Iowa Church's Secret DEA Deal Clears Path for Legal Ayahuasca

October 18, 2026

Photo by Gabriele Stravinskaite via Unsplash.

On October 5, 2026, the Iowa Board of Pharmacy voted to hand the Iowaska Church of Healing something no ayahuasca congregation in the state has ever held: a Certificate of Registration clearing the last domestic hurdle before federal sign-off on importing and brewing its sacrament. That sounds like a bureaucratic footnote, but it's the visible tip of a deal that's been negotiated almost entirely out of public view.

The Iowa vote traces back to a confidential settlement the church reached with the DEA in June 2026 -- an agreement that, according to filings, effectively grants the church both an import certificate for concentrated ayahuasca paste and a manufacturing certificate to produce bulk tea domestically. What makes this one different from the handful of RFRA ayahuasca settlements that preceded it -- Arizona's Church of the Eagle and the Condor, Washington's Church of Gaia -- is that this agreement was filed under seal. No public memorandum, no published terms, just a court notice that a deal exists and a state regulator acting on the assumption that it's binding. That raises real questions about who's actually running this church, what strings the DEA attached, and whether sealing a RFRA settlement is a one-off or the new template for how the federal government intends to handle ayahuasca going forward.

What the Iowa Board of Pharmacy Actually Approved

Photo by Werner Pfennig via Pexels.

The Iowa Board of Pharmacy's order isn't a blanket blessing -- it's a conditional, closely watched approval. The certificate the board granted on October 5 comes with probationary status for a full year, meaning the church has to operate under heightened scrutiny before it can claim anything resembling settled legal footing in the state. Among the conditions: the church must report any adverse event during a ceremony that requires medical intervention outside the ceremonial setting, a provision that gives regulators a direct line of sight into what happens when something goes wrong with a DMT-containing brew consumed in a group setting. The board's written order is notable for how explicitly it leans on the DEA settlement -- it states plainly that the federal agreement 'effectively grants' the church a certificate to import concentrated ayahuasca paste from abroad and a separate certificate to manufacture bulk tea once that paste lands domestically. Iowa's approval was never going to be the end of the story; it's structurally the second step in a two-part process the DEA has been quietly building out. Step one is a federal settlement resolving the underlying Religious Freedom Restoration Act dispute. Step two is securing the relevant state-level registration or licensure, which then triggers the DEA to finish processing whatever permits remain on the federal side. Iowa just checked that second box. What's unusual is how little the public gets to see about the substance of step one -- the terms that make step two possible in the first place. For a church that spent years in litigation and regulatory limbo, the probationary certificate is real progress. But it's progress built on a foundation that outside observers, including other churches watching closely, can't actually inspect.

Inside the Sealed DEA Settlement

Photo by TayebMEZAHDIA via Pixabay.

What we know about the DEA-Iowaska settlement comes almost entirely from what DOJ lawyers told the court, not from the agreement itself. Back in June 2026, government attorneys informed the presiding court that the DEA and the church had signed a memorandum of agreement resolving their RFRA dispute -- then both sides jointly asked the court to file that memorandum under seal, pointing to privacy interests and, somewhat circularly, the public interest as justification for keeping it closed. That's a notable ask in a case about religious exercise and a federally controlled substance, areas where courts have historically favored transparency precisely because the public has a stake in how these exemptions get decided. Reporting on the sealed terms suggests the agreement covers ground you'd expect in a security-conscious settlement: personal identifying information for church members, the specific names of individuals authorized to handle the controlled substance, protocols for how the paste and tea are stored, and the mechanics of the import process itself. The agreement also reportedly recognizes, in writing, the church's RFRA right to practice what it calls its Sacrament of Ayahuasca -- but only subject to the conditions baked into that sealed document. The practical effect is that the DEA has conceded the core legal point, religious exercise, while keeping every operational detail that would let outsiders evaluate the deal's rigor locked away. Prior RFRA ayahuasca settlements played out in open court filings that anyone could read and compare. This one didn't, and that departure is already prompting the obvious question of whether the memorandum could eventually be pried loose through a Freedom of Information Act request, since DEA is a federal agency subject to FOIA even when it negotiates behind sealed court filings.

Who Runs the Iowaska Church of Healing

Photo by Damir K via Pexels.

