KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A man serving a 27-year sentence in federal prison isn’t having much luck persuading judges that his prosecution violated his supposed religious right to traffic heroin.

The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected Timothy Anderson’s appeal of his St. Louis convictions last year of conspiracy and of possessing heroin with plans to deal it.

Anderson had pressed that the trial judge erred in spiking his request to have the case thrown out. While admitting he dealt heroin, Anderson pressed that he did so as part of a religious nonprofit he created to distribute the drug to “the sick, lost, blind, lame, deaf and dead members of God’s Kingdom.”

Anderson insisted his prosecution was an illegal infringement of his “sincerely held religious belief.”