Season 2, Episode 1: A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Muslim Leader Get High

Sughra Ahmed [00:00:00] A dear, dear friend let me know about this study that was happening at Johns Hopkins and NYU, looking for religious professionals that would be interested in being a part of this study. Scientists were curious about whether psychedelics could help a range of different faith leaders become more expansive in their sense of who and what the divine is. My initial reaction was, what are you talking about? That just sounds off. I had never even heard the word psychedelics at that stage. And so my friend very patiently and very enthusiastically engaged me in conversations about psychedelics. One of the most powerful things that he could say to me is that I’ve done this and I’ve benefited. I was unwell for a really long time. This medicine has helped him heal to this extent? Okay, let’s talk. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:01:08] When she first heard about this study, Sughra Ahmed was the associate dean for religious life at Stanford University. She was a religious professional and had been for many years. She had a graduate degree in Islamic studies and was the first woman to chair the Islamic Society of Britain back in the UK. She led prayer, she preached, and she gave advice. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:01:31] And that translates essentially as Ustadha. Ustadha is an Arabic Urdu Farsi word that means teacher. So for me, being Ustadha was about being able to lead not just Muslim communities on campus at Stanford, but also other faith communities. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:01:49] Sughra counseled students through their big religious questions. And after her friend mentioned this study, she suddenly found herself grappling with some pretty big questions of her own. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:02:02] What even is this? Is this something that is legitimate for us? Is this is something that could hurt? In the Quran and in other texts, things like alcohol are clearly forbidden. And the spirit in this context is that I don’t want you to be coming to worship or prayer or be in conversation with me with your mind veiled. So you’re not thinking clearly. So how can you be in worship? 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:02:30] But did her Muslim faith also forbid the use of psychedelics? 

Sughra Ahmed [00:02:34] I’m somebody who believes in God. I have always believed in God, I’ve been raised in a Muslim household, in a muslim community. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:02:43] And, should she, a devoutly religious woman who had never touched an illegal drug in her life, should she travel to Johns Hopkins University to take psilocybin for scientific research? Welcome to season two of Altered States. Over the next 10 episodes, we’re going to explore two distinct camps in the world of psychedelics. On one side, there’s the realm of spiritualists, mystical experiences and psychedelic churches. And on the other side are scientists, clinical trials, animal studies, and psychopharmacologists. These two worlds are often far apart, and even at odds. But sometimes they’re not. Because when they get all tangled up together, that’s when things get really interesting. Think of this as the science versus religion season. But know that there’s so much more in between. I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. This is Altered States. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:03:47] When I talked to somebody who’s very learned when it comes to Islam, or somebody who I hold with great respect, we had long conversations about plant-based medicine and psychedelics. And through those conversations, we talked about the fact that even though things like alcohol are clearly forbidden, psychedelics unveil the mind. And so it doesn’t fall in the same category. And so I signed up, took a gazillion psychometric tests to make sure that I qualified. And that led me into Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and on that sofa with a blindfold across my eyes. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:04:24] At around the same time that Sughra was taking those tests, journalist Michael Pollan heard about this study from some of the researchers involved. 

Michael Pollan [00:04:31] The idea was to give a group of religious leaders, rabbis, priests, ministers, pastors, monks, a high dose of psilocybin to kind of see what would happen. And as soon as I heard about it, I was like, this is something I want to write about. I mean, look, religion and science have been oil and water since the time of Galileo, right? I mean people purporting to offer a scientific version of reality were burned at the stake by the church. But the psychedelic realm is a place where the two get mixed up in really interesting ways. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:05:08] The study was published in May 2025. Michael interviewed some of the religious leaders and wrote about it for the New Yorker. This is the story of that study and what happened to Sughra and some of the other participants in the years after they tripped for the very first time. So Michael, welcome back. Thank you for joining us on Altered States. 

Michael Pollan [00:05:34] Thank you, Arielle. Very good to be back. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:05:36] Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Can you tell me about this study? 

Michael Pollan [00:05:40] Basically, they were trying to use science to study religion and spirituality and this phenomenon called the mystical experience. This is an experience, there’s a long literature recounting it. It’s a big part of the history of religion. And basically it involves revelation, some sense of contact with the divine, a transcendence of self and time and space, and a sense of merging with something larger than yourselves. And this has been very much at the center of psychedelic research since the very beginning. Roland Griffiths, who really spearheaded the revival of psychedelics research beginning around 2000, got into it because he had a mystical experience that he said was way, way, way beyond the kind of materialist understanding I could explain to my scientist colleagues. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:06:31] And he was one of the researchers involved in this study. 

