How to Change Your Mind

Hopkins office, “but I figured that was a long way off in the future.” Yet
soon after Johnson arrived at Johns Hopkins to do a pharmacology
postdoc in 2004, “I found out that Roland had this super hush-hush
project with psilocybin. Everything lined up perfectly.”
Johnson worked on the lab’s early psilocybin studies, serving as a
guide for several dozen sessions and helping to crunch the data, before
launching a study of his own in 2009. The smoking study gave fifteen
volunteer smokers who were trying to quit several sessions of cognitive
behavioral therapy followed by two or three doses of psilocybin. A so-
called open-label study, there was no placebo, so they all knew they were
getting the drug. Volunteers had to stop smoking before their psilocybin
session; they had their carbon-monoxide levels measured at several
intervals to ensure compliance and confirm they remained abstinent.
The study was tiny and not randomized, but the results were
nevertheless striking, especially when you consider that smoking is one of
the most difficult addictions to break—harder, some say, than heroin. Six
months after their psychedelic sessions, 80 percent of the volunteers
were confirmed as abstinent; at the one-year mark, that figure had fallen
to 67 percent, which is still a better rate of success than the best
treatment now available. (A much larger randomized study, comparing
the effectiveness of psilocybin therapy with the nicotine patch, is
currently under way.) As in the cancer-anxiety studies, the volunteers
who had the most complete mystical experiences had the best outcomes;
they were, like Charles Bessant, able to quit smoking.
After interviewing cancer patients confronted with the prospect of
death, people who had had epic journeys in which they confronted their
cancers and traveled to the underworld, I wondered how the experience
would compare when the stakes were lower: What kinds of journeys
would ordinary people simply hoping to break a bad habit have, and what
kinds of insights would they return with?
Surprisingly banal, it turns out. Not that their journeys were banal—
psilocybin transported them all over the world and through history and to
outer space—but the insights they brought back with them were mundane
in the extreme. Alice O’Donnell, a sixtyish book editor born in Ireland,
reveled “in the freedom to go everywhere” in the course of her journey.
She grew feathers that allowed her to travel back in time to various scenes
of European history, died three times, watched her “soul move from her