“The reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life.”

Chuck Klosterman

This Month in Doctor

Last month, Twitter erupted in the most memorable mutiny of MAGA Christianity to date because Donald Trump depicted himself as Jesus Christ, which Trump then lied about by saying he was a “doctor.” A week later, on the eve of a holiday for LSD, Trump played doctor again by signing an executive order crafted by psychedelic activists within Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s administration because he had received a text from Joe Rogan. With blasphemy out of the newscycle, Twitter this time erupted with bipartisan applause. By the time you’re reading this, the Trump administration has also rescheduled state-licensed marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, and someone attempted to assassinate him at a hotel for reasons nothing to do with any of that.1

The above paragraph is, insanely, an even-handed summary of events. What had long been a flirtation between the budding psychedelic industry and the Trump administration was finally consummated, if not quite yet a marriage.

It’s always a little strange for me when something happens in the psychedelic movement that I would have once cheered. Why am I not excited about the order today? To some, since I am no longer a psychonaut and am now a pastor, I am a religious fundamentalist who hates veterans, science, medicine, healing, and derives his pastoral identity from Les Misérables’ Javert. To Michael Pollan, I simply think “psychedelics are the root of all evil.”

My view isn’t for these reasons, nor because of Trump’s reasons for signing it: the unpopularity of the Iran War, retaining Rogan’s services, and appeasing a MAHA coalition of hippies and Christians even weirder than you can find in my favorite Asheville Waffle House. My view is that even if you like psychedelics and find them to have potential uses for medical healing, you still have good reasons not to like this move.

As I started to think through this, a tweet from Pope Leo and the NFL draft made me think about the even bigger issues at play in how we relate to reality itself.

But first, since you didn’t ask for it but are reading anyway, here’s what I think about Trump’s embrace of psychedelics.

What the Executive Order Does and Doesn’t: A Primer

Trump’s executive order does three primary things: fund ibogaine research, expand “Right to Try” access, and direct the FDA to give vouchers to “fast-track” review of new psychedelic treatments. There is more detail on this covered in a psychedelic industry outlet’s overview and across the internet. There are also some public misconceptions.

“Federal prohibition of psychedelic medicine in America is over,” said Bryan Hubbard, an ascendant ibogaine evangelist who was in the White House for the order signing. This is not technically true, but it’s also impressionistically false. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, you cannot legally go out and use psychedelics unless you are part of a clinical trial, which has already been the case for decades.

The order basically moves select FDA drug applications (which have already gone through initial trials) to the top of the queue for final review, shortening the review time to 1-2 months. While ibogaine was heavily discussed and was the raison d’etre for Rogan’s inspirational text to Trump, ibogaine was not one of these fast-tracked therapies. Rather, ibogaine received additional funding, notably in the wake of Texas legislation that Hubbard and others have backed and have failed (including a version in my state of Vermont that did not make it out of committee this session).

Since the Trump administration moves faster than the speed of discernment, six days after the order, vouchers have already been awarded to three companies for two drugs, psilocybin and methylone. But for the psychedelic breakthrough therapies that did get a green light for quicker review, it doesn’t guarantee they will be approved, per se.

So there are some concrete wins here for proponents that they would argue are simply righting some wrongs. In their view, Nixon created an unjust system over 50 years ago, therefore Trumpian tactics to save lives are worth it. Others think the order is still important but more notable for its symbolism than its specific actions, a rising tide for all our research boats. Accordingly, most news stories presented the story without much askance glances, save for its policy-by-podcaster birth process with doula Rogan. This origin story is only partly true—psychedelic lobbyists have been part of the Trump 2.0 every step of the way—but it has a charm, given that the order doesn’t sound that bad to most people.

The Other 11 Hours and 59 Minutes

The main reason it doesn’t sound that bad is that the stories of psychedelic healing sound so good, probably because they often are, in and of themselves, good. Since the order, even some of Trump’s fiercest opponents like Jon Stewart found themselves reluctantly admitting our Broken Clock in Chief had finally fulfilled time. Is this that special twice-a-day minute?

Many people just see Trump’s order as cutting some red tape to fix bad politics with better politics, prioritizing promising forms of research that help veterans and others suffering crippling diseases. People like myself thus feel cornered to repeat our thousandth supplicating caveat: while my views on the psychedelic movement have changed drastically since being a part of it, I can still support people who get psychedelic healing. I’ve had some myself (I haven’t drank in nine years thanks to a psychedelic experience, and I wasn’t even trying to quit drinking). People who had accepted hardship from a mental disease found liberation. How could I gripe against this? I couldn’t, and I don’t, even knowing that these anecdotes miss the unspoken tradeoffs, complicators, and other bad decisions downstream of the healing.

Most of the popular media takes echo the years of narrative-crafting by psychedelic lobbyists who have invested heavily in social engineering practices. This has culminated in an unassailable onslaught of buzzwords, marketing associations with thought-terminating cliches, and probably no small amount of personal affinity that the average middle-class to wealthy American has from their own personal experiences of psychedelics, at least from my view from the amphitheater lawn.

I don’t necessarily hold these takes against anybody. It is a fact of navigating life that we have to settle for being well-read in summaries of summaries of issues we mostly don’t have time to delve deeply into the specifics. Most people on most issues, myself included, repeat opinions we’ve heard that make us feel good to hold. In this case, it feels good to many people to be cautiously affirming of drugs, provided it’s in a wise, reasonable, and nuanced way. Nobody wants to identify as a prohibitionist Puritan nor van-dwelling trustafarian. For many like Jon Stewart, I imagine it must also feel really good to occasionally “hand it” to Trump on an issue, proving to yourself that you are not an ideologue, and that like all the other reasonable people, you just happen to also agree Trump did a good thing here, still disagreeing with Trump along with all the reasonable people on every other issue where Trump did a bad thing.

But as you know within the domains of your expertise, when we get into the specifics of an issue, they often defy conventional wisdom and certainly include things the birds of media miss from their view.

Why the Obviously Good Order is Actually Bad

There are reasons to dislike this executive order even if you think it’s obviously a good thing because psychedelic drugs should be safely administered in clinical settings, and probably even if you think they should be fully decriminalized (within that camp, Psymposia put out a summary video that includes many concerns from a leftist perspective, and we should probably all be concerned about tools being developed by wealthy dudes who love combining privacy-invading tech with AI and drugs while believing they’re here to save America from its “mind viruses”).

Another notable voice of dissent was Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine Corps veteran Democrat from Massachusetts. Shortly after the executive order, Rep. Auchincloss grilled RFK Jr. about it in a committee hearing.

Here are some of my reasons this is a bad idea:

1. The order uses a voucher program that may be illegal and which FDA staffers already thought was sketchy

We are all goldfish in 2026, and most of us (including the media) completely forgot or never heard that the mechanism Trump’s FDA is leveraging for this order is only months old, highly controversial among those within it, and to many, probably illegal. According to the AP, “Concerns about the legality of the program have also contributed to the recent departure of several leaders of the FDA drug center, which is now being led by its fifth director in the past year.” Why? Per the article:

The plan may run afoul of legal, ethical and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines.

Outside experts point out that FDA drug reviews — which range from six to 10 months — are already the fastest in the world.

“The concept of doing a review in one to two months just does not have scientific precedent,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “FDA cannot do the same detailed review that it does of a regular application in one to two months, and it doesn’t have the resources to do it.”

Widespread concern that FDA drug reviews — long pegged to objective standards and procedures — have become open to political interference.

Questions about the legality of the program led the FDA’s then-drug director, Dr. George Tidmarsh, to decline to sign off on approvals under the pathway, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. … After his departure, Dr. Sara Brenner, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, was set to have the power to decide, but she also declined the role after looking further into the legal implications.

I’m going to stop quoting because you read more about it in that article, another one from the AP on its legality, this one from STAT News discussing the voucher program as a vehicle for political interference and corruption, or (and let’s be honest) just doing your own AI-powered research. This was also further backed up by Rep. Auchincloss:

“Scientists under political pressure from Makary have shared their concerns through my office’s whistleblower channel. Here are a few: "I was pressured into withholding a recommendation for approval for a drug that was intended for a rare disease by Dr. Prasad and other FDA leadership"...

“Direct lobbying to the Commissioner's office [is] a smart and productive business practice for companies to get what they want.”

There have been further concerns about the overall climate at the FDA and political interference in the drug process:

Former FDA staffer: “I recently left FDA due to the political pressure I was receiving to withhold my recommendation for approval for a drug that was intended for a rare disease. I was part of a review division that was constantly under pressure. Specifically for this recent example, we met frequently with Prasad and other FDA leadership who emphasized the drug should not be approved. However, from the review document and my experience, it would have been approved had it not been for the political pressure.”

Counterpoint: we seem to be fine with political corruption as long as it helps us, because otherwise it may mean never being helped. Over the years of rooting for my mostly unsuccessful North Carolina pro sports teams, I never complain when a referee makes a bad call to help my guys; God works in mysterious ways for the Carolina Hurricanes, at least until the Eastern Conference Finals (maybe this year will be different).

2. The decisions made are already nakedly political

But while I like it when corruption helps my sports teams, I also like a little theater of plausible deniability. In pro wrestling, the refs need to maintain kayfabe too.2 So even if you’re the most cynical pro-psychedelic actor, you have to worry about the optics here when the voucher program’s debut has already demonstrated that these are going to be political decisions.

The order benefited a voucher recipient denied by the White House only six months ago, a choice also apparently made for political reasons. Did the data change in six months, or the winds? As reported in Psychedelic Alpha:

This element of the executive order seems to be a complete U-turn. Last October, the White House vetoed FDA’s inclusion of Compass Pathways’ psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression program in its inaugural list of voucher recipients. As we have reported, apprehension among Trump’s inner circle around how its base would view the action appears to have driven the decision to yank the voucher. One can only assume those political considerations would be accentuated in an election year, meaning today’s executive order seems to also suggest a level of confidence around the political viability of forwarding certain psychedelics-related policies.

Take 1 and 2 together, and the only reasonable null hypothesis is that psychedelic drug decisions at Trump’s FDA will be overtly made under political pressures. Where will this leave the long-term credibility of any approvals?

3. Injecting politics into science is bad, even if you think bad politics prevented good science

To the psychedelic movement, using politics has been justified because psychedelics were treated unfairly. Rogan repeated the common and oversimplified history that says psychedelics were only banned for Nixon’s racist political purposes, and they stopped being studied only because of political blocks, and there were no other harms or issues coming from them. I’m going to frustrate some of you by saying that this is wrong, and I’m gonna annoy you even more by telling you the truth that I don’t have time to explain why it’s wrong, just that I used to believe it until I learned how FDA standards changed, how there actually were a lot more horror stories in the psychedelic sixties than I knew or wanted to admit, and how the extant evidence base for psychedelic therapy is still contested by many independent scientists as insufficient. When I was in it, I did not want to believe any of this.

But even if the story in its simplest form were true, it would still bother me how unbothered people are at the nakedly embraced injection of politics that has always been part of psychedelic science. As Michael Pollan told the open secret a decade ago, “science” has been the theater upon which psychedelic political activism has played out for thirty years. Take the problems you’re aware of with normal scientific biases, then add in a spiritual belief in their advancement to fix society, and the result is a movement’s self-righteousness to manipulate political levers to “spiritualize humanity.” While there are serious researchers in the field who value data over slogans, the politics and public reception steamroll their nuance.

If one thinks the substances were maligned by bad politics, the answer must be better science. When this science is irresponsibly expedited through yet more politics, the long-term effect will not lead to better science, but reasons to further question its legitimacy. Will the 2076 history of 2026 be “the only reason psychedelics became legal is because Donald Trump wanted a political victory”? If so, it would have as much valid explanatory power as our current revisionism.

4. The profiting has already begun by those literally in the room

You might be surprised to learn that the Trump administration has aligned itself with people advancing policy in support of their financial interests. Many of the Silicon Valley investors who have been influencing Trump 2.0 since before inauguration day stood in the Oval Office for the order signing. This includes Elon Musk’s longtime associates, the Jurvetsons, who have ambitious market-oriented and AI-infused plans for our psychedelic future. Bryan Hubbard’s Americans for Ibogaine legislative gambits also got a bailout after floundering in Kentucky and Texas.

Another attendee at the signing ceremony, Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, is a veterans advocate who also runs a psychedelic church and offers an investment advisory service. I don’t know Mr. Buckley, who might have an ability to hold all these roles together in integrity that I wouldn’t. Within days after posting about the proud moment in the White House, Buckley posted an advertisement for his investment services, promoting an “institutional-grade sector intelligence brief”; Saturday’s “sacraments” were Thursday’s “exploding” stocks. As one pro-legalization commenter replied: “It’s not a good look for an advocate for their legalization for medicinal uses to be associated with a hedge fund focusing on psychedelics... This just looks gross.” Buckley responded, saying, “It’s called Profit with Purpose. My wife and I have personally funded No Fallen Heroes for five years. Donations are scarce. … Investors who understand the science and believe in the mission are part of the solution, not the problem.”

This week, the New York Times also raised questions about financial conflicts of interest with the close RFK ally Calley Means, a psychedelic activist who some psychedelic insiders believe may have had an influence on coordinating this executive order.3 As reported in Politico this week, Means’ sister, Casey, has been struggling in her nomination process for surgeon general due to questions about her psychedelic endorsement, New Age beliefs, and basic qualifications, criticized in a Washington Post op-ed by a former Trump administration official: “Americans are free to pursue whatever spiritual path they choose. But the surgeon general is not a shaman.”

5. We are really bad at reading health headlines

One of the many issues of turning science and health decisions into political ones (of which we have plenty of examples since March 2020) is a people problem. Again, most of us don’t have time to credibly study most issues, even ones that affect us. People read headlines, hear anecdotal proclamations, assume the safety cart before the data horse, and seek them out immediately. That’s essentially why there is a psychedelic underground that has boomed in recent decades, and why I expect it will boom more from these actions even more than the official pathways of legal therapy (assuming it comes), if for nothing else than for cost reasons. I regularly get calls from people and loved ones who have experienced harm in the underground, and I expect to get more.

6. The idol-making drugs just got fed into an idol-making machine

There is another factor that makes long-term issues from psychedelics harder to detect than other drugs. I truly mean it when I say that I love many people who feel helped by these drugs. They’re among some of my oldest friends in my entire life. And because I love them, I have to emphasize the spiritual gravity of this: these are drugs that, for whatever reason, make people worship the divine with them. It is not a good thing that a side effect of these drugs is that people idolize them. It is a disastrous thing when the professional community supporting them also idolizes them. And this is obvious if you spend time in the psychedelic spiritual industry and you don’t share that idol.

Granted, you could still feel it’s better to be imperfectly Machiavellian to create faster opportunities for healing than to let people die in a purity spiral. I don’t expect emerging Big Psychedelia to turn down the opportunities, and I also won’t hold it against researchers who take some extra crust from a larger research funding pie even if they don’t directly benefit from the order. The system may be corrupt, but at least now it’s legibly corrupt, right?

Yet this will always sit in extreme tension with the spiritual ideals that remain intrinsic to the movement. This isn’t Tylenol research. Process is even more important where there is passionate ideology, and if you’re a spiritual movement, process has to matter or you eventually lose all credibility among those who don’t blindly follow false shepherds. The reason there was an Oval Office meeting on April 18th was because for decades, the bulk of psychedelic research has been driven by people who see them as sacred paths to the divine. Once again, the movement has a choice between its spiritual ideals versus what’s more effective and most convenient (which is how you know it’s on its way to becoming a true religion). And once again, the leaders of the movement revealed their true perennial philosophy is a glamorous realpolitik. It’s like how my dearest love Phish chooses not to fix Ticketmaster price-gouging because paying to play pays more than playing straight-up. They have every right to, but it makes their parking lot “community” hit different.

Okay.

So that’s the executive order.

But as I’ve been chewing on this story for a few days, the issues with the executive order don’t interest me as much as the reality of football.

When the Reality is the Simulation

I bought Chuck Klosterman’s recent book, Football, for vacation. I went on vacation despite knowing that psychedelic news reliably interrupts my vacations (this now has happened with the 2024 FDA rejection of MDMA, the 2025 release of the clergy study, and now Dr. Trump’s office hours). I bought the book because despite my Carolina Panthers’ usual efforts, I love football.4 I thought I was getting what Klosterman advertised as a book about why football will one day not be culturally hegemonic, and it is that.5

But along the way, the pop-cultural intellectual also makes an important observation, to repeat the epigraph: “The reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life.” Put another way, what we love about football isn’t the truth of what football is, but the media product it is presented as, which is fundamentally different from how it is experienced as played or even personally witnessed.

To state it in more obvious terms: your idea of something isn’t the thing itself. This is because things are “mediated.” You don’t directly perceive a thing. To see anything, you go through something else.

This is important in understanding psychedelic media coverage, and it is important to understanding psychedelic experiences themselves. Psychedelics are, by definition, mediations. You take a substance to alter your perception of reality. Pop psychedelic spirituality often invokes the idea that you are getting to something purer, truer, and un-mediated. I’m going to be unpersuasively blunt and just tell you: this is wrong.

One does not simply take a trip back to something pure. You are tripping on a distilled combination of every association you have with psychedelics, every time your mind has contemplated the Peruvian jungle or the Grateful Dead or Midsommar or your uncle who overconfidently synthesizes NPR stories, or perhaps the researchers of your clinical trial and the interviews they give, the music they play, and the way they arrange the couch you trip on. You take a trip that, if basic materialism is correct, is taking all the unconscious contents of your brain and, the wet Large Language Model that it is, spits back out something between statistics and algorithmically-influenced but impossible to fully derive chaos and this becomes indistinguishable to us from magic or God. If basic materialism is incorrect, you dare to dance with angels and demons and learn the tricks to not meditate on the stories of psychosis you’ve heard don’t really happen if you don’t want to believe they do. All of this is saturated in drugs that, for some unknown (at least to me) mechanical reason, generate feelings of deep profundity. Simulated meaning attaches itself to your unique simulated spirituality.

Every Christian’s and atheist’s experience of Christianity is not the full reality of Christianity, even if it were knowable. We all operate under an idea of what Christianity is—authoritarian or liberating, communal or cultish, abusive or saving. We all live in the unreality of our perception of it. Likewise, your psychedelic “reality” is the unreality of what you think psychedelic experiences are supposed to be like, with a massive injection of barely-understood biochemistry. And what’s informing this is every story you’ve heard and headline you’ve ever glanced. It is all mediation, and for this reason we do call its creators “the media.”

I’ve been thinking about this again not only because of a hipster book on football, but because Pope Leo recently tweeted something about the dangers of AI:

“When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”

(People have been referencing Baudrillard and “hyperreality” in reference to this. I haven’t read him, which hasn’t previously stopped me from referencing somebody to sound more sophisticated, but today I’ll just assume there’s something very French going on here.)

Centuries before Pope Leo and ChatGPT, John Calvin identified this problem within Christianity, arguing that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, we have collapsed “the sign” (bread and wine) with the Signified (God).6 Calvin’s instincts were iconoclastic, but it didn’t mean he was a Christian nihilist.7 While the signs may not be the Signified, we can still retain what makes them spiritually meaningful. The Lord’s Supper is still a place where Calvin believed Christ and the Holy Spirit were really present, just not in the way we thought.

The problem is that we need a mediator between us and God, or for the less-theist, between us and the Ultimate. To Calvin, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, only Christ was the great Mediator.8 In turn, baptism and the Eucharist are appropriate lesser mediators only because the Mediator instituted them, not because they are him. But Calvin’s take remains controversial because we are passionate about signs and their verisimilitude, and theology is boring for most people and hard for the people it isn’t.

But even Calvin, whose serious detractors could still admit was one of the most scrupulous Christian thinkers ever, probably underestimated how much our collapsing of the sign and the Signified was a problem for everything we experience. When we feel like we’re touching the pure Signified, the true, unmitigated spiritual reality, it’s just a complex series of signs that we’ve inherited that we’re still relating to, rather than the thing as it is. This is not just about drugs, but a human condition. It’s also how I could have an extended period as a non-Christian really into Zen only to wind up Presbyterian again. Our roots share the instincts of distrusting overly reified symbolism because it distorts our relationship to truth, even if truth is ungraspable beyond fleeting moments of satori, or to the Christian, grace. I guess the main lesson here is that, like Baudrillard, Calvin was very French.

But while mediation feels inescapable in post-postmodernism, Klosterman also notes how there are very somber reminders that not everything is mediated. Some things just are. His example of that is the prevalence of the brain injury CTE from playing football. It’s a disease that is much realer than any story football tells about itself. Leading to violence, mental illness, and self-harm, its reality has loomed over and dominated the evolution of football and our understanding of it in the past decade. This hasn’t unseated its cultural hegemony, but it has complicated it. Notably, and also complicatedly for me, the former NFL player Robert Gallery is an advocate of ibogaine because it helped him deal with his CTE. Gallery would have every reason to be specifically upset at me for liking football and being suspicious of the psychedelic industry.

Also complicatedly, and unfairly, psychedelic harms are often realer in a way that lots of psychedelic healing isn’t. Yes, some psychedelic healing is “really real,” and we know it especially when we can measure it. But much isn’t. So instead, narratives are crafted and stories told, the domain of mediation. Maybe these mediations are trying to overcompensate with narrative what science can’t, for in the land of the blind postmodern, the one-eyed narrative is king.

Eventually, though, the narratives fail when they don’t reflect the “premodern” data that science gropes for. This is where the cardiotoxicity, the psychoses, the sexual abuses, and the suicides live. One can weave these into narratives as just part of the “dark night of the soul” or the sanctity of harm reduction or the need for yet-more funding. I suspect that, like football, part of the attraction of psychedelics is the danger. But the harms are literally realer than the stories about them, and eventually, though it may take forever, reality catches up.

What may never catch up is the stuff that remains unrecordable and always-contestable yet nevertheless impactful: ended marriages and deserted careers over dubious “insights,” false recovered memories leading to false allegations, becoming a more morally “fluid” person who becomes comfortable with manipulation because curating a psychedelic journey teaches you how to manipulate yourself first.

The upshot is this: psychedelics are on-demand spiritual simulations to accommodate hyper-individuality. When they become objects of devotion, and (like AI) mistaken for authentic reality, the trade-offs can be subtle and devastating on one’s basic ability to make sense of truth and meaning. In my view, this is probably at the core of so many of their negative effects that are difficult to study even if people wanted to. These are drugs that imbue you with so much meaning that they can “one-shot” you into insane conclusions, even if they’re wrapped up with real healing. Some thus blend partial reality into deeply held unreal conclusions and reorient their entire lives around them. Some become outright schizophrenic in the clinical sense of the word, and it tears me apart knowing these cases. If you do come to realize you’ve believed a profound illusion without fully breaking, you might still become nihilistic and demoralized. Or worse, you complete your psychonaut arc, find the remixed cliche insights tired, and become devoutly religious. As I can report, that’s the 5-MeO of spiritual pride.

People who trip should care about these problems, but so should people who don’t trip. You should care that while there are unpredictable harms, it is predictable that they will happen, they will be catastrophic, and the second-order effects of harms will rip open our meaning-making.

There is an old saying in law that I learned from one year of shuttling court documents for a Raleigh law office to the state house (while listening to the early days of Joe Rogan): “When you have the facts, you pound the facts. When you have the law, you pound the law. If you have neither, you pound the table.” Psychedelic narratives pound the science if it has it, but because it so often doesn’t, it pounds the stories over and over and over. And while “the science” may be good enough to be approved, the Trump order is like pounding the table with an anvil. Both the stories and the science may end up cut by the shards.

On-Demand Angels, Mediated Demons

So yes, everything you love and hate about psychedelics is not reality as-is but mediated by media and The Media. But you have to remember that members of the media are people too (the internet doesn’t love this). The producers of media are also consumers of media, and despite knowledge of how it is made, they are not exempt from being manipulated by good storytelling technique. In fact, a compelling, well-made story may even more incline them to believe in its truth, as if it were an artistic masterpiece pointing to something beyond itself. In other words, the journalists who report on this movement are also its audience, receiving pro-psychedelic curations and curating them again for the public.

This is the engine that makes Pollan and the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative’s strategy sophisticated and effective (several PSFC leaders were in the Oval Office for Trump’s signing ceremony). The “cadre” of psychedelic-affirming journalists doesn’t just create reporters who know specific details about drugs and policy. It creates a sea of content that drowns out the reality as is, in all its blank canvas, with unreality that is even louder: psychedelic medicines are an inevitable good if we are “safe and responsible,” whatever those things need to mean at any given time. What’s even more effective is that these mediations sometimes have been balanced, both sincerely and performatively. The result is that we informed citizens now all agree, we just must, that psychedelics can be safely and responsibly incorporated.

While these stories of healing have been on parade from Netflix to Oprah to a thousand decentralized seashells in the ocean of our internet, the horrible stories get the occasional name-check from a psychedelic blogger and only break through to the mainstream media when their inconvenience is overcome by an undeniable relevance (as in the case of FDA’s 2024 rejection of MDMA, which got far more press than the abuse that occurred within it which had been known for years). These stories remain woefully untold. They never enter into the trip that is your personal unreal opinion of psychedelics. Take the recent emergence of abuse stories from the Brazilian group Santo Daime, often lifted up in Christian conversations as a proof of psychedelic Christian concept (if you’re willing to accept that God, after revealing himself as Jesus Christ in the first century, ordained a 20th-century prophet to evangelize ayahuasca and instruct us to sing hymnody about its founder Mestre Irineu). Or take the 21-year-old who stabbed himself, or the Utah ketamine doctor who committed murder-suicide of his son, or on and on and on. In my memory, as someone who notices these things, the only notable case in recent years of a psychedelic harm story breaking through to the national media is Joseph Emerson, the commercial pilot who tried to shut off a plane in the after-effects of a mushroom trip.9 While the same glowing healing pieces run on everywhere from 60 Minutes to your favorite YouTuber, the average person never hears about the vast majority of these stories unless you happen to live in the locality where it happens. If that’s not by design by the psychedelic movement, it’s a gratefully accepted accident.

If these horror stories could be dismissed as irrelevant one-offs, the national media’s appetite for research scandals with broader implications on “the science” itself leaves a lot on the plate. In my case, there was one well-done piece from Brendan Borrell in the New York Times in March 2024 about the issues at Johns Hopkins. But at that point, the Hopkins’ investigatory findings hadn’t returned. When they did, it became clear that the most legendary researcher in contemporary psychedelics, Roland Griffiths, deceived regulators to install his donors as researchers in a clinical trial. The national media shrugged. The only real coverage came from Pollan, whose intervening mediation established a narrative that minimized the scandal and glamorized the potential on behalf of his friends. The New Yorker was aware that he had multiple undisclosed relationships with those directly implicated in the scandal and was complicit in his journalistic misconduct. The same pattern has appeared via psychedelic industry access journalism, including in the Times.

There was a Detroit babysitter last year that you didn’t hear about. She was a 35-year-old nanny who was charged with first-degree murder for stabbing a grandfather with a screwdriver. Finding her naked and covered in blood, police also found mushrooms and marijuana in her purse. Any honest and experienced psychonaut can guess the idea of how the awful tragedy might have happened, but nobody cares when Joe Rogan says a blatantly misleading claim in the Oval Office, repeated to millions, that “these drugs are not illegal because they’re harmful.” Rogan has been repeating this line since I was a regular listener of his podcast in the early 2010s and, I’ll admit, contributed greatly to my own overestimation of their safety. I don’t know how you read these stories without genuine grief.

So why do these stories never impact the greater meta-narrative beyond “we should be cautious and careful”? Perhaps it is because such stories have already been integrated into the moral calculus of continued psychedelic usage by those who love them. The basic distilled lesson for the psychonaut is don’t freak out and have someone nearby who can help you not freak out. More extended theological meditations on these and other regular-enough catastrophes usually lead to something naive, nihilistic, or too morally relativistic for what I can accept.

When vested-interest psychedelic journalistic outlets do publicize the stories of scandal, abuse, and tragedies, the framing may poke but must never indict the greater psychedelic endeavor. The framing is “despite this horror story that the public will mostly never hear about, how can we deal with it to make our psychedelic experience better?” Maybe this is a more productive mindset, or maybe it’s alleviation of moral injury. I wonder the same thing about football’s new helmets.

Unreal Alternatives

I don’t often write about Trump and, like psychedelics, would just as soon never again. But I think the Broken Clock theory around this order is true, just not in the way people want it to be. The exceptional timing was a rare occasion when Trump did something that was somehow accepted by the media and both parties as good. The credit for that applause must go to those who helped with decades of social engineering to prime the public to take this calculated leap of faith against hard-won lessons of history.

So one thing I’ve re-learned from this episode is that we experience Trump in the same mediated way as we experience anybody. This is how Trump’s Christposting can be so universally offensive, and then in less than one week, he can do something that gets a better reaction than if Jesus himself had done it. He has been, after all, the “first meme president” since 2016, because Trump is a mediated experience more than the actual person he is. And it turns out our opinion on Trump’s corruption is, maybe also obviously, mediated most powerfully not by our reasonable principles, but by whether we like the corruption.

But if our experiences of Trump and psychedelics are both unreal, this betrothal is also unreal. Its unreality will be simulated as more real for those whose interests it serves, and will be ditched by MAGA the moment it is no longer helpful, and the psychedelic industry will probably spend decades trying to distance itself from becoming his fourth wife. But as Marla Maples knows, some associations are sticky even if they’re no longer real, if they ever were.

Psychedelics help some people in some ways. I would be happy at such an announcement if it was actually what it said it was, but even in my cynicism I know good will come out of it. Many will still be liberated, and many will be harmed, and many who believe they are liberated will be put in more beautiful cognitive chains that twist their lives and sense-making more than they could know. While some will indeed retrieve healing, others will reap as the undertold psychedelic ancestors reaped, lies that deform our sensibilities. Simply, there will be more acid casualties. And when there’s one acid casualty, despite our illusions of hyper-individuality, the harms are felt by their loved ones in the reality of our interconnectivity. Any former addict knows what the addict themselves often don’t, that the reality of their addiction impacts more than themselves. The reason for more psychedelic research is that this is undoubtedly also true for PTSD, and I think it’s good to have more options for treatment provided none are made idols. If human history is any suggestion, most of this goodness will only be discerned much later in retrospect, when the future history of our current day earns a more compelling cultural re-mediation.

The greater, existential mediation problem is probably inescapable. I know I’m compromised by it and complicit in it. I’m skewed and skewing it despite my most honest effort to say what I really think is true. And I know none of this will matter to you if you are convinced it doesn’t matter. You may be convinced that biblical prohibitions against plant-based magic were just haters of good mediation, power-enforcers of their own unreality. Yet it may still matter if you do care and seek reality and truth as it is, and if you are convinced (or even just intrigued) about spiritual paths of renunciation that seek to remove the unreal in pursuit of what is actually true, to glorify true divinity and not our favorite simulations that will betray us. Sometimes these simulations may never betray us personally, but they convince us to betray the people who love us, which is its own horrid fate. From this side of my dirt road, the tragic yet surest road to joy is to find oneself personally betrayed by the idol you once held, for then you can get on to God.

Drugs infuse meaning into signs that don’t often deserve it. But also, now that I type it, they can, on the flip side, make people see how mediated everything is; “It’s all just a social construct, man.” How we deal with this dialectic is seen in the difference between the health and music of the Grateful Dead and Phish.

The Dead made psychedelic music that felt poignant and reverent because they took the psychedelic signs they received seriously. But because they took them too seriously, it ended up causing destruction, not the least of which on Jerry Garcia, even with a beautiful soundtrack and a devoted following to their triumphantly melancholic folk-jazz rock. By the time Jerry died, everyone who was there for it knew it was depressing, but at least it was a deeply meaningful depression.

Phish’s approach was different. If mediation is a fact we can’t escape, the next generation of psychonauts learned that conflating mediation with reality is where things start falling into a deep well. So from the beginning, Phish evoked psychedelic emptiness with more ebullience than the Dead did. Instead of making their concerts church, they made them a party. This also had its delayed tragedies. After drugs ended the band and nearly killed its leader, now Trey Anastasio is sober and Phish shows are reliably uplifting. They are back to playing with the empty signs and alchemizing them into bliss. Sometimes they get accused of making happy-clappy, post-Christian, improvisational Dad-rock, but I’m still into this.

The bind is this: it’s actually a really big problem to take psychedelics too seriously. But they must be taken somewhat seriously to reproduce desired effects. And they must be taken seriously, or else things shatter. But also taking them seriously is how you shatter. So one might look at this dilemma and instead of picking between the lose-lose scenario, do something nutso like become a Christian. After all, religion is a pre-made sign-system with a whole interpretive tradition to help you.

But the bind here is that Christianity doesn’t work as just a sign system. It needs to believe that its most important premodern references are true. This is why I don’t think mystical psychedelic Christianity will last when it inevitably devolves into Christianity as only a metaphor, dissolving when it encounters serious commitments to Scripture and tradition. This “you actually have to believe it” bar is the rubber-and-road reason many become interested in the church and then bail. Phish can work as a psychedelic band with a sober frontman. But Christianity doesn’t work unless Jesus Christ is actually the son of God. It’s like how trying to play poker with fake chips isn’t really playing poker; what makes Christianity work is the stakes. It’s why the rich young man who can’t sell it all walks away in silence; if he really believed it, he wouldn’t walk away.10

Anyway, like football and like psychedelic experiences, the reality of Trump is understood through the unreality of his media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life. And this is even more true for the psychedelic movement that simulates the spirituality we wish we had for ourselves. We cannot avoid having mediators between us and truth, knowing that upon contact with our human nature, we will immediately render it unreal. Below is not the prettiest photo of the beach you’ll ever see. But it is the beach as I saw it. Our best effort can only grope at the simulation impatiently while walking and waiting to receive grace, the unmediated Mediator, mending the rest of our lives in its own time.

When we still had malls, I remember buying my first Radiohead album, OK Computer, from FYE Music in the early 2000s. For anyone who did the same, the opening chords of “Airbag” ripped into our understanding of the world, a jarring musical thesis staring at the intersection of technology and capitalism, the critically acclaimed soundtrack of dot-com horrors we knew yet not. With songs like “Electioneering” and “Fitter Happier,” Radiohead’s issue was not that anyone was making money. It was about what it was doing to our souls and the nameless who were doing it to us. When I went back to buy the OK Computer tour concert DVD, Meeting People Is Easy, the box art made the subtext clear: “You are a target market.”

This came back to mind when I read a report released a few weeks ago by the psychedelic drug industry watchdog and third-railers Psymposia. The report describes how the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC), a group of psychedelic enthusiast millionaires and billionaires, has been socially engineering a movement to capture regulators, social media narratives, and, as I first spoke out two years ago, even religion. The PSFC comprises around 200 members, with a core contingent in Elon Musk’s orbit. While their project is presented on one level as a goal to promote new medical treatments, what has been clear is that another goal is to evangelize a non-medical spiritual mission.

For those who have followed my Substack, this was previously shown in the clergy study I blew the whistle on, aspects of which I am still trying to understand. What this new report reveals is how that study was what we all hope to be: connected to something greater than itself.

Psymposia are a group who are no stranger to controversy. While I don’t share their political or theological background, and while those reported on will dispute some interpretations of the facts, the report appears to be seriously vetted by a third-party and published in the face of potential legal retaliation. Since some of my stuff was mentioned, I am going to focus on the facts and how they relate to my concerns.

Also, while this isn’t the focus of what I’m going to talk about, I want to acknowledge the role of the report’s contributing author Meaghan Buisson in continuing to warn others how the therapies promoted by the psychedelic industry led to her abuse, discussed at length in a podcast four years ago this month. Others have tried as well, to largely deaf ears in the industry, in part because these therapeutic practices appear as an extension of the industry’s amorphous psychedelic theology and would implicate its most prized studies and practitioners. While I won’t speak to all that directly, it’s certainly relevant to what’s going on here.

I also need to say that I don’t believe that the psychedelic elite nor the wealthy (at least most of them) are on a personal level any more evil than the average person (at least most of them). A decade ago, I worked for several years on the IT help desk of a hedge fund. In the office, the ultra-wealthy were pretty normal, because people are people. I’m grateful some Reagan-era Republicans unwittingly funded my ayahuasca retreats in the California desert. Those experiences played some role in my return to Christianity.

I once was enmeshed in the psychedelic spiritual-industrial complex and am still unlearning its logics. I have left it to become a small town pastor, though I still go to Phish shows sober (there are dozens of us). Still, I recognize that for many, any Christian expressing concern about this might sound alarmist, demonizing, and hypocritical. And, well, we do get hysterical sometimes. We do demonize when we shouldn’t. The Church practically invented spiritually-charged abuse for the sake of a utopian mission. Unfortunately, even for those who find us as broken clocks, our concerns are sometimes legitimate.

So I believe the public needs to know that there is a well-funded and well-connected group engaging in what the report calls “cultural engineering,” priming the public to embrace not just a class of drugs, but a set of worldviews about them which are intertwined with their mission. This should give pause to anyone who might consider both intended and unintended consequences that may come from technocratic manipulation of the human spirit.

What is also evident is a historical trend. The psychedelic movement has been a long line of scapegoating to purge narrative threats. Abuse victims, critics, whistleblowers, and other dissenters are the latest, but the dynamics of scapegoating go back farther. Sometimes, the scapegoat of the movement’s failures were in singular figures like Timothy Leary (who did plenty to deserve condemnation) or Richard Nixon (same). But often, the psychedelic scapegoats have been bigger and impersonal: the DEA in their evil drug war, or religion in its dogma, or the psychiatric industry and their SSRIs, or the FDA and their ignorance, all convenient enemies to blame for the failure of psychedelic drugs and the people who love them at the expense of a wider consideration for what role all these groups play in a functional society. I sometimes wonder if scapegoats fracture critical elements of the movement itself, as factions within psychedelicism each have competing ones. My advocacy to try and protect the vulnerable has carried the narrative risk of scapegoating priests, researchers, and journalists who were, nevertheless, engaged in unethical behavior.

In all this, the scapegoating often turns internal, with the ego demonized and expelled more than once, only to sneak back in as it does. More horrifically, the survivors of pseudoscientific psychedelic therapy abuse have had their psychological defenses scapegoated to allow for predation, both by abusers and their enablers.

While the specific scapegoats are unique in this history, this is just part of the story of humanity. To say the psychedelic movement is uniquely evil would be to then scapegoat the movement. But to ignore how it participates in ritualistic scapegoating would be folly, and plenty of that is on display in Psymposia’s report, such as in coordinated smear campaigns in a rush by funders to save a doomed MDMA application to the FDA. And while all of us can be enticed by temptations to scapegoating, there should be no false equivalency where there is asymmetrical power.

So I neither want to engage in scapegoating myself, ignore the exhaustively reported actions, nor recapitulate them all, but speak especially to what I see spiritually going on for those who want to get a handle on this. I am still trying to make sense of the dangers here alongside the many stories of positive psychedelic experiences. I have my own stories, or I wouldn’t be writing this.

But if psychedelics are said by psychonauts to be “non-specific amplifiers” of our psyche—and arguably, money is as well—then the combined power of psychedelics and money amplifies the sins of the powerful, projected onto society, leaving the rest of us to care for what, and who, is broken in the aftermath of their vision.

Funding disclosure: I have no financial conflicts of interest to disclose. My ministry is partly funded by a few people who read my sermons online, but primarily by an undisclosed group of mostly retired Vermonters.

In Philanthropic Fairness

As I’ve chewed on the report, I’ve tried to imagine the perspective of the wealthy here, as if I were back in their third home helping them set up WiFi in their Montecito breakfast room all over again. Some of their bios are profiled here. They are not a monolith, but have diverse interests unified by a common goal in expanding psychedelic drug access. Some are driven by being close to personal tragedies like heroin overdoses that many of us can feel who have ever been close to addiction. From many of their perspectives, I imagine they see their project as just pragmatic in trying to solve the intractable problems of depression and PTSD, while also feeling they have a wonderful spiritual secret the world needs to experience.

Also, the PSFC organization describes itself as a “community” facilitator, a place where members are mostly not giving directly to the PSFC organization. Rather, the PSFC gives advice on where to give, but members don’t have to listen to what they suggest. While this might be benign, it also perhaps downplays the power of PSFC leaders in shaping the direction of channeled funds.

In a webinar, PSFC’s leadership don’t seem to fit the report’s description of “syndicate.” In many ways, they come off as a sweet group of well-intended thoughtful people who I could imagine in my church. This is what makes it hard to square the persons with the actions, which I can best make sense of through looking for greater mechanisms. If there is no malice, there is perhaps overwhelming mimetic desire: the desire to emulate healing they’ve had, to grow the movement they’ve been enlivened by, and replicate an inspiring vision. But desire can become more binding into moral compromise than we realize.

Some insiders have defended the PSFC by saying funding groups like this are just how the world works. Is there truth to that? Take, for example, my local community land trust. They pool resources for a shared mission, host events to promote ideas about affordable housing, and engage local leaders in conversation to help craft bills. That’s not sinister.

But if I learned that the land trust was directing the majority of its funding to a PR campaign that included “training journalists” to massage coverage, using proxy groups on my town’s online forum, and if this housing nonprofit were doing all that because they wanted to build communes for their new religious movement, it would look like something out of Wild Wild Country.

Still, I imagine some members of the PSFC don’t even care about the spiritual side of things, just medical treatments. Some of these funders are paying for important harm-reduction and safety research that a corporation might not, stepping in to fill in research gaps for “market failures” when a lack of patent protections made psychedelic research unprofitable.

And if they do care about spiritual transformation, maybe it’s understandable that they see themselves as visionaries, doing the hard work of building things that will help people spiritually “wake up.” To return to the mall for a second, many in the PSFC are Gen Xers who might have even once been inspired by OK Computer in college. Is it possible they actually have the antidote to tech alienation? After all, we’re not just alienated from each other these days, but truth itself, and the implied sola experientia tenet of the psychedelic New Reformation says that personal experience is the only thing you can trust: “I don’t know much, but I know what I felt on that trip: connection, rebirth, insight into my trauma and ignorance. I can count on that.”

In their own minds, there’s no syndicate gatekeeping a cottage industry that’s a hybrid between pseudoscientific therapy and a new religious movement. PSFC’s leadership sees themselves as managing an “overwhelming” amount of psychedelic interests, not trying to culturally engineer, but bringing tech, finance, and D.C. savvy to optimize and scale the gift. Some have suggested it’s just an email list of friends trying to do good who could buy a yacht instead.

Yet despite it all, I cannot look past the amount of energy that says it goes towards love that winds up in a narrative war. I have also wondered: is an even deeper spiritual manipulation inevitable when New Age attitudes get amplified with money and drugs? The parkour trainer Rafe Kelley, who has said he had positive MDMA experiences, had this to say in a recent podcast with Paul Anleitner on growing up in that environment:

“C.S. Lewis talks about this in The Abolition of Man. Traditional philosophy asks us, ‘How do I live in accordance with nature, in accordance with the Dao?’ whereas the technological worldview asks, ‘How do I bend nature to my own will?’ …I grew up in the counterculture, the hippie movement, New Age spirituality, and there’s a sense that this was a return to the land. This is a reclaiming of our relationship to Mother Nature. And yet at the same time, I think it had this egoistic drive to overcome that was not fully metabolized. And I think that they saw Eastern spirituality as a set of technologies that can free the self from constraint. And that ultimately led to an enormous amount of narcissism and very dysfunctional patterns of behavior with people.”

Despite its efforts, the technological approach to the soul cannot fix what is emergent from it.

But if you want to beat Big Pharma, maybe you have to become Big Pharma.

Opioids and The New Familiar

As the report shows, it was not long ago that miracle drugs were pushed on the American public by a coordinated well-funded campaign. Unlike opioids, you are not being targeted for financial profit this time, but a greater vision that needs your political cooperation.

According to the report, rather than funding science, the majority of the PSFC’s $125M three-year funding priorities was dedicated to PR. With many parallels to what led to the opioid crisis, the report describes a plan centered on narrative manipulation, exploiting veterans for public sympathy, and attempting regulatory capture of the FDA. Note that while the FDA ultimately rejected the MAPS application for MDMA therapy in August 2024, the report details ongoing attempts to embed within the Trump administration.

It seems a driving impulse has long been changing the public perception of psychedelics, taking science-by-press-release to the Nth degree, exploiting empathy to overstate benefits and downplay risks. While that is the front-end development of cultural re-programming, the back end includes ethics washing, drug safety theater, and “training” funded activist journalism.

But to complicate the comparison to the opioid crisis, there is not only interest in replicating a Big Pharma model that goes through the FDA, but using state-regulated quasi-therapy programs (such as in Oregon and Colorado). These state programs have been laden with issues from the start, but the point is not a belief in a single model, but simply growing psychedelic drug access and use through the PSFC’s “thousand flowers.” Meanwhile, a single large flower from the comparatively “boring” psychedelic capitalists who do not appear to share the same FDA scapegoats, Compass Pathways, just announced it is planning for possible approval a year ahead of schedule. It seems they will get to reap the benefits of the PSFC’s persuasion campaign without carrying the risk.

I have previously attributed the propaganda mechanics pushing psychedelic acceptance mostly to the common folly of our shared humanity, the social dynamics of drugs with a passionate fanbase. I think that’s still in play. But what is clear in this report is that there is also substantial centralization that gives the illusion of something organic. And this really can distort the whole information matrix that affects how the average person makes sense of these drugs. Well-intentioned journalists, policymakers, and members of the public see enough headlines and carefully curated talking points across multiple outlets and imagine themselves to be informed, when really they have been receiving the same droplets of propaganda from the same handful of faucets coming out in different pipes. Those pushing it would use different adjectives; “PR and marketing” are, after all, PR and marketing terms for public manipulation.

There is a cognitive dissonance for many in the psychedelic movement. One of the value propositions the industry makes is that these drugs are supposed to be liberatory, unlike the enslaving opioids that were pushed by Big Pharma (who, as we see in the ads above, also styled their drugs as liberatory from pain). But for many, using psychedelics to cure themselves from opioids has brought new problems. When people use psychedelics to treat opioid addiction (and I know self-reported success stories), this has sometimes delivered life-changing results. But it’s also sometimes delivered, well, other life-changing results.

We don’t really know the exact numbers, but psychedelic usage clearly leads some percentage of people to long-term psychological harm, character twists, personality changes that are not always for the better, and messianic complexes reminiscent of the gnostics swirling around the Early Church. This is not even getting to the memory-holed horror stories of when things turn catastrophically and violently wrong.

While opioids plague bodies, creating physical dependencies and overdoses, and some have found psychedelics to liberate them of that, the danger of this psychedelic project is the potential for catastrophic impact on some indeterminate number of souls, attacking mental stability, personal identity, and spiritual autonomy.

The public’s support of veterans is crucial to this, and as someone who was a chaplain intern at a VA hospital, my faith deepened by their faith, I am personally concerned about their receiving better treatment, but I’m also concerned about their exploitation. Like in the buildup that created America’s opioid fallout, the dynamics here are not always good for veteran advocates either.

For years, Jon Lubecky was the singularly most connected pro-psychedelic veteran lobbyist who has now disavowed some of the PSFC-connected groups he used to lobby for. While Lubecky has said he greatly benefited from MDMA’s impact on his PTSD, he has now struck a public note of warning, including that adverse events have not been properly recorded. He is particularly adamant against the psychedelic industry and its ulterior motives. As he said in an interview, “When medicine becomes a movement, the people who suffer are the patients, because the patients are inherently exploited for the movement.” In sharing my article on Michael Pollan’s unethical journalism that has protected PSFC-connected projects, Lubecky wrote, “Far too much ‘research’ on human subjects in this field is for propaganda value and to create activists for their political causes.”

Now it’s true that the addiction profiles and highs of psychedelics are not the same as opioids in type or scale, and it’s true that psychedelics do not usually make one physically dependent. But besides the Russian roulette chances of developing mental issues, do psychedelics also risk spiritual dependencies among those who enjoy them? I have argued yes. The risks are not just the ~10% who self-report some kind of extended harm, but, as many like Ashley Lande and William Craddock have reflected, the bizarre darkness and moral confusion that can come from someone who believes it is going well.

Some believe you are opening yourself up to the demonic, entities who pose as angels of light (or just a DMT machine elf). But even if there are no demons in your worldview, what makes combining psychedelics with a new class of enlightened therapists uniquely insidious is what I and others have repeatedly stressed: these are drugs that can render you highly susceptible, more than you realize, to the attitudes, whims, and desires of those who administer them. As the report says, “Psychedelics have been normalized for medicalized use without a real understanding of their risks, especially their capacity to render people vulnerable to influence and persuasion.” You are not just taking a psychedelic when you take a psychedelic. You are opening yourself up to the worldviews and motivations of those who cultivate your experience.

This should be concerning even if mushrooms are core for how you connect to the sacred, because being high on your own noble motives is exactly when catastrophes happen (see the Church). The greed driving the opioid crisis led to something awful. Now imagine that opioids were pushed by a group of insiders who worship the divine on sacred Oxy retreats.