Michael Pollan [00:06:34] Yes, he was the lead researcher until his death in October 2023. And one of the things that it’s important to know about this study too is it’s building on a history. There was something called the Good Friday Experiment done in 1962 at Marsh Chapel on the BU campus in Boston, where Walter Pahnkey, who was a graduate student working with Timothy Leary, had 20 divinity students all in a Protestant denomination. And he gave 10 of them psilocybin and he gave ten of them a placebo. And they all sat in the basement of Marsh Chapel listening to a Good Friday sermon being piped in from above. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:07:14] So one of the producers on this show actually obtained an audio recording of the sermon that the study participants listened to that day. I haven’t heard it yet, but I wanted us to listen to it together. This is Reverend Howard Thurman. 

Reverand Howard Thurman [00:07:27] There was no glory on the hills that day. Only dark shame and three stark crosses rearing at the sky. And then darkness fell. 

Michael Pollan [00:07:49] I love it. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:07:50] Very dramatic. 

Michael Pollan [00:07:51] Very evocative. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:07:53] It’s got a little bit of a, I don’t know, like vampiric kind of quality to it for me, but yeah, that’s wow. 

Michael Pollan [00:08:01] Imagine listening to that while tripping on psilocybin. That would be very powerful. But that study left a lot to be desired in terms of controls. Even though it had a placebo, they were in this very religious setting. And it was a little loosey goosey like a lot of Timothy Leary supervised experiments were in that time. But it’s canonical within the world of psychedelic research. And eight out of the 10 who had taken psilocybin reported a powerful. Religious experience and one of the things this study at Hopkins and NYU is was an effort to improve on that, to replicate it with more rigor. It was going to be larger to diversify the religious traditions represented and get as wide a representation as possible. I think they were curious to find out if religious leaders might have any particular insight to share on the mystical experience. Whether a mystical experience induced by psilocybin was comparable to the sort of mystical experience that people in religion often have. And perhaps would they shed light on an idea that’s very common in the psychedelic community but certainly wasn’t articulated by the researchers. That there is some sort of common core to all religions, a perennial philosophy, which is a term that Aldous Huxley used. He believed that at bottom you could trace all religious traditions to a mystical experience that had similar qualities. But yes, this was an effort to use science to explore religion and in a way use religion to explore science. In other words, use the insights of these religious professionals to learn something about the psychedelic experience. So it was deliciously messy that way. That’s kind of what drew me to writing about it. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:09:54] And at its core, we’re talking about a study where you have scientists who are asking religious leaders to come in and take psilocybin and then tell them about their experiences. 

Michael Pollan [00:10:06] Yeah, basically they were prepared by two guides. The two guides sat with them during their journeys, which lasted, you know, four to six or eight hours. And then afterwards, they filled out reams of questionnaires and came back to get debriefed on what they had experienced. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:10:24] Okay, so what kind of religious leaders were they able to recruit? 

Michael Pollan [00:10:28] Well, they were going for as wide a range as possible, but they didn’t succeed entirely in getting everybody. If you look at the demographics of the group, you find that it’s heavily Christian, 76%. Many different Christian denominations, 17% were Jewish. They only had one Muslim and one Buddhist. There was no Hindu, for example. So as hard as they tried to make it broadly representative. It definitely skewed very Western and very white and very male. 31% were female. And the requirement was you had to be psychedelically naive, and you had have a congregation. You had to a leader of some kind, not just somebody who was devout. They really wanted to look at people who were leaders, because one of the things they wanted to explore was whether this experience would help with burnout. And burnout is a real problem, I learned, among clergy of all kinds. You’re dealing with the dying all the time. You’re in charge of this institution. You have declining attendance and membership. You have financial problems. It’s all on you, and you have to be available 24-7. So they wanted people who were dealing with that to see if the experience might rekindle their faith and interest in their vocation. So I interviewed at least a dozen of the participants in the study. And they were just the easiest people to talk to. But they had also had this incredible experience that they were very eager to talk about and had not had an opportunity to do. I talked to Zac Kemenetz, a rabbi at Berkeley. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:12:07] I had not previously used psychedelics in the past. I was high on God and Jewish ritual and spirituality all these years. 

Michael Pollan [00:12:17] I talked to Hunt Priest, who is an Episcopal priest. 

Hunt Priest [00:12:21] I was reading a magazine called The Christian Century. I was just flipping through it. And I saw an ad for the study at Hopkins. And I immediately thought, there’s no way I’ll get in, because who wouldn’t want to be in this? 

