changed him.” Griffiths had shared with Schuster his growing
dissatisfaction with science and his deepening interest in the kind of
“ultimate questions” coming up in his meditation practice. Schuster then
made the call to Griffiths telling him about the interesting young man
he’d just met at Esalen, explaining that they shared an interest in
spirituality, and suggesting they should meet. After an exchange of e-
mails, Jesse flew to Baltimore to have lunch with Griffiths in the cafeteria
on the Bayview medical campus, inaugurating a series of conversations
and meetings that would eventually lead to their collaboration on the
2006 study of psilocybin and mystical experience at Johns Hopkins.
• • •
BUT THERE WAS STILL one missing piece of the puzzle and the scientific
team. Most of the drug trials Griffiths had run in the past involved
baboons and other nonhuman primates; he had much less clinical
experience working with humans and realized he needed a skilled
therapist to join the project—a “master clinician,” as he put it. As it
happened, Bob Jesse had met a psychologist at a psychedelic conference a
few years before who not only filled the bill but lived in Baltimore. Still
more fortuitous, this psychologist, whose name was Bill Richards,
probably has more experience guiding psychedelic journeys in the 1960s
and 1970s than anyone alive, with the possible exception of Stan Grof
(with whom he had once worked). In fact, Bill Richards administered the
very last legal dose of psilocybin to an American, at the Maryland
Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove State Hospital in the spring
of 1977. In the decades since, he had been practicing more conventional
psychotherapy out of his home in a leafy Baltimore neighborhood called
Windsor Hills, biding his time and waiting patiently for the world to
come around so that he might work with psychedelics once again.
“In the big picture,” he told me the first time we met in his home
office, “these drugs have been around at least five thousand years, and
many times they have surfaced and have been repressed, so this was
another cycle. But the mushroom still grows, and eventually this work
would come around again. Or so I hoped.” When he got the call from Bob