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  “Sometimes I am asked, what I believe about psychedelics. And my answer is simple, I believe in the data.”

Dr. Roland Griffith

 

Dr. Rolland Griffith is trained in psychopharmacology, which is the convergence of trying to understand psychoactive drugs and behaviour. He undertook a meditation practice about 25 years ago, which awakened his curiosity about the nature of changes in consciousness and spiritual experience.

When he was introduced to Bill Richards, something clicked. In 1997, they put together a protocol to study psilocybin at a high dose in healthy volunteers who had never before had a psychedelic drug. Ultimately, John Hopkins green-lighted the project.

After a decades-long hiatus, in 2000 our research group at Johns Hopkins was the first to obtain regulatory approval in the United States to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy, psychedelic-naive volunteers. Our 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin is widely considered the landmark study that sparked a renewal of psychedelic research world-wide.

Since that time, we have published further groundbreaking studies in more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in respected scientific journals. This makes Johns Hopkins the leading psychedelic research institution in the U.S., and among the few leading groups worldwide. Our research has demonstrated therapeutic effects in people who suffer a range of challenging conditions including addiction (smoking, alcohol, other drugs of abuse), existential distress caused by life-threatening disease, and treatment-resistant depression. Studying healthy volunteers has also advanced our understanding of the enduring positive effects of psilocybin and provided unique insight into neurophysiological mechanisms of action, with implications for understanding consciousness and optimizing therapeutic and non-therapeutic enduring positive effects.” (full article here)

Upcoming research will involve psilocybin in regards to smoking addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), opined addiction, Lyme disease, anorexia nerves and alcohol use in people with major depression.

If you are interested in partaking in research at John Hopkins, you are able to apply to some studies that you can access by clicking this link.

 

Roland Griffiths – The science of psilocybin and its use to relieve suffering