Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  Wasson, R. G. 1958. Les premieres sources. In Les champignons hallucinogenes du mexique, R. Heim, and R. G. Wasson, 15–44. Paris: Museum d’histoire naturelle.

  ———. 1980. The Wondrous Mushroom. New York: McGraw Hill.

  Yensen, R., and D. Dryer. 1995. Thirty years of psychedelic research. The Spring Grove Experiment and its sequels. Yearbook of the European College for the Study of Consciousness 1993–1994:73–102.

  Torsten Passie, M.D., obtained his medical degree at the Hannover University Medical School and also has an M.A. in philosophy and sociology from Hannover University, Germany. He worked for some years with psycholytic pioneer Professor Hanscarl Leuner and is now at the Dept. of Clinical Psychiatry of the Medical School Hannover where he is doing research with psychedelics and other altered states of consciousness. He is a member of the European College for the Study of Consciousness (ECSC) and the Swiss Physicans Society for Psycholytic Therapy (SÄPT). He is the author of Psycholytic and Psychedelic Therapy Research 1931–1995: A Complete International Bibilography.

  6

  PRISONER BEHAVIOR CHANGE AND EXPERIMENTAL MYSTICISM:

  TWO CLASSIC STUDIES FROM THE HARVARD PSILOCYBIN PROJECT

  DIANE CONN DARLING, RICK DOBLIN, AND RALPH METZNER

  THE CONCORD PRISON STUDY

  In the pre-prohibition days of the late 1950s and early 1960s, many innovative experiments were conducted using new potent hallucinogens. Such experiments were conducted in mental institutions, prisons, theological seminaries, private homes, and in the offices of practicing psychiatrists. The goals varied somewhat, but the intentions can be understood to be of an exploratory and healing nature. One of the best known of these early studies was the Concord Prison Project, conducted by Timothy Leary and associates under the auspices of Harvard University’s center for Research in Personality.

  One of the first studies of the Harvard group was to investigate the effects of psilocybin on “normals” in a nonclinical, nonexperimental but warm, supportive setting. Results were evaluated by a questionnaire, which showed that “88% of their subjects . . . reported that they had learned something of value about themselves and the world, while 62% claimed the experience of psilocybin changed their lives for the better.” (Leary et al. 1963).

  Subsequently, Leary sought a controlled setting where measurable long-term results could demonstrate that psilocybin might be a powerful catalyst of behavioral change. He found it in Concord Prison, where, between February 1961 and January 1963, with the cooperation of the prison bureaucracy and staff and of thirty-two inmates, his team conducted in-house experiments using psilocybin in a unique setting of openness and mutual support. The behavioral criterion of insight and personality change was to be the recidivism rate (the rate of return to prison after release) of the prisoners who had participated in the project.

  The concept of the program was to be radical. Leary’s philosophy of research was to design it as a “collaborative group program; we avoid as much as possible the traditional doctor-patient, research-subject, or professional-client relationships.” (Leary et al. 1965). Over a period of around eighteen months, small groups of inmates were selected and matched with controls. All were evaluated with a battery of standard psychological tests, which were then “fed back” to the project inmates, giving them insight into their current psychological conditions. The Harvard team then explained in some detail the anticipated subjective effects of psilocybin and encouraged the men to relax and not fight the experience. They were also encouraged to decide upon their own specific personality change programs, such as, “I want to understand what drinking means to me.” Then, in a relaxed, informal setting, they were dosed on up to three separate occasions with escalating amounts (20–70 mg) of pure Sandoz psilocybin.

  In every session, one of the two team leaders and (after the pilot study) one inmate from an earlier group also dosed with smaller amounts (5–10 mg) of psilocybin to demonstrate solidarity with the subject inmates and to establish collaborative trust. The group was ideally, to quote Gerald Heard (1959): “concerned but not anxious, interested but not engrossed, diagnostic but not critical, aware of the seriousness and confidential value of what is being conveyed and all the more incapable of coldness or shock, aloofness or dismay . . . Any sense of fear or alienness means that the root danger and origin of all breakdown, i.e., separation is present.”

  After the return to baseline consciousness, subjects attended lengthy discussion meetings to work through their experiences and to integrate what they had learned into their everyday lives; then they were retested with the identical battery of tests, and the results again fed back to them. A second (and occasionally a third) all-day session followed with further discussion meetings.

  The subjects who were granted parole during the span of the study were included in a special preparole group, where they were coached on employment opportunities and certain legal and other difficulties that they might face upon release from prison. A nonprofit organization, Freedom Inc., was created to coordinate postrelease efforts, but, as Leary noted, “This phase (post-parole) of our program was never fully developed. We now realize that it is necessary to set up a halfway house where members can meet regularly and discuss mutual problems along the Alcoholics Anonymous lines. For practical and material reasons, we were limited to irregular individual contacts with group members” (Leary et al. 1965).

