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The Johns Hopkins study prepped its 15 subjects with four weeks of pretty standard cognitive behavior therapy – things like visualization, keeping journals, focusing on intent to quit, and reasons for quitting, among others. There were three psilocybin sessions, the first a moderate dose, and the final two a high dose. The subjects were encouraged to focus on their anti-smoking intent before taking the psilocybin in each session, otherwise, they were encouraged to wear eyeshades and earphones (piping in music) and go inside.
Attendants were there for their safety and reassurance if necessary, but there was otherwise little direction given. There were no negative physiological outcomes from the psilocybin sessions. Five of the 15 participants expressed moderate fear during the session (of losing control, losing grip on sanity) and one expressed extreme fear. All of the anxiety reactions were successfully resolved before the end of the session. The 13 participants (80 percent) who managed to quit and remain smoke-free for six months were asked to identify the reasons for their success. The most frequently chosen answer was: “by changing the way you orient yourself toward the future, such that you now act in your long-term holistic benefit, rather than acting in response to immediate desire.”
The answer that was chosen as the most important: “by changing the way you prioritize values in life so that reasons to smoke no longer outweighed reasons to quit.”
These rather basic changes in personality orientation are usually difficult to achieve, both in daily life and in traditional therapy. That such a high proportion of participants managed these perspective shifts is most likely attributable to life-changing mystical-type experiences catalyzed by the psilocybin. All but two participants (87 percent) rated at least one psilocybin session among the 10 most meaningful experiences of their lives.
This result too has an echo in that long ago LSD research by Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer. As Hoffer noted, the participants, hard-core alcoholics, who had significant spiritual experiences under the drug's influence were the ones who seemed to be able to stop drinking. The exact nature of the experiences was astoundingly varied; however, they often involved some transforming vision, such as one subject from an early alcoholism trial, who described a visualization of meeting himself in hell: “How can I explain the face, vile, repulsive and scaly, that I took by the hand into the depth of hell from whence it came and then gently removed that scaly thing from the face and took it by the hand up, up into the light and saw the face in all its God-given beauty.”
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is not the vision itself, but the fact that the experience was powerful enough to end a profound addiction, permanently.
Although Osmond, who also took LSD multiple times himself, had some of the fear responses observed in a minority of the Johns Hopkins participants (“Every so often the walls of the room would shiver, and I knew that behind those perilously unsolid walls, something was waiting to burst through. I believed that would be disastrous … I asked for some water. I drank the glass which [my friend] brought, and found that it tasted strange. I wondered if there might be something wrong with it: poison crossed my mind ….”). He came through at the end to this: “My experiences with these substances have been the most strange, most awesome, and among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life. These are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality.”
