CHEMICAL ENLIGHTENMENT

Line Up for the Scientific, Psychedelic Mystical Tour

The comfortably furnished room in a corner of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine in Baltimore seems an unlikely setting
for spiritual transcendence. Yet one after another, volunteers last
year entered the living room--like space, reclined on the couch,
swallowed a pill, and opened themselves to a profound mystical
journey lasting several hours. For many of them, the mundane
certainty of being a skin-bounded person with an individual existence
melted away. In its place arose a sense of merging with an ultimate
reality where all things exist in a sacred, unified realm.
Participants felt intense joy, peacefulness, and love during these
experiences. At times, though, some became fearful, dreading unseen dangers.

The pills that enabled these mystical excursions contained
psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms that
some societies have used for centuries in religious ceremonies.
Psilocybin boosts transmission of the brain chemical serotonin, much
as LSD and some other hallucinogenic drugs do.

Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland R. Griffiths and his
colleagues have taken psilocybin out of its traditional context and
far from the black-light milieu of its hippie-era heyday. Griffiths'
team is investigating the drug's reputed mind-expanding effects in a
rigorous, scientific way with ordinary people.

In the group's recent test, psilocybin frequently sparked temporary
mystical makeovers in volunteers who didn't know what kind of pill
they were taking. What's more, some of these participants reported
long-lasting positive effects of their experiences.

As a control in the test, the researchers used methylphenidate--an
amphetamine known as Ritalin when used to treat attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder. Methylphenidate rarely produced a mystical
experience, although the researchers were intrigued that a few people
did have that response.

Griffiths' study, published in the August Psychopharmacology,
combines research on psychedelic-drug effects--which have received
little attention in the past 40 years--with a burgeoning scientific
interest in the roots of spirituality (SN: 2/17/01, p. 104:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010217/bob7.asp). The new
findings put psychedelic studies on the road back to respectability,
Griffiths says. In the 1950s and 1960s, preliminary research had
suggested that LSD and related substances--now regarded as powerful
but nonaddictive drugs--aided in psychotherapy, addiction treatment,
and creativity-promoting programs.

However, the excesses of researchers such as the late Harvard
University psychologist Timothy Leary, as well as widespread illicit
use of psychedelic drugs, led to legal restrictions that halted most
psychedelic research.

Now, the scientific and clinical promise of drugs such as psilocybin
can be fully explored, in Griffiths' view. "With careful preparation,
you can safely and fairly reliably occasion a mystical experience
using psilocybin that may lead to positive changes in a person," he
says. "Our finding is an early step in what we hope will be
scientific work that helps people."

Spirit Trips

Griffiths' recent work was inspired by an unusual 1963 investigation
conducted by physician and minister Walter Pahnke. Half of 20
Protestant seminarians randomly received psilocybin before listening
to a radio broadcast of a Good Friday service. The rest took a B
vitamin that caused the skin to flush.

After the service, many members of the psilocybin group reported
unusual spiritual experiences. Four of them had full-blown mystical
reactions, which they said included ecstatic visions and a feeling of
oneness with God.

In interviews conducted 6 months and 25 years later, members of the
psilocybin group attributed many more positive changes in attitude
and behavior to the Good Friday service than vitamin takers did.
Psilocybin-induced mental states had apparently triggered lasting
improvements in people's lives, researchers concluded.

During Pahnke's study, however, participants sat together during the
broadcast and could easily tell whether others were acting out of
character. Such observations could have affected their reactions to
what they had ingested. Griffiths' team tried to minimize the power
of expectation by not telling most participants which drug they were
taking and by administering pills to one volunteer at a time.

The team recruited 36 physically healthy adults, ages 24 to 64, who
had no serious mental disorders themselves or in their immediate
families. All but one volunteer had graduated from college. None
cited any previous use of psychedelic drugs. Each reported at least
occasional participation in religious or spiritual activities,
including church services, prayer, and meditation.

At the start of the study, each volunteer met several times with a
psychologist or social worker, who later sat with participants during
drug sessions and offered support if needed.

Each of 30 randomly selected volunteers attended two 8-hour drug
sessions, the second occurring 2 months after the first. At one
session they received a strong dose of psilocybin and at the other a
high dose of methylphenidate. No participant was told which drug he
or she ingested--only that it might be either of the two substances.

