Word: psilocybin
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...study, performed by Dr. Walter N. Pahnke as part of his work for a Ph.D. from Harvard in the History and Philosophy of Religion, established that psilocybin is capable of inducing "mystical experiences" as experimentally defined, Dr. Pahnke received an M.D. before he began the study...
...Pahnke's experiment involved administering psilocybin to 20 theology students, none from Harvard, in a setting designed to optimize the chances for mystical reactions. The ten students given psilocybin scored significantly higher on Dr. Pahnke's experimental criteria for defining mystical experience than did the ten controls, who were given nicotinic acid, a vitamin which has mild somatic effects. The study was conducted as a "double-blind" experiment, in which neither the subject nor the experimenter knew who was receiving which drug...
...psychiatrist and a philosophy professor renewed the debate on consciousness-expanding drugs last night. At the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, Dr. Gerald L. Klerman and Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at M.I.T., discussed whether drugs such as psilocybin can benefit mankind, and found themselves in sharp disagreement...
Scientific evidence," said Dr. Klerman, "runs counter to the claims of Richard Alpert and others that psilocybin is safe. Nor is there evidence that it can help the mentally disturbed or produce important insights for normal people...
...Novelist Aldous Huxley wrote, in The Doors of Perception, that mescaline produced in him an effect that seemed like seeing the beatific vision. Psychologist Timothy Leary, who was dropped from the Harvard faculty last spring after receiving strong criticism for his freewheeling research in the use of LSD and psilocybin, gave the drugs to 69 "fulltime religious professionals," found that three out of four had "intense mystico-religious reactions, and more than half claimed that they had the deepest spiritual experience of their life...