Lessons From a Detroit Psychedelic Church: Community, Betrayal, and a $7,000 Scam

A story about community, trust, cross-cultural conflict, and how good intentions collapse without accountability.

Prologue: A Church Chair in June 2023

There's sweat dripping between my shoulder blades as I try to find a comfortable position in this church chair. I'm trying not to squirm too much, sitting next to an interesting Lithuanian fellow who invited me to the Psychedelic Society.

It's 4:30 on the fourth Saturday of June 2023, at St. Matthew's & St. Joseph's Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI, and I'm not the only one squirming as vastly different social groups fill the room. There are psychologists and therapists, though they don't share that freely. Leather-jacket-wearing socialites work the room. A handful of eccentric hermits with names like Sammoa. I count at least three pairs of cosmetic prosthetic ears: two cats, one elf. But the majority of the room is students and followers of Baba Kalindi: working-class African Americans who've lived in Detroit for generations.

I reach into my pocket to check the time, then remember my phone is off—sealed in a Faraday bag in my car a few blocks away. Most psychedelics are still Schedule I narcotics, and as the child of a federal agent who was also a strict fundamentalist Christian, I’d had it drilled into me that spending time with “these people” was sinful, unethical, and dangerous—never mind the years I could spend in prison for possessing these substances, or what taking these “illicit drugs” might do to my immortal soul.

The psychiatrist next to me is telling me their personal story with DMT and how it changed their ontology, a conversation I'd normally find fascinating, but I'm struggling to be an active listener while keeping my 5-in, 5-out breath count going so I don't hyperventilate.

I'm saved from that balancing act when a short, stout Black woman in her late 60s steps to the center of the room and welcomes everyone to the first meeting of the relaunched Detroit Psychedelic Society since the passing of its founder, Baba Kalindi. I had no way of knowing that over the next two years I'd get to know this woman, Mama Ayana, one of Baba's wives, deeply.

As Mama Ayana ensures everyone has a snack and a drink, an athletic Black man who looked to be in his 30s (he was actually in his 50s) makes his way to the center of the room. This was the first time I met Justin Petty, also known as Moudou, and he was about to scam both Mama Ayana and me out of several thousand dollars, though neither of us knew it yet.

The Context of The Detroit Psychedelic Society

Mama Ayana recounts the founding of the Society. It roosts started in the 1970s, when Baba Kalindi began experimenting with psychedelics, specifically high-dose psilocybin mushroom trips.

As a Black man in the 1970s, Baba was a contemporary of Roland Fischer and George K. Aghajanian, but ran in different circles.

Historical accounts often focus on the white renaissance of psychedelics in the U.S., but there was a simultaneous renaissance happening in other communities, including Black communities.

Kalindi traveled Europe and the U.S., attending lectures, spending days in libraries, developing a unique philosophy grounded in these experiences. He later lectured in Europe and brought the first psychedelic conference to the United States.

While the War on Drugs raged, Kalindi waged his own war against what he saw as the darkness around him, using what he considered sacred sacraments starting the Detroit Psychedelic Society in 20214 & the first conference (The Detroit Entheogenic Conference) in 2016. Over his life he taught thousands of people, facilitated hundreds of trips, and developed followers and students who, over time, formed the Detroit Psychedelic Society.

There's much more that could be said about Baba Kalindi, both good and bad, but I'll leave that for another time.

After decades running the Society, Kalindi died during COVID on April 10, 2020, shattering the community that had formed around him and his work. As there was no clear succession plan, his passing left students, wives, and children without direction, and the Society effectively shut down until the meeting I found myself at.

Meeting the Members of The Detroit Psychedelic Society

As Mama Ayana finishes telling us how we got here, she invites us to stand, introduce ourselves, and share our experience with psychedelics—and why we came to this relaunch meeting of the Detroit Psychedelic Society. That’s when the knot in my stomach tightens. Not because public speaking scares me, but because I assume there’s a federal agent in the room recording everything, and I don’t want to publicly admit to breaking the law. I haven’t used my real name, and I haven’t overtly admitted to any drug use—what my father would call a dangerous illegal drug, my mother would call a mortal sin, and Mama Ayana a sacred medicine.

"Who wants to go first?" Mama Ayana asks, & after a moment of awkward silence a short women in thick glass in the back left corner stands up an starts speaking.

Over the next hour I hear from dozen’s of people freely admitting to substance use, and what shocks me isn't the self-incrimination. It's the stories of lives snatched back from the brink of destruction.

The room cries as veterans describe PTSD symptoms that nearly ended their lives, until psychedelics helped them get back on their feet. We clap for mothers whose children were taken by CPS, now out of the addiction cycle with the help of psychedelics.

A woman named Julie Barron stands up and introduces the Michigan Psychedelic Society, a statewide network of people and professionals interested in psychedelics. She's a licensed therapist focused on psychedelic-assisted therapy.

People with chronic medical conditions describe finding new ways to engage with life. The psychiatrist next to me talks about rethinking their practice after their own DMT experiences.

Then it’s my turn. I introduce myself by my first name only. I mention that I’m neurodivergent and that I got interested in psychedelics through meditation and by studying the nervous system. I vaguely reference a few experiences without saying anything that could get me in legal trouble.

I sit back down, drenched in sweat, and immediately replay everything I said. I haven’t had a theatrical, life-altering trip, and I haven’t found psychedelics to be the magic pill so many others in the room describe. But the experiences I’ve had while metabolizing a psychedelic have helped me connect to reality in ways that felt deeply meaningful—and I still have more questions than answers.

The Front Man

As the last person sits down, the athletic fellow—Moudou—takes center stage. He reminds me of a school principal: charismatic, confident, outspoken. He launches into a speech about “the forces at play” trying to stop “the awakening.” Much of the language is coded in ways I don’t fully understand, but he frames himself and the room as a special group with a mission to awaken the world, and the room is eating it up. There’s clapping and hollering, and I wonder if I’ve stumbled into some kind of religious revival without realizing it. So I lean over to my friend and whisper, "Is this a cult?" He laughs and shrugs. I know I'm too smart to fall for a cult, so it doesn't really matter. Moudou closes by saying the Society needs volunteers and invites people to sign up for the email list. The presentation ends, and we stand as people refill their plates. The conversation is even more electric after Moudou’s speech and everyone’s stories.

I make my way across the room and find some veterans I’d noticed earlier. I want to know whether their lives have really changed or whether they’re just playing along. As we talk, I learn they aren’t “free” from PTSD, but they feel able to process it and move through it in ways they couldn’t before.

That same pattern holds for most people I speak with over the next hour as I work my way around the room. Not as magical as the introductions made it sound, but genuinely useful: psychedelics seem to be helping people engage with—and process—darkness that other treatments couldn’t touch.

I catch my friend's eye across the room. We make our excuses and head for the exit. On the way out, I stop to thank Moudou, who's surrounded by people and clearly having a moment. I tell him I'm interested in learning more and that I'll add my email to the list on the way out. He thanks me briefly, then dives back into his conversation with what seems to be his fan club.

At the sign-up iPad, I hesitate. Everything discussed in this room is breaking federal law, and while Detroit has decriminalized psychedelic plants, that's far from a safe harbor. I’m torn between wanting to join a community of interesting people who are willing to talk about experiences that have been meaningful to me, and all the fear from my family and culture. I use a burner email—traceable if someone really wanted to—but it feels like a little security.

Walking back to the car parked a few blocks away, my friend and I agree: some people in the room were "out there," some were genuinely struggling, but most seemed normal and curious about expanding their understanding of the world. We were comforted by the number of mental health professionals present, and people like Julie who seemed like real professionals in the space. We agree to come back next month.

Getting Involved in a Psychedelic Society

Three months later, I'm at my fourth meeting. The format is always roughly the same: loosely structured introductions, announcements from Moudou about laws and other organizations' efforts, a request for help or donations, and networking.

Like many social spaces in Detroit, the room tends to self-segregate, roughly half Black, half everyone else, and I make a point of spending time on both sides.

I still haven't received any emails despite signing up multiple times, so at the end of today’s meeting I wait to talk to Moudou. He’s clearly popular—the person in demand. I ask about not receiving emails, and someone chimes in that they also haven’t received any. He seems annoyed and tells us to sign up again.

“One more question,” I say. “You keep asking for help—what kind of help do you actually need?” He’s visibly irritated, but repeats, “Help grow the society,” which is still too vague for my autistic brain to act on. So I mention that I’ve built websites and run a digital marketing firm, and ask whether that would be useful. Suddenly I have their full attention, and they’re all warmth. We exchange numbers on an encrypted messaging platform and agree to meet about the website.

