How to Change Your Mind

with “the snicker test”: How would your colleagues react when you told
them you were running experiments with LSD? By the mid-1970s,
psychedelics had become something of a scientific embarrassment—not
because they were a failure, but because they had become identified with
the counterculture and with disgraced scientists such as Timothy Leary.
But there was nothing embarrassing about psychedelic research at
Spring Grove in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, and there, it looked
like the future. “We thought this was the most incredible frontier in
psychiatry,” Richards recalls. “We would all sit around the conference
table talking about how we were going to train the hundreds if not
thousands of therapists that would be needed to do this work. (And look,
we’re having the same conversation again today!) There were
international conferences on psychedelic research, and we had colleagues
throughout Europe doing similar work. The field was taking off. But in
the end the societal forces were stronger than we were.”
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared Timothy Leary, a washed-up
psychology professor, “the most dangerous man in America.”
Psychedelics were nourishing the counterculture, and the counterculture
was sapping the willingness of America’s young to fight. The Nixon
administration sought to blunt the counterculture by attacking its
neurochemical infrastructure.
Was the suppression of psychedelic research inevitable? Many of the
researchers I interviewed feel that it might have been avoided had the
drugs not leaped the laboratory walls—a contingency that, fairly or not,
most of them blame squarely on the “antics,” “misbehavior,” and
“evangelism” of Timothy Leary.
Stanislav Grof believes that psychedelics loosed “the Dionysian
element” on 1960s America, posing a threat to the country’s puritan
values that was bound to be repulsed. (He told me he also thinks the
same thing could happen again.) Roland Griffiths points out that ours is
not the first culture to feel threatened by psychedelics: the reason R.
Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico was that
the Spanish had suppressed them so effectively, deeming them dangerous
instruments of paganism.
“That says something important about how reluctant cultures are to
expose themselves to the changes these kinds of compounds can
occasion,” he told me the first time we met. “There is so much authority