No Shame in the Neoshaman: The Deadly Rise and Fall of a Florida Ayahuasca Church

This long-read investigation is taken from VICE magazine, v29n1: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.

Neoshaman (noun): a New Age ceremony leader, typically Western and urban-dwelling, who appropriates the ancient shamanistic practices and psychedelic substances of indigenous communities, popularizing their use for financial gain via cultic rituals and a guru-like persona.

In 2012, Chris Young was 38 years old and down on his luck, living out of a hostel in Miami, Florida. Born and raised in nearby Louisiana, Young had recently given up his nightclub career as the party-starting ‘DJ NV,’ and the side hustles that saw him organize strippers for big events and earn a conviction for pimping somewhere along the way.

Young would later say in court that he’d grown tired of a lifestyle that, he appeared to admit, was filled with drugs and promiscuity. Around that time, Young—a tempestuous man with a brown goatee and an egg-shaped head—met his future wife Verena, a wealthy German naturopath with blonde hair and a penetrating gaze.

Things moved quickly between Young and Verena. Within a few months, he’d got a passport for the first time and the couple took a trip to Verena’s homeland, where she fell pregnant. They married in 2014. “I was a stay-at-home dad,” he told a civil court in Orange County, Florida, some years later. “In Germany, it’s very cold, it’s very wet, the sun doesn’t come out often. I didn’t know the language, so I got very depressed.”

Young started searching for ways to throw off his Black Dog. That’s when he first heard about ayahuasca, the storied psychedelic potion from the Amazon that contains DMT and conjures startling geometric visions and spiritual awakenings in the minds of its users. Despite effectively being illegal, it is estimated that 1.5 million Americans, roughly 0.5 percent of the population, have consumed the brew. Some commentators speculate that every night of the year, an ayahuasca ceremony is taking place somewhere in the U.S. and celebrity adherents include Will Smith and NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Sludge brown and vomit inducing, ayahuasca has become notorious for “one-shotting” some of those who take it, spurring them to make sudden and drastic changes that throw their lives into chaos. Although scientific studies back up anecdotal reports that it can help combat stubborn mental health conditions, experiences with ayahuasca seem to vary with a wildness that is rare even for psychedelics.

For a plant that generates so much uncertainty, there are two things we know for sure. In September 2014, Chris Young was about to take ayahuasca for the first time, and it was going to change his life forever.

“The organization that Young formed went on to serve ayahuasca to more than 30,000 people. Overall, it facilitated more psychedelic trips than any non-religious entity in U.S. history.”

Young had booked himself onto a retreat in Ibiza with a cultish organization named Ayahuasca International. Its leader, Alverto Varela, later died of brain cancer while under police guard in hospital due to charges relating to unspecified sex crimes. “This guy did not want to be a shaman, he was very open about just wanting to be rich,” an insider once said of Varela, who operated Ayahuasca International on a franchise model. “He would train people very fast. Then they would get an exclusive territory, he would sell them the ayahuasca, and the commissions would be kicked up the pyramid.”

It was in Ibiza that Young first realized there could be big money in ayahuasca. Yet something about the stay must have resonated on a deeper level. While Young was on the White Isle, Verena suffered a second trimester miscarriage. Although he returned to Germany to be at his wife’s side, Young was soon back in Ibiza imbibing ‘the vine of the soul’ with Ayahuasca International, this time plagued by questions. “Why, why, why did this happen?” he wondered aloud during one ceremony. In the throes of grief, he claimed he started having prophetic dreams. “‘You need to go home and open up this beautiful retreat,’” Young said he’d been told by a higher power. “‘It’s your duty.’”

It was a responsibility he carried out well. The organization that Young formed went on to serve ayahuasca to more than 30,000 people. Overall, it facilitated more psychedelic trips than any non-religious entity in U.S. history.

★☆★

In 2015, it was time for Chris and his wife to return to Florida. Verena’s family bought them a four-bedroom suburban home 20 miles from Orlando International Airport and Young followed the steer he said he’d been given in his dreams, partnering with a national spiritual group to establish an ayahuasca center named Oklevueha Native American Church Somaveda of Soul Quest. Just one year on from taking the intense psychedelic for the first time, Young was serving it to fellow Americans seeking relief and transcendence. Shortly after, Verena gave birth to a healthy baby boy. This felt like a good omen to Young, who described the child as a “gift” given to him by ayahuasca. “My god is planet earth,” he told VICE in 2017. “My Jesus, my savior, is ayahuasca.”

