The psychedelic evangelist
Before he died last year, Roland Griffiths was perhaps the world’s most famous psychedelics researcher. Since 2006, his work has suggested that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, can lead to poisoning mystical experiences, and that those experiences can in turn help treat anxiety, depression, addiction and the fear of death.
Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University gained widespread recognition among scientists and the popular press, helping to bring the psychedelic field out of the deep backwaters of the hippie movement of the 1960s. This second wave of research into the hallucinogenic compounds strengthened political campaigns to decriminalize them and spurred investment in biotechnology.
Dr. Griffiths was known by friends and colleagues as an analytical thinker and a religious agnostic, and he warned fellow researchers against hype. But he also saw psychedelics as more than mere medicine: Understanding them could be “critical to the survival of the human species,” he said in a conversation. Later in life, he admitted to using psychedelics himself and said he wanted science to help unlock them transformative power for humanity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he even had a vaunted attitude prophetic role among psychonauts, the growing community of psychedelic believers who want to bring the drugs into mainstream society. For years, critics have denounced its outsized size financial And philosophical influence of these advocates in the insular research field. And some researchers have done just that asked quietly or dr. Griffiths, in his focus on the mystical realmmade something of it the same mistakes that doomed the previous era of psychedelic science.
Now one of his longtime associates is offering a more forceful critique. “Dr. Griffiths has conducted his psychedelic studies more as a ‘new-age’ retreat center, for lack of a better term, than as a clinical research laboratory,” reads an ethics complaint filed last fall at Johns Hopkins by Matthew Johnson, who worked with Dr. . Griffiths for almost 20 years, but resigned after a dispute with colleagues.
Dr. Griffiths acted as a “spiritual leader,” according to the complaint, by injecting religious symbolism into the investigation and steering volunteers toward his desired outcome. And he allowed some of his longtime donors — drug legalization advocates — to help with investigations, raising ethical questions.
“These are serious allegations that need to be investigated,” said Joanna Kempner, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University who reviewed the complaint for The New York Times. The clashes at Hopkins, she added, reflect this a broader debate in the field on ‘blurring the boundaries between empirical research and spiritual practice’.
Many researchers see it medical promise in the mind-altering power of psilocybin. But so far, it hasn’t outperformed traditional medications in any form of depression comparisons carried out so far. Its potential for treating other conditions, such as addiction and anorexia, is also uncertain. And the jury is still out on whether that is the case mystical experiences are central for the effectiveness of the drug.
“The inferences drawn in the literature as a whole certainly do not follow from the evidence,” says Eiko Fried, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who recently published a book. critical assessment of the field. The drugs also come with unpredictable risks, such as: psychotic episodesincreased suicidality or extensive emotional problemsthat’s most of them probably underreported.
In an email, Johns Hopkins told Dr. Johnson that his allegations were being investigated. A university spokeswoman did not respond to detailed questions for this article, but said the study is “expected to meet the highest standards for research integrity and participant safety.”
Skeptical beginning
In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of studies reported near-miraculous results using hallucinogens to treat alcoholism and depression. Then came the backlash.
Harvard made headlines for firing professors who distributed LSD and psilocybin to students. During the 1971 murder trial of cult leader Charles Manson, a psychiatrist testified that LSD could have made Mr. Manson’s followers more likely to commit murder.
Psychiatric researchers, meanwhile, began to adopt the randomized clinical trials that had revolutionized other fields. Seven controlled clinical trials in the 1960s and 1970s tested The usefulness of LSD in alcohol addiction. Six came back negative.
Dr. Griffiths, who grew up near Berkeley, California, experimented with LSD He later told interviewers during his studies, but that was it skeptical of the claims surrounding it. He was completing his doctoral research in psychopharmacology in 1970 when LSD and psilocybin became illegal, making them more difficult to study.
He set up a laboratory at Johns Hopkins that published renowned studies on caffeine, heroin and other drugs for decades. He didn’t think much about psychedelics until the 1990s, when he started practicing meditation and… read about mystical traditions.
