them apart was not difficult, rendering the double blind a somewhat
hollow conceit: those on the placebo sat sedately in their pews while the
others lay down or wandered about the chapel, muttering things like
“God is everywhere” and “Oh, the Glory!”) Pahnke concluded that the
experiences of those who received the psilocybin were “indistinguishable
from, if not identical with,” the classic mystical experiences reported in
the literature. Huston Smith agreed. “Until the Good Friday Experiment,”
he told an interviewer in 1996, “I had had no direct personal encounter
with God.”
In 1986, Rick Doblin conducted a follow-up study of the Good Friday
Experiment in which he tracked down and interviewed all but one of the
divinity students who received psilocybin at Marsh Chapel. Most reported
that the experience had reshaped their lives and work in profound and
enduring ways. However, Doblin found serious flaws in Pahnke’s
published account: Pahnke had failed to mention that several subjects
had struggled with acute anxiety during their experience. One had to be
restrained and given an injection of Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic,
after he fled from the chapel and headed down Commonwealth Avenue,
convinced he had been chosen to announce the news of the coming of the
Messiah.
In this and a second review of another Timothy Leary–supervised
experiment, of recidivism at Concord State Prison, Doblin had raised
troubling questions about the quality of the research done in the Harvard
Psilocybin Project, suggesting that the enthusiasm of the experimenters
had tainted the reported results. If this research were going to be revived
and taken seriously, Jesse concluded, it would have to be done with
considerably more rigor and objectivity. And yet the results of the Good
Friday Experiment were highly suggestive and, as Bob Jesse and Roland
Griffiths would soon decide, well worth trying to reproduce.
• • •
BOB JESSE SPENT the early 1990s excavating the knowledge about
psychedelics that had been lost when formal research was halted and
informal research went underground. In this, he was a little like those
Renaissance scholars who rediscovered the lost world of classical thought