While Young has no Native American heritage, teaming up with an organization that presented itself as a branch of the Native American Church had its advantages; the official national council has a legal exemption from the U.S. government to use peyote as a religious sacrament—it wasn’t ayahuasca specifically, but it still offered some semblance of cover.

When, in 2016, the partnership hit the skids (Oklevueha’s members were derided by the official council as “fake Indians” who were only interested in getting high), Young split and set up his own Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth, applying to the Drug Enforcement Agency for an official religious exemption to consume ayahuasca. These choices defined Young’s life for the next eight years, as he blazed a trail of illegal psychedelic entrepreneurialism and flagrant cultural appropriation, openly advertising his services as an ayahuasca-serving neoshaman and raking in millions on a mind-bending quest to live his own American Dream.

In my interviews and conversations with more than two dozen former Soul Quest staff, volunteers, and attendees, a nuanced picture of the retreat center emerges. It seems clear that it genuinely was a place of healing and community for countless people, including well over 1,000 military veterans with PTSD, many of whom turned up desperate and saw ayahuasca as a last chance saloon. “People arrived suicidal and left in tears of joy,” says musician Nathan Fallou, who worked as a facilitator for three years at the height of Soul Quest’s popularity. “I don’t even have the words for what we witnessed on those Sunday mornings. You had dozens of people every weekend literally having their lives saved.” In the process, however, he admits that staff turned a blind eye to “some shady things.” For many, Fallou acknowledges, it was “better to just focus on the positives.”

What seems to unite nearly everyone who went to Soul Quest is an ambivalence towards Young, the church’s patriarch, owner, and main financial beneficiary, who rarely drank ayahuasca himself and did not respond to VICE’s questions in relation to this article. “Everyone looked up at him at first but if you said anything out of line, the whole world would come down,” says Sophie,* a former Soul Quest insider who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He’s got that belligerent, Machiavellian streak: That’s Chris.”

☆★☆

In the early years, Soul Quest ceremonies were fairly modest affairs. Up to 40 people would pay more than $500 each for a weekend of simple ayahuasca rituals presided over by Young and a supporting cast of other amateur neoshamans, which took place on the patio by the backdoor of the property. Tapestries were hung and flute music played through a speaker as attendees puked into white buckets from the purgative effects of ayahuasca, which Young would serve from a spoon as he wandered around banging a drum.

Soul Quest was the only above-ground ayahuasca center in the U.S. and business was brisk. Soon, Young was cultivating his public persona, casting himself as a “purveyor of tribal medicine” and weaving a humble origin story in his soft Southern drawl, telling followers he’d been an emergency medical technician (EMT) until Big Pharma’s deadly opioid epidemic turned him against Western medicine. (In reality, Young was never employed as an EMT, though he did complete the training.)

“Young exists in a canon of pioneers who introduced new philosophies, substances, and practices to U.S. soil for the first time. History hasn’t always been kind to these figures.”

Like Ayahuasca International, Soul Quest was very big on advertising. A billboard on the highway next to the center exclaimed, “TURN RIGHT NOW! Experience the Healing Power of Nature.” If you searched for “ayahuasca in the U.S.” on Google, Soul Quest would be the first result; the organization appeared as “Ayahuasca USA” on Google Maps, and it had the @ayahuascausa handle on Instagram. The center appealed heavily towards psychedelic novices who could not afford to travel to more traditional, long-running sites in the Amazon, and who could generally not discern the shoddy quality of Soul Quest’s ayahuasca ceremonies as they lacked a frame of reference. “In many ways, Soul Quest brought ayahuasca to the U.S.,” Sophie says. “No one was doing it above ground before Soul Quest.”

Although Westerners have been traveling for decades to consume ayahuasca in the Amazon—where indigenous communities have been drinking it for centuries—you could argue that Young exists in a canon of pioneers who introduced new philosophies, substances, and practices to U.S. soil for the first time. History hasn’t always been kind to these figures. Yogi Bajan, who popularized kundalini yoga in California in the 1970s, was later exposed as a predator, while allegations of running an abuse-ridden child sex cult have trashed the legacy of once-celebrated tantra teacher Osho Rajneesh.

