ANDRÉ CHUNGAN EPIDURAL FOR DEATH?
Eventually, when she was near the point of sur-
rendering hope entirely, it would return in the
form of Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacolo-
gist and professor of behavioral biology at Johns
Hopkins University. Griffiths was in the middle of
an experiment that involved giving psilocybin, the
active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, to
51 end-stage cancer patients in an effort to allevi-
ate their fear of death.
Psilocybin, along with LSD, a similar hallucino-
genic, is in a class of drugs known as psychedelics.
As opposed to psychotropic drugs, whose primary
function is to alter the mood or function of the
brain, the main action of psychedelics is to change
actual perception or cognition, bringing the brain
somewhere beyond ordinary consciousness.
Known for his meticulous research methodolo-
gies, Griffiths also maintains a rigorous practice
of meditation that he began about two decades
ago. His meditation eventually caused a swerve
in his thinking, and this stern scientist began
to meander and muse. He started to wonder about
wonder itself. And from that wondering grew
his interest in psilocybin and its effects on the
human psyche.
Shifting his laboratory focus away from animals
and drugs of abuse, Griffiths homed in on psyche-
delics. In 2006, he published his landmark study,
straightforwardly titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion
Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial
and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual
Significance.”
The idea and the experiment were not new, of
course. The novelist Aldous Huxley first tried
psychedelics in the early 1950s and famouslycontinued ingesting them to the very end. In 1963,
dying of laryngeal cancer and unable to speak, he
made a written request of his wife to inject him
with LSD on his deathbed so that he could leave
this world in a psychedelic swirl of stars. What
Huxley wanted, and what the work of Griffiths
could realize, is for death to be less of a physiologi-
cal process and more of a spiritual one.
Around the time of Huxley’s death, an anesthe-
siologist at the Chicago Medical School namedEric Kast was finding normal analgesics insuf-
ficient for managing the most intense pain of his
dying patients. He decided to explore whether
LSD might be an effective alternative. In a study
published in 1964, he compared the analgesic
properties of Demerol and Dilaudid with those
of LSD. The subjects of the study were 50 people
suffering from various severe cancers, gangrene
of the feet and legs, and a single case of shingles.
Kast’s statistical analysis showed that LSD proved
superior to the more common analgesics. On LSD,
patients not only developed “a peculiar disregard”
for their suffering and for the seriousness of their
situations, but also they discussed their death more
freely and with considerably less fear.THE ORIGINAL MAGIC MUSHROOMS
Kast and Huxley were among the earliest modern
psychedelic pioneers, but they were not the ones to
bring into popular use the drug that would eventu-
ally help Carol Vincent and so many others. That
honor belongs to R. Gordon Wasson, a public
relations executive for J.P. Morgan & Co. and an
amateur ethnomycologist — someone who stud-
ies the historical uses and sociological impact of
mushrooms. As a businessman who wore a pressed
suit to work every day, he was hardly a likely can-
didate for the job of mushroom messenger. In fact,
up until his honeymoon, Wasson had hated mush-
rooms, calling them toadstools or “excrescences.”
His Russian-born wife, however, convinced him of
their majesty and beauty.
Wasson had heard stories of magic mushroom
ceremonies in Mexico that supposedly occurred
only under the cover of darkness and were led by
a sacred shaman. Research revealed to Wassonand his wife that when Hernán Cortés overtook
Mexico, he discovered the Aztecs were using dif-
ferent kinds of mushrooms in their religious rites,
calling the plants teonanacatl, “God’s flesh.” Were
they purely a plant of the past, or did they still
exist? On June 29, 1955, Wasson and his friend
Allan Richardson traveled to a remote Mexican
village in Oaxaca, in the Mixteca region, in search
of teonanacatl. Wasson wrote a Life magazine
story about it two years later.62 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
Roland Griffiths started to
wonder about wonder itself.
And from that wondering grew
his interest in psilocybin and its
effects on the human psyche.