  The Harvard team made mighty efforts to stay in touch with the eleven inmates who were free in the Boston area. After failing to draw them to a meeting at Leary’s offices at Harvard to plan a self-run halfway house, staffers resorted to meeting with the ex-cons in the evenings one-on-one in restaurants and bars. In one case, Leary even took one prisoner into his home and gave him a job at Harvard (the job was to find a job). The intention was to provide a network of friendly support aimed at keeping them out of trouble. Two case histories were reported, both concerning study members who apparently successfully reintegrated into normal working and living environments (Leary 1976).

  The rationale of the program was based on Thomas Szasz’s groundbreaking work on the game-quality of conduct. Leary explained it thus:

  A game is any learned behavior sequenced with roles, rules, rituals, values, specialized languages and limited goals. Self-defeating games are maintained largely through inability to recognize the features and rules of the game one is involved in, and through inability to detach the self from its actions . . . Thus many of our procedures are designed to reduce helplessness. Relationships that imply or emphasize power differences are avoided, as much as possible. This is the rationale for the feedback of the test results and interpretations. Maximum responsibility for his own change process is given to each prisoner.

  . . . We have found that in a benign, supportive setting and with a favorable set, psilocybin can produce a state of dissociation or detachment from the roles and games of everyday interaction. This detachment, or temporary suspension of defenses, can provide insight and perspective about repetitive behavior or thought patterns and open up the way for the construction of alternatives. If the defenses are abandoned in a non-anxiety provoking situation, the experience also serves to establish a quite profound level of trust and communication between members of the groups (Leary et al. 1965).

  In follow-up personality testing, a few changes of statistical significance were found. Minor improvements in scores of project participants on the California Psychological Inventory were noted, including Sociability, Sense of Well-Being, Socialization, Tolerance, and Intellectual Efficiency. Socialization-maturity and achievement scales also improved, all significantly more in the study group than in the controls, who were never exposed to the program. However, only seven of the thirty-two subjects were available for final testing, thus muddying the importance of the resulting scores. In addition, the practice of feeding back results to subjects probably tended to make the subjects test-wise, which could account for all variances. Further, there is a known tendency of short-t
imers to increase their conformity to staff and community norms just prior to release.

  Eighteen months after the termination of the project, recidivism rates for subjects were reported as not different from the expected base rate for Concord Prison as a whole. Of all men released from Concord 56% had returned two and one half years later. Out of the thirty-two involved in the project, four were still in prison, one had escaped, and eleven remained free, a recidivism rate of 59%.

  Here the research statistics got fuzzy and perhaps a little creative to demonstrate the hypothesis that psilocybin therapy was effective in reducing the crime rate. In their paper published in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice (Leary et al. 1965), the researchers broke the numbers down into types of return: due to parole violations and due to new crimes. They found that, compared to a 50/50 incidence in the prison population as a whole, only 7% of project participants were returned for new crimes, with 52% returned for parole violations. “One and one half years after termination of the program the rate of new crimes has been reduced from 28% to 7%, although if parole violations are counted the overall return rate has not changed. It is proposed that these results warrant further research into the potentials of the methods used, especially since no other method of reducing the crime rate exists.” (Leary et al. 1965; Doblin 1998).

  Rick Doblin published a follow-up and critique of the Concord experiment in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (Doblin 1998), which was later republished in the Winter 1999–2000 issue of MAPS Bulletin. In it, Doblin states that his intention was:

  to raise awareness in a new generation of students and researchers about what this author believed at the beginning of this follow-up was a successfully proven approach to behavior change. It was also hoped that this follow-up might help to catalyze additional research extending and expanding on Leary’s pioneering study and its reportedly promising results (Doblin 1998).

  He was able to locate records for twenty-one of the original thirty-two subjects and interviewed two of them as well as three of the researchers. The criminal histories he located recorded activity for the 2.5 years following release from the incarceration in which the inmates participated in the psilocybin project, as well as up to thirty-four years later when the follow-up study was conducted. The figures closely approximated those given by Leary et al., so Doblin assumed that the lost folders were likely a random subset of the entire cohort.

  Though he found some minor irregularities in Leary’s group’s reporting of recidivism rates among several papers published over several years, he found two big problems. The first was that the reported researchers had compared recidivism rates of study inmates who had been released for an average of ten months, with the recidivism rate of all Concord prison inmates who had been released for an average of thirty months. As the probability of recidivism is a function of how long someone has been out, rising over time, the comparison was invalid. Using a graph indicating the recidivism rate as a function of time, Doblin determined that the control rate was 34.3%, compared to the experimental group’s 32%, a 2.3% reduction (not the 23% reported), which is not significant and is the same as a finding of no treatment effect.

  The other flaw Doblin detected was in the assertion that parole violations were of a lesser gravity than new crimes, thus that the program actually reduced the crime rate overall. Leary reported that only two prisoners were returned for new crimes and fourteen for parole violations of a minor technical nature, which were found possibly due to extra supervision the subjects received, as they were known to have taken part in this experiment. Doblin’s research revealed that many of the subjects who were returned to prison on parole violations had actually violated their parole by committing new crimes for which they were subsequently convicted. In addition, some subjects who had simple parole violations not associated with a new crime were released and subsequently rearrested for new crimes all within the follow-up period of 2.5 years.

