oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for
universal truths and enlightenment” is an abiding element of our
humanity that has nevertheless “enjoyed little credibility in the
mainstream scientific world.” The time had come, she suggested, for
science “to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences . . . even
if they sometimes involve claims about ultimate realities that lie outside
the purview of science.”
• • •
ROLAND GRIFFITHS might be the last scientist one would ever imagine
getting mixed up with psychedelics, which surely helps explain his
success in returning psychedelic research to scientific respectability. Six
feet tall and rail thin, Griffiths, in his seventies, holds himself bolt
upright; the only undisciplined thing about him is a thatch of white hair
so dense it appears to have held his comb to a draw. At least until you get
him talking about the ultimate questions, which light him up, he comes
across as the ultimate straight arrow: sober, earnest, and methodical.
Born in 1944, Griffiths grew up in El Cerrito, California, in the Bay
Area, and went to Occidental College for his undergraduate education
(majoring in psychology) and then on to the University of Minnesota to
study psychopharmacology. At Minnesota in the late 1960s, he came
under the influence of B. F. Skinner, the radical behaviorist who helped
shift the focus of psychology from the exploration of inner states and
subjective experience to the study of outward behavior and how it is
conditioned. Behaviorism has little interest in plumbing the depths of the
human psyche, but the approach proved very useful in studying behaviors
like drug use and dependence, which became Griffiths’s specialty.
Psychedelic drugs played no role in either his formal or his informal
education. By the time Griffiths got to graduate school, Timothy Leary’s
notorious psychedelic research project at Harvard had already collapsed
in scandal, and “it was clear from my mentors that these were compounds
that had no future.”
In 1972, right out of graduate school, Griffiths was hired at Johns
Hopkins, where he has worked ever since, making his mark as a
researcher studying the mechanisms of dependence in a variety of legal