The Published "Effects" and the Unpublished Effects
After late-stage drama, one of two papers in the psychedelic clergy study is published. Other things weren't.
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 It appears that the second paper, with qualitative analysis led by a study donor, will not be published at this time.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 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 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.
Robert 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 ~17:00.
For those outside the joke: for a long time, the phrase “bad trip” was anathema in favor of this euphemism.