Michael Pollan [00:12:33] And I talked to Sughra Ahmed, who is a Muslim, the only Muslim in the study. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:12:38] The clinicians were actually ready to close the study, thinking, well, we’re not really going to get anybody different to the cohort that we’ve already got. So we’re going to be able to keep the study open for much longer. And then along I came. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:12:50] Did some of the participants tell you why they ultimately decided to say yes to this? 

Michael Pollan [00:12:57] Yeah, in some cases, because they had never had a mystical experience. And they shared some of the questions of the researchers as to what they might learn about God. So I think they were kind of spiritually hungry. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:13:10] I had read that mystical experiences could potentially help people feel better or be closer to divinity. And that was at that time kind of exactly what I needed, some spiritual resuscitation. 

Michael Pollan [00:13:28] Then you had people who really did feel burned out, people who felt something was missing in their life or in their work. 

Hunt Priest [00:13:35] I was sort of in a place of I felt stuck in my work in some ways. I was busy in my church life. And there was a lot of work to do there. And I was tired. I was dealing with some anxiety. 

Michael Pollan [00:13:47] And some people were just curious. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:13:49] I was convinced that this is something that not only is intriguing, but actually it’s really, really important to bring this into the Muslim communities that I connect with for my people to be at the table. And when I say my people, I mean women, women of color, Muslim women. It was important for me to also ensure that when it came to this kind of experiment and it was going to be published later, that I’m able to take some of that back to my community and say we were part of this. Now, where do we go? 

Michael Pollan [00:14:22] And the fact it was legal, by the way, matters a lot to people. I mean, for many people, the opportunity to have a psychedelic experience in the hands of really skilled guides in a university setting with legal permission is quite an opportunity. Although it was illegal, it still carried some reputational risks. So some people wanted to remain anonymous. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:14:46] I was pretty concerned about anonymity. These people don’t look like me. They don’t know what my people are like. They don’t know what our culture is like. When they say anonymous, what does it really mean? Is it really anonymous? Or is my data going to sit in a box file on that dusty shelf over there like all those other box files? I had all these things in my imagination and the only way I was going to get through them was by asking questions. Because you’ve got to remember, my family don’t I’m doing this. My friends don’t, I’m not doing this, apart from the friend that actually recommended the study to me. I felt really vulnerable and I felt like a bit of a maverick. I knew I wanted to do this. I knew it was important, but I was also alone. And then on top of that, there’s nobody in this team that I can look at and think, okay, they might understand what I might be feeling right now. They might understand the enormity of what I’m undertaking without even discussing it with family and friends. 

Michael Pollan [00:15:43] For someone like Sughra, there was real risk here. She wasn’t sure how her community would react. So in advance of her session day, she wanted to make sure she would really be supported. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:15:54] So I asked a gazillion questions to the most senior scientists and the people who are in charge of the whole thing, all the way to the people who are going to be sitting with me when I would be probably my most vulnerable in life. If you’re recruiting for a diverse range of people, religious leaders no less, then the set and setting that you have built would have incorporated, all of the possible religious leaders that might have volunteered that you’d be curious to sort of have in your research, including Muslims. I didn’t find that that was the case. It did give me reason to be nervous. You know, I’m concerned. You’re asking me to go into a place that I’ve never been before. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And at a very, very basic level, I might use language that is not English, right? It might be Arabic, it might be Urdu. It would be alien to your ears, perhaps. I had to say to them, so when I do say words that you do not understand, if you could just write down some letters and I could try and figure it out later. And I had go into this thing knowing that I had two gorgeous human beings next to me. But, they didn’t really understand where I was from. They didn’t really understand who I was. I wanted them to feel like I really made a fuss. As though I have said and done everything that I possibly can to fight for people like me or people who might not exactly be like me, but are non-white middle-class kind of folks so that next time they wouldn’t just rinse and repeat. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:17:33] So what happens next? 

Michael Pollan [00:17:34] What happens next is they’re handed a little pill and they swallow that and they lie down and put on eye shades and wait for their journey to begin. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:17:47] I soon started to feel kind of like a opening fuzziness in my forearms and in my stomach. 

Hunt Priest [00:17:57] I remember thinking, oh my God, this is big. I don’t know what this is, but this is big. More after the break. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:18:13] Welcome back, This Is Altered States. Before the break, Sughra Ahmed, a devout Muslim leader, took a risk and decided to take psilocybin as part of a scientific study. She was one of 29 religious leaders who participated in this experiment, many of whom spoke about their experiences with the journalist Michael Pollan. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:18:35] So Michael, can you talk a little bit more about what was so interesting to you about this study and its focus on religious leaders? 

