Before his death last 12 months, Roland Griffiths was probably the world’s most famous psychedelics researcher. Since 2006, his work has suggested that psilocybin, present in magic mushrooms, may induce mystic experiences and that these experiences, in turn, might help treat anxiety, depression, addictions, and fear of death.
Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University gained wide recognition amongst scientists and the favored press, and helped bring the psychedelic field out of the deep recesses of the hippie movement of the Sixties. This second wave of research on hallucinogenic compounds strengthened political campaigns to decriminalize them and stimulated investment in biotechnology.
Dr. Griffiths was known to friends and colleagues as an analytical thinker and non secular agnostic, and he warned other researchers against the hype. But he also saw psychedelics as greater than mere drugs: understanding them might be “crucial to the survival of the human species,” he said in a single to speak. Towards the top of his life, he admitted that he had used psychedelics himself and said that he wanted science to assist unlock them. transforming power for humanity.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, he even had the infamous one prophetic role amongst psychonauts, a growing community of psychedelic believers who wish to introduce drugs into mainstream society. Over the years, critics have decried oversize clothing financial AND philosophical influence these supporters within the island research field. And some researchers do he asked quietly or Dr. Griffiths, specializing in mystical landI made several the identical errors that erased the previous era of psychedelic science.
Now one in every of his longtime collaborators is publishing stronger criticism. “Dr. Griffiths conducted his psychedelic research more like a ‘new age’ retreat center, for lack of a better term, than a clinical research laboratory,” says an ethics grievance filed with Johns Hopkins last fall by Matthew Johnson, who worked with Dr. Griffiths for nearly 20 years. years, but resigned after a heated dispute along with his colleagues.
Dr. Griffiths acted as a “spiritual leader,” the grievance said, infusing the research with religious symbolism and steering volunteers toward the end result he desired. He also allowed a few of his longtime donors – supporters of drug legalization – to assist with research, which raises ethical questions.
“These are serious allegations that need to be investigated,” said Joanna Kempner, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University who reviewed the grievance for The New York Times. She added that the fights at Hopkins are a mirror image a broader debate on this field on “blurring the boundaries between empirical research and spiritual practice.”
Many researchers see doctor’s promise within the mind-opening power of psilocybin. But to this point it hasn’t worked any higher than traditional depression medications direct comparison conducted to this point. Its potential to treat other conditions, equivalent to addiction and anorexia, can also be uncertain. And the jury remains to be out on whether mystical experiences are crucial on the effectiveness of the drug.
“Conclusions drawn from all the literature are certainly not based on the evidence,” said Eiko Fried, a psychologist at Leiden University within the Netherlands, who recently published critical review flap. Medicines also carry unpredictable risks, e.g psychotic episodesincreased suicide Or prolonged emotional difficultiesthat are essentially the most quite a few probably underestimated.
In an email, Johns Hopkins informed Dr. Johnson that it was investigating his allegations. A university spokeswoman didn’t reply to specific questions on this text, but said the study “is expected to meet the highest standards for research integrity and participant safety.”
Skeptical beginnings
In the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, a series of studies reported near-miraculous results with using hallucinogens within the treatment of alcoholism and depression. Then got here the response.
Harvard made headlines for firing professors who administered LSD and psilocybin to students. During the 1971 murder trial of cult leader Charles Manson, a psychiatrist testified that LSD could have made Mr. Manson’s followers more more likely to commit murder.
Meanwhile, psychiatric researchers began implementing randomized clinical trials that revolutionized other fields. Seven controlled clinical trials conducted within the Sixties and Seventies tested The use of LSD within the treatment of alcohol addiction. Six tested negative.
Dr. Griffiths, who grew up near Berkeley, California, he experimented with LSD during college, he later told interviewers, however it was true skeptical claims around him. He was completing his doctoral research in psychopharmacology in 1970, when LSD and psilocybin he became illegal, which makes learning difficult.
He founded a lab at Johns Hopkins that published well-regarded research on caffeine, heroin and other drugs for many years. He didn’t think much about psychedelics until the Nineteen Nineties, when he began practicing meditation and examine mystical traditions.