Unlike the Sacklers’ more straight-forward greed, the report describes how the PSFC essentially acts as a PR and lobbying firm for something that includes a spiritual movement. One goal is to prevent unsettling stories from becoming what PSFC documents call “negative media cascades,” which, to translate, could mean “prevent the public from being disturbed,” with a desired $46.4 million in funding just for “communications and public health education.”

Part of that strategy is paying journalists one UC Berkeley-sponsored grant at a time. UC Berkeley’s psychedelic center was founded by author Michael Pollan. PSFC leaders embraced Pollan’s avowed strategy of “training” journalists as part of a “bulwark against backlash” in the public and the media. While framed as “public education,” there is reason to question this frame. As I covered earlier this year on Pollan’s journalistic malpractice in The New Yorker, it is noteworthy that a celebrity journalist professor who teaches at UC Berkeley and Harvard believes in “inoculating the public” to scandals, using journalism to vaccinate the public from being too concerned about psychedelic harms.

Another means of narrative regulation is through the UC Berkeley center’s popular newsletter called The Microdose, which claims independent journalism. But it is unclear what independence means when the Berkey center’s funding has come from those whose projects they sometimes cover; in a request in April asking if they had a policy on covering those affiliated with the center, they did not respond.

As far as the grants go—building what Pollan calls a “cadre” of reporters—this doesn’t necessarily mean quid-pro-quo, nor does it have to. Biased “training,” social network pressures, and the smallest financial incentives in a field where it’s hard to make a living are enough to selectively cover, twist, and frame bad stories to shape the public imagination to its proper end.

There are no cartoon villains here, and neither is Pollan. I do not see malice as we think of malice, but perhaps reflexive seduction: seduction into a self-therapeutic worldview that sees spiritual wholeness as something to be gained through techniques, whether practices or chemistry, which begets seduction into drugs that promise to heal the soul, which turns into seduction of others to share the spiritual wealth, even if it means some aren’t so lucky. This is just a notable, visible expression of what would necessarily emerge from this system: a movement’s self-mythology translated into something the outside everyday person can consume, then later, a mechanism for regulating that self-mythology’s ongoing narrative among adherents. Rather than consciously malicious manipulation, I believe it is more likely done through unconscious in-group imitation, the currency of belonging.

However we try to explain it, like opioids and now cannabis, this sets up a media environment where journalists fail to rigorously report about the harms of drug-based issues until it’s too late.

Pilot Program

Regular readers of this newsletter are familiar with how a Johns Hopkins and NYU clergy study produced psychedelic evangelists. In some ways, the study was a pilot program test-driving a PSFC vehicle, like an art car on the Burning Man playa to show everyone what’s possible.

Regulators found such egregious improper donor involvement that, in the words of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Institutional Review Board, the study “significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants” and “significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization’s human research protection program.” As I covered, there were abundant overlapping psychedelic evangelist goals expressed by many of the researchers and funders affiliated with the study. Giving people drugs that make you open to suggestion, persuasion, and undue influence by funders acting as researchers, directly interacting with subjects without disclosure, nakedly motivated by a spiritual mission, is an abuse of both scientific principles and human subject research.

Besides the report, there was another public revelation this month. In a recent podcast, former Hopkins faculty and study team member Dr. Matthew Johnson shared that my whistleblowing led to a series of investigations, which apparently began with the study’s lead legendary researcher Roland Griffiths conducting an “internal audit” to try and get ahead of Hopkins regulators. But according to Johnson, Griffiths’ internal investigation looked like a “sham”; despite being a faculty member on the study, Johnson was never interviewed (and for what it’s worth, I never received as much as an email confirmation from the Hopkins psychedelic center that they were aware of my concerns). Johnson, who had previously raised ethical concerns, described the response as “circling the wagons... it wasn’t about ‘Okay, what was done right? What was done wrong?’... It [was] more about protection.”

Chapter 12 of the Psymposia report covers a lot of ground previously covered in my newsletter, but further shows how the whole Hopkins psychedelic research center was also essentially created as a PSFC product. The clergy study team wasn’t just loosely connected to the PSFC. As the clergy study paper acknowledges, one of the founding members of the PSFC, Bob Jesse, also funded the study through his nonprofit, helping conceive and design the study and then co-author it. He has been attempting to engineer psychedelic spirituality for over thirty years.

Besides the abundance of statements from Jesse about Hopkins’ psychedelic studies and the “reconstruction of religion,” or wanting to use science for “waking up” people to “fire on all cylinders,” or any number of public talks Jesse used to give to psychedelic researchers about their spiritual mission, the report shared another interesting quote I had overlooked. It was from 2009, a decade into Jesse’s involvement in Hopkins’ research. If this doesn’t sound like a scientist talking about science that is interested in truth, it’s not:

“Why is it important for you to know that I’m an engineer? Well, scientists and scholars are interested in truth, so at the end of the day…they go to sleep being satisfied that they’ve discovered something that they’re convinced is true. Engineers, by contrast, like to build things…. [They] feel satisfied because something exists in the world that didn’t exist before…. At the end of the day, just know that there are people in the room who are more concerned with ‘ultimate truth’ than I am.”

This checks out. Because if they were scientists interested in discovering the truth of the effects of psychedelic therapy on religious populations, why wouldn’t they run a study on all kinds of religious people, especially laypeople? Why would they target a handful of outlier clergy if not to, as Griffiths himself described, “evolve” religious institutions? With funding from researchers, several did go on to pivot their careers to psychedelic nonprofits, which is how I got tangled up in this.

The picture that has long emerged looks like the clergy were not part of a truth-seeking enterprise, but one for reprogramming religion. Some of the clergy are offended by that, and I get that, especially because most of them described positive experiences. I might have felt offended too if I were in it, but no matter the case, they all had a right to know about the unethical behavior, and so does the public.

In 2023, Pollan revealed that Jesse made editorial suggestions to every issue of The Microdose so that they don’t “exaggerate” or “misrepresent,” but Jesse was not listed on their website as a contributor. When I asked in April 2025 whether he still had this role, I received no response. Pollan’s New Yorker piece conspicuously did not mention him at all.

I have long written about the danger of psychedelics simulating profundity, manufacturing meaning without a true referent behind it, then assigning the felt-meaning to the images and phrases that emerge from the subconscious on a trip that become “insights.” This is exactly what has historically made it useful for cult programming, such as the LSD initiation rites of Aum Shinrikyo, who became infamous for terrorizing the Japanese subway system with sarin gas.

What causes people to upend their world with such fervency? It may be how psychedelics can make you so certain that you have learned something so profound, that must change your worldview, to a degree that is not earned nor healthy. As Dr. Johnson said, 100% of those involved in the clergy study wrote that they believed their psychedelic-induced experience was “strong or absolutely true.” This is not necessarily a good thing, he said, because, “There’s evidence that psychedelics make people more suggestible and you can kind of leverage them to having an overconfidence.”

A recent paper on this phenomenon by researchers Lucas F. Borkel et al. points to what is called the “epistemic risk.” That is, psychedelics can not only change what you believe, but how you decide what’s true. Through an inflated sense of meaning, psychedelics can impact your truth filter and BS detector, the very ability to tell between truth and counterfeit. This may not only be bad for you, but for people who love you because of the decisions you then make with a broken discernment engine. Here is the researchers’ chart illustrating an example of how this can happen:

This issue has become harder to ignore thanks to a recent viral New York Times story of the also-a-psychedelic-billionaire Amy Griffin’s questionable “recovered memory” on MDMA, with consequences that may have inadvertently ruined an innocent man’s life. Another recent viral story of issues in IFS therapy—which has been used by many psychedelic therapists, including those leading psychedelic trials, and IFS’ founder promotes using IFS with MDMA therapy—presses the issue more of how psychedelic therapy can further impact our already eroded sense of reality in the AI era.

What has become obvious is that psychedelic sola experientia—faith in personal experience above all—is deeply misplaced. But this faith can be hard to let go of, like someone who feels the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit in worship services, only to wonder whether their faith had been built on a compelling series of musical chords to cover for something dark.

If this epistemic crisis remains looming over the entire field, we wouldn’t know it from the psychedelic industry. In a recent podcast by UC Berkeley about the study that further downplayed the issues, Pollan celebrated that the study produced a new “conversion.” The pilot flew.

Your Religion Patch is Ready for Download

If the Hopkins study revealed how spiritual experience can be engineered, other PSFC members show how it can scale. As the report notes, PSFC’s goals include “incorporat[ing] psychedelic experiences into well-established traditions” alongside a “long-term goal to accelerate the spread of psychedelic churches.”

PSFC member Steve Jurvetson, the billionaire long-time friend of Elon Musk on SpaceX’s board, posted glowing, glossed-over excerpts from Pollan’s article. “Pollan’s report reminds me of the mysteries of antiquity,” he said, highlighting one clergy’s report of “‘a spiritual orgasm.’”

Jurvetson’s sympathetic joy isn’t because he is a deep fan of religion. In March 2024, he tweeted some beliefs about children being raised religious:

“Indoctrinating children with the adult’s mind virus is cognitive child abuse. Few adults would chose [sic] their religion.” - @FutureJurvetson

In this case, if raising a child religious is “child abuse” to Jurvetson because it gives them a “mind virus,” it is apparently not a human rights abuse to experiment on religious people for a psychedelic gospel.

“Mind virus” isn’t a random term, but one that seems to have some coin in their friend group. Musk repeated it when he recently told Joe Rogan that buying Twitter wasn’t about money:

“The reason for acquiring Twitter is because it was causing destruction at a civilizational level…The woke mob essentially controlled Twitter. And they were pushing a nihilistic, anti-civilizational mind virus to the world. And you can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco.”

To be fair, Musk himself joined the growing numbers of those expressing sympathetic views toward Christianity in the build-up to the 2024 presidential election, telling Jordan Peterson he’s “probably a cultural Christian” who believes “the teachings of Jesus are good and wise” and that Christian beliefs “result in the greatest happiness for humanity…I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.” This is a view of Christianity that mostly appreciates it for its utility.

However you may feel about woke mobs or Christianity, it seems our new soul engineers are not really looking to sell a product, but to fix what they see as one of many “mind viruses,” or perhaps merely misguided religions, through technological power, mining them for their moral value and updating them with psychedelic transcendence.

Does this mean everybody in the PSFC privately shares these views? No, but it’s like that hypothetical corrupt community land trust. If I’m giving to a project where key people involved really seem to believe in re-engineering religion, at some point, if I’m not saying anything against that and I’m still supporting them, then they do represent my views.

Now, nobody would argue that religious upbringings can be abusive. If someone views all religion as intrinsically brainwashing, that is their opinion. But if a proposed solution were to be drug-based counter-brainwashing with “mimetic countermeasures,” this would be, well, concerning.

Put this all on the middle rack and amplify it with Musk’s AI, and what comes out of the oven is a disturbing glimpse of the future where Jurvetson sees AI as psychedelic therapists, what he calls “the obvious long-term solution” due to labor costs. Perhaps the masses will get ShamanGrok and a pill while the privileged spring for artisanal ayahuasca.

If this seems like it may have downsides, it is a reminder that wealth becomes a force amplifier for any flaws in our epistemologies. This is an industry populated by people who have taken a lot of epistemology-shaking drugs, and the main truth they can agree on is that more people should take these drugs. Truth may be hard to come by, but the will to replicate overwhelms.

We already know that AI has significant issues with its ability to impact the judgment, beliefs, and behaviors of those who interface with it. Combine that with systematically adding drugs that twist our tools for discerning truth and are known for their ability to make one open to suggestion and persuasion, and you have what the report describes, “an elite circle [who] controls industries that work synergistically to shape perceptions of reality at scale.”

Combine that with a holy mission to enlighten the world, and you have the central pathology of the whole movement. For years before the PSFC existed, the Great Satan of the psychedelic subculture was public backlash against societal acceptance of drugs. In this mindset, the ignorant public mind is the ultimate scapegoat. This feeds a sacred duty to “teach” the masses, be they religion, the FDA, or the person who watches PBS. Since they cannot be expelled, they are transformed not into human partners in discerning truth, but into a target market, inoculated and engineered for their own good.

The Muraresku Surprise

But for all the grim outlooks, there is one public development that is fascinating and, as a “prisoner of hope,” I dare say is hopeful. Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key expressed a vision of a legal psychedelic Reformation through Hopkins’ psychedelic studies, becoming a popular best-seller thanks to Joe Rogan. As Travis Kitchens previously reported, academics quoted in the book had begun to denounce it and its conclusions. What is now surprising is that while Muraresku may not discount the book, he has seemingly disavowed the whole psychedelic Reformation project.

As the report details, Muraresku was brought to Burning Man in 2023 by PSFC affiliates, where they set up a giant drone display with a meme from the book about psychedelic journeys, “Die before you die so that when you die you won’t die,” emblazoned across the desert sky. In the context of the phrase’s original inscription at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mount Athos, it is a Christian phrase. Out of that context and onto the playa, it is a Christian view stripped of Christ, seeing religion’s purpose as primarily about self-transcendence, self-preservation, and projecting of self-desire—which, okay, maybe still does describe many self-professed Christians.

But like I did with my views, Muraresku has also, to borrow from Pollan, “changed his mind” with some eye-popping statements:

“When reached for comment, Muraresku distanced himself from the project of mainstreaming psychedelics through any model. ‘I can think of no medical or religious institution, no psychedelic church, no Grateful Dead concert that will be able to deliver the kind of experience that literally takes centuries or millennia of iteration to perfect, and that has undeniably gone missing from Western civilization,’ Muraresku wrote.”

“On the subject of medical mainstreaming, he wrote of ‘warped incentives embedded into the for-profit pharma model ... racing to scale to maximize a bottom line. Simply put, money + psychedelics need to get divorced, and stay divorced.’ Regarding the religious use of psychedelics, he forecasted ‘a disaster down the road,’ citing ‘the warped incentives of recruiting and retaining members of a congregation,’ the ‘weaponization of mind-altering drugs,’ and the likelihood of cults developing. On ritual use, he wrote that ‘whatever genuine psychedelic rituals have been preserved by traditional cultures the world over, they ‘are best left uncorrupted by Western minds.’” Muraresku asked Psymposia to remind ‘“the psychedelic world”’ that I have never attended their conferences, and never will. And to please stop inviting me to conversations.’ He concluded his email by stating that he would like to ‘get the word out to everybody in the psychedelic community: ‘please leave me the fuck alone.’”

His sentiments are extremely relatable to me, and I will happily do so and wish him well. The disasters down the road, if realized, are truly harrowing to imagine. After once crossing paths in favor of combining psychedelics and Christianity, I am surprised to find myself saying that we have each reached a similar conclusion again.

We’ve Already Met

I think a question OK Computer never answered for my teenage self is how much we are to blame for our spiritual disease, how much is corporate, and how much is inevitable technological creep meeting our nature.

There is, then, one last risk that is just for me: I am at risk of being a Pharisee who gives thanks he’s not a psychedelic elite while caught in the same or worse spiritual dynamics. Maybe I’m just trading one form of seduction for another, reenacting spiritual superiority in Christian clothes, convicted that my new even deeper experiences revealed a truth others are missing, and I need to share a message to help. What’s different? Maybe not much. I can at least say that I think that is true that Christ was who he said he was, and the implications of that have changed everything for me. What I can also say is that Christianity teaches me I’m a sinner in need of grace, while psychedelics taught me we are gods who can make ourselves in our own image. If both are dangerous when amplified by power, only one tells me to divest of glory-seeking. So watching certainty combine with wealth and technological power to reshape souls gives me fear, not because I’ve transcended these human dynamics into a new Christian enlightenment, but because I know how powerful they are.

So it’s really hard for me not to feel the heaviness of the possibilities here in a world that does not need more bad news. I know good has and will come out of it, but I still mourn those who will be hurt and will not recover because of the hubris of those involved. Minds, families, and souls have already been left on the cutting-room floor of the billionaires’ cultural editing room.

For a long time now, a big question for me has been about the implications of how these drugs subtly and less subtly shape minds. As a pastor, I am particularly concerned with how the rollout of psychedelic therapy seems to be explicitly targeting “converting” people. This should give people who don’t like Christians pause, too, because we know Christians can and will use the same means to convert people to their version of a psychedelic gospel, and that will also be deeply wrong and disturbing. So again, not just for Christians but for anyone seeking care, you have to be diligent in wondering: who is shaping this environment? What are their underlying beliefs? What are their ethics, and how do they respond to harm or not? What are the implicit, silent values filtering through in unconscious ways? And as all Christians must ask ourselves of our churches, are the values shaped by the gospel of Jesus Christ, or just his aesthetics?

None of this denies any legitimate benefits people may have gotten from psychedelics. I still believe better science will yield medical treatments using them, perhaps over generations and disassociated from this movement, just as we no longer eat Seventh-day Adventist cereal. But I think the soul engineers are wildly over-optimistic about our ability to spiritually fix ourselves. And I think this is a case study of how sin begets more sin. My sin doesn’t like that Luke 18:9-14 teaches that we are farther from God when we are right but arrogant than we are wrong and feel how wrong we are. I hope I am wrong about all this, not only so that disaster can be avoided, but that I can be humbled again to be closer to God than my confirmation bias pride. I am still afraid I will be right, and the consequences of being right would be a world not only with the consequences themselves, but a kneecapped societal ability to self-correct when more and more people share psychedelic-induced grandiosities that buy a misguided loyalty to these drugs.

How long the PSFC exists in its current form remains to be seen. It is just one form of a problem that will re-emerge wherever psychedelics and money congeal. Like any nonprofit, the PSFC’s donors are the first and primary customers of PSFC projects, the story it sells itself about what it’s doing. If anyone feels caught up in this, I would say that if Muraresku has permission to reject the prompt, so do you.

I want to return to the message Elon’s friends cast across the sky and why it’s almost right. To “die before you die so that when you die you won’t die” with Christ vacuumed out defeats its Christian purpose: to be in Christ. “If we died in Christ, we will live in him” is crucial to the gospel (Romans 6:8). But dying to the old self isn’t worth anything if the “new self” is clothed with LLM-generated aesthetics, imbued with the power of simulated profundity, a vacant “meaning” for the sake of having it, a gravitational pull into a dark star. I do get why we shouldn’t throw around the word “demonic.” We should be judicious and fair. Just like the first Hopkins psilocybin experiment was careful not to say these were “mystical” experiences, but “mystical-type” experiences, maybe this isn’t demonic, it’s just demonic-type.

As I was processing all this, I’ve come to what might be some unlikely common ground. It is not only a billionaire who thinks religion is a mind-virus. Christianity, itself, believes that worshipping religion is also a “mind virus” which Christ liberates us from. Religion scapegoats us. Christ stands opposed to religion, but in paradox, still calls us to be gathered in his body, an ecclesia, a called-forth-and-sent-out assembly, a Church. We Christians still believe that ordering this body must regrettably result in some kind of religion, intentionally cultivated, a necessary technology to mitigate sin, but also a sign of sin itself. We use revealed religion in the patterns and liturgies of the Church as a gift from God to regularly remember together the fullness of who He is, lest we worship something else while fooling ourselves into thinking we don’t have religion just because we aren’t in church. We are all sinners, and so we all have religion, chicken and egg.

The problem is in the project to patch the mind virus. A few billionaires are just the most powerful and well-funded expression of a therapeutic-technological worldview that is already endemic to the entire psychedelic-spiritual scene. But actually, I believe we are all in this picture, and we shouldn’t like it.

If we want to meet the soul engineers, we must meet ourselves. We all try to be soul engineers. We try to earn grace. We want a technique to fix us, or at least the occasional rave to ward off the madness. We religious people want prayer practices and worship services to get us feeling right rather than something we are called to do in response to grace while caring for the poor and the downtrodden. We want our politics to make us holy before God and to repair the national spiritual deficit ourselves. And we want it with drugs of all kinds. However effective that is for some in the great spiritual casino of the psychedelic industry, it is also a dangerous and particularly jacked-up way to do it, considering the ramifications on the mind and human agency. Our soul engineering wants to be baptized in power and sacrifice outcasts who diminish our self-image and threaten our goals. The gospel scandalizes our efforts by taking on sacrifice until it redeems the outcast through weakness. And in this world, we are all living in exile.

To be in Christ, if only for moments, if only partially, if only to succumb back again to The Machine, is to experience freedom from anyone’s soul engineering, especially our own, to see visible signs of the invisible God leading us away from a parade of false images. For Christians, to be home wherever we are is to be in Christ. When those of us who call him Lord do so, it is to say he is sovereign over our worst instincts, even as we hand ourselves, the jailer, the keys right back, trusting and believing that it somehow matters to know that we are called for more than this and less of this, and we do not need it.

I am a Presbyterian pastor in northern Vermont. You can reach me at revjoewelker@gmail.com for thoughts, factual corrections, and prayers.

On Friday, I posted the full Accord from the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia sent to me noting that Priest was deposed from ministry for offenses related to “Conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” and “Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy.” Earlier that week, I had asked the Diocese if I could include more details from their post-investigation report so that people could understand the context. I waited 48 hours for a response and, receiving none, released the Accord as-is. In response to this public disclosure, Hunt Priest posted a statement to the Ligare newsletter.

Before I share Priest’s statement, it is crucial to understand the history of how this disciplinary process began.

My concerns started over three years ago when, as a divinity school intern, I came to believe that Priest and his organization, Ligare, were putting people in harm’s way, being particularly disturbed by Priest’s private statements and conduct. I resigned my internship and attempted to follow the model of Matthew 18, speaking first with Priest, then with others on the Ligare board, then others in Ligare’s social sphere, during which Priest declined a non-disciplinary mediated conversation with Bishop of Georgia Frank Logue. Through these conversations, several others shared my concerns, and some board members left Ligare. After I became a whistleblower on the Hopkins/NYU study, Bishop Logue asked if I wanted to initiate a Title IV process, which I declined, wishing to give Priest still more chance to reform.

I continued to avoid a formal process with the Episcopal Church until Priest and Ligare sent a defamatory cease and desist (C&D) letter, copied to an officer at my Presbytery (I am an ordained Presbyterian minister) and an officer at Harvard Divinity School, in an effort to intimidate and censor. I publicly posted my response to the C&D and then initiated the Title IV proceedings. That process ended last week.

Now, here is Priest’s statement:

Priest’s statement contains a number of falsehoods that, like the original C&D letter, are proven false by the official documented record. The Diocese has confirmed that they will not further comment, as now Priest is no longer under their jurisdiction and the matter is closed from their perspective. Thus, I am compelled to correct part of the record he is distorting.

First, Priest claims he “was not removed from ordained ministry, but chose to remove myself.” The official Accord from the Diocese of Georgia states he agreed to a “sentence of Deposition,” which is a serious disciplinary sentence. While he may have “chosen” to agree to it (similar to a plea agreement) instead of choosing an ultimatum to leave his psychedelic non-profit work, it is a formal, disciplinary removal, not a voluntary resignation, which the Episcopal Church’s Canons distinguish. A “Deposition” (Canon IV.2) is explicitly disciplinary and is not the same as a voluntary, non-disciplinary “Release and Removal from the Ordained Ministry of this Church” (Canon III.9.9), which cannot be granted in the middle of Title IV proceedings. If Priest had left Ligare to stay as an ordained priest in response to the Diocese’s findings, there would have been an “Agreement for Discipline” (Canon IV.9), not an exoneration.1

Second, Priest claims he was “cleared of the charges” which were “levied against me.” This is false. The Diocese formally referred the matter for investigation on two specific offenses, “Conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” and “Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy.” While the panel initially found “not sufficient information” to support the dishonesty and fraud charge related to the cease and desist (C&D), it was subsequently recategorized as a different charge.

As for why the C&D charge was recategorized, according to an email from the Diocese, “Rev. Priest said he did indeed receive the cease and desist before it was posted. However, he was surprised to hear from us that it says you were terminated. While he received the cease and desist from [his attorney] as expected by protocol, he did not read it carefully before it was posted on his behalf.”

In this version of events, months after my public rebuttal of the C&D, he was allegedly “surprised” to hear its contents, which included several other falsehoods that went unaddressed. Over a year later, after Priest had apparently privately admitted the letter’s falseness, neither he nor Ligare had ever publicly acknowledged nor privately contacted other parties to correct their defamatory statements. I had to ask the Diocese to reach out to officers at my Presbytery and Harvard Divinity School to clear my name, which they did.

Thus, even taken at face value, the charge of dishonesty was not “cleared,” but recategorized as Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy, because it meant that, in Priest’s version of events, he was approving defamatory legal threats without verifying if they were true. Whatever the case may be, the final Accord he signed explicitly states he was deposed for offenses including “Conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”

Moving on from this, Priest falsely implies that the Reference Panel’s concerns amounted to semantics about “safe and ethical” that he used in podcasts, saying, “That’s it. Really.” While his use of “safe” with regard to psychedelics was noted as a concern (and the word “ethical” is not in their report), the review panel asserted additional findings that he did not disclose in his statement.

There were, in fact, multiple offenses related to Conduct Unbecoming of a Member of the Clergy in the official report. In addition to the issue of his unbecoming public communications and the re-classified C&D charge, the report stated, “Rev. Priest has not been serving in a sacramental capacity as part of his work with Ligare. This leads to (sic) Reference Panel to the conclusion that his priesthood is solely a way to lend credence to the work of Ligare.”

Further, during the investigation, Priest had been under a Restriction on Ministry, a suspension from acting as a priest or representing himself as one. In defiance of this order, the panel found he had violated the terms of this restriction by continuing to represent himself as a priest at a Harvard conference, both in the conference materials and while presenting.

At the conference, the panel noted, he also promoted the idea of psychedelics during the Easter season. As he said in the talk:

“Thinking about these things liturgically, what would it be like to think of Lent as a period of, oh I don't know, ‘preparation,’ and then maybe on Good Friday have a psilocybin experience, and then use the 50 days of Easter as a way to make meaning and integrate. And then Pentecost, which, all bets would be off on Pentecost. (crowd laughs) Just throwing that out there! Feel free to do with that as you wish. It's all there, it's all there.”

According to the report, “This highly concerns the Reference Panel, as it is further evidence that his work could easily be construed as the Episcopal Church encouraging the use of psylocibin (sic).”

Simply put, after agreeing to a Deposition that included charges of dishonesty, Priest has continued to be dishonest. Priest would like to frame the Diocese’s findings as a grand referendum on psychedelics and the Church, a noble cause for which he is being persecuted, a visionary ahead of his time. The reality is that this result was about repeated dishonesty and irresponsible advocacy that can cause people harm.

Rather than accept responsibility, Priest is following a playbook typical among Christian leaders found in misconduct, using impression management tactics designed to control the narrative. The tactics of these crisis narratives have been detailed by evangelical Christian abuse expert Wade Mullen's work, such as Discrediting the Truth-Tellers, Cutting Off Reflected Shame, Basking in Reflected Glory, When White Lies are Pink Flags, and the Coercive Cycle.

I spoke out on Priest and a number of parties now officially found by their institutions to have committed misconduct, continuing to pursue accountability at extensive personal cost, because I believed lives were at stake, and I am taking my ordination imperative seriously to protect the vulnerable. I know I have told the truth and done all I could.

Below is the formal “Notice of Accord and Deposition” issued by the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. The notice specifies that the offenses which are the subject of the Accord are found in Canon IV.4.1.h.6, which is “Conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,” and Canon IV.4.1.h.9, which is “Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy,” of the Canons of the Episcopal Church. According to the notice from Bishop Frank S. Logue, Priest has agreed to a sentence of Deposition, meaning he is “deprived of the right to exercise the gifts and spiritual authority of ministry conferred upon him by ordination.” Agreement to the Accord means a trial of the case will be avoided.

While the specific details of the 13-month investigative process remain confidential at this time, this notice is the culmination of concerns that began over three years ago when I was interning for Ligare, when I became concerned that Priest and Ligare’s conduct was jeopardizing the health and safety of members of the public. For a variety of reasons, I avoided entering a formal process with the Diocese until Priest and Ligare attempted to censor and legally bully me through a defamatory cease and desist letter. My complaint raised several additional concerns which were subsequently investigated. The Accord released this week is the outcome of that process. I am grateful for the Diocese’s resolution and am relieved that the long process has concluded.

Ultimately, this outcome is also a sad and direct consequence of an unethical psychedelic study that experimented on human beings for a non-scientific spiritual mission with drugs that make one open to suggestion and undue influence, even well after the drug’s effects have subsided. The Hopkins/NYU study was found by Johns Hopkins’ Institutional Review Board (IRB) to have multiple counts of “serious non-compliance” with federal regulations. The IRB concluded that these ethical breaches “significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization's human research protection program” and “significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants.” As it pertains to this case, an undisclosed donor acting as a researcher then funded Priest with seed money to start Ligare.

Thus, the issues here extend beyond just one case of clergy misconduct. This is a result of years of enabling behavior from the psychedelic movement, including by Hopkins researchers and other psychedelic leaders prioritizing their spiritual movement over public safety. For years, members of the public have been put at risk of significant harm with psychedelic drug use by clergy who have no clinical backgrounds to justify promotion of the use of any drug, even if such drugs were legal, much less drugs with poorly understood long-term safety profiles. Curious laypeople and naive Christian leaders have continued to turn to Ligare with the false impression they could learn about psychedelic drugs from trustworthy religious leaders, who have subsequently sought to monetize their interest.

I thank the Diocese of Georgia for seeking justice with compassion, reaching accountability that will prevent harm to the vulnerable.

                                                                                            Michael Pollan, July 2021

Author’s Note: This is a long and detailed piece that zooms in on a report in The New Yorker to raise larger questions of journalism. The subject requires a thorough examination of many interconnected issues, so I’ve organized it into several sections for flow and context.

This article has been updated to note that Michael Pollan was offered a chance to comment prior to publication. Neither Pollan nor The New Yorker returned requests for comment.

Since writing this article, one of the featured priests was deposed from ministry (announcement and response).

I. Professional Wrestling

I love authenticity in spiritual conversations, and I love good prose. There is plenty of both in Michael Pollan’s latest piece in The New Yorker, “This Is Your Priest on Drugs,” an immersive survey of the honest-to-weirdness stories of the Johns Hopkins and NYU psychedelic clergy study. It recalled experiences and journeys that struck participants as profound, even in darkness. As has become intrinsic to his brand, Pollan gifts readers with unusual sides of the human experience through a sympathetic look at high-profile psychedelic research.

But as a whistleblower whose concerns led to Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) finding multiple counts of “serious non-compliance” with human subject protections in this study, I found Pollan’s account jettisoned journalistic ethics and offered consistently manipulative framing. The article was also used to launder1 the findings of an additional ethically-compromised paper that was blocked from publication, and this crucial context was never disclosed to readers. Pollan and The New Yorker did not return advance requests for comment on this piece.

Pollan’s piece was not the first to report on the study in a significant outlet; the New York Times reported on the study in March 2024 that gave balance to multiple perspectives, reporting on what other researchers saw as a “New Age” research environment. Reason reported some other interesting details related to the study in February 2025, including a successful attempt to visit Pope Francis. But Pollan, the veteran journalism professor, had yet to weigh in as the man on the inside of the movement with his definitive Harvard-Berkeley take.

It was a piece Pollan had been planning for years, and telling his version of the story was not supposed to be this hard. The same week the clergy study’s findings were first presented to an eager conference crowd, Pollan introduced the study’s legendary lead researcher, Roland Griffiths, to a crowd of 10,000 who wished to honor him following a terminal cancer diagnosis. Pollan directly introduced him in gushing praise: “What he says carries the weight of Science with a capital S…For a journalist, Roland is a dream come true.” As it would turn out, Griffiths had apparently deceived regulatory bodies in order to grant donors direct access to human subjects as members of the study team.

During the celebration dinner, other key donors and researchers for the clergy study spoke, namely, Pollan’s friends Bob Jesse and T. Cody Swift. Jesse was a funder and an author, while Swift also funded the study and led qualitative analysis without IRB approval on a paper that wound up not getting published. According to Pollan’s piece, Swift says he didn’t realize he hadn’t been IRB-approved.

Whether Pollan just wanted to tell some interesting stories or wanted to herald in a triumph of the scientific and religious future, he wound up having to rescue the future from embarrassment.

Regarding his psychedelic journalism, Pollan has repeatedly referred to an “inoculation” strategy, an approach to journalism that seeks to vaccinate the public and the press from “turning” on psychedelics through media tactics described as “public education”: “I can’t overestimate the value of public education as a way to inoculate the public against the inevitable negative stories—business collapses, sexual abuse in the treatment room, suicides, scandal,” Pollan said in a 2021 online forum interview. In 2023, Pollan used the phrase again and implied that this method involved maintaining a “sober” tone. “It may not be as exciting sometimes, but I think in the long run, it’ll be more credible. And when things do go wrong, the public will be somewhat prepared for it. And I think that that’s important. So it becomes a kind of inoculation.”

It seems the goal is to present the public with a neutral facade and, like a vaccine, share just enough of a negative story so that an audience develops antibodies from scandals. It has been an effective, if Machiavellian, strategy for a science journalist to take.

(If you are new here and need a recap of everything, here you go:)

The challenge in deconstructing an inoculation is that Pollan writes a sophisticated narrative that, at times, seems to genuinely strike a balance of fairness. As someone who has taught Ivy Leaguers how to tell stories, Pollan is an expert storyteller himself through understatement, making it look easy, rendering any protests looking strained, even uncool.

It’s not all appearances, either. The style has enough substance for everyone to chew on something and for noone to feel fully satisfied. He helps us connect through individuals and their personal journeys, and raising questions about this piece might feel like attacking them. He even affords some other voices just enough airtime against the message being sold, the marketer’s counter-pitch embedded within the pitch (“this jetpack may not work under every condition”). Nobody could accuse him of being completely one-sided when he’s giving ample space to chaplain Rita Powell’s experience of the abyss, who was a friend of mine. It's not a puff piece.

Puff pieces aren’t careful orchestrations, accentuating some notes just enough but not too much, using tension to draw the reader in to make the final triumph feel earned. It’s not pop music, but more like cynical jazz, a gifted saxophonist calculating just enough “wrong” notes to make it seem authentic so that you miss all the corruption in the back of the club.

And so I have to be a little uncool and lay out how Pollan’s journalism functions as damage control for his friends and colleagues who were behind the study. It obscures both his connections to them and the severity of the study’s problems while sharing data they couldn’t get published through peer review, all while misleading readers. By hiding his most significant conflicts of interest and downplaying a research scandal, the result is not just a disservice to his readers; it’s bad science journalism and bad religion journalism, but good inoculation.

What started as a simple review of the article kept requiring more context. I think the following is best understood not merely as a rebuttal of the article, but as a lens to look for when Pollan’s psychedelic journalism acts like professional wrestling, a performance with a predetermined outcome, featuring a celebrity special guest referee to sell the show.

II. Due Credit: The Door of Sincerity, Windows to Objectivity

But it’s not all bad, and I’m not just saying that because this is the part of a critical review where you’re supposed to give due credit. No, as someone who was able to study psychedelics in divinity school in part thanks to Pollan’s earlier work, and as someone whose own spiritual journey took me through many of my own authentically weird psychedelic states, at times reading this article brought me back to some great memories of old friendships with kindred spiritual seekers. It gives a glimpse into the ayahuasca circles I spent many nights in underneath the California desert sky.

Like those ayahuasca circles, I found myself connecting to the stories through the doorway of human sincerity, sometimes despite myself. The authenticity, the excitement, the realer-than-real quality, the ways that it (at first) transformed me and opened my heart. The stories also brought me back to the period of my life when I was a covert psychedelic evangelist, giving a presentation on Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind to a group of Christians in a small Boston-area church. When he reported a participant feeling closer to God, there is more than a nugget of truth to that post-psychedelic experience in my spiritual journey—but also nuggets of strong contradiction where my experiences took me much further from God and deeper into myself.

Since I’m giving credit on account of shared sincerity, it should be noted that some of the participants didn’t love the Pollan piece either. There is an element of voyeurism involved that at times feels uncomfortable. Some felt he gave too much airtime to the “controversies," or that the branding of the thing was cartoonish (perhaps the same reason it’s not always recommended you look in the mirror on mushrooms). To that end, one could think that maybe the story was like a tough negotiation—you know it is fair when nobody is thrilled.

I’m grateful that Pollan included ample energy to Powell’s dark experiences, the inappropriately-Christianized environment per Rabbi Kamenetz, as well as Sughra Ahmed’s feeling that she hadn’t received adequate support and that the sessions were “extractive.” It did make me wonder whether this article was, in turn, extracting yet more, like the process of boiling maple sap that’s already been pulled from a tree, distilling it to be consumed by the masses. Pollan also made sure to share the complexity of experiences that, in relaying thoughts from my former academic advisor Charles Stang in the piece, were not as pleasant as “the ones the researchers were advertising.”

These were important disclaimers and caveats to the glossy numbers the paper touts—79% “reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life,” while 96% “rated their first encounters with psilocybin as being among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.” There are good reasons to contextualize these numbers as scientifically limited at best, and Pollan does so. But he also shows the humans behind the numbers who felt their lives were positively changed.

Including outside-the-bubble experts was another strength of the piece, serving as windows towards something more objective than the intensely subjective environment. Pollan himself noted “the study had serious limitations,” discussing priming effects and including the skepticism of study design expert Andrew Gelman. Pollan presented it as a scientific curiosity, but missed how it is at the heart of some of my central concerns—how ethical is it for researchers to “prime” people under a drug known for making you impressionable when those researchers have such strong spiritual beliefs about psychedelics?

Pollan also at least attempted to give voice to some questioning the “mission” of this study and the premise of psychedelic spirituality via rabbi Ariel Goldberg and long-time psychedelic researcher Rick Strassman. He also cited paper co-author Matthew Johnson’s warning against the guruism of the primary researchers and mentioned my own whistleblowing, framed as “a critique.”

So what is there to take issue with? Am I expecting perfect neutrality that I don’t have? Isn’t this an exemplar of fair reporting?

And since I’m still giving credit, let’s be truly fair—I don’t have to deal with an editor, don’t know what editorial decisions went into this, and don’t have a word count to worry about (as much as some readers wish I did). So what’s the problem?

For one, the piece is so sophisticated that you almost miss how Pollan actually helps his friends circumvent the very ethical violations he’s supposed to be reporting on. And you completely miss that some outside experts don’t think it should have been published at all.

III. Should It Have Been Published?

When planning his piece, Pollan could not have expected he would have to report on his friends being involved in some of the most significant confirmed research misconduct to date in psychedelic research. Pollan, given advance copies of the study data, attempted to time his article with the release of the study in a two-year-old industry journal, Psychedelic Medicine.

Pollan almost had a gigantic omelet on his face when, as reported by UC Berkeley’s Microdose newsletter, the study was momentarily pulled by the overseeing publisher due to failing to meet their ethical standards after The New Yorker article had come out. The publisher’s sudden reversal of that decision deferred the final call to the journal, whose ties to the study’s authors make the publishing process look something like a vertical monopoly.

So The New Yorker must have breathed a strange sigh of relief: a study that was deemed too unethical to publish by neutral observers ultimately was.

Pollan also failed to disclose the full nature of the IRB’s findings (found here), or convey their gravity. While saying the IRB reported “serious non-compliance” and giving a partial summary, Pollan did not mention that there is no higher level of IRB finding than “serious non-compliance,” did not mention that such findings are rare, much less when they come in multiples, nor did he include at all one of the counts of serious non-compliance that participant data was also mishandled in being given to an outside third-party. Pollan also omitted key language, that the IRB reported these instances of serious non-compliance “significantly compromised the integrity of the [Johns Hopkins’] human research protection program [and] significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants.” The New Yorker did not return a request for comment on this editorial decision.

The severity of these ethical breaches is not merely the opinion of those unsympathetic to the research, but by some of Pollan’s colleagues. On the June 11 panel with Pollan, UC Berkeley neuroscientist Michael Silver—co-director of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics2—stated plainly that such violations are “not ambiguous from the perspective of human subjects researchers.” He continued:

These kinds of violations should never happen. This kind of oversight is really unacceptable, and at best, is a distraction from the research and scientific aims of this study. And at worst, participants in this study were interacting in altered states of consciousness—and in the months afterwards—potentially interacting with study team members who were not qualified, and certainly had not been vetted.3

I further respect that these comments were given in a pro-psychedelic setting that might have felt uncomfortable to share. Silver did go on to argue that these ethical failings do not necessarily invalidate the scientific data itself and seemed at peace with its publication. “The effect sizes [are] so large and so consistent, I can’t see how failing to disclose members of the study team and conflicts of interest really affects the nature of the results and their interpretations.” But this diverts from the central issue. The primary issue to me is not about the statistical validity of the paper, it is about the fundamental ethics of experimenting on human beings in a study compromised by “unacceptable” oversight. Silver also said the presence of conflicts of interest in the study team was something standard to science; scientists are passionate about their work and must engage in fundraising, and it’s a problem in some ways, but a normal one we have to live with. Though I believe he was speaking in good faith, I also believe there is a difference in kind here: how many scientists are trying to get drugs legalized and decriminalized that they think are deeply spiritually meaningful, often to the point of religious fervor? As Silver admitted, “Many of us in psychedelic research are in it because of our powerful experiences.”

Pollan also “successfully failed” to fairly portray the strongest concerns of those concerned with the study and concealed the true heart of the ethical matter: human beings were given high-suggestibility drugs by psychedelic evangelists, drugs that are “cultogenic” for their ability to be abused by charismatic leaders to create unhealthy self-serving groups, in a study that seemingly had minimal scientific or public health benefit and created more psychedelic evangelists.

In the piece, Pollan quotes University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo, giving the appearance of balance but focusing only on the question of scientific bias, reporting Charo as saying, “a funder who participates in the research process ‘introduces the potential for bias, conscious or unconscious, that goes beyond the biases that all researchers have.’” While this is true, it is not the heart of the ethical problem, and I wasn’t sure if Professor Charo had other opinions on the matter.

So I emailed Professor Charo to get more context about the findings, specifically how common serious non-compliance was and whether she thought the study would have been approved since it was carried out with funders directly interfacing with participants. She told me:

“It is very uncommon to find serious noncompliance, as most investigators have training in the regulatory requirements and ethical norms prior to be allowed to enroll subjects, and many have consultations with the IRB staff while preparing their protocols…Also based on my own experience, the IRB most likely would not have approved a study in which sponsors had this degree of direct involvement with subjects.”

Charo did say that “there have been cases in the past when experiments that were done unethically yielded results that warranted publication, if there was a significant public health benefit to the data and if there were discussion about why the experiment should not ever be done again in the same, unethical fashion.” Some rabbinical discussions, she noted, advocated sharing the results of Nazi experiments if there was public health value (Charo is Jewish). I replied to her that while perhaps some public health good may come of it, “It’s a small sample of an unusual population (religious clergy), and the motivations of several researchers were brazenly about advancing a non-scientific religious and spiritual agenda, and given that bad public health outcomes are also guaranteed to happen from this study persuading people into unhealthy behaviors with these drugs, I still (in my admittedly biased view) think that this should not have been published.”

In reply, she said, “I share your view that the underlying motivations (or subsequent use of the work) undermines its public health value.”

This concern is heightened when there is populist, irresponsible scientific journalism giving free advertising to psychedelic evangelism. As covered in a 2022 episode of New York Magazine’s “Cover Story” podcast, we know that for whatever health benefits he has helped people find, some feel their loved ones lives have also been lost in part to Pollan’s prior irresponsible psychedelic journalism.

So the more people you ask, the more you understand the gravity of the problems with this study are far beyond what Pollan conveys. As we have seen so far, the journal’s publisher and an expert interviewed by Pollan believe that this research probably should not have happened nor should have been published. And in fact, one of the two papers wasn’t published. Until, that is, Pollan circumvented regulators to unofficially publish its contents.

IV. Data Laundering And Other Circumventions

Pollan’s report did more than just downplay the IRB’s findings. A central irony here is that Pollan circumvented the very disciplinary actions Pollan was supposed to be reporting on. In doing so, The New Yorker was made party to laundering blocked research data (the term “laundering” in this piece is not used as a literal accusation of criminal activity).

Pollan recently indicated that The New Yorker would not let the story be run until there was a peer-reviewed paper: “The New Yorker did not want to publish until the scientific article came out. They felt that legitimized the whole thing.”4 So they waited. And after the publisher relented despite their ethical concerns, the paper got published.

But there were supposed to be two published papers, and only one actually did get published with peer review. What happened to the other? Pollan shared it in The New Yorker—but didn’t describe it as such. According to Pollan on June 11:

There was qualitative paper that was planned, but will apparently never come out. ... I was fortunate in that I was allowed to read a draft of it—draw from it, quote from it in my piece—but because of the controversies surrounding the study, the Hopkins IRB doesn’t want this data—which is to say these wonderful interviews—to ever get out, and I think that’s a shame.5

Rather than disclosing this with his readers, and likely his editors, this blocked, unpublished qualitative data was instead misleadingly presented in The New Yorker in this way: “Swift, the funder who helped debrief some of the participants, also sent me a narrative account that highlights themes from sixteen interviews. It reads almost like a psychedelic oral history.” He then goes on to share the contents.

This framing is nothing less than a sleight of hand to share a paper that didn’t get published because of ethical issues. So to be clear again: Michael Pollan shared unethically collected data blocked by Johns Hopkins regulators and did not present it as such. Instead, he framed it to millions of readers as a simple “narrative account” from a helpful funder.

There’s a second potential problem for researchers. Here’s the specifics of what researchers were required to disclose:

The JHM IRB determined the following must be reported to all journals and disclosed in all publications where data related to this study may be published:

1. There were two unapproved study team members, one who was also a study sponsor, directly engaged in the research;

2. There was an additional approved study team member whose role as a sponsor of the study was not disclosed to the IRB and who directly led the qualitative analysis;

3. Conflicts of interest related to the two individuals who were engaged in the research and also served as study sponsors were not appropriately disclosed nor managed; and

4. The funding sponsorship for this study was not disclosed to the JHM IRB.

It’s simply true that Pollan’s article didn’t include these full required disclosures, and the ones he referenced didn’t include their required language. Swift is also never described by Pollan with the IRB’s words—a sponsor who “directly led the qualitative analysis”—but with other euphemisms: “the funder who helped debrief some of the participants,” and “interviewing participants and writing a narrative account of their sessions.” These were not clarifications for full accuracy, for they omit that Swift led a team of other people working on this qualitative data with him.

While Pollan may not be beholden to the IRB, what about any researchers who gave him manuscripts in advance? By publishing contents of the blocked paper and underreporting the required disclosures prior to the quantitative paper’s official publication, did Pollan inadvertently expose his friends to more IRB regulation?

In sum, Pollan’s piece circumvented IRB regulators who had, in their mercy, just allowed them to publish controversial data at risk of the IRB’s own reputation. A major media platform was then used to launder ethically problematic research in lieu of formal publication. While Pollan may have felt justified as they were blended in with his personal interviews with participants, and he saw that as the essence of the story, it still means ethically compromised, non-peer-reviewed research was presented to millions of readers without the essential context that Hopkins deemed mandatory for public consumption.

A media representative for Johns Hopkins Medicine did not return a request for comment on these issues. The New Yorker did not return a request for comment either.

So why would a veteran science journalist disseminate research data in such a misleading way, even potentially circumventing his own editor’s wishes?

V. A Little Damage Control For My Friends: Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest

Pollan’s actions here make more sense when you consider the level of, er, “embeddedness” he has with the psychedelic movement. Pollan is not honest about these relationships to the point of journalistic malpractice.

The Friend: T. Cody Swift

Pollan presents Swift as a curious character in this saga that might give readers the impression that they are strangers to one another. He did not reveal that they have had a friendship going back years.

In the acknowledgments section of Pollan’s 2021 book, This Is Your Mind On Plants, Pollan refers to Swift as his friend and promotes one of his non-profits:

“Thanks to my friend Cody Swift, founder of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, and his colleague Miriam Volat for educating me about the threat to the peyote cactus and for introducing me to several of the members of the Native American Church who appear in the narrative. IPCI’s work conserving peyote for Native Americans is urgent and deserves our support (ipci.life).”

This friendship proved valuable for Pollan’s research, as one third of This is Your Mind On Plants is centered on peyote, a prime interest for Swift. They further connected over mutually backing a new non-profit, as reported by Marc Gunther:

[Swift’s non-profit] RiverStyx and others last year became seed funders of a new nonprofit called the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund (IMC Fund) to preserve five “keystone” medicines — ayahuasca, toad, iboga, mushrooms and peyote. Key backers of the IMC Fund include Dr. Bronner’s, environmental advocate Christiana Musk, and author Michael Pollan.

Through Riverstyx’s wide funding reach, Swift’s presence is everywhere in psychedelia. So why didn’t Pollan act like they knew each other?

Yet this isn’t the biggest omission.

The Glaring Omission: Bob Jesse

Bob Jesse is an author and sponsor of the study who has publicly discussed psychedelic PR strategy with Pollan and still consults for the psychedelic center Pollan co-founded, the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP), where Jesse is listed as an “Advisor and Collaborator” and where Pollan is still listed on “Leadership & Staff.” A friend of Pollan’s, he was not noted at all. His omission is one of the biggest red flags of the whole piece.

