Roland Griffiths

The study that restarted a science

For three decades after the 1960s backlash, rigorous human research on psilocybin was effectively frozen. It was Roland Griffiths, a respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins with a career built on caffeine and drug-dependence studies, who reopened it. His 2006 paper reported that, under careful conditions, psilocybin could reliably occasion “mystical-type experiences” that participants rated, months later, among the most meaningful of their lives.¹

Rigour first

What made Griffiths persuasive was precisely that he was not an evangelist. He came to the work as a sceptic and insisted on the machinery of serious science — controls, blinding, dose-response, long-term follow-up, safety monitoring. That credibility helped seed a wave of clinical trials on psilocybin for depression, anxiety, and end-of-life distress, and the field’s slow, still-incomplete path toward the clinic.²

Why he belongs here

Griffiths belongs as the figure who completed a long arc: from the Mazatec velada, to Hofmann’s molecule, to a controlled trial with a data-safety board. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he spoke publicly and calmly about facing death — informed, he said, by his own research into what these experiences can offer. He died in 2023, having turned a ceremonial sacrament into a measurable, defensible clinical question.²