Blue Dreams

by Lauren Slater

  Critics of psilocybin and other psychedelics claim that a mystical experience inspired by these agents is a dishonest shortcut to nirvana. They call the phenomenon “chemical mysticism”—not of equal value to an enlightened state achieved, say, through days of fasting or hours of meditation and prayer. The idea that one can pop a pill and touch God was and is distasteful to people who believe that true mysticism is achieved only by a lifetime of pious behavior and service to the divine. Those who adopt this viewpoint are also wary of scientists deciding what is or isn’t a mystical experience, a determination that they claim should be made by theologians, ministers, rabbis, or priests.

  But the counterargument points out that psychedelic plants have been used for centuries to facilitate communication with worlds beyond our own and are themselves part of a sacred circle which is not a shortcut but rather an aperture we go through with careful, meaningful preparation and a sense of awe. From this perspective, taking the psychedelic is itself a sacrament that allows users to touch the numinous, the transcendent, the very face and body of the divine. In fact, some scholars have even argued that psychedelic plants may be at the root of all religions, may be the very reason why they exist in the first place. Imagine primitive Homo sapiens ingesting psychedelic plants, something they in all likelihood did, and seeing visions for which they had no explanation except that there must be a world beyond our world, a sacred spot that demanded our respect. Perhaps from these experiences they deemed necessary a life of prayer and piousness alongside a palpable belief in divinity.

  Timothy Leary was among the scholars who believed that psilocybin and other psychedelics gave rise to valid mystical experiences that could radically revise mind and body, belief and behavior. While carrying out research at Harvard from 1961 to 1963, he tested psilocybin on thirty-two prisoners in the nearby Concord State Penitentiary who had volunteered for the experiment. Leary’s goal was to see whether the drug would reduce rates of recidivism once inmates were released. In this experiment the drug was given to the inmates in group therapy sessions, over a period of months, so that each prisoner had several psychedelic experiences. Leary and his colleagues, in an attempt to disassemble the rigid hierarchy that defines prison life, took the psilocybin along with the prisoners and conducted the sessions while under the influence. The result was that prisoners who received psychedelic group psychotherapy did indeed have markedly lower rates of recidivism than their non-drugged counterparts.

  There was, for instance, the case of S., a forty-eight-year-old man whom Leary described as a hardened criminal, having spent a total of fourteen years behind bars, a hulking man who had devoted years to larceny, fraud, drunkenness, and an assortment of other petty misdemeanors and felonies. Under the influence of psilocybin, however, S. experienced waves of sadness washing over him, and he seemed to soften. For the first time he turned almost tender, seeing his life as it was—wasted, with so much time lost to lockup. “Out of the shell of a hardened criminal,” wrote Leary, “emerged a sensitive lonely child-like human being.” When S. was released from prison some weeks later, he found himself disoriented but nevertheless managed to get a job on a construction crew and was later promoted to foreman. Eventually, S. opened an auto body shop. At the time of Leary’s writing, it had been two years, and S. had not gone back to prison.

  It must be noted that Doblin found flaws in Leary’s study similar to the ones he pursued in Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment. Still, Leary’s psilocybin study is undoubtedly the inspiration for a current study taking place in a Brazilian rainforest where prisoners—men who have committed murder, rape, child molestation—are brought to participate in a ceremony that involves drinking ayahuasca tea. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogen, a mind-bending, mind-blowing chemical that researchers are hoping will transform hardened criminals into reflective, responsible citizens. “I’m finally realizing I was on the wrong path in this life,” one prisoner told a reporter in 2015. “Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness.”

  Of all the intellectuals who investigated the psychedelics, Huston Smith, the renowned scholar of religious studies who chaired MIT’s philosophy department during the turbulent 1960s, is the one who perhaps best found the middle ground between critics of chemical mysticism and supporters of psychedelic journeys. Smith himself had many psychedelic-inspired mystical experiences and did not doubt their authenticity, but he stressed that set and setting were critical to the outcome. There is a huge difference, he pointed out, between someone who has prepped deeply for her session, who goes into it with intention and the true desire to quest, who has questions she can pose to the drug, and the person who imbibes LSD tossed into the punchbowl at a party. In many ways it was Smith who laid the groundwork for Doblin and Griffiths and the other researchers who would return to the psychedelics a generation later.

  The Drug War, Finally Fading

  Though researchers are bringing psychedelics back into their various fields of study these days, it is difficult for us to imagine, given the paucity of psychedelics in a post–War on Drugs world, how freely available they were in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, so freely available, in fact, that they eventually leached out of the laboratories and into the streets of a culture undergoing seismic shifts. The drugs became part of protests and alternative lifestyles, eventually causing the Nixon administration, in October 1970, to sign the Controlled Substances Act, making all psychedelics illegal. The DEA put them on Schedule 1, reserved for the highest-risk drugs with the most severe penalties attached, effectively erasing these substances not only from the culture but also from science. Indeed Richard Nixon once famously called Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” There were exceptions, and for a short time researchers like Grof were still able to obtain funding for psychedelic studies, but it was with such increasing difficulty that by the mid-1970s all research had come to a halt, and the fecund body of knowledge gleaned from the psychedelic work done by Grof, Pahnke, Leary, Kast, and others got buried and eventually all but lost to memory.