The Iowaska Church of Healing isn't a large or especially well-known institution outside psychedelic church circles. It was formed in Iowa in September 2018, built around the leadership of Admir Dado Kantarevic, who the church also refers to by the name Shaman BaBa DaDo and describes as an internationally renowned healer and clairvoyant. For a period, the church's headquarters was simply Kantarevic's former home in Des Moines -- hardly the institutional footprint you'd expect from an organization now the subject of a sealed federal settlement. The church has never pretended its sacrament sits in a legal gray zone: it has acknowledged outright that DMT, the active compound in ayahuasca, is a Schedule I substance with no statutory religious exemption written into federal drug law. Any protection the church enjoys exists because of RFRA case law, not because Congress carved out an exception the way it effectively has for peyote used by the Native American Church. That legal reality cost the church when it sought IRS tax-exempt status -- the application was denied after federal officials flagged the group's ayahuasca ceremonies as involving illegal drug use, a reminder that different federal agencies can reach very different conclusions about the same religious practice depending on what statute they're applying. The church kept pressing on the DEA front regardless. In January 2026, it told the D.C. Circuit that the DEA was continuing to stall its exemption application, a complaint common among ayahuasca churches that argue the agency slow-walks these requests for years even when it eventually settles rather than fully litigates them.

A Pattern of DEA Ayahuasca Settlements -- With One Big Difference

Iowaska's case doesn't exist in isolation -- it's the latest entry in a slowly growing line of DEA accommodations for ayahuasca churches, each one shaping expectations for the next. Arizona's Church of the Eagle and the Condor reached its own importer registration deal with the DEA back in 2024, a settlement that anticipated the church bringing in as much as 25 kilograms of ayahuasca annually. Washington's Church of Gaia went a step further in late 2024 or early 2025, becoming the first ayahuasca congregation to win an approved RFRA exemption petition outright rather than settling mid-litigation. Both of those resolutions were made public, giving attorneys, regulators, and other churches an actual document to study -- import caps, security requirements, reporting obligations, all visible. Iowaska's settlement breaks that pattern as the first one resolved under seal, and that distinction matters more than it might initially seem. The two-step sequence on display here, a federal settlement first, state licensing second, looks increasingly like the DEA's preferred template for handling these cases rather than a one-off accommodation. If that's accurate, other churches pursuing RFRA protection now have a clearer procedural path to follow, but potentially without the benefit of a public document showing them what conditions to expect or what terms are negotiable. That asymmetry is likely to draw attention from attorneys and legal observers who track religious exemption cases, particularly given the public interest in understanding how a federal agency with a long history of resisting drug exemptions decides, case by case, who gets one.

What This Means Going Forward

Photo by VBlock via Pixabay.

With Iowa's certificate now granted, the expectation is that the DEA will move to process whatever federal exemptions, registrations, and permits remain outstanding for the church, and do so without the multi-year stalling the church complained about to the D.C. Circuit earlier this year. But probationary status isn't a formality -- it means Iowa regulators keep real oversight authority for the next year and can revisit or revoke the certificate if adverse events pile up or reporting obligations go unmet. None of this amounts to ayahuasca becoming legal in any general sense, in Iowa or anywhere else. The substance remains federally controlled outside these narrow, individually negotiated RFRA accommodations, and nothing about this settlement changes that baseline for anyone who isn't a member of this specific church operating under this specific agreement. State and local law on psychedelics more broadly continues to vary widely across the country, and readers should check current law in their own jurisdiction before assuming this case signals any broader shift -- it doesn't. The more interesting open question is whether the sealed settlement terms stay sealed. Litigation has a way of forcing documents into the open, FOIA requests take time but sometimes succeed, and reporters covering this space have shown sustained interest in how DEA evaluates these petitions. It wouldn't be surprising if the actual memorandum surfaces eventually, whether through a future legal challenge, a records request, or simple leaks from people close to the negotiation.

Strip away the procedural language and what's missing here is the stuff that actually matters for public accountability: the import quotas, the security protocols for storing a Schedule I substance, who exactly is accountable if something goes wrong. That's precisely the detail the public can't see in this case, and it's unusual precisely because the RFRA ayahuasca settlements that came before this one were argued and resolved in open court filings anyone could pull up and read.

Other ayahuasca churches now have a playbook they didn't have a year ago: settle quietly with the DEA first, then take that settlement to state regulators for licensure, rather than fighting for the kind of public precedent that Church of Gaia secured. That's a faster, quieter route to the same destination. Whether it's good policy or just a convenient way for an agency that's historically resisted religious drug exemptions to avoid setting a transparent precedent is a fair question, and one worth pressing until someone actually gets a look at what's in that sealed memorandum.