The remaining six participants received methylphenidate at the two
sessions without being told what the pills contained. At a third
session, they took psilocybin pills after being told what was in the tablets.

After taking psilocybin, 22 of the 36 volunteers described having
mystical experiences, the scientists say. All but three of these
cases occurred in volunteers who didn't know what kind of pill they
were taking. Mystical events typically included a sense of merging
with an overarching reality, perceiving unity in all things,
transcending time and space, and basking in overwhelming feelings of
love and other positive moods.

At the end of psilocybin sessions, 25 participants--including 3 who
hadn't reported mystical encounters--rated the experience as among
the five most meaningful and spiritually significant events in their lives.

After taking methylphenidate, four volunteers reported mystical
experiences as well. They, too, ranked the experience among the top
five in their lives.

Feelings of extreme fear or dread emerged in 11 of the 36 volunteers
after taking psilocybin and in none after taking methylphenidate.
Those who encountered negative reactions nonetheless completed the
sessions with assistance from the psychologist or social worker.

Positive effects of psilocybin seemed to last beyond the sessions.
Two months after their last drug session, 29 participants reported
moderately or greatly increased well-being and satisfaction with
their lives as a result of psilocybin experiences. The others cited
no such changes, but none described any declines in well-being in
response to the psilocybin use.

Interviews with family members, friends, and coworkers of each
volunteer confirmed the reports of long-lived improvements in mood,
attitudes, and behavior.

The researchers are now analyzing results of a 1-year follow-up of
participants.

Griffiths also plans to explore how brain processes unleashed by
psilocybin compare with neural activity in people who experience drug
free spiritual epiphanies. "There's good reason to believe that
similar brain mechanisms are at work during profound religious
experiences, whether they're produced by fasting, meditation,
controlled breathing, sleep deprivation, near-death experiences,
infectious disease states, or psychoactive substances," he says.

Deep Hypnosis

Although it's not news that psilocybin stimulates mystical
experiences, Griffiths' study offers important improvements over
earlier studies, asserts psychologist Etzel Cardena of the University
of Lund, Sweden. First, in most instances, neither the participants
nor those assisting them knew which drug was being administered. This
approach enabled researchers to distinguish genuine drug effects from
placebo reactions. Second, the researchers verified participants'
reports of psilocybin-induced improvements by talking to their
families, friends, and coworkers.

Cardena studies yet another way that people enter life-changing
spiritual realms. Some folks spontaneously undergo mystical
experiences during periods of "deep hypnosis," he contends.

From a group of 147 college students, Cardena identified eight women
and four men who entered trance states with ease. Dubbed hypnotic
virtuosos by Cardena, such individuals can direct their thoughts
inward and, in no more than a minute or two, become hypnotized on
their own. None of the 12 students in the study reported being in a
meditation program or currently using psychedelic drugs, although 3
had ingested such substances years ago.

In a silent, dimly lit room, each participant induced a self-hypnotic
state under three conditions--while lying on a bed, pedaling a
stationary bicycle at a comfortable rate, and sitting on a stationary
bicycle equipped with a motor that propelled the pedals, moving
participants' feet at a moderate rate. Sessions ran for 17 minutes.

Participants reported an initial period of moderate hypnosis
characterized by spinning sensations, a feeling of lightness, loss of
touch with the external world, and perceived bodily changes, such as
enlarged hands.

They then reached a state of deep hypnosis, which became more intense
when the students were lying still, Cardena says. The experiences
while in deep hypnosis closely resembled mystical journeys taken in
Griffiths' psilocybin sessions. Reports included a sense of floating
or flying, of one's mind leaving one's body, of merging with a light,
and of being one with everything, as well as powerful feelings of
love, wonder, and freedom.

In another parallel to Griffiths' findings, participants occasionally
noted that the unusual occurrences of deep hypnosis scared them.

Still, at the end of the experiment and 8 months later, the
volunteers mentioned only positive effects of the deep hypnosis,
Cardena reported in the January 2005 International Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Favorable results included
increased personal insight, fewer nightmares, and enhanced inner
peace. In other words, these people enjoyed the inner benefits of a
self-induced mystical encounter without ingesting any mind-altering drugs.

"It's about time that psychology and related fields started taking
seriously mystical and other anomalous experiences," Cardena says.