The First Meeting - Jan 5th, 2024,

It’s Friday, Jan 5th, 2024, at 5pm, and I’m running around my house which is a total construction zone - shoving building materials into the kitchen, throwing tarps over half-finished projects, and setting up a folding table in the front room.

Moudou and Mama Ayana are on their way to talk about the website. Normally, I wouldn’t invite strangers - people who could reasonably be called drug dealers - into my home. But meeting in public, with unsecured wifi and potential eavesdroppers, felt like an even worse idea.

By 5:30, I start to wonder if they’re going to ghost me—until I remind myself that Detroit time is like island time, and everything runs a little loose. Just as I pick up my phone to send a check-in text, a white Ford box van with a peeling decals for a epoxy-company pulls up, and two figures in black step out. For a moment, I panic. What did I just invite into my house? How could I have been this stupid? Before I can do anything, the porch light catches Mama Ayana’s face under her hat & she’s smiling. I exhale, and open the door.

Going through the Society’s Wix site, payment processor, email marketing, and social accounts, I learn more in ten minutes of scrolling than I had in months of attending meetings.

I’ve been in organizational development, digital marketing, and technical infrastructure since I was 15, and as I flip through spreadsheets, I can see an entire story unfolding—while I ask where the Society is headed. Moudou talks about growth, activation, liberation, freeing minds: a big vision with no deliverable plan, a pattern I recognize from consulting work with visionary-but-disorganized founders.

I turn to Mama Ayana instead. She's quieter, less outspoken, but there's real kindness and care there and I decide to get behind the project.

The Growth Starts to Show - March 2024

I’m sipping a London Fog at Congregation Coffee in March 2024, once again seated across the table from Mama Ayana and Moudou.

Over the last three months, I’ve learned the psychedelic movement in Michigan is far larger than sixty people in a church basement. There are festivals, fairs, talks, and communities statewide, with the Michigan Psychedelic Society acting as something of a hub.

Every group publicly states it’s for informational purposes only and doesn’t distribute substances, which is acutely true in the vast majority of cases. I’ve talked with other organizers and learned there’s been almost no legal enforcement action against informational organizations or their leadership in recent years; enforcement targets distributors, and even that’s rare outside conservative parts of the state—so it seems reasonable to meet in public now.

In my experience, digital marketing engagements like this usually surface organizational-development questions that need answering before you can move forward, and this was no exception. I learn the Society is officially just Mama Ayana and Moudou, with a few recurring volunteers, and no other infrastructure.

For reasons that will soon be made clear, I totally over invest. In the last ninety days, I formalized an events calendar, fixed the email list (it turns out signups were never actually added, and handwritten forms were never entered), designed and launched a marketing campaign, rebuilt the website, and started conversations about a basic legal/financial structure—though I got a cold shoulder on anything that touched finances directly.

The results showed: each of the past three monthly meetings drew more and more people.

Mama Ayana has been a pleasure to work alongside, but I’ve had to “manage” Moudou more than once. We would agree on a calendar of events, and then he wouldn’t show up, claiming he never approved any events. We would make decisions as a team in writing, and then he would claim we never discussed the issue—then get heated when I showed him the written record.

As I have been bombing through years of archived material, the picture that emerges is of Baba Kalindi as someone who cared deeply about people, even if I didn't share all his views about the nature of reality. His focus was on giving people access to substances that, with the right set and setting, could be profoundly powerful. That I could get behind.

Not only did I mostly agree with the organization’s vision, but I’d also begun to develop what I now see as a trauma bond with Moudou—who, in retrospect as I read the hunders of emails & text sent back & forth, was clearly grooming me, though I would have denied it in the moment.

When I first met him, I had just left a residential Zen Center training program—an experience I now recognize as religious abuse. I was also newly out of my most significant romantic relationship. And as a socially awkward, white, autistic, queer person, Detroit is a hard city to build community in. This felt like a way to grow my social circle with people I actually connected with. I told Moudou about these experiences. He assured me I was finding a new community within the Society, that we could grow the organization together, and that he would ensure I got the professional and social introductions I needed to make this transition in my life. I believed him.

We Hit Out Stride

By late spring 2024, the monthly meetings had doubled in size since 2023, and I was even giving the occasional presentation to the group.

We’d moved from the St. Matthew's & St. Joseph's Episcopal Church reception hall to the basement, and then to a room at Cannabis Counsel, on Jefferson Ave in Detroit.

Baba Kalindi was known for giving psychedelic conferences, and there hadn’t been one in several years, so we started planning to launch a conference.

I’m deep in the society at this point, meeting regularly with Moudou at Congregation Coffee as he takes the lead on organizational-development efforts. In my personal life, I’m leaving a tech startup job after clashing with leadership over what I believed were unethical—and possibly illegal—activities.

Everything feels in upheaval. I’ve always been a self-development junkie, but the last year has included a significant amount of personal growth work, and my existing friends weren’t interested in the kinds of conversations I wanted to have.

I know I’m in a raw, vulnerable place, and this project becomes an escape from a difficult reality—one I put more time into than I’d originally planned. But it seemed to be paying off, and Moudou was assuring me that I’d have a place as the organization formalized and we started to attract funding.

Oh We’re Starting A Church Now?

It’s 1:30 on Saturday June 29th, 2024 and I wander the St. Matthew's & St. Joseph's Episcopal Church looking for the meeting, a line of confused attendees trailing behind me like ducklings.

No sign of it anywhere. I call Moudou. No answer. I call Mama Ayana, who picks up on the first ring & asks where I am. I explain & she informs me the meeting moved to a Cannabis Counsel.

As I hang up I turn to the line of people following me and explain the situtation. People are frustrated as the website, email & social media posts are listing St. Matthew's & St. Joseph's. I scrawl an updated address on a scrap of paper and tape it to the church door.

Driving across town, I'm frustrated. This isn't the first time Moudou has changed something without telling me, then denied it when I show him our actual text history. I've started calling him before every meeting just to remind him to show up. When I've asked other Society members about this pattern, I'm told I'm a white man (I'm non-binary, though they don't register that) who needs to be more adaptive to different cultural norms around time and communication, rather than "projecting my whiteness."

The room, once I find it, is packed with the people I redirected—plus several more who somehow knew where to show up. Two concentric circles have formed, and more people keep arriving.

I lean in to ask how they got the updated address. They tell me they follow Moudou on Facebook and Instagram, and he posted it there. When did this become the Moudou show, I wonder, and why is the Society’s own website the last to know?

As the meeting winds down, I corner Moudou. Before I can get a word out, he says, “We’re starting a church. The leadership team is going to look at a building right after this. Can I text you the address?”

I’m stunned into silence—a genuinely rare state for me—and I’m suddenly reliving a memory I’d buried: a previous church I’d helped launch.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household, in church every Sunday and Wednesday. At 18 I was on staff at one church and in a leadership development program at a megachurch, leading a college ministry of 80–100 people weekly, with 150 volunteers under me.

When I came out as queer, I was expelled from both churches in the same weekend and socially excommunicated. At the same time, that megachurch was planting a new, supposedly more progressive church, led by Travis Whitaker called Mile City. I joined that launch team while I was still reeling from rejection, and watched that church eventually land on rejecting queer people too. The liferaft I'd clung to sank.

I snap back to the present as Moudou asks if I got his text. I did. "I'll see you there in 30 minutes." Mama Ayana checks in. She'd only known to come here because she saw it on Moudou's Facebook.

Sitting in my car afterward, hyperventilating slightly, I pull up the address: an auto shop turned event venue off Fenkel (15605 Woodrow Wilson Detroit, MI 48238) , in a rough part of town not far from my own house.

Per Ankh House of Life Preview

Walking in, I find what will become "Per Ankh House of Life," a gutted automotive shop, full of junk, front door propped open with a rock. What was pitched as a preview of a new church turns, over the course of the evening, into a party: food, alcohol, marijuana smoke, rather explicit rap music. I learn most of the people here are Moudou's friends and family from the neighborhood he grew up in which is just down the block, not Society members. I'm one of the only white people in the building, which isn't itself a problem, but the tone has shifted entirely from what I expected a church preview to be.

I find Moudou, and decide not to push anything tonight. On my way out, I ask Mama Ayana: "So we're starting a church?" "Apparently," she says. "We're going to start a nonprofit, get some legal protections." I tell her I think we should talk about that. The protections might not be what she thinks.

The Backstory Comes Into Focus

Three weeks later, waiting outside the locked church for a late Moudou, Mama Ayana fills in the picture. Several "factions" exist within the broader psychedelic movement. There's the white-led medicalization effort associated with groups like MAPS, following in a lineage traced to Terence McKenna, Rick Doblin & many others.

Baba Kalindi was a contemporary of those figures but ran in different, often-erased circles. Groups outside the medicalization/scientific-materialist frame have claimed Kalindi and similar figures as their own lineage, typified by groups like the The Church of Ambrosia, led by Dave Hodges.

