in chapter one. Unlike the Concord Prison Experiment, the “Miracle at
Marsh Chapel,” as it became known, made a good faith effort to honor the
conventions of the controlled, double-blind psychology experiment.
Neither the investigators nor the subjects—twenty divinity students—
were told who had gotten the drug and who had gotten the placebo,
which was active. The Good Friday study was far from perfect; Pahnke
suppressed the fact that one subject freaked out and had to be sedated.
Yet Pahnke’s main conclusion—that psilocybin can reliably occasion a
mystical experience that is “indistinguishable from, if not identical with,”
the experiences described in the literature—still stands and helped to
inspire the current wave of research, particularly at Johns Hopkins,
where it was replicated (roughly speaking) in 2006.
But most of the credit for the Good Friday Experiment rightfully
belongs to Walter Pahnke, not Timothy Leary, who was critical of its
design from the start; he had told Pahnke it was a waste of time to use a
control group or a placebo. “If we learned one thing from that
experience,” Leary later wrote, “it was how foolish it was to use a double-
blind experiment with psychedelics. After five minutes, no one’s fooling
anyone.”
• • •
BY NOW, Leary had pretty much lost interest in doing science; he was
getting ready to trade the “psychology game” for what he would call the
“guru game.” (Perhaps Leary’s most endearing character trait was never
to take himself too seriously—even as a guru.) It had become clear to him
that the spiritual and cultural import of psilocybin and LSD far
outweighed any therapeutic benefit to individuals. As with Hubbard and
Huxley and Osmond before him, psychedelics had convinced Leary that
they had the power not just to heal people but to change society and save
humankind, and it was his mission to serve as their prophet. It was as
though the chemicals themselves had hit upon a brilliant scheme for their
own proliferation, by colonizing the brains of a certain type of
charismatic and messianic human.
“We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard,” Leary later
wrote about this period, “believing that it was a time (after the shallow,