Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [59]
Richards would guide me to another insight. It was a signpost that would point me back to Christian Science, the religion I had dismissed a decade earlier. Sometimes, a brush with “God” or another dimension of consciousness transforms a person physically. It is as if the mere possibility of a hidden reality realigns a person’s body.
Researchers started to chase down this mysterious connection between psychedelic experience and healing a half-century ago. They envisioned a revolution in the treatment of autism, depression, terminal illness, and alcoholism. Many of the early studies were haphazard, bearing a sort of gee-whiz quality. They also yielded stunning anecdotal results. But before researchers could compile convincing evidence, the golden age of psychedelics came to an end.
Cancer in the Age of Psychedelics
By the 1970s, the U.S. government was fed up with the sixties drug culture and Timothy Leary’s call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Favoring a butcher’s knife where a scalpel would have done nicely, it shut down the sale of all psychedelic drugs, not only for recreational purposes but for research as well. A rich area of psychopharmacology thus became off-limits, but not before a cohort of rock-star researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and other research institutions conducted a raft of studies on the effect of psychedelics on a range of mental diseases and phobias.
In the mid-1960s, Eric Kast at Chicago Medical School stumbled on a surprising side effect of LSD—one that hinted at the symbiotic relationship among body, mind, and, dare I say, spirit. Kast found that after being treated with LSD, patients with end-stage cancer suffered less pain and “displayed a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations.” 10 Study after study confirmed this. From 60 to 70 percent of the terminally ill patients enjoyed a dramatic turnaround in mood and outlook on life after tripping on LSD. Many saw their pain level drop precipitously.11 The question was: Why? Did the chemicals reduce their pain directly—or indirectly, by reducing their stress and thus their pain? Or did these studies hint at another, spiritual, dimension?
I wanted to know the backstory to these psychedelic studies. I tracked down a few of the researchers, now approaching their seventies, who were too experienced, or too old, to worry about today’s scientific reductionism. One of those researchers was Bill Richards, who helped conduct the Johns Hopkins study. In 2006, I met Richards at his home office, nestled in lush wooded land adjacent to a wilderness park in Baltimore. He sat in his cozy office on a brilliant July morning, a man with copper skin and a gray goatee and a half-smile that put me instantly at ease. A few minutes in his calm presence and I thought, I wouldn’t mind taking hallucinogens from this man.
Why did psychedelics help the terminally ill? I asked.
The subjects traveled to “another level of consciousness. The deeper the mystical experience, the better the outcome,” he said.
“There’s a study I did with a hallucinogen called DPT,” Richards later remembered. “We divided the cancer patients into two groups after the fact—those who had experienced mystical consciousness, and those who hadn’t. And we compared those two groups, and those who did experience the mystical consciousness manifested more capacity for intimate contact, for example, as well as decreases in anxiety and depression.”
“And pain, right?” I asked him.
“Reduced pain for some,” he replied.“When we were working with LSD, we recorded decreased reports of pain. That was also