How to Change Your Mind Read online

  “Bob was open-minded to a fault,” she told me, with a laugh. “He would talk to anyone.” Like many people in the NIDA community, Schuster well understood that psychedelics fit awkwardly into the profile of a drug of abuse; animals, given the choice, will not self-administer a psychedelic more than once, and the classical psychedelics exhibit remarkably little toxicity. I asked Johanson if Schuster had ever taken a psychedelic himself; Roland Griffiths had told me he thought it was possible. (“Bob was a jazz musician,” Griffiths told me, “so I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”) But Johanson said no. “He was definitely curious about them,” she told me, “but I think he was too afraid. We were martini people.” I asked if he was a spiritual man. “Not really, though I think he would have liked to have been.”

  Jesse, not quite sure what Schuster would make of the meeting, arranged to have Jim Fadiman bunk with him, instructing Fadiman, a psychologist, to check him out. “Early the next morning Jim found me and said, ‘Bob, mission accomplished. You have found a gem of a human being.’”

  Schuster thoroughly enjoyed his time at Esalen, according to his wife. He took part in a drumming circle Jesse had arranged—you don’t leave Esalen without doing some such thing—and was amazed to discover how easily he could slip into a trance. But Schuster also made some key contributions to the group’s deliberations. He warned Jesse off working with MDMA, which he believed was toxic to the brain and had by then acquired an unsavory reputation as a club drug. He also suggested that psilocybin was a much better candidate for research than LSD, largely for political reasons: because so many fewer people had heard of it, psilocybin carried none of the political and cultural baggage of LSD.

  By the end of the meeting, the Esalen group had settled on a short list of objectives, some of them modest—to draft a code of ethics for spiritual guides—and others more ambitious: “to get aboveboard, unimpeachable research done, at an institution with investigators beyond reproach,” and, ideally, “do this without any pretext of clinical treatment.”

  “We weren’t sure that was possible,” Jesse told me, but he and his colleagues believed “it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens.” Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people’s mental problems than with their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.

  Shortly after the Esalen meeting, Schuster made what would turn out to be his most important contribution: telling Bob Jesse about his old friend Roland Griffiths, whom he described as exactly “the investigator beyond reproach” Jesse was looking for and “a scientist of the first order.”

  “Everything Roland’s done he’s devoted himself to completely,” Jesse recalls Schuster saying, “including his meditation practice. We think it’s changed him.” Griffiths had shared with Schuster his growing dissatisfaction with science and his deepening interest in the kind of “ultimate questions” coming up in his meditation practice. Schuster then made the call to Griffiths telling him about the interesting young man he’d just met at Esalen, explaining that they shared an interest in spirituality, and suggesting they should meet. After an exchange of e-mails, Jesse flew to Baltimore to have lunch with Griffiths in the cafeteria on the Bayview medical campus, inaugurating a series of conversations and meetings that would eventually lead to their collaboration on the 2006 study of psilocybin and mystical experience at Johns Hopkins.

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  • • •

  BUT THERE WAS STILL one missing piece of the puzzle and the scientific team. Most of the drug trials Griffiths had run in the past involved baboons and other nonhuman primates; he had much less clinical experience working with humans and realized he needed a skilled therapist to join the project—a “master clinician,” as he put it. As it happened, Bob Jesse had met a psychologist at a psychedelic conference a few years before who not only filled the bill but lived in Baltimore. Still more fortuitous, this psychologist, whose name was Bill Richards, probably has more experience guiding psychedelic journeys in the 1960s and 1970s than anyone alive, with the possible exception of Stan Grof (with whom he had once worked). In fact, Bill Richards administered the very last legal dose of psilocybin to an American, at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove State Hospital in the spring of 1977. In the decades since, he had been practicing more conventional psychotherapy out of his home in a leafy Baltimore neighborhood called Windsor Hills, biding his time and waiting patiently for the world to come around so that he might work with psychedelics once again.

  “In the big picture,” he told me the first time we met in his home office, “these drugs have been around at least five thousand years, and many times they have surfaced and have been repressed, so this was another cycle. But the mushroom still grows, and eventually this work would come around again. Or so I hoped.” When he got the call from Bob Jesse in 1998, and met Roland Griffiths shortly thereafter, he couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. “It was thrilling.”

  Bill Richards, a preternaturally cheerful man in his seventies, is a bridge between the two eras of psychedelic therapy. Walter Pahnke was the best man at his wedding; he worked closely with Stan Grof at Spring Grove and visited Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York, where Leary landed after his exile from Harvard. Though Richards left the Midwest half a century ago, he’s retained the speech patterns of rural Michigan, where he was born in 1940. Richards today sports a white goatee, laughs with an infectious cackle, and ends many of his sentences with a cheerful, up-spoken “y’know?”

