Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church (Orlando, FL)

Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth was founded near Orlando, Florida, in 2015 by Christopher Young, who describes himself as a "medicine man" and runs the retreat with his wife, Verena Young. The church holds weekend ayahuasca retreats -- pairing the DMT-containing Amazonian brew with kambo, a ritual using the poisonous skin secretions of an Amazonian tree frog -- charging several hundred dollars per session; a former board member testified that more than 20,000 people had attended by the mid-2020s. Soul Quest has never held a Drug Enforcement Administration religious exemption for its use of ayahuasca, a Schedule I substance; for years it instead relied on a public claim — never shown in the fetched court records to have been tested on its merits — that using only the ayahuasca vine rather than the leaf placed its practice outside the Controlled Substances Act.

On Easter weekend 2018, 22-year-old Brandon Begley took part in three ayahuasca ceremonies and a kambo ritual within about two days. He began convulsing; staff and a shaman held him down on the ground and gave him "sugar water" rather than calling for help, and roughly three hours passed between the onset of his distress and the 911 call. Begley died from complications of acute hyponatremia, a dangerous drop in blood sodium linked to excessive water intake. The Orange County Sheriff's Office closed its investigation without filing charges. Begley's family sued Soul Quest and Young for wrongful death in 2020; in May 2024 a jury in Orange County's Ninth Judicial Circuit found Soul Quest and Young negligent and ordered them to pay the family $15 million, according to VICE's investigative reporting. Soul Quest and Young then sought Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, which a federal court rejected in July 2024 after finding the church had continued to hold paid retreats and had taken in roughly $7.5 million in revenue between 2022 and mid-2024; a related interlocutory appeal in the case was separately affirmed by Florida's Sixth District Court of Appeal in September 2025, without resolving the underlying merits, and the family's effort to collect the judgment was continuing.

Separately, after Soul Quest applied for a DEA religious exemption in 2017, the agency denied the request in 2021, concluding that granting it would not further the government's compelling interest in preventing diversion and abuse of DMT. Soul Quest's challenge was dismissed by a federal district court in 2022, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the DEA's denial in December 2023 over a dissent from Judge Newsom; Soul Quest continued operating retreats throughout this litigation. A former co-director, Dr. Scott Irwin, testified that Young kept sole control of the church's finances with no outside accounting oversight, and told police in 2017 that Young had physically attacked him; Irwin died in Ecuador in 2024. The case illustrates a pattern documented across unregulated psychedelic retreat networks: unqualified emergency response, opaque internal governance, and a religious-exemption legal posture that has repeatedly failed under judicial scrutiny.