HOW MUCH SHOULD THE AUTHENTICITY of these experiences concern us?
Most of the therapists involved in the research take a scrupulously
pragmatic view of the question. They’re fixed on relieving their patients’
suffering and exhibit scant interest in metaphysical theories or questions
of truth. “That’s above my pay grade,” Tony Bossis said with a shrug when
I asked him whether he thought the experiences of cosmic consciousness
described by his patients were fictive or real. Asked the same question,
Bill Richards cited William James, who suggested we judge the mystical
experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by “its fruits”:
Does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?
Many researchers acknowledge that a strong placebo effect may be at
work when a drug as suggestible as psilocybin is administered by medical
professionals with legal and institutional sanction: under such
conditions, the expectations of the therapist are much more likely to be
fulfilled by the patient. (And bad trips are much less likely to occur.) Here
we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials: while it
succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of
science, its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that
leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can
explain. Science is being used to validate an experience that would appear
to undermine the scientific perspective in what might be called White-
Coat Shamanism.
Are questions of truth important, if the therapy helps people who are
suffering? I had difficulty finding anyone involved in the research who
was troubled by such questions. David Nichols, the retired Purdue
University chemist and pharmacologist who founded the Heffter
Research Institute in 1993 to support psychedelic research (including the
trials at Hopkins, for which he synthesized the psilocybin), puts the
pragmatic case most baldly. In a 2014 interview with Science magazine,
he said, “If it gives them peace, if it helps people to die peacefully with
their friends and their family at their side, I don’t care if it’s real or an
illusion.”
For his part, Roland Griffiths acknowledges that “authenticity is a
scientific question not yet answered. All we have to go by is the
phenomenology”—that is, what people tell us about their internal
experiences. That’s when he began querying me about my own spiritual
frankie
(Frankie)
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