Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University received widespread acclaim among scientists and the popular press for helping to pull the psychedelic field out of the deep mire of the hippie movement of the 1960s. This second wave of research into hallucinogenic compounds strengthened political campaigns for their decriminalization and boosted investment in biotechnology.
Dr. Griffiths was known to friends and colleagues as an analytical thinker and religious agnostic, and he warned his colleagues about the hype. But he also saw psychedelics as more than just drugs: Understanding them could be “critical to the survival of the human species,” he said in a speech. Late in life, he admitted to taking psychedelics himself and said he wanted science to help unlock their transformative power for humanity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it had a prominent, even prophetic, role among psychonauts, the growing community of psychedelic believers who want to bring the drug into mainstream society. For years, critics have decried the enormous financial and philosophical influence of these advocates on the insular research field. And some researchers quietly questioned whether Dr. Griffiths, in his focus on the mystical realm, was making some of the same mistakes that doomed the earlier era of psychedelic science.
Now, one of his longtime associates is issuing a more pointed critique. “Dr. Griffiths conducted his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new age’ retreat center, for lack of a better term, than a clinical research laboratory,” states an ethics complaint filed with Johns Hopkins last fall by Matthew Johnson, who worked with Dr. Griffiths for nearly 20 years, but resigned after an alleged row with colleagues.
Dr. Griffiths acted like a “spiritual leader,” the complaint said, imbuing the research with religious symbolism and steering the volunteers toward the outcome he wanted. And he allowed some of his longtime donors — supporters of drug legalization — to help with studies, raising ethical questions.
“These are serious allegations that need to be investigated,” said Joanna Kempner, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University who reviewed the complaint for The New York Times. The conflicts at Hopkins, he added, reflect a larger debate in the field about “the blurring of lines between empirical research and intellectual practice.”
Many researchers see medical promise in psilocybin’s mind-opening power. However, so far, it has performed no better than traditional depression drugs in the only comparison to date. Its potential to treat other conditions, such as addiction and anorexia, is also uncertain. And the jury is still out on whether mystical experiences are the key to the drug’s effectiveness.
“The conclusions drawn in the literature in general certainly do not follow from the evidence,” said Eiko Fried, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who recently published a critical review of the field. Drugs also come with unforeseen risks, such as psychotic episodes, increased suicide, or widespread emotional difficulties, which are likely underreported.
In an email, Johns Hopkins told Dr. Johnson that it was investigating his allegations. A university spokeswoman did not respond to detailed questions for this article, but said the research “is expected to meet the highest standards for research integrity and participant safety.”
Skeptical authorities
In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of studies reported near-miraculous results using hallucinogens to treat alcoholism and depression. Then came the backlash.
Harvard made headlines for firing professors who distributed LSD and psilocybin to students. During the 1971 trial for the murder of cult leader Charles Manson, a psychiatrist testified that LSD could have made Mr. Manson’s followers more likely to commit murder.
Research psychiatrists, meanwhile, began to adopt the randomized clinical trials that had revolutionized other fields. Seven controlled clinical trials in the 1960s and 1970s examined the utility of LSD for alcohol addiction. Six came back negative.
Dr. Griffiths, who grew up near Berkeley, California, experimented with LSD during college, he later said in interviews, but was skeptical of the claims surrounding it. He was completing his doctoral research in psychopharmacology in 1970 when LSD and psilocybin done illegal, making them more difficult to study.
He set up a lab at Johns Hopkins that for decades published good studies on caffeine, heroin and other drugs. He didn’t think much about psychedelics until the 1990s, when he began practicing meditation and reading about mystical traditions.
Around that time, a friend introduced him to Bob Jesse, a former tech executive who founded a nonprofit called the Spiritual Practices Council. Through legal briefs, scientific research, and a book publishing venture, Mr. Jesse advocated the use of hallucinogenic chemicals and plants for the greater good of humanity. Now he wanted to give them the beginning of science, as he later said in a speech.
