Psilocybe zapotecorum
Image courtesy of Alan Rockefeller
One of the study participants spent more than two decades in therapy in a futile attempt to heal the deep wounds inflicted by a violent and emotionally abusive stepfather. She ran away from home, was raped twice by men who picked her up hitchhiking, and ricocheted from one abusive relationship to another.
The patient, a 51-year-old woman from South Carolina, coped by deadening herself emotionally. “I knew I was messed up, but I sealed up all those feelings because they were so overwhelming,” she recalls. “They were like the monster that is locked behind a three-foot-thick steel door.”
Under the influence of MDMA, she was able to let go of the blockage that had stunted her emotionally. “The drug opened the door and removed that fear of feeling,” she says. “I never cried about those experiences before, but now I can and I welcome it. I no longer feel like I’m holding back the Red Sea.”
Success stories like these explain why psychedelics never lost their appeal for Grob and a handful of other academic scientists. Despite their promise, however, it is still difficult to get such studies off the ground. Psychedelics are classified as Schedule 1 drugs by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which outlaws their use outside a research setting. Exceptions are made for Native American churchgoers, who are allowed by law to use peyote in prayer meetings, and members of a branch of a Brazilian-based church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who have won court battles for the right to use the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca in their religious rituals.
In the current climate, the main source of funding for studies of hallucinogens are two private philanthropies: the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, which was founded in 1993 by academics and mental health professionals to finance scholarly research, and MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), which has dispensed more than $10 million since it was launched in 1986 by Rick Doblin, a drug reform activist in Boston with a Harvard University Ph.D. in public policy.
But it is not just social taboos that have scared off government funders and pharmaceutical companies. Critics worry that this research will legitimize reckless recreational use, especially among impressionable young adults. “That danger needs to be considered before we open a Pandora’s box,” says Glen Hanson, a pharmacologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and former acting director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “So much emotion is tied up with this research that it often gets in the way of critically analyzing the risks.”
Still, mainstream psychiatrists like Herbert Kleber, director of the Division on Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, hope these experiments will chip away at institutional resistance. “They have therapeutic potential for crippling mental maladies, especially for OCD, PTSD, and drug and alcohol addictions, which have such a high relapse rate,” says Kleber, a former deputy director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House. “These are not easy drugs to work with, and some of the side effects are unpredictable. But they are all absolutely worthy of research.”
With his salty beard, wire-frame glasses, khaki pants, tie, and sport jacket, Charles Grob, a 57-year-old professor of psychiatry, doesn’t look anything like a wild-eyed rebel of the ’60s. He squeezes in psychedelic research on weekends because his workdays are filled overseeing a large clinical program that handles 400 to 500 patients a year and supervising the child psychiatry fellows, residents, interns, psychology postdocs, and social workers in training who rotate through his department at UCLA.
Grob’s fascination with the medicinal powers of hallucinogens began in 1972, when he was babysitting dream-research experiments at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where his father, David Grob, was chief of medicine. Having dropped out of college and with little to do but read, he dug into the library of his psychologist boss, Stanley Krippner, and was astonished to learn that after World War II scientists were achieving what seemed like miracle cures by treating once-intractable mental ills with psychedelics such as LSD. “They were at the cutting edge of psychiatric research,” Grob says.
While peyote and other plant hallucinogens had been used in shamanistic rites for centuries, the modern era of hallucinogenic research began in April 1943. At Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with LSD, a rye ergot fungus he had been working with, and suddenly saw the world through kaleidoscope eyes.
That first acid trip sparked an explosion in experimentation by psychiatrists, intellectuals, artists, spiritual seekers, and even Nobel Prize–winning scientists including physicist Richard Feynman and Francis Crick, who reportedly admitted before he died in 2004 that he had visualized the double-helix structure of DNA while under the influence of LSD. In the heady postwar years, hundreds of promising studies were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Europe on the use of LSD and other psychedelics, like peyote, to treat such psychiatric maladies as schizophrenia, autism, drug addiction, alcoholism, and chronic depression. “People don’t realize today how valuable these studies were and how enthusiastic the reception was within psychiatry, which was then locked in a rigid Freudian orthodoxy,” Grob says. “Investigators were getting very rapid, positive, and transformative changes in patients.”
By the early 1960s more than 1,000 studies on LSD and other hallucinogens discussing the experiences of 40,000 patients had been published in reputable medical journals. “It was a medicine of remarkable power,” Stanislav Grof says. The Czech-born psychiatrist conducted dozens of government-sanctioned LSD experiments in the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s on heroin addicts, alcoholics, and terminal cancer patients in his native Prague and later at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, a mental health facility in Catonsville, Maryland, where he was chief of psychiatric research.
