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Why do you think your interest in this alternative domain, let’s say, became so intense that it was able to displace an already developed expertise and a fully functioning career in this other direction? What was going on? Well, there’s something very compelling about the nature of these transformative experiences, and that’s what we can describe the kinds of effects that emerge with the psychedelics. But, you know, more than that in in meditation, in prayer practice, you know, there’s there really is there arises a sense of the ineffable and and there are a lot of things tied to that. But but but meaning is is integrally involved in that. And that, frankly, just became so compelling to me. As a matter of fact, it it kind of dwarfed my interest in drug abuse, pharmacology to the point that I actually considered at one point dropping out of scientific the scientific academy and going off to India to an ashram to do much more intensive meditation practice. Were there exist with your existential reasons for that? Or was it merely a matter of where your curiosity took you? I mean, so I mean, you had a you had a very well established and productive and I would presume meaningful and engaging career. I don’t know how you found the teaching aspect of that. Was that rewarding to you as well? Or were you more a pure researcher? OK, OK. But I mean, you had a fully functioning professional life at that point. But but something gripped you. And were there personal reasons for that? Or do you think it was more a manifestation of curiosity? I think it was raw curiosity. But, you know, once once one enters into that relationship of investigating this mystery of of of what it is that we’re doing here, right? I mean, this is it’s kind of the core existential mystery of being that I think comes up in this. This is my framing now. At the time, I didn’t you know, I didn’t know how to even contextualize this. I knew it was something that emerged from meditation. I thought it had something to do with what religious teachings were about. I couldn’t I had I just had no context for putting that together. But it was it was super compelling and it seems incredibly important. And I would say if anything, it’s it’s at least you know, that that interest and the importance in it hasn’t faded one bit for me. So why did you decide then instead of abandoning what you’d already created and journeying, let’s say to India to for the the second half of your life, that that’s how the Jungians would think about it, I suppose, is the spiritual part of your life. Why did you decide to continue walking down the scientific pathway? And what do you think of that decision? Well, I think it’s one of the best decisions I could have possibly made. Let’s see. It it was what I knew. I mean, it was all all the tools I had. I was in a unique position. I started reading the literature on psychedelics and going, huh, this is this is interesting. And I wonder if this is true. And frankly, I went into that first study. And this and this may have made me an acceptable person to take this on. I went into that first study with a deep sense of skepticism. I was very happy with what I was learning about the nature of these experiences from meditation. I was kind of put off by the what struck me as excessive enthusiasm. Among those people who have continued to be engaged in psychedelics. Well, enthusiasm means to be filled with God’s spirit. So it’s exactly the right word for for for people who’ve been by psilocybin, let’s say, or hypothetically by excessive enthusiasm. And of course, that is a danger. There’s no it’s not like there’s any shortage of religious manias. I mean, that can manifest itself as part of manic depressive disorder. And you see you see religious experience of a sort often in schizophrenic delusions as well. So it’s not like there’s no danger there. There’s plenty of danger. I agree. And there, there still is. And the first study, the first study was which which one was that? The first study was looking at a high dose of psilocybin and comparing it to a fairly high dose of methylphenidate or Ritalin under under very deeply blinded conditions. So it’s a good study because you used an active placebo, so to speak. Did you have a placebo in there as well? Or was it methylphenidate versus psilocybin? It was just straight up comparing methylphenidate in psilocybin, but under deeply blinded conditions where people knew that in the course of two or three sessions, they would have at least one session in which they would get a dose of psilocybin. But they were also told that they could get I think it was 13 other psychoactive compounds. We recruited in only people who had zero prior experience with psychedelics. So because the allegedly the the profile of subjective effects are so unique that that people could unblind themselves by taking in naive people. We also eliminated a potential recruitment bias of people who were had good experiences. How did you convince the ethics committees that it was acceptable to first of all to do this at all and also the administrators at your university and second that it was acceptable to use naive