religious and mental health professionals, and patients with severe
personality disorders. Several hundred patients and volunteers received
psychedelic therapy at Spring Grove between the early 1960s and the
mid-1970s. In many cases, the researchers were getting very good results
in well-designed studies that were being regularly published in peer-
reviewed journals such as JAMA and the Archives of General Psychiatry.
(Roland Griffiths is of the opinion that much of this research is “suspect,”
but Richards told me, “These studies weren’t as bad as people like Roland
might imply.”) It is remarkable just how much of the work being done
today, at Hopkins and NYU and other places, was prefigured at Spring
Grove; indeed, it is hard to find a contemporary experiment with
psychedelics that wasn’t already done in Maryland in the 1960s or 1970s.
At least at the beginning, the Spring Grove psychedelic work enjoyed
lots of public support. In 1965, CBS News broadcast an admiring hour-
long “special report” on the hospital’s work with alcoholics, called LSD:
The Spring Grove Experiment. The response to the program was so
positive that the Maryland state legislature established a multimillion-
dollar research facility on the campus of the Spring Grove State Hospital,
called the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Stan Grof, Walter
Pahnke, and Bill Richards were hired to help run it, along with several
dozen other therapists, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, and support staff.
Equally hard to believe today is the fact that, as Richards told me,
“whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD
sessions as part of their training to do the work. We had authorization!
How else could you be sensitive to what was going on in the mind of the
patient? I wish we could do that at Hopkins.”
The fact that such an ambitious research program continued at Spring
Grove well into the 1970s suggests the story of the suppression of
psychedelic research is a little more complicated than the conventional
narrative would indicate. While it is true that some research projects—
such as Jim Fadiman’s creativity trials in Palo Alto—received orders from
Washington to stop, other projects on long-term grants were allowed to
continue until the money ran out, as it eventually did. Rather than shut
down all research, as many in the psychedelic community believe
happened, the government simply made it more difficult to get approvals,
and funding gradually dried up. As time went on, researchers found that
on top of all the bureaucratic and financial hurdles they also had to deal
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(Frankie)
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