Michael Pollan [00:18:42] Yeah, there were a bunch of things. There’s a whole strain of thinking in psychedelic research that there is something special and spiritual about the experience. And to have trained religious leaders have that experience that they would have some sort of nuanced understanding of it and particularly of the mystical experience, which is such a common thread through so much of the history of religion. One of the questions I was curious about is would all these different religious leaders, the imagery of their trip, would it be similar to one another or really distinct? Would it reflect their own faith and the imagery that church or denomination? Or would it point to some common core at the heart of all religion? And that’s an idea, it’s somewhat controversial idea, but it’s held by many people. And that the common core of all religions is this thing called the mystical experience. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:19:41] How do the researchers go about measuring a mystical experience? 

Michael Pollan [00:19:46] Well, with a questionnaire, of course. It’s called the mystical experience questionnaire. And you fill it out and you answer, “have you had an experience that has these qualities?” And first of all, it was Walter Pahnkey in the Good Friday Experiment. He wrote the first mystical experience questionnaire, which was an attempt to break down the elements of that experience and see how people measured their experience. He based it on William James, who offered the first sort of quasi scientific analysis of what it consists of. And it has such things like reverence and awe, a loss of a sense of time, joy or wellbeing, no space boundaries, spaces transcended, a sense timelessness. And I think very importantly, a sense merging with something larger than yourself. It could be the universe, it could be nature, and it could God. And that unitive consciousness as it’s called is a real hallmark of the mystical experience and really accounts for I think the divine encounters that many of the people in the study reported. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:20:51] Got it, okay. 

Michael Pollan [00:20:52] So that’s what the researchers were going for. They wanted to see if these religious leaders would have mystical experiences as judged by their questionnaires and whether they would judge them to be authentic. I think that was really key. They thought that these people would be in a position to help answer a question that has kind of bedeviled psychedelic research for a couple of decades, which is, is the mystical experience that people report a mere drug effect or is it the real deal? So they go into these specially designed rooms and Sughra, I recall, mentioned that she prayed beforehand. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:21:29] I took permission from the team about offering some prayers of my own. It was incredibly important to me that I was able to bow down and prostrate to God and seek guidance and seek comfort and seek connection before I took the medicine. The medicine was offered to me in what looked like a goblet of times of old and it was offered me with incredible reverence and respect for the medicine and for the moment, which took me by surprise, actually, that in a clinical trial, there was this reverence for the human condition and what the human being is about to experience. I ingested the medicine with some water and then I felt like it got stuck in my throat and there’s a psychological aspect to that, right? Like there’s nervousness. You know, I was with these strangers and I’d ingested something that was going to give me a really powerful experience. Going into this, I had no aspirations to have an encounter with the divine because in my tradition, I feel like you really need to polish the heart and the soul to be able to start even dreaming, hoping of a dream, for example, with the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, or any of the prophets, peace upon them all. But in my actual journey, I felt I encountered the divine and how I know that I encountered the divine is very difficult to explain. I just knew. I simply knew. And I trust that knowing. 

Michael Pollan [00:23:15] First of all, everybody that I spoke to, and I think the vast majority of participants did have a divine encounter. And in all cases, God was not a figure, not embodied in any way, but it was a presence that was vividly felt. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:23:31] In the journey, I felt the divine present right behind me. Like right behind my shoulder. I know in the Quran, God, Allah says that I am closer to you than your jugular vein. That moment reminded me of that verse. And that verse is very, very dear to me. I felt like if I just sort of leaned a little to the left and maybe a little back, that I could probably brush with it in some way. I was very calm. It wasn’t a stupendously exceptional moment. It just felt powerful and calm all at the same time. It was beyond the way in which we categorize things, people, it was above all of this language business that we have between us. You cannot reduce it to that. There’s often sort of a knee-jerk reaction, I think, in faith communities, that, “What? You’re gonna pop a pill and then meet God?” And I think that sounds glib because it is glib, and I still very firmly believe that. So for me, that moment, that presence of knowing that the divine is right, right, really, really really close, just really close felt like I had been given a gift that I am just in complete awe of. 