Common threads of these groups include: very high-dose treatments, unconventional cosmologies involving a "dark synthetic force" opposing an "organic light awakening," anti-regulation and libertarian leanings, and, often, substantial profits from selling psychedelic substances under a banner of religious freedom.

Several of these West Coast groups are looking for a lineage to claim authority through, and Moudou has positioned himself as Kalindi's primary student, hence the funding now materializing for a church. I ask Ayana why Moudou, specifically, given how many of Kalindi's actual students and family there are. "He's played his cards right," she says, "and so the money thinks he is, and as long as that's good for the community, I'm not going to get in the way."

Moudou arrives, and we start planning the conference sitting around a hightop table from Mama Ayana’s house she has lent the church: two dozen speakers, some "big names" in what you might call the "alternative psychedelic space," not the MAPS side. As the scope becomes clear (speakers flying in internationally, sponsorship deals, a church launch simultaneously), I realize I need to decide what role I'm actually willing to play.

Going All In - July, 2024

By July, I'm unemployed and increasingly isolated. I'd left my job over ethical concerns and was struggling to find a new one because, as I put it to myself, I had inconveniently high ethical standards, and I wanted my work to have meaning.

My social circle had narrowed to the "menagerie of quirky humans" in the Society—people who wanted to chase philosophical questions for hours. My queerness had become an increasingly public part of my identity, and that had led to further isolation from my family and old social groups.

As I talked these issues through with Moudou during our planning meetings, he pointed out that this often happens to people who leave the default path and again reassured me that I had a place in the Society. Our conversations started to formalize around a paid position within the church as we secured more funding, and I decided to go all-in on the conference professionally and socially.

I ask Moudou directly whether this made sense as a career move. He assures me, with his connections, it would. I'd independently verified the psychedelic industry was real and growing (if very networking-dependent), and I'd already done paid work with retreat centers and attorneys through Society connections. It seemed like a reasonable bet.

As I write this nearly two years later, I’m rereading our emails and text messages, sitting in that same coffee shop in some of the same chairs I shared with Moudou. I just shake my head and wipe tears from my eyes. I was in such a vulnerable place, and now I can see him playing me for the helpless thirty-something I was.

From July onward, this becomes my full-time, unpaid job: 40+ hours a week on calendars, sponsor outreach, graphics, admin, speaker coordination & prep. We build a shared Notion workspace with full transparency: budgets, schedules, timelines, meeting minutes, all documented and open.

Volunteer days at the church brought dozens of people to clean, paint, landscape, and renovate the space: university researchers moving cinderblocks on Saturdays, GM contractors pulling up with a a huge trailer full of lawn equipment & tools, veterans (echoes of my own veteran father) helping fix walls. An admin team of sex educators, psychologists, and therapists meets weekly. I feel alive, electric, part of something with a mission.

The Cracks

By August, the structure had clarified: Mama Ayana as spiritual/esoteric elder, Moudou as charismatic front man, me as the person people called with admin questions & several others helping launch this church. But underneath the highs, the leadership relationship, mainly between Moudou and me, kept fracturing.

He'd fail to show up and unlock the doors for volunteer days, then accuse me of scheduling them without his knowledge, despite texts proving otherwise. Society meetings, once structured, became Moudou monologues, which I'd occasionally fact-check publicly, earning public scolding in return.

A recurring flashpoint: Moudou would tell the group psychedelics were "completely legal and very safe," and I'd follow up noting they remain Schedule I federally, that Detroit's decriminalization just means the city prosecutor won't pursue charges, and that outcomes depend heavily on set and setting. This dynamic, his sweeping claims, my public correction, visibly chafed at what I read as a growing messiah complex, and it made people uneasy.

He'd also launch, cancel, or edit events via his personal social media without consulting the leadership team, creating conflicts with the Society's official communications.

I overlooked these red flags because I was high on the sense of community, and because, when I raised them with other members, I was told I was projecting "white saviorism," that I needed to "decolonize my understanding of time," or that expecting Moudou to follow a calendar the team had agreed on was "white elitism."

I watched Moudou take increasing control while Ayana grew too exhausted to push back. When other non-Black members raised concerns, they were sometimes met with racial-tension framing that shut the conversation down.

This dynamic was compounded by white members overcorrecting through guilt-driven deference. During one memorable volunteer day, Moudou got in a white veteran’s face, yelling about how the gravel was being leveled. When I intervened, a white woman told me it was important for Black men to express their emotions and that white people needed to make space for that—even, apparently, if it meant screaming at a traumatized veteran over gravel.

When I asked whether that standard applied evenly to white men, I was called a racist. This wasn’t an isolated moment; it was one example of a pattern that recurred often at Per Ankh.

Racing Toward the Conference & Opening

By mid-September, I'm volunteering most days, splitting time between admin work and physical labor, alongside Moudou epoxying lab floors with donated equipment from Center for Mycological Analytics allowing us to run HPLC analysis.

I'm also all-in financially. Reviewing my notes now, I can see the mounting problems clearly in hindsight, and my own blindness to them at the time, driven by isolation and disconnection from anything outside this project.

Going All In, Financially

With 14 days left until the conference & the church lauch, it becomes clear we’re not going to have a videography crew for the four-day event—we don’t have the budget for the $20K quote.

This conference is full of niche, valuable presentations from people who rarely speak publicly, and the thought of not capturing and sharing this content feels unacceptable to me.

After many conversations with Moudou, I write up a proposal: I would front the capital to rent or buy the video equipment needed to record the conference, with the understanding that we would presell the media rights to the videos and those dollars would go directly back to me to reimburse me, plus an additional $2,000 to cover editing expenses.

A copy of this contract can be found in the linked Google doc found the in the FAQ Section.

Everything would be tracked in real time with copies of recipes in our shared Notion dashboard. I knew this was a risk, but I believed it was manageable.

Moudou accepted the proposal in writing. And because I knew things could get squally at the Society, I not only got the proposal in writing—I also shared it in the leadership team’s Notion board and outlined the funding structure in detail on the sponsorship page of the website.

I pull all-nighters teaching myself the technical side on a shoestring budget, while also coaching Moudou through a sponsorship push—drafting emails and messages for him to send and helping him respond when sponsors write back with questions.

And it worked! We raise over $15,000, more than enough to cover $6,806 in media costs, and Moudou assures me the Church of Ambrosia will cover any shortfall. I breathe a sigh of relief and pat myself on the back: not only did we cover the cost, we raised extra funds for the church.

Managing Moudou, at this point, felt like managing the most eccentric, difficult CEO clients I'd worked with in my consulting career, except I was doing it unpaid, having set aside job applications, new clients, and dating to make this happen. I was acting as his back-office ghostwriting support, drafting emails for him, because he hadn’t done sponsorship of this magnitude before, and I had.

Three Days Out Until La

With three days left before the conference, glitches were still piling up. There was no furnace at the facility, so I offered to buy heaters for key spaces, with the understanding I’d be reimbursed. By now I knew information could get slippery in the Society, so I made sure it was in writing via text message. Other essentials—cash box, wristbands, signs, etc.—started stacking up, and again I offered to purchase them after getting approval and written compensation.

We had scientists onsite setting up Center for Mycological Analytics, and they were sleeping in the building, so I brought cooking pots over from my house so they could use the kitchen. Speakers were flying in, and I was giving people rides.

The timing was working out perfectly: Thursday October 31st was Halloween/Samhain and the first day of the conference, which meant Wedneesday was our setup day—an all-hands push from dawn to dusk to clear the last of the junk. The owner of the building offered some professional lighting insight, which I was rigging up. We were painting side rooms to act as wellness spaces for bodywork, and Ayana was finishing painting projects in the front room. And then, when we were supposedly ready for the conference, Moudou was nowhere to be seen—so people kept coming to me with questions and requests.

When Wednesday night landed, I couldn’t sleep, so I journaled. I poured out everything it had taken over the last eighteen months to get to this point, much of which had been blamed on me being white.

I listed the people I was working with, and how it felt like family was coming online and connections were forming. Flipping through photos on my phone, I saw so many smiles—so many people I’d spent the last eighteen months (and especially the last ninety days) crying and laughing with. This felt like the portal to an upgrade, and while I was more socially isolated and economically unstable than I’d been since I was a teenager, I was confident the next few days would catapult me into new growth which the church leadership had assured me would happen.

The Conference

Day 1: Sorry is that an Alligator your Holding

It's Thursday afternoon, 3pm, the weather perfect and the windows open. After a late-night push and an early-morning run to the UPS store for signage, we're actually ahead of schedule.

