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Dr. Roland Griffiths’ Altered States
04.12.2010
06:51 pm
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“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating.”  Building A Green Economy, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine article in the NYT was hardly that day’s only 60’s-inspired story.

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again describes how, once again, scientists are looking to psilocybin and other psychedelics as a possible cure for cancer-related depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug and alcohol addiction.

This week’s gathering in San Jose, California, promises to be the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the U.S. in forty years and will include Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.  While psychedelics may indeed bring comfort to people seeking to repair some mind-body schism, Griffiths belongs to the new breed of researchers grappling with their spirit-expanding potential:

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them.  None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.  The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment.  At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Roland Griffiths at TED follows below:

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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04.12.2010
06:51 pm
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