participants? Why did they? Why did they? And do you think that in today’s climate, do you think that that study would now be possible? Well, let’s say if you hadn’t laid the groundwork for it. You know, I think partly it was good luck and partly it it actually speaks very well of Johns Hopkins and their ethic review procedures. So when I assembled that protocol with some help from the Council on Spiritual Practices and counseling from Bob Jesse, when I assembled that protocol, I asked the question, I mean, I assembled that protocol. I actually thought that there’s probably less than a 50% chance it would even be approvable because because of these ethical committees, it has to go through, you know, not only the Hopkins Ethical Committee, but FDA and FDA hadn’t approved a study giving a high dose of a psychedelic to a psychedelic, naive individual for, I don’t know, you know, 25 plus years, decades. And and so it was no means clear that it would even even go. But but it was so interesting to me. And as I said, I was losing losing comparative interest in the other things that I was doing that I thought, well, you know, why not? The the ethical scrutiny that that got was as was unlike, as you might imagine, unlike any previous protocol or even any protocol since it went through many levels of scrutiny within my institution, Johns Hopkins, including being looked at by the dean and the managing attorney’s office and and whatever. And and I’m I have to say, I’m very proud of Johns Hopkins as an institution. It’s stunning that they did it. I can’t believe that they did it. I can’t what what what arguments did you marshal to to put up against? Because, I mean, it’s so easy for a committee to if they see risk, just to say no, because no is simple. The problem goes away and no one’s accountable for it. Yes. Yes is complicated. And so how did you convince them this was a worthwhile endeavor, especially given your own skepticism at that point? Well, it really came down to a science and risk benefit ratio. I think the big risk that most institutions would have caved in on is a political risk, a reputational risk. You know what? You know, to be associated with psychedelics like that. Look what Larry did for Harvard. Yeah, exactly. But the committee at Hopkins that looked at this really put the politics to one side and weighed the risk benefit ratio to to the volunteers. What did they see as the benefit? Oh, in terms of just understanding the nature, let’s say we put it forward as a comparative pharmacology study. OK. And so and we had done a lot of work with comparative pharmacology. And in fact, I had a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to compare what one of my specialties at the time was sedative hypnotics. And and I had a grant that had proposed to compare ketamine, which is an NMDA dissociative anesthetic, with some other compounds. And and so I I modified it to say, well, we’re going to look at ketamine, but I think we’ll look at psilocybin and instead of comparing it to a classic. OK, so there was some incrementalism there because ketamine is already like radically psychoactive, although perhaps not so much as a pure psychedelic, let’s say. So there was some incrementalism and you’d already got support from granting agencies and you had all your credibility behind you. Yeah. And and so what we could what we could argue is we’re we’re looking at relative abuse potential here. Now, the study as it’s published doesn’t read out as that, but that that was really how it was designed as a classic comparative pharmacology study in which we could compare the effects of psilocybin to methamphetidate in healthy volunteers. We had, you know, we could look at things like that. I can see that that would be you could make a mount of pretty straightforward, valid scientific argument for that. You have methamphetidate, which is a standard psychomotor stimulant, basically dopaminergically mediated something like cocaine. And then you have this strange psychedelic and there the the reason they’re addictive is not or if they are. And of course, there’s tremendous discussion about that, but they they don’t fit neatly into the category of other abusable drugs. And so that that is an issue that’s worthy. It’s very hard to get animals to voluntarily take psychedelics at least regularly, whereas you can do it with cocaine with no problem. So I can see that that you can make a basic science argument right there. And you said also abuse potential. OK, OK, OK. Fair enough. I’m still stunned that they managed it. But but but it’s so interesting to see how much work and preparation and care at all sorts of levels had to go into that before it was made possible. And it’s also even possible that maybe that caution was warranted because one of the things that really strikes me about your research program is that it hasn’t got out of hand. Right. I mean, and that’s what happened in Harvard in the early 60s when Leary started playing around, let’s say, with LSD, which you don’t play around with. You’ve been able to really keep this within a tightly bound scientific box while still investigating and popularizing the reality of the mystical experience for the participants.