Michael Pollan [00:25:10] By the time I sat down to write the article, Sughra was willing to let me use her name, but I interviewed other people who weren’t, and one was an Eastern Orthodox priest who, in the piece, I call Father Gregory. He was really burnt out. He was real frustrated with church politics and the bureaucracy, and this made him really angry. And he said he’d become this very bitter person that people avoided in his church. And he had taken a vow of celibacy also and was struggling with that. And he just described himself as in this spiraling down of anger and bitterness and pornography, he said. He imagined himself laid out in Christ’s tomb on this stone slab, covered in rose petals. And he was dying, but he felt that there was love in him that was gonna survive his death. And this love kind of manifested itself as this transcendent force. And he said at one point, he was making love to love. And he said that this was a very uncomfortable moment for a celibate priest, because there clearly was an erotic dimension. And he was so enthralled by this experience that even though he had to pee, he would not get up and just kind of released his bladder. And he described this moment as the beginning of the decalicing of his heart. And in a way, it was like the cliche psychedelic experience, which is, you know, that, “love is all there is, and love is the most important thing.” He doesn’t know this is a trope of psychedelic experience, and it meant the world to him. I was so disarmed when this person I had never met told me this story. And you could see this was not somebody with a callous on his heart. And for Zach Kamenetz, the rabbi from Berkeley who had just had a baby, the journey provided an incredible amount of insight. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:27:25] No matter what I saw, whether it was going down a deep, dark tunnel, which felt like timeless and spaceless and ageless, or seeing my newborn daughter, my wife and myself as animated woodland creatures, happy and joyous together, there was some wisdom that was embedded in each of these moments. It felt like for the very first time, after the miscarriages and after the three IVF rounds and finally good embryos and finally our first child being born, the opportunity to just say thank you in my own words, full of emotion, full of gratitude, full of the grief and the pain of all of the moments that went from learning that there was a fetus that was no longer growing in my wife’s body to this beautiful baby having been born. Thank you. Thank you for it all. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:28:40] So when we talk about the mystical experience, I know some people describe it as a divine encounter or as quote unquote seeing God, but what is it that these leaders actually say they experienced? 

Michael Pollan [00:28:52] Well, none of them saw God as this embodied form or the guy in the clouds with a beard, but they felt a very powerful presence or a sense of an imminence or a suffusion of their own bodies with this divine presence. But one of the things I found particularly interesting that came up in several of my interviews was the God of people’s experience was a feminine presence. And this is men as well as women and this kind of blew people’s minds. One described a complete deconstruction of patriarchal religion in his experience. Another, a woman said that God was like a Jewish mother and she was a Baptist and she kind of blown away by that. So there were some commonalities across faiths in their experience of God. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:29:37] That’s so interesting. So how many dosing sessions did these participants take part in? 

Michael Pollan [00:29:43] Well, they were offered two, but not everybody wanted the second dose or could do the second dos. So out of the 29, five declined the second does. And in some cases, such as Rabbi Zach’s, the second experience was profoundly different than the first. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:29:59] I went in for the second dosing with the increased dose of psilocybin, assuming naively that more psilocybin would mean more of what I experienced the first time. And very quickly, after I had swallowed the pill, I knew that something was immediately different. It really took a very long time to come on as where the first time it was immediate. And so I started to wonder like, what’s going on? Is there something wrong? Is there’s something different? Maybe it’s not gonna work this time, ha ha ha. And basically for the next six hours, I felt like I was in a deep dark hole. There was no light, there was no color. There was no relationships or no visions to be had, but either cosmic boredom or what I might now call residing in the shadow of faith, not faith itself, but in its shadow where I encountered emptiness, where there was nothing, what felt like nothing happening, literally nothing was happening. I was encountering the nothing of reality, the absence, capital A. And that was very confusing to me. I had not experienced divinity as capital N nothing before. And at the end of that experience, I felt like I had done something wrong. And I had never encountered as a religious person a spiritual paradox, but here I was. I was holding both the fullness of compassion and the bleakness of boundaries. And so put all together and over many years, I’m embracing two polarities of a spiritual life. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:32:22] So these people clearly had profound experiences, in some cases, really strange experiences. And they had a lot of time to make sense of those experiences on their own, right? Because from what I understand, the study took a long time to publish. Do we know why it took so long? 

Michael Pollan [00:32:38] Well, things got a little complicated and controversial, particularly with regard to the story of Hunt Priest. 

Hunt Priest [00:32:45] In that first session, I most definitely experienced the divine presence. It was just a powerful electrical current moving through my body. It started in my spine, moved up my spine and got lodged around my Adam’s apple. And there was a moment that I thought my Adam Apple is gonna explode or whatever this was gonna come out my ears or my mouth or my eye sockets. And I remember thinking, oh my God, this is big. I don’t know what this is, but this is big. 

