New York City is a recurring setting in the history of psychedelic research and practice, linking public fascination with psychoactive mushrooms to early spiritual inquiry and contemporary clinical trials. The city’s role is not confined to a single institution: Manhattan apartments, hospitals, museums, and a dental-school treatment room each mark a different passage between private experience and public recognition. Across these settings, psychedelic practice moves from an intimate ceremony to a spectacle, a therapeutic proposal, and finally a tightly organized research session.

Publicity and private ceremonies

After R. Gordon Wasson’s account of the Mexican mushrooms appeared in Life, he supplied mushrooms for first-person accounts of psychedelic journeys in other magazines and conducted ceremonies in his Manhattan apartment. The apartment made the experience available within the city, even as the published stories carried it far beyond New York: Wasson also appeared on the CBS program Person to Person, and his account reached millions. An exhibition on magic mushrooms at the American Museum of Natural History followed, placing the subject in a major public institution.

The city thus appears both as a site of private access and as a platform for public attention. Wasson’s Manhattan ceremonies were part of the circulation of an experience he had encountered in a much different cultural setting. The book also makes clear that this circulation had costs elsewhere: the attention that drew visitors to María Sabina and her village helped turn the mushrooms from a guarded practice into a commercial attraction. New York is not where those consequences unfolded, but its apartment gatherings, media reach, and museum exhibition belong to the chain by which the practice became widely known.

Hospitals and early spiritual inquiry

Manhattan’s Towns Hospital is connected to Bill Wilson’s account of spiritual awakening. In 1934, he was given belladonna there, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties, and later credited the resulting mystical experience with helping bring about his sobriety. The book traces the idea of spiritual awakening and surrender to a higher power—a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous—to this drug experience. Two decades later, after learning about the work of Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer with alcoholics, Wilson explored whether LSD might occasion a comparable awakening. His subsequent sessions took place in Los Angeles, not New York, but the earlier Manhattan hospital experience shaped the question he brought to that later work.

New York City also figures in the formation of the researchers who questioned whether LSD should be understood as a model of psychosis. Sidney Cohen was born in New York City, trained in pharmacology at Columbia University, and first read about LSD in 1953 while preparing a review of chemically induced psychoses. When he tried the drug in 1955, his experience surprised him: rather than the expected state of madness, he reported profound tranquillity and a sense of contemplating eternal truth. His account helped press against the psychotomimetic model, although the book locates his LSD sessions and research activity in Los Angeles. The city’s importance here is biographical and intellectual: it is where Cohen’s life began and where his scientific training started, not the setting of the decisive experiment.

A network with Manhattan in its circuit

By the late 1950s, Al Hubbard moved among research centers across North America, carrying therapeutic advice and ampules of Sandoz LSD. One leg of his circuit took him to Manhattan to meet Wasson, before he continued between other researchers and treatment sites. The itinerary places New York within a loose network sustained by personal encounters, shared techniques, and the movement of supplies, rather than presenting it as an isolated center. Hubbard’s travel joined the city’s mushroom publicity to the wider clinical effort, while the work itself remained distributed across places such as Weyburn, Vancouver, and Los Angeles.

New York’s later clinical setting is more controlled and deliberately domestic. At New York University, psilocybin sessions took place in a treatment room furnished to resemble a cozy den: a long couch faced an abstract painting, while art and mythology books, native craft items, a ceramic mushroom, a Buddha, and a crystal softened the hospital atmosphere. Yet the room’s medical function remained visible in its fittings, ceiling tracks, and oversized bathroom with grab bars and pedals. The contrast makes the treatment space legible as both a designed environment for a vulnerable experience and a room inside a large urban hospital complex.

The NYU trial and its physical setting

The treatment room became the setting for Patrick Mettes’s six-hour psilocybin journey in a clinical trial investigating whether a single high dose could alleviate anxiety and depression associated with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. The book’s narrator first heard Mettes’s story there while interviewing Tony Bossis, who guided the session, and Stephen Ross, the psychiatrist directing the trial. A sister study at Johns Hopkins was pursuing the same broad question, while other trials examined possible uses for psilocybin in depression and addiction.

Mettes entered the study after reading a New York Times article about renewed medical interest in hallucinogens. He had bile-duct cancer, diagnosed three years earlier; by 2010 it had spread to his lungs, and he was struggling with an especially debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the possibility that he might not survive. His wife, Lisa Callaghan, opposed his decision to volunteer because she wanted him to keep fighting, but he contacted New York University and was accepted. Their disagreement placed the trial within the intimate stakes of illness as well as its institutional setting.

In January 2011, Mettes traveled alone by subway from the couple’s Brooklyn apartment to the treatment room in the New York University dental school on First Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. The session was held there because both Bellevue and New York University’s cancer center wanted distance from a trial involving psychedelics. Bossis and Krystallia Kalliontzi greeted him, reviewed the day’s plan, and at nine in the morning gave him a chalice containing a pill; for at least thirty minutes, no one knew whether it held psilocybin or placebo. Mettes stated that he hoped to cope better with cancer-related anxiety and depression and to work on what he called his regret in life. He arranged photographs of himself and Callaghan on their wedding day and of their dog, Arlo, before lying on the couch with headphones and eyeshades.

The city as a changing frame

Across these episodes, New York City’s significance lies in the different forms of access it provides. The Manhattan apartment brought mushroom ceremonies into a private urban setting; Towns Hospital anchors Wilson’s remembered spiritual awakening in medical care; the museum made mushrooms an object of public display; and the New York University dental-school room made a psychedelic session part of a formal clinical study. These are not interchangeable spaces. Each marks a different negotiation between experience and institution, from personal exploration and media exposure to the safeguards and constraints of research.

The city’s settings also reveal the uneven continuity of psychedelic inquiry. Cohen’s early career belongs to a period when researchers were testing and revising explanatory models, whereas the NYU trial resumed a line of sanctioned therapeutic research that had been interrupted in the 1970s. The carefully arranged room, with its homelike objects set against unmistakable hospital infrastructure, gives that return a concrete form: an effort to make an intense experience possible within the medical system without disguising the system that contains it.