Around this time, a friend introduced him to Bob Jesse, a former technology executive who had founded a nonprofit organization called the Council on Spiritual Practices. Through legal advice, scientific research, and a book publishing enterprise, Mr. Jesse advocated using hallucinogenic chemicals and plants for the greater good of humanity. Now he wanted to provide them the imprimatur of science, as he later stated in to speak.
In 1999, with funding from Mr. Jesse’s nonprofit organization, Dr. Griffiths began recruiting healthy volunteers for the experiment. Mind-altering mushrooms have been used for hundreds of years in religious rituals across cultures. Can the identical sorts of meaningful experiences be induced within the laboratory?
His team distributed leaflets around Baltimore: “Seeking people committed to spiritual development to study states of consciousness.”
Buddha within the mind
Dr. Griffiths’ lab looked like a lounge with a couch, a number of spiritual and art books, and a shelf with a Buddha statue. According to Bill Richards, a psychotherapist and former Methodist minister who worked on many studies, the concept was for volunteers to “appreciate the spiritual states that can be awakened.”
Dr. Richards provided a psilocybin pill or placebo to the participants at a chalice-shaped incense stick from Mexico that Mr. Jesse gave to the team. Neither the researchers nor the participants knew which pill was within the fat burner.
Wearing a watch mask and headphones, volunteers were encouraged to lie on a couch to acquire the utmost effects of the drug, which lasted for about five hours. At the top of the session, Dr. Griffiths got here in to document his experiences. “He was just amazed,” Dr. Richards said. “He wanted to hear their stories over and over again.”
Dr. Griffiths used the “Mystical Experience Questionnaire”, which has its roots in: philosophy a supporter of the novelist and psychedelic enthusiast Aldous Huxley. For example, he asks volunteers to rate their sense of “deep humility before the majesty of what was considered sacred.”
More than half of the 36 participants in Hopkins’ first study had a “full” mystical experience. Many considered it probably the most significant events of their lives. When test was published in 2006, 4 comments Drug investigators ran alongside him, praising his rigorousness.
In his research on other drugs, Dr. Griffiths later he said“he had never seen something so unique, powerful and lasting.” The results, he said, suggest that “we are hard-wired for these kinds of experiences.” The Council for Spiritual Practices sent a fundraising letter claiming that the study “uses science trusted by modernity to undermine its secularism.”
The volunteers weren’t a random cross-section of the population. In his 2018 book “How to Change Your Mind,” writer Michael Pollan noted that there have been no “hard-core atheists” among the many participants, who included an energy healer, a former Franciscan monk and a herbalist. Dr. Griffiths spoke openly about this flaw within the study. “We were interested in the spiritual effect, and initially we distorted it,” he told Mr. Pollan.
Some researchers suspected that the drug caused mystical experiences because the bizarre laboratory and questionnaire had prepared volunteers for such an end result. Dr. Richards also conducted several lengthy preparation sessions with volunteers in his home office to construct trust, he said.
“Roland did not do the research I expected and hoped for,” said Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist on the University of New Mexico. “He just jumped in with both feet into the world of mystical experiences.”
Years earlier, Dr. Strassman administered psilocybin and intravenously DMT, a compound present in ayahuasca tea, to greater than 50 volunteers in an austere room. Only one person, a spiritual studies graduate, had a mystical experience. In turn, an architect fascinated about computers said he saw “raw fragments of reality.” Others thought they’d been abducted by aliens.
The drugs “did not have any spiritual properties,” Dr. Strassman said.
Psychedelic researchers have long recognized that the attitude of the volunteer and the setting wherein the session takes place…setting and setting” as they call it, are crucial to the topic’s response.
Such expectation effects affect all sorts of clinical trials. Because of the volunteers’ hopes for the study, even those that received a placebo often show greater improvement than those that received nothing. Some experts suggest that psychedelics work as “super placebo” because they’re increasing suggestiveness.
Natasha Mason, a psychopharmacologist at Maastricht University within the Netherlands, stated that while she understood the goals of the Hopkins researchers, the experimental design placed a thumbs down on the spiritual scale. “The results of their mystical experiences are very high compared to other groups,” she said.
Dr. Richards declined such criticism. Psychedelic drugs, he said, open a state of consciousness that permits for religious experiences.
“The Buddha, if you will, is in the human mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether there’s a statue in the room or not.”
