Griffiths went into the cancer study with trepidation. “I was really concerned that we could damage people with this kind of big, opening experience when they’re confronting their own mortality,” he says. Similar studies had been carried out decades before and found that psychedelics lessened psychological distress for patients. Griffiths’ study backed up those earlier findings and found that patients emerged feeling more at peace with their mortality. The positive effects remained evident six months later.
When they were conducting that study, Griffiths couldn’t imagine what those subjects were going through. Recently, though, Griffiths was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. In the wake of that news, he stepped down as director of the university’s Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, though he’s stayed active in its work. He likes to say he cut back from 70 hours a week to 40. He also married his longtime partner.
I spoke to Griffiths in the living room of his Baltimore home on a chilly February afternoon. On the day I saw him, he had just completed a round of chemotherapy and worried that he might not be sharp enough for an interview. In reality, he had no trouble speaking about his life and research for more than two hours, reflecting on his midcareer shift and where he thinks psychedelic research is headed. He also spoke about the prospect of his death. Shortly after the diagnosis, he felt what cancer patients understandably tend to feel: fear and sadness. But he’s made an effort to steer his thoughts toward acceptance and gratitude, and the result has been a kind of new awakening. “Who wants to be depressed or angry or resentful?” he says. “And going to war with it just really felt like the wrong posture.” Where he’s landed instead, he says, is in a place of “joy and equipoise and well-being I couldn’t have imagined would have emerged from a terminal-cancer diagnosis.”