Sacred Intentions: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies →
The team had been having marked success in treating alcoholism and neuroses with LSD and other psychedelics (in fact, the man who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, praised LSD’s spiritual uses and wanted to distribute it as a supplement to AA meetings). But then an intriguing new avenue of research came about by sheer circumstance when a member of the research department came down with terminal cancer. “Since there were such promising results with alcoholics and neurotics, we wondered if it would be helpful for her,” Richards says. “She was open to it.”
The woman’s own written report in Richard’s 1979 paper in the Journal of Altered States of Consciousness reads, in part:
I was alone in a timeless world without boundaries … Suddenly, I recognized that I was a moment in time, created by those before me and in turn the creator of others. This was my moment and my function has been completed … .
I cannot remember the logic of the experience, but I became poignantly aware that the core of life is love … I felt that I was reaching out to the world — to all people — but especially those closest to me. I wept long for the wasted years, the search for identity in false places, the neglected opportunities, the emotional energy lost in basically meaningless pursuits….
Later as members of my family came, there was a closeness that seemed new … All noticed a change in me. I was radiant, and I seemed at peace, they said … I am living now, and being. I can take it as it comes … .I am still me, but more at peace. My family senses this and we are closer.”
“She experienced a dramatic decrease in anxiety and depression and lived the time that she had left much more fully,” Richards says. “That started our interest in applying psychedelic therapy to cancer patients.” Encouraged by the dramatic results, Richards and his colleagues conducted sessions for 91 cancer patients, mostly at Sinai Hospital in Northwest Baltimore, over the following 10 years.
“There are a lot of people with cancer lying in bed, depressed, just lying there, suffering, preoccupied with pain and estranged from their family members. Sort of half alive while they’re waiting for the cancer to advance. We found that people who have mystical experiences tend to benefit most dramatically. They resolve conflicts of guilt, grief, estrangement from family members, breaking through the denial and pretense that often accompanies cancer. That’s incredibly helpful. They are less anxious, less depressed, closer in their personal relationships, less preoccupied with pain.
“And, perhaps most significantly, those who have mystical experiences claim loss of a fear of death … that they somehow feel part of something eternal. Not necessarily personal immortality — there’s a paradox there — it’s not denying death, but that somehow in spite of the reality of death, it’s a good universe. Life makes sense. And there’s every reason to live the rest of this lifetime as fully as possible. It’s pretty inspiring.”