Whether or not Young warrants a place in this pantheon, only tomorrow knows. There are certainly those whose experiences with the Soul Quest boss have been laced with more than their fair share of suffering.

★☆★

Brandon Begley was the blond-haired, blue-eyed epitome of a ‘Florida kid’ when he discovered Soul Quest. The 22-year-old was working as a pizza delivery driver and golf caddy, and loved to skate and play guitar, yet he yearned for spiritual meaning. Brandon had gone vegan and switched to fluoride-free toothpaste and chemical-free deodorants, and would make T-shirts adorned with symbols of love. “He became very aware of the substances that he would put in his body,” his father, John-Paul ‘JP’ Begley, tells me.

There is a tragic irony to this, since Soul Quest’s sacraments were instrumental to Brandon’s grisly death on Easter weekend, 2018.

Two days after arriving at Soul Quest on March 30, Brandon underwent three grueling ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as a ritual involving kambo, an Amazonian frog poison that possesses detoxifying effects (for the latter, he paid Soul Quest an extra $150 on top of the $500 program fee). Some kambo practitioners recommend people drink copious amounts of water before taking the non-psychoactive secretion, while Soul Quest’s manual set the upper limit at 5 liters, a huge quantity. Though it’s unclear just how much water Brandon drank, there were concerns it had been too much.

That afternoon, Young told Brandon to stay at the center overnight so that he could be supervised. But after staff found him unresponsive at 5PM, they alerted Young, the only person at Soul Quest with medical training, and he was allegedly urged to call an ambulance. Later, in court, Young insisted that he thought Brandon’s issue had been spiritual rather than medical in nature. So staff carried him outside, where the neoshaman who had been leading the retreat with Young used reiki therapy to “ground” the stricken youngster, believing that he could solve the problem by removing esoteric energy from Brandon’s head while praying and singing.

Brandon suffered convulsions that were so intense they caused skin to tear from his arm and face as his body writhed against the ground. He was left bloodied and bruised. Eventually, a blanket was placed on the ground so that he wasn’t in direct contact with the earth. The neoshaman instructed staff to prepare a sugar tea but after Brandon was given a few drops, he had a prolonged seizure that proved deadly. Only then, at 8PM, was an ambulance called, after Young and the staff had watched Brandon deteriorate due to severe hyponatremia, a condition brought on when the body’s sodium levels become critically low due to water overconsumption.

The recording of the 911 call is a distressing listen. “We want to take him to the hospital, but right now it might just be best for you guys to come here instead of us taking him,” Young tells responders. “He’s unresponsive… We thought he was sugar diabetic so we gave him some sugar water, and that… He’s turning blue… He’s turning blue…”

Later, Young rang JP Begley. “He called me—‘You have to go, your Brandon has been taken away in an ambulance,’” JP recalls. When the panicked father asked which hospital, he claims that Young replied: “I don’t know.” JP immediately set off in his car, three hours from Orlando, on a mad hunt to find his son—a father’s worst nightmare. “I was calling every hospital in Orlando trying to find a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy named Brandon Carl Begley. Young sent me on a wild goose chase.”

None of the hospitals had recorded an admission under that name. At some point during his fevered search, JP discovered that the paramedics hadn’t even been told Brandon’s name, leading staff to register him as a John Doe. Eventually, a doctor at one hospital was able to match JP’s description of Brandon to his prone body. “The doctor’s like, ‘Yeah, this is more than likely your son here, but we have him registered as John Doe. You need to get here now.’” But there was nothing the doctors could do. Brandon died three days later from the acute effects of hyponatremia, namely anoxic brain injury.

JP, a mild-mannered country singer and professional golfer, vividly recalls the horror of that night, as we sit together in the Palm Beach office of his pro-bono personal injury lawyer William Chapman. “Looking back, I’m just thankful that I was able to recover Brandon,” he says, wiping away tears. “He could have disappeared.”

☆★☆

Young did not pause activities in the days and weeks after Brandon’s death. Instead, he slashed prices, offering 20 percent discount promotions for retreats that month on his Facebook as the ceremony schedule continued apace. On a trip to Arizona to promote a self-made documentary about Soul Quest titled From Shock to Awe, Young made claims that Brandon had taken drugs, a witness told me, which were later debunked by the autopsy. Young also kept a photo on his Facebook profile of a group shot featuring Brandon, after posting it the day before he fell ill. When JP went to pick up Brandon’s car, accompanied by police, he claims Young treated him with contempt and did not offer even a cursory condolence.