Michael Pollan [00:33:17] At one point, he remembered, although it turns out it didn’t really happen, that Bill Richards, who was his guide, did a kind of laying on of hands and put his hands on his head. And the other guide held his feet and he just felt this current passing through him. 

Hunt Priest [00:33:32] After the electrical current moved through my body and I was touched and it went out the top of my head, I began to make sounds that weren’t exactly words. They were sounds that seemed to mean something. And I remember thinking in the moment, is that what’s talked about in scripture, of speaking in tongues? It was something about this throat blockage being unblocked with this energetic force that was moving through my body. And then like singing, like words that were not words, like some sort of holy language that I didn’t need to know about. There may have been some moaning. There was also a erotic kind of sexual energy in all of it. It wasn’t like having sex, but it felt charged erotically. 

Michael Pollan [00:34:29] But after this happened, he felt a new lightness and freedom and that he’d broken through this block that he had and that this was an incredibly powerful experience for him. 

Hunt Priest [00:34:40] I’ve interpreted it in a couple of ways. One is in a really Christian way that that energy moving through me is the Holy Spirit, that the Holy spirit manifests as energy. The next day, I remembered the verse from scripture that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirt. And from that moment on, I thought that’s exactly right. Our bodies are where the Spirit lives in us. It’s where God lives. And one of the ways that I understood that block in my throat was because as a priest and a preacher, my voice is really important. And I felt like often my voice was squelched. It was blocked because I had not been able to say things I wanted to say or needed to say as a clergy person and preacher. The other thing is in my tradition, if we’re praying with somebody, especially if they’re sick or struggling, I often put my hands on their head. And because of that experience of being touched and that so much dramatically increasing the experience, I began to see and know that I was doing something more than just touching people, that it had deep spiritual power and significance. 

Michael Pollan [00:35:48] You know, the mixing of science and religion is just kind of explosive and makes people very uncomfortable. Scientists think it’s kind of woo-woo and not serious. And religious people think it’s, you know, we’re talking about sacred experience that’s being measured and administered and chemically occasioned. Is that a cheapening of the spiritual experience? I’m sure there are people who feel that, that this is a synthetic version of what is really profound and sacred and shouldn’t be messed with. But there are also people who fear or believe that there is a hidden goal to this study that isn’t being disclosed and that is to inject psychedelics into religion. And some people feel they wanna defend religion from that and that this is a heretical move. I don’t think that this was the goal of any of the researchers. I talked to them about it and they specifically disclaimed it. But with regard to Hunt’s experience, the fact that he spoke publicly about his session, which he did several times and he described this laying on of hands, a man who had worked for him as an intern felt that there had been a boundary violation and that this was a case of therapist abuse basically. And that led to an IRB investigation, Institutional Review Board. This is the organization at any university that ensures the safety and wellbeing of experimental subjects, whether they’re humans or animals or whatever. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:37:26] Right, they approve the methods of a study beforehand and also keep track. 

Michael Pollan [00:37:31] Exactly, you have to submit your protocol, exactly what you’re gonna do to the IRB and they comment on it. And they’ve determined that in fact, Bill Richards hadn’t touched Hunt Priest on the head. He had touched him on the shoulder, which was consented to. And the reason was they had videos. And so that charge melted away. But there were other charges too. Two of the funders got involved in the research. One became the person who was conducting these in-depth interviews. Another served as a guide or a second guide in several sessions. This hadn’t been disclosed to the IRB in the original filing. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:38:10] Yeah, that’s to be clear, that’s a highly unusual thing to have happen in a scientific study, right? 

Michael Pollan [00:38:16] Yeah, as far as I know. I mean, I don’t think it’s forbidden, but it’s unusual and certainly should be disclosed. And in fact, the IRB in its conclusion cleared the study for publication, but said they had to disclose this. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:38:29] Some experts have voiced concerns that the researchers in this study might have primed the participants to have a spiritual experience. What do you make of that? 