Rachel, who goes by Vishuddha in ceremony spaces, has swept in like an angel over the last few days, cleaning up the last loose ends and getting us over the finish line. But one key piece is still missing: to run the media setup, we need a wired internet line, something I've been asking Moudou about for two months. The Notion card for this single action item has 26 comments on it: reminders, pleading, outlining exactly how critical it is. It's been put off until the last possible day anyway.

Two hours before the event starts, Moudou walks in carrying a router and tells me to set it up. Then he mentions, almost as an afterthought, that its settings are locked by the ISP for the next 72 hours. Which means the $6,806 in video gear and the hundreds of hours I've put into learning this equipment are wasted. Which pales in comparison to the recorded talks we're about to lose and the 15K+ of sponsorship dollars we'll have to return, all because this one critical piece of infrastructure got delayed until the last possible moment despite 26 documented requests.

I draft a message to the leadership group text and have a Rachel read it over before I send it, trying to explain the issue calmly. The phones ping. Within sixty seconds flat, Moudou is in my face, chest to chest, yelling that I'm "a little bitch" and that this isn't how "real men" solve problems.

I'm about to cry, not because someone I'd come to see as a mentor is screaming at me, but from the sheer intensity of the last few weeks imploding over a simple, preventable issue I'd tried to prevent 26 separate times. It feels indicative of the entire relationship.

Because apparently magic still happens sometimes, a sponsor who's also something of a hacker manages to crack the ISP lock with less than an hour before the event starts. The three days of testing I was supposed to have collapses down to sixty minutes.

I lock in, and as guests and vendors start arriving I'm surrounded by a sea of tech gear I'm still integrating in real time. After the last audio test, we rush the equipment into the back as the Thursday night welcome party begins. I think the chaos is behind me. It's not; it's about to start hitting.

By 8pm, the volunteers running check-in on my iPad tap my shoulder. I'm wearing a full-body zorb suit that night, partly for the aesthetic, mostly for the compression, which helps me stay regulated. They tell me there are people saying they bought tickets that aren't showing up in the system. I walk to the folding table, where there's a line of people in the most outrageous outfits I've ever seen, and normally I'd be loving it.

I greet a woman in fishnet stockings and ask what's going on. She explains she has a ticket, and sure enough, when she shows it to me, it lists the correct address, time, and title, but it's from a website we're not using. I photograph it and ask where she heard about the event. "A friend," she says. I let her in, confused, and tell the volunteers I'll find out what's happening.

I find Moudou in the crowd and show him the ticket. "Oh yeah," he says, "that's the promoter's site." "Promoter's site? What are you talking about, the Society sells tickets through our website." No, he explains, a friend of his is a promoter and is separately selling tickets.

This is the first I'm hearing of it. Is the Society getting any of that money? How do we even know who's on this second list? Did the leadership team approve this?

Before he can answer, a man walks into the room holding an alligator. I actually rub my eyes and wonder if I've taken something without realizing it. Behind him is a woman with a boa constrictor wrapped around her body, and another man wheeling in a cart full of cages.

I turn back to Moudou: "What is this?" "Oh yeah, we're having an exotic animal exhibit tonight," he says, already drifting off, clearly high on something. I'm livid. After everything we'd discussed about liability management and financial integrity, this is happening without a word to the leadership team.

As I make my way back through the packed room, another woman wheels in cases and cases of liquor. I stop her and ask what's going on. She's the bartender Moudou hired, and she starts setting up a full bar in the venue. I ask if she has a liquor license. "A liquor license? What's that?" Back to Moudou I go. We'd talked at length, as an entire leadership team, about liability, specifically to ensure informed consent around everything happening at this event, because we were all personally at risk. I would never have signed off on any of this.

In the space of one day, Moudou has brought in a ticket promoter who ends up taking 75% of ticket sales with no waivers signed, dangerous exotic animals with zero insurance, and a full bar with no liquor license, and the money from all of it simply disappears.

I'm apoplectic. I find Ayana; she just shrugs and says she didn't know about any of it either. I go back to the volunteers at the registration table and tell them they can leave, since registration is now meaningless; we have no real way of knowing who's actually here.

I grab my keys and laptop from the storage room and go. As I head out, the church is packed wall to wall, a DJ is playing explicit rap music, the air is thick enough with marijuana and nicotine that I'm getting a contact high, and there's more alcohol flowing than at a bar on a Saturday night.

I was told this would be a church, a place of healing and ceremony, a place where we respect set and setting. It's turned into an underground club. I get in my car and drive home crying. This isn't what I signed up for. The trust is shattered, and I'm more overloaded and shut down than I've been in a long time. This was supposed to be the launch of the church, the conference and my entry into the next phase of life. This is only day one.

Day 2: Managing the Unmanageable

Friday November 1st, 2024 7am, I'm the first one at the venue. I got up early, went for a run, did thirty minutes of yoga and a round of breathwork, and I'm ready to go.

I walk in and the place is trashed, exactly like the party it was the night before, and nobody cleaned any of it up. I'm in an ironed shirt, business pants, and polished black leather shoes that are sticking to the floor where someone spilled boos.

The air is rancid with body odor and the lingering smell of smoke. I roll up my sleeves anyway ruining the ironing job, fill trash bin after trash bin with bottles, plates, cans, and cigarette packaging, then find a mop in the supply closet and get to work.

Rachel arrives and lights frankincense and sage, smudging the space as I finish with the trash and reset the chairs, all knocked out of alignment from the party.

Moudou is nowhere to be found and no one has heard from him; Ayana is at her house hosting several out-of-town guests. John and Matt, two of the Society's most reliable volunteers, walk in and give me a hug, and honestly, those hugs are the only thing keeping me upright that morning. By 10am we're ready to start which is a good thing because there’s a line at registration.

During the planning meetings, Moudou had specifically and repeatedly refused to allow a sound amplification system, insisting everyone could just learn to project their voice. We all knew that wouldn't work in a cavernous, echoing industrial warehouse, but no one could talk him out of it and Ayana wouldn't weigh in, so that first day people struggle to hear.

The volunteers I'd recruited and trained for registration and facilities are golden, reading the how-to docs ahead of time, arriving early, staying late to help with transitions. The media team is full of total champions, fixing glitches as they pop up and keeping everything in frame with backup audio rolling.

Moudou keeps changing the agenda without warning or explanation, causing slides to be out of order and the wrong person to be mic’d for the video recording; every time he changes something, I make him write it down, because ten minutes later he'll insist that change never happened. Eventually Rachel starts acting as an intermediary between us, because I've lost the ability to be civil after hours spent liaising with speakers to make sure they'd arrive in time for their own presentations, only to watch several of them lose their speaking slot entirely because Moudou made a last-minute calendar change mid-talk.

Most painfully, a speaker who'd given up family time to attend the conference never got the chance to present at all because of these needless, unannounced shuffles.

We end Friday, and I leave with a backup of the files after cleaning the facility once again so it's ready for the next day.

Day 3: I guess will start without you?

Saturday, I'm back after another run, yoga, and breathwork, this time in a full-body compression layer because my nervous system is starting to shut down. The accumulated chaos is getting to me, but I push through because we're going to make this conference happen no matter what & I’ve gone all in on this bet from my personal & professional life.

Registration opens at 10am, and one of the Dave Hodges the main sponsors walks in with a sound system he bought from Guitar Center and tells me to set it up. I explain we already have an audio system running for the recording, and there isn't time to integrate two systems, something we could easily have arranged in advance, and had discussed, before Moudou shut it down.

Dave gets in my face: "I'm paying for this event, that means it's my event, and you'll do what I say." He pushes into the tech booth and starts unplugging the audio system I'd spent days configuring. I stand back and watch him dismantle the work and set up microphones I already know it will produce a feed back loop given the position of the speakers and podium. Once he's gone, I quietly rewire everything to work properly.

It's 11am, the first speaker is ready, and there's no Moudou and no Ayana anywhere. Rachel and I call around; no answer. 11:15, still nothing. We have a room full of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and over a hundred other attendees waiting, and neither leader is present.

At 11:30 I make the call to start the event myself, welcome everyone, apologize for the delay, and introduce the first speaker.

Dave Hodges throws a fit that I'm not using it, storms onto the stage mid-presentation to hand the presenter a different mic, and shoves his way back into the tech booth to switch on his speaker, which instantly triggers a deafening feedback loop.

He spends part of the presentation moving speakers around and live-testing audio, wildly disruptive to everyone in the room, and this forced integration causes the recorded audio to develop issues that were entirely avoidable.

