agreement in July 2023 and the agreement establishes a five-year term for CB Therapeutics to provide services. Specific financial and operational details — such as budgets, timelines, and exact deliverables — are not detailed. Benouis told DoubleBlind that once additional testing gives them even greater confirmation of legitimacy, the deal will move forward and be valued at $1.8 million over a 24-month production timeline.

We reached out to Sher Ali Butt, CB Therapeutics founder and CEO, about details of the contract and production timeline. These details, however, remain confidential. “We do not comment on confidential commercial discussions or agreements,” Butt wrote to us in an email, suggesting that any plans of mass production may be premature. He also noted that the company has not “begun any experimental work in that area.” In other words, CB Therapeutics would need to conduct additional research to determine if the alleged psilomethoxin compound is even the drug it claims to be and if it can be mass produced at all. 

While mass production of the compound remains in limbo, Benouis told DoubleBlind that the church hopes to bypass the religious exemption process altogether and sell the substance as a “nutraceutical.” Religious organizations who work with psychedelic drugs, like the Church of Sacred Synthesis, are required to be compliant with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in order to receive a Religious Freedom Exemption Waiver from the Drug Enforcement Administration. This paperwork grants legal protections to churches who serve Schedule I drugs as religious sacraments.

Allison Hoots, the Sacred Plant Alliance’s executive director and an attorney who specializes in religious freedom laws as they pertain to psychedelic churches, expressed doubts regarding the legal viability of the church’s plans. “If we're just looking at whether [the church] might be defensible under a RFRA exemption analysis, the key components that the government is going to look at is religious sincerity,” said Hoots in an interview with DoubleBlind. “And then [the DEA is] going to look at whether the sacred substance or sacrament is being solely used for religious purposes and if diversion to non-religious purposes is being prevented as much as possible — just like a pharmacy or any other DEA registrant.”

And the more visible the church becomes — through lawsuits or mass production — the more scrutiny it invites, since the DEA weighs exactly the kind of commercial activity Hoots describes. As Rush points out, most churches aren't fielding discussions about valuations in the hundreds of millions.

“As I understand the allegations,” Rush said, “the Church claims an enterprise value in the hundreds of millions of dollars based on discussions with prospective investors. That is unusual language for an organization presenting itself as a church, and it underscores the tension at the heart of the case: whether this is really about protecting sacred religious practice, or about defending what is speculated to be a commercially valuable psychedelic enterprise from public scrutiny.

For now, the compound at the center of it all remains exactly what it has been for years: still unproven and unregulated, but impossible to ignore.

This article was produced in partnership with Psychedelic State(s) of America – a nonprofit-sponsored news organization dedicated to rigorous independent psychedelic journalism. Learn more about PSA’s Media Partnerships Program and donate to the PSA Media Fund here.

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