Michael Pollan [00:38:38] The priming issue I think is real. You know, they are asked in one of the questionnaires about their sacred experience. So there’s an assumption that they had one. And this is a study about exploring and developing your spiritual life. So they’re basically saying, you’re gonna have a spiritual experience. So, you know, priming is a real issue in psychedelic research and expectancy effects. Although it is true, you cannot reliably predict the kind of experience people will have. And people surprise you all the time. The fact is that, you know, everything from the Buddha statue in the treatment room to the music that’s being played to the kinds of questions you’re asked. I mean, if you are having a series of questionnaires before and after, and then your second trip before andafter, and every time you’re asked, have you had a mystical experience? You’re putting the idea in people’s head that you probably should have one. And so it’s a kind of vulnerability of this research that in many ways, people are primed for a certain kind of experience. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll have it, but it sort of loads the dice in that direction. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:39:49] Okay, so setting that aside, what did the researchers find once they did their analysis? What were the main conclusions of the study? 

Michael Pollan [00:39:57] Well, it was very interesting. First, with regard to the mystical experience, they screened immediately and then six months later. 88% of the participants met the criteria for having had a mystical experience. And then they found at six months that compared with the control group, participants who had received psilocybin reported significantly greater positive changes in their religious practices, attitudes about their religion, and effectiveness as religious leaders. As well as in their non-religious attitudes, moods and behaviors. So a very strong improvement in their practice of their vocation. And they went back 16 months later and participants rated at least one of their psilocybin experiences to be among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lifetime and most psychologically insightful experiences of their life time. That’s kind of incredible. And 42% rated one of their psilocybin experiences to be the single most profound experience of their lives. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:41:06] Wow. 

Michael Pollan [00:41:08] One of the findings I found particularly interesting is that most, something like 71%, reported positive changes in their appreciation of religious traditions other than their own. Now, although there were no serious adverse events reported, 46% of the participants. Said that their psilocybin experience was among the top five most psychologically challenging of their lives. So it wasn’t always easy for these people, but it was nevertheless profound. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:41:38] Okay, and what about the big questions of the study? Did they think this was real and not some illusion or a by-product of their brain chemistry, making them think that they were having a mystical experience? 

Michael Pollan [00:41:50] Most of them regarded their experience as authentic and that it was the real deal. And there was nobody I talked to who had any doubt about that. Even the ones who had negative experiences didn’t doubt their authenticity. So I think that was a significant finding, but I think it’s important to stress this is a small group, it’s self-selected in a way. There are many religious figures who would never do this. This is a group of people who perhaps had a spiritual hunger or were struggling in their work and open to the possibility that they will end up questioning their faith. Whenever you take a psychedelic at these kind of doses, you are throwing the dice. And people could have come out of this doubting the existence of God, doubting the legitimacy of their faith, so they’re risk takers also. So we should be very careful in drawing big conclusions from this particular cohort. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:42:49] What happened with the participants after they completed the trial? Did any of them experience a substantial change? 

Michael Pollan [00:42:55] Yeah, some people, their whole life course changed. A couple of them spoke publicly about it. Others though, like Sughra, kept it to herself. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:43:03] After taking the medicine, I made a decision not to talk about my experiences with anybody. I certainly didn’t want to talk publicly about it. It was very personal, very intimate. I don’t think my family would understand my experience even if I had shared with them. To try and understand that you pop something that is the equivalent of a mushroom into your mouth and you have hallucinogenic experiences and that actually Sughra believes that those are real and that they are true and now wants to live her life by them. I mean, that’s beyond any lay person who has had no exposure to the world of psychedelics. And I don’t think it’s very fair to expect any kind of understanding from people until they have been exposed to this work themselves. 

Michael Pollan [00:43:44] Several of the participants came out of the experience believing that psychedelics should be part of their faith and gave up what they were doing to start psychedelic organizations. That’s kind of extraordinary. Zak Kemenets ended up forming a group called Shefa which is about bringing psychedelic experience into Judaism in various ways. 

Zac Kemenetz [00:44:09] I estimate around a million Jewish adults in the United States using psychedelics currently. They want to reengage with the content of their tradition and sometimes for the first time, they want to be able to pick up a prayer book. They want be able just pray in their own language. And I haven’t ever encountered any other catalyst for that kind of deep yearning, that deep desire than psychedelics. 

Michael Pollan [00:44:43] And Hunt Priest who after his experience became so convinced that the Episcopal Church could make good use of psychedelic experience in religious retreats. He started an organization called Ligare and in fact left his job, his post, at that time he was a priest, to do this full time. 

