On Friday, April 20, 1962, Howard Thurman delivered a Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. “He came to me with his eyes and asked for water,” Thurman began in a retelling of the Samaritan woman at the well, “stretched out his hand and spoke. His mind burned into mine like the noon sun. My pitcher of thoughts broke.”

He described in those words what so many Christians — indeed all those with a deep and abiding spiritual yearning — desire: a life-changing direct encounter with the Divine.

When these moments do occur, they are often termed “mystical experiences.” They’re marked by an overwhelming sense of unity with a higher power, transcendence, and a kind of knowing that is not bound by rational thought. Some people seem to be blessed with these unexpected encounters, like Saul on the road to Damascus. Others prepare for them for decades through fasting, solitude, prayer, and meditation, like the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Still others live in quiet faithfulness their entire lives without any kind of experience they would consider mystical.

In the basement of Marsh Chapel, as Thurman preached that day in 1962, Walter Pahnke, a Harvard researcher studying the nature of mystical experiences for his Ph.D. thesis, was conducting an experiment. He had gathered 20 seminary students and 10 guides to examine whether those intense, life-changing experiences had to be so rare. Or, could they be induced — with help of some fungi? Pahnke administered a placebo to a control group and for the treatment group he gave a 30 mg capsule of the psychedelic psilocybin, a legal substance at the time, derived from so-called “magic mushrooms.”

“He showed me my own soul, cracked and dry as a discarded wine skin and made it whole,” continued Thurman, from above. “As I carried my peace back to the streets of saika, a new world woke.”

Huston Smith, the world-renowned scholar of comparative religion, participated as a guide and received a dose of psilocybin that morning.

In Cleansing the Doors of Perception Smith recalled that day. The basement was in chaos. One student stood in front, mumbled a sermon, and made for the exit. His mission, the student confessed later, was to call a press conference announcing a new age of a thousand years of planetary peace and harmony.

The Psychedelic Science of Good Friday

The scene Smith described cohered with my understanding of the turbulent 60s. Messianic pronouncements of enlightenment devolving into a self-centered hedonism typified by Timothy Leary. The visions of change a brief mirage temporarily hiding chaos and turmoil underneath.

However, when participants in the Good Friday experiment were asked to measure their experiences in categories Pahnke developed — like a sense of unity, transcendence over time and space, sense of sacredness, ineffability, a deeply positive mood — the results were clear: Those in the treatment group were far more likely to have reported characteristics consistent with a mystical experience. In a follow-up six months later, the results were the same. A retrospective study 25 years later showed that participants rated the experience even more meaningful and transformative than they had immediately after the experiment.

“Until the Good Friday Experiment, I had no direct personal encounter with God of the sort that bhaki yogis, Pentecostals and born-again Christians described,” Smith recalled. The height of the service for him was a soprano who sang a hymn and as she closed the song, he called it “the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced.”

After Nixon championed the criminalization of psychedelics in the early 70s, research on these substances largely entered a 30-year hiatus. But in 2000, Johns Hopkins University received federal approval to resume clinical testing on psilocybin. The results of their first study, released in 2006, ignited a wave of research into psychedelic therapies addressing treatment-resistant depression, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction.

What first caught my eye were the studies about addressing substance use disorders. I was researching my book Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals About Us. I was awash in heartrending stories of the damage that various drugs can bring to the lives of individuals, families, and communities. What I had previously known about psychedelics were either cautionary tales of “burned out hippies” experiencing flashbacks or what sounded like frivolous and potentially dangerous use at concerts and clubs.

Addiction is far worse today than just a few years ago. In 2020, more people under the age of 65 died from alcohol-related causes than from COVID-19. Annual drug overdoses have surged to over 105,000 and illicit fentanyl overdoses alone are the leading cause of death for those ages 18–45. The death toll for smoking still clocks in at nearly 480,000 lives per year.

Treatment for substance use disorders (SUD) has always been challenging. For example, in 2018, 55% of smokers attempted to quit but only 8% achieved abstinence 6–12 months later. The best pharmaceutical treatment available today maxes out a 35% success rate.

However, a Johns Hopkins study, involving three psilocybin sessions combined with cognitive behavioral therapy, showed that 80% of participants were confirmed to have quit smoking at a six-month follow-up. A subsequent follow-up study showed that many of these changes persisted even longer-term, with 60% remaining abstinent.

Granted, it was a small-scale study, but early results are promising and are being replicated in other areas. An NYU study showed strong initial results for treating alcohol use disorder and at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, there are encouraging early results for reducing cocaine use.

These results aren’t just happening in clinical settings. Another study demonstrated a significant correlation between self-administered psychedelics and subsequent decreased daily drug use. Another found a 30% reduction in risk for developing an opioid use disorder correlated with any psilocybin use.

But one bit of information kept jumping out at me in the smoking cessation study and was echoed in other studies, “these results suggest a mediating role of mystical experience in psychedelic-facilitated addiction treatment.”

