Good Friday Experiment

More recently, Doblin has founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which promotes and sponsors scientific research into psychedelics. As well, he has recently authored a follow-up study to Leary, Alpert, and Metzner s Good Friday Experiment, an early investigation into the relationship between psychedelic and religious experience. 

A quarter century later, researcher Rick Doblin published the results of his long-term follow-up study of the Good Friday Experiment. He located nineteen of the original twenty subjects. With sixteen of them he conducted interviews and readministered the six-month follow-up questionnaire, which Pahnke had designed for the experiment so long ago. 

In the interviews, subjects reported vivid memories of their Good Friday experience and characterized it as one if the high points of their... 

As it happens, the venerable Huston Smith was one of the leader-subjects in the Good Friday Experiment. In a 1996 interview with Tom Roberts he relates his experience (Smith 2002) ... 

Coverage of the Good Friday Experiment in both the scholarly and popular media was broad and largely but not universally positive. Doblin speculates that Pahnke s underemphasis on the difficult psychological struggles of most of the psilocybin subjects may be in part responsible for the unpreparedness of the many subsequent formal and informal experimenters for this aspect of the experience. 

Doblin, R. 1991. Pahnke s Good Friday Experiment A long-term follow-up and methodological critique, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 23 (1). 

Smith, H. 2002. The Good Friday Experiment. In Hallucinogens a reader, ed. 

In a Boston University chapel on Good Friday 1962, twenty Christian theology students took part in Pahnke s experiment after having been exhaustively tested and screened. Ten were given 30 mg. of psilocybin. The others (as nearly as possible, a similar group) received 200 mg. of nicotinic... 

Should you experience problems with memory effects more often, an improvement in sample preparation and frequent flushing are advised. A very good flushing procedure for the equipment without the column is isopropanol, water, 6 N HNO, flush with water until neutral (it takes some time. .. ), then again the mobile phase. If you are in a bad mood or don t feel like working hard on Friday afternoon, flush using this procedure. You will surely get a happy, satisfied smile from your equipment. I hope there are 4-5 such Fridays per year in your laboratory. 

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