Psychedelics

Travis Kitchens | From the March 2025 issue

Rick Doblin had come to believe that psychedelic experiences are the "common core" of all religions, and he wanted to test this thesis. In February 1984, the 31-year-old college student living off a trust fund in Sarasota, Florida, typed out a letter to the United Nations, proposing a study that would double as a "training program for a variety of religious ministries." He needed only 50 volunteers, he said, plus a panel of scholars and religious mystics (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to judge the results.

Doblin reached out to several politicians for help too. He even wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II. In the meantime, he took on what might have been an even more daunting task, though today it sounds almost mainstream: turning MDMA into medicine.

Beginning in 2015, another psychedelic visionary, Roland Griffiths, initiated a research project nearly identical to what Doblin envisioned. A collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health, Griffiths' experiment gave psilocybin to two dozen "religious professionals"—Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim clergy—on two separate occasions.

What happened is still mostly a mystery, as the paper has yet to be released. Just as the finishing touches were being finalized, Griffiths was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. At the same time, a controversy was growing in his lab that threatened to derail the psychedelic renaissance. The accusations centered on alleged misconduct involving the religious professionals study.

Five months after Griffiths died peacefully at his home in October 2023, The New York Times published a bombshell exposé that called the study's integrity into question. The article drew on two ethics complaints filed by a former protégé, a psychologist named Matthew Johnson whom Griffiths had groomed to be his replacement.

Griffiths, Johnson said, had been running his research lab less like a laboratory and more like a "'new-age' retreat center," recommending spiritual literature to volunteers and allowing politically aligned funders to work directly on studies. These funders were also paying for projects aimed at introducing various religious communities to hallucinogens. The line between research and advocacy, he argued, had disappeared.

Johnson also accused Griffiths of infusing his research with his own spiritual beliefs and advancing a political agenda aimed at spreading the use of psychedelics. All this, Johnson said, created a "cult-like atmosphere."

The release of the religious professionals study was put on a permanent hiatus. Since then, more information has emerged about Griffiths and the researchers around him, shedding light on an ambitious plan to revitalize Christianity by incorporating a psychedelic sacrament.

Doblin, who is now the president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, thinks the unreleased study might be the most important research paper in psychedelic history. It will be a "terrible, terrible tragedy" if it is never released, he says. "I felt that it had the greatest political implications." He blames the delay in publication on fears "that it might spark a fundamentalist backlash against psychedelic research."

But the paper itself, he adds, doesn't "speak to this whole issue of the common mystical core. They avoid the kind of political benefits that I think could come from this understanding that religions are like languages. We all speak different languages but they're coming from the same basic source."

This idea—that there is one truth and one universal core to all religions—is the heart of Perennialism, a school of mysticism with a long history. Doblin is not the only person in the psychedelic world who is fascinated with this concept: It has turned up, well, perennially, in numerous scientific papers as well as a dubious but popular recent book called The Immortality Key. The idea's influence raises an important question about the renaissance of psychedelic studies: Are these researchers guided by science, religion, or some awkward combination?

Roland Redmond Griffiths was the avatar of a new generation of straitlaced scientists said to be bringing fresh blood, rigorous standards, and a cautious approach to an area of research tarnished by political antics and reckless evangelism. The scion of the same blue-blood family that produced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Griffiths was the psychedelic counterculture's dream spokesman: a clean-cut "scientist's scientist," so conservative that he once admonished the soft drink industry for "being in denial about the role of caffeine in their products."

Griffiths' career path took a left-hand turn when he was introduced to meditation and psychedelics. Bored with his research on opioids and tobacco, he started meditating regularly in the early '90s with a girlfriend who was a part of the new age scene. ("She........

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