the DEA. (Many of Griffiths’s Hopkins colleagues were skeptical of the
proposal, worried psychedelic research might jeopardize federal funding;
one told me there were “people in the Department of Psychiatry and the
broader institution who questioned the work, because this class of
compounds carries a lot of baggage from the ’60s.”)
“We had faith that the people on all these committees would be good
scientists,” Richards told me. “And with luck maybe a few of them had
tried mushrooms in college!” Roland Griffiths became the principal
investigator of the trial, Bill Richards became the clinical director, and
Bob Jesse continued to work behind the scenes.
“I can vividly remember the first session I ran after that long twenty-
two-year hiatus,” Richards recalled. He and I were together in the session
room at Hopkins; I was sitting on the couch where the volunteers lie
down during their journeys, and Richards was in the chair where he has
now sat and guided more than a hundred psilocybin journeys since 1999.
The room feels more like a den or living room than a room in a
laboratory, with a plush sofa, vaguely spiritual paintings on the walls, a
sculpture of the Buddha on a side table, and shelves holding a giant stone
mushroom and various other nondenominational spiritual artifacts, as
well as the small chalice in which the volunteers receive their pills.
“This guy is lying on the couch right there where you are, with tears
streaming down his face, and I’m thinking, how absolutely beautiful and
meaningful this experience is. How sacred. How can this ever have been
illegal? It’s as if we made entering Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums,
or sunsets!
“I honestly never knew if this would happen again in my lifetime. And
look at where we are now: the work at Hopkins has been going on now for
fifteen years—five years longer than Spring Grove.”
• • •
IN 1999, an odd but intriguing advertisement began appearing in weeklies
in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area, under the headline
“Interested in the Spiritual Life?”