Spiritus Contra Spiritum

Christian and Hebrew scriptures provide multiple examples in which spiritual fervor and intoxication are mistaken for one another. Eli the priest mistook the prayers of Hannah at the temple as drunkenness (1 Samuel 1:13); after Pentecost the disciples needed to defend themselves against a charge of drunkenness (Acts 2:15); and from Paul to the church in Ephesus, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit …” (Ephesians 5:18, NRSV). There might be some similar feelings along the way, but one path leads to life and the other is poison.

Carl Jung, in a 1961 letter to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) co-founder, Bill Wilson, also picked up on these oppositional themes. He formulated the problem as “spirtus contra spiritum” or spirit (alcohol) against spirit (of a human). All of us, Jung acknowledged, “pant for living water” and there are substances, like alcohol, that provide a dangerous facsimile of experience with the Divine. In this formulation, what happened in the basement of Marsh chapel on Good Friday might feel something like the living water Thurman preached about but was in fact a deceiving duplicate.

Ernest Kurtz, the author of Not God, the seminal history of AA, noted in an essay that Wilson’s response to Jung was surprising. Wilson enthusiastically discussed his own use of LSD and promoted the idea that it might provide a sort of spiritual catalyst that could help others address their problematic drinking.

Wilson, after years of failed attempts to quit drinking, described a “spiritual awakening” in which he saw a white light and imagined a society of mutual support for helping others to break their addiction. His description fits many of the classic criteria for a “mystical experience” and soon after, he helped found Alcoholics Anonymous. However, Kurtz described Wilson’s initial “spontaneous” mystical experience as legitimate but his later experimentation with LSD as a misguided attempt to discover the Divine in a chemical.

The leadership of AA vehemently condemned Wilson’s use of LSD. But what Kurtz and others failed to grapple with is that the line between Wilson’s two kinds of experiences was not as stark as they might have thought. When Wilson had the initial mystical experience that they praised, he was in the midst of trying the “belladonna cure.” This involved ingesting two relatively toxic, and psychedelic plants, Belladonna (deadly nightshade) and Hyoscyamus (henbane).

A New World Wakes

William James argued that religious and spiritual experiences should be judged by the fruit that they bear. If we apply this standard to the use of psychedelics, their record is decidedly mixed. From the transformation and service of Bill Wilson to the chaos and narcissism of Timothy Leary.

No chemical automatically turns sinners into saints. Previous hopes for pharmacological magic bullets for curing life’s greatest ailments have failed to materialize. Chemical technologies have the same possibilities and dangers as any kind of technology, they can hinder or help, cover up, or reveal. Technological advancements tend toward a kind of deception when used uncritically. And no substance use or medication comes without risks.

But what if Wilson’s intuition was correct? He did not think psychedelics would “cure” addiction, but he did have hope that they might increase the frequency of the kind of experiences that catalyze dramatic, or “quantum” change. The authors of the smoking cessation study emphasize that it is the combination of psilocybin sessions and cognitive behavioral therapy that makes their treatment so effective, not just the psilocybin.

William Richards, the researcher who helped bring back the scientific study of psilocybin in his study published in 2006, is careful to say that psychedelics do not “cause” spiritual experiences but at best “occasion” them. Another way to say it might be that they temporarily put humans in a position of least resistance to a grace that always and perpetually surrounds us.

The future of this research and whether or not these treatments will reach widespread adoption is still unclear. There are unanswered questions as to the frequency of serious adverse events and it is a common scientific trend to see the efficacy of a treatment decrease as it is brought to scale.

But, what might be the greatest barrier is the meaning of Good Friday. I wrote in Addiction Nation:

When our view of the cross is that God demands blood in order to redeem, it is little surprise we have a country and culture that wants to see people suffer even more before help will be provided. But when we understand a God who enters into our suffering, we see that it is grace through which we are transformed.

How our society has chosen to treat people who use drugs and those who struggle with addiction is deeply rooted in the myth of redemptive violence. While not often articulated directly there is a sentiment I run into often: people who use drugs should suffer because they believe their God requires it.

The substances themselves are considered evil and they defile the “temple” of the body. In this view, those who would profane that which is holy are deserving of the judgment and punishment of the Divine. And so, there is deep resistance in some recovery communities and many treatment centers to the use of Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) like buprenorphine and methadone in spite of their proven ability to dramatically reduce overdose deaths.

Harm reduction strategies, like overdose prevention centers and syringe exchanges, are met with vehement opposition because of the belief that those who use drugs should suffer as much as possible. Harm should be the consequence of any drug use outside of societal norms.

The opposition will likely be similar to any sort of psychedelic assisted therapy no matter what further research reveals. But, I’m an optimist. Like Wendell Berry, I believe that we can all “practice resurrection.” New life is possible for those who struggle with alcohol and other drugs and a new life is possible for those stuck in judgement of people, like me, who have struggled with their own drug use or are in active use today.

Whether my fellow Christians like it or not, we are in the midst of what many have called a “psychedelic renaissance.” It will be full of old dangers and possibilities as this new world awakes.