Summary

“A Renaissance,” continued. Pollan describes how, as the research team led by Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse gathered scientists and resources, Jesse realized that the project needed the guidance and expertise of a psychologist, and found one in in a man named Bill Richards, who had been working for several years on different types of psychedelic-related research at the Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore. Pollan describes Richards’ own history of experimentation with LSD, his belief in its potentially curative powers, and his concurrent belief that it could also engage people with spirituality and enlightenment. There are also descriptions of how governments and other authorities resisted and tried to control such experiments, with one researcher observing, “There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures” (59).

Pollan then describes how...