Life Changers

In 1935, a man named Bill Wilson cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous. He
had recently undergone a self-described spiritual revelation that
caused him to stop drinking alcohol. Two decades later, before legal
restrictions largely ended studies on psychedelic drugs, Wilson
backed research that suggested a use for drug-induced mystical
experiences as part of alcoholism treatment.

Griffiths and his colleagues now plan to follow up on that research.
They will try to determine whether psilocybin indeed fosters a
spiritual insight that people can use to break alcoholism's grip.
They also want to examine whether psilocybin sessions ease depression
and anxiety in end-stage cancer patients.

A few treatment-focused investigations of psilocybin are already
under way. In pairs of 6-hour sessions separated by 1 month,
psychiatrist Charles Grob of the University of California, Los
Angeles administers either psilocybin or placebo pills to patients
with life-threatening cancer. Patients then typically lie still with
their eyes covered while listening to relaxing music. Grob and two
assistants sit with each patient during these sessions.

Grob has studied six patients so far, tracking them for 6 months
after completing the sessions. He plans to investigate six more
patients before publishing his findings.

"Even without having a classic mystical experience, these patients do
pretty well after psilocybin sessions, and their anxiety often
decreases," Grob says.

Another study, directed by psychiatrist Francisco Moreno of the
University of Arizona in Tucson, is examining psilocybin as a
treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. This condition is marked
by anxiety and a need to perform repeatedly certain behaviors, such
as hand washing. Results are promising, Moreno says, although he
won't discuss the findings in detail until their upcoming publication
in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In the meantime, Griffiths' paper has attracted some surprising
supporters. Psychiatrist Charles R. Schuster of Wayne State
University School of Medicine in Detroit says that the new
investigation will hasten explorations of the neural basis of
drug-induced altered states of consciousness. Schuster, the former
director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, calls the treatment
of drug addiction with psychedelic substances "entirely conceivable."

Psychiatrist Herbert D. Kleber of Columbia University in New York
City agrees. Former director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, Kleber cautions that only well-prepared
individuals--such as those in Griffiths' study--are likely to reap
lasting benefits from drug-related mystical states.

Kleber looks forward to investigations of whether mystical
experiences triggered by methylphenidate and psilocybin activate the
same brain regions. Activity in the brains of people who show minimal
reactions to psilocybin should also prove intriguing, he says.

Not everyone finds Griffiths' study enlightening, however. The new
data simply confirm the longstanding knowledge that psychedelic
substances disturb perception, cause disorientation, and sometimes
instigate fear and paranoia, remarks David Murray, special assistant
to the current director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy. Clinical benefits of psilocybin have yet to be
demonstrated, he asserts.

"Psilocybin might grow hair on bald men--we just don't know," Murray
says with a chuckle.

Even ardent proponents of psychedelic-drug research acknowledge that,
after lying dormant for decades, the field faces many unanswered
questions. It's been a long, strange trip, and it's far from over.

References:

Cardena, E. 2005. The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and
physically active. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis 53(January):37-59. Abstract available at
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp? id=3Dta2j5ayye2l3109p

Griffiths, R.R., et al. 2006. Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type
experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and
spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology 187(August):268-283.
Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5

Kleber, H.D. 2006. Commentary on: Psilocybin can occasion
mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance by Griffiths, et al.
Psychopharmacology 187(August):291-292.

Schuster, C.R. 2006. Commentary on: Psilocybin can occasion
mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance by Griffiths, et al.
Psychopharmacology 187(August):289-290.

Further Readings:

Bower, B. 2001. Into the mystic. Science News 159(Feb. 17):104-106.
Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010217/bob7.asp

Strassman, R. 2001. DMT: The Spirit Molecule--A Doctor's
Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical
Experiences. Rochester, N.Y.: Park Street Press.

Sources:

Etzel Cardena

Department of Psychology

University of Lund

P.O. Box 213

SE-221 00 Lund

Sweden

Roland R. Griffiths

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

5510 Nathan Shock Drive

Baltimore, MD 21224-6823

Charles S. Grob

University of California, Los Angeles

Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences

1000 West Carson Street

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1768

Herbert D. Kleber

Division on Substance Abuse

New York State Psychiatric Institute

1051 Riverside Drive

Unit 66, Room 3713

New York, NY 10032

Francisco Moreno

University of Arizona

Department of Psychiatry

1501 North Campbell Avenue

P.O. Box 245002

Tucson, AZ 85724-5002