🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that trusts our readers enough to let go. (We’re still monitoring our open rates though.) 👀

Bill Richards built a career in clinical psychedelic research in the 1960s, which is to say, before the music abruptly stopped. Decades later, he co-wrote the Johns Hopkins protocol (and playlist) that helped bring it back.

We asked Bill what he remembers about the end of the first golden age, why a good psychedelic soundtrack can make all the difference, and how to keep the sacred from getting lost as the field matures.

It’s really happening.

The FDA is now reviewing not one but two new drug applications for psilocybin. Both Compass and Usona have filed their paperwork.

We’re praying the FDA green lights them both.

But approval would be limited to treatment-resistant or major depression. That leaves out everyone coming for personal growth, well-being, grief, chronic pain… the list goes on.

The good news is, you don't have to wait on the FDA. Althea is already open to adults 21+, no diagnosis needed.

We’ve overseen 5,000+ psilocybin sessions, and 97% of participants called their experience beneficial.

I was once 23 years old, studying theology at the University of Göttingen in Germany. I hadn’t heard the word “psychedelic” and had no idea what psilocybin was. But in the psychiatric clinic around the corner from my dormitory, Hanscarl Leuner was doing research with a new drug said to evoke memories from early childhood. I was already writing down my dreams and studying my Oedipal complex, so I thought I might get some new insights if I tried it.

My screening consisted of being asked if I got drunk often. I said I didn’t, so I was in. Then I was led to a little basement room with a window looking out over the hospital garbage cans, given an injection of psilocybin, and left alone. They didn’t know anything about set and setting in those days. 

What saved me was my pious Methodist faith. If any grisly insights about my mother emerged, God would be with me. But what happened went beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I sank and rose into a transcendental state of incredible beauty and meaning, filled with love. We’d now call it mystical consciousness, or the Hindu Atman-Brahman unity. I was one very amazed 23-year-old kid.

At one point the researcher came in and very seriously tested my knee reflexes, hammering on my patellar tendon and writing down his notes. I sat there with my arms outstretched, feeling compassion for the infancy of science. He hadn’t the slightest clue what was really going on. 

After that I started guiding sessions at the clinic and bumped into Walter Pahnke. He’d come from Timothy Leary’s world in Boston and knew about supportive set and setting, so together we introduced it to the clinic’s research. I’ve been running sessions ever since, and that was only 63 years ago.

I worked at Spring Grove, which became the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, from 1967 to 1977. By the end of those ten years, hundreds of people had received psychedelic therapy and reported benefit.

Then the leadership changed and the clinical sciences department was eliminated, and so was my job. I have the dubious distinction of being the last one to leave the sinking ship. I remember emptying out my office with my two sons, who were 3 and 5. Psychedelic research was over. I spent the next 22 years building my private practice, teaching college students, playing my piano, and hiking in the woods.

Anthropologists tell us psychedelics have been around for about 9,000 years. They’ve emerged in many cultures, been suppressed, emerged again, and been suppressed again, kind of like mushrooms. Now they’re bursting out all over, with incredible promise for better mental healthcare and even a revitalization of religion. We can do it right this time if we keep grounded and provide good education on how to take psychedelics. 

The metaphor I often use is downhill skiing. If you just jump on a pair of skis and head downhill, like I did when I was young, you’re very likely to hit a tree. You should get instruction first and learn to balance, slow down, and speed up. Similarly, if you’re going to take a psychedelic, you need to know how to turn off the intellect and stop trying to put into words what’s happening right now. You have to choose to trust, and allow yourself to feel whatever wants to be felt. Do it in a setting where you feel safe and supported, because the attitude that you can do it all by yourself will get you into trouble sooner or later.

Bob Jesse from the Council on Spiritual Practices introduced Roland and me. Roland had never taken a psychedelic and was a little wary of them, but he’d reached some very impressive states of consciousness as a Buddhist meditator, which made him curious and open. I guess he also trusted me, and he knew of the work we’d done at Spring Grove before the research went dormant.

Roland brought the academic legitimacy. He was a full professor and a world expert on caffeine, with good relations with the FDA. They’d entrusted him with just about every other drug, so why not psilocybin? I brought the clinical experience of knowing how to work safely with patients, so I got to help design the treatment space, develop our procedures, and choose the music.

Together, we wrote a high-quality protocol. Two institutional review boards approved it, along with the FDA, other federal agencies, and the Hopkins lawyers. We kept getting green lights, and all of a sudden we had psilocybin in our pharmacy.

I remember the first session I ran, with a religiously trained man from the UK. He lay on the couch with tears running down his face, ecstatically awestruck at the beauty of the experience, and I thought, how could this ever have been declared illegal?

Back then it was three of us, with Mary Cosimano as my co-therapist. Now there are about 85 people in the Hopkins center, with millions of dollars in funding. They’re not going to get the genie back in the bottle.

It’s time you got a taste of the other magic mushroom. Amentara’s Starter Kit bundles whole Amanita muscaria caps, capsules, and chocolate, so you can see which format you like best.

Letting the ego die takes a decision to trust, and supportive music can make that a little easier. For the onset and early peak of a high-dose session, I think the music needs a very strong, unfolding, reassuring structure, especially for first-timers. I like music that goes somewhere, like the current of a river. A simple gong or a jazzy rhythm won’t pick you up and carry you the same way.

For people unfamiliar with these depths of the mind, I think of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, or sacred music like Bach’s Kyrie from the Mass in B Minor, or the opening of Brahms’ Requiem. The human voice is another instrument in the orchestra, and I think it’s kind of maternal for many people.

Eventually the music becomes like the net for a trapeze artist. If you get anxious and need it, it’s there to pick you up. If you don’t, you forget it’s there. Once you arrive in a unified state, I don’t think the music matters. On the way back, you can have your favorite pop music, whatever it is.

The sacred isn’t going away. And we don’t have to defend it, because it will manifest itself. 

We had a colleague at Hopkins who sometimes wanted to take the little Buddha statue out of the treatment space so it wouldn’t influence people. I would suggest there’s a Buddha within every human being, because the Buddha is simply the one who woke up. You can’t take the Buddha out of the psyche.

I’ve seen people have profound spiritual experiences even when they didn’t want them. One man who identified as an atheist thought he was immune to Christianity, and then he had the most classic Christian experience I’ve ever witnessed. Then again, a Catholic priest who desperately wanted to see the beatific vision got something else. While the Kyrie from the Mass in B Minor was playing, he found himself reliving childhood sexual abuse.

To me, that points to the wisdom of each person’s psyche on that particular day. The content of one’s experience is ingeniously choreographed, better than anything we as therapists could plan. So our job is presence, safety, and trust, while the psyche picks a destination. When it delivers a monster, we encourage people to dive into the pupil of its eye and ask what it’s made of. Monsters are there to teach us something.

Pick up a copy of his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.