How to Change Your Mind

invited several of the world’s most prominent drug researchers—some of
them decorated soldiers in the drug war—to comment on the study,
giving the journalists covering the study plenty of ideological cover.
All of the commentators treated the publication as a major event.
Herbert D. Kleber, a former deputy to William Bennett, George H. W.
Bush’s drug czar, and later director of the Division on Substance Abuse at
Columbia University, applauded the paper for its methodological rigor
and acknowledged there might be “major therapeutic possibilities” in
psychedelic research “merit[ing] NIH support.” Charles “Bob” Schuster,
who had served two Republican presidents as director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), noted that the term “psychedelic”
implies a mind-expanding experience and expressed his “hope that this
landmark paper will also be ‘field expanding.’” He suggested that this
“fascinating” class of drugs, and the spiritual experience they occasion,
might prove useful in treating addiction.
Griffiths’s paper and its reception served to reinforce an important
distinction between the so-called classical psychedelics—psilocybin, LSD,
DMT, and mescaline—and the more common drugs of abuse, with their
demonstrated toxicity and potential for addiction. The American drug
research establishment, such as it is, had signaled in the pages of one of
its leading journals that these psychedelic drugs deserved to be treated
very differently and had demonstrated, in the words of one commentator,
“that, when used appropriately, these compounds can produce
remarkable, possibly beneficial, effects that certainly deserve further
study.”
The story of how this paper came to be sheds an interesting light on
the fraught relationship between science and that other realm of human
inquiry that science has historically disdained and generally wants
nothing to do with: spirituality. For in designing this, the first modern
study of psilocybin, Griffiths had decided to focus not on a potential
therapeutic application of the drug—the path taken by other researchers
hoping to rehabilitate other banned substances, like MDMA—but rather
on the spiritual effects of the experience on so-called healthy normals.
What good was that?
In an editorial accompanying Griffiths’s paper, the University of
Chicago psychiatrist and drug abuse expert Harriet de Wit tried to
address this tension, pointing out that the quest for experiences that “free