When the Harvard psychiatrist Jerry Rosenbaum decided to found an institute to study psychedelic drugs he telephoned some of the sharpest minds in neurology, an Ocean’s Eleven of brain science. They all wanted to be in on the job.
Bruce Rosen, a pioneer of brain-imaging technology at Harvard Medical School, said he had always wanted to do it, “but I didn’t think I could say anything”. Stephen Haggarty, director of the Chemical Neurobiology Laboratory, confessed that he had been “just always wanting to do this”, Rosenbaum recalled on a university podcast. “But again, same idea: would he be taken seriously?”
Psychiatrists at other universities were already investigating the potential use of psychedelics to treat depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), but there was particular cause for reticence at Harvard. It had been the setting for a series of ambitious, controversial experiments in the 1960s with “consciousness-expanding drugs”, led by the psychologist Timothy Leary and his assistant Richard Alpert. The writer Aldous Huxley, who would later take LSD on his deathbed, was an enthusiastic supporter.
After three years of research, and facing growing controversy over Leary’s methods and concerns that the drugs were being supplied to a steadily wider circle of undergraduates, the academics were thrown out. By the end of the decade Leary had become a leader of the counter-culture movement, President Nixon had declared him “the most dangerous man in America”, and Congress had made psychedelics illegal.
Rick Doblin, a researcher who started campaigning for the revival of psychedelic investigations in the 1980s, founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, says the legacy of Leary’s experiments has haunted Harvard. “I like to say, ‘have we buried the ghost of Timothy Leary?’, ” he said. “I do think we have.”
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He is on the board of advisers for Rosenbaum’s new institute, the Centre for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at Massachusetts General Hospital, a giant research hospital affiliated to Harvard Medical School. “That’s a pretty good sign, that there is now a formal psychedelics research centre connected to Harvard Medical School,” he said. “And what’s happening at Harvard Divinity School is incredible. They are so into psychedelics these days.”
Doblin regards it as a sort of renaissance. Psychedelic drugs were “part of the foundations of western culture” he said, referring to secret religious rites in ancient Greece called the Eleusinian Mysteries. “It started around 1,000 BC and went to 392 AD or so,” he said. “It involved a drink called kykeon and there has been modern scholarship about it having a psychedelic component. It was wiped out by the Catholic Church.”
Modern research into psychedelics, and the arrival of LSD in popular culture in the late 1960s, coincided with the space programme and the moon landings. Astronauts returned to Earth speaking of something called “the overlook effect”, an altered perspective they had gained by seeing Earth as a small blue marble in the heavens. Doblin believes that psychedelics offer a similar recalibrating experience.
He first tried LSD in 1971. “My initial experiences were only glimpses of that,” he said. “I was only 17. I wasn’t emotionally very mature. I was scared of letting go. Scared of going crazy. I would have intimations of this bigger picture.”
As an undergraduate at New College in Florida, he conducted a follow-up study of the 1962 Good Friday Experiment in which Leary’s PhD student Walter Pahnke convened 20 Protestant divinity students in the basement of a Boston church. As the service, held by the minister and civil rights leader Howard Thurman, was broadcast into the basement, the students were each given a capsule containing either 30mg of psilocybin or a placebo.
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The idea was to establish whether the drug could facilitate a “mystical” experience in a religious setting. Pahnke hoped to “create an atmosphere similar to that of tribes which used psilocybin-containing mushrooms for religious purposes”, Doblin wrote. Leary insisted, over Pahnke’s objections, that the researchers leading the experiment also be given a pill, in the same manner, to give the test a more communal feeling and to bolster the confidence of its participants.
Doblin interviewed 16 of the participants a quarter of a century later, seven of whom had taken the psilocybin. All had vivid memories of it. “For most this was their life’s only psychedelic experience,” he said. They “characterised it as one of the high points of their spiritual life.”
Only two described it as uniformly positive. The others recalled moments in which they felt they were “going crazy, dying, or were too weak for the ordeal”. Though these struggles were resolved in the course of the experience, Doblin concluded that “these difficult moments were significantly under-emphasised in Pahnke’s thesis” and that he had left out the fact that one of the subjects endured what looked like “a psychotic episode” and was given a shot of tranquiliser.
As concern over Leary and Alpert’s methods grew over the course of 1962, the academics responded in a letter to the college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, bemoaning the “hysteria” and suggesting that their critics were unqualified to comment on psychedelics because they had not tried them, or that they had not tried them properly.
“There is no reason to believe that consciousness-expanding drug experiences are any more dangerous than psychoanalysis or a four-year enrollment in Harvard College,” they wrote. “Those scientists who have taken the drug themselves and listened to their subject’s descriptions end up with the awesome conclusion that they are dealing with an indescribably powerful tool.”