It is particularly egregious given that Bob Jesse introduced the psychedelic world to Pollan and Pollan introduced the whole world to Jesse. “Bob introduced psychedelics to me in a way no one else could have,” Pollan said two years ago, pausing to laugh, “That’s not what I mean.” In previous Pollan writings, such as in his 2015 New Yorker piece profiling the rise of psychedelic science and his famous 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, Jesse is given near-hagiography status. It was Pollan who told the world about how Jesse brought two of the other authors together, Roland Griffiths and Bill Richards, a trio at Hopkins who were always linked for their work in restarting psychedelic research. Jesse was not a bit player at Hopkins, nor in the journal paper; he is the second listed author on the paper, and in the “Authors’ Contributions” section, he is listed as having contributed “Conceptualization, methodology, writing—review and editing, funding, acquisition.” Out of the seven authors named in “This Is Your Priest On Drugs,” only one other was not mentioned, a young data specialist who assisted on the paper.

“When the history of second-wave psychedelic research is written,” Pollan wrote in his original New Yorker piece in 2015, “Bob Jesse will be remembered as one of two scientific outsiders who worked for years, mostly behind the scenes, to get it off the ground.” But Pollan couldn’t find two out of 6500 words for his friend Bob Jesse to be in the 2025 history of the controversial paper Jesse authored and his organization sponsored.

Jesse’s absence is especially notable given Jesse’s specific interests in psychedelics and religion. Pollan had previously described him as on a “mission” to revive psychedelics, “not so much of medicine as of spiritual development,”6 and as Jesse described in a 2021 webinar I attended, the earliest psychedelic strategy conversations 30 years ago focused on the question, “What would it take to draw attention to these materials for their sacramental potential?”7 According to Jesse, they concluded that this would involve finding a scientist with a pristine reputation to conduct psychedelic research on “healthy normals” at a top university.

In a title that is so on the nose you might think I made it up, Jesse gave a talk two years before the clergy study titled “From the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Findings to the Reconstruction of Religion.” In the talk, Jesse likened the strategy of his approach to the martial art Aikido—not to “oppose” something, but to “blend” with it to “take it in a safe direction.” Rather than opposing religion like in the 1960s psychedelic era, the new goal was “learning to do religion better.”8 In the same 2013 lecture, he described psychedelic mystical experiences as a new “doctrine.”9 In a 2016 talk, he said that he sees a psychedelically-induced mystical experience as a “birthright.”10 In 2024, after the clergy study had already come under fire, Jesse defended their approach as being interested in “people waking up.”11

In June 2023, Pollan also indicated that Jesse exercises a degree of editorial input over The Microdose, a newsletter produced by UC Berkeley’s BCSP. “Another venue of my conversation with Bob is in the in the offices of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Bob is a invaluable advisor to us,” said Pollan. He further notes that “Bob, on a volunteer basis, reads every issue of The Microdose before it comes out” before making changes to ensure they do not “exaggerate” or “misrepresent.” I sent an email to The Microdose asking if Jesse still had editorial input and how they managed conflicts of interest in stories that impact BCSP affiliates, and I received no response.

In this light, the extent to which Pollan strains to avoid mentioning him by name is unignorable. Yet he was on Pollan’s mind; out of just a handful of emailed questions, Pollan asked me a strange one about Jesse, specifically, if I knew why Jesse (and Richards) left Hopkins. I told him he should ask his colleague.

If he was seeking to tell an accurate story, why didn’t Pollan think any mention of Bob Jesse was relevant?

And why didn’t The New Yorker require disclosure of this brazen conflict of interest?

And what else is missing?

The SPSC, the Bromances, and the “New Reformation”

Beyond the official authors and sponsors of the study, Pollan is deeply enmeshed in the psychedelic world he writes on. He failed to convey it in the piece.

Notable here is Pollan’s connection to Brian Muraresku. Muraresku’s interest in a “New Reformation” is described in the introduction to his best-selling and influential book, The Immortality Key, about Christianity and psychedelics; Pollan wrote a preface for the paperback version. Some reporting has covered aspects of Muraresku’s relevant background for Compact Magazine and Reason, as well as how some academic sources of the book have now criticized it.

Muraresku’s introduction to his book, subtitled, “The New Reformation,” opens with a story of a Hopkins psilocybin patient and praises several Hopkins researchers before describing at length some psychedelic theological views on this “New Reformation”:

• “A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers. More troubling is the God of organized religion and his army of spokesmen—those priests, rabbis, and imams who stand between superficial definitions of heaven and a common-sense public who have every right to demand proof. When the answer to their doubts is condescending moralism, contrived from an outdated and impenetrable holy book, it’s time to cut out the middleman in the private search for transcendence.”

• “And if enough consenting, healthy adults could experience what Dinah experienced with proper preparation and guidance, even once in their lives, we just might have a new Reformation on our hands.”

• “What was the original sacrament of Western civilization? And did it somehow sneak its way into the primitive rites of Christianity? If the experts ever turn up new information on the real reason why the universe of Greek-speaking pagans became the founding generations of Christianity, turning a Jewish healer from Galilee into the most famous human being who ever lived, it promises the Reformation to end all Reformations. Because the mystical core, the ecstatic source and true lifeblood of the biggest religion the world has ever known, will have finally been exposed.”

• “In the summer of 2007 I randomly plucked an issue from the growing pile of unread magazines in the corner of my office. The title of the article that would forever change my life smacked me in the face: ‘The God Pill.’ It was a brief write-up of the very first psilocybin experiment at Hopkins. … At the time, however, there was very little scholarship specifically dedicated to drug use in Ancient Greece or early Christianity. With no way to dig deeper, that’s where I had to leave the idea for many years. Until William Richards and Roland Griffiths, the chief researchers at Hopkins, brought it back on my radar in the most unexpected way possible: through the laboratory.”

Pollan’s preface, like Muraresku’s introduction, connects Hopkins’ broader psilocybin research to the supposed rediscovery of the roots of ancient Christianity: “Griffiths and his colleagues were dropping some most interesting crumbs, leading anyone who might to want to follow them in the direction not of science or medicine but deep into the history of religion.” According to a source, an earlier version of the clergy study’s manuscript included a reference to the book. Clergy study team members Bill Richards and Anthony Bossis are also featured in the book in glowing terms.

Pollan and Muraresku seem to have initiated a high-profile joint venture, UC Berkeley and Harvard’s Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture (SPSC), a venture made possible by a gift from Elon Musk ally Antonio Gracias and conducted jointly at Harvard and UC Berkeley (Pollan has been a professor at both). “Harvard is the ideal place to explore the topic of psychedelics from new angles,” said Gracias, “and to craft a framework for their legal, safe, and appropriate impact on society.”

While it is unclear what exactly Pollan’s ongoing role is, the initiative seems to have been spawned by their efforts. As Muraresku said in a tweet last year, which Pollan retweeted:

“Sometime after the release of The Immorality Key, I had the opportunity to meet and brainstorm with Michael Pollan… Yesterday marked the culmination of 2.5 years of conversations, and a historic milestone. Harvard and Berkeley just announced the very first cohorts of a truly interdisciplinary grant program. …None of this would have been possible without the stewardship of Michael Pollan, or the goodwill of so many friends and colleagues at both Harvard and Berkeley.”

Elon Musk’s sister-in-law Christiana described it this way in a press release:

“When Michael Pollan and Brian Muraresku brought us the opportunity to support this research, we were inspired by what we had learned in their respective books, Your Mind on Plants, and The Immortality Key,” said Christiana Musk, Co-founder and Director of Flourish Trust. “Humanity’s relationship with mind-altering plants and fungi is ancient. Just as it’s important to better understand the promise and risks of psychedelics in mental health treatments, it is also important to understand how these compounds may have shaped meaning-making systems throughout time and across cultures and how they might be contributing to that today. These initial grantees offer an inspiring contribution to this nascent field.”

While Pollan mentions his founding of the Berkeley psychedelic center in The New Yorker piece, he does not mention this project and its mutual connection with some of his story’s subjects. For example, Charles Stang is the head of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, a key partner and recipient of SPSC funds, and study participant Jaime Clark-Soles is involved in a project downstream of the SPSC through Harvard Law School called PULSE (“Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience”).

To see a different example of Pollan’s journalistic relationship to the psychedelic movement at large, consider the following tweet from the deleted X/Twitter account of Ben Sessa, which shows Pollan grouped with psychedelic researchers at a 2023 Icelandic psychedelic conference where Pollan was a speaker:

Sessa was featured in the Netflix adaptation of Pollan’s book, and would later have his medical license suspended for developing an inappropriate sexual relationship with a client, who later took her own life. Rick Doblin, one of the primary leaders of psychedelic research and the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), is also featured in the photo.

The point of sharing this photo is simply to wonder: is this the journalistic distance Pollan is conveying to readers? When the country’s most influential journalist on a topic is publicly described as being in a “bromance” by controversial members of a field he covers, it blurs lines between covering the movement and being a part of it.

VI. Crowd Control: Injecting a Narrative Vaccine

So far, we’ve established that the most damning IRB language from Johns Hopkins wasn’t shared, that blocked data was laundered, that the study’s other findings were disseminated in a way that appears to have violated the IRB’s mandate the piece was supposed to be covering, and that he had had significant undisclosed conflicts of interest with the study’s key figures and is further enmeshed in the field without conveying it to The New Yorker’s readers. This all starts to shed light on the other issues in Pollan’s work.

But first, let’s revisit his “inoculation” strategy.

“Inoculate the Public”

In a 2021 interview, Pollan went on the record for believing in “inoculat[ing] the public” from “negative stories,” including “business collapses, sexual abuse in the treatment room, suicides, [and] scandal.”

As I wrote in a letter to The New Yorker editors in advance of the piece,12 while Pollan frames this as “public education” with “solid information and true stories” to manage the narrative when “the press” might “turn” against psychedelics, this approach is deeply problematic. Baked into this philosophy is a presupposition about what is in the public’s best interest and a clear desire to soften the impact of negative coverage. Simply, is a journalist’s primary responsibility is to report the facts, or to “inoculate” the public from them? Pollan’s opinion that “the press” should not “turn” against psychedelics seems likely to conflict with his duty to report fully on a scandal, particularly one involving his friends.

Pollan repeated the term “inoculation” in conversation with Bob Jesse, discussing how to “prepare” the public for “when things go wrong.” The conversation was held at the same big 2023 MAPS conference where they celebrated Roland Griffiths. Pollan has been heavily criticized by some, including myself, for his omission of a story of a high-profile abuse story that occurred under the oversight of MAPS. This story did not feature in his book or Netflix adaptation that sang the praises of MDMA research. Despite this, it became a significant factor in the FDA’s decision to decline MAPS’ application for MDMA therapy.

The discussion, “Tempering Psychedelics,” was introduced by a presenter around achieving “mainstream adoption and lasting reform.” Pollan and Jesse shared a long-term view of “public education,” discussing communication strategies that involved greater discussion of risks and more careful tones. While this was in the name of being responsible and reporting with “integrity,” their discussion was also aimed at advocacy. As Pollan asked Jesse, “How [do] we talk about psychedelics when we’re trying to get them decriminalized or legalized?” Pollan and Jesse discussed how acknowledging risks can be a strategy for gaining credibility. “If I change my strategy and I talked about risk at the beginning, she would listen,” said Pollan.

When viewed through the lens of “inoculation,” Pollan’s decision to downplay the full severity of the Johns Hopkins IRB findings and omit key conflicts of interest no longer looks like a simple oversight, but rather a consistent application of his stated journalistic strategy to inject a narrative vaccine.

I shared detailed concerns with The New Yorker editors about this conversation, Pollan’s ties with Jesse, and other concerns in advance of the story’s publication.13 After acknowledgment of receipt, I did not receive a response from editors.

Character Building

In this light, the characters in Pollan’s story begin to take on a certain shape. Pollan does not ignore that lead researcher Roland Griffiths had mixed and at times conflicting motives, which appears to be true. However, Pollan avoids naming Griffiths—the one Pollan has repeatedly described in gushing terms, who has a sterling reputation—as being the person who was most at fault for the findings of serious non-compliance, where Griffiths’ actions appear to have been deliberate bypassing of regulators. In March 2024, the New York Times reported that Griffiths’ lab was noted by many to have an overly spiritualized environment, and reported an inappropriate retreat between participants and researchers. In contrast, Pollan gives the impression that Griffiths had grown “more careful,” which may be true, but it doesn’t change that he carried strong motivations to influence religion earlier on. As Griffiths said to Jordan Peterson in 2021:

Whether the future is integrating into existing religious institutions, or seeing an evolution of our cultural institutions that can incorporate this sort of thing is, you know, I think a question…I’m almost thinking of this now in an evolutionary sense, we have to evolve the cultural institutions that can create the containers around these experiences…this is part of the co-evolution that needs to happen.

This stands in contrast with Pollan’s muted claim that “All stressed that it was never their intention to inject psychedelics into organized religion.”

“Yet some,” Pollan adds, “Such as Swift and Richards, have been openly supportive of that effort. (Richards has spoken at a public Ligare event.)” While this sentence may also be technically true, it not only downplays Griffiths, it (again) omits any mention of Bob Jesse’s interest in this effort and downplays the nature of the involvement. Richards is described by Pollan as “infectiously cheerful” with “a wide, toothy grin,” a whimsical elder, and not someone whose commitment to ethical seriousness also has questions. Richards did not simply speak at an event, but gave enthusiastic support that a participant was “devoting his life right now to facilitating this emergence in which we so desperately need” in the same period the participant was giving a false description of his session with Richards, described as an “ordination.” Later, Richards was a keynote speaker at a spiritual direction conference hosted by the participant. Pollan also ignores that Richards’ 2015 book implores religions to be “emboldened” to embrace psychedelics. Rick Strassman, quoted in Pollan’s piece, wrote a review of Bill Richards’ 2015 book years ago that warned about the researchers involved using the clergy study as a way to popularize their religious beliefs.

This is part of the important contextual backdrop for Pollan’s featured subject, Hunt Priest. The most obvious omission here was that Priest’s organization hired a psychedelic lawyer to send a defamatory attempt to censor me. While I publicly documented my response to it, Pollan did not mention the letter nor inquire into its veracity when he emailed me questions. Among other issues in this area,14 Pollan also describes the episode with Richards as “drew criticism online” rather than being what sparked an initial Hopkins investigation.

(August 2025 update: Priest has now been deposed from ministry)

Even some of the outside experts Pollan brings in, portrayed as neutral arbiters, have undisclosed relationships with the study team. Pollan invites Elaine Pagels, a scholar of Gnosticism and early Christianity, to close the article and give him a “reality check.” But according to one participant’s report, she was part of a presentation of preliminary findings with some study team members and participants at the Parliament of World Religions in August 2023 (along with the unofficial progressive Christian pope, Fr. Richard Rohr).

According to one observer, Pagels said:

“[I can’t help] mentioning a personal note; what excited me [was] when I was invited by Thomas Swift and Doctor Anthony Bossis to share and [present] the results, I saw how these results resonated with the discovery of what I called the Gnostic Gospels. You know, they [Gnostic Gospels] were written about 2000 years ago, and they talk about what Neuroscientist Roland Griffiths, one of the leaders in this research, calls inner knowing. You know, that is different from what we think of as rational knowledge.”

As Pollan reports, Pagels has been invited to give a commentary on the study in the journal in which it was published. It is also Pagels who delivers the final verdict and closing thoughts of Pollan’s piece:

“Traditions can become fossilized,” she said. Religious institutions will need to be “enlivened and reimagined and transformed” if they are to survive and serve people today. “It’s like art,” she added. “We don’t just stay with the art of the fifteenth century. People are still making paintings!””

Pollan obscured NYU researcher Anthony Bossis’ psychedelic interests as well. In a profile for Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key, Bossis reportedly described religiously oriented goals for his psychedelic studies based on the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece (a popular theory that a sect used a psychedelic brew recently received significant pushback from several classics scholars).15 In the book, Bossis’s position is characterized as such:

The whole point of these psilocybin interventions, [Bossis] concedes, is to trigger the same beatific vision that was reported at Eleusis for millennia.16

Bossis added this endorsement to the book: "A timely message, given the re-emergence of psychedelic research for end-of-life distress. A tour de force on the perennial quest to unlock the mystery of death. A spiritual adventure page-turner that’s not easy to put down. And a mystery tour well worth taking.”

Bossis later spoke at a conference in Eleusis in 2023, discussing the results of the clergy study; Muraresku and Hopkins’ psychedelic center director, Fred Barrett, also spoke. In the talk, given weeks after issues around the study became public, Bossis attempted to clarify his position, saying, “We’re not out to change religion or anything, we’re scientists.” Yet in the audience conversation, Bossis sounded a slightly different tone. Bossis argued he didn’t think it was a good idea to spread these drugs rapidly, but seemed to still believe in a slower influence on culture. He relays a story from the early 1960s in which Timothy Leary was advised to slow down, to “Keep it to the researchers…the intellectuals, the artists, the jazz musicians, the religious leaders, let it slowly filter into the culture, don’t just throw it out there….the mystery schools, including Eleusis, were always kept secret. Because they felt—maybe it’s arrogant—you can’t just unleash it on the masses.”

So, how does Pollan describe Bossis’ opinions about psychedelics and religion? Not much: “‘To me, these experiences can be spiritual,’ Bossis told me,” is the entirety of how Pollan describes his views.

Kafka Traps, Strawmen, and Gadflies

In the piece, Pollan sets a trend of referring to me as a “critic” rather than a whistleblower. I was unsure what was motivating this until Pollan made the strange claim on a panel this past June 11th that I was “a supposed, but not real whistleblower.”17 In the same talk, Pollan’s revealed preference was to call me a “gadfly.”18 Whether I am labeled a “whistleblower” or a “gadfly” or a pastor of a small church in rural Vermont is irrelevant compared to the facts at hand.

Apart from this, Pollan’s follow-up note about fifteen participants writing a letter that “disagreed” with me is misleading about its focus. I wrote about this in my last update, but the letter was primarily an endorsement of the study's publication while it was in jeopardy, a crucial context Pollan did not report.

Here is how I put my core concerns to Pollan in an email, which I sent before Johns Hopkins confirmed there was serious unethical behavior:

“Overwhelming evidence suggests the study experimented on human subjects for the researchers’ and donors’ spiritual mission. This is a deeply unethical abuse of science and of human subject research. Public comments and documented actions from donors and researchers suggest this study was experimenting on human beings with high-suggestibility drugs to produce a result that would influence public opinion. The publicly available evidence was detailed in my Substack.”

While I know well that we can’t always use full quotes for the sake of space and flow, a fact-checker asked only if I agreed that the study was “part of a strategy to integrate psychedelics into mainstream religion.” I said yes. And that is all that was included of my perspective. It’s true, but it wasn’t representative of my main concerns.

Pollan does make some attempt to touch on how bad the behavior of the study was, even quoting study author Stephen Ross that it “seems like pay to play” (note the heavy lifting of “seems”). But he then uses Ross to deride the real ethical problems here as “conspiracy theories that we’re all colluding to create a psychedelic religion.”

Kafka traps and strawman arguments aside, the public statements of those associated with this research are public, documented, and numerous. The allegation, at least on my part, was never that they were “creating a psychedelic religion,” nor does the presence of ambivalent study team members (like Ross and Johnson) defeat the point, which Johnson, a co-author, agreed with. If I were to correct myself above, it would be the presence of missions, rather than a singular one. As you can see by now, there was not necessarily uniformity, but a Venn diagram of psychedelic spiritual interests — Griffiths, Richards, Jesse, Bossis, and others in the periphery of the study. I would recommend simply taking the authors’ words and actions at face value.

There were many other things in the Pollan piece that, yes, it’s hard not to feel a bit like the “Always Sunny” meme in pointing out: the understatement of “a case can be made that the participants were primed,” or how Pollan refers to the study in charming terms “as an odd sort of ethnography, though, the study tells a provocative story”—but is it an ethical study to give drugs with understudied risks to produce an “odd sort of ethnography”? And while he grounds the statistics about the positive impact on clergy, I can’t help but feel a disconnect between that and receiving defamatory legal threats attempting to censor me.

Imagine how Pollan’s story would look if the real life story was just slightly different. I once wrote an allegory about the famous MDMA trial that wound up rejected last year by the FDA, imagining an alternate universe where Christians were pushing these studies. Here’s another allegory:

Imagine if a study were proposed by several members of an offshoot sect of Christians who believed drug use was key to their gospel, and indeed, the heart of all religion (perhaps recruiting a couple of “non-believers” to the study team for credibility). Since these Christians were forced underground by what they saw as unfair laws, imagine they had strategized for decades on how to use research to change cultural attitudes and influence public policy. Eventually, the Christians conduct a study on atheist therapists with one sponsor wanting to “wake them up” to their gospel. Imagine these drugs were known to create an environment where participants are impressionable to the beliefs of those administering them, a risk amplified in an unprofessional social setting of enmeshment between some researchers and subjects. Imagine they didn’t disclose all their donors to regulators, and one Christian donor had even conducted interviews and data analysis without the university’s knowledge. Imagine one of the Christian sponsors then funded some of their subjects in non-profits that seemed to promote the use of Schedule I drugs to the public, even though these therapists had no medical backgrounds.

The point isn’t to say Christians are unfairly maligned. But would the study get published? I don’t think so, unless the journal was also staffed with others from the same sect.

How would a journalist cover it? It depends on whether he was also a believer.

VII. The Soul Ajar, The Believer Hidden

Despite what we’ve now seen, Pollan presents himself as fairly neutrally invested in his reporting on this study, though he does admit having some conflicts and biases:

I first encountered the small community of psychedelic researchers while writing about the cancer study for this magazine. I met many more when I wrote a book about their work, and since then I’ve argued that psychedelics have the potential to treat mental illness and teach us about the mind. In 2020, I helped establish a psychedelic research center at U.C. Berkeley and, after I learned that Griffiths was dying of cancer, I donated to a new chaired professorship that he considered a part of his legacy.

Setting aside the aforementioned lack of disclosures, does Pollan only think psychedelics have the potential to “treat mental illness and teach us about the mind”? Or does he omit an only-slightly-subtle undercurrent of spiritual advocacy that runs throughout the whole decade of his psychedelic writing? After all, the opening epigraph to How to Change Your Mind is Emily Dickinson: “The soul should always stand ajar.”

Spiritual, But Religion-Curious

For those who are still confused, Pollan appears to be a significant believer in psychedelic spirituality in his own right. His researcher friends under scrutiny were part of the same researchers who introduced him to the world of psychedelic spirituality, with How to Change Your Mind reading partially as a conversion memoir down to its double-entendre title. In a 2021 conversation with Harvard professor Charles Stang in which they discussed having dinner with Muraresku, Pollan described how psychedelics made him more spiritually inclined and impacted his ego; since taking psychedelics, he said, “I’m a much more spiritual person than I was.” As he wrote in How to Change Your Mind, reflecting on 5-MeO-DMT:

Perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.

Okay, so Pollan may be more of a spiritually inclined psychonaut with a particular view about the spiritual value of psychedelics than he lets on. Maybe not a big deal. But what about religion?

Here, too, Pollan has more cards than he shows. His 2021 book This Is Your Mind On Plants—where he cites researcher Swift as his friend—culminates in an extended meditation on peyote rituals in the Native American Church. While not coming right out and explicitly endorsing religion as the best container for psychedelics, he instead through his expert show-don’t-tell style makes the case for psychedelics in the context of structured, ceremonial group experiences that promote social cohesion—the ingredients of religion except “the r-word” itself, as his colleague Jesse once called it.

As Pollan writes in the introduction:

The spiritual or ceremonial use of plant drugs can also help knit people together, fostering a stronger sense of social connection accompanied by a diminished sense of self. We have only just begun to understand how the human involvement with psychoactive plants has shaped our history. It probably shouldn’t surprise us that plants of such power and possibility are surrounded by equally powerful emotions, laws, rituals, and taboos. These reflect the understanding that changing minds can be disruptive to both individuals and societies, and that when such powerful tools are placed in the hands of fallible human beings, things can go very wrong. We have much to learn from traditional Indigenous cultures that have made long use of psychedelics like mescaline or ayahuasca: as a rule, the substances are never used casually, but always with intention, surrounded by ritual and under the watchful eye of experienced elders.

He continues the theme in talking about the Native American Church as a “moral model of drug use”:

The group setting here is critical. The fact that the healing process is unfolding within a community, with everyone listening to the same music and prayers, gazing into the same fire, and experiencing the same shifts in brain chemistry, serves to reinforce the individual’s new narrative, as does the fact that the attention of the group is fixed on the recipient of its prayers. It sounds a bit like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, where stories of transformation and rebirth are crafted and then cemented by the approbation of the community. Except in this case the power of the ritual is immeasurably enhanced by the altered state of consciousness all share.

In a 2021 GQ interview promoting the book, he echoed his support of the Native American Church:

We think of drugs as disruptive to the community. You have a breakdown when people are using drugs, and drug use in our civilization is very individualistic. But then you realize it doesn’t have to be that way. You have this culture for whom drug use helps cohere the community, helps bind it together, and they don’t use these drugs alone. That’s really significant

To be clear, my issue isn’t with the Native American Church, and I don’t know to what extent Pollan exactly believes in religious psychedelic use. But without “scaring the horses,” the impression is that Pollan is leading the “horse” of his audience to the waters of psychedelic religion.

Pollan further reinforces his curiosity in the religious potential of psychedelics in the preface to his colleague Muraresku’s The Immortality Key, tying them directly to Johns Hopkins studies. Regarding the potential psychedelic roots of Christianity, Pollan writes:

With The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku has picked up and followed these provocative lines of inquiry, in the process advancing the story of psychedelics and religion to the point where it must be taken seriously. … By the end of The Immortality Key, the idea that the very foundations of our civilization—its Greek, Roman, and Christian DNA—were powerfully influenced by psychedelics will no longer seem far-fetched in the least. This is one of those books that, once read, can’t be unread: by the time you get to the end, the history of religion, not to mention our culture, will look very different, and, at least for me, make a lot more sense. But The Immortality Key makes another valuable contribution as well: it pushes the psychedelic renaissance into the realm of the humanities and culture, which may well be its next, and most exciting, chapter.

To Pollan, it seems the Hopkins studies aren’t just about medicine, but also about the religious origins of Western civilization and how to harness them for the future.

Mystical Mythicals

Yet for all his religious fascination, this has not yet translated into serious religious scholarship, perhaps what some participants also bristled against in the article. “No one I spoke to, not even the rabbis, described seeing the stereotypical God of the Old Testament,” he reports with intrigue. Nevermind that one of “Old Testament God’s” sticking points is not being seen, but it serves a useful foil for Pollan’s fascination with participant reports of feminine divinity.

Pollan also appears to misuse his own expert source to support a sweeping generalization about religion. A quote from professor Charles Stang laments a modern “desert of experience” in American religion and calls it “not normal.” Pollan uses this to bolster his claim that faiths naturally “pivot” away from experience toward mere tradition.

But Stang’s point seems to suggest the opposite. If a lack of direct experience is historically abnormal, it suggests that a focus on experience has been a more consistent feature of religion throughout history than Pollan implies. If Stang actually agrees with him, then this is at least poorly conveyed.

In an interview accompanying the article, Pollan builds on this as one of his favorite grinding-axes, saying that the primary resistance religion has to psychedelics is feeling that such experiences are a “direct challenge” or a “threat”:

I believe it’s viewed as threatening [to organized religion] because if psychedelics can offer people intimate, direct contact with God they don’t need to go through a priesthood or an institution. Going directly to God circumvents the hierarchy.

While this plays well with psychonauts and some secular people, it is unsubstantiated and is a far more conspiratorial theory than what he ascribes to those who find ethical problems with his friends. He makes similar sweeping statements and generalities throughout the piece, such as, “the entire history of world religions in a nutshell: orthodoxy and authority in tension with the direct spiritual experience of the individual.” The word “tension” is doing a lot of work here. If Pollan simply means that religious traditions have always debated the role and authority of personal experience, he is right. But the framing suggests a simple binary where “orthodoxy and authority” are opposed to “experience.” That, well, is not the entire history of world religions in a nutshell.

Taking just Christianity, and just one dimension of it, embedded into the New Testament is a charge to have your faith be actionable, that is, intrinsically experiential. No, not drug experiences, but the experiences that come from being deeply embedded in your community, the experiences of true self-sacrifice for the sake of the other, the experiences of carrying one’s cross. While the debates have been endless about what experiences and how they relate to salvation—as Pollan alluded to in the June 11th talk with “antinomianism” and the Reformation—there has never been a question in mainstream Christian history about whether one must have a lived religion.

Pollan’s fixation on the idea that psychedelics are a “threat” and a “challenge” to organized religion also says nothing about the experiences that I and many other Christians have. Some of us deeply familiarized ourselves with psychedelics and then left them for what we believe is a truer, if sometimes subtler and more discerning, relationship with God. This was based on faith, reason, yes, tradition, yes, Scripture, but also, perhaps surprisingly to Pollan, our experience.

In Pollan’s budding theology, which is understandable but hazardous in the hands of an influential reporter, the entire point of mysticism seems to be experiences that liberate humanity and connect to God, unlike those mean old bad guys who care about the Bible and want power over you. But staying only in my limited lane of Christianity, this is just not how the majority of Christian mystics have felt about it. Instead, a deep relationship with Scripture and theological discernment of orthodoxy has been embedded into the “mystical experience” of their entire lives. But moreover, as Catholic monk Thomas Merton argued, chasing mystical experiences should actively not be the point of Christian mysticism. They are side effects of a devotional life. To chase them and center one’s practice around them creates an idol out of a bug and obscures the feature: the grace of God that can only be given freely, not induced and summoned, even if you use the word “sacramentally.” The Holy Spirit is not an experience, nor a feeling. The Spirit is the person of God who acts in often quite hidden ways and does not serve at our beck, call, or ingestion.

I admire the sincerity of the participants, and I can also say with sincerity that the import of my own psychedelic experiences faded away as I began to understand the implications of the simulated profundity driving the experiences. The mimicry of meaning in my body’s chemistry attached outsized and unearned significance to the random contents of my unconscious, a key contributor to the danger the mystic Merton warned about: making an idol out of experience. It ascribes way too much power to a false image, no matter how sincere and filled with love an image may appear.

I spoke with psychedelic researcher Rick Strassman, who has written extensively on psychedelics and prophecy in Judaism. Strassman, Jewish himself, was interviewed by Pollan for the piece, who had problems with his lack of interrogation on what he sees as an underlying premise of the study. “He didn't really challenge the notion of an underlying experience involved in major religions is the unitive mystical faith. He never addressed that,” says Strassman. “One of the points I made to Michael that wasn’t examined in the piece is that we’re looking at a universal religion. You have to ask: whose universal religion?”

Strassman also told me he found Bob Jesse’s omission from Pollan’s piece puzzling. According to Strassman, Jesse originally approached Strassman to do a study on psilocybin and mystical experience around 1995 while Jesse was in the San Francisco rave scene. When deliberating it with a mentor, Strassman remembers, his mentor recalled the 1970s Spring Grove experiments that involved Richards. His mentor cautioned him about the path they went down: “They got religion. They stopped being scientists. They figured they had discovered a panacea, which was only now a question of determining which conditions would be helpful for. They stopped doing science. Instead, they became believers. So, when Bob asked me to run that [mystical experience] study, I didn’t want to contribute to delusion.”

VIII. The Last Illusion

There was a lot of authenticity in The New Yorker piece, if not always from its author. But in the Graduate Theological Union panel on June 11th in Berkeley, Pollan finally told us how he really felt. It was not quite the same disposition he had in the piece:

Critics have emerged, and they’re calling attention to abuse by therapists, which is a real phenomenon. They’re calling attention to bias in research, as Michael [Silver] indicated, is a real phenomenon. All of that is very healthy. But it’s a much more complicated beat than it was. And you also have these disenchanted psychonauts, people who were deeply involved with psychedelics who had some kind of conversion to deciding they are the root of all evil, and these gadflies are coming after researchers and journalists.

So there’s a healthy debate; I don’t think a proper approach, though, is to try and suppress publication, I think the proper approach should be to allow publication and then fight it out and argue it. So it’s a very complicated landscape for journalists. And one of the things we’re doing, in fact, at BCSP is doing a lot of journalism around psychedelics. Funding journalism. The idea to develop a cadre of really good, sophisticated journalists who can write about all these complexities with more nuance and sophistication.19

This was at least a refreshing expression of some, ahem, psychedelic candor. The emphasis on “gadflies,”20 the persecution, the storyteller who sees ensuring ethical oversight as “suppressing” the story he wanted to tell, the positioning himself as a patron of journalistic integrity, funding a “cadre of really good, sophisticated journalists” to cover the psychedelic space with “nuance and sophistication” in the same breath that he’s fabricating that ex-psychonauts like myself think the drugs are “the root of all evil,” all after admitting he circumvented the same IRB Roland Griffiths did. Here, Pollan was authentic.

As for his journalist fellowship program, when announcing it with funder Tim Ferriss in July 2021, Pollan had high hopes. “We’re hoping that we’ll have a group of journalists up to the task of holding everybody's feet to the fire.”

Rather than meeting this standard for himself, Pollan’s piece was full of damage control that carefully marketed a vision of psychedelic religion, even if imperfectly. Just like professional wrestling, some of the punches and falls his subjects had to endure were real, and they hurt, but the outcome was decided before the IRB had ever investigated.

The article circumvented regulators, hid the worst of Johns Hopkins’ findings, and steered the narrative away from the question that many others have asked in the psychedelic field—what are the real ethical implications here? Should this study have been published, or even run? Would anyone who wasn’t the Hopkins team get away with this?

And as for Pollan, how do we evaluate the rest of his work?

The philosophy of inoculation and the purpose of vaccination is to give a dead form of the virus so that nobody will question whether any of this really makes sense or is worth it. The journalistic failures in “This Is Your Priest on Drugs” mean the question is no longer just “What was wrong with this one article?”, but, “What else have we missed?”

The importance of this is not an abstract exercise for me, and why I preferred this study should not have been published so that we can then “argue about it” as an academic exercise. As a pastor, I know of many psychedelic casualties—the real people whose lives have been profoundly and negatively impacted after being influenced by the overwhelmingly positive and incomplete narratives championed by works like Pollan’s. This kind of storytelling sometimes has devastating consequences, and it targets people I know and love.

It’s been a long time now since I gave credit for what Pollan got right (remember that?). But to be clear, “This Is Your Priest on Drugs” is not a puff piece. It’s more like the piano at a hedge fund’s holiday party, where the reader is in a cocktail lounge eavesdropping on a sexy-strange spiritual conversation long enough to ignore the unfortunate corruption that brought this quarter’s earnings.

For Pollan and his friends, Hopkins’ research serves as the sacred origin story for the “next, and most exciting, chapter” of psychedelics. Any significant ethical failure wouldn’t just tarnish one study, it would risk polluting the well. Just as his colleague and friend Bob Jesse talked over a decade ago about using psychedelic research to no longer oppose, but “blend” with religion, Pollan has less reported on this story than blended into it, shaping the field in which he covers.

Perhaps most tragic to me, as someone who loves authenticity, is that the main laundering being done isn’t of divinity or data. Pollan extracts other people’s authenticity to launder the illusion of his own.

Share

On a Friday afternoon when the dominant social media story about psychedelics was a New York Times article about Elon Musk’s ketamine, MDMA, and mushroom usage in the Trump 2024 campaign, one of two papers for the Hopkins/NYU psychedelic clergy study was quietly published, appearing eleven days after Michael Pollan wrote a piece on it for The New Yorker and fourteen days after it was mysteriously posted online and then quickly removed.

But while one paper with the statistical analysis was published, titled “Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions,” there were initially planned to be two papers, as stated by study author Anthony Bossis in 2023. It appears that the second paper, with qualitative analysis led by a study donor, will not be published at this time. Will it ever be?

Who knows, but it’s reasonable to guess that the second paper not getting published seems at least partly due to some of the ethical issues I blew the whistle on to Johns Hopkins, which found “serious non-compliance [that] significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization’s human research protection program [and] serious non-compliance [that] significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants.” (I expanded on those findings and the journal in which the study was published here.)

Per Pollan, the science of the published quantitative “Effects” paper was described thus: “Scientifically speaking, the study had serious limitations.” Pollan did not mention that a second paper had been planned, but it seems possible that a donor directly leading the qualitative analysis without proper oversight might have undermined the second paper’s already comparatively less scientific value. I don't mean to imply the paper was rejected rather than simply not submitted, just that it was planned and worked on, and now its status is unclear.

The limited scientific value did not stop predictable poor science communication, such as The New Yorker sharing infographics touting the numbers on Instagram. Nor did this stop some participants from using the study in their non-profit marketing materials (it’s now $150 a year to join psychedelic Christian Ligare’s online community). In more misleading science communication, another commenter made an incorrect claim about the Hopkins IRB findings, saying, “After a yearlong audit, the IRB did not agree with the main contentions of these complaints,” falsely implying that the IRB commented on the undue influence of the spiritual and religious mission of researchers. The IRB neither agreed nor disagreed with this issue, because, as I wrote a few weeks ago, it is just not in their jurisdiction.

In lieu of a second paper, the authors gave Pollan their content to share with the public. In effect, the New Yorker piece now acts partially as the unofficial qualitative paper, which I'll review in my next update.

As far as the paper that was published, there were also some final twists and turns in the publishing drama. The journal’s publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, owned by Sage Publications, was made aware of the ethical issues after I sent them an email. Some time passed, and then one day I heard that the study wouldn’t be published while waiting to catch a layover flight at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Fifteen minutes later, before I could finish my airport-priced Wendy’s combo and board my flight, I heard the reverse—the paper was going to be published after all, and that day. A Baconator never tasted so bad.

Then it wasn’t posted that day. For nine days, it was uncertain what was happening, until finally, this past Friday, the journal’s website updated with two articles. But they weren’t two papers.

Instead, one article appearing alongside the published paper was a cryptic publisher’s note from Sage, which, as writer Jules Evans noted, recently retracted a ton of papers from a sketchy journal. It is remarkable mostly for how much nothingness it contains: “The publisher is aware of the concerns raised on this study as well as the findings of the investigation undertaken by John Hopkins Institutional Review Board who maintained oversight of the study design, methodology and the research team. The article has been published in accordance with our Editorial Independence policy (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/editorial-independence-at-sage-0).”

Why did Sage post this? I don’t have solid information here, but given that publisher’s notes don’t just appear alongside every controversial study, my feeling is that Sage thought the ethics were significantly dubious, and the subtext is saying their hands are tied, and thus, washed of any publication sins; Evans even indicated something about an ethical decision from Sage being “over-ruled,” but I can’t verify that. Whatever happened, the result was that we were all given a spontaneous collective remembrance that Psychedelic Medicine has editorial independence, even if PM’s editorial board has questionable independence from the authors. It would be interesting to hear the fuller story someday. The mystery and weirdness never seem to stop here.

Update with reporting from The Microdose on June 6, 2025: “Officials at SAGE, Psychedelic Medicine’s publisher, decided the paper would not be published because it did not meet the publishers’ ethical standards, but reversed their decision. In a comment sent to The Microdose, SAGE spokesperson Camille Gamboa wrote that, ‘In conversations with the Editors-in-Chief and in support of our editorial independence policy, we determined they should make the final decision on this article. It is our understanding that the editors are proceeding with publication.’”

There was another wrinkle to this. A letter signed by fifteen participants, dated May 12, appears to lobby for the paper’s publication (how they knew its ethics were being reviewed is also a mystery to me). While Pollan’s placement in his article suggested this was an “open letter” that “disagreed” with me, not mentioning any other context, I had never heard of it before Pollan’s piece. I’m not even sure if it was an open letter, as it appears to have been intended for the publisher and to media outlets to lobby for publication rather than about me. I won’t post the signatories, since I’m uncertain whether this was intended for public posting and it has their emails, but here is a screenshot of the contents of the letter, with the most relevant bit for my stuff:

We are also aware of blogs making allegations about us as participants. We strongly reject any allegation that the below signatory-participants have been manipulated into taking leadership roles after the study that we would not have taken anyway in the course of our professional lives. We are professional religious leaders and public theologians who have decades of service and leadership experience. We are committed to our faith traditions and to truth, service, ministry, and justice. Our experiences as participants in the study are our own to interpret and share at our discretion, and no one has the right to speak for us, even when such concern is well-intentioned. We are pleased that this study is finally being published, and welcome further good-faith dialogue and debate about the role that psychedelic medicines may play in our world or in religious communities.

To be clear, I have never spoken for anyone, and I never made any allegations about the vast majority of participants, even some of whom I found their behavior distasteful. Rather, this is what I wrote two years ago:

Some participants may not see themselves at all in this story—I hope they don’t. But to the participants, from one religious professional to another, of course you have the right to interpret your experience however you want. You have the right to tell your story.

…

To the participants, your experience and your interpretation absolutely matter and you absolutely have a right to both in ways that complicate what’s been said. But one of the deeply unfair things here is that science, true science in its true form, is not private—science is intrinsically a public project. A pursuit of truth. And so while you have the right to your experience, society also has a right to say that the behavior in this experiment was absolutely disturbing from our stance outside of it. The public has the right to the opinion that it was a bold-faced attempt to transmit a “doctrine”1 so that one particular psychedelic Message would go forth, sometimes at the expense of more important values. And the public has a right to say this is not and cannot be okay.

Ultimately, the participant signatories got their wish in publication, and they may keep telling their story longer than I may tell mine.

While many exhaled with the paper’s publication on Friday, including my own exhales of relief that some decision was finally made, I don’t know how many feel completely good about it. Some seem triumphant, and I’m sure some are hoping to gloat over my coping and seething (if you need that, just imagine my face eating that overpriced airport burger with a sigh). On the other hand, and maybe it’s just projection, but others seem exhausted and glad it’s just out and over. As perhaps the most-discussed unpublished paper in psychedelic history, its results were basically already disseminated before publication, making the paper feel somewhat anti-climactic after the Pollan piece. Others wish it weren’t a story anymore; despite being planned as Roland Griffiths’ magnum opus, the Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research has yet to tweet out the study or share Pollan’s article (maybe they will now that I’ve jinxed it). They didn’t respond to comment on the IRB’s findings, and to this day, two years later, I have never received any correspondence from the Hopkins psychedelic center in response to any of my concerns, including a basic confirmation of receipt. They never informed me that they had allegedly conducted an internal investigation, nor did they indicate whether they had forwarded my concerns to the IRB. I still don’t know if they ever did.

There will be time to further analyze and discuss the contents of the paper for, well, the end of time, I suppose. Of most relevance for what I’ve written, it was interesting that the paper noted a lack of serious adverse events despite a known event of a participant having a “false memory” that initiated JHU’s audit. Since the IRB looked into this and did not comment on any unreported adverse event or boundary violation, it appears the participant began falsely remembering his story sometime after his trial to a great number of people, including in his very first ever email to me, in marketing his vision for psychedelic Christianity. So the best guess of what happened is that if this false memory seemed to develop later, there was no serious adverse event nor boundary violation during the experience, and so the study team technically didn’t have to report anything as far as the IRB is concerned. Still, nobody on the study team seemed to notice or care that what he was describing years later didn’t happen, nor that he was describing a boundary violation.

(By the way, if you are new here and need a recap of everything, here you go:)

The only other thing I’ll say on the study for now is the basic irony in the title of the paper: “Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions.” While the paper extols the positive benefits, in mid-2022, several people affiliated with the study team and the non-profit became distinctly concerned about the “effects on the attitudes and behaviors” of at least one participant whom I interned for; there is a reason several people with ties to the study left the non-profit Ligare shortly after I resigned early due to my disturbance at the participant’s reckless behavior and callousness towards psychedelic harms, risks, and abuses, a period now seemingly described as Ligare’s “adolescence.”

Necessary caveat here: I met less than half of the participants, never have spoken for any of them, can’t say anything about the ones I didn’t know, and many of the ones I did meet, I didn’t know well enough to speak to the fullness of their character. But in my context, the “attitudes and behaviors” I did see made me feel deeply concerned about the increasingly evangelical attitudes and behaviors that were flippant towards the ways psychedelics can seriously destroy lives. As one clergy participant told me with a laugh, “My main concern is that we’ll be too concerned!” It disturbed me that discussing harms was such a “challenging experience”2 with people who, by and large, had zero medical or research credentials.

But they should not be totally blamed for their misapprehensions. It might be hard for outsiders to believe, but it was considered taboo and paradigm-shifting in the psychedelic movement circa 2022 to suggest that these drugs actually have real risks and harms, and that they hadn’t really been studied in depth, a view that has now somewhat changed. I wasn't alone in my concerns back then, and in fairness, one study team member wrote a breakthrough piece on changing the conversation around that. The paper itself mentions some of these harms, and study lead Roland Griffiths would publicly name risks, but there have also been public and private reports of him suppressing stories of psychedelic harm. Three years later, there have been improvements in communication and the psychedelic field’s overall turn to finally start studying the harms, but there are some hard math problems that come with mass drug use that can’t be worked around.

When I left, I was still very much a believer in psychedelic Christianity and psychedelic spirituality at large. I had also been working for two years as a project manager for a group of underground psychedelic churches. I left that group at the same time. But in contrast to what I observed from Ligare Inc. and affiliates, my time in those non-Christian groups was refreshing in their relatively ethical leadership and professionalism. Several were licensed medical professionals, and they weren’t laughing about harms and trying to evangelize anybody. They were trying to improve practices and understanding after lots of accumulated experience with things sometimes going really, really bad. Those people, many of whom had been doing it for decades, weren't just hypothetically concerned about harms and risks; they realized that harms weren't being properly recorded, and they didn't know if things were truly bad or how to best deal with problems. While I grew to be disillusioned with the whole psychedelic movement, and while my basic theological differences have significantly diverged with that group, in the three years since I quit both organizations, I haven't lost a single night of sleep wondering if the churches I worked for were generally trying to take care of people, even if I now fear the premise of the practice has fundamental flaws and is spiritually detrimental. Many underground psychedelic churches today are horribly run, and I can’t endorse any and would caution against all. But as a Christian, my concern lies more with other Christians than whatever people choose to do in a movement I'm no longer part of.

A year after I left Ligare, in mid-2023, it was still considered a groundbreaking summit where Michael Pollan and study sponsor and author Bob Jesse implored 10,000 people to discuss risks, since it’d be bad for PR in the long run if they didn’t. But there is still a third rail: what are the ethics of a spiritual worldview that markets drug-based religious experiences where, even if the majority might have a good time (side-effects notwithstanding), you know that some percentage of people experience long-lasting mental illness, debilitation, suicides, or violent episodes? While Jesse has sometimes compared this to car crashes and mountain climbing accidents, and sometimes this is conflated with accepting risks in medical treatments, what is the deeper ethical implication of this as a “sacramental” path to God?

This seems to still be a forbidden question, mostly downplayed by an appeal to statistics; whatever Jesus might have said, psychedelic Christianity says, “What’s the big deal if 1% of the sheep get lost?” And perhaps it’s a moot point in the psychedelic world, largely comprised of individualist spiritual seekers, where every person takes risks into their own hands.

The Church, for all its problems, is not meant to be this way, and it fails enough to meet this measure every day without adding drugs to the equation. If only the psychedelic Christian leaders who signed the kinda-open letter had signed an open letter for psychedelic abuse victims instead of being platformed by the organization that oversaw the abuse.

When I resigned from Ligare, there was only a month left on my internship, but I was disturbed enough that I wanted to ensure my resignation was on the record while also giving some involved a chance for adjustment. I distinctly avoided blaming Priest and appealed for dialogue and slowdown. Ligare claims they did, though information about risks only appeared on their website after I went public over a year after I raised concerns privately. During months of attempting conversations with Priest, the Ligare board, other participants, Priest again, and the Ligare board again, I had grown deeply uneasy with larger concerns around the whole study environment to the point where I felt I needed to become a whistleblower.

I came to realize that this study was not normal or healthy science, and that the goals of some authors, donors, and affiliated researchers (some of whom were one and the same) to influence religious attitudes were, if not uniform, overt and stretched back decades. The sense of grand mission, the hiring and firing of documentary teams, things already covered here and in other outlets made me feel that the main goal was marketing a certain kind of religious vision. And in mid-2024, the “effects” on these “attitudes and behaviors” culminated in a defamatory attempt at censorship sent on behalf of Ligare and Priest.

Those are just some of the effects that went unpublished in the paper and unmentioned in Pollan's piece, “This Is Your Priest on Drugs,” the best-effort PR for the paper that managed to stumble bloodied across a finish line. I will review that in my next update, and for now leave it to others to analyze the published “Effects.”

For whatever benefits come, many psychedelic casualties will come downstream from this, with plenty of lost sheep from harms and abuses here. It seems such human beings are just the cost of doing enlightened business in this strange religious science.

Those following the Johns Hopkins and NYU psychedelic clergy study via this newsletter know that about six weeks ago, I received word that the Johns Hopkins Medicine Institutional Review Board (IRB) found that the study had multiple counts of serious non-compliance with the university’s federally-required human subject protections.

Despite this, it appears the study is set to be published by a relatively new psychedelic journal with many ties to industry insiders (more on that below).