Naturally, JP—who works at the Mar-a-Lago golf course owned by Donald Trump, with whom he is on first-name terms—was distraught and sought justice for his eldest child. After the local sheriff decided not to pursue a criminal investigation, JP knocked on the doors of countless no win, no fee lawyers without joy until meeting Chapman, a former college baseball player who agreed to take on the case against the advice of his partner. Chapman went on to bankroll the legal effort to the tune of $100,000 in administration and expert witness fees, and by March 2020 a civil suit against Young and Soul Quest had been filed. The warmth, and deep respect, between Chapman and JP is palpable, forged over several hundred hours together preparing a case that Chapman says has been the most consequential, and important, of his 23-year career.

“We understand you want healing, but you can’t lie to us,” Young told the show, alluding to Brandon’s death. “If you lie, you die,” he added, crassly.

In May 2024, following a bitterly fought case, a court ruled Young was liable for negligence in the wrongful death of Brandon Begley. Young and Soul Quest were ordered to pay $15m in compensation and Young attempted to declare bankruptcy, but was turned down due to the illegal nature of serving ayahuasca. The acrimonious battle for the money—which JP says he will use for charitable good, though his main concern is leaving Young penniless—continues.

★☆★

In the aftermath of Brandon’s death, Young seemed to return to the party boy decadence of his pre-ayahuasca years. He attended EDM shows in Las Vegas and holidayed in Ibiza with his new Ecuadorian girlfriend (after dabbling with polyamory for a spell, Young and Verena had split). January 2019 saw the arrival of “the maloca” at Soul Quest, an Amazonian-style longhouse used to host psychedelic ceremonies that was erected on the turf where Brandon suffered through his last conscious moments. It allowed Soul Quest to grow significantly and the ceremonies—sometimes led by indigenous ayahuasca facilitators—were regularly attended by up to 100 people. It seems Brandon had been all but forgotten, with his death under a code of omerta. “In my three years there, from after Brandon died in 2018 to 2021, I never even heard about it,” says Fallou. “That’s how good a hush-hush job they did. It’s only because of the Reddit forums that I actually learned some inconvenient truths.”

When questioned about Brandon’s passing, Young—who’s been presented by filmmakers and experts as a bonafide “medicine man”—was quick to deflect blame. The popular Netflix documentary series (Un)Well, which aired in August 2020, featured Soul Quest prominently as part of its ayahuasca episode. “We understand you want healing, but you can’t lie to us,” Young told the show, alluding to Brandon’s death. “If you lie, you die,” he added, crassly. “Everyone here knew that there was nothing we did wrong. We found out, shortly thereafter, he had a history of seizures.”

This misleading claim, which was not scrutinized by the show’s producers, was based on the presence of an anti-seizure medication called levetiracetam in Brandon’s autopsy. Yet during the depositions prior to the court case, the judge ruled that Brandon was only prescribed levetiracetam for the first time while he was in the hospital. “There’s no competent evidence of a prior medical condition or prior medication that [Brandon] failed to disclose,” Circuit Judge Eric Netcher wrote in a 2022 partial summary judgment. Soul Quest and Young’s defense failed “to create a genuine dispute of material fact,” he added. As such, the documentary—and the publicity it stirred up—only deepened the Begley family’s torment.

Two years later, in May 2024, Young—whose claim to have been an EMT had long since been debunked—cut a curious figure in court. Observers say he was often slouching, eating sweets, and chit chatting. His defense lawyer, forced to change his argument away from the seizure history claim, instead focused on Brandon’s water consumption while advancing a spurious and highly personal case that JP had abandoned Brandon as a young boy when he moved to Florida to advance his golfing career. He also argued that a previous bad trip on mushrooms proved Brandon was unfit to take psychedelics.

In courtroom scenes that were at times chaotic, one figure from Soul Quest allegedly tried to solicit the judge’s law clerk to attend one of the organization’s ayahuasca ceremonies, while JP was inundated with deranged texts from an individual offering him ayahuasca, so he could “meet his son once again.” (The sender was apparently unconnected to Soul Quest.)

But while Fallou says the couple hundred ceremonies he was involved in passed off without medical emergency, it was not only Brandon who was seriously harmed at Soul Quest. In 2017, Canadian Kevin Rupchand said that he had a seizure after following staff instructions to drink several gallons of water in the wake of consuming katawa, a poisonous tree bark. The case was settled out of court, apparently for $100,000.

