The family of a 22-year-old man, Brandon Begley, who died after taking ayahuasca and kambo at a retreat center in Florida, have urged Left/Right Productions, the producers of a Netflix show, to retract an interview that falsely claimed that Begley had a history of seizures.
In an episode of the Netflix documentary series (Un)Well, which aired in August 2020, Christopher Young, founder of the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth, claimed he and his staff were not liable for Begley’s death, and that the decedent had previously experienced seizures.
“If you lie, you die,” Young told the program. “Everyone here knew that there was nothing we did wrong … We found out, shortly thereafter, he had a history of seizures.”
READ: Older People Don’t Trip As Hard on Psychedelics As Younger Demographics
On May 15, however, the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court in Orange County, Florida, ruled that negligence from Soul Quest and Young was “a legal cause” of Begley’s death and ordered them to pay $15 million to Begley’s family. It followed a prior partial summary judgment dismissing Young’s claims, ruling: “There’s no competent evidence of a prior medical condition or prior medication that [Begley] failed to disclose.”
Following three ceremonies with ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian tea containing DMT, and one ritual involving kambo, which typically induces vomiting to achieve a detox effect, Begley drank too much water, causing his sodium levels to plummet and eventually forcing him into a seizure.
But Begley was prescribed Levetiracetam, the anti-seizure medication, for the first time while in the hospital following the incident at Soul Quest, it was established in court.
“You could turn the Netflix show on and watch it right now,” JP Begley, Brandon’s father, told DoubleBlind. “It hurts all of us, knowing that people still think that about my son, and nobody’s doing anything about it.”
He added that the show never contacted his family or their legal team to check the defamatory claims made by Young, a former wedding DJ. “Nobody did their due diligence,” he said. “It’s very upsetting to know it is still out there.”
Left/Right Productions and Netflix did not respond to requests for comment.
Begley said he did not spend five years taking legal action against Soul Quest for his own financial gain, as was claimed by the retreat center’s lawyers in court. “No amount of money could bring Brandon back,” he said. “What I was looking for was an amount that would ultimately shut them down. Anything that we can recover will go on helping people in the future.”
He paid tribute to the family’s lawyer William M. Chapman Esq., who took the case on a pro-bono basis after being touched by the tragic death of Begley, who died seeking healing. “It took a long time, but the American justice system got it right,” Chapman said of the verdict.
After Soul Quest’s seizure defense was dismissed, its legal team focused on a September 2015 incident in which Begley had eaten psilocybin mushrooms at his home and began to suffer from the symptoms of rhabdomyolysis, a rare and serious medical condition that breaks down muscle tissue. “There was no testimony by the experts to say there’s any correlation [with seizures], and the judge agreed,” said Chapman.
READ: Lykos Therapeutics Quietly Moves to Patent MDMA
Chapman, a former insurance defense lawyer with more than 23 years of experience, said he was shocked by the “callousness” demonstrated by Soul Quest’s defense attorney Derek Brett. “I used to represent hospitals and doctors,” Chapman said. “When you go into an emotional case like this, and cast aspersions upon the loved ones of the deceased, you better be sure they carry evidentiary weight.
“The jury appeared bewildered by the anger and nastiness that the defense attorney showed when he depicted the father of this poor boy as deserving nothing, and that he’s a bad father. It was completely unfounded.”
In court, Chapman argued that the failure to call 9-1-1 for three hours, despite “the obvious and ominous gravity” of Begley’s “extreme” symptoms, showed negligence by Young, the only staff member with any formal medical training, and Soul Quest.
Begley, a keen guitarist and skateboarder, fell ill at the retreat center on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018, and was found unresponsive around 5 pm. The Soul Quest “shaman” and musician, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment in court, prayed, sang, and performed reiki on Begley, trying to remove energy from his head, according to court records. Young said in his deposition that he thought Begley was not suffering from a medical issue, but a spiritual ailment, “as many times I’ve seen many, many, many of our members go through very similar situations.”
An unnamed witness told the court that others had advocated calling an ambulance long before Begley’s seizure, but Young decided to follow the shaman’s advice and give him some sugar water. “Everybody seemed to trust Chris knew what the heck he was doing,” they said during the depositions. “They just gave, like, a very small amount of the sugar water to him, and then I remember things seemed to take a turn for the worse, and he started convulsing.”
Begley suffered a prolonged seizure at 8 pm and only then was an ambulance called, once he was in a coma and effectively brain dead. Begley died on April 4 from acute hyponatremia.
But there are other problems facing the organization, which one local news channel recently described as a business operating as a church. During the pre-trial proceedings, it emerged that then-board member Dr. Scott Irwin made a police report in May 2017 in which he detailed an alleged assault by Young.