Before the findings dropped, Michael Pollan also sent me written questions for an upcoming piece about the study for The New Yorker. Given Pollan raised the psychedelic tide by promoting Johns Hopkins’ psychedelic research, and given that he seems to have a passion for protecting psychedelics’ public image from “negative stories,” and given that he is a colleague of Bob Jesse’s (who is the founder of study sponsor Council on Spiritual Practices), and given that some improper donor involvement was at the heart of the non-compliance, and given that he has even publicly discussed PR strategy with Bob Jesse, it should at least be interesting to see what The New Yorker publishes.

I had hoped to post more detailed thoughts on the Hopkins IRB response earlier, but Easter season kicked in along with a slew of threads converging. So what can we make of the findings?

Breaking Down the Findings

As reported, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) determined that the engagement of unapproved study team members, undisclosed sponsor roles of study personnel, and the involvement of unapproved donors were part of multiple counts of “serious non-compliance” that “significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization’s human research protection program,” with an unauthorized use of a transcription service that “significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants.” JHU said these have been reported to the FDA. Hopkins’ Office of Human Subjects Research referred my follow-up questions to the Johns Hopkins Medicine Media Relations office, who did not return requests for comment. I cannot independently confirm if the NYU IRB also investigated. I sent the findings to the NYU IRB with an additional letter, but they did not say whether they had previously investigated, and it is likely standard practice to not say.

Since most of us don’t know much about IRBs and may have just heard that acronym for the first time, how do we put this in context?

So, uh, what is an IRB?

I’m going to give my best non-scientist’s explanation of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) based on my experience familiarizing myself in this process (here’s also just a link to the Wikipedia article for the lazy but more thorough education). I bring you the power of Google-fu, my learning experiences over the past couple years, and AI deep research tools to double-check my work (hey, I’m just fully disclosing that, vet it for yourself):

Human research done in the United States is regulated by the US Department of Health and Human Services, but they farm out most of the actual regulating to the sites. Each institution doing human research is required to maintain an IRB to do the actual regulating. While IRBs have minimum standards of how they must operate according to federal regulations, they don’t all have uniform policies; Johns Hopkins’ IRB does not necessarily act the same as, say, the University of Vermont.

The primary thing all IRBs are charged to do is protect the rights and welfare of people who sign up to be researched on. Okay, still vague. More specifically, the IRB’s main power is to approve and disapprove research proposals to check (among other things) for ethics, safety, and informed consent in the study design. They also approve research staff and donation sources, engage in periodic reviews while the study is going, and in this case, conduct reviews/audits/investigations after the fact if issues are raised.

So when people say an “IRB investigated,” it does not mean they looked into every possible ethical dilemma or research malpractice. It does not mean that they have any kind of subpoena power (they don’t). They may only conduct interviews if they feel necessary (I was not interviewed). When investigating, they seem to mainly review whether proper paperwork like informed consent documents were filed, whether things like adverse events were properly reported, and yes, whether sponsors and study team members were properly disclosed, vetted, and trained. Contrary to what may be assumed, they usually don’t investigate research misconduct like data fraud, which is often handled by other university departments like the Johns Hopkins Office of Research Integrity.

How do we measure the response?

For one, it seems to be unusual that they respond at all, so kudos to Hopkins for that. As one university bioethicist not in psychedelic research told me, “I'm kind of amazed that the Hopkins IRB did anything at all, and even more amazed that they told you about it. That would never happen here [at my university]. As far as what they didn't do goes: most investigations like this stick really close to the federal regulations, so if the issue is something really out of the box, ethically speaking, they will usually play it safe and say nothing. Also, it's worth remembering that IRBs don't really have much power. The university can take disciplinary action—and the FDA can, of course—but the authority of the IRB (at least as far as I know) extends only to the protocols they review.”

So there is still a lot unknown and the IRB won’t say, including the identity of donors and researchers who were in non-compliance.

But “serious non-compliance” is a significant and formal term, not an arbitrary adjective or minor administrative error. Take, for instance, UC Merced’s definition, which lists it as the highest level of non-compliance, describing it as that which “has a significant adverse impact either on the rights or welfare of participants or on the integrity of the study data.” Serious non-compliance often refers to actions that involve a deliberate disregard for the regulations or the IRB's directives. That the JHM IRB determined the study’s actions "significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization’s human research protection program" is as strong an indictment as it sounds.

Some of these findings are confusing at first because of the overlapping roles. To break down the specifics of what they found a bit more and remix it into layman’s terms:

1. “Engagement of two study team members whose research activities were not IRB reviewed and approved;”

There were two people directly involved on the study team itself whose study actions did not go through the proper oversight. This could mean the IRB didn’t get a chance to vet them and evaluate whether they were qualified to serve on the study team or train them on the IRB’s expected ethical practices.

2. “Failure to accurately report support sources;”

Funding for the study was not fully disclosed for proper oversight. This means the IRB did not get a chance to assess the bias and conflicts of interest of donors that would be influencing the study design. Participants also have a right to know who is funding the research they are signing up for. Would IRB approval have been given if they were aware of support sources and their motivations? Would all participants have signed up?

3. “Failure of two people engaged in this research to disclose their conflicts of interest, including their role as study sponsors, to the IRB or to participants. Only one of the two conflicted individuals was added to the study team. This individual failed to disclose their role of sponsor of the research to the IRB and led the qualitative analysis.”

Hopkins regulators were unaware two people involved were donors or their conflicts of interest. One person directly led parts of the research—they were approved to the team, but their status as funder was not disclosed. The other person was “engaged in this research” while apparently not on the study team, and also was unknown to regulators that they were a donor.

The required disclosure, “conflicts of interest…were not appropriately disclosed nor managed,” appears to be a bit of an understatement; one sponsor also funded participants to advocate for psychedelics in their religious communities and funded a retreat between participants and researchers, as reported in the New York Times.1 Some additional background on the researchers was reported by Reason.2

Combined with point 1, and looking at the IRB’s required disclosures, it seems there were three people in question who were “engaged in the research” without proper authorization—two of which were on the study team without approval,3 two of which the IRB didn’t know were funders, and one was both. So it looks like:

• Study Team Member A (unapproved to study team, not a donor)

• Study Team Member B (unapproved to study team, also an undisclosed donor)

• Study Team Member C (approved to study team, but status as donor wasn’t disclosed, led the qualitative analysis)

Since the IRB says participants weren't fully aware of the potential biases influencing the study, the failure to disclose these critical conflicts of interest and roles appears to have compromised the ability for participants to provide fully informed consent.

4. “Furthermore, the JHM IRB determined that using an external entity to transcribe data without IRB approval”

By using an external transcription service, the study compromised participant confidentiality and privacy. A third-party that Johns Hopkins’ IRB didn’t know about had access to participant interviews outside the oversight of the IRB.

So while the information the IRB disclosed is limited, the findings are still especially concerning given several donors and researchers were motivated to influence public opinion to embrace psychedelics.

Beyond the IRB’s commentary is the remarkable fact that this occurred under the study’s principal investigator, legendary researcher Roland Griffiths. Because of how he opened doors for psychedelic research, Griffiths’ legend had grown in sync with the psychedelic field’s. In particular, Griffiths’ reputation of integrity and attention to detail lent much-needed credibility to psychedelic research.

In June 2023, alongside a long line of NYU and Hopkins researchers, Michael Pollan introduced Griffiths to a dinner in his honor in front of ten thousand psychonauts in this way:

I've interviewed a great many scientists but none of them is remotely like Roland Griffiths. Why? I think it's because he is a man of two minds. Two equally interesting minds. One as you've heard a lot about, is the mind of a rigorous, scrupulous, well-respected scientist, so what he says carries the weight of Science with a capital S. I interview lots of people like that and I harvest their quotes in my articles. But the other is the mind of a man willing to say things about consciousness, about ultimate reality, about the fate of the species that will absolutely blow your mind. Honestly, for a journalist, Roland is a dream come true…This is who we have before us: a first rate intelligence consisting in equal parts of rigorous scientist and equally rigorous spiritual explorer, able to hold not just two ideas, but two entire worldviews in one mind. I think I speak for all of us in saying that our minds have been immeasurably expanded by sharing this life with his.4 5

As director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Michael P. Bogenschutz, said at the same dinner, “He was the most meticulous scientist I know, and I can’t imagine him ever knowingly saying anything that was untrue.”6 Griffiths bequeathed a professorship bearing his name before his death in October 2023.

But it seems unlikely that someone of Griffiths’ experience made these mistakes unintentionally, especially his failure to disclose to university officials that a donor was directly leading qualitative analysis. I asked several researchers and bioethicists who are not in psychedelic research about this, and they said while donors often have input in the design of a study and giving feedback on results, this level of direct involvement with subjects in a drug study is something they hadn’t seen before. I couldn’t find other examples of this in my research, but I welcome someone giving an example.

What the IRB Findings Don’t Say

As discussed, IRBs have a limited investigative scope and even more limited appetite for communication beyond legal requirements. There is much they can’t and won’t say.

Behind their opacity, the IRB’s conclusions are not a “clean bill of health” for the rest of the actions around the study. Hopkins will likely not disclose the evidence weighed or other concerning behavior beyond their scope and policies. In response to emailed questions, Hopkins did not say whether there was any internal discipline for the researchers, donors, or the Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research, nor if there will be increased oversight for psychedelic studies going forward.

The IRB was ironically, if predictably, silent on the original cause of the investigation. I blew the whistle on the study after being disturbed by my experiences at a Christian non-profit spawned from the study and then realizing its founder had been publicly describing what would have been a boundary-violating “ordination” experience in his session by a study guide. According to multiple sources, video reviews showed that this event didn’t happen, and the participant now ascribes the story to a faulty memory. Things still don’t make sense to me: why did it take so long to investigate, and when was he informed that it didn’t happen? If it was properly investigated in time, why did a donor-researcher keep paying him to run the Christian non-profit while telling the story? In following up with the IRB, they of course would not divulge any more details about what they found about this event.

The IRB was also predictably silent about specific concerns around donors’ and researchers’ religious and spiritual agendas, and concerning behavior of researchers, donors, and participants that wasn’t officially part of research activities. For one instance, a participant went on a peyote retreat with a study team member. Did this fall under “conflicts of interest were not appropriately disclosed nor managed”?

So the IRB’s findings are silent on the bigger picture issues. I expect many will be frustrated by this report by what it doesn’t say, and what Johns Hopkins is unlikely to ever say. Without legal requirements, the public may never know the full story.

Why “Serious” Findings Are Serious

To be sure, this situation was not like, say, the Walton Family Foundation didn’t get permission to interview rural teachers about how they taught third grade. This involved giving humans drugs known for inducing openness to suggestion by people who have spent decades advancing psychedelic spiritual and religious goals. With drugs known to create culty group dynamics and utopian visions, a donor acting as researcher funded multiple participants to start non-profits geared towards their religious audiences, and a significant amount of participants made psychedelics a key part of their theology and pivoted their careers. What may seem like proof of spiritual validity to one looks like a red flag of undue influence to another.

Some in the psychedelic movement are privately spinning the primary finding of the IRB as having “cleared it to publish,” but taking this as the primary takeaway signals a continued lack of seriousness about ethics that surrounded the study and the broader psychedelic movement for years. As PsychedelicWeek said on X/Twitter, “The federal protections referenced stem from the Nuremberg Code and atrocities such as Nazi torture of people in concentration camps and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. So, we should take research ethics seriously & defend the rules intended to protect human research participants.”

These were not small lapses in paperwork, but behavior that warrants questions as to why it was hidden from regulators.

Silence and Hidden Donors from JHU

Johns Hopkins Medicine and JHU’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research (CPCR) did not return requests for comment on the findings. I have yet to see a public acknowledgment from either, and I don’t expect to.

While Hopkins remains silent on this issue, the CPCR shared an interview with the first recipient of the Griffiths Professorship, Dr. David Yaden, on “Psychedelics Research: Evidenced-Based Messaging, Informed Consent, and Adverse Events Surveillance”. Dr. Yaden has published extensively on psychedelic ethics. Within the interview, Dr. Yaden made the contested claim that “psychedelics do not pose unique challenges to informed consent,” a view many others disagree with in the field (a deeper dive for another day). Dr. Yaden went on to say this was because “there are plenty of other medical interventions that involve potentially major changes to function and identity — so psychedelics are not exceptional in this regard. But psychedelics do have a set of features that makes them distinct and are, therefore, worth substantial consideration.” Dr. Yaden also indicated they are partnering with the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics to improve their consent documents and called for better adverse event reporting.

Dr. Yaden did not return a request for comment on the IRB findings of serious non-compliance that happened under Griffiths.

Beyond silence, sometime in the past year donors to the Griffiths Professorship Fund were hidden from their website. Here is an archived page from June 2024 with a list that includes one of Elon Musk’s closest allies and D.O.G.E. friend Antonio Gracias, Elon Musk’s sister-in-law Christiana, Sam Harris’ foundation, and Tim Ferriss.

Most relevant to the religious professionals study:

• Riverstyx (whose co-director was on the study team) was listed as a donor at the “Partner” level, which according to JHU’s giving website for the fund, indicates a gift between $250k to $999,999.

• Claudia Turnbull, reported as a guide on the study,7 was listed at the “Visionary” level of gifts over $1M, and was described with special thanks: “Claudia Turnbull, whose leadership brought together the needed funding.”

• Michael Pollan was also listed with Judith Belzer as “Supporter” donors with gifts between $1,000 - $99,999.

Some Organizations

While the IRB will not disclose the identities of the unapproved donors and researchers, and I cannot confirm, it is worth sharing a few organizations that are known to be related to this research to get greater context. I hope the published paper(s) will bring more clarity. I previously covered at more length some of the additional connections and backgrounds of people connected to the study here, here, and here.

Note: To be clear, some people below may have been properly reported to the IRB, and I don’t want to engage in speculation (okay, I know someone reading laughed at that). One of the organizations below appears to not even be a sponsor, though still significantly tied to the study. Have I given enough disclaimers to avoid empty legal threats again?

Riverstyx Foundation

The goal was to “give clergy the opportunity to connect deeply with a sense of spirit, of the divine” and, ideally, to reinvigorate “the spiritual foundation of our society with more meaning.”8

Lucid News on T. Cody Swift, Co-Director, Riverstyx Foundation

Based on all available evidence, it appears Riverstyx Foundation’s T. Cody Swift donated to the study while leading the qualitative analysis without his sponsor status disclosed to the IRB under the oversight of Roland Griffiths. Riverstyx is known to have funded the study, and Riverstyx has given millions of dollars to Hopkins research over the years, with Swift getting access on Hopkins’ study teams before, including as session monitor.

Swift was the presenter of the qualitative findings when the study was presented at a conference in 2023, where he said he conducted all interviews alongside Dr. Alexander Belser of NYU. It is unclear if he co-led qualitative analysis with Dr. Belser or if it was led by another donor I am unaware of, but I could find no evidence Dr. Belser donated to the study.9 The New York Times reported, “Swift said that his foundation provided financial disclosures in published papers and on its website. ‘I always try to hold awareness of how my personal views might influence the people I work with.’” However, this does not speak to if his disclosures were given to the IRB.

Riverstyx also funded participants in the starting of non-profits aimed at religious audiences. An additional Riverstyx employee at the time was engaged in the research and sat on the board of the Christian non-profit funded by Riverstyx.

Riverstyx’s funding priorities have included many donations towards religious psychedelic causes and have stated a desire to influence public attitudes. Per their website, they are focused on “social transformation” and “high-leverage social change” in hopes of “effectuating enduring change in both cultural awareness and social policy,” elaborating:

“Riverstyx attends to the places in society and our psychology which have been relegated to the shadows- out of fear, ignorance, and puritan influence- recognizing that which is repressed only festers and breeds pathology in its unnatural separation.”

Council on Spiritual Practices

“The challenge for all of us: find, or create, or improve, or be reformers within social contexts that provide day-in, day-out, weekly support for the shared enterprise of living out what a primary experience offers to us…Let’s learn to make peace with [religion]. It’s out there. Not only is it out there, but the world’s finest land, and architecture, music and so on have all been devoted to this enterprise. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it became more potent at delivering on its own promise of helping people be kinder to each other?”

Bob Jesse, Council on Spiritual Practices, 200910

Bob Jesse’s Council on Spiritual Practices has been repeatedly listed as study sponsor in many places. While Jesse is closely tied to the study team, I could not find evidence that Jesse was directly engaged in the research or part of the study team. Via CSP, founded in 1993, Jesse has been strategizing research for psychedelic spiritual and religious goals since his involvement in the San Francisco rave scene through the 1990s.

Michael Pollan’s book profiled part of how he organized the earliest Johns Hopkins psychedelic research and has acted as a kind of psychedelic sage to a once-tiny research community. Jesse has spent decades talking about psychedelics being combined with religion, including about his views as psychedelic experiences as a “new kind of doctrine” and a “birthright.”11 He also wrote a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 in support of an ayahuasca group’s religious freedom.

Jesse is now a colleague of Pollan’s at the UC Berkeley psychedelic center that Pollan co-founded. According to Pollan in 2023, Jesse reads every issue of UC Berkeley’s industry newsletter The Microdose to make editorial suggestions for any exaggerated or misrepresented language.12 Thus far, The Microdose has not reported on the findings of serious non-compliance with the study.

Heffter Research Institute

“What happens when you can offer someone an experience of awe? How does that change your life?”

Claudia Turnbull, study guide, board member of Heffter Institute13

Heffter Research Institute is one of the oldest and most significant psychedelic funding bodies, a mainstay of the psychedelic vanguard since its founding in 1993. In Heffter's 2023 newsletter, they claimed to have funded 156 studies. It appears it did not sponsor the religious leaders study, but there are still significant other ties.14 I did not previously report on Heffter in my original series of posts on the study.

Since the IRB’s findings, I was made aware that Heffter had several significant connections to the study team and donors, and some are a bit strange; I have now been told through a third-party that Heffter did not sponsor the study,15 but they had claimed to have sponsored it when the study launched back in 2015, deleting the post that had been up for ten years after I asked earlier this week. Their website claimed this yesterday (emphasis added): “Our researchers are also collaborating with the Council on Spiritual Practices to explore the effects of psilocybin with religious professionals to understand how a mystical-type experience may benefit their work as clergy.” As I was double-checking links, I saw this had changed to clarify: “Researchers Heffter has supported at Johns Hopkins and NYU also collaborated with the Council on Spiritual Practices…” The study is currently listed as “Current Research” in their Spirituality section, with the now-added note: “Note: Heffter Research Institute did not provide funding for the Religious Leaders Study.”

Heffter’s page on “Future Research” also adds more context for their relationship to the study trial sites: “The founding of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic Research, the NYU Center for Psychedelic Medicine, and the initiation of the Usona Institute project to achieve FDA approval of psilocybin for medical treatment, are deeply gratifying to everyone at Heffter, having been instrumental in mentoring and funding the work that led up to those profound institutional developments.”

Claudia Turnbull is currently listed as a Heffter board member, along with her husband Carey, and reportedly acted as a study guide.16 It was also reported in Lucid News that the Turnbulls donated to the study. Turnbull also is listed on the advisory board of NYU’s psychedelic center (which ran the other trial site), where Heffter has donated, and was listed as a $1M donor to the Griffiths professorship as detailed above. Turnbull received an M.A. in Consciousness studies from Goddard College in Vermont, not too far from me. Goddard sadly recently closed due to financial struggles facing many small liberal arts schools and is known for producing my favorite band Phish (who I would argue are also scholars of consciousness).

T. Cody Swift of Riverstyx also regularly donates to Heffter, is also listed as a Heffter board member, and is also listed on the advisory board of NYU’s psychedelic center.

The study's principal investigators Dr. Griffiths (Hopkins) and Dr. Stephen Ross (NYU) were also listed as board members of Heffter in 2015 when the study commenced.

Psychedelic Medicine and Study Connections

Before the digital ink had scarcely dried on the pixels of the IRB’s findings, the study was apparently accepted by the two-year old journal Psychedelic Medicine. The journal has considerable connections to Hopkins and Heffter:

• Dr. Charles Nichols, listed as a board member of Heffter and Co-Editor-In-Chief. Riverstyx’s site indicates it has donated directly to Dr. Charles Nichols’ research in 2021 and 2025.

• Former Editorial Board member Dr. Roland Griffiths of Hopkins, deceased, study's principal investigator, still also listed board member of Heffter

• Associate Editor Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu of Johns Hopkins, also Associate Director of the Hopkins psychedelic center

• Editorial Board member Dr. Fred Barrett of Johns Hopkins, also Director of the Hopkins psychedelic center

• Editorial Board member Dr. Charles Grob, co-founder of Heffter

• Editorial Board member Dr. David Nichols, founder and Vice-President of Heffter

• Editorial Board member Dr. Katrin Preller, listed as Chief Scientist of Heffter

• Co-Editor-in-Chief Dr. Peter Hendricks has previously received funding from Heffter for his research.

• An article authored in March 2023 indicates that the two co-editors met at the board meeting of Heffter in 2015.

In requests for comment on the concerns I had around Psychedelic Medicine’s conflicts of interest, editorial independence, peer-review process, transparency, and accountibility while asking about Heffter’s sponsorship of the study, I received the following from Co-Editor-in-Chief Dr. Peter Hendricks: “Heffter Research Institute did not sponsor the study. I served as the EIC of the manuscript and have never received funding from any of the study’s funders. The study was subjected to peer review and no one from JHU or NYU was involved in the editorial process, including those on the editorial board.”

How weird is all this? I come away with the feeling like the lines are completely blurred and arbitrary all over the place here, with extensive social ties and pressures that could easily compromise judgment. Not to mention large swaths of the psychedelic industry are part and parcel with a social movement of activist research and wellness influencers with a side of therapy cult. But maybe it’s all normal.

Some have argued to me that criticizing this study based on the motivations is the “genetic fallacy” rather than looking at the data itself (the “genetic fallacy” is criticizing something on its origins rather than the contents). Why not publish and let people evaluate it? Setting aside ethical considerations, I think there are two issues with this. For one, the “why” isn’t just about the “why,” it’s how the “why” affects the “how”; data collection and analysis were directly shaped with a level of unapproved sponsor involvement that is potentially unprecedented in drug research, and it’s unprecedented for good reason. The potential for biased data through how questions are asked and interpreted is not just about the donor motivations in and of themselves, it's about the integrity of the research process in data creation and collection.

The second problem has to do with the harms of bad science communication that are extremely predictable here. Nobody knows better than psychedelic researchers that the public goes on vibes and headlines rather than specifics. Several people involved have demonstrated they can’t be trusted to responsibly communicate the information; people have already been using this unpublished study to advance psychedelic narratives and careers for years, and people have already been harmed by that. Even in presenting the study’s preliminary findings in June 2023, Griffiths expressed concern about catastrophic harm from too much cultural uptake of psychedelics.

There are times when it feels to me like there’s a vertically-integrated monopoly in the psychedelic scientific apparatus. In psychedelic research as a whole, the donors are the researchers are the journal editors, all existing in overall alignment with psychedelic industry media and an overwhelmingly sympathetic mainstream media. This is not even to mention the extra complications when participants “go pro” in psychedelics and exist as colleagues with the same donors and researchers found to have committed ethical violations but who now share incentives. And then there are the normal pressures like “publish or perish” and quotidian corruption in scientific research writ large.

Whatever scientific use may come of the study environment—and I do like to remember that the Seventh Day Adventists still gave us all cereal and vegetarianism—it seems like the scientific findings have never been the main point. There is a story to tell and sell.

Core Concerns

So there are many egregious factors that bear on concerns around the dissemination of this study and about the well-being of the participants and public. These participants were given high-suggestibility drugs known for their abuse potential by psychedelic guides. These drugs were administered to clergy by a score of people who have openly stated goals to influence religious traditions to embrace psychedelics. Donors funded participants to promote psychedelic usage among religious populations and others have publicly indicated goals of influencing public policy and religious attitudes around psychedelics, and previous researchers at Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research (CPCR) have publicly expressed concern about the environment at the CPCR.

In any case, once again it was proven that it’s better ask for forgiveness than permission. Whether Griffiths knew he was taking a gambit or not is a question, but it paid off: in the end, the Hopkins IRB’s findings were serious and necessitate disclosure, but they look like they will still get some papers and press.

Given the legend of Griffiths at Hopkins, there is good reason to wonder if there are other reasons why, after all these counts of serious non-compliance and the greater context, the IRB still permitted the use of data to be published. And given that the agendas of sponsor organizations have included influencing public opinion by instrumentalizing scientific research, and that these drugs are known to cause belief changes influenced by their environment and the participants’ livelihood was directly connected to their belief systems, there continues to be more serious issues beyond the plain text of the IRB’s response letter. The study was, in my view, abusive to the principles of scientific research and the human beings under Johns Hopkins’ care.

The core of my concerns remains unchanged: I believe the evidence overwhelmingly shows that this study experimented on human beings for an evangelical mission to influence the public to embrace psychedelics, an agenda manifestly more important than its stated scientific purpose or following required ethical practices. I don’t know if the IRB could have responded more strongly and what they have done behind the scenes. But I urge all IRBs who oversee psychedelic research to review their policies to ensure something like this never happens again, with institutional leadership making that commitment clear.

Share

After twelve more months of silence, on Friday, I received the following email from the Office of Human Subjects Research:

Text reprinted below:

“Dear Reverend Welker

We are writing in follow-up to your letter dated March 4, 2024 concerning JHM IRB protocol number: IRB00036973 - “Effects of Psilocybin-facilitated Experience on the Psychology and Effectiveness of Professional Leaders in Religion”.

The Johns Hopkins Medicine IRB (JHMIRB) reviewed the human subjects related concerns and concluded that the following events constituted serious non-compliance because they significantly compromised the integrity of the Organization’s human research protection program:

1. Engagement of two study team members whose research activities were not IRB reviewed and approved;

2. Failure to accurately report support sources; and

3. Failure of two people engaged in this research to disclose their conflicts of interest, including their role as study sponsors, to the IRB or to participants. Only one of the two conflicted individuals was added to the study team. This individual failed to disclose their role of sponsor of the research to the IRB and led the qualitative analysis.

Furthermore, the JHM IRB determined that using an external entity to transcribe data without IRB approval and appropriate agreements constituted serious non-compliance because it significantly compromised the rights and welfare of the participants.

The JHM IRB determined the following must be reported to all journals and disclosed in all publications where data related to this study may be published:

1. There were two unapproved study team members, one who was also a study sponsor, directly engaged in the research;

2. There was an additional approved study team member whose role as a sponsor of the study was not disclosed to the IRB and who directly led the qualitative analysis;

3. Conflicts of interest related to the two individuals who were engaged in the research and also served as study sponsors were not appropriately disclosed nor managed; and

4. The funding sponsorship for this study was not disclosed to the JHM IRB.

These determinations were reported to the FDA.

We take seriously concerns reported to us related to human subjects research and appreciate your report to our office. If you have any questions about the IRB’s determination, please feel free to contact me.”

The study's serious non-compliance events were in violation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regulations governing human subjects research. Hopkins did not return a request for comment at the time of publication. I hope to soon share a longer post with more detailed thoughts around this.

-Joe

Share

Two weeks ago, I was copied on a cease and desist letter to Substack sent on behalf of Rev. Hunt Priest. The letter (below) is attempting to censor my posts about him.

I considered not sharing this letter. However, I think it is important for the public interest, which is why I became a whistleblower in the first place. This letter confirmed my deeper concerns about the Rev. Priest’s patterns of deceptive and manipulative behavior. I’m posting the letter along with my response so people are warned.

Another reason is that every time I have written something about Rev. Priest or his organization, Ligare, in the past two years, I have received an email from someone different about Ligare’s negative impact on their life or a loved one’s life. If you are reading this, you are not alone, and you are not crazy.

Last August, I published a whistleblowing series on a psychedelic clergy study at Johns Hopkins University and a psychedelic Christian non-profit related to it. I wrote an update about it last month (which gives a tl;dr for the unfamiliar). Since the update, I have recently learned that two figures related to the study, study guide Dr. Bill Richards and one of the study’s funders Bob Jesse, are no longer with Hopkins, and their profiles are no longer on the Hopkins psychedelic center’s website.1 I do not have more information at this time.

But for the point at hand: why did I receive this letter? Here’s the brief version.

Why are we here?

The Rev. Hunt Priest is a priest in the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Georgia. Over two years ago now, I quit my internship at his non-profit Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society. They give plenty of disclaimers saying that they don’t promote illegal use, they only offer educational information, they give disclaimers that you should ask a doctor, etc. But they “are a home for Christians exploring psychedelics,” and given the state of legality in the United States, it is obvious that a great deal of Ligare affiliates, audience, and friends are people who personally use psychedelics outside of legal use. That is not a moral judgment in itself, and I once believed in this exploration. For a time, I worked for Ligare as an intern while pursuing my MDiv.

But I quit this organization two years ago because they were acting recklessly, because their reaction to stories of sexual abuse in psychedelic trials deeply offended me, and they did not prioritize discussion of the risks of psychedelic usage. Overall, my experiences with Ligare and their affiliates greatly contributed to reconsidering my previous beliefs about synthesizing psychedelics and Christianity.

I unilaterally came to the decision to end my internship early. This was well-documented. The Rev. Priest expressed disappointment. I talked with my field education office before, during, and after, and many friends. I quit another psychedelic organization and distanced myself from the field I once was very passionate about.

Over time, I felt compelled to speak out on Ligare as I also came to take a closer examination at the Johns Hopkins study that Rev. Priest participated in. He introduced himself to me with a story he would then describe in public multiple times, a story about experiencing a kind of ordination at the hands of Dr. Bill Richards:

• According to an Esquire article released after this series in October 2023, before Priest’s treatment, “Dr. Richards said with a smile, ‘You’re about to meet God.’”

• The Rev. Priest wrote the following of his trial experience both privately and published in a book, in which he was under the influence of high-suggestibility drugs: “After asking permission, Bill placed his hands on the top of my head as I sometimes do when offering healing prayers and anointing a parishioner (the sacrament of Unction) and Darrick sat at my feet and allowed me to press my legs against him as I had done for my wife when she was in labor with our son.”

• While potentially still under the influence of suggestibility in the “afterglow” effect, Rev. Priest described: “In our conversation afterwards I asked them what all that energy was about. Bill smiled and said, ‘In Christian language, I think we call that the Holy Spirit.’”

• Later, the Rev. Priest would describe this experience as evoking his ordination, along with “a desire to make the experience available to all who need and desire it.”

If this had happened in a psychedelic trial, especially at the hands of Dr. Richards, it would have been an egregious boundary violation that led to more unethical entanglements with Hopkins. I called for an investigation into it.

But based on multiple accounts, it now appears the Rev. Priest’s story didn’t happen. At all. And the Rev. Priest has yet to publicly share what did happen. Whether it was just a false memory, fabrication, or something else, only Rev. Priest or Hopkins would be able to tell, and only an investigation could reveal when people might have discovered it didn’t happen. Hopkins has remained silent on the study, and Rev. Priest has refused to speak on it publicly. Instead, the Rev. Priest has now chosen attempted censorship.

I made ad nauseum offerings to people to offer fact checks and comments. Before and within my series, I invited everyone involved to offer fact corrections and any comments they would like reproduced. Only in the most recent email before the C&D, the Rev. Priest shared for the first time that he has never facilitated a psychedelic session, and I have added this as a footnote to the relevant post. Prior to last month, I had received one fact check and zero comments.

Rev. Priest avoided publicly discussing my series while he recruited new audience members for Ligare. He then announced an upcoming conference for spiritual directors (scheduled for this weekend) featuring Dr. Richards, along with a talk by Dr. Richards for $35/ticket. Again, this was without either man publicly addressing what happened in the room. One could only speculate as to why. It remains to be seen if they will address it this weekend.

Last month, nine months after the first whistleblowing series, I began working on an update. After a back and forth with Rev. Priest in which he attempted to involve my church leadership, a few weeks went by. I then received the following C&D letter.

The Letter

Here is the letter, with redacted information of the attorney and others copied on it:

My Response

To be clear, I’m not worried about Substack taking down these posts. Free speech is kind of their thing, and I didn’t violate any laws in what I shared. My writing was protected by whistleblower laws in the United States, and what was shared was shared with multiple clear public interests, most importantly the public’s health.

These public interests have since been verified. My work has since been attributed and corroborated by the New York Times in March of this year. Multiple individuals have since reached out to me with substantiating concerns about Ligare and the negative health consequences on their lives and the lives of others. 

The letter’s opening framing is so deceptive that it is clear Rev. Priest has lost all benefit of a doubt from being simply mistaken about events. While I believe he is still a victim of an unethical study that put him in this position, he has now chosen to lie and bully in a disgrace to his office.

Many of the allegations contained in the letter are easily shown to be erroneous in what they reference, some are demonstrated as false with a paper trail, some are matters of opinion falsely framed as unfactual, and some simply deny sources for my reporting that I stand by.

I did not violate the law in procuring or sharing this information, and my writing is given whistleblower protections in the United States. Rev. Priest has long been aware of his opportunity to offer corrections, and was invited to share comments that I offered to reproduce. In lieu of those comments, I have reproduced his letter. 

I will now address the letter with a point-by-point rebuttal, starting with its extremely misleading framing. 

Point by Point Rebuttals

“During his tenure as a student at Harvard Divinity School, Mr. Welker worked at Ligare under a Federal work study program where he was privy to privileged employer information. Mr. Welker’s internship was terminated after less than six months employment. Disgruntled by his termination…”

• The phrasing of this letter is misleading, and appears to be phrased intentionally misleading. In fact, the exact opposite of what it implies is true–I was the sole person who initiated termination of my internship early. Rev. Priest did not wish for me to end it early. Was I “disgruntled”? Certainly not by my termination. That brought me much relief. The Rev. Priest and Ligare’s disturbing behavior caused me to terminate it. This was documented in multiple ways.

• In my final evaluation submitted to the Harvard Divinity School field education office, dated April 2, 2022, I wrote:

  • “There is some pain that I felt I needed to end this placement site early, however, my conscience told me that I needed to in light of my growing public health concerns, disillusionment with psychedelic spiritual organizations and leaders, and growing differences with the organization. While I did not feel the situation was tenable for me finishing my term…”

• In a letter to Ligare's board of directors on April 7th, 2022, I expressed extensively detailed concern over their recklessness, including in the following:

  • "I believe that rather than rushing into conducting retreats and encouraging experiences, Ligare needs to adopt this more conservative approach and use this time in its organizational life as a space to foster deep contemplation rather than action.”

• Rev. Priest shared this letter with Ligare’s board in an email on April 7, 2022, including the following note: “Joe has discerned that it was time for him to end his professional/internship relationship with Ligare.”

Again, to emphasize, it is my opinion that this cease and desist letter is intended to mislead Substack about the nature of who ended my internship and why. 

“Falsely and maliciously claims that Rev. Priest is somehow the victim of a “boundary violation,” “suggestive touch” and/or other “unethical behavior” by researchers at John Hopkins University (May 7, 2024, August 17, 2023);”

As detailed in the referenced posts, this point is referencing an event based on Rev. Priest’s own public words. He is claiming I “falsely and maliciously claimed” something by believing his repeated public story.

In other words, the Rev. Priest seems to believe I should be held more accountable for his words than he should.

Further:

• The assertion that the alleged action was tantamount to a boundary violation was based on the public statements of Hopkins researcher Sandeep Nayak, also referenced in the post.

• I used conditional statements such as “allegedly” and “if” throughout each post in conscious attention to precision, in the event that it didn’t happen.

• It is, in a word, preposterous to blame me for claiming what Rev. Priest’s described repeatedly in public and private forums.

“Falsely and maliciously claims that Rev. Priest’s alleged victimhood is the subject of an “ongoing” or forthcoming investigation by John Hopkins University as well as a coverup for which Ligare was “financially rewarded” (May 7, 2024, August 17, 2023)”

As for the existence of an investigation, I stand by my sources. If Johns Hopkins would like to clarify the status of any investigations and correct any misunderstandings on my part, I would love them to; I have yet to receive any official message from them since this all began.

As for the rest of this point, the letter conflates multiple issues and falsely asserts something I never said.

• I never asserted Ligare was financially rewarded for a “coverup.”

  • On the August 17, 2023 piece, I wrote, “It seems that the Rev. Priest has been financially rewarded for telling the public about this experience,” that is, his trial experience that he publicly related multiple times. 

• The use of “seems” demonstrates an opinion, which is also legally protected speech. The detailed reasons for why it “seems” that way are included in the referenced piece. 

• The opinion about this perception was based on publicly available records of donations Rev. Priest received from the RiverStyx Foundation, whose co-director was the simultaneous Hopkins donor and study team member T. Cody Swift, both in 2021 and in 2023. Again, this was publicly available information from RiverStyx’s website, as referenced in the piece.

“Falsely and maliciously claims that Ligare and Rev. Priest “acted as psychedelic ‘ambassadors,’ engaging in illegal activity with the knowledge of some Hopkins and Riverstyx researchers” which generated “concerns around the Rev. Priest’s behavior” (May 7, 2024);”

• The “ambassadors” language was taken right from Ligare’s wording and phrasing, both in their website and in internal documents, as referenced in the piece and can be seen in this archived snapshot of their website.

• I fully and unequivocally stand by the assertion that Rev. Priest and Ligare engaged in illegal activity with the knowledge of some Hopkins and Riverstyx researchers, and that this generated concerns around his behavior.

  • Rev. Priest personally disclosed some of his illegal activity to me, which I disclosed to a Hopkins and Riverstyx researcher who was on Ligare’s board of directors. The Rev. Priest’s concerning behavior was a focus of discussion.

“Falsely and maliciously claims that Ligare held retreats in which illegal activity occurred and “directed people to unregulated psychedelic practitioners” (August 16, 2023);”

• In addition to other reports I personally received, I referenced this in my May 7, 2024 piece: “In the [2023] progressive Christian book Discovering Fire, in which Rev. Priest has a foreword, the author says that he attended one Ligare-sponsored retreat in Colorado in 2022. This would be, at minimum, federally illegal.”

• While a Ligare employee, I personally directed people to unregulated practitioners, and attempted to connect them to Rev Priest. Please see the attached screenshot of a conversation on Facebook Messenger from January 8, 2022, while I was an intern at Ligare:

  

• This was followed by a call. I later regretted this interaction, called this person back, and reinforced that I could not personally vouch for this unregulated practitioner being safe or ethical.

“Falsely and maliciously claims Mr. Welker aided individuals in the commission of illegal activity while employed at Ligare (August 16, 2023);”

• While I appreciate the author speaking in my defense, the August 16th piece does not exactly assert this. I will plead the fifth, but this is, still, a strange claim. How would the letter author know all that I did and did not do while at Ligare?

“Falsely and maliciously claims Ligare’s participation in clinical trials led by John Hopkins University was marred by “sexual abuse” perpetrated by clinical researchers at John Hopkins University (August 16, 2023);”

• This is an example of egregiously poor reading of the referenced article to the point of negligence. The article in question only references sexual abuse in trials by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), not by Hopkins, nor by their researchers.

• There is absolutely no statement that could possibly be construed as connecting sexual abuse to Johns Hopkins. It makes me wonder if the letter author even read the referenced posts (the letter author also mistitles the referenced post).

• Notably, however, Rev. Priest has not denied Ligare’s atrocious reaction to hearing about this abuse, nor their subsequent silence. Meanwhile, Rev. Priest was a featured speaker at MAPS’ Psychedelic Science conference in June 2023.

“Falsely and maliciously claims without factual support that the relationship between Ligare and John Hopkins University was “extensive,” “highly unusual” and “unethical” (May 7, 2024);”

• These words are examples of opinion, which do not fall under defamation or otherwise false claims. I stand by the assertion of these opinions.

• At any rate, there was extensive factual support, as the post references in the original post, including this image. This does not even show the full extent of the ties:

  

“Falsely and maliciously claims that termination of Mr. Welker’s internship was “because of [Ligare and Rev. Priest’s] recklessness” (May 7, 2024);”

• This is another example that is not just deceptive, but easily disproved with documentation. To reassert, I terminated my internship by my initiation and decision. In addition to the multiple documents of this referenced in point one, I had many extemporaneous conversations at the time with witnesses who can verify my reasons that included recklessness.

“Maliciously and impermissively publishes internal business information obtained while an employee of Ligare including confidential donor information, meeting agendas, corporate governance documents and internal communications (May 7, 2024, August 15, 2023, August 16, 2023, August 17, 2023)”

• No confidential donor information was shared. The only donor information that was shared was information that was publicly available on RiverStyx’s website, as referenced.

• As for Ligare, I defer to earlier comments on protected whistleblower disclosures.

Additional Comments on Substack Guidelines

I understand that it is in Substack’s sole discretion as to whether content violates their guidelines. That said, the letter does not appear to demonstrate familiarity with Substack’s policies. For example, it claims I committed “impersonation in a way that misleads others (e.g. pretending to speak for Rev. Priest as alleged victim).” This, as I understand from the common sense reading of Substack’s policies, is not what Substack defines as impersonation. Impersonation is something like using someone’s name and likeness to pretend to speak as them. It’s weird for the letter to claim that. That said, even in the letter’s misunderstanding of this policy, here is what I actually wrote about the Rev. Priest, emphasis added:

“The Rev. Priest is entitled to continue to interpret his experience however he wants…But however he wants to interpret it, behavior is behavior, and the alleged behavior can’t be a precedent. It can’t be something a Hopkins research subject touts as the clinical standard. The Rev. Priest can interpret the alleged behavior however he wants. But the alleged behavior he described is a boundary violation.”

I never once spoke for him as an alleged victim, though it was my opinion that he was (and is) one. It is bizarre to construe this as “impersonation,” whether pertaining to Substack’s guidelines or otherwise.

Conclusion

Last year, the Rev. Priest espoused the virtues of accountability at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) conference in June 2023:

“I think Christianity is pretty immature in a lot of ways, because we’ve not held people accountable to the teachings of Jesus. We’ve made it about ‘how do I feel?’ And ‘how do I get political power in some corners?’ But it’s all about, ‘How do I feel?’ And so holding people accountable in the Christian context to the teachings of Jesus after you’ve had an experience of transformation would be, that’s, yeah, so immature spirituality, that’s a problem.” (applause break)

Almost exactly a year later, his response to being held accountable is sending a cease and desist letter.

It is very sad to me Rev. Priest chose this route. I now publicly urge his church leadership and colleagues in the Episcopal Church to consider whether his actions are representative of the Episcopal Church. This is not even to speak of the baseline appropriateness of a non-profit ministry that “educates” on the use of any drugs with no apparent formal medical training among its leadership (when asked about this last month, Rev. Priest declined to comment).

This attempted letter of intimidation is a shameful example that, ironically and in my opinion, appears to be tantamount to actual defamation in contrast to what it claims. I am not the first whistleblower who has been attempted to be bullied into silence, nor will I be the last, but I will fight for my free speech for the public interest. 

Finally, the letter asserts: “Mr. Welker is not a journalist. He is a first-year part-time pastor of a small Christian congregation in rural Vermont.”

It is true I am not a journalist; I will proudly wear the label of whistleblower instead. And I will also confess one other factual thing the letter gets right, that I am a pastor of a small rural church, that it is my first pastorate, and they cannot afford a full-time pastor. I don’t know why he included this detail. But for whatever it’s worth, I’m thrilled to be serving where I am. I am blessed beyond riches.

Given the ample evidence as outlined in this letter, I plan to continue to write for Psychedelic Candor as appropriate, remaining within Substack’s content guidelines, terms, policies, and agreements as I have.

Sincerely,

Rev. Joe Welker

East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church (a small, rural church)

It’s been nine months since the Religious Science of Johns Hopkins, a whistleblowing series on a psychedelic clergy study. I called for an investigation into the study, and I promised an update with any responses.

The primary update is that the religious professionals study has been under investigation at Johns Hopkins outside of the Center for Psychedelics & Consciousness Research (CPCR). According to a source with knowledge of the investigation, the CPCR also ran its own internal review. The CPCR did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Part of this investigation was looking into an alleged potential boundary violation by Hopkins researcher Dr. Bill Richards as described by Episcopal priest and study participant Rev. Hunt Priest. Rev. Priest described Richards laying hands on his head akin to an “ordination,” prompting a “Holy Spirit” experience as an origin story for starting his non-profit Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, which I interned for from September 2021 to April 2022.

Despite an ongoing investigation into the study, Dr. Richards is keynoting a conference hosted by Rev. Priest’s non-profit Ligare, as well as giving a $35-a-ticket talk (discussed further below).

The circumstances raise questions that, so far, neither has addressed publicly. In a reply to a request for comment for publication, Ligare declined to offer a comment about Dr. Richards on the record at this time. Dr. Richards is also offering a workshop at the prominent Horizons psychedelics conference on May 8th. Horizons did not respond to a request for comment.

There have been several other updates related to the clergy study in the past nine months; in October, the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Roland Griffiths, passed away from cancer. In March, the New York Times ran an extended piece about related issues with Dr. Griffiths’ lab at Hopkins.

Before getting to the updates pertaining to this story, here’s a recap. To dive in further on the specifics, click on each header or read it from the beginning.

Recapping the Issues

• Spiritual mission:

  • Researchers and donors to the Hopkins/NYU study have been in the public record about the motivations of their research, some of which appear to be a social goal of advancing their religious and spiritual beliefs about psychedelic drugs and mysticism through the reputation of science.

• Ethical issues around psychedelic suggestibility:

  • Psychedelics render people highly vulnerable to the influence of those who administer them, causing significant ethical issues. Hopkins’ guidelines called for the bond between researchers and participants to be made even closer than usual for safety purposes. However, this seems to leave participants more vulnerable to undue influence both within and beyond the trials.

    • Some of the ethical implications of psychedelic suggestibility include the possibility of belief changes to those of guides, identity shifts with sense of self, and an “afterglow” period where one remains open to influence after the acute effects are gone. When psychedelic researchers have not paid careful attention to the effects of suggestibility in their trials, it has created what some researchers have called “chemosocial matrices” of social groups between participants and researchers. While this has potential benefits, it can possibly lead to both poor ethical outcomes and issues with the quality of research.

• In 2021, one Hopkins researcher warned about scientists “playing guru,” with some researchers of the clergy study in mind

  • Covered more in the March New York Times piece, Dr. Matthew Johnson said in 2021, “Even short of sexual impropriety, psychedelics might magnify the subtle abuses of differential power that can be at play in the routine practice of clinical psychology or medicine. It can be challenging to be associated with what might be one of the meaningful experiences in a person’s life. The scientist or clinician might, perhaps without explicit awareness, fall into the trap of playing guru or priest, imparting personal philosophies without a solid empirical basis.”

• A large donor to the study acted as both an interviewer and a data analyst

  • A major donor of the Hopkins study, T. Cody Swift of the Riverstyx Foundation, acted as both an interviewer and analyst during the study. Another employee of Riverstyx was also a data analyst for the study.

    • This degree of donor involvement gives significant power to a donor to ask questions to elicit certain kinds of responses, then the power to interpret the responses.

• The same donor also funded participants to start psychedelic religious non-profits

  • Swift’s Riverstyx funded two participants to start their own non-profits. One of these non-profits, Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, was founded by Rev. Hunt Priest, a priest in the Episcopal Church, in April 2021.

• The relationships between participants and researchers were extensive and highly unusual

  • There are more interrelated relationships here than could be covered. One manifestation of these unusual entanglements was a July 2022 retreat with participants and researchers, which the New York Times piece covered.

  • For another example of the close ties between some researchers and some participants, the Rev. Priest attended a peyote ceremony with another study team member arranged by Riverstyx.

• In public descriptions of his trial experience, the Rev. Priest described a “Holy Spirit” moment, but the description appeared to be an alleged significant boundary violation. This has since been under investigation.

  • According to an Esquire article released after this series in October 2023, before Priest’s treatment, “Dr. Richards said with a smile, ‘You’re about to meet God.’”

  • The Rev. Priest wrote the following of his trial experience: “After asking permission, Bill placed his hands on the top of my head as I sometimes do when offering healing prayers and anointing a parishioner (the sacrament of Unction) and Darrick sat at my feet and allowed me to press my legs against him as I had done for my wife when she was in labor with our son.”

  • While potentially still under the influence of suggestibility in the “afterglow” effect, Rev. Priest described: “In our conversation afterwards I asked them what all that energy was about. Bill smiled and said, ‘In Christian language, I think we call that the Holy Spirit.’”

  • Later, the Rev. Priest described this experience as evoking ordination, with “a desire to make the experience available to all who need and desire it.”

    • In a October 2023 piece for Esquire released after this series, “Someone laid their hands lightly on Priest’s head, and the electric current increased its voltage tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold, and that current shot right out the top of Priest’s head and he began speaking in tongues…After he returned to himself, Priest knew he must return to Georgia and do something more daring than just lead a church. He had to change the whole of Protestantism. Which is what he’s carrying out now.”

  • Dr. Richards, who in 2015 wrote a book detailing his psychedelic theology and desire to integrate it into Western religion, said at a 2022 Ligare talk he was “[happy that] Hunt is devoting his life right now to facilitating this emergence in which we so desperately need.”

