How did Johns Hopkins and Imperial College restart psychedelic research?

Psychedelic research restarted through small, carefully controlled studies run by university scientists. Clinical work on psychedelics began to resume in the 1990s, after the prohibition of the 1960s and 1970s. Two groups became the symbols of the revival: a team at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and a team at Imperial College London.

At Johns Hopkins the leader was Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist who began studying psychedelic drugs in 1999. His group's study, published in 2006, used a rigorous double-blind design: 36 volunteers with no experience of hallucinogens were given psilocybin and, in another session, methylphenidate (Ritalin) as a control. In that study 61% of volunteers reported a "complete mystical experience" after psilocybin, against 13% after the control, and two months later 79% reported moderately to greatly increased life satisfaction and well-being. Asked how this differed from Timothy Leary's earlier work, Griffiths said his was rigorous, systematic research under carefully monitored conditions.

At Imperial College London, the psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris in 2014 became the first scientist in 40 years to legally test LSD on human volunteers. In 2016 his team published what it called the first modern research trial of psilocybin, on 19 patients with treatment-resistant depression; symptoms decreased for at least three weeks. Three years later he founded the Centre for Psychedelic Research there, the first of its kind in the world.

None of this settles whether psychedelics work as medicines. These were small, early studies, and in 2024 a former colleague of Griffiths publicly criticized the soundness of research in his lab. The revival is real; the verdict is still open.