By Noon the sound is finally stable, and Moudou walks in. He waves me over; Rachel and I follow him into the kitchen, where Moudou starts laying into the two of us for starting the event without. I'm genuinely about to unload on this man before Rachel physically moves me out of the room and stands there absorbing the scolding herself. I get the "don't you dare come back in here" look and head back to the sound system. Between speakers, Julie from the Michigan Psychedelic Society asks how I'm doing. "Dissociated, overloaded, and nearly apoplectic with preventable frustration," I tell her She replies “well that sounds like a lot.”

The rest of Saturday plays out almost identically to Friday: a comedy of preventable errors, nonsensical schedule changes, missed speakers, audio glitches.

As the day winds down, Dense from the Mushroom Hub finds me and hands me a box of chaga tea and mushroom stew for the volunteers. I thank him profusely, grateful for the reminder that most of the vendors, speakers, and participants I'm surrounded by are genuinely stunning examples of humanity, and that it's really just one person jamming up the whole system.

Day 4: Sorry are you drunk? Oh wait you’re drunk!

By Sunday, the last day, I have no energy left for a run or yoga. I take a cold shower instead and show up first again. Dave, The sponsor is back in the tech booth, berating me for not being an audio engineer, and after he finally walks away, a therapist who'd been a steady presence on the media team all three days pulls me aside. "You know that was emotional and verbal abuse, what just happened to you?" I ask what she means. "I've been watching Dave and Moudou abuse you and Rachel this entire conference," she says, "and I want to make sure you know what's happening to you, and that it's not okay." I start to cry, because I know she's right, and because I'm so confused how I can be at a conference in a church that's supposed to be about healing while one of the two leaders is acting unhinged, abusing an unpaid volunteer support team, while Mama Ayana does nothing to stop it, and a major sponsor who runs one of the largest psychedelic churches in the country is just as bad. It's happening in plain sight, and the rest of the leadership keeps telling me it's because I'm white and don't understand expressions of other cultures. "Bullshit," the therapist tells me. "I might be from Atlanta, but I'm just as Black as they are. That's bullshit." I tell her I know, but I honestly don't know what to do about it right now, and I think I'm just going to get through the conference. "That's fair," she says, but she insists on getting my number so we can talk after it's over.

The event is supposed to end at 3pm. By 3pm we still have seven speakers to go because of the ongoing schedule changes, which have grown increasingly chaotic: some speakers are somehow giving two presentations, others are running for two hours instead of their allotted forty-five minutes, with Moudou preventing me from cutting anyone off.

My volunteer team needs to leave as it turns to 6pm and people are still talking. With four speakers left, Moudou abruptly cuts one off and announces this will be the last speaker, meaning several people who'd flown in specifically to present never get the chance. I feel devastated on their behalf. But he isn't finished. He then announces that someone has 2-gram psilocybin chocolates available for $30 donations.

I go pale. This is something the entire leadership team and I had specifically discussed at length. Not only had I raised concerns about it directly, but sponsors had explicitly asked whether any federally illegal substances would be present or sold at the event. Despite Moudou's private desire to sell product, the whole committee had agreed, in writing, on the tickets, on our FAQ pages, in our sponsorship agreements, and in our written agendas, that there would be no substances at the conference, because none of us were willing to carry that level of personal liability. And now, out of the blue, he's decided to sell mushroom chocolates anyway: a serious breach of everything we'd agreed to.

I grab a volunteer and ask them to come with me as a witness. I find Moudou. "What is going on, we talked about this, we agreed there would be no substances." Before I can finish, he cuts me off, gets in my face for what is now at least the third time there's been physical intimidation, and says, "Listen, boy - this is my event, this is my church, and we'll do what I say." He storms off. I turn to the volunteer: "Did you catch that?" "Loud and clear," they say.

As the last speaker wraps up, we wait for Moudou to come back and close the event. He's gone. He's left the venue entirely and is nowhere to be found. Mama Ayana steps up and stumbles through a hurried, improvised closing ritual, since she also never got the chance to give her own presentation.

By 8pm, five hours after the event was supposed to end, I'm still working the room, thanking vendors and speakers, helping haul out cases of merchandise. Ayana leaves. For a while it's just me, and I start to hyperventilate as the stress of the last four days finally crashes down. I pack up all the tech, store it in the building, photograph everything, and send documentation to the leadership team. Then I do what I've been doing since I was a kid in a fundamentalist Baptist church: I start stacking chairs.

I was sitting in a church chair the very first time I came to the Society, and there's something fitting about stacking them now. I stack them eight high, wheel them out on a dolly, and cry, chair by chair. I pause and put a Trevor Hall song on repeat on the sound system from Guitar Center that had messed up our video audio all weekend, and I stack and cry to it, over and over.

Once the chairs are gone, I cut the music, grab a dust mop, and start in the back left corner of the room, walking and breathing the way I was taught in the Zen temple I once lived in. Step and breath, step and breath, and whenever I start thinking too hard again, I go back to the corner and start over.

What should take five minutes takes nearly an hour. It's 1am Monday morning when the door opens and Moudou walks in, clearly intoxicated, with his wife and a few others in tow. I walk out to greet him; he's slurring his words and stumbling, though I don't smell alcohol on his breath. I ignore him and go straight to his wife, look her in the eyes, and say, "I'm so sorry you have to deal with this man," handing her his keys, which I'd found while cleaning up. She bows her head wordless. I go back to sweeping while Moudou rambles nonsense nearby.

As I finish, Moudou suddenly starts talking more coherently, to one of the regulars he walked in with. Intoxicated, he admits he's scared, that he wasn't ready for any of this. He saw Baba Kalindi as the second father and as his “commander”, & he wasn't ready for Kalindi to die. That when Kalindi died, part of him died with him. That he felt forced into a leadership role he wasn't ready for, terrified he'd waste Kalindi's legacy.

It suddenly makes a kind of sense, and I finish the floor. On my way out, I stop at a small altar set up in an alcove near the kitchen, in Kalindi's honor. I never met the man, though I'd spoken to dozens of people whose lives he'd changed. I refill the water in the flower vase and leave around 2am, slamming the door hard behind me.

That unguarded confession is the moment I keep returning to when I ask myself why all of this happened. That admission of fear, of feeling abandoned, of being afraid to let down a father figure, is, I think, where so much of this dysfunction comes from.

I get home at 2:10am and sit in my driveway dry-heaving for twenty minutes before going to bed, leaving all my equipment sitting in my car overnight, probably not the smartest choice given the neighborhood. I sleep for nearly twenty-six hours straight.

The Aftermath

Processing the Wreckage - Nov 4th, 2024

When I wake and unload my car, I'm in a kind of shock. Over four days I've seen the worst in people I thought were my chosen family, and what I'd hoped would be a real shift in both my career and my social life. I don't have a framework for processing what just happened, and I recognize the feeling: it's close to what I felt being expelled from my childhood church, where I'd been on staff in a pastoral role, for coming out as queer. The world feels inverted, my connection to other people feels fractured. These are feelings I know well from the psychedelic world, but in the past I had a community to process and integrate them with. Now that community is the very source of the confusion.

I collect what turns out to be nearly a terabyte of media from the four cameras and several audio devices we used, and start uploading it to a Google Drive folder provided by David at the Church of Ambrosia. My home internet connection would take over a week to get it all up, so I grab my scooter and ride around downtown Detroit looking for a coffee shop or coworking space with fiber internet, without success. I end up back at my own office, an old converted rectory, setting up an upload station, and eventually get everything sent to the editing team the Church of Ambrosia had lined up.

I’d gone quite after the conference as I didn’t even know what to say or who to say it to. Moudou had texted me a few times in the preceding days with logistics questions, including about equipment I'd left at the venue which I answered.

Can we resolve this directly? - Nov 20, 2024

After two weeks I asked for a meeting & he dodged - I Insisted & we agree to meet Nov 20, 2024 from 5 to 7pm at Per Ankh. I'm nervous walking in, since I haven't seen him since the night he was screaming at me, the last time visibly intoxicated.

The place is a mess, random people smoking weed and tobacco strong enough to make me cough, new furniture I don't recognize, a nature documentary about African predators playing on the TV.

He's busy talking to other people, and it's forty-five minutes before we actually sit down. I hand him a printed copy of the expenses, both media and facilities, and we go over them. He says he's got it, it'll be a few days. I consider raising the broader pattern of abuse and conflict from the conference, how much I'd looked up to him as a father figure the way he looked up to Kalindi, how hurt and lost I feel. The few times I try, he denies everything happened. I'm in his building, in the middle of the neighborhood, after dark, and I give up and drive home feeling more lost than ever.

Would a Mentor Help - Nov 22, 2024

The Society and Per Ankh had a large, overlapping membership, and one man in his mid-fifties stood out to me as wise and level-headed. When the church launch was underway, I'd asked him directly to act as a mentor, and he agreed. He was there every day of the conference, an enormous help with electrical problems, and even brought in a batch of ghost pipe tincture to help calm everyone's nerves. I've gone back and forth about naming him publicly and decided against it, since I believe it could affect his career, and while I ended up deeply hurt by him, I don't think it was intentional.

