Discover 4

THE CRAB

None of the drug’s history was known to Vincent,

who learned of Griffiths’ cancer patient study

after her adult son read about it online. Here was

something she could do, Vincent thought. She sent

in her name on a long shot and was pleasantly sur-

prised when the Johns Hopkins team got in touch

with her. She flew to Baltimore to meet Griffiths

and his colleagues and to undergo psychological

and physical testing. By this point, fast approach-

ing the life limit she had been given for the disease

six years earlier, Vincent had become definitively

depressed. She had tried almost every natural cure

available, and still her nodes continued to swell,

a constant reminder of her foreshortened future.

“I thought a lot about death and dying,” she says.

“It was so relentless. I remember crossing at an

intersection. A car came toward me. Instinctively

I jumped out of the way, but afterward I wondered

if maybe I should have just stood there.”

Now 59, Vincent was accepted into Griffiths’

double-blind study. She would receive two doses

of psilocybin on two occasions five weeks apart.

One dose would be high and one would be either

high or low. No one would know which was which.

In April 2014, Vincent stepped into a Johns

Hopkins treatment room that researchers had

stripped of its medical veneer and made to look

like a comfortable living room. In doing this, they

were adhering to the idea that set and setting are

paramount for those ingesting psychedelic drugs.

Vincent had two guides who would accompany

her for the duration of her trip. She was not fright-

ened. Her guides, Griffiths’ colleagues, asked her

what her intentions were.

“This is not about just having a good time,” she

said. “My intent is to find ways to deal with my

diagnosis and to recover my normal state of mind

as much as possible.”

To emphasize the noetic quality of the quest,

Griffiths gives his subjects their psilocybin in a

goblet, which he believes further connects the use

of the drug to its ancient roots. Vincent clasped the

goblet coolly. She swallowed the pill. Eventually,

she felt faint. One of her guides suggested that she

lie on the couch, then put headphones and an eye

mask on her.

Through the headphones poured the most

exquisite music Vincent had ever heard — con-

certos and chanting, the music physical, palpable,

lifting her up on crystal crescendos and then drop-

ping her back into dark depths that frightened her

at first. Then colors came and the feeling of space,

deep space, as she faced a massive and monolithic

structure that was dark, impersonal and cold. She

saw a gold shield, a huge black vault, and then

motifs so drenched in stunning color that she wept

for their beauty. Where’s the God? Vincent asked.

Where’s the human? Where’s the connection? She

posed her questions to an endless expanse of space

and at first got no answers.

What she did get, however, was a collage of

images — a fish, a rabbit, a huge pirate ship, a

castle — and then a massive dark force coming

closer and closer. In a moment of pure courage,

Vincent reached out to touch the monstrosity, only

to have it turn soft as fog. As she experienced this,

a superhero in a red cape blew by and, from time

to time, a white cartoon crab made an appearance,

clacking away.

Vincent would later come to understand that the

crab was her cancer. Through the crab, with the

crab, Vincent saw that her illness and death were

not nearly the big deal that she had made them out

to be. “I was told to lighten up a little,” she says.

“To lighten up a lot. I was told to have a sense of

humor; after all, the crab was a cartoon.”

When her trip was over, six hours later, Vincent

was changed. Though personally an atheist, she

had felt connected to something larger than her-

self, “some kind of communal energy,” she says.

She could understand that the world wouldn’t

come to an end just because she did. Her mandate

was to laugh about it. “You die and you say, ‘I’m

here. I’m home. I’m back.’ ” Through psilocybin,

Vincent found a quilt in a corner of the universe,

a safe space she believed she would go to when her

time came.^ D

66 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

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From the book BLUE DREAMS

by Lauren Slater. Copyright

© 2018 by Lauren Slater.

Reprinted by permission

of Little, Brown and

Company New York, NY.

All rights reserved.