Expanding Our Minds
Once dismissed as part of hippie culture, the psychoactive drug psilocybin may offer exciting new avenues for treating intractable problems, says alumnus Roland Griffiths.
When Roland Griffiths first told his academic colleagues
about the area of research he’d like to focus on for the
rest of his career, he faced a mix of disbelief, scorn, and
perhaps only grudging acceptance. It’s understandable:
Griffiths (Ph.D. ’72) wanted to learn about psilocybin, the
active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” a notorious drug
that made its mark in the 1960s, and that remains highly
marginalized today within American pharmacology, mainly
due to its illegal Schedule 1 status.
“Many drugs [have been] demonized by politicians
and the press,” Griffiths says, “but there were incredibly
promising studies pre-Nixon on how psilocybin could
affect humans in a positive way.”
Griffiths has dedicated more than two decades to
analyzing and studying this mind-expanding compound, a
relatively new focus in academia with regard to treatment
of trauma, among other areas. Last year he was named
the director of the new Center for Psychedelic and
Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine in
Baltimore, launched with a private donation of $17 million.
This center will expand on what Griffiths has already
accomplished as a professor of behavioral biology in the
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and
the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. Since
1999, he has researched how psilocybin can alter moods,
invoke spiritual experiences, treat mental distress within
cancer patients, and even help smokers flick away their
cigarettes for good. (The U of M also conducts research
in similar areas through its Nielson Lab, run by Jessica
Nielson, an assistant professor in the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute
for Health Informatics. The lab studies neuropsychiatric
disorders, including psychedelic neuroscience research.)
Griffiths says his area of research has the potential to
change lives for the better.
“A real jaw-dropper for me with this research is learning
from some patients that their interaction with psilocybin
in our lab was the most meaningful experience in their
lives,” Griffiths says. “They also attribute psilocybin use
to long-lasting positive changes in their lives, which
seemed improbable to me based on everything I knew
about pharmacology.”
John Hopkins Magazine interviewed one of Griffiths’
patients, a cancer sufferer in Portland, who revealed
how taking a low dose of psilocybin left him feeling like
a child discovering a new place, brimming with curiosity
and wonder. The man didn’t hallucinate or hear voices
talking to him but instead, recognized he wouldn’t be the
same ever again. He told the magazine, “My approach to
life used to be very cerebral. Now I come from a place
of mindfulness.”
Being mindful of one’s own life actually led Griffiths down
this path to study the magic in a certain type of mushroom.
When he was finishing his doctorate in psychology and
pharmacology at the U of M, he tried meditating for the
first time. “I didn’t really take to it then, but 20 years later, I tried it again, and it opened my eyes to a wide
range of experiences we can bring out in us.”
Meditation began shifting his perspective
on varied states of consciousness, and later
on in his career, Griffiths later would lead a
double-blind study on the effects of psilocybin. Since that seminal study, which found
psilocybin experiences had been life-altering
for two-thirds of the participants, Griffiths
has become one of the leading authorities
in the world on the therapeutic benefits of
this compound.
Despite growing up in the Bay Area in the
late 1960s, Griffiths didn’t subscribe to the
hippie movement and didn’t actually dabble
in drugs himself, he says. Instead, he threw
himself into subjects like physics before
eventually realizing “Math and physics
weren’t as intriguing to me as psychology.”
He began focusing on psychopharmacology while at Occidental College in L.A.,
class of ’68, but the University of Minnesota
attracted him when he decided to earn his
Ph.D. Griffiths has a long relationship with
the U of M, even before he attended: His
parents were both graduate students and
met as neighbors at a boarding house on
University Avenue. His father’s time at the
U of M as a grad student in the psychology
department was cut short when he was
deployed overseas during World War II,
only later returning to earn his psychology
Ph.D. from the School of Public Health in 1951.
Although it wasn’t the deciding factor
in his decision to head back to Minnesota,
Griffiths says he appreciates how storied
the school’s psychology department has
been over the years—most notably with B.F.
Skinner teaching at U of M in 1936, where
he also wrote The Behavior of Organisms.
After his time at the University, Griffiths
headed to Baltimore to join John Hopkins as
an associate professor of behavioral biology,
eventually becoming a full professor in 1987.
He has authored hundreds of studies on
drug-taking behavior, ranging from nicotine
users to meth abuse to caffeine withdrawal.
His studies often conclude there is hidden
potential within psilocybin we’re only just
beginning to realize. One of his research
projects, for example, found that in the
15 volunteer cigarette smokers who tried
psilocybin, 80 percent of them abstained
from cigarettes for at least 6 months. “We
think the brain rewires itself in some way
after taking this compound,” Griffiths
explains, “and it may give people increased
psychological flexibility, so much so they
can tolerate discomfort and develop more
self-efficacy.”
Griffiths points out his main study focus
still does carry real risks. “We know that
ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms can
result in serious adverse effects, including
engaging in dangerous behavior out of panic
or confusion,” he says.
In the future, Griffiths hopes to study how
psilocybin may combat depression among
individuals with Alzheimer’s, and his team will
also coordinate research around psilocybin’s
influence on those addicted to opiates and
OCD sufferers.
David Silverberg is a freelance writer in Toronto.