“Chris Young attacked me,” he wrote in a statement to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office “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. He threatened to kill me. Tried to attack me again, and the crowd held him back.”
A former retreat volunteer told DoubleBlind that Soul Quest is “very litigious” and “people are afraid to talk for fear of legal action against them. For an ayahuasca church to be doing this, just shows how much it has lost its way. Chris is 100% in charge despite his questionable qualifications to justify calling himself a medicine man.”
Soul Quest has also faced criticism for the size of its ceremonies, which have topped 100 attendees. Soul Quest made upwards of $100,000, every two weeks—but sometimes weekly—according to former insiders who raised serious questions over financial transparency at the church.
In a recent Reddit thread, multiple former workers and guests posted detailed 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 said. “So many people have left Soul Quest and made their own practices because they know that with Chris behind everything, it is all about how much money he can bring in.” Another wrote: “I went there once and a weekend there was enough for me to decide that I would never go back there. That place is madness!”
Others have had seizures at the center but survived. In 2017, Kevin Rupchand said he was not given adequate medical care after suffering a seizure. He took legal action against Soul Quest and the case was settled out of court in 2022. On the Netflix show, one woman had a seizure on camera and was later hospitalized.
“A participant in a September 26, 2020 ayahuasca ‘Warrior Quest’ retreat also recently reported to DEA that, after she began experiencing adverse effects from an unknown substance also administered to her during an ayahuasca ceremony, Soul Quest staff members delayed calling 911,” a Drug Enforcement Administration official wrote to Soul Quest. “She also alleged that hospital emergency room personnel had told her that Soul Quest staff members had repeatedly dropped off customers experiencing adverse reactions.”
Soul Quest also came to prominence thanks to its unsuccessful application to the DEA for a legal religious exemption to serve ayahuasca, which is effectively considered a controlled drug. Soul Quest spent up to $2m in legal fees in its battle with the DEA, according to former insiders. In its 2023 decision, the DEA said Soul Quest had appeared to be inconsistent in following its own procedures to protect the health of retreat participants and was not sincere in its purported religious beliefs. “Following the DEA ruling it is effectively an illegal business,” the former volunteer said. “The cops could arrive at any moment. It’s a disaster.”
It is rare for people to die at ayahuasca or kambo ceremonies, but it does occur. There have been 58 deaths associated with ayahuasca, according to a report by the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service (ICEERS). However, “not a single autopsy has attributed the fatalities to acute ayahuasca intoxication” and ICEERS said the deaths would mostly have been avoided if minimum safety standards had been upheld. Kambo, meanwhile, has been linked to an unspecified, though very small, number of fatalities.
Soul Quest is only one of the most prominent examples of dozens of churches in the US that offer psychedelics as sacraments to members, who usually pay. Figures in the psychedelic community have faced criticism online for not sufficiently calling out Soul Quest before the conclusion of the wrongful death suit.
Now, however, experts are putting pressure on Soul Quest to close. “I am not alone in feeling that Soul Quest now needs to shut down,” said Rob Heffernan, independent researcher and activist, in a recent webinar.
READ: The DEA is Playing God with Psychedelic Churches
Beyond the negligence that led to Begley’s death and the “misinformation” promoted in the aftermath, tales of a romance between Irwin and Young’s wife and the subsequent assault on Irwin tarnished the church’s image. “It was startling that church leaders would be airing this in public,” said Heffernan. Young also had an online dispute with an ayahuasca provider in Peru that portrayed him in a negative light, especially while DEA exemption was being sought, Heffernan added.
“This underscored for a number of us that they have no place running a church using psychedelic sacrament,” he said. “While Soul Quest provided any number of people with worthwhile experiences, they also failed to listen to those who were having challenging experiences, and ignored the advice of experienced lawyers, activists, and ayahuasca church leaders.”
More than 20,000 people have undergone retreats at Soul Quest, making it one of the world’s largest ayahuasca churches, with many positive experiences reported. Soul Quest has said that judges, lawyers, doctors, and “military people” have attended. Following Begley’s death, healthcare protocols were beefed up significantly, Young told the court in his deposition. “After the incident of Brandon, we ensured our medical safety with much more higher standards to ensure there would not be any type of medical complications if there was something to arise in Soul Quest,” Young said.
As part of the judgment, which has not been appealed against, according to Chapman, Young and Soul Quest have been ordered to disclose their debts and assets.
JP Begley said that he hoped the lawsuit could help prevent anything like this from happening in the future. “Justice has spoken,” he said. “It does feel really good to have that vindication for Brandon. As if he was speaking himself saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong here.’”
