The Albany Gazette - Zide Door Marks 4/20 with Community Offerings and Salute to Psilocybin History

OAKLAND, CA / ACCESS Newswire / April 17, 2026 / Most people recognize 4/20 as a day on the calendar tied to cannabis culture. Many in psychedelic culture also recognize 4/19 as Bicycle Day, the anniversary of Albert Hofmann's first intentional LSD experience.

But far fewer know that April 20 is also the anniversary of the Marsh Chapel Experiment, the landmark 1962 Good Friday psilocybin study at Boston University that helped establish the modern connection between psychedelics, mystical experience, and formal religious inquiry.

ForZide Door and the Church of Ambrosia, that history matters. It reminds people that these sacraments are not merely part of modern culture. They are inherent to an ancient spiritual search for direct experience, meaning, and communion with the divine.

To honor that history, Zide Door is marking the 4/20 event with special offerings for members starting April 17 through April 20. To celebrate the four-day period, the church will grant free memberships to new members and allow free renewals to current church members.

Additionally, to mark the church's annual celebration on Monday, April 20, Zide Door will provide free sacraments to the first 420 current members who enter the church.

For Church Pastor Dave Hodges, founder of the Church of Ambrosia, the event is more than a celebration. "It is a wonderful opportunity to educate members and the broader public about the often-overlooked spiritual and historical significance of 4/20," he said.

The foundation of this historical thread runs directly through the Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted on April 20, 1962, during a Good Friday service led by the Rev. Howard Thurman, the influential theologian, Boston University chaplain, and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.

The experiment, designed by Walter N. Pahnke, a Harvard Divinity School graduate student working under Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, explored whether psilocybin administered in a sacred setting could evoke genuine mystical experience. In later years, the study became recognized as one of the most important milestones in modern psychedelic history, influencing the creation of tools used today to measure and assess the results of psychedelic research.

This year, the Church of Ambrosia has made that history easier for the public to access. The church has digitized and published Pahnke's 1963 Harvard dissertation, Drugs and Mysticism, available via the link, https://ambrosia.church/history/good-friday-experiment/, along with Rick Doblin's 1991 follow-up study at https://ambrosia.church/history/doblin-good-friday-1991/.

Both online works are now substantially easier to read, search, and study, and Pahnke's original dissertation, in particular, is significantly more readable than in its scanned PDF form.

What makes the 4/20 event so powerful and enduring is that it was inspired by far more than mere physical substance. Rather, it is about faith and the determination to approach spiritual experience with seriousness and admiration.

Pahnke worked to define mystical experience in terms that could be studied, and the experiment brought those questions into a church service with religiously inclined participants. That combination is one reason the study still carries power and substance, more than 60 years later.

As discussed in Pastor Hodges' Ambrosia Podcast with Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), decades after the Marsh Chapel Experiment, the participants who received Psilocybin continue to regard the experience as spiritually authentic and deeply meaningful.

Doblin's long-term follow-up showed that the experiment's effects were not merely momentary or theatrical. For many of the men involved, the experience remained vivid and spiritually significant for years.

By hosting both the original dissertation and the follow-up in a readable web form, the church is helping preserve a key part of psychedelic religious history while making it easier for researchers, journalists, members, and the broader public to engage directly with the source material.

For Zide Door, the history is not abstract. It speaks directly to the church's understanding of sacrament, spiritual freedom, and religious community. The 4/20 observance is meant to celebrate the church's members and to preserve the knowledge that psychedelic sacrament has a profound religious history that goes hand-in-hand with its enduring cultural significance.

"For our church, 4/20 is not just cultural, it is spiritual," said Pastor Hodges. "It is a day to honor sacrament, community, and the long history of people seeking direct experience of the divine."

Zide Door is based in Oakland and serves as a community gathering space for members of the Church of Ambrosia, where they can receive the sacrament in a religious context. The church continues to focus its work on religious freedom, community, and the sincere spiritual use of sacrament.

Contact:

Loretta Kalb
PRxDigital.com
Email [email protected]
Text: 916 835-4043

Sources and further reading

Church of Ambrosia, The Good Friday Experiment (Pahnke, 1963)
https://ambrosia.church/history/good-friday-experiment/

Church of Ambrosia, Doblin: Good Friday Experiment Follow-Up (1991)
https://ambrosia.church/history/doblin-good-friday-1991/

MAPS, The Good Friday Experiment Follow-Up
https://maps.org/other-psychedelic-research/external-psilocybin-research/the-good-friday-experiment-follow-up/

MAPS, 1962 Good Friday Experiment (Podcast)
https://maps.org/2010/05/27/1962-good-friday-experiment/

Harvard Divinity School, Psychedelics, Spirituality, and a Culture of Seekership
https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/05/12/psychedelics-spirituality-culture-seekership

SOURCE: Church of Ambrosia

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

(A.Johnson--TAG)