Hunt Priest [00:45:04] I do see a future where psychedelics are part of Christian practice because they actually are now. I talk to a lot of Christians that are using psychedelics and they can coexist because they do. And I know it’s not a mainstream view and it’s certainly still fringe, but it’s happening already. This is not about evangelism or conversion. It better not be, that’s a misuse of this. And I’m sure that’ll be tried to by Christians but I think we should offer these as a way to help people find their spiritual path. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:45:36] In the time since we interviewed Hunt, the Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia revoked his ordained ministry, due in part to his work with psychedelics. Hunt is no longer an Episcopal priest. While we were reporting on this study, we reached out to more than a dozen religious organizations to inquire about their stance on the use of psychedelics, most did not respond. But several did. One spokesperson from the Rabbinical Assembly said that it is permissible for adults to consume mind-altering substances, under the supervision of a trusted medical professional. And officially, the Episcopal Church has no position on the use of psychedelics. 

Michael Pollan [00:46:21] And then, Sughra formed her own organization. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:46:24] I run a collective called Ruhani. Eventually, in January 2023, I remember talking to somebody and saying, I just can’t bury this anymore. I just, can’t do that to myself, it’s hurting. And so later on that year, I was asked to speak about Islam, Muslim cultures and psychedelics at a conference, Psychedelic Science. I ended up talking to person after person after person, I think it was like two hours or something and found myself giving my email address and my phone number to lots of strangers who were expressing to me that I also have taken the medicine. I also am Muslim. I also choose not to share this with my family or my friends. And I’m also struggling. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel safe having these conversations openly. And so I decided there and then that we would start a digital container. Where anybody who wanted to from these communities could come along and we would have conversations every month online. 

Michael Pollan [00:47:28] I don’t know of another cohort of people who’ve been in psychedelic study who have actually devoted their lives toward advancing the cause of psychedelics in their world. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:47:40] At Ruhani, we are able to help both Muslim communities but also the wider world understand the relationship between Islam and psychedelics. Psychedelics are not new in Muslim cultures. And a lot of people will just be completely shocked to hear that. We are not pioneers. There have been people before us, long before us saints especially in the Sufi traditions that have ingested things and have had mind altering experiences. 

Michael Pollan [00:48:07] In a way, they’ve had a conversion experience and what they’ve been converted to are psychedelics. But they haven’t left their faith. In fact, their faith has been renewed but they feel that in the case of Sugahra, Muslims and in the cases of Hunt Priest, Episcopalians, and in the case of Zak, Jews, could benefit by including psychedelic experience. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:48:29] When we think about psychedelics and religion coming together, I think for a lot of people there is going to be an inherent fear and I understand it, of course I do. Or a knee-jerk reaction that says, well, this is not your fast track way to God. Like if you want to encounter the divine, if you want to get closer to the divine if you want to engage in your spirituality or your theology in that way, it takes rigorous hard work over a prolonged period of time. Our saints didn’t just pop a pill. This is the work of lifetimes and we know that from the stories of the greats who have gone before us. This isn’t something to fear. It’s not going anywhere. If anything, we’re going to be consuming more and more of it as generations go on. So how do we learn about it, respect it and then share that with other people? That’s the answer. 

Michael Pollan [00:49:24] Instead of the usual, we’re gonna medicalize this, we’ve got to find a therapeutic target. This is a kind of very exciting science where we’re delving into big questions of metaphysics and using psychedelics and science to do it. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:49:40] Do we know if there will be more studies like this? 

Michael Pollan [00:49:42] Yes, the next study I hear is gonna be at Johns Hopkins where they wanna give a high dose of psilocybin to atheist philosophers and see what happens. Science generally looks down on narrative and what philosophers call phenomenology, the experience of humans. I think that the stories of these individuals have enormous value and needs to be part of science. 

Sughra Ahmed [00:50:11] The medicine took me away very gently into another world, another space where I was able to, what I understand is encounter my true self, understand my actual values, go through the things that really matter to me and gain a crystal-like sharp focus on what those things are. And today in all the stresses and strains of the world and with all that happens in life. When I can go back to that experience, when I can remind myself about what is important, it comes from my two sessions. As I feel like the plant continues to unfold and continues to talk to me. 

Michael Pollan [00:50:51] The transformative power of psychedelics is quite remarkable, doesn’t always happen. I think that the setting and the priming and all that are very important. But this is yet another group that I interviewed who told stories of personal transformation that were poignant and powerful. And when you think about it, remarkable. I mean, it’s a mushroom. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:51:20] Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Our executive editor is Malia Wollan. Jennnie Cataldo is our Senior Producer. Our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum. Our associate producer is Jade Abdul Malik. Our audio engineers are Terence Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo. Fact Checking by Graham Hacia. Our executive producers are Malia Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzales. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen and Nate Brenner. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week. Most well-known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including the United States, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics, with few exceptions. Altered States does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use.