Hallucinogen Therapy Is Coming

Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, in a trial at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for nicotine addiction. He was 52, and he’d smoked between one and two packs a day for nearly 40 years. After his first psilocybin session, his urge to smoke was gone. During his third and final session, he had the vision that helped him quit for good.

He saw lakes, roads, and mountains, and a broad-shouldered man at the helm of a ship, lassoing birds. Was it his dead father? He wasn’t sure. But he remembers giggling and feeling good. Music was playing in his headphones. During Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring he had the sensation of physically touching the music, which was smooth and bright yellow in his mind’s eye. As the music progressed, he traveled, flowing outward toward an immense space that never ended. He may have wept for joy—he’s not sure—but the beauty of the vision overwhelmed him. “I was seeing forever,” he told me.

Kreitman was brought up Jewish, but doesn’t consider himself to be particularly religious. Yet he falls back on religious language to explain the experience. “I think I saw God at one point,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. The day after the session, in his journal, he wrote: “The question is, if I saw God and infinity, what’s next? How does that change me and my life?”

When I spoke with him this August, Kreitman had an answer: He hadn’t had a cigarette for three years. He’d previously tried nicotine gum and patches, to no avail. He always returned to the habit, falling into the easy rhythms of smoking on the way to work and on the way home. It was taking a toll on his health, though. He was chronically short of breath and although they didn’t nag, his wife and children