We meet Nov 22, 2024 from 12 to 2pm at a Mediterranean place in Farmington Hills. I bring a written agenda covering every issue I'm facing and ask for advice on how to process what happened and how to actually get reimbursed. His advice comes down to two things: what's done is done, there's no way to undo the harm, so let it go; and don't raise the reimbursement issue directly, come at it indirectly if I actually want to get paid. I find both pieces of advice deeply unhelpful.

I later learn he had no real intention of helping me, and that he characterized my request as an attempt to "recruit him as a white man to cause a race issue" within the Society, a characterization that was later repeated at a public leadership meeting, despite our conversation supposedly being confidential. I haven't spoken to him since.

Surely The Leadership Team can Solve This - December 3rd, 2024

After the mentor meeting goes nowhere, I escalate to the entire leadership team by email and text, starting with a written Conflict Resolution Outline. Since I'm already losing trust in the group, I track who actually opens the attachment: only one person does, though everyone later claims they'd read it. I follow up by text with people who used to be close friends, chosen family, expecting this to be straightforward since they'd all been part of nearly every meeting and conversation that led up to this. No one disputes that I'm owed the money. But no one engages with the issue either; instead I get accused of racism for even bringing it up. When I provide the evidence in writing, I get silence.

I’m intentionally choosing not to name the individuals on the leadership team or screenshot our conversation (though you can find more of this in the publicly available court fillings) because I want to protect their privacy. While I’ve lost all respect for each person, I don’t believe any of them—other than Moudou—intentionally wanted to see anyone harmed. I think most fell into a few groups: useful idiots; other white people who were afraid of being called racist; and people who were having sexual interactions with Moudou and other members of the society, and were therefore in a compromised position.

I will include on screenshot from the leadership team from myself which I think summarizes how I approached the issue again & again.

The Personal Attacks Start - Mid December 2024

By mid-December 2024, Moudou had started sending me aggressive, threatening text messages filled with personal attacks. At times, he even said he was proud of my family for disowning me as a queer person because I was clearly a coward. He also started refusing to reimburse me, despite the funds we had raised.

I’d stopped attending Society meetings & I couldn’t make sense why this was falling apart. I had dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s. There was clear documentation of the expenses, with attached receipts, and a clear record of the sponsorship dollars that came through the website. We had a written agreement that was shared publicly, and I think that’s exactly why Moudou was becoming aggressive.

There’s a recurring pattern with Moudou that I had seen over nearly two years of working with him which payed out with lots of other people. He would agree to something with me or others and then not follow through. When he didn’t follow through, he would blame it on a miscommunication. But most of the time, there was no room for that excuse—for example, when we would schedule Society meetings months in advance, always for the fourth Saturday of the month. These events would be promoted on the website, in the email newsletter, and on social media for months. Then, when the day came, Moudou would claim I’d gone rogue and scheduled an event without telling him, to make him look bad.

Mama Ayana asks for time. - February 2025

Throughout this entire conflict, Mama Ayana was functionally silent, allowing Moudou and me to fight it out. Later I learned that Moudou had also become increasingly aggressive toward her, and that she was dealing with her own reimbursement and financial stability issues caused by Moudou’s takeover of the Society and the Per Ankh building—both of which Mama Ayana had helped fund.

As Society president and a key figure throughout, I kept her informed as things unfolded, without expecting direct action from her, until I finally told her I planned to file legal paperwork because I’d been unable to resolve this any other way. She asked for more time, and that stretched all the way to August 16, 2025.

I have since leaned she’d met with the wider leadership team at Congregation (the coffee shop that had become our haunt). When she raised the issues I’d brought forward and asked that I be given a chance to tell my side, Moudou stood up in the middle of the coffee shop and yelled across the table that she was “a plantation mama for siding with a white boy.”

Not long after, she separated entirely from the organization, and I later helped her retrieve her personal belongings from Per Ankh and relocate them to her own storefront, the Crow's Nest. While I wasn’t personally at the meeting so I can’t confirm this happened the story was echoed by several others.

Since then, Mama Ayana has become a genuine friend—someone I continue to trust. I’ve learned she herself fronted several thousand dollars to open Per Ankh, on the understanding that she’d be able to run her own business and nonprofit out of the space—an arrangement Moudou later denied, forcing her out and keeping her money. Despite my encouragement, she has chosen not to pursue her own legal claim, citing how little success I’ve had collecting on mine.

Pay Up or Collections - May 9th, 2025

At the start of May, I had a meeting with my accountant about how bad my financial situation had gotten. I’d gone all-in on the Society, and not only did it result in no professional connections, it also left me over seven thousand dollars out of pocket—with no sign of being reimbursed. Moudou’s trash-talking of me also led to a few gigs I was bidding on getting canceled. Here is a three-part conversation that became the turning point in this process.

Note: I mention four thousand dollars because I believed that was all we had left. Later court documents showed there was still the original $15K+ that had been raised.

Escalation to The Michigan Psychedelic Society - Sept 18, 2025.

I email the statewide organization asking for a mediated conversation & notifying them unsafe condition at Per Ankh several times durning this process. Julie, the founder and director, had been at the conference and witnessed many of the events I've described, and I'm hoping a level-headed outsider can bring some rationality back into the process. I hear back only to learn they' re unwilling to support any mediation. After that door closes, I shut down on the issue entirely. Everyone I once knew and trusted has, without ever really talking to me, seemingly chosen to side with the person refusing to reimburse me.

What Was Happening at Per Ankh in the Meantime

These sessions happened inside a converted landscaping building without a fire alarm system, without private space, without any mental health professional present, often with a single person overseeing as many as fifteen participants at once. "Set" amounted to a random Spotify playlist, gas-station incense, and YouTube visuals playing on a flat-screen TV. People sat on folding chairs or secondhand couches on a scrap of carpet, in a building with no working heat or air conditioning, in a post-industrial neighborhood with collapsing buildings nearby, meaning that even if someone needed help, there wasn't really anyone around. Even Detroit police were slow to respond to calls from that address.

Predictably, this produced a string of bad outcomes, including at least two suicide attempts that I'm personally aware of, and I'd be shocked if there weren't more. One involved someone I knew personally from my time with the Society; for their own protection, I won't share their name here. The second involved someone new to psychedelics entirely, relayed to me by more than one source. By the time I heard about these, I was no longer part of the Society and had no standing to intervene directly, but I wrote up what I knew and emailed the Michigan Psychedelic Society asking for peer support, an investigation, or any kind of intervention. I never received a response.

I’ll See You In Court Small Claims Court - January 21st 2026

With every channel of communication and conflict resolution exhausted, I do the thing I'd been trying so hard to avoid because I don’t want to repeat the age old story of a white man bringing a black man to court. I know the court system is broken which is why I tried so hard to avoid it. On January 21st 2026 I file two small claims against the organizations. As I’m standing under the fluorescent lights signing the papers on the second floor of the 26th district court, I feel utterly confused. How did I go from finding a new family to filing legal claims? What had I done wrong, and why was this happening again?

I’m dreading the process of preparing the evidence for the cases. As a former policy debate student who did Moot Court and Mock Trial camps for fun in the summer, I know how to do this—but I also know I’ve trauma-blocked much of the past.

As I go through the media and messages from the entire situation—screenshotting and uploading documents—I have to stop and cry, hyperventilate, and have full-on panic attacks as I re-engage with all of this trauma. It’s almost harder to relive the trauma than it was to go through it in the first place dispute using every coping tool I have it’s a rough few weeks.

When I find particularly nasty moments, I share them with Mama Ayana during our occasional conversations over tea, and one phrase she shared helped me find meaning in the storm: “This is what happens when you confront a narcissist,” she would say.

The Courtroom - March 25th, 2026

I show up at the 36th District Court on March 25th 2026 for hearings scheduled back to back at 10:30am, presided over by a Black woman magistrate. Moudou arrives with Lucia Pavone and Per Ankh's newly appointed ethics director to defend the case. They bring no evidence of any kind, submitted ahead of time or presented in the room.

The first case is called. I present my case with the evidence I'd outlined and an opening statement. We go back and forth; Moudou calls two witnesses, both of whom accuse me of being a racist, delusional white man, but neither presents any actual evidence. I win the first case in 10 minutes.

Before the second case begins, the magistrate remarks, "While you might have won that case, I don't think you'll like this next outcome," which signals to me that she's already made up her mind, not exactly what I'd hope for from a magistrate, though given that I'm a white male-presenting person suing a Black man in the city of Detroit, in front of a Black female judge, I understand how it might look.