Shockingly, another woman was hospitalized after having a seizure on-camera in 2019, while Netflix were at Soul Quest filming an ayahuasca ceremony—and when the DEA rejected Soul Quest’s application for religious exemption, it highlighted a separate September 2020 report of a woman whose experience went south. “Soul Quest staff members delayed calling 911,” the agency said in a letter, “[the woman] also alleged that hospital emergency room personnel had told her that Soul Quest staff members had repeatedly dropped off customers experiencing adverse reactions at the emergency room.”

Perhaps this wasn’t altogether surprising. In court, Young admitted that some facilitators had undergone no formal training, and instead were required to complete a year of volunteer service. Some of those volunteers were in recovery from drug addiction, and were giving their time principally in return for free ayahuasca. There were those who relapsed, only adding to the scrambled atmosphere of the place. In November 2023, a male volunteer who had recently left Soul Quest died by suicide.

The circumstances remain unclear, and may bear no relation to his experiences at the church. Either way, the public image of Young as a credible “medicine man” was falling apart.

☆★☆

Today, Young lives in a luxury four-bedroom, chandelier-clad $750,000 home in a gated community in the Orlando suburbs. “I came up with nothing,” Young said in a 2023 interview. “I was homeless, I was completely poor… My mother was a drug addict, I never had a father. My grandmother raised me as much as she could, till she couldn’t afford to take care of me. I was on my own since I was 14. Started working at little Taco Bell for $3.85 an hour and just working my way up.”

Little by little, Young turned Soul Quest into a personal fiefdom, a place where the most anguished people came to heal, and he was richly rewarded in the process. There is a striking contrast between the ancient methods that Young used to build his wealth, and the thoroughly modern trappings he chose to lavish it upon.

“The boy who came from nothing now had a fortune he needed to forfeit, fast—or else he’d have to sit back and watch JP Begley take it from him instead.”

According to documents disclosed during the bankruptcy process, Young drives a $180,000 Mercedes and owns a $370,000 luxury motorhome. As of December 2023, he had cryptocurrency funds totalling almost $400,000, and a party in Amsterdam to celebrate his 50th birthday followed hot on the heels of jaunts to Cartagena, Las Vegas, and Tulum (the latter being the getaway of choice for today’s monied neoshaman). Until the winding down of Soul Quest, he was paid an official salary of $320,000 a year as the organization’s head honcho; a white guy donning a feathered headdress and Amazonian jewelry at rituals that saw him do little more than pour the foul-tasting epiphany-gloop. On his trips to Tulum, Young, a phenomenal salsa dancer, would wear traditional paintwork and post photos to social media declaring it was “time to get my tribal on.”

Young’s social media presence is certainly an eyebrow raising one. He would post regularly, showing off his mansion, shenanigans backstage at EDM shows, fine dining experiences, and foreign holidays—typically enjoyed with a succession of girlfriends around half his age—while a legion of volunteers quietly kept the church going in his absence. “Always remember… Rumors are carried by haters, spread by fools, and accepted by idiots,” he once posted in an apparent riposte to his critics.

“I was super concerned about what I was witnessing and the lack of transparency,” says Fallou. “The [facilitators] with their faces on the website had the clout to stop being, ‘La, la, la, I’m grateful for the medicine,’ and not play along with the bullshit. Do the math; he was pushing 100 people a weekend, and they were paying near $1,000 each, with only basic overheads. It enabled one person to get super rich from a fake church.”

The organization brought in $7.5 million from 2022 to mid-2024, as shown by filings provided during bankruptcy proceedings. But at the time of that claim, Young only had around $20,000 in his personal bank account, along with the crypto. Aside from funding his lifestyle and keeping the candles lit at Soul Quest, where did it all go? Well, lots of places: Young’s legal fees for the case against JP Begley likely ran into the hundreds of thousands. The failed DEA exemption bid cost at least $1 million, according to Dr Scott Irwin, a senior minister in charge of group counseling and psychedelic integration sessions at Soul Quest. On top of all that, in the two months before filing for bankruptcy, more than $250,000 left Young’s account. He upgraded cars, made extra mortgage payments, and invested in a $17,000 home security system, according to financial records submitted to court. “It’s insanity,” Chapman says. “The bankruptcy trustee is looking at this excessive spending.”

