Federal appeals court says Utah can proceed with a psilocybin prosecution tied to a psychedelic church

What happened?

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit filed a published opinion on October 5, 2026 in No. 25-4115, a civil-rights case brought by Singularism and others against Utah County and others. It was an appeal from the federal district court in Utah (No. 2:24-CV-00887).¹

The background: after local authorities seized the group's psilocybin and records in 2024, the federal district court ordered the seized items returned under Utah's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.³ By August 2025 it had also denied the officials' motion to dismiss and halted the state's criminal prosecution of a member of the church.² We don't name the person charged.

The three-judge appeals panel reversed on the main points:¹

• The district court should have abstained under the Younger doctrine, which keeps federal courts from interfering with pending state criminal cases. The exceptions for bad faith and irreparable injury were not met, so the injunction against the state prosecution must be vacated.
• On the First Amendment claim, the law's allowance for qualifying health care systems to use psilocybin does not show that Utah treats comparable secular use more favorably than religious use, because supervised medical use comes with safeguards that religious use lacks. The church did not dispute that the law is neutral, and a neutral law that applies generally needs only a rational basis, the most deferential standard of review.
• The court dismissed the appeal on two other questions, whether the law has individualized exemptions and a Fourth Amendment claim, finding it lacked jurisdiction to decide them now. The individualized-exemptions question goes back to the district court to decide first.

The opinion did not decide the church's claims under Utah's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In a footnote it noted that the state had not appealed the district court's separate preliminary injunction under that act, which required return of the seized items and barred interference with the group's religious use of psilocybin, and it expressed no opinion on that injunction.¹

Why does it matter if you're looking for a mushroom dispensary?

Some storefronts and groups present psilocybin sales or "sacrament" as protected religious practice. This ruling shows the limits of that argument. Calling a provider a church does not by itself stop a state prosecution, and a federal court generally won't step in while the criminal case runs. Under this ruling, religious-freedom arguments against the prosecution go to the state court hearing the criminal case, not to a federal judge asked to stop it. The unappealed preliminary order about this one group's religious use is not a license for anyone to sell psilocybin.

Regulators elsewhere have been just as skeptical. In September 2025, DC's ABC Board upheld the closure of a storefront presenting as a church, finding it had not shown a sincere religious belief and had no DEA exemption to distribute a Schedule I substance; that order is in the register. Our guide to the legal claims shops make covers the church, gift and "decriminalized" arguments one by one. Utah itself has no psilocybin store or center program; its law lets qualifying health care systems use psilocybin under medical supervision, as the opinion describes,¹ and our guide to licensed psilocybin centers explains what that covers.

What happens next?

The case returns to the federal district court in Utah with instructions to vacate its injunction against the state criminal case, which can then move forward. We found no hearing dates for either as of November 2, 2026. A losing party can ask the full Tenth Circuit to rehear a case or ask the US Supreme Court to review it; we have not confirmed whether either side has done so. We'll update this post when there is a new ruling.