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But “if you announce your discovery you’re in trouble. If you discuss it quietly with your friends you have a cult,” they continued. If you attempt to apply the findings within the traditional setting of a university, “you are sidetracked, blocked, or fired”.
Both were effectively removed from Harvard the following year and became part of the Sixties counter-culture movement, promoting the use of psychedelics and encouraging others to “turn on, tune in, drop out”.
Doblin, in his paper on the Good Friday Experiment, writes that “some of the backlash that swept the psychedelics out of the research labs and out of the hands of physicians and therapists can be traced in part to the thousands of cases of people who took psychedelics in non-research settings, were unprepared for the frightening aspects of their psychedelic experiences, and ended up in hospital emergency rooms.”
In the late 1980s, when he wanted to do research on the effects of psychotherapy with MDMA – the drug commonly known as ecstasy – “no one would let me,” Doblin said. “I realised that politics was in the way of science. So I decided to study politics.” He enrolled in the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, and he founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies to lobby for and ultimately to fund clinical research into psychedelics.
One of the first studies in the new wave of psychedelics research was conducted by Charles Grob at Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles and involved a dozen participants with terminal cancer, who were grappling with depression. “People at the end of life often are in a terrible existential crisis,” he said. “They have lost their sense of purpose.”
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Given psilocybin as part of the trial, they would often experience dramatic visions and emotions. “Later we ask them for that story,” he said. “There seems to be some internal recalibration of the central nervous system, particularly in regards to the sense of self, shifting how one perceives oneself.”
Some compared it to a computer being turned off and on again. The beneficial effects seemed to endure. “It gives them a sense of themselves, they are stepping back and looking at themselves, their current plight, their life history, from a different perspective.”
At New York University, Anthony Bossis, a clinical psychologist, conducted a similar study. Terminal cancer patients, monitored by psychologists and psychiatrists, reported visions of floating over the Empire State Building, of journeying through space, of light falling from an aperture in the sky. They spoke of contemplating pain, and the prospect of death.
“The worst pain and the worst fear and the worst anxiety turned into . . . the most precious thing I have ever known,” said Estalyn Walcoff, a psychotherapist who had been diagnosed with an untreatable lymphoma, in a video in 2014. “I wish I could put it into words, but it was a sense of connectedness that runs through all of us.”
Bossis said the participants reported a “mystical” experience, “where people experience meaning and a sense of sacredness.” Research in the Sixties had suggested the possible use of psychedelics to treat the depression of people with terminal illnesses and to treat alcoholism, he said.
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At Harvard, Jerry Rosenbaum, 75, now director of the Centre for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics, believes that the drugs may be used to treat a broad spectrum of ailments. When he began trying to launch the centre at Massachusetts General Hospital he heard from “people all over the country, both those who suffer and want help, and those who have used these agents, telling me how life-changing they were,” he said. Imaging studies of the brain under the influence of psilocybin showed what one researcher called a “snowglobe effect” with parts of the brain “communicating with each other, transiently, that rarely talk to each other,” he told the podcast Ask A Harvard Professor. “They’re going to be developed and tested for really everything.”
Though possession of psychedelic drugs outside a research setting is still an offence under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration has recognised breakthroughs in the therapeutic use of MDMA for PTSD in 2017 and of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.
An effective campaign for political reform has been led, in particular, by American military veterans who have championed the use of MDMA for PTSD; an unexpected reversal from the days when psychedelics became part of the protest movement against the Vietnam War.
Part of the legal backlash against the drugs had a much broader target than just Leary and Alpert, said Mason Marks, leader of the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School. “President Nixon wanted to shut down voices that opposed his political agenda.”
He said seven cities and the state of Oregon have now decriminalised psychedelics. Oregon recently went further, voting to legalise the supervised administration of psilocybin. Marks said the state’s health authority has just released draft rules for this. He foresees an enormous new industry. “There are a lot of companies coming to Oregon from all around the world,” he said.
Students at Harvard have taken note too. There is now a Harvard Psychedelics Club that aims to foster the discussion of psychedelics in medical science, art and culture.
“There are a lot of factors coming together,” said Max Ingersoll, 22, a social studies student who is one of its founders. They are careful, given the history at Harvard, to emphasise that their meetings are sober, and not a forum for students to take the drugs. “We definitely talk about our own experiences, but we are careful about how we present it. We really are focusing on the research.”
The pandemic had brought with it a greater focus on mental health, and this, along with new research, “is coming together ... and providing an increasing interest in psychedelics,” he said.
