Katherine MacLean, Hopkins researcher

Katherine MacLean, a former Johns Hopkins researcher and author of a landmark paper on openness, imagines psychedelic care extending beyond the treatment of a sick individual. Her proposed psychedelic hospice would bring dying people and their loved ones together in a natural retreat setting, making the shared work of letting go part of care. The idea places her among researchers considering not only clinical treatment but the wider human uses of psychedelic experience.

Research Background and Wider Vision

MacLean is identified as a former Johns Hopkins researcher who wrote a landmark paper on openness. In the book’s account, that background gives way to a proposal that exceeds the familiar medical arrangement between doctor and patient: a retreat in nature where both a dying person and loved ones could use psychedelics. The purpose would not be limited to treating the patient; it would help everyone involved let go.

MacLean explicitly resists confining psychedelic treatment to the person with a diagnosis. She warns that limiting its use to the patient would preserve the old medical model, and says she becomes nervous when people argue that only doctors should prescribe psychedelics. Her preferred outlook is broader in application, though the account does not specify the hospice’s practical arrangements or how it would be governed.

Death, Care, and the Medical Model

The hospice proposal treats dying as an experience embedded in relationships rather than as an isolated medical condition. By including loved ones alongside the patient, MacLean’s vision shifts attention from the individual as the sole recipient of care to a group facing loss together. Its natural retreat setting also contrasts with care confined to clinical institutions, although the proposal remains an aspiration rather than an operating program in the evidence presented.

MacLean’s argument connects psychedelic therapy with a difficult cultural subject: death. The wider discussion describes American death as commonly taking place in intensive care despite many people saying they would prefer to die at home with loved ones. Against that background, the hospice idea suggests that psychedelics might help people approach letting go together, not merely alleviate symptoms in the patient.

Institutional Caution and Broader Acceptance

MacLean’s expansive view echoes the 1960s-era hope that psychedelics might benefit people beyond those who are ill. The narrator notes that such talk makes some mainstream colleagues uneasy, especially while researchers seek medical acceptance. The tension is not simply between treatment and non-treatment: it concerns who may take part, who may guide access, and whether psychedelic experience belongs only within physician-led care.

A parallel change appears in the account of Roland Griffiths. When the narrator first raised the idea of improving the lives of well people, Griffiths called it culturally dangerous to promote. Across three years of conversations, however, the narrator came to understand that Griffiths also believed many people beyond those facing cancer, depression, or addiction could benefit from the molecules and the spiritual experiences they might occasion. He cautiously recast his position in the future tense, saying that their value would be too great to limit to sick people. This does not establish that MacLean changed Griffiths’s view; it places her hospice proposal within a broader debate over whether psychedelic care can move beyond the boundaries of conventional medicine.