Otherwise, we run the risk of replicating the mistakes of the 1960s in which these compounds were actively promoted by poster children such as Timothy Leary for widespread use without appreciation for the risks to individuals or to broader culture. It seemed to me, from the very beginning, that we would need to proceed in baby steps, starting with evaluating safety and efficacy through existing regulatory and culturally accepted channels such as medical use. My initial focus has been on the approval of psychedelics as therapeutics. In his own words, here is what Griffiths has to say about his life's journey. Griffiths PhD Professorship Fund, an endowed psychedelic research program that aims to "advance understanding of well-being and spirituality in the service of promoting human flourishing for generations to come." As a legacy project, he recently created the Roland R. He's filled with "gratitude for the miracle of sentient existence" and hope for the future. Just over a year ago, Griffiths, who is 76, received a terminal stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins, which he founded, has been at the epicenter of it all. Since then, his clinical trials and hundreds of published papers have shown the drug's significant therapeutic benefits for treating depression and nicotine addiction and, perhaps most dramatically, a profound reduction in end-of-life anxiety for people with cancer. In an initial study, most participants reported having "mystical-type" experiences, and 14 months later, two-thirds of those people described the experience as one of the five most meaningful of their lives. In 1999, the psychopharmacologist, whose research had previously been focused on drug addiction, convinced Johns Hopkins School of Medicine leadership and government agencies to let him initiate a research program focused on psilocybin. Psychedelics were banned by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act and, before his work, the last legal dose of psilocybin given to an American was in 1977. He famously brought psilocybin-the active ingredient in "magic" mushrooms-back into the field of medical research for the first time in decades. In a career that's melded scientific rigor with open-mindedness, Griffiths has blazed a new era into the research of psychedelics.
He first dabbled in meditation as a graduate student, and though talk of "heart chakras" left him dubious, he used the practice as metaphor and leaned in. Roland Griffiths is a self-defined skeptic-but he'll entertain the fanciful. By As told to Greg Rienzi / Published Summer 2023