Roland Griffiths, a pioneer who led a renaissance in psychedelics research; at 77
Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral science and psychiatry whose pioneering work in the study of psychedelics helped usher in a new era of research into those once banned substances — and reintroduced the mystical into scientific discourse about them — died on Monday at his home in Baltimore. He was 77.
The cause was colon cancer, said Claudia Turnbull, a longtime friend.
Dr. Griffiths, a distinguished psychopharmacologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, spent decades studying the mechanisms of dependence on mood-altering drugs. He published scores of papers on opiates and cocaine, on sedatives and alcohol, on nicotine and caffeine.
His work on caffeine, which he noted was the most commonly used drug in the world, was groundbreaking, showing that, yes, it was addictive, that withdrawal could be painful and that caffeine dependence was a “clinically meaningful disorder.”
But in August 2006 he published a paper that wasn’t just groundbreaking; it was mindblowing.
The paper had an unusual title: “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” And when it appeared in the magazine Psychopharmacology, it caused a media ruckus.
“The God Pill,” read the headline in The Economist. Here was the first double-blind, placebocontrolled clinical study in decades to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic on what scientists call “healthy normals” — healthy volunteers. Its focus was not on the beneficial properties of the drug for those suffering from depression, or being treated for cancer, or facing end-of-life terrors, or trying to quit smoking. Those landmark studies would come later.
This work involved trained doctors administering high doses of psilocybin — the psychoactive, or mind-altering, component found in the psilocybe genus of mushrooms — to healthy people in a controlled, living room-like setting.
Eighty percent of the participants described the experience as among the most revelatory and spiritually meaningful episodes of their lives, akin to the death of a parent or the birth of a child, as Dr. Griffiths often said.
Their experience had all the attributes of a mystical event. They described profound feelings of joy, love and, yes, terror, along with a sense of interconnectedness and even an understanding of a sublime, sacred and ultimate reality.
Such positive effects on their mood and behavior lasted for months and even years, as author Michael Pollan discovered when he interviewed many of the participants for his 2018 book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.”
“To listen to these people describe the changes in their lives inspired by their psilocybin journeys is to wonder if the Hopkins session room isn’t a kind of human transformation factory,” Pollan wrote.
Dr. Griffiths’ work, which began in 1999, was endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as a cohort of experts that included the former deputy of the drug czar under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And it ushered in what many have called a renaissance in psychedelic research.
Psychedelics had been the third rail of scientific inquiry ever since Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were thrown out of Harvard for passing out LSD with messianic fervor in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, psychedelics had been declared controlled substances deemed illegal for recreational and medical use.
Yet beginning in the 1950s, well before Leary exhorted a generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” LSD — a synthetic chemical derived from a fungus, along with psilocybin and other psychedelics — were being studied and used successfully to treat alcoholism, depression, anxiety and distress among the terminally ill.
The term psychedelic was coined in 1956 and drawn from the Greek root psyche, which translates to mind or soul. Freighted with the counterculture baggage of the 1960s, however, it devolved from its original meaning as a mind-altering drug into an aesthetic rendered in loopy typefaces and black-light posters.
Roland Redmond Griffiths was born on July 19, 1946, in Glen Cove, N.Y., to William and Sylvie (Redmond) Griffiths. His father, who had trained as a psychologist, specialized in public health; his mother was a homemaker until the family moved to El Cerrito, Calif., in about 1951, after William had taken a job as a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. There, Sylvie began successfully pursuing a master’s in psychology.
Roland Griffiths majored in psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and studied psychopharmacology at the University of Minnesota, earning his doctorate there in 1972. Johns Hopkins hired him immediately afterward, and he began concentrating his research on drug use and addiction.
Dr. Griffiths leaves his wife, Marla Weiner; his three children, Sylvie Grahan, Jennie Otis, and Morgan Griffiths; five grandchildren; and his siblings, Kathy Farley and Mark Griffiths. His marriage in 1973 to Kristin Ann Johnson ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Diana Hansen.