  Richards, who holds graduate degrees in both psychology and divinity, had his first psychedelic experience while a divinity student at Yale in 1963. He was spending the year studying in Germany, at the University of Göttingen, and found himself drawn to the Department of Psychiatry, where he learned about a research project involving a drug called psilocybin.

  “I had no idea what that was, but two friends of mine had participated and had had interesting experiences.” One of them, whose father had been killed in the war, had regressed to childhood to find himself sitting on his father’s lap. The other had hallucinations of SS men marching in the street. “I had never had a decent hallucination,” Richards said with a chuckle, “and I was trying to get some insight into my childhood. In those days, I viewed my own mind as a psychological laboratory, so I decided to volunteer.

  “This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone.” A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the opposite experience. “I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns, losing my usual identity. And all I can say is that the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to be possible. ‘Awe,’ ‘glory,’ and ‘gratitude’ were the only words that remained relevant.”

  Descriptions of such experiences always sound a little thin, at least when compared with the emotional impact people are trying to convey; for a life-transforming event, the words can seem paltry. When I mentioned this to Richards, he smiled. “You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”

  In the middle of his journey, one of the psychiatric residents stopped by the room to look in on Richards, asking him to sit up so he could test his reflexes. As the resident tapped his
patellar tendon with his little rubber hammer, Richards remembers feeling “compassion for the infancy of science. The researchers had no idea what really was happening in my inner experiential world, of its unspeakable beauty or of its potential importance for all of us.” A few days after the experience, Richards returned to the lab and asked, “What was that drug you gave me? How is it spelled?

  “And the rest of my life is footnotes!”

  Yet after several subsequent psilocybin sessions failed to produce another mystical experience, Richards started to wonder if perhaps he had exaggerated that first trip. Some time later, Walter Pahnke arrived at the university, fresh from his graduate work with Timothy Leary at Harvard, and the two became friends. (It was Richards who gave Pahnke his first psychedelic trip while the two were in Germany; he had apparently never taken LSD or psilocybin at Harvard, thinking it might compromise the objectivity of the Good Friday Experiment.) Pahnke suggested Richards try one more time, but in a room with soft lighting, plants, and music and using a higher dose. Once again, Richards had “an incredibly profound experience. I realized I had not exaggerated the first trip but in fact had forgotten 80 percent of it.

  “I have never doubted the validity of these experiences,” Richards told me. “This was the realm of mystical consciousness that Shankara was talking about, that Plotinus was writing about, that Saint John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart were writing about. It’s also what Abraham Maslow was talking about with his ‘peak experiences,’ though Abe could get there without the drugs.” Richards would go on to study psychology under Maslow at Brandeis University. “Abe was a natural Jewish mystic. He could just lie down in the backyard and have a mystical experience. Psychedelics are for those of us who aren’t so innately gifted.”

  Richards emerged from those first psychedelic explorations in possession of three unshakable convictions. The first is that the experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination.

  “You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

  After Richards finished with his graduate studies in the late 1960s, he found work as a research fellow at the Spring Grove State Hospital outside Baltimore, where a most improbable counterfactual history of psychedelic research was quietly unfolding, far from the noise and glare surrounding Timothy Leary. Indeed, this is a case where the force of the Leary narrative has bent the received history out of shape, such that many of us assume there was no serious psychedelic research before Leary arrived at Harvard and no serious research after he was fired. But until Bill Richards administered psilocybin to his last volunteer in 1977, Spring Grove was actively (and without much controversy) conducting an ambitious program of psychedelic research—much of it under grants from the National Institute of Mental Health—with schizophrenics, alcoholics and other addicts, cancer patients struggling with anxiety, 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 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 t
hinks 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 that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

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  • • •

  BY THE MID-1970S, the LSD work at Spring Grove, much of which was state funded, had become a political hot potato in Annapolis. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission investigating the CIA disclosed that the agency had also been running LSD experiments in Maryland, at Fort Detrick, as part of a mind-control project called MK-Ultra. (An internal memo the commission released concisely set forth the agency’s objective: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”) It was revealed that the CIA was dosing both government employees and civilians without their knowledge; at least one person had died. The news that Maryland taxpayers were also supporting research with LSD promptly blew up into a scandal, and pressure to close down psychedelic research at Spring Grove became irresistible.

  “Pretty soon it was just me and two secretaries,” Richards recalls. “And then it was over.”

  Today Roland Griffiths, who would pick up the thread of research that was dropped when the work at Spring Grove ended, marvels at the fact that the first wave of psychedelic research, promising as it was, would end for reasons having nothing to do with science. “We ended up demonizing these compounds. Can you think of another area of science thought to be so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It’s unprecedented in modern science.” So too, perhaps, is the sheer amount of scientific knowledge that was simply erased.