I present the second case with the same evidence. Back and forth again, and in the end the judge weighs my word and Mama Ayana's corroboration that we did raise the funds against Moudou's word and his three witnesses' claim that we hadn't raised any money, and splits the difference: I'm awarded 50% of the claim. It still means I'm walking away from the project at a financial loss overall, but it's something.

You can see the court filing at the 36th District Court Website:

• The Detroit Psychedelic Society Case is: 26240068
• The Per Ankh House of Life case is: 26240067

We walk out of the courtroom, and the bailiff follows to give us each a copy of the paperwork. The moment Moudou reaches Lucia and the ethics director, the story starts changing, entirely different from what had just happened in a room where everything is part of the public record. He goes on and on about how terrible a person I am & about how I’m lying & manipulating the Magistrate.

What stands out most to me, looking back, is that I walked into that courtroom with more than 50 pages of evidence: screenshots of conversations, emails accepting proposals, a written agreement outlining terms that had been formally accepted. Moudou and his team walked in with none of that, and spent their entire time attacking me personally instead.

I walk down the street to SPRKBOX and order a coffee and sit in the belchony just shaking with anger, fear, rage, lost and so many other emotions.

Collecting the Funds - August 2026

As I write this, it's been months since I won those cases, and I haven't seen a cent of the awarded funds. I've heard secondhand from people still in the Society that Moudou has vowed to dissolve both nonprofits, the church's and the Society's, before he'll pay me anything. He may not have a choice: I've now requested, and been granted, a property seizure request, currently being executed by a court officer.

Where I Find Myself as we end 2026

It's been two years since this began, and I haven't fully recovered my footing. My trust in people has taken a real hit, I'm in a difficult financial position, and my standing in the Metro Detroit psychedelic community has imploded.

I went in hoping for a genuine leap forward, personally and professionally, I invested hunders of hours and thousands of dollars & came out in debt and more isolated than before. I've spent a lot of sleepless nights trying to locate the lesson in this. What I can say honestly is that I acted in good faith throughout, based on the information I had at the time, and that I've learned to sit with pain and confusion without flinching from it. I still want to be part of the broader psychedelic community, but I haven’t yet found a meaningful way to participate.

Writing this article has been very challenging, but it’s also giving me a clear structure for what happened, which is allowing processing and integration to take place. I trust that I’ll compost this experience and, one day, be thankful it happened.

What We Can Learn

1) A Note on My Own Perspective

I want to be upfront about the limits of this account. I have mixed motives in writing it, and memory, especially of something this stressful, reshapes itself every time it's recalled. I'm not claiming this is a courtroom-grade, universally agreed record of exactly what everyone did, said, and intended. I know I remember imperfectly.

This isn't written to launch a pile-on, and it's not really an attempt to declare anyone a villain, though I think that possibility is worth taking seriously. It's meant as a public examination of where I believe I acted skillfully in this cross-cultural relationship, and where I didn't. I'm choosing to make it public rather than private because I tried the private route exhaustively first, and because I believe the underlying pattern, a breakdown in cross-cultural trust and communication, shows up often enough elsewhere in this community that it's worth examining openly.

Part of this conflict, I think, comes down to two very different backgrounds meeting head-on: I'm a non-binary, autistic person raised in a fundamentalist Christian military family; Moudou, from our conversations, identifies as a heterosexual Black man from Detroit with decades more life experience than I have. That collision, and the way it echoes similar breakdowns I've seen elsewhere in this world, is a big part of why I think this is worth discussing publicly rather than letting it stay private.

2) This is about skillful vs. unskillful choices—not who’s right or wrong.

One of the many lessons that psychedelics has taught me, viscerally, is that reality is hard to pin down, and it often depends on your perspective. As I’ve processed these experiences, I’ve become less interested in who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m slightly more interested in who acted ethically or unethically, but I’m also aware that those ethics aren’t necessarily shared across different cultural backgrounds. What I’ve found most helpful is understanding what were skillful and unskillful choices in the middle of the mess.

A) “Professionalism” As the Moral Standard

I come from the business world. I have a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a focus on entrepreneurship, and I’ve been working in predominantly white business culture since I was 15, having worked with 2,100+ businesses. I brought that same mindset—along with its communication style and ethical norms—into my work with the Detroit Psychedelic Society and Per Ankh House of Life, and that was unskillful in two ways.

First, I projected the unquestionable “rightness” of those norms onto Moudou and the community, which clearly had different ways of doing business. Because these are the dominant social norms, I think Moudou & Co. felt pressure to act in ways that weren’t natural to them.

Second, I’ve learned through traveling abroad that there are many different ways of doing business, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. I didn’t create space for Moudou’s way of doing business.

Learning: Bring a spirit of curiosity—not assumption—to the relationship, and be prepared to have direct conversations about subtle expectations, including what each person assumes is ethical, instead of presuming you’re correct.

Learning: Make sure the relationship dynamic can support direct conversation about cultural differences without breaking. If it can’t, don’t move forward.

B) Respond to the Pattern, Not the Words

None of the issues that led to the court cases were new; they had shown up before. I watched problems compound over time, and instead of checking in and admitting we weren’t aligned, I kept pushing for alignment. For example, I knew Moudou didn’t stick to any plan we made—no matter how well documented—yet I was still somehow shocked when he didn’t follow through on reimbursing me. I could have been more skillful by acknowledging the pattern I was seeing, rather than projecting the version of reality I wanted to be true.

Learning: Write down the patterns you’re seeing, and respond to that information—not just the words someone else has written.

C) I Overcommitted & Needed The Outcome

While it’s true that I was operating from a highly compromised personal position—and was actively encouraged to invest in this project with the understanding it would lead to professional and personal success—it’s also true that, on some level, I knew I was vulnerable. I chose to believe someone had the solution to my pain instead of seeing the full reality in front of me.

When I saw Moudou dodge responsibility—blaming miscommunication instead of locking in—I responded by thinking I just needed to tighten up my communication, rather than recognizing the pattern. This happened again and again, and each time I told myself I just needed to communicate better instead of seeing the pattern for what it was likely motivated my need for this to work out.

One of the first rules of negotiation is that you can’t be so emotionally invested in an outcome that you won’t walk away if it’s a bad deal. I broke that rule. It would have been more skillful to walk away when I saw things going wrong, instead of overlooking multiple red flags.

Learning: Be willing to walk away.

D) Navigating Racial Tensions within Psychedelic Space

This situation took place in the City of Detroit, specifically within the context of a historically Black community (the Detroit Psychedelic Society), with people from many different racial backgrounds. In practice, the group often fell along the lines of Black and “everyone else.”

Many of the Black members in this situation felt protective of their community and didn’t want whiteness to become the default social norm. That sometimes led to accusations of racism when the underlying issue was actually a difference in unspoken communication norms, ethical norms, or cultural expectations. Using racism as shorthand for “I disagree” isn’t helpful.

Many of the white members (shorthand for not Black in this context) were highly aware of the racial power dynamics and were terrified of being portrayed as racist. That fear made some people hesitate to challenge unethical behavior. In effect, the threat of an accusation became a trump card that couldn’t be navigated.

Much of the funding for minority-run psychedelic spaces often comes from white funding sources. Some of these funders have an unstated expectation that, by funding these minority spaces, they are effectively buying social credit—or protection from public accusations of racial prejudice.

These and other racial tensions were part of nearly every interaction, but they were rarely named or discussed collectively because doing so made everyone uncomfortable.

Learning: Be willing and able to talk about racial tensions. If you’re not able to do that, be willing to walk away.

E) You Can’t Want It More Than the Other Guy

This is a lesson I keep relearning. During my work with the Detroit Psychedelic Society, I created structures for more success than the rest of the leadership team was interested in. Specifically, I pushed for a calendar of events planned a few months out, along with stable, recurring updates to our website and communication channels. While this did lead to more consistent meetings and higher attendance, it also became a point of friction that eventually contributed to the breakdown.

I’ve experienced and witnessed this dynamic again and again in cross-cultural communication: one group sees what something “could be” and pushes for growth, while another is content with a lower level of engagement and wants “chill vibes.” The tension between those two worlds often causes a rupture.

Learning: Don’t push others unless you have their consent. If you push, don’t be surprised when you experience resistance.

F) There Needs to Be a Neutral Third Party

During this conflict, my repeated request was to have a mediated conversation with a neutral third party who could help us overcome our communication challenges and reach a reasonable outcome. I requested this help from several sources, and no one was willing or able to provide it.

In this specific situation, it likely wouldn’t have helped anyway, because Moudou was so resistant to having a conversation that he would accuse Ayana of being a “Plantation Mama” for merely suggesting I be given the opportunity to speak to the leadership team again. Still, having a person or organization to support the process of navigating inevitable challenges is a critical part of future projects I’m part of.