Around that time, a friend introduced him to Bob Jesse, a former technology executive who founded a nonprofit called the Council on Spiritual Practices. Through legal briefs, scientific research, and a book publishing venture, Mr. Jesse advocated the use of hallucinogenic chemicals and plants for the greater good of humanity. Now he wanted to give them the imprimatur of science, as he later said in a conversation.
In 1999, Dr. Griffiths, with funding from Mr. Jesse’s nonprofit organization, to recruit healthy volunteers for an experiment. Mind-altering mushrooms have been used for centuries in religious rituals of various cultures. Can the same kinds of meaningful experiences be generated in a laboratory?
His team distributed flyers in Baltimore: “Looking for individuals committed to spiritual development for a study of states of consciousness.”
Buddha in the mind
Dr.’s laboratory Griffiths looked like a living room, with a sofa, a selection of spiritual and art books and a shelf with a Buddha statue. The idea was to give volunteers “an appreciation for the spiritual states that can awaken,” said Bill Richards, a psychotherapist and former Methodist minister who has worked on several studies.
Dr. Richards delivered the psilocybin pill or a placebo to the participants in a chalice-shaped incense burner from Mexico that Mr. Jesse had given to the team. Neither the researchers nor the participants knew which pill was in the burner.
Wearing an eye mask and headphones, the volunteers were encouraged to lie down on the couch for the drug’s maximum effects, which lasted about five hours. At the end of the session, Dr. Griffiths to document their experiences. “He was just amazed,” said Dr. Richards. “He wanted to hear their story again and again.”
Dr. Griffiths used a ‘mystical experience questionnaire’, which has its origins in a philosophy embraced by novelist and psychedelic enthusiast Aldous Huxley. Volunteers are asked to rate, for example, their sense of “deep humility in the face of the majesty of what was perceived as sacred or holy.”
More than half of the 36 participants in the first Hopkins study had a ‘complete’ mystical experience. Many called it one of the most meaningful of their lives. When the study was published in 2006, four comments of drug researchers rubbished it and praised its accuracy.
In his research into other medications, later Dr. Griffiths saidhe had ‘never seen anything so unique, powerful and lasting’. The results, he said, suggested that “we are ready for this kind of experience.” The Council on Spiritual Practices sent a fundraising letter claiming that the study “uses the science, on which modernity relies, to undermine the secularism of modernity.”
The volunteers were not a random cross-section of the population. In his 2018 book, “How to Change Your Mind,” author Michael Pollan noted that there were no “stone-cold atheists” among the participants, including an energy healer, a former Franciscan monk and an herbalist. Dr. Griffiths was open about this disadvantage of the study. “We were interested in a spiritual effect and initially had a preconception about the condition,” he told Mr Pollan.
Some researchers suspected that the drug induced mystical experiences because the unusual laboratory and questionnaire prepared the volunteers for that outcome. Dr. Richards also conducted some lengthy preparation sessions with volunteers at his home office, he said, to develop trust.
“Roland has not done the kind of research I expected and hoped for,” says Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico. “He simply jumped into the mystical world of experience with both feet.”
Years earlier, Dr. Strassman psilocybin and intravenous DMT, a compound in ayahuasca tea, given to more than fifty volunteers in an austere room. Only one person, a religious studies major, had a mystical experience. In contrast, an architect with an interest in computers reported seeing “the raw bits of reality.” Others thought they had been abducted by aliens.
The drugs “had no inherent spiritual properties,” said Dr. Strassman.
Psychedelic researchers have long recognized that a volunteer’s mindset and the setting in which the session takes place – “set and set”, they call it – are crucial to a subject’s response.
Such expectation effects influence all kinds of clinical trials. Because of the hope of volunteers in a trial, even those who receive a placebo will often show more improvement than those who receive nothing. Some experts have suggested that psychedelics function as… “super placebos” because they increase suggestibility.
Natasha Mason, a psychopharmacologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said that while she understood the aims of the Hopkins researchers, the experimental design had put a thumb on the spiritual scale. “The results of their mystical experiences are very high compared to those of other groups,” she said.
Dr. Richards turned it down such criticism. Psychedelic drugs, he said, open up a state of consciousness that makes religious experiences possible.
“The Buddha is, if you like, in the human mind,” he said. “Whether there’s a statue in the room or not, it doesn’t matter.”