(RNS) — “I was the kid who never even smoked pot. I was very cautious, and a rule follower,” said Rabbi Julie Danan, spiritual leader of Seaside Jewish Community in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
So when Danan took the short train ride to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore in the summer of 2016 to receive a legal 20 milligram dose of psilocybin, it was, in her words, “out of character.”
Danan was participating in what was billed as a clinical trial exploring the effects of psilocybin in clergy, run by Johns Hopkins and New York University researchers. Other participants included four other rabbis, a Catholic priest, several Protestant ministers and a Muslim leader.
Like a few of her fellow participants, Danan told Religion News Service, her psilocybin trip was “the most powerful and overwhelming spiritual experience of my life.”
In the intervening decade, the Johns Hopkins/New York University study has taken on an almost mythic quality among some psychedelic enthusiasts as they awaited the results and imagined their impact. The study, some hoped, could reduce stigmas toward entheogens in certain religious spaces, while proving the value of spirituality in psychedelic ones. Others worried it would generate moral panic or be wielded as license to use psychedelics indiscriminately.
Rabbi Julie Danan. (Courtesy photo)
But since Danan took her first dose, no confirmed results of the trial had been released until Friday (May 30), ostensibly delayed by controversy over the execution of the study and the illness and death of its lead author, Roland Griffiths.
The long-awaited results were less controversial, revealing that 96% of the 24 participants retroactively rated one of their psilocybin experiences among the top five most spiritually significant of their lives.
It’s the second study to assess the impact of psilocybin on “religiously oriented individuals,” according to the release article, published in Psychedelic Medicine. During the now-infamous “Good Friday Experiment” in 1962, 10 seminary students received psilocybin and 10 others a placebo while listening to a sermon preached by Christian mystic Howard Thurman at Harvard’s Marsh Chapel.
Attempting a more rigorous approach, the new study recruited clergy participants through advertisements, subjected them to interviews and screenings and ultimately administered “moderately high” psilocybin doses during two separate sessions.
Sixteen months after their doses, most participants rated the experiences among the top five most psychologically insightful (83%) and personally meaningful (79%) experiences of their life. Most gave “strong or extreme endorsement” that the experience “increased their effectiveness in their religious vocation” (79%) and “increased the sense of the sacred in daily life” (79%). Forty-two percent said it was among the top five most psychologically challenging experiences of their life.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said William Richards, one of the architects of the study. “It’s a little like composing some musical composition, and the point comes where it’s complete, and who knows what it does as people listen to it … It could pave the way for some very constructive things in the future in medicine and education and religion.”
Though the findings are staggering for those involved, it’s hard to know how applicable they are to the general population. The study’s authors go so far as to warn that the findings could “lead to inflated expectations of benefits and under-appreciation of risks.”
Sharday C. Mosurinjohn, an associate professor of contemporary religious context at Queens University in Ontario, wasn’t surprised by the findings, noting that participants came to the study with “metaphysical chops.”
“There’s nothing surprising about the fact that that people with religious and spiritual orientations can take a psychedelic and have … an experience that is significant to them in their religious tradition, and an experience that is spiritually potent,” she said.
Gary Laderman, a religion scholar at Emory University in Atlanta and author of the forthcoming “Sacred Drugs: How Psychoactive Substances Mix with Religious Life,” said the study’s significance is simply its existence.
“I’m not sure what kind of generalizations anyone can make about 25 people, mostly self-selected liberal Christians, about the drugging impact of psilocybin on people,” said Laderman. “Still, Johns Hopkins and NYU schools of medicine carried out the study, and that in itself speaks to the powerful presence psychedelics have in popular consciousness — not just presence, but drawing power.”
Since the Hopkins/NYU study launched, American culture has continued to experience what Laderman refers to as a second “psychedelic awakening.” Once associated with peace movements, spiritual revolution, LSD research and acid rock, entheogens faded from public consciousness during the War on Drugs and are now making a comeback. “It’s all medicinal. It’s all about plant medicine, or the kind of therapeutic value of psychedelics,” said Laderman.
Interest in psychedelic substances’ spiritual dimensions have also emerged, fueling psychedelic churches and discussion at progressive Christian festivals and academic conferences. To their own surprise, several of the study’s participants were inspired to become leaders in these psychedelic-spiritual spaces.
The Rev. Jaime Clark-Soles, a Baptist minister and seminary professor, became a field scholar for the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality and an affiliated researcher for Harvard’s PULSE (Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience) program. The Rev. Jeff Vidt, a registered psychotherapist and hospital chaplain ordained in the United Church of Christ and on the board of the Canadian Association for Spiritual Care, is now an advocate for having spiritual care providers involved in psychedelic clinical trials.
Three of the participants — Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, the Rev. Hunt Priest and the Muslim leader Sughra Ahmed — have founded organizations to serve adherents from their respective faith groups interested in psychedelics.
