(RNS) — “I was the kid who never even smoked pot. I was very cautious, and a rule follower,” said Rabbi Julie Danan, spiritual leader of Seaside Jewish Community in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
So when Danan took the short train ride to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore in the summer of 2016 to receive a legal 20 milligram dose of psilocybin, it was, in her words, “out of character.”
Danan was participating in what was billed as a clinical trial exploring the effects of psilocybin in clergy, run by Johns Hopkins and New York University researchers. Other participants included four other rabbis, a Catholic priest, several Protestant ministers and a Muslim leader.
Like a few of her fellow participants, Danan told Religion News Service, her psilocybin trip was “the most powerful and overwhelming spiritual experience of my life.”
In the intervening decade, the Johns Hopkins/New York University study has taken on an almost mythic quality among some psychedelic enthusiasts as they awaited the results and imagined their impact. The study, some hoped, could reduce stigmas toward entheogens in certain religious spaces, while proving the value of spirituality in psychedelic ones. Others worried it would generate moral panic or be wielded as license to use psychedelics ind …