University research with entheogens (roughly, God-evoking
substances such as peyote and sacred mushrooms) has
returned. The field of study includes pharmacology,
psychology, creativity enhancement, and spirituality. To
explore the possibility of participating in confidential
entheogen research projects, call 1-888-585-8870, toll free.
http://www.csp.org.Not long after, Bill Richards and Mary Cosimano, a social worker and
school guidance counselor Richards recruited to help him guide
psychedelic sessions, administered the first legal dose of psilocybin to an
American in twenty-two years. In the years since, the Hopkins team has
conducted more than three hundred psilocybin sessions, working in a
variety of populations, including healthy normals, long-term and novice
meditators, cancer patients, smokers seeking to break their habit, and
religious professionals. I was curious to get the volunteer’s-eye view of
the experience from all these types, but especially from that first cohort of
healthy normals, partly because they were participants in a study that
would turn out to be historically important and partly because I figured
they would be the most like, well, me. What is it like to have a legally
sanctioned, professionally guided, optimally comfortable high-dose
psilocybin experience?
Yet the volunteers in the first experiments were not exactly like me,
because at the time I doubt I would have read past “Interested in the
Spiritual Life?” There were no stone-cold atheists in the original group,
and interviews with nearly a dozen of them suggested many if not most of
them came into the study with spiritual leanings to one degree or
another. There was an energy healer, a man who’d done the whole Iron
John trip, a former Franciscan friar, and an herbalist. There was also a
physicist with an interest in Zen and a philosophy professor with an
interest in theology. Roland Griffiths acknowledged, “We were interested
in a spiritual effect and were biasing the condition initially [in that
direction].”
That said, Griffiths went to great lengths in the design of the study to
control for “expectancy effects.” In part this owed to Griffiths’s skepticism
that a drug could occasion the same kind of mystical experience he had
had in his meditation: “This is all truth to Bill and hypothesis to me. So