  • While Rev. Priest’s trial description was received by a study team member’s inbox as early as January 2021, it is unclear if it was in his original trial description. In April 2021, Rev. Priest founded Ligare with financial support and board membership from Riverstyx.

  • It is unclear if any investigative actions were taken by Hopkins around Rev. Priest’s disclosure until after this series was published.

  • It is unclear which investigators knew of the incident that Rev. Priest had publicly shared on podcasts and in writing multiple times.

  • There are now questions about whether the experience happened as Rev. Priest has repeatedly publicly described, but Rev. Priest has not clarified this publicly.

• After this, Ligare then acted as psychedelic “ambassadors,” engaging in illegal activity with the knowledge of some Hopkins and Riverstyx researchers

  • Despite this and many other concerns around the Rev. Priest’s behavior, Riverstyx continued funding Ligare in February 2023.

  • In addition to concerns over Ligare’s communications, direction, and the safety of Ligare’s activity, with no information about risks on their website’s “Resources” page (archived May 2023) until after this series, I terminated my internship with Ligare due to disturbing conversations with several members of Ligare’s leadership team downplaying concerns of abuse in psychedelic clinical trials.

• The initial findings of the clergy study were debuted at a large conference in June 2023 with a carefully crafted theological message aligned with the spiritual beliefs of researchers and donors

  • The presentation’s message tracked with what appears to be the goals for religious change for the study and with what psychedelic researcher Rick Strassman, PhD, predicted in 2018:

    • “One should retain a healthy skepticism for the ‘religious leaders’ studies now occurring at New York University and Hopkins…It is inevitable that researchers will use these data to support their notion of a ‘universal, core, primary mystical experience’ underlying all particular faiths.”

The New York Times Story

In examining issues in the research environment fostered by the late Dr. Griffiths, Brendan Borrell deserves credit for tackling a contentious story that would be hard to leave anybody fully satisfied. After conducting a wide range of interviews, Borrell released perhaps the most critical piece on psychedelic research in a mainstream media outlet to date, which is to say it is one of the only mainstream media pieces in the past decade to include a significant amount of critical examination (a recent Washington Post article is another example).

This newsletter received an attribution link with many of the themes here independently confirmed, though not all; the Times story focused more on the tensions between Griffiths and Johnson, who had been a colleague of Griffiths for nearly two decades. The piece noted Dr. Johnson’s criticisms that “Dr. Griffiths has run his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new-age’ retreat center” and like a “‘spiritual leader’… infusing the research with religious symbolism and steering volunteers toward the outcome he wanted.”

Some commenters framed issues at the Center as a Johnson versus Griffiths battle of jealousy despite the breadth of issues that have been raised at the CPCR. This also ignored the wide-ranging interviews conducted from those on and off the record, and that the description of this environment was far from being held only by Dr. Johnson. Other industry reactions defended Dr. Griffiths as less of a leader than a follower, a victim of psychedelic forces rather than a driver of the problems.

The Times piece can be further informed by watching the dinner given in Dr. Griffiths’ honor at the large MAPS conference last June, which included a now-infamous painting commissioned by Riverstyx’s Swift, with one Hopkins researcher describing Dr. Griffiths as, “A new kind of archetype; he’s a sage for our age.”

Dr. Griffiths also telegraphed his desires for psychedelic social change and intentions for the religious professionals study three years ago during an interview with Jordan Peterson, recorded March 2nd, 2021, starting around the 2:11:00 mark.

Griffiths: “I’ve concluded, and it sounds to some like an overstatement but I don’t think it is, that actually unpacking this whole situation is crucial to the survival of our species…if we can understand the kinds of experiences that give rise to mutual caretaking, then we have the ability to solve all kinds of horrors that our cultures have imposed on us, and you could imagine interfaith dialogues that could come out of exploration of these kinds of experiences across faith traditions, and my guess will be the discovery is gonna be, ‘Well wait a second, the bedrock core—and this is the perennial philosophy—the bedrock core of most of these traditions is really quite similar.’ So whether the future is integrating into existing religious institutions, or seeing an evolution of our cultural institutions that can incorporate this sort of thing is, you know, I think a question.”

Dr. Griffiths then cautions about the risk of integrating psychedelics into society too quickly, giving an argument against psychedelic legalization in favor of a careful integration with religion, part of a theory of social change to resist cultural backlash:

Griffiths: “Look what happened when the Spanish came over to Mexico, they actively stamped out the use of of psychedelics. I think at the core if we’re not careful, it can be destablizing to culture, and then culture’s gonna come back and demonize them, which is exactly what happened in the ‘60s. So I am concerned about the excited movement towards decriminalization and legalization.”

Peterson follows with some extended thoughts on Carl Jung and the need for healthy tension between religious dogma and religious experiences, with Griffiths discussing psychedelic risks. In addition to the safety concerns of this, Griffiths brings it back to concern of cultural backlash:

Griffiths: “If I can come back [to thinking] culturally, and how we integrate this, I’m almost thinking of this now in an evolutionary sense, we have to evolve the cultural institutions that can create the containers around these experiences such that they don’t threaten our existing institutions which will become reactive and demonize them and shut them down, and figure out the intelligent use of these compounds.”

Peterson then turns to the religious leaders study, hinting at the reconvening of participants that would take place in July 2022:

Peterson: “Now you’re inviting religious leaders to participate in that process. So just out of curiosity for example, you’ll have this assembly of religious leaders who have undergone this experience. So will they commune? Wil they discuss collectively the implications of this? Because you know, it’s necessary to start thinking about how those social structures might be evolved. You have this first batch of people who have already made an ethical commitment and a disciplined choice, it would be fascinating, it seems, to put them together for three or four days and say, ‘Look, what do we do with this?’ You’re in a unique position to see what answers might arise from that.”

After discussing Harvard Divinity School’s psychedelic chaplaincy program, which I was involved in early discussions with, Dr. Griffiths concludes this section by pointing to his desire for a way for psychedelics to not only be given to people in need of healing, but “well persons,” an idea popularized by Hopkins’ spiritual mission of their research since Michael Pollan’s first New Yorker article on psychedelics in 2015.

Griffiths concludes this portion of the Peterson interview:

Griffiths: “Right now we have no path forward in our culture for approval for administration of psychedelics to well persons….this is part of the co-evolution that needs to happen.”

A month after this interview, Rev. Priest’s Ligare was started with seed money by study donor and researcher T. Cody Swift of Riverstyx, with a Riverstyx and study team member on the board. In January 2021, and throughout 2021, Rev. Priest repeatedly described his origin story in the study, which entailed describing an alleged boundary violation.1

A Conference in the Midst of An Investigation

In spite of an ongoing investigation looking at Rev. Priest’s description of his trial experience with Dr. Richards, Rev. Priest announced through his newsletter on April 8 that his “personal mission” of combining psychedelics with spiritual direction had come to pass:

The conference has since sold out, but tickets for an accompanying $35/a head in-person talk from Dr. Richards are also available as of publication.

In response to an email request, Ligare did not offer a comment for publication on Dr. Richards’ participation or the ongoing investigation. Ligare clarified in an email that in response to community feedback, the previously planned “Certificate of Completion in Psychedelics and Religion” would no longer be offered due to the potential for being misunderstood as a training certificate rather than a certificate of attendance.

More information on the conference can be found at the URL www.ligare.org/store.

Responses

Before and throughout the series I made several explicit invitations to those involved to send any comments they would like published and for corrections. By and large, I did not receive any responses from those involved, and none who wanted to include a public comment. I received one fact-check, which was resolved with that person immediately after publication, who did not want further comment.

Response from Hopkins

As mentioned in the intro, Hopkins’ CPCR has not publicly responded. I reached out through the Center’s website to comment before this piece about the status of Dr. Richards, given his public engagements, but did not receive a reply.

Response from Ligare

In nine months, Ligare has not yet publicly acknowledged the series. Last week, in the first correspondence since the series, Ligare shared they believed there were factual errors and misrepresentations but have not yet given specific corrections to be published.

Before the series was published, there was no information about risks on their resources webpage, as seen in an archived snapshot from May 2023, despite existing for two years as an advocacy and educational project aimed at Christian populations. They have since publicly begun signaling some discussion about risks; in an April newsletter, Ligare stated that “our ministry is focused on education, connection, and harm reduction.” This is a marked difference from my time in Ligare, in which I terminated my internship early in part because of their recklessness.

Since this series was published, they have drastically updated their website to include issues raised by this publication. To be clear, while their website has made improvements to overall information and messaging, I would not endorse the information on it for Christian laypeople. Then again, my position on psychedelics has changed considerably, in no small part because of my interactions here.

While Ligare uses “safe” and “legal” as a mantra for what they promote, this belies that many Ligare affiliates and leaders use psychedelics in illegal settings. In the progressive Christian book Discovering Fire, in which Rev. Priest has a foreword, the author says that he attended one Ligare-sponsored retreat in Colorado in 2022.2 This would be, at minimum, federally illegal. As an intern, I once personally helped connect someone who contacted Ligare with a practitioner who was practicing illegally.

Lingering Questions

There is no known timetable for resolution on the Hopkins investigation, and I expect Hopkins leadership to feel their hands are tied from saying something publicly as it’s ongoing. In the meantime, Dr. Richards is still listed as a research psychologist on the Hopkins website as of publication. Have his actions have been cleared in this investigation? If not, why is he doing the retreat with Ligare? If he is cleared, how and why? What actually happened? And as for Ligare, why host him for a paid event without ever addressing this?

Update: three weeks after this piece, I was copied on a cease & desist letter sent to Substack in an attempt to censor my whistleblowing. Here is the letter with my response.

Subscribe now

Share

Note: one sentence has been corrected for clarity (see footnote 1).

In part one, I gave an overview. In parts two and three, I provided some groundwork for the spiritual missions of the Hopkins team and what are some heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility drugs and belief transmission. In parts four, and five I talked about the reckless ambitions of the Christian non-profit I worked for, funded by a Hopkins researcher, and some of its fallout. In part six, I called for an investigation, and in part seven I examined the narratives being presented.

An update to this series was posted in May 2024.

He has a spirit that has made him unable to speak.

This kind can only come out through prayer.

Mark 9:17, 29

The thesis here was truth and mercy. These are the two antidotes to Jacob’s deception and Esau’s revenge. I’ve been more Esau lately than what feels good, and yet more truthful than I could bear to give. And yet in our desire for justice we cannot live furious forever. Mercy is a gift to Esau as much as his brother who asks him for it. And just like all who manipulate for power, Jacob gets his own cosmic justice anyway—Jacob may have stolen a blessing, but as the story goes, he didn’t realize he just put himself in the queue for a broken hip and 14 years of servitude, living out deception’s implications in an encounter with the truth he wished wasn’t so. The truth is a gift to the liar once accepted. It is a gift to all of us liars.

And the mercy of God is sovereign no matter who’s lying, who’s angry, who’s betrayed, who’s traumatized, who’s…you get it.

Mercy is always humming for us. It’s not mine to grant. It’s mine to ask for. And it’s a gift to us all.

But I write here today with more freedom because some people of psychedelia’s past spoke to the dark in their own plain way so that I could hear it and be more free. Eventually, many of them moved on, sometimes before knowing where to, but anywhere but here. The good seed they planted sometimes took time, but it did take root until it grew into the wheat of truer cognitive liberty and a little more justice.

In Sum

Sometimes I wonder how much of my pain of the last year is the pain of having a story I didn’t know how to tell.

I can say now that having told what I can of my part of it, there is something freeing in that. And I know there are many more stories locked in the toxic swirl of that culture. Some of them are within this story, but those stories aren’t mine. Some participants may not see themselves at all in this story—I hope they don’t.

But to the participants, from one religious professional to another, of course you have the right to interpret your experience however you want. You have the right to tell your story. I’m just telling my colleagues as I see it: I believe you were subjected to a disturbing religious science experiment that jeopardized your agency for someone else’s golden calf. Hopkins built stronger-than-normal trust bonds, gave you high-suggestibility drugs, and recruited you into something that, if it’s not a cult, boy, you sure understand it better when you study cults. These are disturbing and plain things, and I would be remiss not to say them.

While the newly proposed FDA guidelines for psychedelic clinical trials state that “adequate measures are taken to minimize bias on the part of the subjects, observers, and analysts of the data,” funders held multiple roles while researchers committed alleged unethical behavior and cultivated inappropriate relationships, blending into a convoluted matrix of conflicts of interests that likely heightened suggestibility effects and transformed some believers into worshipers at the idol of the grand Psychedelic Meaning Loop.

In presenting their initial findings to a conference, binding all individual stories into a bundle, I believe researchers obscured all these conflicts of interest and unintended consequences in favor of a narrative that propagated their spiritual and religious motivations at the expense of a fuller truth.

It cannot be denied that as of today, some participants still feel their experience was a tremendous blessing. And in my opinion, the Hopkins psilocybin team has used science to steal their own blessing. I believe the religious professionals study is a case study in the shadow of psychedelics happening in the highest-profile research. I hope it is a call to a much higher standard of conscious ethics around psychedelics, their power for suggestibility, and conflicts of interest, raising awareness of what cannot be an acceptable precedent—not for science nor religion.

The manuscript is apparently submitted. I am calling for the relevant institutes to investigate, less because I am optimistic they will but more so that it is on the record that they won’t. Moreover, I am calling for much more public scrutiny to what was attempted and what happened.

I want to revisit the concerns of Dr. Rick Strassman. Here are his views as described by Danielle Giffort in Acid Revival:

Echoing the warnings that he received from researchers nearly thirty years earlier, Strassman argues that clinical psychedelic research must avoid "overreaching into theology and religion.” Strassman concludes his scathing book review with a reminder: “Leary's alarming mantra: 'turn on, tune in, and drop out' evidenced the inability of psychedelic researchers to rein in their own messianic pretensions. This is something that the field, now just recovering from decades of neglect, cannot afford.”

With the abundance of concerns raised, I urge you to look at the holistic picture of the Hopkins religious professionals study—does this seem like a healthy and professional research environment? Does it seem like a healthy culture for participants or for researchers? Or does this seem more like an environment that sought to manufacture religious consent?

To the participants, your experience and your interpretation absolutely matter and you absolutely have a right to both in ways that complicate what’s been said. But one of the deeply unfair things here is that science, true science in its true form, is not private—science is intrinsically a public project. A pursuit of truth. And so while you have the right to your experience, society also has a right to say that the behavior in this experiment was absolutely disturbing from our stance outside of it. The public has the right to the opinion that it was a bold-faced attempt to transmit a “doctrine” so that one particular psychedelic Message would go forth, sometimes at the expense of more important values.

And the public has a right to say this is not and cannot be okay.

And it doesn’t mean stolen blessings don’t have real ones in time.

Perverse Incentives and Profanities

What I have most come to most believe from this experience is that psychedelic religion needs to be left in the world of religious freedom. Seek it out in psychedelic communities and pursue a legal strategy. Let science do science, not spiritual PR. Whatever is genuinely of the Spirit in psychedelics needs no advertising. It needs no flawed studies pushing a theological vision. That is not the Spirit. That is an imposition of power of a particular religious viewpoint through seduction.

But I remember and understand the perspective of why this scientific route feels justified. However we feel about drug scheduling, it is the drug war that has created perverse incentives to secure non-Christian religious freedom through manipulative means.

Perverse incentives to avoid bad publicity.

Perverse incentives to manufacture good publicity.

And so, then, personal perverse incentives to retain status, lead the way, burnish a persona of authority. Nothing new under those suns.

The old perverse incentives of academia, research funding, and minding your own business rather than getting involved.

There are certainly perverse incentives to be the ones who “save dying Christianity.”

And maybe because traditional Christianity is still seen as the hegemonic evil (not the least of which by liberal Christians), maybe people just don’t care about seducing Christian pastors into being their mouthpieces—they just see it as a gift. And when so many progressive Christians can’t find God in their own tradition, they have the perverse incentives to find God in something else.

Ultimately, this led to perverse incentives to create research to validate spirituality instead of arguing for religious freedom rights, not only because mainstream culture doesn’t “get” psychedelia, but because so many psychonauts retain a distrust of religion.

But perhaps the greatest perverse incentive here is the incentive to try to secure access to the sacred in a way that profanes it.

Anything we hold sacred has the ability to be profaned. And I don’t mean in the delightful profanity we all sometimes take in barbecuing someone else’s sacred cow that we see as a false idol—sorry about that. I mean profaning science to manipulate public opinion, profaning religion in the freakin’ name of the Holy Spirit, and profaning psychedelics in the same way as the US government: by pretending you can control them.

And it profanes whatever you want to call the group of people having conversations about these things. But I know one of the unspoken lies is that the psychedelics are the sacred thing about its “community”—as if what makes the Shipibo people holy is the fact that they use ayahuasca and not the fact that they are made in the image of God.

I don’t see the sparks and seeds of the holy in psychonauts in the drugs, but in the desire to know something realer than the lies of religion, finding it in experience. But the idolatry of spiritual experience creates perverse incentives to slowly erode one’s moral code. And that must go.

A few pieces ago, I talked about how the parable of the lost sheep gets inverted to make inconvenient sheep. For the uninitiated, the story is simply that the Good Shepherd does not toss out one to save ninety-nine. The Good Shepherd lives in pursuit of the lost sheep wherever she hears their cry. The pragmatic shepherd says we have to move on without the lost. The Good Shepherd strikes her staff to smash the idolatry of perverse incentives.

Mercies of a Stolen Blessing

The story to me here is a story of pursuit after what so many psychonauts have wanted for so long—not merely legal rights, but proof of spiritual legitimacy from mainstream Western religion in all its constellation. This seems to me what Dr. Bill Richards has sought: a blessing, and in his mind, also to bless. But psychedelia never actually needed that from the mainstream culture. In fact, it’s famously thrived on countering it. And while the political realities made many psychonauts feel they had to pursue propagandistic subterfuge to secure legal freedoms, it does not make such tactics any less deceptive. And whatever the realpolitik gains, such deceptive tactics ultimately “profane the mysteries” of psychedelics. It also profaned religion and science—but what hasn’t these days?

It doesn’t mean there can’t be a blessing. God uses all things. In the case of the Jacob of Genesis, sometimes we can be totally manipulative in seeking a blessing without negating the blessing. But it also doesn’t negate the deception, nor can we throw our moral compass into some oceanic bliss.

Jacob got his blessing through deception. But he also showed that the greater trickster was God, using our sin toward his plans.

The Prodigal Son is a parable influenced by Jacob and Esau. Like Jacob, the Prodigal Son just wanted his blessed inheritance early. He got greedy. He made a mess of his life, and made life harder for everyone around him. But mostly, he just embarrassed himself. He lost his dignity. When he came back home, the brother’s temptation was to lord it over him and to make him pay. But the Father just wanted to celebrate his return, and tell him what he really wanted to hear: you are loved. There are no mistakes that can keep you from being worthy of love.

And however furious I’ve been, however descending into madness I can go, and however wrong I think this study is and needs investigation, I will be damned if I’m going to live my life as a Prodigal Brother, and I will be damned if I can’t see whatever mercies of a stolen blessing come in time.

When Jacob had his holy struggle, he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” But the Prodigal Son was set free when he realized he didn’t need to wrestle with God, or man, or the law, or mainstream religion, or anybody to seek his blessing. He didn’t need to deceive and take it through subterfuge, sleight of hand, and an abusive culture. He didn’t need to leverage the levers of credentialism. He already had a blessing, and he never lost it.

Esau could not forgive unless he knew he had been deceived.

And he could not be given the gift of being a forgiver until his deception was acknowledged and seen by the brother who deceived him.

Grace, Hope, Vision, Freedom

Grace (and moral luck)

I believe that the researchers, the participants, and many of us in that sphere were caught up in the incredible opportunity we had somehow found ourselves in. We had stumbled into a moment of time and place to be at the forefront of psychedelics and institutional Christianity. But none of us were, or are, entitled to any position just by virtue of first-mover effects. Such lucky historical timings entitle us to nothing. And in my view, the result was like inverting the Hank Hill joke about Christian rock music: so far, it seems “psychedelic Christianity” does not make psychedelics better, but Christianity worse.

But I want to give one last word of consideration for the Rev. Priest. For all of us who had discovered a new hope to revive our dying religion or bless our start-up one, the Rev. Priest was simply doing exactly what our collective utopian visions demanded of him: pretend like everything is still a utopia. However we feel about anything else, if there was one thing the Rev. Priest was great at, it was making the psychedelic world feel blessed. And all I’ve been able to do lately is make people feel judged. And what would Jesus think of that?

In my view, the study itself has a chance to set dangerous precedents with what is ethically acceptable, much less healthy, out of science and psychedelic religion. It is set to tell a story about clergy and psychedelics that obscures how the power of high-suggestibility lingers into impacting morality, critical clarity, and discernment of vocation.

Many of us have achieved moral injuries working in psychedelics. I cannot heal from mine unless I name them. But I also must recognize that I was morally lucky that I was not given more power, that I was not more successful in trying to grift my way up the psychedelic career ladder. I imagine some may characterize my actions here as the impotent signs of jealousy. Maybe. But to attain the goals I used to want would have only accrued more entanglements of incentives that would have made it harder to leave behind without more moral wounds. If I had been more successful in attaining the dead visions of my old dreams, then I might have also very easily wanted to stay and be silent. It is always useful to consider what would make one act in the same way as someone else in the story, what would put us in the shoes that couldn’t walk away. There is always grace to be found in simply thinking of that.

Highlighting issues with passion does not prevent healing nor preclude forgiveness. In truth, it is naming wrongs with the fire of love that makes forgiveness possible. But it requires both Jacob and Esau to see the wrong. Forgiveness is a two-party state of consciousness.

Hope (beyond hope)

The history of religion is one littered over and over again with self-deification of humanity’s belief in its own projects, cloaked in the name of a triumphant transcendent principle. Why should the principle researchers of this study pretend this ended up anything different?

I can’t speak for where the study’s religious participants and study team designers should place their hope. For Christians, our hope is placed in Jesus Christ, however we understand him, for if we know history we have seen so often what happens when best liberal intentions self-deceive into thinking we can bring about his kingdom. This does not mean progress is impossible—it means that changing the most fundamental condition of our impossible situation of being trapped in our stuff is a fool’s errand. It means that for Christians, any progress we make in which we are so proud of ourselves for making it—for being on history’s Right Side, as if we are not doomed to be just as direly on its Wrong Side—should be distrusted.

Nobody should have expected anything different, but we all did, because we hoped. There is a kind of hope, just as powerful of a psychoactive as any, that drives psychedelic movements. A hope that seeks to turn back the clock to a time before our undefinable traumas, to reverse humanity’s march towards The End as much as immanentize it. But a true hope, an eternal hope, is a hope that is unseen.1 It is a hope beyond all vision—mine, Hopkins’, and institutional Christianity’s. It is a hope beyond whatever ecstatic realm we can conjure, beyond the most sober pragmatism of our doomed-out-of-the-box plans, beyond all idols of our minds and spirit. We must escape the traps of our partial visions in order to live in the hope that cannot be seen.

Vision (a different one)

Even to the Christian mystics, mystical experience is not the core of the gospel. It doesn’t mean Christian mystics cannot give thanks for the workings of the Holy Spirit wherever it goes, however it blows; working through sinners—God’s only option. It doesn’t mean a Christian can’t be happy for a psychonaut. But it might mean a better understanding of where those paths diverge, and why.

And where I diverge is rejecting the Message that we can make God come to us simply by taking a psychedelic, no more than we can turn on a fan and call it the Wind. I am going where Thomas Merton went, into the “mysticism of is-ness:”

We have to distinguish between the kind of mysticism of exaltation, which transports a man into what he is not, and is always reaching out to what man is not, is not yet, or even cannot be. Reaching out into the future, or reaching out into the 7th heaven, or reaching out into levels of experience that are not granted to ordinary men, and so forth… or the other kind of mysticism, which perhaps is not mysticism, which simply grows deep into the ground of what one is. 

And I would say that the most crucial thing, at least for me, is the repeated affirmation of the necessity to dig into what one is. A mysticism of is-ness, a mysticism of existence, a mysticism of accepting what is here and now right in front of your nose. And seeing that it is useless to reach out to what one is not and what one will never be. And to try to have what one can never have. If one consistently despises what one is and what one has, and where one is, then one fails to see that it's all right there. 

Now of course LSD, I suppose, does in a certain sense, do that. But yet it doesn't. Because after all, you need LSD to make the passage, and we don't need anything to make the passage. The passage is immediate. There is no passage; you aren't going anywhere. You’re where you are. 

And it isn't a question of being turned on. It's a question of being grateful for what one is. It isn't a question of ecstasy, or being elevated above one's human condition. It is a question of being human and realizing that there is, in a certain sense, nothing greater than to be human since the son of God became human. You don't even have to bring in that explanation to us, the ground of our faith, but it's built into humanity itself.2

I think the prime danger of psychedelic theologies is the same danger of the mysticism of exaltation, another form of “mistaking church for God” in an outsized belief in spiritually arriving through a preferred experiential method, which leads to idolatry of the method, which leads to sacrificing people harmed by the method to preserve the reputational social power of the method. At the same time, ecstatic experience expresses a real need, or at least a hunger in need of a refined appetite, that cannot be discounted. I would be derelict in my duty if I did not commit to giving people more alternatives than simply Christian platitudes. Merton believed theology must address real needs. Where we do not think psychedelics address our needs, we ought to work to discover and articulate that which does.

I don’t know if I will ever use psychedelics again. Probably not. But I’m grateful for the gifts and mercies of the blessings those trips stole, when I was a guy eager to try and get his divine inheritance as soon as possible. But these gratitudes are wounds, too. I cannot celebrate them too much when held next to the brokenness of those harmed by them. I do not want to discount genuine healing, and I do not want to forget my spiritual vitality being restored way back when. But I also cannot forget the souls who were not so lucky because psychedelic evangelism sold them something that was deadly false. Even now, I do not want to undersell the gift of a little more seeing, however limited—what a grace to have vision at all. But I do not forget the wisdom of another ayahuasca journeyer, a now-deceased man named Matthew, whose beautiful soul’s impulsive response to these larger theological questions was just, “Fuck if I know.” And fuck if I know whether psychedelics were good for him.

I was born spiritually blind. I will remain blind. A Christian always has our mind’s idols between us and the true Christ. The future may have some marginally better understandings, but also new blindnesses. And I will continue to be in the Church so that I may keep working on my eyesight. The Church is a “hospital for souls,” and that includes an optometry department. But Christians can only aspire to be blind eye doctors. We are called not only to expose and speak to the darkness in the world, but the darkness in ourselves. We do that by being vulnerable with each other. That sacred, precious vulnerability is the thing I miss most from my psychedelic retreats. That truth and mercy. This is not a cope—it really was not the experiences. They just gave me and some pilgrims an excuse to pour out ourselves to each other, discovering a little more is-ness beyond our last blindness, only to walk by faith into the next.

That is the Real Thing. I cannot believe we need psychedelics for it.

Religious Freedom

Last March, I made a special pilgrimage to Burlington, Vermont, to pay my first visit to the birthplace of Phish, my psychedelic band of almost twenty years (but for the record, I was at first just a sober phan). I was in the middle of deconstructing how I felt about everything I’ve talked about here, and more. I was first feeling the sense that I was going to have to let go of a variety of dreams I had: psychedelic chaplain, ayahuasca church guy, and who knows what else. I didn’t know exactly what would happen, but here I was, driving past dead trees to frozen Lake Champlain, comforting my psychedelic pain with a novel nostalgia trip.

As I drove back through state highways, winding my way back home without wanting to get back anytime soon, passing by one-room libraries, general stores like a scaled-up Mary Poppins bag, chock-full of more stuff than they have any reason to be…and some country churches. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I started my degree, but it definitely hadn’t been finding myself at one of those.

And yet when I saw barn after barn peering out from fields of snow, I thought, “You know, even this time of year…I could live here.” And as I kept passing old churches in the least-churched state of the union, for the first time, in the midst of my early stages of post-psychedelic grief, I heard myself sighing in defeat, “I guess I could just be a pastor.”

And I caught myself—”just”? “Just”? Had I really inflated myself so much that I thought it was whatever to do the work my father did, or my great uncle? Had I really said, “Ahhh, I guess if I have to”? Maybe I was feeling “just” a slap in the face from my Lutheran great-great-grandfather who was old enough to know a Gettysburg that didn’t have fields nourished in blood, who built his church building with his bare hands and preached in German and English every week. And I realized—what a tremendous, tremendous honor of a lifetime it would be for me, to be so lucky and blessed if I could do that. To be with people without needing to convince them. To love them as they are, to not live for experience, and yet swim in their abundance. To share who I am and hope to earn their trust to share who they are with me. To be a fellow pilgrim seeking truth and asking for mercy, with a piece of paper that says he gets to talk about his path and let people know God loves them no matter what, in spite of everything, and not to mistake our favorite signs for the Signified who lives and reigns in magisterial love.

The day I hit send on this last piece, not yet able to turn back to see what charred bridges lay behind me, I am moving to Vermont to be just a country pastor. I want people to live with the knowledge that they are blessed and have always been blessed without any need for deception. I want people to have religious freedom. And now, I have it too.

An update to this series was posted in May 2024.

Share

In part one, I gave an overview. In parts two and three, I provided some groundwork for the spiritual missions of the Hopkins team and what are some heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility drugs and belief transmission. In parts four, and five I talked about the reckless ambitions of the Christian non-profit I worked for, funded by a Hopkins researcher, and some of its fallout. In part six, I called for an investigation.

I have been told I shouldn't publish these things, because they will weaken the image of the psychedelic movement, and that any means are justified in popularizing LSD because it is the only thing that can prevent nuclear war. This silliness is part of the Psychedelic Line, the collection of half-truths, wishful thinking, and lies repeated until they are believed, that has the movement morally paralyzed.

Licia Kuenning, née Lisa Bieberman, August 5, 1967

With all these painful puzzle pieces of the Johns Hopkins religious professional study’s past laid out—knowing I’m missing many myself—I want to return to the present.

As I talked about at the beginning, the study’s findings have not been published yet, but they were previewed in a popularly attended panel in June 2023 during the largest psychedelic research gathering in history, over 10,000 attendees for the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 conference. Again, presenting the study was NYU’s Dr. Anthony Bossis alongside Hopkins’ Dr. Roland Griffiths and RiverStyx’s T. Cody Swift.  Having heard some of the snippets of participant stories in the introduction, alongside the undisclosed social context that I’ve shared, in this piece, I want to take one last look at what they said in contrast to what you now know and what they knew as they said it, focusing on some of the narratives emerging from the study, and to start making sense of some wounds.

And to not forget anyone’s humanity here.

Before this all started, I invited all and will repeat it here: I will share any comments people involved here want to say in a follow-up post at a future date, sometime before Net Zero Trauma arrives in 2050. And I will respect it if that’s not their choice.

The next piece will be the last piece for a while. And thank God.

But before I share the framing you’re meant to repeat with a smile, I just want to say one thing about going to the movies.

The Message is the Medium

For the past two years, the publication of the study was hyped as just around the corner, only for it to be delayed without explanation despite all interviews being completed years earlier. Why? Who knows, add it to the pile of questions for lead investigator Dr. Roland Griffiths. But through it all, the guiding light of PR remained. Nobody’s lost sight of the Message.

If they—we—were primarily interested in public relations, we would be no different from the rest of the psychedelic movement. If the “political science” of MAPS is engineered to produce a particular political result, religious science is the production of psychedelia’s religious marketing. Not a seeking of theological truth, but a new grammatical toolkit for you to articulate the psychedelic Message: if you can’t feel God, you can just make God come to you.

Marshall McLuhan famously advised Timothy Leary in his creation of the 1960s phrase, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.” McLuhan was perhaps even better known for coining, “the medium is the message.” It means something like, “the form of a thing transmits something to you in and of itself; the form conveys meaning alone.” As in, there’s something about going to the movies that says something at least as much as what the movie actually is. And it’s true, there was something about seeing Barbie alongside a pink army of strangers you didn’t know were in the reserves that communicated a more coherent message than the third act (I still enjoyed it).

When instead the Message is the medium, it is the Message which dictates the plot you’re forced to live in. If you want to hang around in professional psychedelics, you don't get to opt out of the Message into truth as it is. That’s not part of the movie.

It might be expected that a growing psychedelic professional world would have a PR department. Psychedelic capitalism begets psychedelic marketing. But in professional psychedelics, PR is the format. The Message is the medium.

The way things seem to go is that to produce art, music, vibes, and now old-time religion in the movie of professional psychedelics seems inevitably, to hand over your voice—certainly your still, small one—in service of that medium. The marketing message is the frame which everything has to be forced into. Because the Message is the medium. 

My home North Carolina’s state motto is esse quam videri, Latin for “to be rather than to seem.” With hyper-suggestible drugs and their effects, often so much of what starts as “seeming” can practically transform into the reality we wish—almost.

Presentation, Revisited

In the study’s presentation, RiverStyx’s T. Cody Swift presented high-level findings and quotes from participant reports. Even over smuggled audio (thank you carrier), I could see some wheat in the weeds. And I found some of the thoughts and feelings publicly shared by participants about the conference to have real goodness. Rabbi Kamenetz described not just the study presentation, but how hopeful the conference gathering was to him for the future of Judaism and his work. He described feelings of warmth, and fullness, and a mutual embrace, alongside some of his feelings of ambivalence, and his own complexity.

However much darkness of my heart I’ve conveyed here, I hear this ambient undercurrent of mutual blessing and I can feel that it also is real. And good. Like Jacob and Esau of the Book of Genesis, religion and psychedelia as long-strained brothers of deception and anger, finding each other in a reconciling embrace, witnessing to each other, “After all the pain, look at how much we’ve each been blessed. Won’t you now accept my gift? For to see your face is like seeing the face of God.”

It’s good wheat in the weeds. I can’t rest in a field of cheap grace after reflecting on what’s been done. But it’s good wheat. Let the reader understand: my least favorite Christian trope is the forced happy ending, and we’re not at the end yet, anyway. There has to be accountability here. What has happened is appalling. If we want real truth, justice, reconciliation, accountability, ownership…if we decide we want these things more than the Message, then the movie doesn’t have to be so depressing, retraumatizing, and predictable. If Johns Hopkins must circle wagons in denial of what’s obvious to everyone outside their bubble, it will just be a painful epilogue, a missed opportunity, and a helpful warning to society.

If Dr. Roland Griffiths is a truer believer than he lets on, he no longer sounds like an optimistic one. In introducing Swift to introduce the findings, Dr. Griffiths contrasted himself with Rick Doblin’s rapid approach to introducing culture to psychedelics, while he desires an approach over several generations, because “not everyone will know the risks…But there really are catastrophic risks.” Indeed. I guess I’m curious—why are cultural strategies being talked about at all here in a scientific presentation? Have we lost what science is actually supposed to be about? Scientists, you know I’m not a scientist, are you really letting us religious people be the skeptics in the room now?

He took several minutes to emphasize cautions. He did note their screening was more intensive and conservative than will be likely in future programs, which means there may likely be greater reports of adverse experiences in future studies (of more clergy?). With later punctuation, to his concerns, “These interventions are so powerful at an individual level, and we must assume at a cultural level….We can’t see what we can’t see yet.” But for as much time Dr. Griffiths spent on the risks of expanding psychedelics into culture too fast, many of his participants were speakers and leaders in several events at the conference that week. And I’m sorry, but one more time: for a guy who likes to give the impression that he’s doing objective, spiritually-neutral, culturally-agnostic science, he spent a lot of time discussing cultural impacts.

And while Dr. Griffiths and others at Hopkins have spoken of risks, they have spent few resources in researching long-term harms. As Jules Evans noted in his conference write-up, after 20 years of research, “Why didn’t Johns Hopkins or the other big research teams yet produce any research on long-term harms? Why did no one fund any such study in the US?” 

As for the presentation of the study itself, the framework of “high-level findings” was just a framework, just a medium for the Message, that allowed for papering over the specifics, including important ways things went wrong for some participants. Maybe not officially in the data, nor in the movie, but here in the reality that matters. 

Neither Dr. Griffiths, Dr. Bossis, nor Swift disclosed the study’s conflict of interests with RiverStyx, neither in the written conflicts of interest disclosures before the conference nor any mention on the stage. Swift introduced himself during the presentation as simply “a Marriage and Family Therapist in California.” This is true, and Pope Francis is a pastoral counselor in Italy.

It is no doubt that these high-level findings and quotes from participant reports have something real in them, something inspiring. The reported experiences described reinvigorated, refreshed, and inspired clergy. Noting that participants did not have many visual God images, Swift described participants as rather feeling God, experiencing God “in relational qualities…radical closeness, intimacy, God as sexuality, God as love.”

According to Swift’s interpretation, these were “resonant with their theological beliefs but often extended beyond those beliefs.” For whatever the truth, and I’m sure it’s somewhat true, it’s a good tool in the rhetorical kit: resonant, but beyond. As Swift would frame, “they reported understandings as more personal and deeply felt yet more mysterious,” and the result appeared to have demonstrable benefits. According to Swift, four out of twenty-four participants experienced an uptick in attendance in the year after their trips. Notwithstanding other factors why a church could coincidentally rise in attendance, if this is an indication of the trial’s success, does this mean the trial failed for the other 20 clergy?

These high-level findings avoided outright stating the theology of participants changed, certainly not so much that religious institutions should be worried. But based on their descriptions, participant beliefs did change, for many of them now accommodated psychedelic spirituality in line with the researchers’ public theology-of-no-theology.

The idea that all religions are the same at the core is a non-neutral religious view. The idea that psychedelics can get you to “the same place” as prayer, or yoga, or other practices…that is a belief. To say reaching “the same place” is the point of spiritual life is a belief, for to say states of consciousness are what religion’s all about is a belief too. And I have to say, with as much tenderness to everyone’s hope amidst nihilism, it is not an inspiring one to me.

Continuing on, Swift said, “Whereas before their theological understanding may have been conceptually or intellectually from their training, it was now felt or understood from a lived experience.” And again, however true this might or might not be for some, we have to pay close attention with all of the above that these are not direct quotes, but his combined characterization.

Despite attempts to frame participants as not undergoing spiritually dangerous belief changes, with only their beliefs about drugs becoming “symbiotic,” the belief that psychedelic drugs can be symbiotic with one’s theology is a belief change. A significant one, that should not be assumed as entirely benevolent just because Hopkins says it is. And it’s one that is, indeed, a movement into their Message.

While wanting to indicate something good happened with theology but nothing at all for religions to be concerned about—just trust them, they hold the mystery keys after all—Swift indicated that “a throughline of the study was a deepened sense of humility in their relationship to theology,” as if to say again, “Don’t worry about any changes to theology, they’re just humble improvements,” just ask the California MFT. But theology is more than just a symbol system. It is the relationship. One cannot change the relationship of theology to its outer phenomenon without inherently changing the theology itself. Theology also inherently includes the subject’s relationship to it as part of it—most simply seen in the difference between a Christian fundamentalist and a liberal Christian, each possibly sharing near-identical symbol systems with the chief exception being how they relate to it, and neither one often being that humble about it. Yet still—as each would quickly tell you—sharing very different beliefs.

There’s a carefully crafted needle being threaded here. Nobody wants to scare religious institutions by worrying them about changing their clergy’s beliefs… but of course there was hope to report changes to religious clergy’s beliefs in some way to consummate the sacred cultural psychedelic marriage. It certainly was never going to be, “We have studied religious professionals under psychedelics and we regret to report it’s too bad—it turns out they can’t be Turned On.”

No. The Message is the medium.

From the high-level findings, it would appear that the team had successfully given all the participants the “new doctrine” of long-time Hopkins psychedelic strategist Bob Jesse, and that just as he said years ago, it had been a “sanity check” into a more humble relationship with theology. They successfully produced participants who had blended their religion like Aikido, symbiotically into the Hopkins team’s without things going off the rails.

While they knew, here in reality, things were going off the rails.

Life in the Shadow of Backlash

I have often wondered what Bob Jesse really thinks about all this. I confess I haven’t asked him. But I feel a great deal of sympathy for him, even now, because the outgrowth of this study has been exactly what he had spent years warning against and wishing wouldn’t happen. Based on his comments, he didn’t want to create evangelists. Probably not even “ambassadors.”

But Pandora’s Box is gonna Pandora. Much isn’t that harmful, like Christians claiming online psychedelic turf and carving out niches to spin ourselves as something we wish we were but desperately aren’t: cool. But Christians always move late into whatever secular culture is doing in our own embarrassing brand-grabbing gold rush, and I’ve done the same. With far more alarm is how psychedelics open up the door for new forms of unethical Christian conversions, manipulative evangelism into a psychedelic gospel based on the raw power of suggestion. In my glance at the Christian psychedelic landscape outside of this trial’s immediate ripples, I found an evangelical Christian pastor describing in an academic thesis having his first experience a year ago, now boasting he had already persuaded over forty other clergy to be guided in his sessions. Is “yikes” a holy term?

That wasn’t the Hopkins vision, but it’s part of the new reality. And it was somewhat predictable.

But it’s not what he wanted. When asked in 2013 by an audience member how the Hopkins research could be parlayed into a roadmap for a new religion,1 he replied:

Very, very carefully, and probably not very quickly. What that might look like in my mind is a group of people who get along well, maybe who have had some ritual going on for some time as a group with a solid identity…and for that group to start adding some self-awareness about the desire to follow that path…Find a sincere group of people who have some sense of doctrine, ethics, and ritual, who are prepared to go down that road, and it’s going to be a long, hard, and probably scary road. But I do believe it will happen.

In my opinion, Jesse seems to have hoped for a religious science that would function as good PR for psychedelic mysticism to religious institutions. But even more than that, in my opinion, it seems he mostly hoped that his mystical “doctrine” might create a couple of quiet religious reformers, people who would privately experiment with different community structures before stepping forward to mount legal cases for religious freedom, just as he’s long supported for psychedelic religious groups. It seems like psychedelic “ambassadors” could be a kind of nightmare for bringing about the psychedelic elite’s personal Satan named Backlash.

While Jesse has repeatedly said he doesn’t like psychonauts being promotional, he’s been a chief engineer for strategic science which is the most promotional thing to happen to psychedelics in the last 60 years. And despite my sympathy, Jesse’s emphasis on preventing backlash has contributed to a psychedelic culture that has wanted to handle things in-house with disastrous results. I believe this approach deserves some “credit” for setting up The Silence, a climate of fear of a cultural re-oppression that might have contributed to the psychedelic subculture’s Code around abuse and harm.

This kind of thinking is, and has to be, anathema to true spiritual conviction. A spiritual community has to take the risk to sacrifice into its fears, or else the thing it’s preserving isn’t really the Real Thing anyway. When you think you can control the Real Thing, all rules are legalism. All rules are red tape—you cut corners, you omit inconvenient stories, you don’t confront the truth even to yourself.

Wrestling with Trust

I know that if my old self were here, the young excited psychonaut, I would need to be patient with him, and he with me. I would especially need to be patient as he came to have a greater sensitivity, though not a mastery, of not only the dance patterns of the sacred, but the counterpatterns of evil.

All throughout working on this, I have been wretching with all the ethical and moral dilemmas—not just the ones I was trying to call out, but the ones within myself. I kept wishing that I had been a better communicator, I had tried more creative routes, that I hadn’t waited, or hadn’t been so psychologically beaten down into waiting. I never stopped feeling like this whole situation was deeply unfair—and there’s so much about our lives like that, blessed in the midst of deep unfairness. It wasn’t fair to participants, and it’s not fair to them for me to talk about it. And maybe it’s not even fair that the researchers had to prove their spiritual beliefs through science so the United States government could say they’re valid. I know first-hand that there are so many deeply unfair double-binds in the process of trying to apply to the DEA for a religious exemption. For most, applying for religious freedom as groups of new churches is not easy, and potentially a kind of entrapment—and that’s church as defined by the IRS, even if the “church” self-definition feels gross to many. The only groups that have won their legal protections through that route have been nominally Christian and/or Indigenous. For groups that don’t want to be Christian, or know that psychedelics mean something spiritually important to them but have trouble defining it, this process is almost a non-starter—but some still try. 

But with all my wrestling, when it came down to it, I felt I had to say something. As much as I love many people here as individuals, I can’t live with knowing people would get hurt if I didn’t say something. As complicated things are, sometimes it felt as simple as knowing I couldn’t trust anyone here with informing people enough, instead choosing, again and again, to manipulate people into their beliefs, name-checking risks vaguely but doing so little actually to educate them—and maybe that’s because these risks are highly, highly unknown, and scary to meditate on, and uncomfortable to listen to people who have experienced them.

I can’t trust what’s coming from this study to keep people safe. I can only trust it will market them for their movie. As complicated as things are here, some things are that simple.

I know there are some people who will have some visceral reactions to their friends being criticized. Some will have a visceral fear-based response to having unsettling questions raised about things that do demand investigation. And some are going to have bang-on criticisms of things I missed or messed up. I know there are going to be many other strong feelings. I have them too.

Believe it or not, I try to be careful in what I say. But I can say that one reason I am writing is that I, personally, would not trust a single person in my life to be kept safe by anybody in this study. I grew up in the liberal church. I come from a liberal Christian family. I have to write because I can’t trust anybody in my area of highest concern with the actors here, least of all in the hands of the Johns Hopkins theology. I wouldn’t trust my people to be in the care of Ligare, and I wouldn’t trust them in the care of these particular researchers.

I wouldn’t trust the actors in the movie to identify a spiritual wrong. I wouldn’t trust them to own a wrong. And I certainly wouldn’t trust them to stand up for what’s wrong, no more than I would trust a fish to fly. I would only trust them to say what they thought needed to be said so that the Message could be maintained. And I would like nothing more than to be able to totally wrong about that and change my opinion. But nobody is entitled to work with psychedelics, and nobody is entitled to trust.

Everyone is entitled to take risk into their own hands. And in the hands of people who make false assurances of psychospiritual safety, that’s all I can honestly feel like you are doing. 

Luminary Accountability

Like the Jacob of ancient days, if many psychedelic movement people want not only legal protections, but a blessing, there are also a whole lot of other people who want some of the leaders—for one, sweet moment—to take some responsibility for their actions, their emotional wake, and the unintended consequences. To say one sincere apology for something real.

Many “luminaries” have begun talking about risks as a new medium for The Message, but I haven’t seen much teeth there. Have they talked about the risk of moral injury, of knowing people have died who overenthusiastically read their books? Have they talked about the risk of losing your clarity, your thinking, your worldview, where you might find yourself appearing at an abusive organization’s conference not only unable to speak your full voice, but doing their propaganda for them? 

With the confidence in which they presented the study coupled with the cautions Dr. Griffiths offered, you would have no idea the dense web of conflicts of interest underlying the social matrix between participants and researchers, risking what Dr. Matthew Johnson had called “guru” complexes. You would have no idea about Dr. Richards’ alleged behavior, or any issues had ever come about from one of their participants (that they funded) had ever come to their attention. But they had. This was outside the technical scope of the study. It was outside the movie, and so it had to be outside the Message.

But it wasn’t outside of their true responsibility.

There would have been inappropriate things to disclose. But an honest report would have said far more of what I saw emerging out of an unhealthy study culture. I haven’t come close to telling the full story, not that I even have it—but neither have they. And it probably won’t ever be fully told.

Freedom From the Press

As I wrote in a piece last year pleading for the psychedelic movement to operate more like a proper field, bringing in the fullness of self-criticism, I just want people to be free of the need to do psychedelic PR. I want psychedelic research to be free of self-deception. I want Bob Jesse to be free of the weight of thinking it’s his job to steer psychedelia’s public image. I want Dr. Griffiths to be free to step outside the movie he’s masterfully directed and edited to experience the freedom of accepting he’s not the genius sage others have put on their pedestal. He’s just a human who wound up holding too many people’s hopes, dealing with too many people’s weird symbolic energy, all too big for anyone’s psyche.

In a similar vein, I am not so sure that what is happening here is not just religious people performing PR for a psychedelic movement who were elevated onto pedestals of status and acclaim, rather than a genuine deep inquiry that can speak with any integrity to its voice, any separation of itself and its values. I know I couldn’t water any of this grass to actually get greener until I found myself feeling truly free of the Message’s medium. And that should tell you where things really stand with psychedelic “cognitive liberty.”

Maybe there will be something more of a beautiful mutual blessing happening with psychedelics and religion, like Jacob and Esau. But this can only happen with a strong sense of healthy boundaries and defined values. Otherwise, psychedelic religious professionals are not Jacob blessing Esau, or Esau forgiving Jacob—they’re at risk of merely being the goatskin on Jacob’s arms. The means of deception.

We don’t have to pretend that things went according to plan here. Johns Hopkins doesn’t have to pretend this was anything close to a “healthy normal” research environment or a model to admire. This doesn’t have to be anybody’s defining moment. This study didn’t—and can’t—save religion from itself, or psychedelics from itself. I want psychonauts and would-be’s to be free of that disastrous, load-crushing weight.

I want people to be free of the prison of the Message.

The next piece is the last one. I will tie up some loose ends, ask a few questions to make other ends looser, and say a few last things about hope and vision.

Share

Part six of a series detailing spiritual missions, hidden issues, and unexamined consequences of a psychedelic clergy study at Johns Hopkins University.