The boy who came from nothing now had a fortune he needed to forfeit, fast—or else he’d have to sit back and watch JP Begley take it from him instead.

★☆★

Luckily, Soul Quest’s neoshamanic leader was good at finding uses for his money. “The real Chris Young took off his ceremonial garb on Sundays and left the church to party at electronic music events, and blow off steam at strip clubs and orgies,” says another former church insider, Nelson.* “He abused the love given to him at the church.”

Soul Quest’s financials were notoriously opaque. Attendees contributed a 10 percent membership fee, but had no stake in how the business was run. Meanwhile, Young was establishing other companies such as ‘World Psychedelic Retreats LLC.’ “If questioned about the fee, Chris would become visibly upset and start yelling,” Nelson adds. In a recent Reddit thread, multiple former workers and guests posted critical comments about Soul Quest. “I once used to be a big advocate for Soul Quest, but after being a long-term volunteer there, Chris has lost the true message behind ayahuasca,” one user wrote. “With Chris behind everything, it is all about how much money he can bring in.”

During the legal case, Irwin also raised concerns over book-keeping, and the power that Young had to potentially manipulate the numbers to his advantage. “There’s never been any financial transparency,” Irwin told the court, according to a transcript of the 2022 deposition. “There’s never been any disclosure of any accounting records of any kind […] All that was done by Christopher Young exclusively.” After raising his concerns, Irwin said that he was told it was not “anybody’s business.”

Irwin left Soul Quest in 2021, fearing a DEA raid after the religious exemption application was denied (curiously, it never came). Irwin—an easygoing, intellectual hippie type—had joined the organization after working at the University of Miami, where he’d led a successful smoking cessation program. Irwin enjoyed a strange relationship with Young, and not long after becoming a Soul Quest board member in 2017, he did something that enraged his boss: he became intimate with Verena.

Young and Verena’s marriage first began to falter when he impregnated another woman. Charlotte,* whom he allegedly first met while she was a guest at Soul Quest, gave birth to Young’s third child just months after Verena had given birth to his second. “That pissed off a lot of volunteers,” another source said. “Chris tried to make Verena and Charlotte be friends, but Charlotte wasn’t interested.” Nelson corroborated the story. “Verena had just given birth when she found out another girl was pregnant by Chris. There were multiple women he was sleeping with at the church who were guests. He treats ayahuasca like it’s a drug to party with.” Around this time, Young grew jealous of Irwin and lashed out, according to a police statement given by Irwin to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in 2017. “Hitting me on the left side of the head with his fist while I had a three-year-old girl on my shoulders at a birthday party,” Irwin said, relaying events. “He threatened to kill me. Tried to attack me again and crowd held him back.”

Amid the threats, Verena took the two children she’d parented with Young and fled with Irwin to Germany. In the fallout from Brandon’s death, however, Young invited them back to help run the church and there was a rapprochement, though it is unclear if he and Verena rekindled their relationship romantically before they formally separated in 2022. “His current girlfriend was a guest before he slept with her,” says Nelson, speaking about the woman Young was dating in October 2024. “The girl before her was from Brazil. There were often indigenous girls from Brazil.”

There were wild parties at the Soul Quest property in between retreats. “It used to be Wednesdays and Thursdays; Chris would bring strippers from the strip clubs to Soul Quest, and they would all be partying,” another source says. “On Thursday evening, there would be a cleaning lady walking around, telling them, ‘You guys need to wake up, get rid of these girls,’” the source adds. “‘You have guests coming tomorrow. You have a spiritual retreat.’” Irwin—who passed away in the second half of 2024, following a period of ill health—was known to call Young’s party friends “cockroaches” and he told staffers such as Fallou that the taking of cocaine was rife.

The unruly behavior would seem to fit with Young’s pre-shamanic persona. In June 2009, in Lee County, Florida, Young was convicted and fined for recruiting, harboring, and transporting for prostitution, and appeared to agree to an undisclosed plea bargain on a charge of living off the earnings of a prostitute, records recently unearthed by Chapman show. (In 2005, he was also charged with two separate cases of battery. Young did not respond to requests for comment on any of these charges.)