Learning: Establish a conflict resolution process—including a neutral third party to help bridge communication challenges—before you launch the project.

3) A Breakdown in Cross-Cultural Trust

Whatever else this shows, it's a case study in cross-cultural communication breaking down. Spending time processing this with Mama Ayana and others, I've come to understand that "I accept," as a commitment, can mean genuinely different things to different people. I walked in believing a written agreement would settle that ambiguity. I'm not sure it can be fully settled, but I've come away with a much more textured understanding of the complexity involved, and I see the same pattern echoed elsewhere in the psychedelic community, not just between mainstream medicalization efforts and minority-led traditions, but in my experience with communities in Latin America and Indigenous Australia as well.

4) Can the Psychedelic Community Self-Police, or Does It Need Medicalization?

Legalization and decriminalization efforts broadly fall into two camps: pharmaceutical-style medicalization, with professional oversight but real cost and access barriers, versus a cannabis-style open market for adults, which relies on the community's professionals to self-police. What my experience shows, pretty definitively, is that the current psychedelic community, at least the segment I was part of, could not self-manage even in the face of attempted suicides and well-documented financial mismanagement. Whistleblowers raised alarms; the responsible statewide organization not only failed to take basic corrective action, but invited the accused parties to co-sign public letters addressing the very accusations against them.

5) An Open Call for Mediation

Since this conflict began, I've followed the escalation process I was taught, direct conversation first, then a trusted third party, then the leadership team, then the wider community, at every step meeting resistance rather than engagement. I've watched this same pattern of ego, favoritism, and unresolved conflict damage relationships across the psychedelic community more broadly: speakers refusing to share space, disputes over reimbursement curdling into years-long grudges. I don't want to add to that cycle.

So this remains an open, standing offer: I'm willing to have a mediated conversation with a mutually agreed, neutral third party, or, in the model I've used in queer community conflict practice, a fishbowl-style conflict conversation, designed not necessarily to resolve the dispute but to model and de-stigmatize conflict itself. That offer stands.

FAQ

Why share this publicly rather than resolve it privately?

Given the legal nature of the psychedelic world—and the presumed confidentiality many of my business clients expect—I struggled with how public to be about this.

You’ll notice I first tried to resolve this issue with Moudou one-on-one. When that didn’t work, I brought in a trusted third party (my mentor). When that failed, I escalated to the entire leadership team. And when that became ineffective, I waited six months and then requested help from the Michigan Psychedelic Society, which was also fruitless.

I believe in a world where we can solve our problems without the government, but in this case every layer of support let me down. Now that there have been two court cases, all of the evidence is part of the public record, so I’m not revealing anything in this blog that isn’t already public information.

I take confidentiality and safety for individuals and organizations I work with ridiculously seriously. But once it’s a legal case, that protection is gone.

Is Moudou aka Justin Petty a Bad Person?

Despite everything, I keep coming back to what he said, unguarded, the night the conference ended: that he felt trapped, unprepared, and afraid of failing the memory of his mentor his commander in his words. I believe he's done genuinely harmful and unethical things, to me and to others, but I don't believe it comes from malice. I think it comes from a lack of support, a man performing more capability than he has, and an ego that can't share the spotlight of Baba Kalindi's legacy.

Is the Detroit Psychedelic Society Safe?

No. Since the split, the Society has launched a paid membership program promising services it doesn't deliver. Mama Ayana has formally separated from the organization. The only person still connected to it with ties to Baba Kalindi is Moudou, who appears, from where I sit, to be in a tailspin.

Is Per Ankh House of Life Safe?

No. That's based on my own direct experience, the documented suicide attempts, and an ongoing investigation by Detroit's ombudsman office. A lot of people, desperate for access to community and psychedelic experience, have turned to this space without any of the safety or spiritual grounding it claims to offer.

Is the Michigan Psychedelic Society at fault in this situation?

I have limited experience working with the Michigan Psychedelic Society, and I have not been part of any leadership conversations, so I can’t speak to its legitimacy. I can, however, make a few observations based on what happened in this situation.

The Michigan Psychedelic Society publicly advocates for the decriminalization of entheogenic substances, arguing that the community can self-police and does not need government oversight. However, when presented with an opportunity to help facilitate conflict resolution and potentially prevent two court cases, it chose not to support mediation in any way, or to refer me to other resources.

When the Society was notified of multiple suicide attempts at Per Ankh House of Life, it took no action—despite hosting events in collaboration with that organization and having Moudou as an active board member. That seems like an unacceptable response from an organization that publicly advocates for self-governance.

Furthermore, the Michigan Psychedelic Society continued to host events in partnership with Per Ankh House of Life after this situation was brought to its attention, which suggests it does not condemn the church’s actions—despite two court cases.

Lastly, during the period this situation played out, the Michigan Psychedelic Society was accused of its own financial fraud. In its public letter addressing those allegations, it chose to include Moudou as one of the three co-signers explaining why there was no fraud. This was a questionable choice, given that it was aware he had been accused of his own financial misconduct, even if there was not yet a court judgment at the time.

It’s important to note that the Michigan Psychedelic Society is a small organization with limited budget and staff time, and it is under pressure not to appear racially prejudiced. While I can understand the constraints on its resources, the compounding choices the Society made are questionable.

What has the impact on Spencer been?

I define trauma as a situation that floods the nervous system to the point it can’t handle reality, and instead stores that experience for future processing. My experiences with Moudou, the Detroit Psychedelic Society, and the Per Ankh House of Life have been deeply traumatizing—not just one moment, but dozens, many of which I had blocked from my memory until I had to go back and read what happened for the court cases.

Beyond the financial hit—which I still haven’t recovered a penny from—I’d bet heavily on my future with the society, professionally and personally. Moudou reinforced that bet again and again, leading me to believe I had a solid expectation of professional connection for future employment or contract work non of which have happened & I’ve heard I’m being activity trashed talked in Psychedelic space.

I’d also reopened my heart to the people & members of the community through this process & in that raw state of just starting to trust people again I learned that it wasn’t safe. Not just with Moudou but with the entire leadership team. I’m still having a hard time trusting people.

My ability to trust that I have agency in this work has been really shaken. Despite “doing everything right” from a paperwork and process perspective, I’m still walking away from this project with hundreds of hours of work and several thousand dollars lost. It’s been hard to convince myself to move forward in life when I’ve learned that even doing things correctly can still result in significant failure and pain.

I still hold out hope that one day I’ll look back on this experience and see how it was necessary—how it brought me to a life with connection and enough resources—but I’m not there yet.

Did the wider community ever ask for my perspective, or just take sides?

This might be what stings the most. I built what I thought were deep, meaningful relationships with many members of the society. We’d cried together, walked through life together, logged dozens of hours working on projects, and shared countless meals. In meetings, we shared our pasts—often full of trauma—and supported each other through it. There were chemically assisted experiences that led to deep relationship-building.

As this story unfolded, I didn’t have a single member text or call to ask for my side of the story, or even to ask what was happening. No one checked in on me or reached out in any way with the exception of the therapist on the media team who forced me to the abuse that was happening. Even when Moudou would actively berate me in front of the society at monthly meetings—both in front of me and behind my back—there wasn’t any engagement from anyone.

The humans I thought were my chosen family abandoned me fully , despite all I had done to help build our community. I still don’t know how to hold this part of the pain.

What is your evidence for these claims?

As I’ve processed this trauma, it’s been important to go back and reconstruct what happened using emails, text messages, photos, and other media, since I trauma-blocked much of this experience. Many of these messages and images have become part of this blog, and more are included in the evidence submitted to the court. Because these court records are part of the public record, I’ve linked them in this Google Drive folder for your review, along with additional documentation.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uickvxzk2NgDP6pQoDjoU08d-Tb96uBT?usp=sharing

What happened to the conference media?

Nearly a terabyte of 4K video and audio sits in a Google Drive maintained by the Church of Ambrosia, with a backup on a hard drive in my possession. Roughly 80% of the talks are intact despite some audio issues caused by the last-minute sound system conflict. My own amateur attempts to edit it in Premiere Pro haven't gone well; I hope to eventually learn the skills or find the resources to finish the job properly.

What Does Mama Ayana say about this?

This issue was mostly kept private until the Women in Entheogens conference, Heal a Woman, Heal a Nation, in July 2026, as Mama Ayana didn’t want to distract from the work of building community. Since the completion of the conference, she has been much more public about the issue, and I would point the reader to her Facebook page for more insight.

In addition, Mama Ayana submitted two written letters to the court explaining the facts of the situation from her perspective. These are part of the public record and are linked in the attached Google Drive folder as part of the evidence packets.