Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

Understandably Wasson took the bait, and so it came to pass that the CIA’s secret quest for the sacred mushroom became Subproject 58 of the MKULTRA program, possibly representing the most crass approach to psilocybin to date. It was as if the CIA were lobbing stones at angels.

Fittingly, it transpired that the double-dealing Moore was well out of his comfort zone in Mexico and loathed the entire episode. Wasson later recalled that Moore had absolutely no empathy for what was going on. Whereas Wasson was sensitive to the customs of the native Mexican Indians and respectful of their cultural beliefs about the mushroom, Moore was there merely as a CIA pawn.

Once again, all those who were in Wasson’s party took part in a mushroom ceremony hosted by the shaman Maria Sabina, though it was Moore alone who had a bad experience. Despite this, Moore was still able to bring back some of the fungi to the United States in the hope of isolating the active ingredient. Thankfully, however, he was beaten in his pharmaceutical pursuit by Roger Heim, an eminent French mycologist and coworker of Wasson, who managed to grow a supply of the mushroom from spore prints that he had taken in Mexico. Heim sent his newly cultivated samples to Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, and it was Hofmann, a highly distinguished chemist who had originally synthesized LSD, who, in 1958, first isolated and then named the entheogenic alkaloid within the mushroom. Psilocybin was thus officially born, a name devoid of the weaponry connotations the CIA would invariably have conferred on the substance had they successfully isolated it first.

Having failed in his allotted task, Moore was not terminated but later applied directly to Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin, as the CIA still maintained their clumsy interest in using this compound as an agent for mind control. Indeed, the CIA soon began to covertly test psilocybin on unsuspecting American prisoners, probably not the best of subjects when it comes to being in possession of a stable, healthy psyche. As the prisoners reported some rather bizarre experiences, it became clear that psilocybin could not enter the CIA’s arsenal—it was just too darn unpredictable. Thankfully, the CIA then turned their belligerent attentions elsewhere.

After Hofmann began to synthesize psilocybin from extracts of the mushroom, the door was open for properly conducted scientific investigation to commence. Apart from the rather dismal CIA attempt, it was 1960 that marked the beginning of the brief affair between the scientist and the mushroom. This occurred at no less a place than the psychology department of Harvard University, that bastion of academic respectability.

What happens when professional psychologists come up against the phenomenal power of psilocybin? One of two things generally results. Either they experience the substance personally and divine its profound implications for humanity in terms of knowledge acquisition, psychotherapy, self-knowledge, and personal growth, or they refuse to take it and instead interpret psychotomimetic (literally psychosis-mimicking) symptoms in those who do take it. A rather sharp division therefore occurs, as it did at Harvard. On the one side stood the infamous and lanky figure of Dr. Timothy Leary, heading a scholarly band of psychedelic intronauts, while on the other side stood members of the unimpressed “establishment,” who tolerated systematic experimentation for only a few years.

If one pinpoints Leary as the man of the moment at the start of that turbulent decade, able to seize the media and galvanize the American youth into rebellion, then we can zoom in on the actual experience that launched his prolific psychedelic career. It was, of course, a mushroom experience.

For forty-year-old Leary it began, as ever, in Mexico. Already an established and respected psychologist at Harvard, Leary spent the summer of 1960 with some friends at the Mexican resort town of Cuernavaca. During his stay, an anthropologist associate at the University of Mexico, who had come across references to sacred mushrooms while studying the Aztecs, suggested that Leary try some.

At noon one Saturday Leary gulped down six obnoxious-tasting local Mexican mushrooms, which had been obtained with much more ease than those consumed by Wasson five years earlier. Through this strange lunch, Leary’s fate was effectively sealed. As he later wrote in his autobiography, while the psilocybin coursed its way through his “virgin” Irish bloodstream, he enjoyed the most awe-inspiring religious experience of his life.

Leary was convinced that in just four hours under the influence of psilocybin he had learned more about the mind and the brain than in the fifteen years that he’d been a professional psychologist. This gives good measure to the strength and psychological impact of his first psilocybinetic encounter. Under the right conditions the mushroom is able to restructure one’s culturally determined concepts about reality and proffer an entirely different set of beliefs with which to navigate oneself through life.

Being a keen and responsive practitioner of psychological science, alert to new fields of discovery, Leary immediately requested funds to set up a research program into psilocybin. In no time at all the Harvard Psilocybin Project was initiated, commencing at the end of 1960, when a handy batch of psilocybin arrived from Sandoz. Already the natural mushroom had been replaced with jars of precisely dosed pills, thereby subtly altering the context of the psilocybin experience. How different might the implications of psilocybin have been at Harvard had the scientists had to go out into the wilds to pick their research material by hand…

One of the most impressive projects undertaken was the systematic study of 175 subjects given psilocybin in which the experimental emphasis was on providing a relaxed and supportive setting. This important notion of set and setting—the subject’s mental and physical environment prior to taking the psilocybin—can never be stressed enough, as they are crucial factors in determining the subsequent psychedelic experience. Leary and his coworkers had already established these facts among themselves prior to their official experimentation, and they were at pains to point out how set and setting played a key role in whether the psilocybin experience proved well or ill. It is possible that had someone without Leary’s temperament and intimate knowledge of psilocybin organized the experiments instead, then more negative experiences would have been reported.

As it was, most of the subjects reported a pleasant or ecstatic experience, that the psilocybin experience had changed their lives for the better. No psychological casualties were reported even though stronger doses had been used than in previous experimentation. There was no evidence for psychological or physical addiction, although 90% wished to repeat the experience. No hangovers were reported and presumably no one awoke the morning after to rooms strewn with empty bottles and cans. In a six-month follow-up study, none of the subjects had developed enduring psychotic or neurotic symptoms. The experiment was a success in demonstrating that under favorable conditions, ordinary people were able to have an inwardly enriching experience with psilocybin. Things on the psychedelic front were looking good. The Earth’s special mushroom, albeit in pill form, was showing promise.

These findings were eclipsed however by the legendary Good Friday Experiment of 1962, surely one of the most radical and far-reaching psychological studies ever undertaken. In their general approach to research and the collection of data, psychologists, particularly up until the 1950s and 1960s, had always had a rather special affinity for rats, more often than not placing them in specially constructed boxes where behavioral phenomena like classical conditioning (you remember Pavlov’s dog salivating to the sound of a bell) could readily be observed. Go into any academic psychology department and you will likely find and smell a rat or three, so beloved are these furry rodents by the ardent psychologist. Rats are cheap, easily maintained, and behave in a remarkably reliable way (like small machines) in their reactions to the manipulating advances of experimental psychologists. Explanations about human behavior can then be extrapolated (so they say) from the results of these rattish experiments on the reasonable but limited assumption that all mammalian brains run on similar principles.