✦ About the Temple ✦
A Church for the Living
the temple of harm reduction is a national religious nonprofit.
We treat the work of keeping people alive as sacred work. Because it is.
What We Believe
Saving a life is holy.
This is not a metaphor. It is the operating principle of this church.
For more than fifty years the drug war has treated the people who use substances as disposable. As criminals. As cautionary tales. As statistics that get rounded down at the end of the fiscal year. the temple of harm reduction rejects that frame completely. People who use substances are people. The medicine they take is medicine. The right to care for one’s own body is a right that no state can revoke.
We believe that when the law prohibits the saving of lives, violating the law becomes prayer.
Drug checking is ministry. Naloxone distribution is ministry. Honest education is ministry. Sitting with someone in the worst hour of their life and refusing to look away is ministry. We do this work because it is what our faith requires of us.
Why a Church
Because the work is sacramental, and a church is the structure that protects sacramental work.
The supplies we distribute as sacraments are not recreational items. They are tools of survival. The means to know what one is consuming. The medicine that brings someone back when their breath has stopped. The educational materials that allow a person to make an informed choice about their own body. Each one represents the difference between a person making it home and a person becoming a name on a memorial wall.
The state has shown again and again that it does not consider this work essential. Federal funding for harm reduction has been cut. State laws still criminalize the simple act of helping. The contaminated supply continues to kill more than one hundred thousand Americans a year. Against that, we organize as a church. Because a church can do what a nonprofit cannot. Because the First Amendment protects sacramental practice in ways the public-health framework does not.
This is not a workaround. It is a return. Harm reduction has always been a moral practice before it was a clinical one. Long before the term existed, communities of people who use drugs and the people who loved them were keeping each other alive. That tradition is older than any regulatory agency. the temple of harm reduction names it for what it is.
Who We Are
The Temple was founded by Mitchel Gomez, former Executive Director of DanceSafe and a harm-reduction practitioner with more than a decade in the field. The Temple is an independent congregation affiliated in spirit with the broader tradition of entheogenic and harm-reduction churches in the United States.
Our congregation is built from the people the work has always belonged to. People who use substances. People who have lost someone. Outreach workers. Nurses who have stopped asking permission. Researchers who got tired of writing papers no one reads while their friends died. Parents. Friends. The people who picked up the phone at four in the morning.
You do not have to use substances to belong here. You do not have to be in recovery to belong here. You do not have to choose between those identities at all. You belong here if you believe that the right to care for a body, including the body of a stranger, is a right worth practicing as faith.
The Origin of the Temple
the temple of harm reduction grew from Mitchel Gomez’s lifelong work in psychedelic harm reduction, Jewish ethics, and sacramental care.
What We Are Not
We are not a treatment program. We are not a recovery center. We are not a substitute for medical care.
We do not require anyone to stop using anything in order to receive care from us. We do not believe that suffering is the price of admission to dignity. We reject the idea that a person must hit rock bottom before they deserve help. That doctrine has killed more people than any drug ever has.
We are also not a political organization, though our practice is inherently political. The act of keeping someone alive against the wishes of the state is a political act. We accept that. We do not campaign. We do not endorse. We minister.
What Comes Next
This site is the front door of the Temple. From here you can learn the Temple’s beliefs, read what we have learned, receive updates, and follow the work as it unfolds. Membership is offered freely to those who want to belong to a congregation that practices harm reduction as sacred duty. Followers engage with the Sacraments of Harm Reduction as part of the Temple’s religious life, care practices, and devotion to the preservation of Sacred Life. The door is open to those called to this work.
If any of this has reached you, the door is open. Walk in.