importation of ayahuasca appear to have stopped, at least for the time
being.
With its 2006 decision, the Supreme Court seems to have opened up a
religious path—narrow, perhaps, but firmly rooted in the Bill of Rights—
to the legal recognition of psychedelic drugs, at least when they’re being
used as a sacrament by a religious community. It remains to be seen how
wide or well trod that path will become, but it does make you wonder
what the government, and the Court, will do when an American José
Gabriel da Costa steps forward and attempts to turn his or her own
psychedelic revelations into a new religion intent on using a psychoactive
chemical as its sacrament. The jurisprudence of “cognitive liberty,” as
some in the psychedelic community call it, is still scant and limited (to
religion), but now it had been affirmed, opening a new crack in the edifice
of the drug war.
• • •
OF THE THREE 2006 EVENTS that helped bring psychedelics out of their
decades-long slumber, by far the most far-reaching in its impact was the
publication that summer of the paper in Psychopharmacology described
in the prologue—the one Bob Jesse e-mailed me at the time but that I
didn’t bother to open. This event, too, had a distinctly spiritual cast, even
though the experiment it reported was the work of a rigorous and highly
regarded scientist: Roland Griffiths. It just so happens that Griffiths, a
most unlikely psychedelic researcher, was inspired to investigate the
power of psilocybin to occasion a “mystical-type” experience by a mystical
experience of his own.
Griffiths’s landmark paper, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type
Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and
Spiritual Significance,” was the first rigorously designed, double-blind,
placebo-controlled clinical study in more than four decades—if not ever—
to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic. It received a small
torrent of press coverage, most of it so enthusiastic as to make you
wonder if the moral panic around psychedelics that took hold in the late
1960s might finally have run its course. No doubt the positive tenor of the
coverage owed much to the fact that, at Griffiths’s urging, the journal had