First Church of Cannabis
cannabis-based church in Indiana
First Church of Cannabis is a cannabis-based church founded in 2015 and registered in the U.S. state of Indiana.
History
The First Church of Cannabis was founded in March 2015 by Bill Levin, who attended Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, a Reform Judaism synagogue, as a child. He said it was a direct response to the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Monthly dues are $4.20. Levin said that the church was granted IRS tax-exempt status less than 30 days after he applied.
Levin titles himself Grand Poobah, or highest holy official, of the church. He claimed that he had the idea to found the church while watching the popular television series The Flintstones. "Grand Poobah" is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885), and used recurringly in The Flintstones as the name of a high-ranking elected position in a secret society, the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.
The group planned to test RFRA on July 1, 2015, with a service in Indiana including the use of cannabis. However, legal threats from the city forced the first service to not use marijuana at all.
“First Church of Cannabis” enters the record as cannabis-based church in Indiana. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what First, Church and Cannabis can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“First Church of Cannabis” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, First, Church and Cannabis provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20647283. Authority coordinates are 39.718, -86.115. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 1885.
A single description cannot reconcile every naming convention, rebuilding phase or administrative transfer associated with a place. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “First Church of Cannabis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.