Divinity Laundering: This Is Your Journalist On Drugs
How Michael Pollan’s journalistic malpractice in The New Yorker ran damage control for his friends in a psychedelic research scandal
“One of the ways you hold an industry accountable is through good journalism.”
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.
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 Religious Science of Johns Hopkins
In August 2023, I became a whistleblower about the spiritual missions, hidden issues, and unexamined consequences of 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
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:
There were two unapproved study team members, one who was also a study sponsor, directly engaged in the research;
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;
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
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.
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.
In this piece, the term “laundering” refers not to illegal activity, but taking ethically “dirty” data—research findings an IRB deemed unfit to publish—and making them appear “clean” by falsely presenting them.
6/17 update - Added Silver’s status as co-director of the UC BCSP
Graduate Theological Union, “Panel Discussion: Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/watch?v=KDeARkThz2I , timestamp 1:00:27
Graduate Theological Union, “Panel Discussion: Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/watch?v=KDeARkThz2I , timestamp 1:06:30
Graduate Theological Union, “Panel Discussion: Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/watch?v=KDeARkThz2I , timestamp 24:30
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, p.34.
Robert Jesse, remarks for Boston Psychedelic Research Group, Jan 10, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=LU1Aunh8EEk
Jesse, “From the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Findings to the Reconstruction of Religion,” Presentation at MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=lM-yinhpOgQ, timestamp 33:00.
Ibid., timestamp 17:00.
Jesse, “Psychedelic Renaissance,” Presentation at Horizons 2016, youtube.com/watch?v=2Ao88YbX2Zc, timestamp 7:11.
Jesse, remarks at Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, June 2024, youtube.com/watch?v=IveXdxdDXx8, timestamp 3:15.
Edited 7/2/25 to indicate my correspondence was sent to The New Yorker ahead of publication.
See above.
Don Lattin has indicated online that he feels Pollan has not fairly cited his work, which includes a book about the study two years ago (as a note, writer Erica Rex previously accused Pollan of plagiarism).
6/15 update - An earlier version of this read “a sect that likely used psychoactive substances for religious purposes.” After some reader comments, I realized I had copied an old note into this section that failed to reflect the current scholarly discourse.
Brian Muraresku. The Immortality Key, p.388.
Notably, “whistleblower” is a term that whistleblowers had to fight for (see Carl Elliot’s book on whistleblowing); Graduate Theological Union, “Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/live/WwXbPfx1vAI , timestamp 41:00
Graduate Theological Union, “Panel Discussion: Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/watch?v=KDeARkThz2I , timestamp 1:09:50
Graduate Theological Union, “Panel Discussion: Psychedelics and Spirituality in Light of the Religious Leaders Study,” youtube.com/watch?v=KDeARkThz2I , timestamp 1:09:50
Due to an embarrassing copy/paste issue, I erroneously said “repeated” here in the original text, fixed 6/13/25.