Banker at the time, rediscovers indigenous use of psilocybin, ingests psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico, and publishes his account in Life Magazine in . The very next year, Wasson having given the psilocybin.
Mushrooms to Hoffman, and Hoffman is this chemist at Sandoz, in Basel.
- Switzerland who had formerly, about years earlier, discovered LSD. Hoffman isolates psilocybin from the mushrooms.
- He publishes his Synthesis the next year. And in that very next year, clinical research with psilocybin is begun.
- Which is totally unheard of in this day and age, where the lag time from molecule discovery to clinical trials can be years and years, if not .
- A decade or more. is a year quite relevant to this symposium. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard Psychology Department start a series of studies Buy blue meanies.
And these studies are important because they
- Recognize the powerful influence of set and setting as a significant determinant of psilocybin effects. They conducted a subsequently discredited study.
- Psilocybin treatment reduced recidivism among prison inmates, but there was some creative use of statistics in.
- That study, and it’s been since discredited. It’s an interesting study, nonetheless. But as Charlie mentioned in .
The Concord Prison experiment, claiming to show that
- The Harvard Divinity School undertook a study. Well, it was Walter Pahnke, who at the time was a graduate student in theology at the Divinity School.
- He conducted a study of psilocybin and gave psilocybin to graduate degree Divinity students in the context of a Good Friday service that was held in , in the Boston University Marsh Chapel.
- So this is often referred to as the Good Friday Experiment or the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Leary and Alpert were dismissed from .
- Harvard in and they were dismissed largely because of controversy about giving psilocybin to students and concern about.
The objectivity of their research. So that brings us to the s and the drug excesses that came about during that decade, in combination with what I’ll call the antics of Timothy Leary, who was a proponent.