The Rev. Jaime Clark-Soles. (Courtesy photo)
“While I don’t expect religious organizations to sort of take this on hook, line and sinker immediately, I think it’s up to people like myself to be able to say, well, I seem to be able to offer a bridge between psychedelic experiences and Muslim communities,” said Ahmed, a onetime associate dean at Stanford University who now leads Ruhani.
The participants’ vocational evolutions are striking, given that all were “psychedelically naïve” prior to the study. Many describe “spiritually significant” experiences they are still unpacking. “I ended up having this beatific vision of God,” said Clark-Soles, who added that she experienced “awe and reverence and majesty,” but in a “fully embodied, fully immersive” way.
Vidt, who took part in the trial shortly after learning he’d become a father, recalled meeting his unborn son during his first session. “My theological and spiritual framework at that time did not make room for this idea. But the idea was that this child chose me to be his father,” he said.
The experiences were not universally positive. Danan said she briefly experienced some of the “terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people through the centuries.” Kamenetz said he faced “a confused void.” The Rev. Seth Jones, a Congregational pastor who currently works in artificial intelligence, said of his second session, “If I weren’t at Johns Hopkins, it would have probably qualified as a bad trip.”
Their takeaways from the sessions were just as varied. Some came to see all religions as part of one truth, while many left feeling more grounded in their personal traditions. Some attributed their psychedelic experiences entirely to God, while others credited changes in brain chemicals or came away convinced that no spiritual experience, drug-induced or otherwise, happens divorced from the brain.
None of them knew who the others were until, around 2021, Priest launched the Christian psychedelic society Ligare and went public as a participant, and those who wanted to gradually found each other. They scheduled monthly Zoom calls, started a group chat and eventually met up for a (non-psychedelic) retreat in the Catskills with some of the researchers in 2022.
“I think the outcome in terms of the connection between the participants in the study is highly unusual for any study,” said Jones, who described meeting the others as discovering a “tribe you didn’t realize you were a part of.”
The group believed the study publication was imminent. Then came reports of ethical oversights. Of note were those raised by Matthew Johnson, a researcher and author on the study who charged Griffiths with biasing the study’s outcome by acting as a “spiritual leader,” framing the trial in spiritual terms and involving funders and psychedelic legalization advocates in the study itself. He also “had concerns that Roland Griffiths wanted psychedelic research to influence religious groups,” according to the New Yorker.
Psilocybin mushrooms. (Photo by Marek Piwnicki/Pexels/Creative Commons)
Meanwhile, an audit ordered by Hopkins’ Institutional Review Board found evidence of “serious non-compliance” with clinical trial practices. The published study reports these lapses, including the involvement of two of the study’s funders in the trial itself. These conflicts of interest “were not appropriately disclosed nor managed,” the study says. It also acknowledges that the researchers referred to “sacred experiences” in recruiting for the study and post-trial questionnaires, language that could have “biased” responses.
While several trial subjects told RNS they reject any insinuation that they were part of a “conspiracy theory” to “get everybody in America to take psychedelics,” as one put it, many acknowledged the study’s shortcomings, including the self-selection of participants and their lack of diversity — 97% of participants were white, 76% were Christians and 69% were male.
But the limitations, they said, don’t discount the study’s findings, or their own experiences.
“My expectation is that more research will be done,” said Kamenetz, whose organization, Shefa, supports “Jewish psychedelic explorers.” “That feels like the most potent outcome of the study coming out, is to have the data with all the asterisks at the bottom about the entanglements or the study design, or the music choices, or the language that people use in preparation or integration, and that we can have more studies to get better data. And that is part of the scientific method.”
The Rev. Dave Barnhart. (Courtesy photo)
Several participants cautioned against hasty psychedelic use, stressing that in the trial they were prepared mentally, and consumed the drug in an appropriate physical setting with trusted facilitators. Priest warned against “consumption culture” and the “sin” of profiting off something that grows naturally; Vidt emphasized the importance of learning from Indigenous practitioners.
The Rev. Dave Barnhart, a United Methodist pastor and participant who became a mental health counselor trained in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, said profound spiritual experiences don’t automatically translate into ethical transformation. “If there is something religious communities can offer the psychedelic community,” he said, “perhaps it’s the importance of a generative context and a moral tradition that brings us back to how we treat the most vulnerable around us.”
That sentiment was echoed by most of the eight participants who spoke to RNS. Many believe organized religions, flaws and all, offer infrastructure to support those wanting to process psychedelic encounters and can empower people to translate their encounters into outcomes. Several spoke positively of the United Church of Christ, a mainline denomination that had been poised to consider a resolution advocating for psychedelic decriminalization, before it was delayed on technical grounds.
“The only thing that really matters is the fruits of it. That’s it. Otherwise, you just had a religious experience,” said Clark-Soles. “The fruits to me, of these experiences, of the holding or transformation, are an ethical life. To me, that’s ultimately what it’s all about.”
