Sacred Intentions: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies

By Michael M. Hughes, Baltimore City Paper. Posted October 16, 2008.

Sandy Lundahl lies on a couch, her eyes covered with a dark cloth mask. She's listening to classical music through enormous headphones: Brahms' Symphony No. 2, the "Kyrie" from Bach's Mass in B Minor, Barber's Adagio for Strings. An hour earlier, she had swallowed two blue capsules containing close to 30 milligrams of psilocybin, the primary active chemical in Psilocybe cubensis and other "magic" mushrooms, and she's already well on her way on a trip into the hidden spaces of her psyche.

Lundahl, a 55-year-old self-described skeptic and health educator from Bowie, is looking for God.

Two experienced guides are with her in the room, monitoring her: Mary Cosimano, a clinical social worker, and William "Bill" Richards, a white-haired, 68-year-old psychiatrist and scholar of comparative religion. He's sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the couch, ready to help Lundahl -- to talk her out of any negative trips, to help her remain focused on the scenes unfolding behind the mask, to offer a drink or some fruit or escort her to the bathroom. The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.

This isn't a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl's first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the "psilocybin room." She's taking part in the first study of its kind since the early '70s -- a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.

The study, which took place from 2001 to 2005, and was published in 2006 in the journal Psychopharmacology with a follow-up in 2008 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, made news around the globe and was greeted by nearly unanimous praise by both the scientific community and the mainstream press. Flying in the face of both government policy and conventional wisdom, its conclusion -- that psychedelic drugs offer the potential for profound, transformative, and long-lasting positive changes in properly prepared individuals -- may herald a revival in the study of altered states of consciousness.

Nonetheless, Lundahl, for one, wasn't initially impressed by the vibrant imagery behind her closed eyelids.

"Nothing had ever been that vivid," she says four years later sitting in her suburban living room. "There was this grid on top of everything, all these colors. And I don't know how long, as I was mesmerized by it, and then I started thinking, Oh, no ... am I going to be looking at this for six hours? Oh, no, no. It was interesting for about five minutes -- maybe not even. I started thinking, Oh, what a waste of time. I said, `Bill [Richards] ... Bill, this was a big mistake.'

"There was a silence, and then Bill said, 'Don't second-guess your decision.' And I realized I had made the decision to participate in this experiment because it was a lark, because it made me look good, and it gave me a story to tell my friends. And I thought, Now look what happened. I'm stuck here for six hours looking at this stuff!

"And I made a vow," she says. "I'm never going to make an inauthentic decision again. Never again. And as soon as I said that to myself it was like -- whooosh -- the colors were gone. And I felt like I was being whisked ... whoa, boy ... and then I went to all these other places."

Bill Richards reclines in a chair in his home office in West Baltimore, bordering Leakin Park. He's warm and affable, with an exuberant, almost goofy laugh. It's easy to see why the study participants interviewed for this story speak so fondly of him. But he becomes quiet and serious when he discusses his work. He has conducted close to 500 psychedelic therapy sessions since the early '60s, and there's a distinct pattern to most of them, including Lundahl's.

"First, it's sensory and aesthetic," he says. "People experience colors, patterns, intriguing bodily sensations -- what most people think of when they think of the effects of a psychedelic drug. It's not life-transforming, by any means. Beyond that stage, they start dealing with psychodynamic issues -- the sense of self, obstacles, fears. It's very personal." In that stage, people often regress to their childhood and relive emotional episodes with parents, sibling, spouses, and children.

"And then ... we enter the archetypal realm. Visions of Christ, or Buddha, or Greek gods ... imagery from the Book of Revelation, that sort of thing. What's fascinating is that they often experience things far outside of their life histories, Christians seeing the Buddha, or someone seeing Egyptian or Hindu or other unfamiliar iconography. Certainly not the stuff they learned in Sunday school. It's fascinating -- almost as if there's a universal cache of knowledge they're tapping into."

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Michael M. Hughes is a writer, performer, and mycophile who lives in Baltimore. His website is http://michaelmhughes.com.

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