A Really Long Strange Trip

So in the early 1990s, he called several of his colleagues, including Charles Grob, who had studied the religious use of another psychedelic substance, ayahuasca, by religious communities in Brazil. By then, the stigma had begun to evaporate a bit. Nichols's idea was to raise funds to support investigators at reputable institutions, so that the work would be invested with some legitimacy from the outset.  Before long, the nonprofit Heffter Research Institute was born. Since incorporating in 1993, Hefter has funded around $1.4 million worth of studies.

The bulk of that money has come from a small group of donors, many of whom are former flower children themselves. For example, Bob Wallace, the ninth Microsoft employee, donated nearly $700,000 over a six-year period. "Most donors are individuals who had [psychedelic] experiences of their own and became convinced that these substances were important to understand," says Nichols.

In addition to Heffter, two other nonprofits—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Beckley Foundation—have gone where traditional academic funding sources were reluctant to venture. Among MAPS donors are the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, and Peter Lewis, former CEO of Progressive Auto Insurance.

Around the same time that Nichols was forming Heffter, Curtis Wright, a former FDA administrator, was digging through files on psychedelic research at the Food and Drug Administration. For three decades, research proposals had been collecting dust there. Led by Wright, a group tasked with speeding up the drug development process reviewed the old proposals and determined there was no scientific justification for blocking some of them. "This is one case where the FDA put science before politics," says MAPS founder Richard Doblin, who did his Ph.D. on FDA regulation of psychedelic research.

But the FDA's decision to approve the investigation of some psychedelic compounds was made 15 years ago. Only recently have major universities followed the agency's lead. "In many cases, the university review boards are more difficult to get through than the federal ones," says Griffiths. "So their approval represents a huge sea change."

Given the troubled history of psychedelic research in the U.S.—Timothy Leary was, after all, a Harvard scientist before he became the godfather of recreational LSD use—most of Griffiths' colleagues prefer to work beneath the radar. Even as they told NEWSWEEK of a recently approved LSD study at University of California at Berkeley, several scientists declined to give specifics. "They are still waiting for the FDA to grant final approval of the actual chemicals, which are being imported from Switzerland," explains Doblin. "The wrong kind of attention could cause some administrator to come in and shut the project down." If that happened, years of paperwork and gentle prodding would be laid to waste.