☆★☆

In October, I paid a visit to Florida. As well as meeting with JP Begley and William Chapman, I wanted to see if Chris Young would sit down with me for an interview. However, Young didn’t return my calls. So, in the eye of Hurricane Milton, the feared “storm of the century,” I made my way to a local business called Dancers Royale to see if the stories I’d heard about Young blowing his earnings in Orlando’s array of strip clubs held any water. DJ K5, the producer of classic Florida house track “Passion,” was on the decks and laying waste to the club’s frankly intimidating sound system. One of the many strippers who approached me on the night—a brunette with a West Coast accent, clad in an ornately detailed yellow and pink bikini—complimented my English accent, but was reluctant to divulge any details about clients. “We’re not allowed to say,” she said, as a man went round with a dustpan and brush sweeping up stray banknotes that hadn’t found their way into dancers’ lingerie.

When I spoke to the manager, he also refused to comment, citing the club’s “discretion policy.” The owner of Dancers Royale was certainly an amiable man. Despite my protestations about being a teetotaller, he had my drink generously laced with gin, offered me something I will refrain from mentioning in print, and on my way out, gifted me a specially made T-shirt bearing a mock voting slip for the then-imminent 2024 presidential election. Was Dancers Royale running propaganda for Biden? No. Trump? Actually, not him either… Strippers? Tick!

★☆★

It’s a wet, dismal day in Florida when I arrive at the former home of Soul Quest. Situated on the opposite side of Orlando to Disneyland, the place appears to be deserted, though a groundskeeper is on hand to let us in. I make an immediate beeline for the maloca, the Amazonian-themed meeting house constructed in the wake of Brandon’s death that was a key part of Soul Quest’s period of rapid and lucrative growth. Inside, a few dozen futons are stacked in a corner. A circular patch of astroturf in the center of the temple is waterlogged. There is the strong stench of mold, as the pitter patter of rain falls on the Sunshine State two days before a category 3 hurricane is due to make landfall. The whole place is in disarray; disheveled and dilapidated. Heading out into the drizzle, the unmistakable acid tang of dog poop assails my nostrils.

It’s unclear when, exactly, the last psychedelic ceremony took place here, or what was in the hearts and heads of those present at the last rites of an organization that shined so bright as it rose so steeply. Out front, a note reading “All white linens from ceremony go here” is strewn on the floor beneath a sign reminding congregants that, “No guns, knives, weapons, or drugs allowed on property.” A Bible sits on a side table. Out back, past rows of small cabins that used to house the premium-tier guests, I find the cauldron in which tens of thousands of ayahuasca doses were prepared by Soul Quest’s lead neoshaman and his one-time disciples. It’s dumped on its side in the overgrowth, with ayahuasca dregs still floating in the corner; a portal to another dimension tossed in a ditch with an ambulance stretcher abandoned nearby. As a symbol of the lack of reverence Young has shown at times to ancestral medicine, it feels slightly on the nose.

By 2023, almost all of the volunteers and facilitators who’d been working at Soul Quest between the time of Brandon’s death and the final weeks of the pandemic had departed, with a few going on to set up ayahuasca retreats of their own. Marcia, who worked as a healthcare assistant at the center for two years, grew tired of Young and the lack of reinvestment of church profits. “I wouldn’t allow that man to serve me medicine now ever, in any capacity,” she says. “I don’t want his vibe anywhere in my bubble. That medicine is sacred, and karma is doing its number on him.” A number of people were unceremoniously kicked out of the Soul Quest tribe by Young, who according to Fallou also controlled the WhatsApp group and social media accounts. “The downside was the whole Chris story,” he adds. “But the good side is we got to continue.”

That they were is a feat in itself. In February 2021, Carlos Tanner—who runs the Ayahuasca Foundation, a retreat and training center in Peru—was invited to speak on a Soul Quest facilitator’s Zoom call. He was shocked by what he heard: “From speaking to them, it was clear they had no idea what they were doing, like how to help someone who needs assistance during a ceremony.” The call was more like a group therapy session, he says. “They knew they weren’t qualified to do the work,” Tanner claims. “Thankfully, a few of the facilitators from Soul Quest came down to do our program. But then they left Soul Quest, because they understood how things should not be done.”

Tanner says Young himself got in touch way back in 2015, not long after founding Soul Quest, to apply for the facilitator program. But he never showed. “I was really disappointed,” says Tanner. “It felt like he just decided he didn’t need it.” (Young has written that he underwent “a formal apprenticeship under the guidance of a traditional Brazilian medicine woman” and learned to perform traditional ceremonies, but did not provide any evidence of this when contacted.)