In 1999, with funding from Mr. Jesse’s non-profit organization, Dr. Griffiths began recruiting healthy volunteers for an experiment. Mind-altering mushrooms have been used in religious rituals of various cultures for centuries. Could the same kind of meaningful experiences be elicited in a laboratory?
His group distributed flyers around Baltimore: “Seeking Individuals Committed to Spiritual Development for a Study of States of Consciousness.”
Buddha in mind
Dr. Griffiths’ lab looked like a living room, with a couch, a selection of intellectual and art books, and a shelf that held a Buddha statue. The idea was to get the volunteers to “appreciate the spiritual states they can awaken to,” according to Bill Richards, a psychotherapist and former Methodist minister who worked on multiple trials.
Dr. Richards delivered the psilocybin pill or a placebo to participants in a chalice-shaped censer from Mexico that Mr. Jesse had given the group. Neither the researchers nor the participants knew which pill was in the burner.
Wearing an eye mask and headphones, the volunteers were encouraged to lie on the couch for the drug’s maximum effects, which last about five hours. At the end of the session, Dr. Griffiths came to record their experiences. “He was just amazed,” Dr. Richards said. “He wanted to hear their story over and over again.”
Dr. Griffiths used a “Mystic Experience Questionnaire”, which has its roots in a philosophy espoused by the novelist and psychedelic enthusiast Aldous Huxley. It asks volunteers to rate, for example, their sense of being “deeply humbled before the grandeur of what was considered holy or sacred.”
More than half of the 36 participants in the first Hopkins study had a “full” mystical experience. Many ranked it among the most important of their lives. When the study was published in 2006, four commentaries by drug researchers ran alongside it, praising its rigor.
In his studies of other drugs, Dr. Griffiths later said, “he had never seen anything so unique, so powerful, so durable.” The results, he said, suggest that “we are wired for these kinds of experiences.” The Spiritual Practices Council sent a fundraising letter arguing that the study “uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine the secular character of modernity.”
The volunteers were not a random cross-section of the population. In his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, author Michael Pollan noted that there were no “atheists” among the participants, who included an energy healer, a former Franciscan monk and a herbalist. Dr. Griffiths was open about this shortcoming of the study. “We were interested in an intellectual outcome and we were initially biased in the situation,” he told Mr. Pollan.
Some researchers suspected that the drug induced mystical experiences because the unusual laboratory and questionnaire had primed the volunteers for this effect. Dr. Richards also held some long preparatory sessions with volunteers in his home office, he said, in order to build trust.
“Roland didn’t do the kind of study I expected and hoped he would do,” said Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico. “He just jumped in with both feet into the world of mystical experience.”
Years earlier, Dr. Strassman had administered psilocybin and intravenous DMT, a compound in ayahuasca tea, to more than 50 volunteers inside an austere room. Only one person, a religious studies major, had a mystical experience. An architect with an interest in computers, in contrast, reported seeing “the raw bits of reality.” Others thought they had been abducted by aliens.
The drugs “had no inherent spiritual properties,” Dr. Strassman said.
Psychedelic researchers have long recognized that a volunteer’s mindset and the setting in which the session takes place — “composition and conditioning,” they call it — are crucial to a subject’s response.
Such expectancy effects affect clinical trials of all kinds. Because of the volunteers’ hopes around a trial, even those who receive a placebo will often show greater improvement than those who receive nothing. Some experts have suggested that psychedelics act as a “super placebo” because they increase arousal.
Natasha Mason, a psychopharmacologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said that while she understood the goals of the Hopkins researchers, the experimental design had put a thumb on the intellectual scale. “The results of their mystical experiences are very high compared to other groups,” he said.
Dr. Richards declined such criticism. Psychedelic drugs, he said, open up a state of consciousness that allows for religious experiences.
“The Buddha, if you will, is in the mind of man,” he said. “Whether there’s a statue in the room or not, it doesn’t matter.”