  Through comparing the findings of the follow-up with Leary’s reported results, it was possible, with some difficulty, to discern Leary’s method of categorization between new crimes and parole violations. Leary’s method counted only the reason for the first reincarceration postrelease, ignoring everything occurring after that. Thus, the distinction between parole violations and new crimes is largely meaningless, since the majority of what Leary considered “parole violations” were caused by incidents that later led to convictions for new crimes.

  If “parole violation” is defined as “return to prison for anything short of an incident that led to a new conviction, such as not reporting to the parole officer, not keeping a job, associating with known criminals or suspicion of or arrest for a new crime but no new conviction” (Doblin 1998), the actual recidivism rate for new crime in the twenty-one psilocybin subjects at 2.5 years post-release was 71%, with fifteen of the twenty-one subjects having returned to prison. In the ensuing 31.5 years, the total recidivism rate was 76%, with only five subjects never having been reincarcerated. There is thus no treatment effect, in terms of reduced recidivism rate for new crimes, at the longest point in time for which base rate statistics for a control group are available.

  In a communication on Doblin’s discovery of statistical error, Metzner (1998) wrote: “We fell victims to the well-known ‘halo effect,’ by which researchers tend to see their data in as positive a light as possible.” He suggested the mistakes made were “unconscious mistakes of overenthusiasm,” rather than deliberate faking, “if only for the reason that our own results clearly show the inconsistencies.”

  As part of the follow-up, Doblin located three of the experimental subjects and interviewed two of them. He also brought these two to meet with Leary in 1996, several months before Leary’s death.

  Both experimental subjects expressed their gratitude at being able to participate in the experiment. Both felt they had benefited personally from their psilocybin experiences and did not suffer any long-term negative problems linked to their psilocybin experience. Both had vivid memories of their psilocybin experiences. Neither had taken a psychedelic drug on their own after the experiment (Doblin 1998).

  One of the subjects was a success story and hadn’t returned to prison, while the other who had asserted: “I firmly believe that I would never have gone back to prison if I had had help [post release], if someone would have guided me, taken an interest. Who the hell wants to do time?”

  For his part, Leary expressed great enjoyment in the meetings and recalled the elation he felt after an experimental session, having brought to the prisoners a degree of mental freedom. When asked what changes he would make in the experimental design if he were doing the protocol today, he again emphasized the need for a halfway house-based support system.

  Doblin concludes:

  The failure of the Concord Prison Experiment to generate a reduction in recidivism rates should not be interpreted as proof of the lack of value of psychedelics as adjuncts to psychotherapy in criminals. Rather, the failure of the Concord Prison Experiment should finally put to rest the myth of psychedelic drugs as magic bullets, the ingestion of which will automatically confer wisdom and create lasting change after just one or even a few experiences. Personality change may be made more likely after a cathartic and insightful psychedelic experience, though only sustained hard work after the drug has worn off will serve to anchor and solidify any movement toward healing and behavior change. Psychedelic drug experiences are not sufficient in and of themselves to produce lasting change. Leary, who wrote about the importance of set and setting, knew this as well as anyone, and wrote, “The main conclusion of our two year pilot study is that institutional programs, however effective, count for little after the ex-convict reaches the street. The social pressures faced are so overwhelming as to make change very difficult.” (Leary 1969) . . . Whether a new program of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy and post-release programs would significantly reduce recidivism rates is an empirical question that deserves to be addressed within t
he context of a new experiment (Doblin, 1998).

  THE GOOD FRIDAY STUDY

  In 1962, scientifically legitimate explorations with psychedelic drugs were a small but growing innovation in Europe and America. Associations were formed that held conferences on the topic; papers were published internationally reporting breathtaking results with particularly difficult kinds of psychiatric patients. During these heady days of experimental ferment, Walter Pahnke, a physician and minister who was studying for a Ph.D. in Religion and Society at Harvard with Timothy Leary as his principal academic advisor, conducted a study of psychedelic religious experience that became known as “the Good Friday Experiment.” It was a well-designed controlled, double-blind experiment to investigate the relationship between the experiences recorded in the literature of spontaneous mysticism and those reportedly associated with the ingestion of psychedelic drugs.

  The study was also designed as a test of the set-and-setting hypothesis, in that it used subjects (divinity students) who presumably had a religious orientation (set) and it was conducted in a chapel during a religious service (setting).

  Knowing that there was much resistance among mainstream religious people to the growing idea that genuine mystical experiences could be had from a drop on the tongue or a little pill, Pahnke chose his measuring instrument carefully. Using classical and modern writings on mysticism, particularly W. T. Stace’s Mysticism and philosophy (Stace 1960), Pahnke developed a questionnaire with a nine-category typology of the mystical state of consciousness, which continues to be a touchstone for inquiry into mystical states today. Briefly, these aspects of religious experience are: