A Really Long Strange Trip

It's been more than a year since John Hayes, a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola College, ingested psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. He claims that the series of three eight-hour highs, administered—in a laboratory-turned-living room at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore—have made him a calmer, less fearful person. "It gave me this sense that space and time are human constructions that can collapse," says Hayes, 59. "The ultimate reality is something beyond those constructions, and more importantly, everything in the world is connected."

These are familiar sentiments to Roland Griffiths, the scientist who led a study of 36 volunteers, most of whom detailed similar experiences after taking the hallucinogenic compound. In a report published on July 1st in the Journal of Pharmacology, more than 60 percent of those intrepid volunteers reported substantial increases in life satisfaction a year after the experiment. "We have people saying these eight hours in the lab are among the most meaningful in their lives," says Griffiths. "Some rank it alongside births and deaths of loved ones." (Eleven volunteers experienced side effects such as fear or anxiety, only eight of them for a significant portion of the session.) Despite the long-held promise that such substances might reveal the secrets of the conscious mind, the study of hallucinogenic compounds has always been controversial. Once a thriving area of research, projects like these ground to a halt in the late 1960s when a media frenzy over rampant recreational use led the federal government to criminalize both psilocybin and LSD. There were reports of college students diving out of windows, staring at the sun until they went blind or developing schizophrenia after taking the drugs. While Griffiths insists many of these reports were pure myth, they scared scientists and administrators away.

For a time, it seemed that convincing America's premier research institutions to fund or sponsor research like this was nigh on impossible. In fact, the Journal of Pharmacology study represents one of the first yields of a 30-year effort to rebuild legitimate psychedelic research programs from the ashes of 1960s.

So how did Griffiths and his colleagues get the funding and approval to bring magic mushrooms and their pharmacological siblings back into mainstream labs? It's been a long strange trip. In fact, the story of how a small group of scientists worked for decades to revive scientific interest in psychedelic drugs and attract private donors to fill the funding gap left by a skeptical establishment is almost as fascinating as the research itself. Griffiths and Purdue pharmacologist Dave Nichols were just beginning their careers when the excesses of their forbears effectively shut down the field of psychedelic research in the early 1970s. "There's just a handful of us driving this, and we're sort of all in the time frame where we just caught the tail-end of the whole Haight-Ashbury period," says Nichols. "But we saw some amazing effects, and the interest never went away, even if the research did." Some of the most striking of those effects had been seen in the terminally ill, who often lost their fear of death and found comfort and peace from drugs such as psilocybin. "The hospice movement had yet to begin," says Nichols. "At the time we were just leaving terminal patients in a sterile corner of the hospital."

But with federal agencies reluctant to fund research into illegal substances and major universities unwilling to chance a 1960s-style meltdown (should the chemicals make their way from labs to dorm rooms), those early threads could not be pursued. So Nichols focused on the biochemistry of psychedelics, relying exclusively on animal models. And Griffiths went on to study the influence of other substances on behavior. Still, the questions that first sparked their curiosity—namely how a particular molecule could so profoundly influence one's perception of the world—lingered on. Until, that is, Nichols and his colleagues rose to a level of prominence that they could leverage to probe their still-controversial interest in these substances.

"I had been saying for decades that you could still do the research if you had private funding," says Nichols. "Finally I realized if I waited any longer, I'd be retired and I'd really regret not having done anything with it."