psychedelics. (Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist
who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic
compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers. He also was the first to
synthesize MDMA since it had been patented by Merck in 1912 and
forgotten. Recognizing its psychoactive properties, he introduced the so-
called empathogen to the Bay Area’s psychotherapy community. Only
later, did it become the club drug known as Ecstasy.) Jesse also
befriended Huston Smith, the scholar of comparative religion, whose
mind had been opened to the spiritual potential of psychedelics when, as
an instructor/lecturer at MIT in 1962, he served as a volunteer in the
Good Friday Experiment, from which he came away convinced that a
mystical experience occasioned by a drug was no different from any other
kind.
By way of these “elders” and his own reading, Jesse began unearthing
the rich body of first-wave psychedelic research, much of which had been
lost to science. He learned that there had been more than a thousand
scientific papers on psychedelic drug therapy before 1965, involving more
than forty thousand research subjects. Beginning in the 1950s and
continuing into the early 1970s, psychedelic compounds had been used to
treat a variety of conditions—including alcoholism, depression, obsessive-
compulsive disorder, and anxiety at the end of life—frequently with
impressive results. But few of the studies were well controlled by modern
standards, and some of them were compromised by the enthusiasm of the
researchers involved.
Of even keener interest to Bob Jesse was the early research exploring
the potential of psychedelics to contribute to what, in a striking phrase,
he calls “the betterment of well people.” There had been studies in
“healthy normals” of artistic and scientific creativity and spirituality. The
most famous of these was the Good Friday, or Marsh Chapel,
Experiment, conducted in 1962 by Walter Pahnke, a psychiatrist and
minister working on a PhD dissertation at Harvard under Timothy Leary.
In this double-blind experiment, twenty divinity students received a
capsule of white powder during a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel on
the Boston University campus, ten of them containing psilocybin, ten an
“active placebo”—in this case niacin, which creates a tingling sensation.
Eight of the ten students receiving psilocybin reported a powerful
mystical experience, while only one in the control group did. (Telling
frankie
(Frankie)
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