☆★☆

In wrapping up the story of Soul Quest, one question remains unanswered. How was all of this allowed to happen?

In her handsome detached home, Orlando news reporter Karla Ray, who covered the story from beginning to end for Channel 9, is trying to explain. “We had been banging the drum on this ‘church’ for several years leading up to Brandon’s death—and then it was like, ‘Okay, what was all my reporting for if this could still happen?’” she says. “The DEA had put them on notice, and local authorities had been out there but nothing had ever come of it. Maybe if action had been taken against Chris and Soul Quest when all the original stories aired, Brandon’s death wouldn’t have happened.”

It’s possible that Soul Quest avoided serious censure, and a DEA raid, due to a sheer lack of understanding around psychedelics, as well as a lack of complaints from neighbors and a respect for private spiritual worship in Florida, where government regulation can be light. But “protections have to be in place for people like Brandon,” insists Ray. “He was failed by Soul Quest and the system that allowed them to continue to operate.”

“In short, reality is beginning to hit, and while many have been able to experience moments of genuine revelation, healing, and community through the neoshamanic movement of recent times, there are others who must now reckon with the harm wrought upon them by a generation of flawed gurus.”

If not for Brandon’s death and the legal action taken by JP and Chapman, she suspects Soul Quest would still be operating today. She’s in little doubt as to what drove Young on. “You don’t turn as many people in and out, as they did every week, if money is not a motivator,” Ray adds. “If you really believe that this psychedelic can change lives, there are other people doing it in a way that is not as ‘turn and burn’ as Soul Quest.”

Ayahuasca expert Bia Labate, co-founder of the educational non-profit Chacruna Institute, acknowledges Young’s “legitimate intentions” to fight the DEA and change the legality of ayahuasca churches in the U.S., but says he became the “self-appointed, messianic leader of the entire movement” who grew detached from the wider community. “Reckless events on the ground led him to crash brutally,” Labate says. “This, however, does not mean that some folks did not experience deep healing within his community; as always life is complex and full of nuances.”

The final point on my Florida to-do list took me to the home of Verena. The newly qualified hypnotherapist answered the door gargling an ayurvedic mouthwash, but refused to speak on the record, citing the pending litigation against Soul Quest and Young as a reason to keep schtum. She stared me down like Medusa as I returned to the car, her eyes not leaving me until I was back in my seat.

★☆★

Having watched this story play out in real time over the past eight years, the rise and fall of Young and his Soul Quest church feel emblematic of the wider psychedelic renaissance in the West. What began as a journey of self-discovery fueled by feverish optimism has curdled into something that feels depressingly in thrall to capitalist principles of profit and largesse. In short, reality is beginning to hit, and while many have been able to experience moments of genuine revelation, healing, and community through the neoshamanic movement of recent times, there are others who must now reckon with the harm wrought upon them by a generation of flawed gurus.

Naturally, it is not in the interests of the psychedelic nouveau riche to be upfront about any of this, and figures like Young are finding new ways to consolidate or claw back their power. In an August statement announcing the closure of Soul Quest, he declared that “the sacrament of ayahuasca has a greater plan for me;” at present, the plan appears to involve establishing a new ayahuasca church and going to the Amazon to get in “some much-needed healing for my mind, body and soul.” For the former, Young is no doubt already on the hunt for congregants; for the latter, he is accepting donations.

In a crowdfunding campaign launched late January, he claimed to have fallen behind on his bills now that he’s no longer drawing a lucrative salary. As an incentive, he offered the first ten people to donate $1,000 or above a painting made by indigenous Peruvian artists, possessions that he doesn’t seem to have declared during bankruptcy proceedings. “Any amount of money will help me get closer to the healing I desperately need,” he wrote. “I really love and miss all of you and can’t wait to hold space for each and every one of you when I return.”

But JP Begley will not be content with a redemption rebrand. “I’m fighting for justice,” he insists. “He only cares about the money. He’s taken my soul, my son, and my best friend from me. I want to be able to visit him in jail. And until that happens, I’m not going to sleep.”

Follow Mattha Busby on X @matthabusby

*Some names have been changed to protect identities

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This long-read investigation is taken from VICE magazine, v29n1: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.