Psilocybin Research Project

Distributes Psilocybin to Researchers, 237 The Harvard Psilocybin Research Project, 239 Use of Psilocybian Mushrooms Increases, 244... 

By late I960, Leary had contacted Sandoz for psilocybin to be used for "creativity studies and had established an eight-member board to oversee the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project. The board included Huxley, psychiatrist John Spiegel (who went on to become president of the American Psychiatric Association), David McClelland (Leary s superior), Frank Barron (an associate who has since written much about creativity), Ralph Metzner (later a close Leary colleague), Leary, and two graduate students who had already started a project with mescaline. 

The opening page of the best presentation on the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project s two-year study with convicts—published in 1968 in Timothy Leary s High Priest (Chapters 9 and 10) and in the Psychedelic Review 10. 

There are also on-going nontherapeutic psilocybin research projects taking place in other countries. One project studies the effects of psilocybin on binocular depth inversion, binocular rivalry, neuropsychology and synaesthesias. It is headed by Dr. Torsten Passie, M.D., at the Medical School of Hannover, Germany. The study involves the use of medium doses of psilocybin to examine the effects on neuropsychological measures (attention, reaction time, etc.), perceptual changes, and subjective effects. 

A 1999 NIDA-funded research project at John Hopkins University estimated that 14% of U.S. residents had an opportunity to try hallucinogens, including psilocybin. The vast majority of those who used the drug transitioned from first opportunity to first use within one year. The study indicates that the probability of making this transition is increasing, especially for hallucinogens. This study indicates that the age of first use is directly related to the age of first opportunity. 

The Harvard academic establishment put more and more restrictions on the conduct of the research, largely because of the mounting sensationalism of media accounts. The legitimate source of psilocybin for the research project dried up. 

Exactly two years ago the Harvard Psilocybin Project initiated a research program at Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Concord, designed to test the effects of consciousness-expanding drugs on prisoner rehabilitation. 

The Harvard Psilocybin Project was formed to investigate, from a psychological point of view, the astonishing properties of this mushroom chemical. From the start, Tim Leary adopted what he called an existential-transactional approach to this research. He rejected the impersonal clinical atmosphere of the traditional psychiatric experiment. Having taken the substance himself in a sacramental atmosphere, he knew how important it was to have a warm supportive setting if one is to experience the ego-shattering revelations of the mushrooms safely. 

The psilocybin project experienced increasing resistance from the Harvard University community. We were criticized that our research... 

Graduate students working on the project, like myself, were told that they would not be permitted to do their doctoral dissertation on research administering psilocybin. 

Here the research statistics got fuzzy and perhaps a little creative to demonstrate the hypothesis that psilocybin therapy was effective in reducing the crime rate. In their paper published in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice (Leary et al. 1965), the researchers broke the numbers down into types of return due to parole violations and due to new crimes. They found that, compared to a 50/50 incidence in the prison population as a whole, only 7% of project participants were returned for new crimes, with 52% returned for parole violations. One and one half years after termination of the program the rate of new crimes has been reduced from 28% to 7%, although if parole violations are counted the overall return rate has not changed. It is proposed that these results warrant further research into the potentials of the methods used, especially since no other method of reducing the crime rate exists. (Leary et al. 1965 Doblin 1998). 

He was able to locate records for twenty-one of the original thirty-two subjects and interviewed two of them as well as three of the researchers. The criminal histories he located recorded activity for the 2.5 years following release from the incarceration in which the inmates participated in the psilocybin project, as well as up to thirty-four years later when the follow-up study was conducted. The figures closely approximated those given by Leary et al., so Doblin assumed that the lost folders were likely a random subset of the entire cohort. 

I had my first psychedelic experience with synthetic psilocybin in 1961. Professor Leary had decided to initiate a prisoner rehabilitation project, and I had applied to be a graduate student research assistant. Growing out of Leary s own experience and his philosophical-humanistic values, he had decided that those giving the psychedelic to the convicts should have experienced it themselves. This was fine with me since I was eager to explore this wondrous experience I had heard so much about. 

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