Katherine MacClean, Matthew Johnson, and Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins have published their study of changes in personality after psilocybin-occasioned mystical experience. (Full disclosure: they’re friends.) From the abstract:
Read the rest…
July 16th was the anniversary of Gordon Alles’ first self-experiment with MDA in 1930 —to my knowledge the first experience with an MDMA-like drug. Much later, at a 1959 conference at UCSF, he described his experience. If you’ve ever wondered what a hallucinogen/MDMA-like experience would be like to someone without any expectations aside from an interest in finding treatments for allergies and congestion, here is his remarkably observant account:
Read the rest…
Roland Griffiths, Bill Richards, Matthew Johnson, Una McCann, and Bob Jesse have a follow-up to their landmark paper in which they reported mystical experiences in volunteers given psilocybin. In this new paper, they find that time has not diminished the impact of the mystical experience seen in many of their carefully prepared participants. 14 months later, the experience is still important. At this time point, 58% of 36 volunteers rate the experience on the psilocybin session as among the five most personally meaningful experiences and two-thirds rate it among the five most spiritually significant experiences in their lives.
Read the rest…
Looking back on the College on Drug Dependence annual meeting, a number of standout presentations about MDMA and psychedelics (or ‘hallucinogens’ as we scientists call them) spring to mind. Here, I highlight just three of them even though I could spend hours and pages discussing a larger number of fascinating presentations.
Read the rest…