In part one, I gave a roadmap. In parts two and three, I shared the spiritual missions of the Hopkins team and heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility psychedelic drugs and belief transmission. In part four, I talked about the reckless origins of the Christian non-profit I worked for, funded by a Hopkins funder and researcher. In part five, I talked about the social entanglements and consequences of conflicts of interest with one of the study’s funders.

Introduction

Earlier in this series, I established through public statements that a joint Johns Hopkins/NYU psychedelic trial for religious professionals has the appearance of being part of a strategic approach to bring psychedelic spirituality to culture through Johns Hopkins’ scientific reputation.

In this piece, I will discuss how since 2021, a participant in the clergy psychedelic trial (the Rev. Hunt Priest) has repeatedly and publicly alleged, including in written testimony, that in 2016 his guide Dr. William Richards touched him in a spiritually-evocative way. The described touch egregiously violates Hopkins protocols, a touch that the Rev. Priest described as like when he has offered “anointing” as a priest. Then, according to the Rev. Priest’s account, Dr. Richards later allegedly suggested the Rev. Priest had experienced the Holy Spirit.

The Rev. Priest has proclaimed himself to have experienced the Holy Spirit and to have received a form of “ordination” in his experience, inspiring him to start a psychedelic non-profit Ligare, with an agenda to create “ambassadors” for psychedelic drugs to Christianity to make them “widely available.” The study team’s funder and researcher, T. Cody Swift, funded this non-profit through his RiverStyx Foundation, which has led to illegal and reckless behavior from Ligare. RiverStyx funded Ligare an additional $52k in February 2023.1

The Rev. Priest has shared the story many times in podcasts, public appearances, and with his full name and publicity information in the book Triumph Over Trauma by Randall Hansen, PhD.2 His report has been in at least one Hopkins researcher’s inbox since January 2021.

Given the breadth of what has been covered so far—the spiritual beliefs of researchers in this study, the capacity for hyper-suggestible psychedelic drugs to unethically induce belief changes, the nature of Ligare’s founding agenda to promote the study, the web of social entanglements—there are an incredible amount of questions that demand answers. It raises serious concerns about more potential hidden misconduct and how much of the study’s data is based on unethical conduct, and what Hopkins researchers have known or done about it. While lead investigator Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. William Richards, Hopkins advisor Robert Jesse, and T. Cody Swift should answer these questions, there must also be an investigation by the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research and the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Standards for Touch

If psychedelics increase suggestibility, both during a session and in the “afterglow” the next day, then touch can be an amplifier of this suggestibility factor. Touch is already used very conservatively in non-psychedelic therapeutic settings due to the impacts on boundaries. But the practices of psychedelic therapists, as a culture, have long pushed far past these boundaries, sometimes seen as relics of Puritanism, obstacles to healing. 

But the Hopkins psychedelic center appears to officially have a conservative approach to touch.

In 2023, Dr. Sandeep Nayak, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Hopkins psychedelic center, gave a presentation at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in a session on psychedelic therapy ethics on the issue of touch: 

There are very strong reasons why touching is not a part of traditional psychiatric therapy…Tell patients you may grab their hand or gently touch their shoulder, but that it will absolutely not go beyond that, Therapeutic touching is a boundary crossing; we need to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a boundary violation.

But this does not appear only to be Dr. Nayak’s opinion, it appears to be in line with standards co-authored by Dr. Richards himself fifteen years ago alongside Dr. Griffiths and Dr. Matthew Johnson in the article “Human Hallucinogen Research: Guidelines for Safety.” A version is hosted on Hopkins advisor Bob Jesse’s Council for Spiritual Practices website. This is what the guidelines have to say about touch, the extent of which is hand-holding:

Appropriate forms of reassurance may include a supportive touch to the arm or shoulder with verbal reminders that the participant is in a research study, has taken the hallucinogen, and that he or she will return to normal consciousness in ‘a few minutes’ or ‘a few hours’ (or whatever the appropriate estimate may be, depending on the specific drug under study and when it was administered). During an intense hallucinogen-occasioned experience when verbal interactions may be of limited help, a powerful form of reassurance (sometimes called ‘interpersonal grounding’) is simply holding the hand of the participant.

If this form of reassurance does not help the participant’s distress, then the protocols call for “pharmacological intervention” as a last resort:

Although pharmacological intervention is a last resort and should rarely, if ever, be needed, medications should be readily available for use if the need arise. For cases in which acute psychological distress is insufficiently managed with reassurance alone, treatment with a benzodiazepine anxiolytic is the pharmacological intervention of choice.

If the Rev. Priest’s testimony is to be believed, Dr. Richards allegedly did not even follow his own standards for touch.

“I Think We Call That The Holy Spirit”

Here is the relevant part of the Rev. Priest’s testimony about the suggestive touch: 

Midway through the first session at Hopkins I began to experience a sensation of something lodged inside me. Not understanding what it was, I imagined it to be energy that had to be released, but with no easy way out. The current of energy, subtle at first, formed in my pelvis and intensified as it moved up my spinal column. When it eventually became lodged near my larynx, a blockage was created which then expanded and began to feel impenetrable. The pressure was so intense that at one point I thought the skin around my Adam’s apple was going to blow open. In my mind I struggled to break it up and quite unexpectedly (and uncharacteristically) began to speak in tongues, the spiritual gift mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:1-25. It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing.

Not long after, my physical discomfort caused me to become agitated, causing my guides to sense that I was struggling with something difficult. I told them something was trying to get out of me. After asking permission, Bill placed his hands on the top of my head as I sometimes do when offering healing prayers and anointing a parishioner (the sacrament of Unction) and Darrick sat at my feet and allowed me to press my legs against him as I had done for my wife when she was in labor with our son. The blockage didn’t fully clear, but as the psilocybin began to wear off I knew that the blocked energy had mostly moved through me.

Although Dr. Richards asked permission, the Rev. Priest's being under the influence of psychedelics undermines his ability to give true consent, especially to an alleged touch that violated Hopkins' established standards for physical boundaries.

According to the account, the Rev. Priest was allegedly subjected to additional unethical behavior in the follow-up session that compounded the impact of the alleged boundary violation. In the follow-up conversation that, according to Dr. Richards' description of protocols,3 seems to have happened the next day during a state of increased suggestibility, Dr. Richards allegedly offered a suggestive explanation for his experience that the Rev. Priest continues to describe:

“In our conversation afterwards I asked them what all that energy was about. Bill smiled and said, ‘In Christian language, I think we call that the Holy Spirit.’” 

In the fullness of the power dynamics of suggestibility—a closer than usual trust relationship, a guide who treats you as a “colleague,” who has just given you evocative touch reminiscent of one’s religious practice, in the first experiences with a drug—the totality of this should be deeply disturbing.

I want to emphasize this again in the most straightforward terms: according to this account, Dr. Richards allegedly touched a participant under the influence of psilocybin in a highly evocative way, along with another guide. Later, he allegedly offered the participant a religious interpretation of his experience. This behavior is deeply inappropriate in a clinical setting with a psychedelic subject. Was this not noticed by researchers because it was so commonplace? Or was it known by researchers to have been a boundary violation, but obscured until the Rev. Priest made it public?

This behavior can have drastic impacts on one’s interpretation of one’s experience, imparting theological meaning onto one’s psychedelic experience that one might not have decided for one’s self. In this case, the suggestion of the Holy Spirit is not minor—traditional Christian theology of the Trinity makes this meaning extra powerful, with Dr. Richards allegedly implying that the event could be interpreted as a sign of God.

This is how the Rev. Priest interpreted the experience in the same testimony:

The ritual act of laying on of hands is mentioned multiple times in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. (See Numbers 27:15–23, Deuteronomy 34:9, Acts 8:14–19, Acts 6:5–6,) For Christians the laying on of hands is used sacramentally as part of healing rituals, Confirmations and ordinations. The connection to healing was pretty obvious for me, but the connection to the sacrament of Ordination was a recent epiphany. Somehow, in the midst of the second session, I found myself on the sofa, moving back and forth between lying on my stomach and being in a kneeling position. I came to know, in the midst of the movement, that I was kneeling and then prostrating myself in front of the Universe. If a sacrament is “an outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” then my call to leadership in the Christian community was affirmed and deepened. The grace-filled gift I received at Hopkins brought me spiritual growth, clarity about my vocation, emotional healing, and a desire to make the experience available to all who need and desire it.

I have no reason to doubt the Rev. Priest experienced the benefits he described. I hate the feeling that I am jeopardizing any sense of grace. But also, I have had many conversations with many people over the past two years that have been worried about the Rev. Priest’s health and his behavior. One person previously aware of the Rev. Priest emailed me yesterday, saying they had previously become concerned about the Christian retreats he's been leading and could not recommend their psychedelic-curious Christian parents to him anymore.

On a Ligare-hosted forum in September 2022, Dr. Richards seemed pleased with the results: “I just want to say how happy I am that this meeting is happening and that Hunt is devoting his life right now to facilitating this emergence in which we so desperately need.” In the same conversation, their objectives appear to have merged to be on a shared mission to “guide” the church into the truth they already know about the psychedelic experience:

Rev. Priest: I agree Bill, I think chaplains and pastoral counselors don’t need a whole lot more - just need maybe an experience and a little bit of training about how this unfolds, cause they’re dealing with people in these major life transitions and spiritual moments and bringing religion and spirituality into the conversation.

Dr. Richards: We need social structures to help people integrate these profound experiences, and then I think good grief! We’ve got them. They’re called churches and synagogues and mosques and temples. All we have to do is somehow awaken them, guide them, educate them..

Rev. Priest: Calm them down!

(both laugh)

Rev. Priest: Exactly.

It cannot be overstated how impactful Dr. Richards’ alleged behavior was.

It must also be noted how his self-described proclivity to regularly offer suggestions has been an unexamined aspect of Dr. Richards’ regular approach, perhaps because it is not too far afield from other psychotherapy approaches that are fine in non-psychedelic settings. But this isn’t normal therapy. And the following approach he describes in his book gives too much interpretive power into a guide’s hands:

Sometimes there are spiritual experiences beyond what the person ever conceived as being within the realm of possibility that need to be acknowledged. There are times when volunteers may be groping for words or concepts and the guides are able to normalize their experiences by articulating ways of thinking that others have found helpful or by suggesting readings from the writings of mystics from years past or of more recent explorers of the mind.

It greatly confounds the data if Dr. Richards is regularly filling in the blanks for participants with his own rolodex of mystical terms. How much trial data has been coded with similar language to discover patterns only because Dr. Richards prompted it from a similar set of psychospiritual vocabulary? 

It is one thing for me and other psychonauts to initially not see that this was allegedly a boundary violation. Perhaps we think it is not a big deal in an underground setting, especially if we do not understand the depths of the ethical implications around psychedelic hypersuggestibility. But again, this alleged touch egregiously violates the standards established by Dr. Nayak and even Dr. Richards himself. This is supposed to be the gold-standard of clinical research. And if it happened as described, not only has nobody done anything about it, it seems that the Rev. Priest has been financially rewarded for telling the public about this experience.

But a more important bottom line is that after allegedly committing a boundary violation, Dr. Richards’ alleged suggestive interpretation made things even worse. And this behavior was in the context of Dr. Richards’ public desires to bring psychedelics into religion, under the guise of scientific authority, combined with the drug effects and a power imbalance, and it significantly jeopardized the agency of this participant.

Going back to part three, it’s behavior that also seems to be exactly what Hopkins psychedelic researcher Dr. Matthew Johnson warned against in his comments concerning clinicians “playing guru” in 2021:

A patient can certainly bring up religious beliefs and concepts in therapeutic discussion, e.g., Buddha, Christ, kundalini, and plant spirits, but it is not the role of the clinician or scientists to introduce such concepts. The goal of the clinician should be a create an open and supportive environment where the patient can make her or his own meaning, if any, from such experiences.

The alleged behavior from Dr. Richards is intolerable, not the least of which by Johns Hopkins own standards. The truth of what other members of the study team knew about this behavior and did in response must be discovered.

Behavior and Interpretation 

The Rev. Priest is entitled to continue to interpret his experience however he wants. As a religious professional myself, I have some theological questions about his interpretation, but neither he nor I can dictate the Holy Spirit—nor can Bill Richards.

But however he wants to interpret it, behavior is behavior, and the alleged behavior can’t be a precedent. It can’t be something a Hopkins research subject touts as the clinical standard. The Rev. Priest can interpret the alleged behavior however he wants. But the alleged behavior he described is a boundary violation.

I can, unfortunately, hear some underground psychedelic practitioners saying who cares, this wouldn’t be a big deal in the underground, and it’s true, and far worse unethical behavior happens there. But this isn’t the underground. This is allegedly gold-standard research that is supposed to be keeping people’s cognitive liberty safe by keeping them safe from researcher practices that are, in the words of Michael Pollan, “perilously close to the world of shamanism and faith healing.”4

If the Hopkins study team didn’t notice it, why? If they did, what did they do?

And why didn’t I notice it while I was in it? Why did I fail the Rev. Priest?

The deeply awkward and unavoidable, horrible reality is that some of us just witnessed several people capitalizing off an alleged boundary violation in front of all of our eyes. And we didn’t even see it. Once I saw it, I agonized so long about what to do here, I thought about anonymizing it, but he’s made it so public, and his own behavior has been noted as dangerous.

The Rev. Priest deserved the chance not to allegedly have his boundaries violated, to interpret his experience for himself, and to figure things out for himself. And I’m sorry, there is just no dignified way for me to speak to this. It just has to be said. It cannot stand.

I did not understand the full depth of psychedelic suggestibility until I started listening a lot more closely to the experiences of survivors. The Rev. Priest deserves all the mercy and grace in the world for how this experience twisted his best judgment and good character. This whole experience has given me a new interpretation of how I experienced his behavior.

It’s so unfair for anyone to be put in this position. To be seduced by a promotional ad in the Christian Century, reading Dr. Richards imply that if you’re brave enough, you could meet “the really real God,” then allegedly have your boundaries violated, then later incentivized to change your ministerial vocation with funds from the spiritually-ambitious Hopkins team. Nobody has a chance against that.

And nobody cared as long as everyone felt happy and high—and I don’t mean on the drugs, I mean high on the status, the grand narrative of history, all that nonsense driving this whole thing.

Nobody cared about the Rev. Priest’s dignity. And I mean his real, God-given dignity. Not any fleeting psychonaut fame that is gone the second you break the Code of Silence. Not the false dignity of an imagined status, or a bogus hagiography.

What happened here was wrong, so wrong, and it was out in the open, and not even me, a psychonaut, saw it for what it was. Why? Because I was gaining off the narrative that was happening. I was connected. I was rewarded by the Message. I was set up for success by the Message. And now I am beyond disgusted.

Why did I air so much dirty laundry in the previous two parts? Why did I expose all these social ties? So that everyone knows that this trainwreck isn’t about Hunt’s failure. We all failed him. And either the Rev. Priest is lying, the Hopkins team engaged in a cover-up, or they have embarrassing levels of incompetence, and that needs to be investigated. But every one of us failed him.

I haven’t forgotten my thesis is truth and mercy. I just wish I could add dignity to my thesis. Because at this point, I feel that we have reached just a pretty undignified situation all around.

And nothing would be a more perfect, poetically tragic encapsulation of the psychedelic medical movement than if it turns out the first Christian non-profit to grace the MAPS stage to have come out of a boundary violation in a Johns Hopkins University study.

Unless Johns Hopkins wants to say they can touch you like they’re anointing you and tell you it was God, this absolutely cannot stand.

I still have a couple more things to say in the next couple of days. But first, I have to emphasize one more time the full summarized case for an investigation.

Call for Investigation

There must be an investigation into the clinical trial “The Effects of Psilocybin-Facilitated Experience on the Psychology and Effectiveness of Religious Professionals” for the following reasons:

According to the standards established by Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Sandeep Nayak in an ethics presentation to the American Psychiatric Association, and according to safety protocols co-authored by Dr. Matthew Johnson, Dr. William Richards, and Dr. Roland Griffiths, according to a participant’s written public testimony, Johns Hopkins guide Dr. William Richards allegedly violated the boundaries of a research subject in 2016. He allegedly did this after having developed a relationship of trust with the participant and while the participant was under the influence of heightened-suggestibility psychedelic drugs, drugs known by Hopkins to induce suggestibility.

Dr. Richards allegedly committed this boundary violation in a study involving Hopkins funders and researchers, including Dr. Richards, who have publicly expressed a desire for a cultural embrace of their views of psychedelic spiritual experiences.

If normal Hopkins protocol timelines according to Dr. Richards’ description were followed, the next day while the subject still in a state of heightened suggestibility, Dr. Richards allegedly made a theologically suggestive intepretation to the research subject—whose vocation is based on his religious beliefs—that he experienced the Holy Spirit.

The description of his testimony has been in the email inbox of at least one Hopkins researcher since at least January 2021. The subject has repeatedly and publicly described his experience.

The alleged boundary violation caused the research subject to believe this moment was an “ordination” and has changed his vocation, in no small part thanks to social entanglements with Hopkins researchers.

The subject started a non-profit with funding from a researcher and funder of the study. The subject received additional funding in February 2023 after Johns Hopkins researchers were aware that the subject had engaged in illegal and reckless behavior.

The environment of this study is deeply unethical and suspicious on its own. But the added context of this alleged boundary violation not only going unaddressed, but leading to the creation of a non-profit, funded by a Hopkins researcher, advancing the public relations interests of Hopkins funders and researchers as part of a decades-long strategy leveraging the reputation of Johns Hopkins to promote psychedelic spirituality in the name of science, is nothing short of appalling. It is a violation of a research’s subject’s basic rights to dignity, agency, and autonomy. And it is a violation of the public’s trust.

This absolutely cannot stand as acceptable behavior from the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

There is an abundance of questions that demand answers.

Was this part of his submitted participant report? When was that received and reviewed? Is this behavior on video tape? Was it reviewed?

What did lead investigator Dr. Roland Griffiths know, and when?

What did funder and co-interviewer T. Cody Swift know, and when?

What did study sponsor Robert Jesse know, and when?

What did the rest of the leadership at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research know, and when?

Were there other participants who had alleged boundary violations and unethical suggestions? Has their video tape been reviewed?

Did Hopkins try to suppress it? Or had such alleged boundary violations become so commonplace that it was part of an unethical research culture?

There are many more questions.

This absolutely cannot stand.

There must be an investigation.

Share

In part one, I gave my “high-level findings.” In parts two and three, I provided some groundwork for the spiritual missions of the Hopkins team and what are some heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility drugs and belief transmission. In part four, I talked about the reckless origins of the Christian non-profit I worked for, funded by a Hopkins funder-researcher and with a Hopkins researcher on its board.

Subscribe now

Today, I will share where things went wrong.

Tomorrow, I will share how things have always been wrong.

Halftime

I would like to take a brief interlude for those who have followed the plot from part one. I’ve often felt in the past year and a half like I’ve been going through hell. Whistleblowers never get any practice at it; you pretty much get one shot, and you have to err on the side of less is more, like you are trying to put together a 1000-piece puzzle, but you only get to use maybe 400 pieces to show the picture. Part of that hell is having my hands tied from what I wish I could say.

Until we’re on the other side, all I can do is remix a Winston Churchill phrase: if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then all I can do is have the best intentions to keep going. But there is another side.

True silence has a holiness that should always be kept sacred. Some silences don’t deserve to share the honor. This includes The Silence.

Open Secrets

It’s not just hell’s road—everyone has noble intentions. This includes Ligare, the Christian non-profit I worked for, whose origins I discussed last piece.

It did not take long into Ligare’s origins for the organization to begin questionable practices. What I can say is that according to my conversations with multiple Ligare board members, the Rev. Priest facilitated illegal psychedelic ceremonies with the knowledge of members of the Hopkins study team, again, while being funded by a Hopkins researcher.1 Ligare also began directing people to unregulated psychedelic practitioners; while working for Ligare, I personally referred one inquirer. But honestly, this kind of thing is just part and parcel with working in psychedelics, a pretty open secret, yet while also pretending only to promote legal settings—marketed as reliably providing an encounter with the divine.

I terminated my internship early with Ligare in April 2022 with a letter to the Board, and later, to the other study participants I had met. As part of that, I began raising concerns about the conflicts of interest with the study team.

But I didn’t say the primary reason I left, which was due to disturbing conversations with several members of Ligare’s leadership team dismissing concerns of sexual abuse in psychedelic clinical trials. My other chief reason for leaving was Ligare’s refusal to prioritize offering their audience of average Christians—the recipients of their ambassadorship “education”—basic information about the risks of psychedelic use. As of today, two years after their launch, their website has nothing about it. Shortly after my resignation letter, Rachael Petersen stepped down from the Board.

Disillusionment

The real beginning of the end for me, my involvement, and any illusions I had that anything would be the same was when the investigative podcast Cover Story: Power Trip was released by New York Magazine, produced by Lily Kay Ross and David Nickles, two people who had been in a small professional psychedelic field for at least a decade. The focus of the podcast was on sexual assault, abuse, data issues, and more in a MAPS MDMA clinical trial, including abuse caught on camera, as well as an uncomfortable walk through the park of psychedelic history that you don’t get at a MAPS conference.

But like many psychonauts, at first, I didn’t want to feel the implications of what I was hearing. For its first half released in late 2021, I was mostly in denial of their disturbing descriptions of psychedelic history as an insular community whose penchant for breaking traditional norms sometimes meant the traditional norms of human dignity. I enjoyed my perch and social standing, and told myself the things people who don’t want to lose their place in a Movement tell themselves: “they just have an axe to grind; they’re just crazy; they’re well-intentioned but their points didn’t actually demand change—maybe they just needed more healing. In fact, MAPS is the real victim, not their victims.”

But as more of Power Trip emerged in early 2022, focusing on the sexual abuse of a MAPS clinical trial participant, my heart sank so hard it managed to bypass my cognitive dissonance. It broke my closed circuit loop of feeling psychedelics were so meaningful to the future of the human race because they feel meaningful. Maybe other things were more meaningful.

I immediately circulated the story to the Rev. Priest and a board member. I told them in an email we “couldn’t ignore” it; it was a story quickly spreading in psychedelic whisper circles, and the events the podcast were covering were quite severe. Maybe other scientists might find it too scary to jeopardize their careers, but we couldn’t stay in The Silence.

During this time, the Rev. Priest and I had a weekly standing Zoom call. I’ll never forget our chat when news of the abuse broke. His immediate reaction over the laptop screen was agreeing it was awful, before adding with a chuckle, “I’m just glad that happened before we got here, so we don’t have to get involved.”

At first, I became alarmed, hoping that it was gallows humor. There was more truth in the gallows than I knew. I felt heartbroken and betrayed—this response is simply not a Christianity worth believing in. Christians are called to get involved when people have been hurt, especially by powerful institutions, especially ones we have proximity to, and had those connections to. Rick Doblin was a phone call away for Hunt. We’re just glad it’s not our problem? This is psychedelic Christianity? Week after week my disgust and insistence on doing something more became more uncomfortable between us. Once, in response to my anger about the issues, he asked me in a sincerely concerned voice how long it had been since I had a good mushroom retreat.

On balance, perhaps Ligare should not be singled out for having a non-reaction to Cover Story. Most of the psychedelic research world still has said nothing. Maybe it’s status anxiety, maybe it’s conflict avoidance, maybe it’s too deep in the cognitive dissonance. Our pride is the last to believe we were manipulated for someone else’s utopia that doesn’t necessarily include a truly free version of ourselves. That’s obvious enough when you find your voice has been bought out, unable to speak against The Silence.

But perhaps instead of psychedelic exceptionalism, it was my Christian exceptionalism that made me think we would be any better in our response, a naive view in its own right given the history of abuse in Christian churches. And we certainly were not exceptional—the vast majority of psychonauts dismissed it and suppressed it. Nobody wanted to cut ties with MAPS, and Ligare ended up well represented at this past June’s MAPS Conference, alongside every other Christian psychedelic professional who never broke The Silence. They were rewarded for it.

But it’s also hard to know—was The Silence so dominant in Ligare because of the psychedelic culture, or just the study culture? I started trying to figure out why. And to this point, we haven’t really touched the most central entity to this story besides Johns Hopkins: the RiverStyx Foundation.

The RiverStyx Loop

As a long-time funder of Hopkins research, the RiverStyx Foundation is a somewhat unique philanthropist organization. According to their website, it takes its Greek mythology-inspired name as a call to attempt to connect “life and death, shadow and light, conscious and unconscious…[the Styx was] a source of power for the Gods, giving life and taking it away.” It funds things that “fear, ignorance, and puritan influence” have repressed and relegated, resulting in an unnatural separation into dualities, and those dualities aren’t going to just non-dual themselves.

To recap from part two, in contrast to Dr. Roland Griffiths’ assertions that the study “is not about changing culture,” RiverStyx seems to see the projects they fund differently. Their funding priorities, per their website, focus on “social transformation” and “high-leverage social change” in hopes of “effectuating enduring change in both cultural awareness and social policy” for little-funded projects. In the religious professionals study, RiverStyx funded two such non-profits: Ligare and Shefa, a Jewish psychedelic non-profit created by Rabbi Zac Kamenetz.

In addition to environmentalism and drug policy reform, RiverStyx co-director T. Cody Swift has been a quietly influential player in psychedelic research at pivotal periods before many other philanthropists ever got involved. In contrast to some bawdier social media personalities, Swift has chosen a low-profile and a special interest in the spiritual side of psychedelics, most especially in Indigenous groups. He deserves credit for being a long-time donor to peyote conservation when such efforts are often extremely underfunded, and for seeming to have come around about the importance of researching risks and harms in psychedelics.

Swift has played what Dr. Roland Griffiths has called a “seminal role” in psychedelic research resulting in a close friendship between the two. As a result, RiverStyx’s donations to Hopkins have coincided with appreciable access for Swift as a direct research partner; Swift has worked with Dr. Richards as a psychedelic guide and qualitative analyst off and on since 2013. And RiverStyx has funded MAPS with over $3.8M since 2009, including $2.8M for their MDMA research, research covered in part in Cover Story.2

RiverStyx’s ethos describes a preference for more direct relationships with their grant recipients, often smaller organizations: “We develop trusted partnerships with organizations reducing the need for arduous reporting and bureaucracy.” On the one hand, this might suggest they allow grantees a degree of autonomy. But it also may be why conflicts of interest can feel extra personal. And because non-profits in a capitalist system like Ligare have to treat donors as their customers with their mission as the product, grant-bestowers like RiverStyx have the potential for tremendous influence over non-profits starved for cash.

This is especially true for a donor like RiverStyx who spreads their influence heavily around the psychedelic milieu, especially centered around Hopkins and the world of this trial. Here is a short list of grant recipients that have some connection to this trial’s social world, what Dr. Tehseen Noorani has called its “chemosocial” setting:

• Johns Hopkins — $1.5M

• NYU — $646k

• Council for Spiritual Practices — $300k

• MAPS — $3.8M

• Ligare — $72k

• Shefa — $67k

• Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions — $45k

I think the ties here are best seen in a visual chart:

In terms of his role in what the public hears of the religious professionals study, Swift was funder, co-interviewer, analyst, and naturally, presenter of the study, giving him the power to tell the story of the data he funded, collected, and analyzed. According to one professor of bioethics I spoke with, while there can be close involvement by funders on some projects, it is unusual to be involved in data collection or management—usually, there are buffers to ensure unbiased data. It is also unclear to me if Swift disclosed his funder status when performing interviews for the study. 

Swift has had a significant voice in shaping the direction of future psychedelic research, and he does seem to have real concerns for harms. Last year, Swift expressed a desire for a more responsible direction for the field, saying in August 2022, “I don’t think there’s been enough space to talk about the potential risks, psychologically or even sexually, that we’re seeing now.” But this potential shift arrives too late for many, including for abuse victims and survivors who were under the care of research bodies funded by RiverStyx. There have been times when psychedelic elite strategists appear to have a vow of not embarrassing each other while victims and their advocates get ostracized, exiled, and otherwise discarded into the void of The Silence.

For an organization that likes to challenge dualities—light and dark, conscious and unconscious—I think it’s worth considering that even if there are no conscious controls over its grant recipients, there can still be hidden, unconscious, “non-dual” controls that distort incentives and compromise voices.

Complex Agencies and Impossible Situations

No individual can be blamed or understood in isolation from their social system. And not all individuals will act the same within it,

This was a culture where multiple parties had multiple roles and enmeshed relationships that made it hard to act with clarity. People weren’t just in damned-if-do-or-don’t double-binds, the culture fostered triple-, quadruple-binds between role commitments.

Don Lattin's book God on Psychedelics opens with a discussion of the religious professionals study, where Rabbi Kamenetz expressed some uncomfortable feelings around Hopkins guide Dr. Bill Richards' influence. I have no desire to tell any of his story for him, nor do I imagine Lattin’s book tells the full story. But it does show that the relative power of suggestion (and resistance to it) is going to vary from person to person. All the same, resistance to this integration appears to have been in spite of the felt influence, not proof of its absence. Each study participant who wishes to tell their story in their own time should get the chance to define themselves as individuals—not neatly wrapped up in anybody’s “high-level finding.”

I must also say that in my experience, for whatever it’s worth, Rabbi Kamenetz has publicly displayed what I felt was sincere concern for abuse and other issues happening in psychedelics, and has occasionally made public comments in resistance to The Silence despite his at least equally-difficult situation. This is also my experience with Rachael Petersen.

(Disclosure: this next part is very difficult for me. Rachael would become a good friend, and it pains me to write about her at all, for she is more than capable of telling her own story—after all, she has before.)

I first met Rachael as part of an interview panel for the qualitative research team for a job I was very happy to apply for despite being very unqualified. After an earlier successful career in environmental activism, Rachael had been a success story as a psilocybin trial participant in a Hopkins depression study. Thanks to her talent, she was hired by RiverStyx as Psychedelics and Religion Program Director, and would also be hired by Hopkins for the clergy study’s qualitative research team. She would also be a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) before later becoming a master’s student.

In early 2020, I felt lucky to be a master’s student who had managed to wiggle his way into a reading group with her, another former religious professionals study participant, and a few others associated with the Center. We would soon develop ideas around a new field of “psychedelic chaplaincy” that turned into a panel for the CSWR.

Rachael, a sharp, heartfelt, and sincere person, shared her story about how her trial experience transformed her mental health and spiritual life. However, as she would later write, reality was often more complicated. In late 2022, she wrote a powerful piece for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin about the dark side of her trial experience that she had felt some pressure to conceal, and very bravely revealed. It received widespread, deserved acclaim among psychedelic insiders and outsiders alike. It was crucially important, nailing the coffin on an old, bad, idea held preciously by psychedelic medicalization activists: the dangerous victim-blaming notion that “there’s no such thing as a bad trip.” Rachael’s piece made that position utterly untenable among insiders. Even before this, she had demonstrated some measure of independence from the Hopkins influence: in 2020 she wrote for Psymposia about concerns of researchers “brainwashing” participants into ecological attitudes, and we collaborated on a panel with another trial participant for the non-profit Chacruna Institute in December 2020 discussing the issues of mysticism in medical trials, including Hopkins. (Disclosure: I worked for Chacruna, who has received $17k from RiverStyx).

Rachael and I bonded over conversations that were not bound to psychedelics and were deeply enriching, and for me, refreshingly grounded by her critical thinking and sincere heart, including a heart for the challenges participants had faced, herself able to empathize as a former Hopkins participant, advocating for their needs.

We were each in our own impossible situation. Even in an impossible situation, I believe Rachael made significant differences in raising more attention to psychedelic harm. In addition to her bad trips piece, she was able to push for future coordination between Brown University and Hopkins on adverse events in psychedelic trials. Her piece’s influence likely contributed to the stark shifts in prioritizing risk from so-called “luminaries.”

I have to say, it’s often struck me that this tone shift from the luminaries seemed as much worried about anticipating a coming PR backlash as concern for the victims in and of themselves. They may be hurt to hear that, but it is just how it honestly feels to me. All of these influencers knew about harms that had come from psychedelics and their trials for years. So while it’s a good thing they are now talking about risks, their words are too little, too late for too many. There are lives gone who aren’t coming back who believed their overconfidence on safety. There are traumatized victims who weren’t aware of abusers that were protected, pressured to stay quiet thanks to The Silence they helped foster. And thanks to their relentless PR campaigns, there are bodies. From where I stand, the primary traumas that need to heal in the psychedelic field are moral injuries. But if psychedelics are the driving locus of your moral compass, you cannot heal the moral injuries they caused. That’s one of the problems with idols.

I have to close this difficult section with one more anecdote: in July 2022, RiverStyx sponsored a $20k gathering with the participants—not to trip, but for support. I have zero idea what was said on that retreat and wouldn't tell if I knew. But it also shows an example of how some “chemosocial worlds” should not be read flatly. While I remember feeling uncomfortable about it, emailing a journalist for the first time with the sense that something wasn’t right here, that a weird vibe was emerging, I found out that participants had requested it and told the journalist I made a mistake. I remember talking to Rachael about it, while I was in the throes of wanting to break The Silence with more conviction, but my inconsolable attitude wasn’t actually what was needed in that moment—Rachael wanted to focus on being able to show up at the retreat for participants and advocate for them, their individuality, and their dignity. To fight for the complexity she didn’t get to have when she was first a Hopkins success story, that she had to fight for herself. And despite our impossible situations, I think she was exactly right to do that. And as for everything else, I know she saved lives.

The Code and the Smile

The obvious problem with having conflicts of interest is that they compromise our judgment, sometimes in ways we can’t see. With conflicts of interest, they compromise us unconsciously in our blind spots as much as anything conscious. There’s just so much more in our blindness than any psychedelic vision. Sometimes the drugs give a blind vision to what was happening right in front of us, right in our midst, in what we participated in. And the more these multiply, you end up stuck in twenty different roles with different needs for those roles, unable to make decisions that might be needed. When The Silence is the backdrop, its Code becomes the only legible guide to navigate these conflicts.

RiverStyx’s slogan is apt: “Philanthropy at the Edge." In many cases, this philosophy has been to the benefit of those marginalized by society. But in my opinion, this philosophy also enabled a research culture that went far over the edge of professionalism. While I could assign victimhood to anyone caught in it, I do not want to rob anyone of their agency for the choices they made, because I feel all of us who got indoctrinated into the psychedelic medicalization movement had pieces of our agency taken from us as we were dosed into someone else’s agenda.

I could not abide by the Code, and so I cut ties with its adherents. Along with it, I cut off my social ties and what seemed to be the future of my dream vocation. And yet, until I found the words for this series, The Silence reigned over me in exile.

When the Code of Silence dominates, it corrupts all moral integrity of anything pretending to be spiritual. It freezes people who want to trust leaders, and it chases out those who can’t. And it twists the moral character slowly of all involved into thinking, hey, maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s not so bad that someone could be given high-suggestibility drugs and inculcated into someone’s dream.

The Silence reigns loud over our worst self-protective instincts. The Silence grows like kudzu throughout any toxic culture. The Code becomes the cultural default mode network, and no psychedelic can take it offline.

I tried to do what I could to push back on what I was seeing and feeling. With Ligare, I tried for months to make things better privately. The Rev. Priest promised he would let me talk about my issues with a wider Ligare audience, and then didn’t follow up on it. In what started as a summer 2022 talk of reconciliation, he told me I had been “impatient” about risks.

But I have to give some credit—he did include and support a piece I wrote for his newsletter talking about psychedelic risk that March, and others in Ligare expressed appreciation for me writing it. And for a lot of this time, I was struggling with my old collective Messianic complex around psychedelics turning into a collective demonic complex, which no doubt created disonnect. And in March 2023, Ligare had a webinar featuring Rachael Petersen and Dr. Charlie Stang to talk about her impactful piece. But I don’t know if he ever quite understood why I thought a Christian organization should be deeply concerned about the hidden theologies and subcultural norms it had inherited with stronger-than-normal trust.

Because I was so frustrated and angry, I asked him if he would be willing to have his bishop mediate, but he didn’t want him involved. All I ever wanted was to share a full spectrum of the complexity of unknowns around psychedelic science, especially long-term impacts, and to stand up for abuse. I told Ligare that if they continued to step up into public leadership, then I would have to speak if things didn’t change.

There’s a lot more puzzle pieces I have to leave in the box. But with everything here—not singling out any organization, but so many psychedelic subcultures—what stands out the most are the small moments.

For me, it’s The Smile. I’m not naming names, or saying we all have to be dour. I mean a very specific kind of Smile, that I think a lot of people who have been in toxic psychedelic situations (and probably lots of other cult survivors) know what I mean.

All I can say to anyone out there is if you ever find yourself looking to buy back your voice, a moment where you probe for a crack in the Code to say what can’t be said, and if you get that very certain kind of motherly, fatherly Smile behind the Silence? Take. That. Sign.

Conclusion: The Tablecloth

I was angry for so long. And I kept thinking, I can't live with myself if I don't say anything. And so I started doing more of a deep dive into researching this series, going back through my emails, going through books. And then I rediscovered something that completely changed how I saw everything.

At first, it was a puzzle piece I wasn’t sure could be part of the 399 other ones, but it’s far too out in the open not to be. It’s practically part of the tablecloth that 40% puzzle is laying on. And it is what convinced me that I had to write this series. I will talk about that in the next piece.

Share

In part one, I gave my “high-level findings.” In parts two and three, I provided some groundwork for the spiritual missions of the Hopkins team and what are some heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility drugs and belief transmission.

Share

In this piece, I will share some of my experiences in a psychedelic Christian non-profit I worked for that had the mission of being “spokespeople, ambassadors, advocates, and allies” for psychedelics, a non-profit centered on the release of the study from its start. This organization was originally funded by a Hopkins study team member, had a Hopkins study team member on its Board, and has been reckless with the awareness of some Hopkins team members.

In a future piece, I will share how this all came out of unethical behavior by a Hopkins guide, and either nobody noticed, nobody cared, or nobody wanted it known.

“It’s one thing for people to develop a curiosity [about psychedelics] on their own, to ask some friends about it, to find some mushrooms in the forest and take them with friends, and it’s another for people to be manipulated by advertising and promotion into having an experience that they might not have chosen on their own. So I see the biggest red flag as being promotion.”

Bob Jesse, 2021

Advisor, Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research

Ambassador Origins

So far I've given some background information into the Johns Hopkins religious professionals study — the spiritual beliefs and motivations of its designers, as well as the problems of psychedelic suggestibility and its potential to bring undue influence onto participants, including belief change. 

Now I want to share where I personally entered the picture, working for a non-profit that sought to be “ambassadors” of psychedelics to Christianity, with further funding and influence from the study team and funder. This included an initial agenda to develop public relations for the study’s release—this started over two years ago, but the study has still not been released. In time, I would come to view the web of conflicts of interest here as blurring all sorts of boundaries, with competing incentives from their competing roles in the same social system. 

That’s not how I saw it at first. Over the pandemic and into the fall of 2021, I began an internship through Harvard Divinity School working in the emerging social milieu of the study through the non-profit Ligare, “A Christian Psychedelic Society,” named after a Latin root word of religion, meaning “to bind,” created by study participant the Rev. Hunt Priest. It soon became a kind of unofficial gathering for many (but not all) of the study’s Christian participants, and included a small group of employees, advisors, and as the Rev. Priest described, an underground “mycelial network” of psychedelic Christians waiting to bloom. At first, I was tremendously excited to work with them. By April 2022, I had ended my internship early and began cutting ties with all my psychedelic involvements so I could think about things more clearly. 

As it’s clear to scientists by now, I’m not a scientist. But I know at least some researchers have asked for thicker descriptions of social networks that emerge from trials. And I think it is important for the public to understand more context around the study that is at risk of being obscured.

Promising Beginnings

Before Ligare, the Rev. Priest had been an Episcopalian parish priest, and I have every reason to believe he was a good one, and no reason to believe he was a bad one. I still love the man. Before ministry, he’s talked on podcasts about his first career as a marketer for Delta Air Lines. The Rev. Priest has discussed in podcasts how he brings his prior background as a marketer into his ministry work, which he’s described as not selling people anything, just to help them see what they can’t. I always found Hunt warm, kind, and gently peace-seeking. A generous spirit who was easy to get along with. We immediately hit it off, collaborating on a Psychedelic Christianity group in the old social app Clubhouse (is it still alive?), getting ready to share the best secret we ever had: a psychedelic kind of gospel, based in the healing ministry of Jesus. 

The beginning of this project was among the most meaningful times of my life. I had experimented with psychedelics for over a decade in non-Christian contexts, and had begun my psychedelic professional career as a spiritual seeker. But now that some psychedelic experiences played a role in my return to the Christian faith, I could not have been more excited to begin work on psychedelic Christianity. I sought all conversations I could with insiders, sending emails with exuberance to anyone I could to see if I could be an asset. As part of Ligare, I felt like I was helping usher Christianity into a pluralistic, deeply spiritual future that its dead religious carcass could not.

With the social climate of the “psychedelic renaissance” not yet in full bloom, many years would pass between the Rev. Priest’s participation and before the start of Ligare. As discussed in the last piece, psychedelic agency is complex; there was a significant cooldown period, and it sounds like over the years the Rev. Priest had discerned the decision with the help of some friends who were in the study too. I first met the Rev. Priest at the tail end of this discernment, before Ligare started. I believe things began changing for the worse once he stepped into the role of taking funding to be a spokesperson, and needing to keep securing funding to keep going—the harsh realities of non-profit work in a capitalist society, when your donors are your customers. And even after that time, the influence of Hopkins was still deeply enmeshed into Ligare’s ethos, with core parts of its mission, agenda, and Board of Directors related specifically to the religious professionals study—not selling, just helping people see what they can’t.

Ligare was able to start thanks to help from members of the study team. In addition to other donors, an initial $20k seed funding for Ligare itself would come from study funder RiverStyx, co-directed by psychedelic philanthropist T. Cody Swift, who also funded the Hopkins religious professionals study from its origins in 2015. Besides funding the study to produce the data, Swift also collected the data for the study as a co-interviewer of all participants, and analyzed the data, developing “high-level findings”—helpful throughlines telling the story of the data. Not selling, just helping people see what they can’t.

RiverStyx has funded over $1.5M to Hopkins in total, and an additional $300k earmarked for the religious professionals study.1 My first paychecks for Ligare were processed by the leading psychedelic organization MAPS, who has received $3.8M from RiverStyx (and whose Public Benefit Corporation Board of Directors includes RiverStyx co-director Miriam Volat), acting in a so-called “fiscal sponsor” role—to be clear, MAPS didn’t fund Ligare to my knowledge; being a “fiscal sponsor” is a technical term for helping new non-profits process payroll before some IRS hurdles clear. Ligare’s original Board included a joint RiverStyx employee and Hopkins study team member, Rachael Petersen.

The name Ligare itself, a Latin root for religion that the Rev. Priest would emphasize as “to bind,” has a nice poetic sound, with an intention pointing to unity, even if it had to be explained a lot. In Hopkins guide Dr. Bill Richards’ 2015 book Sacred Knowledge, Dr. Richards explains it in the ending of the second chapter as part of his vision for religious integration of psychedelics:

If indeed the word "religion," originating in the Latin religare, is to continue to signify that which most profoundly binds us together and reflects a shared perspective on what gives life its deepest purpose and meaning, I personally do not support abandoning it in favor of "spirituality." Throughout the ages, most religious institutions have respectfully included and accommodated experiences called spiritual or religious, however engendered.

Ligare was a tiny fishing-boat of psychedelic disciples with wind at our sails. Whether we explicitly said it or not, the atmosphere was feeling beyond blessed to have found ourselves stumbling into the history books: wow! The first Christians at the frontlines of the revival of psychedelic religion—maybe even heroes for the dying liberal church. How friggin’ blessed were we. The future was brighter than light, and the dreams were big. 

Whose Agenda?

In a sample agenda emailed in April 2021, the Rev. Priest identified four core areas demonstrating the extent that Ligare’s ambitions were centered on the study. “Mission,” “Projects: Immediate Need,” “Projects: Before Release of the Religious Leaders Study,” and “Projects: After release of the Religious Leaders Study.”

Some line-items from the emailed April 2021 Ligare agenda included:

• “To build a network of religious spokespeople, ambassadors, advocates, allies; beginning with those in the Religious Leaders Psilocybin Study and quickly expanding. 1st year goal: 300 Ambassadors, second year 3,000.” 

• “To gain widespread acceptance of psychedelics as a tool for emotional, physical and spiritual well-being by members of religious communities and leaders of local, national and international religious institutions.” 

• “Identify the benefits of psychedelics that will most resonate with religious people.” 

• “Develop ethical standards for religious use, including equal access is a core guiding principle.”

• “A presence at every significant religious conference or meeting.”

• “Prepare for legal religious use in US by planning, organizing and executing Christian retreats in places where use is permitted. Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Portugal.”

• “Leverage the 60th anniversary of the Good Friday Experiment with a celebration of the study and increased understanding and acceptance of Psychedelics in the religious community.”

There were many more mundane items and normal non-profit things, too. And I applauded the agenda at the time. Looking back, I am struck by how presumptive our agenda was. Why were we so focused on expansion? Why were we so sure of what we were doing to encourage people into psychedelics as “ambassadors”? Why were clergy already so eager to capitalize on a movement? Why were we so certain of the safety risks and efficacy of psychedelics as therapy and its compatibility with our religion? Why was the only ethical concern delineated as “equal access”? Were we really examining our intentions or ambitions? 

I understand the dilemma of issues that surround psychedelics and the tension between sincere spiritual beliefs, the desire to share the benefits of one’s faith, and legal realities. While Ligare was focused on Christianity, I was also working for religious freedom rights for non-Christian underground psychedelic churches. Underground churches are, by and large, private practitioners who do not proselytize their beliefs—I have a lot of concerns about that world, too, and concerns about psychedelic usage in general for spiritual purposes, but such churches at least operate in what I always thought was Bob Jesse’s ethic: practicing in as much legal freedom as a grey area allows and figuring things out quietly in peace—though “quietly” sometimes means covering up abuses and a lack of transparency. Psychedelics evangelize themselves just fine. Things get dark and weird fast when you start marketing them, no matter how you market your marketing.

So why did RiverStyx fund them as ambassadors for the study? Why did they give them $52k more in February 2023 after things had gone wrong?

Ambitions Beyond Competencies

It did not take long for Ligare to begin adopting its ambassador aims into plans that extended beyond any reasonable assessment of its competencies.

I am not here to condemn anyone for taking private risk into their own hands, or feign outrage over normal aspects of everyday psychedelic user experiences. However, I’ll just keep saying it, once one begins to influence others to take psychedelics, the ethics, responsibility, and accountability change significantly. This is not my original opinion—again, as the quote up top shared, Hopkins sponsor and advisor Bob Jesse has said the same thing many times. And I wonder if the Hopkins team has held themselves to that same standard.

In the case of Ligare, it was a non-profit serving as ambassadors for unproven medical treatments, with understudied risks. But according to conversations with multiple Board members, Ligare quickly felt emboldened to conduct retreats, all with the knowledge of at least some Hopkins study team members. These included both some domestic underground, unregulated retreats and a legal one in the Netherlands.

It turned out that Ligare’s ambitions were not just to have a psychedelic retreat in the Netherlands—but to run its own study of clergy.

In May 2022, Ligare conducted a retreat in the Netherlands in which they gave more Christian clergy psilocybin in a single group ceremony, assisted by former staff of the Synthesis Institute (who has since had public struggles, covered by excellent reporting from Jules Evans) and a self-trained underground practitioner. I was not aware until January 2022 that the idea was also to gather data from the experience through surveying participants when Ligare asked me for help designing the survey. I was also originally asked to help facilitate and asked to develop a preparation document for participants to help them psychospiritually prepare for their psychedelic journey. After initially feeling honored to be a part of yet another milestone in the Psychedelic Reformation, I became increasingly uncomfortable with my utter lack of qualifications for all of these requests, disconcerted that I was asked in the first place, and I backed out of helping and did not go.

From my internship discussions with the Rev. Priest, there were two main reasons for the Netherlands retreat-turned-study: one, to help give clergy experiences so there might be new clergy ambassadors who could talk positively about mushrooms after taking them in a legal setting. Two, to gather information that could be used for future ceremonial work, with a keen eye towards having group sessions in Oregon once it was legal there. A big part of the Rev. Priest’s thinking, as he would tell me several times, was to provide Christians psychedelic experiences first before having any conversation about theological concerns, much less the significant scientific ambiguities around the risks and outstanding unknowns. 

No Need

While I was initially so enthusiastic to officially begin work with Ligare in September 2021 to start “getting ready for the study,” as we would say. I do not believe their behavior has represented competency, self-awareness, or reflected the responsibility of the power given to themselves to “educate” Christian laypeople about psychedelics. As Bob Jesse himself said in the quote up top: it is one thing to engage in private psychedelic usage, whether personal or religious, and take on risk yourself. It is another to assert authority and ability to be a leader who responsibly conveys risk to parties who may not otherwise engage in psychedelics. To this end, Ligare is enabled by a culture that has demonstrated a preference for PR over people.

