In the previous parts of this series we met Terence McKenna, the storyteller, and Timothy Leary, the provocateur. Both made psychedelics famous, but both also fed the backlash that paralysed the scientific research into them for decades. This final part is about the man who did the opposite: who brought psychedelics back out of the underground and into the laboratory, and did so with a care that even critics had to respect. His name is Roland Griffiths.
The unlikely pioneer
What made Griffiths such a credible figure was precisely that he did not start out as a psychedelic idealist. He was a respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world, and had spent decades building a reputation for sober research into the effects of, among other things, caffeine and sedatives. A methodical, cautious researcher, the exact opposite of a Leary.
It was only around the age of fifty, after a personal experience with meditation that made him curious about the nature of deep states of consciousness, that his focus shifted. In 1999 he started, against the current, at a time when psychedelics were scientifically all but taboo, a research programme into psilocybin, the active compound in mushrooms and truffles. That a scientist of his stature and reputation would take this on gave the field a credibility it had lost since the sixties.
The research that changed everything
In 2006 Griffiths and his colleagues published a study that is seen as the starting shot of the modern psychedelic renaissance. Under strictly controlled conditions, healthy volunteers were given psilocybin, and a striking number of them described the experience afterwards as one of the personally most meaningful events of their lives, comparable to the birth of a child. Crucially, months later many still reported positive, lasting changes in their wellbeing and outlook on life.
Where things had been messy and uncontrolled with Leary, Griffiths did the opposite. Strict protocols, careful screening of participants, professional guidance during every session, and, just as importantly, an honest record of the risks alongside the benefits. The lab was deliberately arranged like a living room rather than a clinical space, because the environment demonstrably shaped the experience. Precisely the principle of set and setting, now taken seriously by science.
From laboratory to treatment
In the years that followed, Griffiths' team steadily built up the evidence. His research indicated that psilocybin, in a carefully guided therapeutic setting, could help with severe depression, with anxiety and existential distress in people facing a life-threatening illness, and with addiction, from smoking to alcohol. In 2020 his group published a rigorously controlled study showing that psilocybin-assisted therapy could effectively treat clinical depression.
The work generated so much scientific and financial interest that in 2019 a dedicated research centre for psychedelics and consciousness was founded at Johns Hopkins, with Griffiths as its founding director. What had once been a career risk had grown into a serious, funded field of science. Other top universities followed, and the field that Leary's era had flattened was standing upright again, this time on a solid foundation.
A final, personal turn
The story got a poignant ending. Late in 2021 Griffiths himself was diagnosed with incurable colon cancer. The man who had spent years researching how psychedelics can help people cope with the confrontation with death now faced that confrontation himself. In his final year he spoke about it with remarkable openness and serenity, and to the end he kept advocating for careful, scientifically grounded research. He died in October 2023, at the age of 77. The field he had almost single-handedly made respectable again lost its most important pioneer, but by now it stands firm enough to carry on without him.
What Griffiths teaches us
Griffiths is the perfect closing piece of this series, precisely because he is the counterpart of the two figures before him. Where McKenna and Leary showed how charisma and enthusiasm can make a subject big and damage it at the same time, Griffiths showed that care ultimately gets you further. Not by glorifying or trashing psychedelics, but by studying them soberly, honestly and methodically, risks included.
And that is exactly the attitude we consider important. An important note belongs with it, though: Griffiths' research took place in strictly controlled, professionally guided clinical settings, which is something very different from taking truffles at home on your own. His work is not a free pass, but an illustration of how much the circumstances matter. Anyone setting out with truffles themselves does well to aim for that same care: a thoughtful preparation and dosing, attention to set and setting, and honesty about when it is better not to do it.
With that we close the Famous psychonauts series, from the poet by way of the provocateur to the scientist. Three very different men, one shared lesson: these experiences deserve to be taken seriously, with as much curiosity as care.