  It is only in recent years, with the War on Drugs finally fading, that a new group of scientists are lifting the lid and peering at past work to draw inspiration and design from those pioneers. Almost five decades after the Nixon administration put the kibosh on psychedelic studies, there is something of a rebirth going on both in the United States and abroad. Research is taking place at several universities, among them Johns Hopkins, New York University, UCLA, Imperial College London, and the University of Zurich, but permission remains hard to obtain because psychedelics are stained by the excesses of the 1960s, a fact that makes both the scientists and their respective governments extremely cautious. Charles Grob of UCLA, along with Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, John Halpern of McLean Hospital, and Stephen Ross of New York University, make up a group of researchers unearthing the studies of yesteryear, dusting them off and putting them back into practice, returning to buried roots where the results are intact and ready to be built on. “It feels a little bit like Rip Van Winkle,” Grob says, and indeed it seems so, as reams of studies rife with tantalizing suggestions that have been locked away are finally beginning to be reopened. “It is enormously exciting to find what is, in essence, a treasure trove of information from the past,” Grob continues. “At the same time we want to be very careful. We don’t want to be associated with flower power. We want to be seen as serious scientists.”

  The goal of these recent end-of-life psilocybin experiments is to determine whether it is possible to reduce or even remove the fear of dying in end-stage cancer patients and perhaps, in future years, in healthy subjects as well. Grob, who calls psilocybin “existential medicine,” envisions treatment centers where the dying could go to get psilocybin administered safely and therapeutically. Rick Doblin, however, finds that use of the drug too limiting. “Why confine this to just the dying?” he asks. “This powerful intervention could be used with young adults who could then reap the benefits of it much earlier.�
� He’s referring to the fact that subjects who have undergone psilocybin treatment report an increased appreciation for the time they have left, a deeper awareness of their roles in the cycle of life, and an increased motivation to invest their days with meaning. “Imagine allowing young adults, who have their whole lives in front of them, access to this kind of therapy,” Doblin says. “Imagine the kind of lives they could then create.”

  A Complete Mystical Experience

  As for Griffiths, he was undoubtedly influenced by Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment; in some ways his first psilocybin experiment is a continuation of Pahnke’s work. In a 2006 study, Griffiths recruited thirty-six healthy adult volunteers, none of whom had ever taken a psychedelic before. All of the volunteers did two sessions; they got psilocybin in one session and a placebo in the other. In an attempt to correct for the failure of Pahnke’s double-blind design, Griffiths opted for an active placebo that contained Ritalin, a strong stimulant usually used to treat attention deficit disorder. Sixty-one percent of Griffiths’s subjects had a “complete mystical experience” during the psilocybin session, compared with only 11 percent during the placebo session. Furthermore, on a questionnaire completed two months after the experiment, many of these volunteers ranked the psilocybin experience as among the most meaningful in their lives, with fully two-thirds of them including it in the top five most spiritually significant events in their lives, and about 15 percent rating the encounter at an absolute peak, the most meaningful thing they had ever experienced.

  At a fourteen-month follow-up these rankings shifted only slightly, and Griffiths also found sustained positive changes in personality. This is especially notable, as many psychologists believe that the basics of personality are firmly set by early adulthood and unamenable to change. Some people are risk-averse, others have an openness to new experiences, and the general belief has been that these tendencies, being hard to overcome, lead people to live their lives within the boundaries of their basic traits. These experiments with psilocybin throw this assumption into question, however. Fourteen months after ingesting the drug, those who had had profound mystical encounters had also undergone significant increases in their openness, which is one of the five personality domains that researchers believe are unchangeable but, according to Griffiths’s work, actually is not.

  Apparently, then, psychedelics can loosen the bonds that hold us in place. Psychedelics can stretch and even snap our tightest tethers. Becoming more open has profound implications for a person. It permits him to take more meaningful risks. It widens the circle of possible relationships, allows for creativity, increases empathy, and makes “the other” less of a foreigner and more of a friend. Thus it is fair to say that Griffiths’s healthy psilocybin subjects were changed in lasting, profound, and positive ways. Griffiths, who has unabashedly said he can’t think of anything more important to be studying, considers the implications far-reaching:

  The core feature of the mystical experience is this strong sense of the interconnectedness of all things, where there’s a rising sense not only of self-confidence and clarity, but of communal responsibility, of altruism and social justice, a felt sense of the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And those kinds of sensibilities are at the core of all the world’s religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions. Understanding the nature of these effects, and their consequences, may be the key to the survival of our species.

  So if psilocybin can reliably induce these life-altering experiences, why have the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have taken magic mushrooms recreationally not had this profound experience? Grob explains that in addition to the carefully controlled setting of these studies and the opportunity to process the experience with the researchers, the subjects are primed for transcendence before they even take the drug. “Unlike the recreational user, we process the experience ahead of time,” Grob says. “We make it very clear up front that the hoped-for outcome is therapeutic, that they’ll have less anxiety, less depression, and a greater acceptance of death.” Subjects, in other words, intend to have a transformative experience.