In time, I came to understand Ligare’s goal was mostly just to persuade Christians of particular narratives around psychedelics. Thanks to connections at progressive mainstays like Sojourner’s and the Center for Action and Contemplation, Ligare is a useful vehicle for disseminating psychedelic narratives to people who think they can trust them to tell them the truth. With Ligare affiliates beginning to step into increasing publicity through conference and festival appearances to “educate” Christian audiences, all I can say is that it shouldn’t have to be me saying this goes against everything the allegedly cautious sages of Hopkins study team members pretend to stand for. And yet, again, Ligare was funded with an additional $52k from RiverStyx in February 2023.

This whole thing is not about painting the complexity of any participant’s experiences with a broad brush, or making it sound like most of them were involved in this. Most of them weren’t. I’ve only met around half of the 24 participants, and I still rather like them on a personal level and love the Christians as fellow members of the Body of Christ, and to my knowledge, most of the other study participants have stayed far out of the limelight. Also, Ligare has always included lots of people who were not at all involved in the study—the “mycelial network” has grown. But looking back now at those of us who did seek the limelight, I have often wondered, does anybody need clergy to be ambassadors for these substances? What does it mean for Christian clergy to be ambassadors for a path that, unavoidably, will include some percentage of bad experiences, even in the “safest” of settings? Are the people who get hurt “the lost sheep,” or the inconvenient sheep?

If you don’t believe me, believe Bob Jesse’s words. Even if the thirty-year project to bring psychedelic spirituality to culture created something he claims to be one of the biggest red flags.

Even if, for some reason, when he said, “it’s another [thing] for people to be manipulated by advertising and promotion into having an experience that they might not have chosen on their own” somehow doesn’t apply to Hopkins placing promotional materials in the Christian Century. Where there was an article with Dr. Bill Richards implying that if only clergy were brave enough, they could meet “the really real God.”

In the next piece, I will share more about the web of conflicts of interest that seem deeply inappropriate for scientific research, and the road paved with good intentions.

Share

In part one, I laid out the high-level view of what I have come to see as a disturbing picture of psychedelic research on religious professionals.

In part two, I explored the spiritual beliefs and cultural agendas driving the research.

In this piece, I will talk about how psychedelics’ ability to increase openness to suggestion has more to consider than just how what happens during the trip might affect data. The impacts of social environment and power dynamics raise important questions about the ethics of belief shifts during trials, leading one Hopkins researcher to warn about clinicians “playing guru” in 2021.

The sheer suggestibility of psychedelics is one of their defining characteristics, so in one sense it is no wonder that so many of the first cohort of volunteers at Hopkins had powerful mystical experiences: the experiment was designed by three men intensely interested in mystical states of consciousness. (And it is likewise no wonder that the European researchers I interviewed all failed to see as many instances of mystical experience in their subjects as the Americans did in theirs.)

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 20181

In the previous piece, I talked about the spiritual beliefs of the primary researchers of the Johns Hopkins religious professionals study. There is nothing wrong with scientists having religious beliefs about anything. But given the nature of psychedelics to make one very vulnerable to suggestion, where subconscious influences in environment and in researchers may be transmitted, there is a heightened responsibility to attempt to take account for these influences. At minimum, this is to ensure scientifically interesting data is gathered, a notoriously difficult problem in this field. But to date, psychedelic research has often neglected to account for the full ethical scope of this suggestibility factor. In particular, there has been relatively little awareness given to the ethics of research-induced belief changes in participants. Is it a risk of research to lose one’s worldview in favor of a researcher? How do we quantify the risk to our agency? With the long-term impacts that such belief changes could accrue, what do people need to know about the power of suggestion?

In this piece, I will explore a couple of implications for psychedelic hypersuggestibility on power dynamics in psychedelic research, how it has shown up in at least one previous Hopkins psychedelic study, and how it may have impacted the religious leaders study in particular. I will also share a warning offered by a former Director for the Hopkins psychedelic center on suggestibility, belief changes, and researchers acting as gurus and priests.

Suggestible “Set and Settings” — Beyond the Trip

The experience of psychedelics is powerfully influenced by one’s expectation; no other class of drugs are more suggestible in their effects.

Michael Pollan, How to ChangeYour Mind, 20182

The “set and setting” has been a known consideration of psychedelic research since the 60s. Yet while suggestibility is often discussed in terms of how a given psychedelic subject’s mood and mindset (set) and environment (setting) will impact their acute psychedelic experience, psychedelic hypersuggestibility means a “set and setting” also has powerful impacts on a participant’s power dynamics with therapists, identity shifts, and longterm belief transmissions. Suggestibility factors can also linger in the day after a trip, in what’s sometimes called an “afterglow,” and be further impacted by social context. Each can have impacts far beyond the acute effects of the drug into a subject’s long-term life trajectory. 

Power Dynamics

In a 2023 article for Nature, Dr. Carolina Seybert and other authors argued how suggestibility has significant impacts on informed consent, increased vulnerability, and boundary transgressions:

The extent to which suggestibility and vulnerability may be enhanced in a psychedelic setting, through the drug-induced altered state of consciousness, should not be underestimated. The patient should be informed about the possibility of feeling closer or more familiar to the therapist when under the influence of the substance. Ultimately, the therapist or equivalent, rather than mitigating psychological risks associated with the psychedelic experience, can be the agent of a boundary transgression. Information regarding the nature of this increased vulnerability of the patient must be provided as part of enhanced informed consent procedures.3

Likewise, in 2021, Dr. William Smith and Dr. Dominic Sisti called for an “enhanced informed consent” process in psychedelic research in part because of suggestibility, because “psychedelic experiences often lead to significant changes in a patient’s personality and worldview.”4

Given the long-term impacts of such personality and worldview shifts, there should be heightened ethical caution for interpersonal entanglements and multiple-role relationships between researchers and patients. 

Belief Transmission

Other researchers have pointed to increased suggestibility as leading to increased belief transmission. In 2021, Dr. David Dupuis offered abundant evidence for the ability of psychedelics to impart belief transmission, depicting a more complex view of hypersuggestibility than simply “brainwashing” to include social impacts: “as much as the power of the psychedelic experience in the dynamics of belief transmission [is] the central role of social interactions and institutions in the maintenance of adherence.”5 In other words, new psychedelic beliefs can be strengthened in the context of ongoing relationships with others sharing those beliefs.

As a result of this combined effect—psychedelic effect and social interaction—Dupuis further argues for the need for deeper ethical considerations:

The concept of suggestibility… raises indeed ethical concerns about the kind of influence therapists, shamans and other facilitators are having over their clients, even when therapy goes well…While it may drive therapeutic benefits, the ability of psychedelics to induce hypersuggestibility as feelings of reverence and revelation might lead to problematic effects in the absence of ethical guidelines regulating their use, especially considering the blurry distinction between accepted and forced persuasion.

Again, what Dr. Dupuis is arguing is not for a simple narrative of “brainwashing”—psychedelic agency is more complex than that, and the potency of new beliefs can be reinforced (or diminished) over time based on social context. This probably goes for any religion; if you want to be more Christian, you should probably hang out with other Christians. But it also seems the blurry line of belief transmission—from guides to subjects—sometimes gets blurrier when relationships deepen and complexify.

Identity Shifts

Besides suggestibility leading to a notable impact on power dynamics and belief transmission, a review of a recent Hopkins trial led by Dr. Roland Griffiths indicated that psychedelic suggestibility can not only induce belief shift, but identity shift, adding another dimension of ethical complexity.6 According to Dr. Neşe Devenot and other authors of the paper, an analysis of a Hopkins smoking cessation study indicated that participants underwent identity shifts from “smoker” to “non-smoker” as part of the study, which appears to have been induced based on some of the preparation literature given to participants. The authors advocated for stronger ethical considerations for “therapeutic frameworks [which] interact with the psychedelic substance in ways that can rapidly reshape participants’ identity and sense of self.”7 What was in the religious leaders study preparation material? I do not know.

While noting this identity shift ended in a positive result for smoking cessation, the authors of the analysis also note that “as psychedelic medicine becomes mainstream, consensual and evidence-based approaches to psychedelic-assisted identity shift that respect patient autonomy and encourage empowerment should become areas of focus in the emergent field of psychedelic bioethics.” 

In the case of smoking cessation, this identity shift appeared apparently benign and related to a desired health outcome. Such shifts are harder to ethically justify among healthy volunteers not seeking treatment. The worldview and identity stakes involved in a religious professionals study seem intrinsically more meaningful than the worldview and identity stakes involved in smoking cessation. After all, unless you’re a Parisian artist or a New York City line cook, smoking is probably not intrinsically part of your job.

Afterglow

Suggestibility does not only impact participants during the session, but in the days immediately after a treatment. According to Kylea Taylor, LMFT, author of The Ethics of Caring, “That extra-suggestible state can often continue past the effect of the psychedelic, because of the association of trust that the experiencer has had with the Responsible Party or the context.”8 As bioethicist Joseph Holcomb Adams further notes, “many psychedelic veterans [say] there is an ‘afterglow’ period where people can still be suggestible.” This view was shared by many psychedelic practitioners I used to work with.

I cannot confirm the timing of all follow-up interviews for the religious professionals study, but according to Dr. Bill Richards’ book in 2015, most Hopkins research studies conduct immediate follow-up interviews the day after treatment, with volunteers bringing in a pre-written outline or rough draft of their experience.9

Social Loops

Suggestibility effects are sometimes amplified by a factor of psychedelic research even less understood—the social climate that emerges out of a study, creating feedback loops. In a recent paper by Dr. Tehseen Noorani and other authors, many people don’t know that many psychedelic clinical trials often develop “dark loops,” social worlds of their own. As the authors point out, these social groups are not always negative. Sometimes, they may act as ongoing support groups for patients with a unique shared experience. There may be a need to help process what can be unique aspects of the experience. It may even help with whistleblowing behavior, such as with a “MAPS Participants” group.

But even if it’s a positive effect, the authors argue it’s something that, at minimum, must be acknowledged as part of understanding the context of psychedelic science. When it happens, it should be described in thick detail so that the possible effects of these social impacts can be contextualized when reading study outcomes.

It should also raise significant ethical concerns—in what other scientific research fields are clinical trials regularly producing their own social world? Yes, there are patient advocacy groups that emerge, and sometimes there are funders of studies who fund those, but those are usually patients seeking treatment of a particular issue—say, US Veterans seeking expanded MDMA research to find a new treatment for PTSD. What about when patient groups form that are not advocating for a new treatment, but for a new religious experience? Maybe that’s unusual just because, well, it’s a pretty rare and weird situation that scientists are studying the effects of their own spiritual beliefs on volunteers.

Whether such social groups emerge as a benefit or detriment to the research and participants, Noorani says this needs to be accounted for in some fashion—either minimized with higher scrutiny, or much more richly described in further detail. Or perhaps we shouldn’t try to bother with concerns around patients and researchers getting socially entangled with high suggestibility drugs that impact worldviews. Perhaps the power dynamics should not be mitigated, but amplified, harnessed, “valorized.” Because it might even be that these “chemosocial” effects, as Noorani calls them, can be leveraged into creating healthier outcomes—and I think this healthier boost likely happened here in the clergy study. Not all participants stayed in close touch as professional contacts, but it seems to have been a deeply supportive and nurturing experience for some who did, and that should not be discounted at all. It just means when it comes to the social environment of any psychedelic study, things are complicated and need to be thought about consciously.

Priming and Confirming

One [Hopkins] volunteer—the physicist—told me that the “mystical experience questionnaire” he filled out after every session also planted expectations. “I long to see some of the stuff hinted at in the questionnaire,” he wrote after an underwhelming session—perhaps on the placebo. “Seeing everything as alive and connected, meeting the void, or some embodiment of deities and things like that.”

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 201810

Many psychedelic studies face issues of expectancy bias confounding results. This has been recently reminded by Dr. Jacob Aday alongside other authors in 2022,11  with Dr. Griffiths discussing in December 2022 that trials currently face “huge, huge expectancy effects.” While this has continued to grow in recent years to further bias data, it has long been a dilemma of balancing priming with safety concerns in recruiting for psychedelic trials.

The religious professional study was no different: from it being open-label, to the way it advertised for participants, to the growing atmosphere of psychedelic cultural hype each year of the study offering confirmation, to the unique sets of circumstances in the trial (at least three of the participants had previously been friends and colleagues for years), I sincerely wonder how much scientifically meaningful data could be ascertained.  

The study was primarily advertised to Christian religious professionals through the magazine Christian Century, which also ran a 2015 article by Don Lattin at the start of recruitment. Lattin says he is aware of several participants who found the study through reading his article first, but I do not know how many participants heard about the study through this article, through a flyer, through word of mouth, or some other means. The Christian Century article publicized the researchers’ intentions to “induce mystical experiences,” with Dr. Richards discussing “profoundly spiritual alternate states of consciousness” in plugging his book, asserting that “sacred experiences also can be occasioned [with psychedelics] with a high degree of reliability,” invoking the chance to meet “the really real God,” all carried with the prestige around Johns Hopkins’ institutional reputation. The open-label status would have only increased any priming effects that occurred in the recruitment and the trial process.

If Dr. Dupuis’ and Dr. Noorani’s hypotheses are correct—that suggestibility is reinforced through not just the drugs but the social environment around them—there were ample opportunities for suggestibility reinforcement in the study in the immediate aftermath to the present day. For one, the researchers’ beliefs were in the public domain, including in Dr. Richards’ book, and only got increased media attention every year from the study until now. The so-called “Michael Pollan Effect” observed by David Carpenter in the wake of Pollan’s best-selling book amplified this further. The ensuing friend groups could have socially reinforced each others’ experiences in a personal way.

Further confounding was the long drawn-out nature of the trial that spanned across a rapid rise in psychedelic popular media coverage. For instance, a participant who had an experience-to-follow-up session spanning from 2016-17 would have a far different environment than a participant who was in the trial from 2018-2019 after the release of Pollan’s book, which seemingly anyone casually interested in psychedelics read in the aftermath of its release. The book (whose quotes are featured here) highlights extensive coverage bordering on hagiography of Dr. Griffiths, Dr. Richards, and Bob Jesse. 

This increasing hype-climate around psychedelic science in the past decade has been observed by many psychedelic researchers to become increasingly difficult to ascertain meaningful data. The primary goal seems to be to generate headlines to increase public acceptance and open up new cultural avenues. The overall research climate has repeatedly developed a revolving door of new trial success stories, including US Veterans who have felt used when they were no longer cooperative with researchers’ PR goals.

Former Hopkins researcher Dr. Katherine MacLean wrote that there was already some awareness that Dr. Richards’ guidance of every Hopkins psilocybin patient was responsible for its theological results: “We even joked that maybe Bill and Mary [Cosimano] were the ones responsible for the mystical results, not the drug.”12 Later, Dr. MacLean further described how Dr. Griffiths and Dr. Richards had little problem introducing overtly religious preparation sheets for its ostensibly secular studies of mysticism, describing an earlier pre-2013 study in this way:

But Roland and Bill ultimately went with a Christian-inspired practice called “passage meditation.” Each participant in the study memorized the “Prayer of St. Francis” and recited it to themselves for ten minutes every morning. As the study went on, people started choosing other passages that aligned more with their personal views, but St. Francis’s prayer was the foundation: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace . . .” Looking back, I can totally understand why some people think we were biased toward spiritual outcomes.13

I don’t know if this kind of thing was part of the religious leaders study preparation—it’s possible it wasn’t (UPDATE: A participant reported “we were not” required to read the Prayer of St. Francis). Still, it is hard for me to read this as anything other than the Hopkins team having a habit of not only avoiding mitigation of suggestibility for their research, but actively encouraging it. Why?

Is Suggestibility a Tradeoff of Safety?

This past June, during his portion of the study’s debut presentation, Dr. Griffiths spent a lot of time emphasizing “catastrophic” risks, stressing cultural caution and patience.

The Hopkins concern about the risks of psychedelics has always been taken into some consideration, and balancing suggestibility concerns with safety concerns is a challenge in all psychedelic research. Back in 2008, Hopkins developed protocols taking this balance in mind according to safety documents authored by Dr. Matthew Johnson, Dr. Griffiths, and Dr. Richards. These documents show concern to mitigate the chance of a “bad trip” through building increased trust and other social ties with participants. One might be tempted to argue that increased suggestibility is necessary for safety. 

But in my opinion, these protocols lack attention to how such socially-bonded safety measures might heighten impacts on power dynamics and the impacts on participants’ identities, beliefs, and relationships. 

In the safety guidelines, the Hopkins authors emphasize:

With this class of compounds, it is critical for investigators to implement appropriate and conservative safeguards… Careless research that lacks attention to the unique risk profile of hallucinogens may not only endanger the safety and well-being of the research participants, but may also jeopardize future human research with these scientifically fascinating compounds.

Pursuant to these goals, the Hopkins authors argue the need to develop stronger-than-normal trust relationships: “It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the interpersonal atmosphere created by study staff in influencing a volunteer’s response to a hallucinogen…we recommend providing additional attention to volunteer rapport beyond what is customary in general human behavioral pharmacology practice.” Despite consciously ramping up the interpersonal ties, it does not appear to me that the authors focused on the ethical implications of stronger-than-normal trust relationships.

In his book Sacred Knowledge, in my opinion, Dr. Richards also gives little attention to ethical concerns of psychedelics while emphasizing his team's attempts to see participants in a more friendly way. In fairness, I learned this is not unique to him—this appears to have been a common shift among clinicians over the past sixty years to be less paternalistic and more egalitarian.14 Dr. Richards describes their approach in the following way:

Volunteers are welcomed as valued participants and colleagues on an important frontier of knowledge rather than labeled as “patients” or “experimental subjects.”...Further, once a person is accepted into a study and signs an informed consent document, he or she usually participates in a minimum of eight hours of relationship-building time with the guide or therapist who will be present during the period of entheogen action.15

The intentions seem sincere to develop relationships that minimize the acute risk of a bad trip, and it’s likely this might have successfully prevented many instances in this category of bad outcome. However, it is questionable that seeing psychedelic participants as “colleagues” sufficiently attends to the realities of the power dynamics between a researcher who has encouraged stronger-than-usual trust bonds with a participant who has then also been given a high-suggestibility drug. Does the framing of participants as “colleagues” result in paying less attention to the realities of power, transference, and countertransference involved? 

2020: Hopkins Researchers Deny Belief Shifts

Prior to the previously mentioned research, some Hopkins researchers had taken the initiative to defend against possible “alarmist reactions” that come from claims that psychedelic therapy could lead to belief changes. In a 2020 piece for Scientific American, Dr. Matthew Johnson and Dr. David B. Yaden of the Hopkins psychedelic research center pushed back against an earlier op-ed in the magazine by Eddie Jacobs, which wondered, “What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?” 

At the time, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Yaden argued there was no data for such changes or concerns about changing beliefs, and certainly not affiliations, arguing that they took into account proper safety measures in their studies:

Consent procedures in psychedelic trials by our research group (and by other groups to our knowledge) already warn that personality and attitude changes are a possibility…Psychedelic experiences are sometimes held as among the most meaningful in one’s life, and may be interpreted to have philosophical or spiritual import, likely depending on the orientation of the participant. Such effects present the opportunity for ethical pitfalls by clinicians. These and other challenges will call for important contributions from ethicists. However, we must also be careful to keep any given concern in perspective and convey realistic risks to the public and patients. From this perspective, we believe, based on the data, that major shifts in political or religious orientation or beliefs are not among the likely risks associated with this treatment. As psychedelic researchers, we believe it is important to remain vigilant against excesses in enthusiasm as well as alarmism.

But whether belief changes are significant to psychedelic researchers often seems to depend on who’s asking, and for what purpose: if it would advance psychedelic spiritual legitimacy, then yes, their beliefs changed thanks to the healing mystical experience. If it would potentially cause backlash and “alarmism,” then no, these mystical belief changes are trivial. But just to be clear—moving into a theological belief that drugs can help you have an experience of God is a very non-trivial religious belief change.

Would the authors still make their assertions today? 

A year later, Dr. Johnson seemed to have significantly and sharply pivoted.

2021: Hopkins Researcher Warns Against Gurus 

In 2021, Dr. Johnson—at the time the Center Director for the Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research—published “Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine.”16 In addition to a concern about the sloppy invocation of “consciousness,” an abundant term in Dr. Richards’ theoretical framework, two of Dr. Johnson's core concerns included “inappropriate introduction of religious/spiritual beliefs of investigators or clinicians” and “clinical boundaries.” What caused such a strong shift from the previous op-ed? 

It is unclear, but the new statements were shockingly strong. Dr. Johnson offered what he called a “warning signal regarding a little-discussed danger at play in psychedelic research. This danger is scientists and clinicians imposing their personal religious or spiritual beliefs on the practice of psychedelic medicine.” He also remarked, “It would also be inappropriate to introduce meta-religious beliefs such as perennialism (the notion that the major religious traditions point toward a core truth).” As I wrote in the last piece, this view has been proudly espoused by Dr. Richards. Johnson further argued that “scientists and clinicians should not include religious icons in the session room or other clinical space,” a comment directly at odds with the religious professionals study design, which Griffiths defended in a 2022 interview with Lucid News.

But Dr. Johnson’s strongest comments were a criticism of “psychedelic exceptionalism” and their direct negative ethical implications:

[Psychedelic exceptionalism] believe[s] that the nature of the experiences people have on psychedelics are so sacred or important that the normal rules do not apply, whether they be the rules governing clinical boundaries, the practice of clinical psychology or medicine, sound philosophy of science, or ethics…The powerful subjective nature of psychedelic experiences can be leveraged toward explicit harm, as in the extreme case of Charles Manson and his followers. Far more likely for scientists and clinicians, however, are abuses that come from the lack of clinical boundaries, e.g., temptations for sexual or other inappropriate relationships. Even short of sexual impropriety, psychedelics might magnify the subtle abuses of differential power that can be at play in the routine practice of clinical psychology or medicine. It can be challenging to be associated with what might be one of the meaningful experiences in a person’s life. The scientist or clinician might, perhaps without explicit awareness, fall into the trap of playing guru or priest, imparting personal philosophies without a solid empirical basis.

While this would become most evident with Dr. Richards, there is also a greater context in play around Dr. Griffiths’ spiritual beliefs about psychedelics. In my opinion, Dr. Griffiths has demonstrated a cavalier attitude about the ethics of inducing a “mystical” worldview because he believes his secular views about mystical-type experiences could not constitute a belief transmission, but a reality revelation. Moreover, he seems to believe these experiences to be intrinsically positive for their meaning-bestowing properties.17 While this might be a valid personal viewpoint, this belief heavily touches on theological areas relevant to the religious professionals study. It deserves much more scrutiny.

But it is surprising that Dr. Griffiths has argued that a worldview suffused with psychedelic meaning is inherently positive. As described by member of the clergy study team Rachael Petersen, employed after her experience as a subject in a different trial, her second Hopkins trial experience when she was a research subject left her in psychological duress for months, “The very quality that made my first experience so profound—its felt sense of authority—made my second so indelibly harrowing, a trip after which nothing felt the same.”18 

The Purpose of Suggestion is What It Does

This radical suggestibility posed a scientific dilemma, surely, but was it necessarily a therapeutic dilemma as well?...For it takes psychotherapy perilously close to the world of shamanism and faith healing, a distinctly uncomfortable place for a scientist to be.

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 201819

As discussed, there may be some reasons to not be overconcerned about suggestibility in some facets. Sometimes it can be an asset for building safety from acute risks of bad trips, and sometimes a close-knit social group from a study might support participants better than leaving them by themselves. And the concerns around suggestibility are clearly not isolated to this study. The Hopkins team was aware of many of them. But were they aware of enough of the ethical ramifications? Were they negligent in following ethical norms?

What many new psychonauts may not realize when they first experiment under a leader’s care is the things that leader believes about psychedelics are just their beliefs, but they can feel so potent and meaningful that they seem concretely factual, because you’ve had nothing to compare it to.

Even when I was a previously experienced psychonaut in other settings, I remember having those powerful feelings for my first ayahuasca guide the first time I sat in a curated psychedelic ceremony. I became almost instantly convinced of the cosmology of their underground church, deeply connected to the social group around it. It was both the realest thing I had ever known and the most magical. How could that have been anything other than God? Maybe it still was—certainly above my paygrade. But also, I now better understand that some of those feelings I had were simply the effects of the compounds interacting in complex ways with my social environment, even ways that were unconscious to me and everyone else—even the guide. I can see that now, but it doesn’t negate the strong affection I still have for those people; it just makes those feelings better boundaried.

There is a wide, wide variety of opinions on psychedelics out there, and I don’t know if anybody deserves to have such outsized power stacked in their favor—a guide who creates the illusion you’re a colleague on an even-power playing field, drugs you’ve never experienced before, known to induce suggestion in powerful ways you can’t possibly anticipate. I can only imagine the added power of this coming from a place with as much prestige as Hopkins has to the average person. 

None of this seemed like a big deal to me when I was involved in the “chemosocial” environment of the study. It seemed like everyone felt things were going well. But that’s one of the things about any kind of ethical norms—they often come to exist because of what happens when things don’t go well. Ethical considerations aren’t just natural instincts of right and wrong. It requires prolonged conscious effort, paying close attention to things that aren’t always obvious about second and third-order ramifications, to hidden dimensions underneath the surface. And everybody still sometimes gets it wrong.

Rather than analyzing the ostensible aim of the religious professionals study, it might be more useful to consider what systems and management scientist Stafford Beer coined with the term POSIWID: “the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does.”

In other words, instead of looking at what the religious professionals study says it would do against headwinds of suggestibility, you might look at what actually happened: under drugs that induce suggestibility, some religious leaders had their beliefs become more like the researchers, and started advancing their interests with the help of their funding. I will share more of that in the next piece.

Share

In part one, I laid out a high-level view of what I came to see as a disturbing picture of psychedelic research on religious professionals. In this piece, I will dive more into the specifics of the spiritual beliefs and cultural agendas of researchers that are in the public record.

Subscribe now

It seems the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only of this powerful molecule, but also of the preparation and expectations of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards’s flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear it, the minds of the designers of the experiments. 

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 20181

Rick Doblin, the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics Studies (MAPS), loves to describe two of his main goals as “net zero trauma” and creating a “spiritualized humanity,” From a strategy perspective, he has described what MAPS does as “political science” — that is, science designed to persuade politics towards these spiritual ends. In this regard, Doblin has been remarkably successful. 

And he is far from alone in his spiritual vision, or success in gaining institutional favor. The core Hopkins psilocybin team behind the religious professionals study, along with NYU’s joint investigator, have discussed their own spiritual and religious beliefs in psychedelics for many years. In this piece, I will explore some of these beliefs and examine whether their research goals have included a strategy to advance those beliefs.

During my involvement in a participant’s non-profit, not only was I aware of the history of psychedelic religious positions various psychedelic researchers held, I once held them myself quite passionately. They gave me tremendous hope and meaning in the midst of an otherwise materialist view of the world. As I adopted their beliefs through reading their books, attending their conferences, and listening to their interviews, I found them to have a perfect internally-consistent logic: scientific, yet more-than, universal and deeply compassionate, just making a satisfying amount of sense. Like many, I shared the core psychonaut belief in “no dogma,” seeing it as the source of so much of the world’s pain and suffering, the source of so many religious wars. I came to find that in the case of psychedelic religious science, there is hidden doctrine within the “doctrine of no doctrine” — but that isn’t, itself, intrinsically a bad thing.

Leaders of the Hopkins arm of the religious leaders study include the original Hopkins psilocybin research team: Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. William Richards, and advisor Bob Jesse, as well as Dr. Anthony Bossis leading the NYU branch of the trial. The Hopkins team has been famous within the small field since their landmark “mystical-type experiences” study in 2006, celebrated by many psychedelic actors as opening doors and funding for psychedelic research. 

Each also has longstanding ties to MAPS, which has pursued what some have described as a “Trojan Horse” strategy. As Michael Pollan has described Rick Doblin, Doblin sees the medical use of psychedelics as “a means to a more ambitious and still more controversial end: the incorporation of psychedelics into American society and culture, not just medicine.”2

Doblin repeatedly emphasizes that one of the impacts of a “spiritualized humanity” will include a world of “net zero trauma,” sometimes attaching specific years to his aims. I genuinely do not know how this is calculated, but in 2021, he seemed to change his mind about whether “net zero trauma” would be by 2050 or 2070.

RiverStyx, a primary funder of the religious professionals study, has funded MAPS $3.8M since 2009, with RiverStyx co-director Miriam Volat sitting on the Board of Directors of MAPS’ Public Benefit Corporation. RiverStyx’s other co-director, T. Cody Swift, was part of the religious professionals research team, interviewing all participants alongside another interviewer, and later as part of the team analyzing the data.

When I first heard about the study as a psychedelicist, I was excited, even if the science was practically a formality to prove what we all already knew, and we knew it because we had experienced it directly. 

In an interview last year, Dr. Griffiths said, “Although this is not about changing culture, it has implications for cultural change, but we were not trying to turn people into evangelical psychedelic proponents. I don’t think any of the investigators wanted that.” It might be true that none of the researchers wanted to specifically create “evangelical psychedelic proponents.” But there’s a lot of other ways to change culture besides trying to create “evangelical psychedelic proponents.” Based on my experience working in the non-profit, which I will talk about in a future post, and when one looks at their extensive publicly attested beliefs with a discerning eye, including in Michael Pollan’s best-seller How to Change Your Mind, it is hard to conclude that the religious leaders study was not primarily part of a strategy to integrate psychedelics into mainstream religion. At least, that’s what I thought I was working for.

The Experiential Doctrine of Bob Jesse

Bob Jesse may not be the lead author of the study, but his organization is its sponsor, and you cannot understand Hopkins’ research without understanding his influential role in marrying science with psychedelic spirituality. Jesse’s ability to bring Dr. Richards and Dr. Griffiths together to Hopkins more than twenty years ago proved to be a landmark pairing that the current wave of psychedelic research is indebted to.

In an extensive profile for Michael Pollan’s book, Pollan remarks that Jesse is on a “mission” to revive psychedelics, “not so much of medicine as of spiritual development.”3 He has been a kind of guide-of-guides in navigating what has always been a political project, carefully thinking about cultural sensitivities to address. Pollan has also described Jesse as a primary leader of the strategic vision of psychedelic research ever since his involvement in Bay Area psychedelic strategy meetings since the 1990s,4 convening and maintaining the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP) since 1995. The CSP is the sponsor of the religious professionals study.

Jesse has been interested in developing a stronger religious foundation for psychedelic work, from what seems like a sincere, heartfelt place to help the world spiritually flourish out of its modern malaise. Rather than diametrically opposed to mainstream religion, he has attempted to persuade psychonauts that the “r-word” of religion need not be so scary.

Before the religious professionals study began in 2015, he gave a lecture at the 2013 MAPS Psychedelic Science conference called “From the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Findings to the Reconstruction of Religion.” In the talk, Jesse described the martial art Aikido—not to “oppose” something, but about peace, love, and non-harmfulness, to “blend” with it to “take it in a safe direction.”5 “I’m not gonna say exactly how I think it relates to this,” he said, “except that I’m pretty sure that it does…We’re learning to do religion better.” He also described the mystical experience (induced by psychedelics or other means) as introducing a new “doctrine” that can impact the other doctrines of one’s religion,6 and in a 2016 talk, that he sees a psychedelically-induced mystical experience as a “birthright”7

In extended remarks for a 2021 meeting with the Boston Psychedelic Research Group, Jesse spoke of the origins of his psychedelic involvement at the Esalen Institute in the 1990s. He mentioned that the very earliest psychedelic strategy conversations he was involved in focused on the question, “What would it take to draw attention to these materials for their sacramental potential - not only their healing potential?”8 They concluded that part of this would involve finding a scientist to conduct psychedelic research at a top university, with a pristine reputation, on “healthy normals.” While perhaps these moves appear cynical now to some, perhaps it was because they were in the context of draconian drug policies and cultural attitudes against drug spirituality.

I still have sympathy for his perspective and appreciation for his predicament. I only recently discovered that he frequently cites Harvard ‘60s unsung hero Licia Kuenning (known then as Lisa Bieberman) as a source of inspiration, who is also a source of my inspiration. And it must be said that Jesse has also consistently expressed greater caution than the rest of the psychedelic movement. Like many, I had an appreciation for his more measured approach among accelerating enthusiasm.

From his old lectures before much-smaller psychedelic audiences, it seems likely to me he anticipated a longer timeline of psychedelic cultural acceleration than what this study turned out to coincide with. He has often seemed more realistic about the timeline of healthy psychedelic integration into Western religion as taking many generations, and encouraged others to call out the mistakes as part of that process. If he thought that psychedelic mystical experiences were “a kind of doctrine,” he also hoped that "the mystical experience gives you a chance to make a sanity check on your [other] doctrine.”9 But I have to admit that while I think he genuinely respects religion, I don’t think this approach really respects science.

The Secular Spirituality of Roland Griffiths

According to Michael Pollan, Jesse’s “campaign” was “a master plan in which Dr. Roland Griffiths plays a central role.”10

Dr. Griffiths has spoken extensively about his ideas around consciousness and “mystical-type” experiences. While in December 2022 he called his colleague Dr. Richards a “true believer” in psilocybin research,11 Dr. Griffiths has his own strong views that psychedelics will be a key to saving humanity. He still holds some of his views close to the vest, as well as personal disclosures of his own experiences. Former Hopkins researcher Katherine MacLean, PhD, described Dr. Griffiths as emphasizing to the team over a decade ago to not disclose their personal drug use, which to be fair, makes it little different than most other American workplaces.12

In the wake of a Stage IV colon cancer diagnosis, Dr. Griffiths recently established a professorship studying "secular spirituality”, a view he described in May as “stripping away from spirituality any need for supernatural ideas or beliefs or theological beliefs but embracing the idea that we're living within this benevolent mystery and it's currently unsolvable, and there's something incredibly uplifting.”13 This perspective spoke to me when I was in the throes of my psychonaut explorations as a New Age-adjacent Californian. If the psychedelic journey was less about beliefs and more like music, psychedelic science could be used to learn how to better chart its theory so more people could play it. I was confident that my psychedelic secuarlity lived outside the realm of belief. We just lived in reality as it is, and psychedelic mysticism is merely a part of that reality.

However, many philosophers and religious scholars argue that secularity cannot be seen as simplistically as an absence of belief.14 The Hopkins study team itself is split on this; Rachael Petersen, qualitatitive analyst for the religious professionals study, also questioned this in late 2022, saying that “what gets labeled as ‘secular’ is often much less so than it seems.”15 This challenge to secular neutrality was a pivotal part of a piece describing a harrowing experience when she was originally a Hopkins research subject.

An example of one such “secular spiritual” belief is the belief that psychedelics carry intrinsic spiritual value, often tied to their ability to invoke meaning. Alongside Hopkins psychedelic colleague Dr. David Yaden, Dr. Griffiths has argued that even if a safer kind of psychedelic were developed with no psychoactive effects (as in “without the trip”), the “meaningful” quality of classic psychedelics would still make them the more ethical default option.16 This position has received criticism from other bioethicists,17 who argue that “meaningfulness” is out of the “proper scope” of medicine and “non-relevant” to the immediate concern of clinical outcomes.18

This is not outside of Dr. Griffiths’ scope; Dr. Griffiths has long touted Hopkins’ results as reliably producing psilocybin experiences in patients that rival importance to the birth of their child. To Dr. Griffiths, and many other psychedelicists, this is a major spiritual green flag. To others, it is a spiritual red flag—do psychedelics distort our relationship to what is healthy, proper meaning? Should a drug experience feel as important as the birth of one’s child? Or is this a signal that something has gone wrong on a spiritual level beyond experiential bliss? This, itself is an “ought” question that can only be answered by one’s beliefs, but Dr. Griffiths has advanced this meaning-making (if not meaning-simulating) property as if it is belief-free.

Writer Ed Prideaux, who has led research into the psychedelic side-effect Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) after experiencing HPPD himself, has wondered whether psychedelics are deeply meaningful or whether they seem to merely mimic meaning. As Prideaux argued in an email:

The psychedelic state and its ready-and-fast pump of meaning provide an ideal recipe for an unethical inflation of meaning beyond the facts. Consider those who keep going back to its well for a ‘meaning high,’ or the subtle ways that one’s psychedelic enthusiasm can become obsessive and colonial of one’s attention… Witnessing the birth of a child is meaningful and should be meaningful. It is serious business for an effect produced by a psycho-technology, scaled and under the control of pharmaceutical corporations, to compete with such an event at all.

To build on what Prideaux is saying here, meaning cannot exist in a vacuum. The very fact that compounds simulate meaning tied to experiences driven by compounds potentially creates a closed-circuit loop of meaning, as in, “psychedelics are meaningful because they generate meaning.” 

There are real trade-offs to think about here. While many psychedelic medicalization advocates champion the cause of having a safe setting with a strong intention, and for good reason, it remains an open but serious question if a recreational approach may actually be safer in some respects. It’s something I first heard long-time psychedelic journalist James Kent ask as part of DoseNation, a long series exposing memory-holed psychedelic history. In 2016, Kent wondered if it was at least possible that taking psychedelics in a recreational setting might actually be mentally safer in some respects than in guided psychedelic therapy, even if in other respects it has different risks. The theory is because if psychedelics can significantly dial up the salience on anything in your consciousness, that effect may be heightened when one goes in with the intention to have a religious experience or therapeutic insight. In a setting like Burning Man, where you may just want to have a fun sense of recreational spirituality, Kent argued you are more likely to write off harmful or false insights as just the drugs talking. And in my experience, there may be some truth to this—while recreational settings have their own real safety issues, I never changed my religion after a Phish show (I was Already There).

Whether one shares Dr. Griffiths’ secular spiritual psychedelic meaning, or is interested in psychedelics just for the party, I think anyone’s positions about psychedelics and spirituality are inherently theological. In my experience as a spiritual seeker, when we believe we have the “dogma of no dogma,” it just means our real dogma is unconscious to ourselves.

The Perennial Mystery of Anthony Bossis

While Dr. Griffiths’ “secular spirituality” seems to make a claim about neutrality through being devoid of belief, there’s an opposite way to claim neutrality: psychedelic religious universalism.

An older, popular psychedelic theology is sometimes known as the “perennial philosophy,” a view grounded in neo-Platonism and advanced by Aldous Huxley. At its core is an Abraham Maslow quote Dr. Anthony Bossis used during the study presentation: “All religions are the same in their essence and have always been the same.” But what is that essence? How are they all the same?

It appears to be a belief in a “core mystical experience” that is “universal to all religions.” In this theology, psychedelics are just one of many practices in which one can alter consciousness to find the core of religious essence. But despite this psychedelic theology’s claim to universality—the unabashedly religious flip-side to Dr. Griffiths’ universal secular spirituality—its claims about mysticism are far from held by all mystics nor scholars of mysticism, as religious professionals study team member Petersen pointed out back in 2019. 

In one interview, Dr. Bossis appears to have described religiously-oriented goals for his psychedelic studies based on the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, a mystery cult that likely used psychoactive substances for religious purposes. In interviews conducted for Brian Muraresku’s 2020 book The Immortality Key, Muraresku describes Dr. Bossis in the following way:

From what I’ve picked up from Anthony Bossis in recent years, a more responsible [psychedelic] movement is afoot. Something that could truly speak to the practical mystics by the tens of millions in this country, and eventually hundreds of millions around the world. Something that has been many thousands of years in the making…The whole point of these psilocybin interventions, [Bossis] concedes, is to trigger the same beatific vision that was reported at Eleusis for millennia.19

If Muraresku is conveying Dr. Bossis’ views accurately, did participants know that this was the whole point? That, if the above is true, they were sought in an experiment to “trigger the same beatific vision” of this ancient mystery cult?

Again, I think there is hidden dogma afoot even when it appears absent. Again, I don’t think dogma is intrinsically bad. But the hidden dogma in much of psychedelics is centered on the primary importance of one’s consciousness. The perennial “mystic” philosophy asserts that the core of religious truth is derived from experiences plunging the depths of human interiority. But this is not actually universal to religion, not even universal among religious traditions who highly value inner transcendent experience. And it has real theological consequences: to center a subject’s consciousness is to center one’s meaning in one’s self, and this posture can become especially prone to narcissism, both personal narcissism and of a subculture’s collective narcissism.

The perennial philosophy’s hope is that in the absence of any particular religion making any sense whatsoever, one might find something universally true in exploring our consciousness to its depths. If this is what Dr. Bossis holds, it is similar to the last primary Hopkins figure I’ll explore, Dr. Bill Richards.

The Universal Consciousness of Bill Richards 

Dr. Richards has been described affectionately as a sweet grandfatherly figure, the “mystical mind” of the Hopkins program.20 Proudly in the perennial philosophy tradition, Dr. Richards is among the oldest psychedelic researchers still active, having played a role in 1960s and 1970s research (Walter Pahnke, who led the famous Good Friday Experiment that inspired this religious leaders study, was the best man at his wedding). His sincere passion for psychedelic mysticism only got mocked at Yale Divinity School in the 60s, but he has finally gotten a long-awaited last laugh over the religious scholar critics.

Dr. Richards, like many of his subjects, had his first psychedelic experience as a volunteer research subject. According to Michael Pollan, he has “three unshakeable convictions”:

The first is that the experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”...Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.21

I didn’t read Dr. Richards’ book until earlier this year, but we shared a great deal in common in our orientation. To the extent that I felt like I had a precious gift that was poorly understood, but I wanted to be widely shared, I can only imagine what it was like for Dr. Richards to hold onto his convictions throughout the cultural climate of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and on.

Dr. Richards’ 2015 book serves as a treatise on his personal beliefs about psychedelics and religion that span back to his involvement in early psychedelic research. The book has drawn criticism from researchers like Rick Strassman, PhD, who has argued Richards’ book is part of an attempt at "creating his new religion.”  In his review in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies in 2018, Strassman even raised concerns directly about the religious professionals study:

It is in this light that one should retain a healthy skepticism for the “religious leaders” studies now occurring at New York University and Hopkins…It is inevitable that researchers will use these data to support their notion of a “universal, core, primary mystical experience” underlying all particular faiths. 

Strassman did note that “Richards’ religious model ought not to call into question the efficacy of the protocol devolving from it,” indicating there may be therapeutic utility that might be extracted from its religious nature. 

Dr. Richards has commented in recent years that he hoped religious institutions would become “emboldened” to embrace psychedelics, with a strong desire to see legal clinical psychedelic usage in his lifetime. And as someone who once deeply shared this hope, I understand the desire to psychedelicize traditional Christianity. After all, to spiritual-but-not-religious people, modern Christianity can often feel at best like a disenchanted mishmash of dying institutions divorced from the experiential needs of people living in what has been called “meaning crisis.” Dr. Richards’ patience in his convictions had paid off: mainstream religion is finally getting closer to understanding, and he was blessed enough to be able to legally guide religious clergy, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to usher the next generation into a better world.

Clouds and Complications

With these backgrounds outlined, there is still foggy obscurity around the conscious intentions of researchers involved and what might have been unconscious. While it can be assumed they all wanted the study to have good results, it also seems clear that each might have had different specific desires for the study outcome that might have come into conflict. And they might have changed significantly from its start in 2015 to the dramatically different public environment in 2023. But it is really, really hard for me to take Dr. Griffiths seriously when he says that “this [was] not about changing culture.” It asks the listener to suspend their critical thought, to choose to believe these words this time but not other words from the team at other times. That doesn’t mean they all specifically wanted to create ambassadors for their views…but it happened, and with no small encouragement from a funder and member of the study team.

In contrast to Dr. Griffiths’ assertion last year that the study “is not about changing culture,” RiverStyx, who funded the study, seems to see their role differently. Their funding priorities, per their website, is:

Preference to early-stage projects and emergent paradigms with the potential to deliver innovative models, tools, and policy for social transformation…We seek high-leverage social change by providing resources to fringe areas that have been most stigmatized and disregarded by society and the funding community, in hopes of effectuating enduring change in both cultural awareness and social policy.

But even if I think the study was quite obviously about changing culture, this doesn’t mean they wanted everyone to trip. In his 2013 talk to a MAPS conference, Jesse expresses a careful, limited psychedelic vision that does not seek to make everyone a psychonaut, but does seek to impact religion by introducing psychedelics into it, and vice-versa:

“We’re learning to do religion better….the most important thing to remember about doing it better is ‘direct experience’ keeps it vital, ‘tempered through community’ is what keeps it from going off in weird unserviceable directions.”

This “direct experience” is the core of psychonaut thought, and what Jesse would say offered:

“a new perspective on ultimate reality [that] is the first little bit of doctrine. ‘Wow things are more connected than I thought they were’ - that's a doctrine. Something you now think is true about the world. that's one of the pillars of religion.” 

In my opinion, it appears Jesse wanted to introduce this new “pillar” to existing religious traditions to avoid the pitfalls of “new [psychedelic] groups” that, despite their freedom, can be more shallow and less stable. The theology of the mystical experience itself may be universal in its vitality and potential to work with religions, but that does not mean he wants all to trip: “When I think about what it takes to generate a planet with more happiness…it will take structures and communities with mystical experience…there need to be communities, not dosing the water supply.”

Rather than wanting to outright dose the world, Jesse has discussed in the mid-90s a trepidation around opening a cultural Pandora’s box. In spite of the hesitance of his late mentor, religious scholar Huston Smith, they figured it would be opened eventually anyway. So, according to his 2021 reflections on the early years of psychedelic strategizing at Esalen in 1996, “The question before the group was, ‘We all think there’s a role for psychedelics. We all believe…the world might be ‘undersupplied’ with mystical-type experience, direct experience of the sacred. Which doesn’t mean to increase the supply willy-nilly. But on population, if more people had that kind of insight experience, it might on average be good for the world.” Per Jesse, “as if planning strategy for a business,” they came up with three items: developing a code of ethics, finding a legal case for religious freedom, and scientific research with a pristine reputation.

I find myself wondering, how do we make sense of Jesse’s openness about Hopkins’ psychedelic research being part of a nearly thirty-year strategy to advance spiritual interests through science? If they didn’t want to change culture, what did they want to happen?

Again, it’s complicated: Jesse has expressed a concern around promotion and things progressing too quickly. In a 2017 conference talk given in his genre of psychedelic states of the union, Jesse feared the movement would be derailed by immaturity: 

So what could go off track? When there’s a lack of skilled, experienced, and networked leadership, people can get hurt; there can be medical emergencies, lasting psychological harms; and there can be more subtle issues that I’ll talk about later…So much of what we call “immature religion” comes from unwholesome or confused motives, and from leaders overestimating their readiness to lead. The problems often emerge around money, sex, holding what you might call “the chalice of revelation” or other power issues.22

It’s a quote that is more apt for the study than may initially appear. And it does suggest that the religious professionals study wasn’t trying to create psychedelic evangelists, per se. This is especially because if there is another feared foe alongside Dogma to the psychedelic movement, it is his brother Backlash: the fear that cultural attitudes could shift and shut down psychedelic research back into another dark age. 

But is a long-term psychedelic strategy to advance psychedelic spirituality an appropriate use of science? More basically, is this good science? While I was once an active proselytizer of psychedelic public relations, I began to wonder, was it ethical to advance our spirituality through scientific PR soundbites? Even with how bad public opinion used to be about psychedelics, other groups had secured their legal religious freedoms through the Supreme Court (including with help from Bob Jesse), and more were still earnestly trying—why not channel more energy into that more honest strategy? 

And in this study, were the study participants aware of what they were recruited into? I also began wondering about its implications on other psychedelic research. How much was motivated by religious and spiritual beliefs? 

So What?

Maybe some are still asking: so what? Didn’t Michael Pollan already cover this? Aren’t researchers allowed to have personal beliefs? Can’t their research be related to those beliefs? Yes, of course they are (and do). Is there anything intrinsically wrong with their beliefs? Even though I don’t hold them anymore, I still believe in religious freedom. But if the study was overtly part of a broader public relations campaign for spirituality, is that an acceptable use of science?

This is a point where I am going to need more help from professionals in the psychiatric field as to the rules of the game here. I found a 2006 Resource Document from the American Psychiatric Association’s Corresponding Committee on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry, which stated, “Clinicians should not force a specific religious/spiritual, antireligious/spiritual, or other ideological agenda on patients or work to see that patients adopt such an agenda.” But that’s 2006 from just one APA committee, and I’m not a psychiatric researcher anyway—what are the binding guidelines here in 2023? I don’t know.

It may be that the views of the researchers above don’t sound that offensive or incompatible to existing theological views of traditional theists. And to some, they aren’t. But in the psychedelic 1960s, some Christian mystics were already concerned that the word “mysticism” was being misused for something with an entirely different relationship to God than tradition taught.

Thomas Merton, a monk devoted to reaching across religious difference and Eastern spirituality, had sympathies for the psychedelic movement, but also concerns that consciousness-based technologies aren’t just easily slotted in and out with Christianity—that it’s introducing a fundamentally different approach to faith. And it seems from these public comments that the researchers’ views are all consciousness-based, not theistically based. As Merton said in a 1967 circulation:

This use of drugs to “transform the consciousness” is now no longer in the stage of mere experimentation…We must realize that, underlying these experiments, is an essentially materialistic conception of man and human consciousness, which is nothing more than an emanation of matter. Since (in this view) even the highest and most “spiritual” experience of the human mind is in the end merely matter realizing itself in man’s consciousness, there is logically no reason why material aids (drugs) should not be used to make this realization more rapid and more effective. It is quite understandable that unbelievers should accept this view. 

