Dr Bill Richards looks at me with kind eyes through the computer screen, his face framed by an overgrown plant, bookshelves and an abstract painting. It hangs behind him in shades of blue, yellow and red, the colours fluid and swirling yet handsomely encased in shapes that have no clear name. If that sounds akin to a psychedelic experience, you’re in luck: because Bill and I are sitting down to discuss just that.
Not one experience in particular, but hundreds of them. Hundreds which Bill has studied in his career as a leader in the field of psychedelic research. He was one of the first to explore psychedelics’ potential for treating addiction as well as end of life anxiety among terminal cancer patients. His passion for this subject began in Germany in 1963 and was nurtured under the tutelage of psychologist Abraham Maslow and the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner. He returned to the US to carry out psychotherapy research with psychedelics from 1967 to 1977; then, at the height of the War on Drugs, he had to shut things down.
He had by then already made waves in the field, notably with his seminal articl – Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism – co-authored overnight in 1966 with Walter Pahnke and mailed off at sunrise.
Today, Bill has an academic appointment in the psychiatry department of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he led a study in 2016 on how psilocybin could be used among cancer patients to alleviate depression. It was described as “the most rigorous controlled trial of psilocybin to date”. He appeared in Michael Pollan’s 2022 documentary, How To Change Your Mind, and his much-lauded book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, is out in Spanish this May.
Bill is a rare breed in the field of psychedelics in that he straddles both scientific and spiritual sides of the discipline. What’s more, he believes the dichotomy that separates the two is false. “It’s not either-or,” he quips. For Bill, it would be remiss to discuss psychedelics in purely scientific terms, just as it would be reductive to explore only their spiritual dimension.
Alongside his psychology credentials, Bill holds a Master of Divinity from Yale (at which point he wished to become a minister) and a PhD from The Catholic University of America. “I grew up with a father who taught chemistry, physics and geology, and a rather pious mother — so science and religion have always been in my blood,” he says. Today still, he plays the organ in his local Episcopal Church. This dual influence has profoundly impacted Bill — whose ideas, out of all those I have heard, I find to be the most inspirational. The mystical experience induced by psilocybin or ayahuasca is, according to him, not caused by the drugs at all. Rather, these substances unlock what is already in our mind. Religious mystics, Bill argues, can access such states of consciousness without the help of psychoactive compounds.
These “transcendental states of consciousness” defy our categories of thinking about “time and space”. “Sometimes,” Bill adds, “it seems more the realm of philosophy than of science.” Some might perceive such a statement as invalidating the scientific relevance of psychedelics; but that is not Bill’s intention. “These drugs,” he says, have likely been around since the dawn of civilisation. They “emerge in cultures” and then “get suppressed”. We have lost touch with historic knowledge, with wisdom that used to be passed down among our ancestors. “Plato and Dante were writing out of mystical states of consciousness,” Bill claims. “But whether they were natural mystics or were munching on magic mushrooms, I have no idea.”
Hellbound and Down 