How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

In 1965, CBS News broadcast an admiring hour-long “special report” on the hospital’s work with alcoholics, called LSD: The Spring Grove Experiment. The response to the program was so positive that the Maryland state legislature established a multimillion-dollar research facility on the campus of the Spring Grove State Hospital, called the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Stan Grof, Walter Pahnke, and Bill Richards were hired to help run it, along with several dozen other therapists, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, and support staff. Equally hard to believe today is the fact that, as Richards told me, “whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD sessions as part of their training to do the work. We had authorization! How else could you be sensitive to what was going on in the mind of the patient? I wish we could do that at Hopkins.”