How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018)

Al Hubbard was born in Kentucky in either 1901 or 1902. He was born poor and “liked to tell people he was twelve before he owned a pair of shoes” (165). He didn’t have much schooling, but he had a penchant for electronics. He invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer as a teenager, which was a battery powered by radioactivity. He sold part of the patent for $75,000, but the invention was a hoax and never went anywhere. Hubbard played a role in Prohibition, helping bootleggers avoid the Coast Guard using a ship-to-shore communication system he hid in the trunk of his taxi (165). He was eventually caught by the FBI and imprisoned.

Hubbard’s life becomes more difficult to follow after his release from prison, and many of the written accounts contradict each other. One story says he went undercover to ship heavy arms before World War II. When Congress started investigating him, he fled to Canada. Hubbard became a Canadian citizen and founded a charter boat business while also running a uranium mining company. The charter boat business earned him the nickname Captain, and uranium mining made him a millionaire (165). At some point during World War II, Hubbard returned to the United States and joined the CIA. Despite his CIA ties, he also worked for the Canadian Special Services and a handful of other federal organizations in the United States. In the 1950s he seemed to still have ties to the CIA, while the government was closely watching the psychedelic community.

In 1951 Al Hubbard had his first LSD experience, and he immediately began spreading the drug across the country, keeping his leather satchel full to the brim with LSD (167). It’s estimated that Hubbard introduced 6,000 people to LSD by 1966, “in an avowed effort to shift the course of human history” (167). Hubbard was even responsible for introducing Humphry Osmond to the idea of high-dose psychedelic therapy. He also was one of the first to understand how important set and setting were for the psychedelic experience (169). Hubbard became one of the most connected figures in the psychedelic community, and he worked with many celebrities.

After spending some time with the psychedelic research community, Al Hubbard decided to formalize those connections and create the Commissions for the Study of Creative Imagination (174). This group strove to go beyond medicine and treatment to change cultures. It’s not clear what the group stood for or whether it truly had much cultural impact, but its existence is one example of the divide between the medicinal and spiritual psychedelic camps. Though Al Hubbard’s life was extremely unorthodox and hard to trace, there is no doubt he was a main player in the rise of psychedelics.

Roland Griffiths was born in 1946 and grew up in El Cerrito, California (31). He completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at Occidental College, then pursued graduate studies in psychopharmacology at the University of Minnesota (31). While at Minnesota, he was influenced by B.F. Skinner, who shifted the field of psychology to focus on the study of outward behavior and its conditioning rather than inner, subjective experience. This research approach interested Griffiths, and he used those methods to study drug use and dependence behaviors.

Following graduate school, Griffiths was hired at Johns Hopkins, where he studies mechanisms of drug dependence in “opiates, sedative hypnotics, nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine” (32). He has published 55 papers exploring caffeine addiction and was responsible for shifting the view of coffee from being a food to being a drug. His work also lead to caffeine withdrawal syndrome being published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The shift of his career from drug behaviors to psychedelics started with his introduction to Siddha Yoga and meditation (32). He began to meditate regularly in 1994 and found himself drawn to the mystery of consciousness and mystical experiences. He felt a divide between his scientific background and newfound interest in consciousness, and struggled to connect the two aspects. He quickly lost interest in his research:

“I could study a new sedative hypnotic, learn something new about brain receptors, […] but so what? I was more emotionally and intellectually curious about where this other oath might lead. My drug research began to seem vacuous. I was going through the motions at work, much more interested in going home in the evening to meditate” (33).

It wasn’t until he met with Bob Jesse that Griffiths realized that he could study consciousness and drug behaviors with scientific rigor. This collaboration lead to the 2006 study published in Psychopharmacology titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Meaning and Spiritual Significance.”

Bob Jesse grew up outside of Baltimore and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins (38). He worked at Bell Labs for a period of time, and he came out as gay in that time. He was responsible for the recognition of the first LGBTQ employee group at Bell Labs, and he later persuaded AT&T to fly a rainbow flag during pride week at their headquarters (38). LGBTQ activism was his introduction to political activism and revealed his passion for making change behind the scenes.

In 1990 Jesse moved to the Bay Area and began work at Oracle. He inspired a group from Oracle to walk in San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade. Oracle began offering benefits to same-sex partners of its employees, becoming one of the first Fortune 500 companies to do so (a move also attributed to Jesse’s behind-the-scenes work) (39).

Jesse became interested in psychedelics during a high school science class. In his 20s he found himself in a group of friends who tried psychedelics out for themselves. Subsequently, he had his first trip at the age of 25, which became a transformative moment in his life.

Following his first psychedelic journey, Jesse began exploring more spiritual traditions and continued to use psychedelics. He found himself more drawn to this line of work and eventually left his position at Oracle in 1995. Jesse formed a nonprofit, the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP), with the intention of finding routes to safely and effectively approach spiritual experiences (43).

Rick Doblin was born in 1953. He began lobbying for psychedelics after graduating from the Florida-based New College in 1987 (35). He experimented with both LSD and MDMA while a student there, and those experiences made him want to become a psychedelic therapist. That dream was extinguished by the ban of MDMA in 1985. The following year Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). To focus on changing federal policy around psychedelic drugs, he completed a doctorate in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School (35). His dissertation focused on the path to acceptance of psychedelics on the federal level. He currently works out of Belmont, Massachusetts, and continues to lobby for psychedelic drugs in hopes of pursuing his dream career as a psychedelic therapist. His work has helped get MDMA research funded, and MAPS has sponsored a handful of clinical trials showing the value of treating post-traumatic stress disorder with MDMA (36-37). MAPS has also sponsored studies using MDMA to treat social anxiety in autistic adults (37).

Paul Stamets was born in 1955 in Ohio (87). He was the youngest of five children and looked up to his older brother John. His brother, a scientist, and built a laboratory in the basement of their childhood home. The approval of his brother would be a guiding aspect for most of Stamets’s life, and perhaps inspired him to pursue typical academic work among his research, without having pursued an academic degree (94). Stamets studied at Kenyon College as an undergraduate, where he had his own foundational psychedelic experience (99). For most of his life Stamets had a stutter that created social anxiety and fear, especially in conversation. After consuming a sizable quantity of mushrooms, he got high and decided to climb a tree just as it was about to storm. He found himself stuck in tree, with lightning flashing all around him. This decision proved to be one of the most important moments of his life.

When the storm passed, he climbed down from the tree and went back to his room. The next day he found himself walking down the sidewalk about to pass by a girl he had a crush on. The girl asked how he was, and Paul responded without stuttering. He notes, “And I’ve hardly ever stuttered since” (100). This moment propelled him to study mushrooms.

At the age of 23 he published his first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies (101). He became a leading expert in the Psilocybe genus. He left Kenyon after a year and enrolled at Evergreen State College in Washington, where he received his formal education in mycology (101). While there, Stamets, his research advisor, and two fellow students turned the college into the hub of psychedelic mushroom research. In researching the mushrooms all around them in the Pacific Northwest, the team frequently discovered new species and published their findings (102). They began hosting mushroom conferences, which were attended by prominent figures in the field, including Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wosson (who is credited with describing the first psilocybin journey by a Westerner) (103).

Unlike some of the other notable figures in psychedelics, Paul Stamets is not an academic. All of his work is outside of academia, and he does not hold any graduate degrees (86). His research is funded by his successful business, in which he sells mushrooms, spores, and mushroom-related products. His research is foundational for the mycology community and has garnered partnerships with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (91). He has written numerous books, including the 1996 field guide Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Stamets also holds eight patents, plus honors from the Mycological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (92)