  For all the convincing eloquence of these explanations, however, something feels fuzzy about a phenomenon in which a cancer-ridden patient takes a pill and overcomes her fear of death not just for the moment but for all the weeks and months that follow. A recent British study can help us understand what might be happening here. In this study, David J. Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London, and others on his team used an MRI to scan the brains of healthy volunteers dosed on psilocybin in order to “capture the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state.” The researchers found that the states of unrestrained consciousness that accompany the ingestion of psilocybin are associated with a deactivation of regions of the brain that integrate our senses and our perception of self. In depressed people, Nutt explains, one of those regions, the anterior cingulate cortex, is overactive, and psilocybin may work to shut it down. In 2016 Nutt and associated researchers dosed twelve treatment-resistant depressives with psilocybin. Each subject had been depressed for about eighteen years on average and had failed to respond to standard interventions like SSRIs and electroconvulsive therapy. Within a week after taking the psilocybin, every single patient had experienced substantial improvements in his or her depressive symptoms, and after three months, five of the twelve subjects had enjoyed a complete remission.

  Perhaps the patients in these various studies are able to capture enduring benefits from psilocybin precisely because they are processing their drug experiences again and again with research staff and, in doing so, changing the way their brains encode positive memories. The phenomenon might be similar to how other memories work: when we remember something sweet-smelling, the olfactory neurons in our brain start to stir; when we remember running, our motor cortex begins to buzz. If this is the case with psilocybin as well, then merely recalling the trip could resurrect its neural correlates, allowing the person to reexperience the insight, the awareness, the hope.

  Griffiths is unearthing and continuing the pioneering work of the 1960s and ’70s, having completed a study using psilocybin with cancer patients who have a life-threatening diagnosis. Additional studies have been done at New York University, where, according to lead investigator Stephen Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic relief from their fear of death, lasting for at least six months. Likewise, Grob found in his psilocybin study of terminal cancer patients at UCLA that all subjects achieved a sense of serenity regarding their death which had not been present prior to their taking the psychedelic. Subjects filling out post-session questionnaires in Griffiths’s study made claims including “All things were alive” or “All things seemed to be conscious” or “All things seemed to be unified into a single whole.” These consistent responses led Griffiths to the conclusion that psilocybin is able to reduce or even remove the fear of death because the patient experiences “an intuition that consciousness is alive and pervades everything.” Once the person grasps that, he says, “from there it is not a great stretch to contemplate the possibility of the continuity of consciousness—or, more traditionally, immortal soul.” In the end, then, it’s really the “perceptual shift” the drug accomplishes, the ability to relinquish the limiting view that we are reduced to our bodies, that brings about the reduction in the fear of death that we see in patients taking psilocybin.

  The Crab

  None of the drug’s history was known to Carol Vincent, who learned of Griffiths’s cancer patient study when her adult son read about it online. Here was something she could do, Vincent thought. She sent in her name on a long shot and was pleasantly surprised when the Johns Hopkins team got in touch with her to conduct intensive phone screening, after which she flew to Baltimore to meet Griffiths and his colleagues and to undergo still more psychological and physical testing. By this point, fast approaching the life limit she ha
d been given for the disease six years earlier, Vincent had become definitively depressed. She had tried almost every natural cure available and still her nodes continued to swell, a constant reminder of her foreshortened future. “I thought a lot about death and dying,” she said. “It was so relentless. I remember crossing at an intersection. A car came toward me. Instinctively I jumped out of the way but afterwards I wondered if maybe I should have just stood there.”

  Now fifty-nine, Vincent was accepted into Griffiths’s double-blind study. She would receive two doses of psilocybin on two separate occasions five weeks apart. One dose would be high and one would be either high or low. No one would know which was which. In April 2014 Vincent stepped into a Johns Hopkins treatment room researchers had stripped of its medical veneer and made to look like a comfortable living room. In doing this, they were adhering to the idea, first put forth by Huston Smith, that set and setting are paramount for those ingesting psychedelic drugs. Vincent had two guides who would accompany her for the duration of her trip. She was not frightened. Her guides, Griffiths’s colleagues, asked her what her intentions were. “This is not about just having a good time,” she said. “My intent is to find ways to deal with my diagnosis and to recover my normal state of mind as much as possible.”

  In asking each subject to create a clear intention that informs and shapes her psilocybin experience, researchers are separating recreational drug use from therapeutic drug discovery. They are also linking their clinical investigations to history, mirroring the way psychedelics were used by Grof and others in the 1960s and ’70s, and, going back still further, the way they were and are used by ancient and indigenous Indian tribes, evoking seriousness and sacredness. In some sense, then, the “new” work with psychedelics is actually very old, springing not just from studies done forty or fifty years ago but from rituals that date back to 500 CE. It’s as if the mushrooms play the part of an oracle that will reveal some sort of truth to those who seek its secrets.