But it is disturbing to see Christians and Jews accepting it uncritically and, one might add, very naively, without apparently reflecting on the momentous theological implications of their act in regard to faith, grace, the love of God, and the awareness of our fallen situation in a world where matter can be turned against us by invisible adversaries.23

The researchers had psychedelic beliefs that were different from their subjects. And that’s okay. But if Dr. Griffiths says investigators “were not trying to turn people into evangelical psychedelic proponents,” they seemed to do more to enable it than discourage it. I knew that through my participation in a non-profit birthed from the study, funded by one of the study’s funders and researchers, a non-profit whose early goals were heavily focused on psychedelic PR for the study.

What I didn’t know, but what I would come to find out through researching Hopkins’ safety documents, was that the study team knew psychedelics lead to enhanced openness to suggestibility as early as 2008. And I learned that this suggestibility has been demonstrated to have impacted other Hopkins psychedelic research. And I learned the concern about psychedelics leading to unethical belief changes and guru complexes was raised by another Hopkins psychedelic researcher in 2021. And that will be covered in the next piece.

Part three can be read here.

Share

A spiritual experience, once ritualized, formalized, and fitted into a static establishment, tends to be manipulated by the ambitions of the believer. It then becomes self-defeating. Vision, systematized and organized for the sake of personal or institutional aims, becomes blindness.

Thomas Merton, 19671

A clinical trial conducted jointly by Johns Hopkins University and New York University, “The Effects of Psilocybin-Facilitated Experience on the Psychology and Effectiveness of Religious Professionals,” funded by the RiverStyx Foundation and sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices, is set to soon be published. The trial gave leaders from various religions two doses of the compound psilocybin, found in psychedelic mushrooms. The goal was to assess the “mystical” content of their experiences, the impact on their mental, physical, and spiritual health in their personal and professional lives, and “whether participants who report having had the strongest mystical-type effects during psilocybin sessions will show the largest positive changes.” In the past few years, some participants have publicly extolled the virtues of the study and its profound positive impact on their ministry. 

I became involved with part of the study’s social world during my time as a master’s student at Harvard Divinity School, where I participated in field education work for a new Christian psychedelic non-profit created by a participant inspired by his study experience.

What started out as one of the most meaningful, fulfilling times of my life became something that, over time, greatly distressed and disturbed me. I’m here to witness to part of what I have experienced and learned, because people have been hurt, and I believe more will get hurt if I don’t. I will be sharing more each day of this coming week.

I am writing to speak out because I believe the motivations of the study were obscured in its description and now the beginnings of its public presentation. Out of this, I believe an entanglement of conflicts of interest between Hopkins, RiverStyx, and some trial participants enabled unethical conduct, as well as unethical behavior during the trial.

The longer I struggled over what to do, I came to see that this behavior did not happen in a vacuum. This behavior came in a study that, in my opinion, was attempting to manufacture religious institutional consent through a long-range spiritual project to influence public opinion under the pretense of science. I have come to believe that, in my opinion, the reputation of Johns Hopkins was leveraged alongside the highly suggestible influence of psychedelic substances, with some funders and researchers demonstrating unhealthy boundaries with some participants to advance their goals. In my opinion, the result was science in name only.

Truth and Mercy

I was not in the study. I only met about half of the study’s participants, mostly just some of the Christians, and cannot speak for any of them. I really loved getting to know them, and still love them; at first, it was the professional highlight of my life. Also, I never met most of the researchers, some only briefly. And I used to share so much of their perspective. 

I’m not telling any of their stories for them. I’m telling you about the story that is beginning to be told to the public, and I’m telling you there’s much more to the story. And while I don’t know everything that happened, what I did see, learn, and wrestle over has really come to shake me. And some of what unsettles me is what I didn’t see while I was in it.

Besides whatever difficulty that comes with speaking out, I find it really odd to be in this position. Psychedelics have been part of my life for 13 years, and I once felt like psychedelics saved my spiritual life twice. In both cases, I had a strong evangelistic phase. Once, I felt they liberated me from my default, dualistic upbringing in Protestantism into a wonderful, weird world of creative, non-theistic, interfaith imagination. Six years ago, I felt they saved me from the nihilism of secular materialism, opening me up to something that felt like the truer version of myself, then back into religion. The butterfly effects that led me to those experiences probably came from the wings of the Hopkins researchers involved here, on the wind of their earlier studies. Finding myself in approximation to that world was a pinch-me dream, feeling blessed to be dropped into a moment that would be huge for the future of American Christianity.

Over the past year and a half, as more issues out of the mainstream’s eye arose in this nascent field, these feelings have turned foreboding. A sense emerged that my psychedelic spirituality was not nearly as liberating as I imagined—that I had been a follower of what the 20th century’s most famous Catholic mystic Thomas Merton called “illuminism,” the worshipping of experience.

But if there had ever been an experience worthy of being worshipped, it would be nigh impossible to find something more potent than ayahuasca ceremonies in the California desert. Those experiences pointed me to at least something like healing and reconnected me to the power of ritual, the power of religion (but like any good Californian, resisting being branded as religious). Eventually, those experiences pointed me back to Christianity. I wanted to do whatever I could to share those experiences with other people. 

Looking back, one of the things I miss most about my ayahuasca days was not the psychological fireworks, the deep-feeling insights, not even the group singing—though that is close. No, if there was anything vital, it was partaking in weekends suffused with truth and mercy. As I got to know each weekend’s fellow travelers, we so often became remarkably close remarkably quickly in baring our deepest wounds, sometimes confessing our deepest secrets to each other, to a higher power, or for the first time to ourselves. So often, this felt effortlessly oriented to seeking forgiveness for ourselves, and even more miraculously, seeking to forgive people we couldn’t imagine forgiving. Truth and mercy.

I don’t have all the truth. I live in need of mercy. But someone asked me what was my “thesis” here. Above all, it is truth and mercy. 

The Light

Before we go further into the details of the psychedelic religious professionals study, I want to start with where we are.

This past June, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) hosted the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, drawing over 10,000 attendees for the largest psychedelic conference in history. On June 22, the penultimate day, Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, of Johns Hopkins, Anthony P. Bossis, PhD, of NYU, and T. Cody Swift, MFT, of RiverStyx debuted the religious professional study’s high-level findings. In addition to his roles as interviewer and qualitative analyst for the study, Swift also funded the study through his role as co-director of the RiverStyx Foundation.

It is an understatement to say the study was highly anticipated among psychedelicists. Best-selling author Michael Pollan and MAPS’ founder Rick Doblin—the man single most responsible for the cultural resurgence of psychedelics—have reportedly described it as the most important study in the career of Dr. Griffiths, who has been arguably the most important psychedelic scientist of the last 25 years. It was also the culmination of three decades of strategic planning from Bob Jesse, a funder and advisor to Hopkins’ psychedelic research since the early 2000s. 

But the study’s influence goes back much further, at least 60 years, to the 1962 Marsh Chapel Experiment run by Harvard Divinity School PhD student Walter Pahnke. That study gave seminary students psychedelic mushrooms while listening to a Good Friday service presided by Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, leading to what was found in a follow-up to be among the most important experiences of their lives. It has inspired generations of psychonauts with the conviction that psychedelics could provide core, so-named “mystical” insights that were the true heart of religion. It has long provided hope that the two estranged cultural enemies—New Agers and the devoutly religious—could be reconciled against all odds.

I was not at the conference, but I listened to crackly bootlegged audio of the presentation. I want to start here because I want to start with the good that seems to have come out of this study, sharing some snippets of the participants telling their stories. There was a lot of real light. 

In follow-ups on the study’s impact in the year after their participation, the presenters described glowing positive impacts on their professional lives. According to the presenters, many participants described their trial experience as bringing them fulfillment, joy, connection, and feeling relationally closer to God. For many burned-out clergy in a religiously-declining country, this type of gift must have been nothing short of miraculous—manna from heaven, water from a rock.

As an attendee noted, the atmosphere of the study’s presentation was emotional and triumphant. Dr. Griffiths, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, came immediately from a teary standing ovation after a speech he gave to the whole conference plenary of 10,000.

According to Swift, participants reported greater trust, flexibility, and freedom from striving in their work. Of the quotes shared, among the most touching to me was hearing a Unitarian Universalist pastor say in the following year, they left room in their sermons for the Spirit to move; a Baptist describing an experience of unconditional love and connection, that “there’s something bigger than you at work, you’re not God and nobody is asking you to be, so just rest”; a Pentecostal saying “I know God less but I love her, love him, love the divine more.”  An attendee in the crowd said, “I would go back to church if I knew my priest had done this.”

More participant stories are shared in Don Lattin’s book God on Psychedelics, describing in rich depth the personal aspect of these journeys. I won’t reproduce them here, but in addition to their religious content, they are moving stories of self-reexamination, family ties, loss, reality reorientation, and sometimes crisis.

As I listened to the presentation, I knew there was so much more being left out. Yes, Dr. Griffiths spent a significant chunk of his time talking in vague but serious terms about psychedelic risks (which have been scarcely studied). But there was so much more that the presenters weren’t being transparent about, weren’t hinting at, if not outright concealing. The overall emotional, inspiring message was clear: a kind of marriage had been consummated, or as Michael Pollan reportedly said that evening to the whole conference, “the virus of psychedelics” has been put “into the bloodstream of religions.”

As Lattin says, “Much of today’s research into psychedelic-assisted therapy remains a social movement in the guise of a scientific experiment…the crusade to introduce psychedelics into the religious mainstream has been underway for sixty years.”2

Later this week, Dr. Griffiths is scheduled to present the study’s findings again at the Parliament of World Religions, this time with a study participant, another participant from the 1962 Good Friday experiment, and perhaps the most well-known living Catholic mystic, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.

The Dark

Despite the light above, my experience of the presentation was not so light. From my perspective, a culture of deception and an aura of manipulation has long seeped through the psychedelic milieu in which the study is situated.

In light of what they knew to be highly-suggestible drugs, some Hopkins researchers involved in the study fostered relationships that, in my opinion, leveraged the power dynamics they cultivated with some participants during and after the trial to further some researchers’ beliefs about psychedelics. I am concerned that, as part of a long-term goal to incorporate psychedelics into mainstream religion, some members of the Hopkins team may have inappropriately transmitted their own beliefs about psychedelically-induced “mystical experiences” to some participants, reinforced through social ties, financial ties, and a growing media climate of hype. These ties continued despite some Hopkins researchers having knowledge of irresponsible, illegal, and unhealthy behavior. And in at least one instance, according to a participant’s testimony, a guide allegedly committed a boundary violation according to one Hopkins psychedelic professor’s standards.

Beyond these and other public health concerns, this is a case study that leaves significant lingering considerations for stronger and longer-term ethical guidelines for future psychedelic research. The study also raises important critical questions for religious studies, theology, and psychedelic religious communities in a time of increased psychedelic religious and spiritual use.

I believe more people will be harmed in psychedelic research and in their engagement in psychedelic subcultures if I do not speak out. I believe the trial was predicated on an unethical premise and that the scientific value of its findings is questionable, yet it may have an outsized and unhealthy influence on culture, leading to public health miseducation and profound abuse. Because of its potential to influence religious institutions and public opinion with an incomplete and misleading picture, I cannot stay silent without doing violence to my conscience.

Seeking Blessing

For many years, I wanted to do anything to help integrate psychedelics with religion. My ayahuasca experiences made me want to return to religion as a pastor, so I quickly found a home in Unitarian Univeralism, whose compatibility with DIY spirituality totally worked with my psychedelic views. But I held those views very close to the vest—it was 2018, and not quite enough people had read Michael Pollan yet to feel comfortable being “out.” I applied to seminary to be a UU minister, but was not honest at all about wanting to integrate psychedelics into my seminary experience. When I reconverted to Christianity the summer of my arrival at divinity school, I remained very, very careful about what I revealed of my psychedelic beliefs.

I was like Jacob in the Book of Genesis, pretending to be his hairier older brother Esau in pursuit of his spiritual security: a blessing. I wandered through mainstream religion, cloaking myself with the goatskin of a twin who sounded more religious than the real me to the institutions I sought credibility from. As Danielle Giffort has described professional psychonauts, I “performed sobriety.” We just wanted a blessing.

And that’s how you had to do things as a psychonaut in mainstream spaces—you couldn’t be fully honest, you couldn’t fully disclose, you had to perform an unattainable image. I think those habits are still deeply ingrained in the culture when it interfaces with the mainstream, and maybe even when it interfaces with itself. 

But when I was riding the wave of the hype, it was amazing. I was high on being at the edge of science, the edge of religion, and the feeling of “I’ve got this secret that I wish everyone could know, if only they were ready for it.” It really felt like I found a new but old gospel that had been obscured by suffocating, dying religion. They obviously didn’t have the spiritual vitality that we knew.

After years of being estranged from my religious upbringing, Christianity finally seemed insane in the right way: a countercultural love system, not insane in all its well-known wrong ways. Many of us went to ayahuasca ceremonies to heal our religious wounds, to escape Christianity’s dogmatic weaponry and crushing cultural weight. So it was at first amazing to find Christians who also shared the secret, and who had a mission to “educate” our tradition, like loving parents bestowing our wisdom unto our ignorant children. 

Well, I don’t believe all that anymore. But even though I have grown greatly concerned about many issues around psychedelic usage and its risks (including spiritual risks), I still believe in religious freedom, and I believe in religious freedom for psychedelic users. I believe many of the problems here arose from perverse incentives of trying to obtain those legal protections. I used to work for legal protections for non-Christian psychedelic groups, and I still want them to have those rights, but I also want people to have information they can trust. I also believe in drug policy reform, but I do not know what combination of policies makes sense.

The Wheat and the Weeds

I think most people in the general public still don’t really understand the degree to which lives have been harmed, traumatized, and ended as a result of professional psychedelic evangelism and abuse, often enabled by the same people who are still leading it. I think the general public needs to understand the flip side to the hopeful narratives that more and more politicians regurgitate, having successfully been persuaded by an amorphous science they don’t really know anything about. This is not to dash anyone’s hope, but to say any hope in human endeavors always needs complicating. And of course, it is complicated.

There is a parable in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus compares the world to a field in which an abundance of good seed has been sown into life-giving wheat. Meanwhile, something evil planted weeds, risking choking the life out of the good wheat. In the story, the people working the field want to just rip out the weeds, right from the root. The wise gardener says no, let them grow—they’re entwined together, and you might rip out the good wheat. When the day is over, the gardener will separate them.

Our bad sides are not just entwined with what’s good, they’re often in some way caused by the same goodness—like the wheat with the weeds, our vices seem wrapped up in our virtues. And it’s really not fair that in this process, I’m not showing most of my weeds. And I’m likely not showing enough of the wheat here. And sometimes, it's really hard to see the difference between the wheat and the weeds—in a culture, or within ourselves. No person can be reduced to all wheat, no weeds, all weeds, no wheat.

And yet, the story of the wheat and the weeds does not tell us to be passive in the face of seeing something wrong. It tells us to be precise in our observations, to be the workers in the field, saying, “Something is really, really wrong here.”

Something’s Not Right. And despite what people pretend the story of the 1960s was, that it was all Richard Nixon’s fault, when you read thicker histories and memory-holed accounts of psychonauts from that time, you find that even some psychedelic leaders in the sixties also found some similar, deeply disturbing patterns in their social milieu.

And yet, I have to have mercy for the souls in the field. The soul that lives beyond our mind’s self-conception, the soul that lives under heavy bags of self-delusion, the soul that is in the image of God. The souls that were trying their best to serve the Ultimate, yet living in denial of the harm they were part of, and denied being a part of. As Robert L. Moore said, “If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down.”3 As Fr. Rohr described in his book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, we cannot escape our participation in evil. But living in denial of the radical extent of evil often means we are its unwitting agent, and quite often we are its justifier. So the Wheat and the Weeds is not about avoiding pointing out what’s wrong. It’s to avoid passing ultimate, cosmic condemnation on the fundamental goodness of the souls caught up in evil, for it is us all. 

The flip side of this is that one dangerous part of the Wheat and the Weeds is that people often weaponize the idea of “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” as a dismissal for all criticisms, all calls for accountability, all calls for change. I don’t know if they realize that when they make that analogy, they are often equating their utopian vision as the baby, and actual harmed human beings as the bathwater.

Moore also said that when you’ve had a God complex around something, whether it’s a utopia, a hero on a pedestal, or a fascinating new experience that you’ve made into an idol, it’s very easy to flip it into something demonic. Inevitably, your illusory messianic ideas will deeply disappoint you. You find out it’s not gonna be a utopia, your hero’s been a villain, the idol will be knocked off the pedestal. When this happens, it’s very easy to make your God complex into a Lucifer complex. I really, really want to avoid a Lucifer complex here, because it’s something I've struggled with before.

It’s very easy and very tempting to go from being Jacob one day, willing to deceive in order to receive your blessing, to being the dumbfounded Esau, furious at having been deceived. It sometimes takes a tremendous amount of energy, and dissipation of energy, to avoid each of these grandiosities. We cannot do it by ourselves. We all need help, especially in relationships.

Sometimes, we create systems that are less than the sum of our parts, for whatever reason, especially when everybody is telling us that we’re on the right side of a historical narrative in which we’ve painted ourselves as the hero. When there’s a toxic culture, the culture of the weeds has wrapped itself around the souls of the wheat.

I can never condemn anybody on that deep, cosmic level. But I need to share a part of what I experienced and witnessed and learned in the past two years as I’ve tried to figure out how to sort the wheat from the weeds.

Going Forward

Each day this week, I’ll be sharing some things I learned from my involvement between 2020 and 2022, and some things I learned after I got out and started going back through psychedelic history and contemporary research papers. I’ll go over the well-documented spiritual beliefs of researchers, the suggestible nature of psychedelics, and some of the complicated entanglements here. Some details have been redacted to protect the identity of sources, and many stories have been excluded entirely that were informative to my decision to speak. I learned through this process that for many whistleblowers, things are often far worse than they are able to depict for many different reasons. And it’s hard to convey the felt gravity. Like some people did before me, I hope some of this helps others come forward in their own contexts, who also feel like there’s something wrong and they feel unable to speak.

To understand how we arrived at the study’s June 2023 presentation, we have to go back to before the study began. It officially began in 2015, but we need to at least go back to the mid-1990s. To understand this study, you have to look at the study team’s public, long-held beliefs about psychedelics and their ideas for integrating them into Western religion. That will be covered in the next piece.

You can read part two here.

I want to tell you a story.

Many years ago, so long ago it’s been nearly forgotten, faith healing became increasingly popular in American Christianity. It was especially prominent among Pentecostals, Christian Scientists, and Mormons, though others had at least occasionally practiced it for millennia. They held fervent altar calls, tent revivals, and other ecstatic worship infused with transcendent music. To its practitioners, everything felt so wildly spiritual that it was undeniable true healing was taking place.

There once was a fundamentalist Christian non-profit, Faith Assisted Internal Therapeutics House (FAITH) International. FAITH's mission passionately advocated for faith healing as a cure for mental illness plaguing society. FAITH rose to prominence decades after the last faith healing movement of the 19th century, composed of the remaining embers of true believers from that era.

Everyone in FAITH had personally experienced faith healing, so they remained devout despite the long-held mainstream opinion that they practiced pseudoscience and questionable spirituality. They knew the public was wrong, and so they were determined to “correct” public opinion by any means necessary. After all, faith healing had radically transformed their lives from living in sin into an enlightened life in Christ. Charismatic leaders in their midst spoke with such smooth passion and scriptural ease, musing in Biblical truisms like, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free!”1 

Besides the grand festival-like revivals, FAITH’s core members had long attended underground churches that performed controversial exorcisms and experimented with polygamous communities out of sight of the law. Faith healers insisted it was the key to the ancient Christian past.

At this time in American history, scientific materialism was on the rise, and along with it, creeping spiritual malaise. The burgeoning psychotherapy field was growing more attractive to Americans, pioneered by primarily upper-class devotees, who all seemed wise as wizards. With the public enamored by scientific progress, FAITH knew that if they could medically “prove” faith healing worked, their views would gain mainstream acceptance. As astute strategists, they also saw that the public’s growing interest in therapy created a political opportunity. At last: this moment in history could be vital to transforming the world to reflect God’s love.

While it was initially hard to get funding, their evangelical zeal pushed them through all sorts of adversity and skepticism. One by one, they secured the backing of wealthy philanthropists, even one of the younger Rockefellers. As they pitched their dream to more and more of the elite, they found that if they talked more about groups like orphans, domestic abuse victims, WWI veterans with “shell shock,” and elderly patients, they got a few more dollars and a little less resistance from their American Psychiatric Association gatekeepers.

Once they secured enough funding and trained enough pastors—initiated into the healing doctrine by being faith-healed themselves—FAITH launched an exciting series of studies. Could faith healing cure lockjaw? What about rheumatism? In their savvy, FAITH created protocols and tracking methods that they knew would get the most promising results. They didn’t need to find out what was true; they already knew it was true. So cutting corners wasn’t a big deal. They were careful not to let people who might complicate the results into their studies, and they made sure to dress up the data with spiritual metaphors when it was often ambivalent: “new study shows faith healing cleanses the sin-sick mind!” There were also many whispers of healing pastors fudging results, coaching patients into answers, and loading questions with enough Christian theology to nudge follow-up survey responses in a particular direction.

Everybody in FAITH was evangelical-adjacent, but some pastors sought to prove their religion was scientifically superior to other religions. Sometimes, this group of pastors would keep in touch with their patients, evangelizing them until they became congregants at the pastors’ local churches.

Healing pastors each had unique techniques, making it hard to know exactly what worked. But this was of little concern because there was a much deeper shared faith in the movement. It was only natural, then, that the treatment protocol allowed for leeway from pastor to pastor. But the genius part of the treatment was that, as the pastors loved to say, it was all about the “Inner Christ.” “Jesus lives in you,” as one faith healer said, “and he will heal you if you just ask him.”

For years things seemed to go well, in fact, so miraculously well that it felt like they were recreating the kingdom of heaven right here on earth. Pastors who had once never gotten public attention beyond tiny Christian magazines became oft-quoted in secular newspapers, even landing a giant New York Times feature. Many new converts proudly witnessed their healing to anyone who would hear, including a former baseball star. With each celebrity radio interview, the stigma against faith healing gradually decreased.

But it didn’t always go well. Some people never got the healing they came for, though most of those folks didn’t want to discourage others from trying it. Some people who tried faith healing only worsened, suffering psychological damage for months and years, but these stories never managed to make their way to the press.

Outside the studies, some issues were becoming more visible in churches that practiced faith healing: tiny fundamentalist sects splintering off, pastors having affairs with congregants, and an increasingly cynical focus on donations. But most of these issues avoided the close attention of the mainstream press, and the momentum of faith healing marched on.

Healing pastors had a few guidelines in the studies, but could mostly practice their faith as they understood it. After all, FAITH was an ecumenical, non-denominational group, and the pastors each had a unique theology; trying to get uniform beliefs, much less practices, just wasn’t gonna happen.

After learning about a few cases of pastoral abuse, FAITH quietly decided that faith healing teams needed to work with partners. This included the Rev. Norman Smith and his wife, Sandra Bayer. Like many of their colleagues, they had been taught controversial therapies by a faith healing legend that, unknown to the public, were based on torture techniques. One day, a patient came to them having suffered sexual abuse. The pastor team thought the proper way to treat him was through “exposure," sexually abusing and brainwashing the patient. When the victim failed to heal, Smith and Bayer invited the victim to live on their farm in Maine, where the abusive “treatment" continued.

Once the abuse was fully uncovered, Smith and Bayer were quietly dismissed. But like many healing pastors, Smith did not belong to a denomination and thus could not face further professional accountability. And because FAITH was non-denominational and the treatment experimental, it fell outside any larger accountability group. By that point, FAITH had built such a stellar reputation in the press that journalists either didn’t believe the story's details, didn’t think it raised issues about faith healing practices, or didn’t want to touch it at all.

Secular America prided itself on being rational, but skepticism in the mainstream quickly gave way to human desperation for hope. More and more newspaper articles discussed the great benefits of this promising treatment, which was somehow both new and old. It had scientifically-minded people involved, but they were also people of faith. They seemed so happy and cured, even if sometimes they seemed a little off, too. A famous, formerly-atheist author wrote a book, The Healing Mind of Christ, which explained how faith healing worked. Claiming to be a “no-nonsense” book to match the tenor of the times, it quickly reached the New York Times bestseller list and spawned reading groups across the country.

FAITH continued doubling down on Christian dogma in response to critical questions, accusing their critics of being “divisive,” sometimes questioning whether they cared about Christianity. Eventually, the Atlantic Monthly magazine ran a story covering the abuse by Smith and Bayer and the backstory of FAITH’s practices. The story garnered significant attention in the faith healing world, but its allies refused to amplify the story. Meanwhile, FAITH continued publicly undeterred. Privately, they were bemoaning poor morale and the drop in donations.

Many FAITH staff members were unnerved. But they stayed silent because they couldn’t fathom quitting. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but FAITH was the place to work if you were a Christian interested in healing, and most of them had experienced it personally. Plus, the early faith healing results were so positive, and the rest of the Christian world was counting on them. So in response to the Atlantic piece, the FAITH Board decided to release a few statements, do a couple of select interviews with sympathetic press members, and close ranks. It was for the greater good of their gospel.

So FAITH’s stonewalling-with-a-smile continued to extol Christian principles of faith healing. But after the Atlantic story, other Christians began quietly having concerns. Still, they didn’t want to make a fuss about it. After all, when they saw FAITH members speaking at Christian conventions, they had such a sincere belief. They spoke so much about the light of Christ.

The Atlantic piece also featured another patient who had a rather traumatic experience in a FAITH trial. Rather than being healed, her mental health had gotten intensely worse, and she became suicidal. When she told her faith healer, he advised her not to go to traditional psychiatric facilities that wouldn’t understand. After climbing out of the hell of a falsely promised heaven, this patient was shocked to discover that the study data did not include the traumas of her experience at all.

Slowly, more people who initially felt healed began to wonder what other religious worldview they signed up for during the rush of the altar calls and laying on of hands. As they started mustering the courage to ask questions, they began to find the old Biblical answers unsatisfactory. “Don’t believe the lies. The truth shall set you free,” murmured FAITH’s sympathizers. But this no longer felt true nor free.

When we look back at interviews of ordinary people from the period who weren’t directly involved, we see statements like, “Non-Christians abuse people all the time,” or, “Well, what was FAITH supposed to do? They can’t control everything.”

Meanwhile, the victims of faith healing continued to be horrified as the movement captivated mainstream America’s fascination. Soon, just as FAITH had predicted, there were countless faith healing centers across the country. Emboldened by having survived the scandal, FAITH leaders continued vocalizing their grandest dreams. “Our goal isn’t just to treat mental illness,” FAITH’s head pastor Nathan Palmer liked to boast, “It’s to heal this country spiritually. It’s to bring everybody to the Jesus that lives inside them. And if we keep at it, we can Christianize the world by 1970.” Palmer would then mention that, to accomplish this, there would need to be tens of thousands of healers trained by FAITH, at the cost of thousands of dollars per person.

Sensing how hungry the country was for this new religious energy, many unlicensed faith healers set up private practices with members of FAITH’s Board serving in an “advisory” role with a financial stake. Many of these were simply businesses with a thin veneer of Christian jargon. Patients would receive prayer books and prayer beads so that, if going in for a full-blown exorcism was too daunting, they could get little bite-sized healing throughout the week.

By now, there was also a parallel ecosystem of unofficial Christian groups living out of sight of mainstream society. They believed so fervently in this healing that they had scarcely become aware of how many people had developed more psychological issues than when they came to church. Clandestine, ecstatic worship services continued, more altar calls were made, and more new believers said, “Yes Lord, I’m healed!” Who was anybody to doubt that? After all, that popular “no-nonsense” Christian author had just adapted The Healing Mind of Christ into a television series, delivering “scientific” faith healing education straight to every American’s home.

The faith healers scarcely recognized the high turnover rate among the flock. It was easy to miss; many were spiritual seekers that came and went, trying other churches before moving on with their lives, some not seeing the big deal, and nobody knowing where anybody ended up.

Sometimes abuse from these churches would make the news, but none of the healers really wanted to look into it. When it happened in their community, they committed to keeping it private out of “compassion” for the abuser. Often the abuser kept their pastoral role. “Jesus loves them too, after all.” They got so practiced at ignoring and justifying abuse that this became codified as a new article of faith. When people would later discuss how a church had hurt them, they would hear, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” Or, “Just keep praying.” Or, “There’s no such thing as a bad faith healing.”

Some people who received faith healing during this time remained diehard believers for the rest of their lives. Others were grateful for the movement of the Holy Spirit that led them to Jesus, but traded in the altar calls for stability. Faith healing never did get scientifically proven.

Eventually, most faith healing churchgoers forgot most of the abuse. But the survivors never forgot. A few others tried to bring sanity to the madness, but the madness could not integrate truth at the expense of their gospel. Some would muster up efforts to write op-eds in local papers to raise attention, but most of the press didn’t want to wade into religious matters.

Because who can argue with healing?

Of course, if you have not figured it out by now, there was no FAITH International. While faith healing was a very real and popular religious movement last century and attempts to scientifically prove faith healing have been made for ages, the details of this story are all fictional. But when it comes to the modern psychedelic therapy medicalization movement, the story is still true.

I imagine some people might take offense at comparing faith healing with psychedelic therapy (hell, some of the offended might be Pentecostals). A psychonaut might argue they know people who genuinely healed through psychedelics, or that their spirituality is more inherently material and less superstitious. They might point to Indigenous use, or protest that faith healers are still allowed to practice their religion without scientifically proving it.

But maybe the problem is that the medicalization movement isn't arguing for its religious freedom; it’s just manipulating the levers of power and the public mind to get it and profit from it. So if the implications of this allegory disturb, then perhaps the literal truth of psychedelic history should disturb more.

Granted, I would not say the analogy is perfect. There are a few key differences between that fictional world and ours. In this story, Christian hegemony protected faith healing. In our time, the psychedelic medicalization movement is protected from scrutiny by capitalism.

It’s also not a totally perfect comparison because the fictional FAITH International wasn’t giving highly-suggestible drugs. It didn’t have video-taped evidence of abuse. And it was consciously a religious movement.

Rest assured, whatever we have today is not something terrible like religion. In fact, it doesn’t have much of a theology of evil at all.

Subscribe now

Sometimes, people run away from the light. They feel they don't want to know what is right, for fear it should turn out to be something too hard for them to do. Perhaps they have read something, or listened to somebody who has strong ideas of his own about what is right, and for fear of being controlled, they shut their minds against the questions that have been raised. This is not a very satisfactory solution, because the questions keep nagging in the back of your head.

It is much better to sit down quietly and wait in the light that is always shining.

Licia Kuenning, “The Light of Christ”

A couple of months ago, my friend Paul told me about a lesser-known psychedelic figure from the legendary Harvard ’60s. Immediately I fell in love; coming across this hero’s candid writing was no small part of finding the inspiration to start this newsletter, and I had long been planning to profile her. In tragic providence, I learned that she passed away just a few weeks ago as I was writing about her, discovering a lovely obituary by her husband Larry.

Her name was Alicia Kuenning, or Licia, known in the ‘60s as Lisa Bieberman.1 Her tenure in psychedelia was a true embodiment of integrity. If there are such things as psychedelic saints, she would be one—though I imagine she would hate this label, for most of her life was spent outside of psychedelia. May peace be with her and her family, and may her spirit echo on long after her life of devoted love.

While known by her religious community and psychedelic historians, her story and perspective are rarely told among psychedelic laypeople. After penning a powerful essay in the late ‘60s (presented at the bottom of this piece), her husband says she attempted to work out a theology that was simultaneously Quaker, Christian, and psychedelic. After leaving psychedelics behind in 1971, she would spend her remaining years devoted to preserving Quaker history, writing essays about understanding its past. In learning more about her, I found her meditations on Quaker history to be just as applicable to psychedelic history or any tradition we care about:

Quakerism is a fascinating historical phenomenon. I myself often don't know what to make of it as regards how some of what Friends of the past believed and wrote applies to my own life. But I want to know the truth about what they were, and I want other Friends to know the truth about it. There is no integrity, and no education, in creating false images of the early Friends and then holding them up as models.

Licia Kuenning, “Publishing Old Quaker Texts”

While Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) are mentioned in every recap of the ’60s Harvard psychedelic scene, the name Lisa Bieberman is absent from most (though not all). Despite her relative obscurity, she was very much a leader, working for Leary’s International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). She produced a variety of community resources from the Psychedelic Telephone Directory, to the one-woman Psychedelic Information Center bulletin run out of her apartment, to harm reduction materials and tripping guides. And like a true psychedelic leader, she got busted for spreading the psychedelic gospel in sugar cubes.

After trading some emails, her husband told me that he is working on transcribing her autobiography, To Mark a Spot: A Psychedelic Pilgrimage about her nine years in the psychedelic movement. It will be released sometime in the next couple of years and will share much more of her story.

Phanerothyme Theology

The world is real;

The God who created it is alive, and will stay that way.

Lisa Bieberman, “Phanerothyme”

Kuenning was more than just a community builder, harm reductionist, or resource provider. She was a spiritual leader, taking a thoughtful religious approach to psychedelics that was counter-countercultural. As detailed in her essay, “Phanerothyme: a Western Approach to the Religious Use of Psychochemicals,” Bieberman understood her experience in radically different terms than the psychedelic mainstream. She was not afraid to make critical judgments over more “destructive” approaches to psychedelics that “cannot be maintained over any length of time, however intellectually appealing they may be at the moment they are propounded.”2

In what would be some of her last public words on psychedelics,3 Bieberman argues for a structured, Quaker-style minimalistic setting. Attempting to come up with a new vocabulary for a new approach, she defines “phanerothyme”—a term coined by Aldous Huxley to be a synonymous competitor to Humphrey Osmond's more popular “psychedelic”—as a method that seeks mental and spiritual clarity:

Call “psychedelic” what you will, but by phanerothyme shall be meant only those substances to the use of which a sober religious purpose is appropriate, those substances of which the occasions of ingestion mark milestones in one's life, to which one looks long after the event for encouragement and faith…The test is not how magnificent the visions, but rather how clear is the understanding obtained, and the test of clarity is its applicability to the decisions of daily life.4

Her theoretical approach should be compelling to psychedelically-curious Christians, if too optimistic in hindsight. While her thoughts are far more grounded than her contemporaries, the ‘60s version of Bieberman underestimated the potential long-term side effects of regular psychedelic use.

There is another fascinating chapter of her psychedelic odyssey that’s even less covered by psychedelic historians: correspondence with the Catholic monk Thomas Merton.

Silent Pen Pals

Before “Phanerothyme,” Bieberman wrote, “On Getting the Message” for a short-lived psychedelic magazine called Innerspace, which Merton somehow obtained. In the piece, she discusses the difficulty of communicating the psychedelic experience. Merton was a world-famous monk who was inundated with letters, spending much of his monastic vocation responding to questions about interfaith spirituality, politics, and life. On the topic of psychedelics, he had only ever expressed skepticism at best. But he was so struck by her piece that he took the time to write her an unsolicited letter. Here is an excerpt5:

The problem of experience and communication, solitude and community, is something I have grappled with for a very long time. It is true one must communicate. But it is most important also not to communicate in words, sometimes, and above all not to be anxious to communicate, not to be anxious to be understood, not to be justified, not to be accepted necessarily. And so on. You know what I mean. I honestly think you people need more than anything else a disciplina arcani (like the first Christians—they did not talk about the sacraments). You need to get a good sane group of you underground fast, because with the public emotion and fury about it this whole thing may dissolve fast into something it need not be. You all strike me as lovely innocent people who may suddenly find that all hell has been let loose, and believe me the establishment in this country has developed that to a high pitch of perfection. I know of course this is a sort of charismatic thing like that in the fourteenth century, and no one can keep it underground or even want to. But I think you should have that too. I think you really need an element of silence, of loneliness, of non-communication in order to make the whole thing more valid and keep it so.

April 15, 19676

Merton’s full letter, published in the anthology The Road to Joy, shows a level of compassion for her psychedelic optimism. This sharply differed from the monk’s usual psychedelic views, which were becoming partially influenced by his growing interest in Indigenous spirituality.

But four months later, Bieberman’s patience with the psychedelic scene had run out, and within a few years, she would quit drug use altogether.

A Friendly Life

While this ended the most public portion of her life, it was only a sliver of her entire humanity. Her faith journey continued on, marrying and changing her name to Licia Kuenning, starting a new Quaker community and publishing house with her husband. It was not always easy between her and other Quakers, known as Friends, because the Kuennings were looking for a Quaker-style Christian community—truer to the Quaker past—that was at odds with contemporary organized Quakerism. This culminated in her eventual declaration that in the year 2006, the Biblically-prophesied New Jerusalem would arrive in Farmington, Maine.7

But even in her mistakes, she displayed her virtues, as one Maine local noted:

[She] stood up on the stairs of the bandstand and acknowledged that nothing had happened, that she’d been wrong, at least about the date. I admired her for that—admired her a great deal—because a lot of prophets would have slunk off, never to be seen again. And people around town were pretty forgiving, too. She was only human, after all, and the prediction hadn’t caused the slightest harm to anyone.

While such grace in error is admirable, far more important than what she got wrong was what she got right. As noted in her obituary, “Licia was always marked by single-minded devotion to what she believed in, even though her beliefs changed over the course of her life.” Coming from this stranger in shared geography but a distant psychedelic land, I find her devotion to show a clarity of heart—a truly phanerothyme soul. Well done, good and faithful servant.8

So yes, if there were a psychedelic canonization process, I would first nominate Saint Alicia for performing the miracle of psychedelic integrity. But I have no doubt she would hate this name. Licia was a unique Christian who wanted a community like the Quakers of the past; she was not a Saint, just an old-school Friend.

But I must confess that, no matter how much I quote her, this piece is not a proper tribute. In fact, the more I excerpt her, the more I disobey her wishes about how we remember figures of the past, which I only discovered as I was finishing up this piece:

Read whole documents rather than excerpts or condensed versions… Remember that those who excerpt documents have an agenda: what they leave out is what does not suit their agenda. It might nevertheless be important for understanding the document….I do not say to Friends that if they study the Quaker past they will learn how to recreate it. The seventeenth century will not come again. I have the more modest hope that we will learn to tell the truth about it.

Licia Kuennig, “Understanding the Quaker Past”

Between my selective use of her and Merton’s words, I feel properly called out.

I must confess my agenda was to honor her as a figure of remarkable psychonautic integrity. But in the challenge of her words, she gently reminds me that she was more than a psychedelic hero or a Christian Quaker communitarian, more than Lisa Bieberman or Alicia Kuenning. There is just too much of her that has been left out.

I hope at least one person reading this honors Alicia by reading her full pieces, straight from the source. Her words are far more provoking beyond their psychedelic, Christian, or Quaker contexts, and they remain in the present tense because the Light keeps shining through them. She challenges us to think about why we tell the truth about what we love, bounded by the limits of our sources, our attention, our biases, and our aims.

Perhaps any excerpts we make of any of our heroes cannot help but diminish them in the name of our agendas. Perhaps the best we can do is fess up to it. And perhaps we can forgive ourselves for our own self-diminishment, for anything we write is only a small excerpt of our total thought. Any story we tell about ourselves is just a curation to be used, hopefully for the good of someone else. And we—even in our fullest, truest selves—are only an excerpt of the Light.

Given her departed wisdom, it is only proper that I let her have the last word through a full republication of her original essay in The New Republic, August 5, 1967. It is a piece of Light as relevant as ever.

And even though I improperly labeled her a psychedelic saint for my own purposes, I hope she can forgive me for lifting her up as a psychedelic role model. But I don’t think she would want to be primarily remembered this way.

So let me just say thank you, Licia, for being a Friend.

The Psychedelic Experience

Lisa Bieberman ● August 5, 1967

It was five years ago that I attached myself to the Cambridge group that started the psychedelic movement. In those days we didn’t use the word “psychedelic” much — the accepted phrase was “consciousness-expanding drugs,” or more briefly, “mushroom,” since the Harvard group worked mainly with psilocybin. There was a whole new world in the mushroom, so we said — the key to a stronger, richer human life soon to be made available to every man. We were full of the happy excitement of sharing a soon-to-be-public secret that was going to save the world. 

Were we like today’s novice acidheads? It is hard for me to tell, because my perspective has changed so much. To my younger, more naive eyes, the mushroom people were idealistic as children, brave as Christian martyrs, and full of wisdom. They were an indissoluble family, destined to go forward, hand in hand, to win souls and bring in the Kingdom. 

I have no idea what has become of most of them. They are not in the movement any more. Some of the conservative fringe members are still conservative fringe members. Some went “straight.” A few drifted away from psychedelics to follow Meher Baba or embrace some other form of occultism. The originally most enthusiastic members just disappeared, sometimes turning up briefly in this city or that, but no longer activists. The leaders, Leary, Alpert and Metzner, apparently unmoved by the fact that their own group had fallen apart, went out to preach LSD as the key to consciousness-expansion, to new starry-eyed kids, forming new groups that fell apart in turn. 

Two years ago I started a bimonthly newsletter called the Psychedelic Information Center (PIC) Bulletin, in which I reported the activities of various projects purportedly aimed at furthering the use of psychedelics for religious or philosophical purposes. The collected back issues are a catalogue of frauds and failures. I finally had to change my editorial policy, because I came to realize that I did readers a disservice to report on things like the Neo-American Church, the League for Spiritual Discovery, the psychedelic shops and so on, as if they were to be taken seriously. Most of the psychedelic projects I reported have flopped, even though the more obvious losers were screened out before printing. Those that remain are a caricature of the psychedelic vision, a mockery of the idealism of youth. (The Church of the Awakening, run by John Aiken, is an exception. It is led by older people who mean what they say.) If the utopian vision of 1962 was too good to be true, it does not follow that what came out of that had to be this bad. 

Does the psychedelic experience really have to be offered to the public in the form of bizarre shows? Do the psychedelic people have to live in squalid ghettos? Does their conversation have to be a rapid-fire rap of slogans and meaningless declarations of “love”? Does LSD still have to be used so excessively and so carelessly; do freakouts have to be regular occurrences at Millbrook (Leary’s Mecca)? Do interpersonal relationships among acidheads have to be so shallow, so short lived? Must the leaders deliberately foster distrust between age groups? Do cheating and stealing have to be the rule among acid dealers? 

The word “psychedelic” is ruined; it might as well be scrapped by those who still wish to speak earnestly about their experience. Psychedelic now means gaudy illegible posters, gaudy unreadable tabloids, loud parties and anything paisley, crowded noisy discotheques, trinket shops and the slum districts that patronize them. There was something I used to mean by psychedelic but if those posters are psychedelic, that other thing isn’t. Put “psychedelic” down along with “community,” “love,” “religion” and other good words the hippies, with the help of Leary & Co., have corrupted. (A community is a place for people to live and work together, put down roots, raise their children and grow old. There is no psychedelic community, least of all at Millbrook, a madhouse place that nobody can stand for long. Of the group that started there, none remain except Leary and his daughter and son. In the mad scramble to be In, nobody asks what became of the people who were In last year, and the latter are silent. How long can this farce be played out? Apparently indefinitely; the turnover of Leary’s followers goes on, each new group of converts as true-believing as the last, until their turn comes to fall out through divorce, rejection, psychosis or disillusionment.) 

Whatever happened to the Neo-American Church Boo-Hoos whose names I used to publish (and what will happen to the new ones)? Art Kleps, “your Chief Boo-Hoo,” went to Florida where he knew there was a warrant for his arrest, got raging drunk, picked a fight with his ex-wife and passed out in a railroad station where he was picked up by police and, when his identity was learned, held on the old charge. (This is what he means when he writes in his recent bulletin, “This is not a good test case — too messy.”) I made the mistake of feeling sorry for him and raised $1,000 for his bail, only to have him retreat into Millbrook and refuse to appear for trial, thus causing me to lose most or possibly all of the bail money. He is able to get away with this because psychedelic people have such short memories, and because they apparently do not expect their leaders to be trustworthy. 

Not the least consequence of all this is the loss of the possibility of trust. A sensitive person can no longer distribute LSD after seeing how it is to be used. One can no longer buy LSD; the dealers cannot be trusted. It is unlikely that I will ever go anybody's bail again. No old head expects much of any newly announced psychedelic project (unless it goes commercial, and then it may become big and rich, but irrelevant). 

Younger converts, however, may be taken in rather cruelly. Last winter a college freshman in Kansas, having been appointed Neo-American Boo-Hoo for his campus, publicized his appointment and began running LSD sessions for members. The church was soon infiltrated by federal agents, and the boy was arrested in the act of handing the sacrament to one of them. “Attaway to get busted, Jim,” wrote Kleps in one of his bulletins. But when the trial approached, Jim’s friends tried in vain to obtain from Kleps the membership applications of the entrapping agents, which were essential to the defense. They write: “We all tried repeatedly to get in touch with Art Kleps. The first phone call roused a secretary who didn’t know who he was but promised to leave a message ‘somewhere.’ The second call also had vague overtones, but we finally got a message for Kleps to send us the applications which the two narcotics agents had filled out during their sleuthing of Jim. The trial began, and still no membership cards showed up. We called again, and this time no one even answered the telephone. There was never any communication, no money, no support, help in any way. Tim Leary did send a cryptic note offering love and help, but little came of that. Jim was placed in the absurd position of having the money for his lawyer come from [those] he was trying to oppose, the Episcopal Church. (His father is a priest.)” 

Let those be warned who think a fake church is better than none for testing the laws. In this sad letter, naiveté of distance still shows through the disillusionment, e.g., in the supposition that any of the female adornments of the Millbrook estate could be described as a “secretary,” and in the assumption that Art Kleps would even have wanted documents on file. In his mellower moods he has been observed to toss mail unread into the fire. The experience described is typical of what is to be expected in attempting to communicate with the estate at Millbrook (known as “Castalia” after Hesse, or maybe Kafka): the note from Leary is also typical. It is Leary’s custom to offer his disciples love and help on any occasion, and to mean absolutely nothing by it. 

I have been told I shouldn't publish these things, because they will weaken the image of the psychedelic movement, and that any means are justified in popularizing LSD because it is the only thing that can prevent nuclear war. This silliness is part of the Psychedelic Line, the collection of half-truths, wishful thinking, and lies repeated until they are believed, that has the movement morally paralyzed. LSD had been sold out, and it’s up to anyone who still cares about, or remembers, the psychedelic experience to reject the phony, commercialized thing that has been erected in its name. 

Vacant-faced kids drop by the Psychedelic Information Center and ask, “What’s happening?” Pressed for what they mean, they usually turn out to be looking for a rock band, or maybe a shop selling buttons, or news of the latest busts. I have nothing for them that they want, and they go away puzzled — they thought I had a Thing here, but it turns out to be just a few publications, no flashing lights, so it isn’t hip. 

There’s still the same thing happening, of course, that’s been happening since psychedelics became available: the possibility of having an experience that will reawaken a person to the basic truths he understood as a child, and point the way to becoming a better man or woman. (But even this possibility is cut off for many of the kids — they have had 100 trips and are jaded. Thus the pathetic search for drugs “stronger than acid.”) 

That would be the only psychedelic happening that I’d be interested in — if a few people could be helped to lead better lives with the aid of psychedelics. If the Indians can do it with peyote, it should be possible for us — if we could just get clear of the cultish, flashy, idiotic pseudo-underground. 

I do have a plan for it, involving a house in the country, above ground where guided sessions will be run for small groups, by advance application. But it won’t go into effect until 1970, as it will take me that long to earn enough money and make adequate preparations and plans. I have seen too many psychedelic projects fall apart to go into one of importance without considerable planning. I have been planning this for more than a year — but then there is no reason for anybody but me to believe that it will work. If another head told me he was going to do something like that, I would be skeptical. I believe it because it is my own commitment. I will not abandon the psychedelics, to which I owe my most valued experiences, to their present fate. 

The LSD story up to now has been a tragedy. A tool of tremendous potential value for science, medicine and personal life enrichment has been allowed, partly by default, to become the plaything of unscrupulous cultists. Most of us have been too hypnotized by the increasing publicity attending the splashy hippy happenings to remember or assert that LSD was once thought to bear quite a different message. Whether one places the blame for its corruption on the politicians who drove LSD underground, on the academicians who allowed this to happen, or on the opportunists who took advantage of the result, the fact remains that society could hardly have done a more thorough job of confounding the good, and magnifying the evil potential in these powerful drugs if that had been the avowed intention of all concerned.

If the future of LSD is to be more wholesome than its past, it must be squarely recognized that the most publicized advocates of the psychedelic are its worst enemies. We cannot rely on them to fight our battles for us, whether it be for religious freedom, the right to do research, or the dissemination of accurate information. Flower power is no substitute for integrity.

Subscribe now