Alice O’Donnell

Alice O’Donnell was an Irish-born book editor in her sixties who entered a Psilocybin trial to stop smoking. Her journey ranged across history and the cosmos, but its practical consequence was intimate: she came away with a renewed sense of wonder, a changed view of smoking, and a lasting commitment to cherish her breath. Her account gives the trial’s abstract goal a human scale, showing how an immense experience could return her to an ordinary, concrete choice.

Identity and the trial

O’Donnell was among the volunteers in a small, nonrandomized study of Psilocybin-assisted smoking cessation. The book situates her among people whose journeys were not limited to the immediate problem of breaking a habit: the treatment could carry participants through unfamiliar worlds and times, while the insights they brought back might be strikingly plain. O’Donnell’s story embodies that contrast. Its extraordinary imagery did not lead her to a complicated theory of smoking; it altered the relative importance she gave to smoking in the first place.

A journey through history and the cosmos

O’Donnell described relishing “in the freedom to go everywhere.” During the journey she grew feathers that let her travel back through scenes of European history. She died three times, watched her “soul move from her body to a funeral pyre floating on the Ganges,” and found herself at the edge of the universe, witnessing the dawn of creation. The journey’s scale overturned the narrowness she associated with adult life, widening her attention from a familiar personal routine to the sweep of existence.

From that perspective came what she called the “humbling” realization that “everything in the universe is of equal importance, including yourself.” The insight did not simply diminish the self; it placed it within a larger field of value. O’Donnell described the experience as a return to “the child’s wider sense of wonder—to the world of Wordsworth.” A part of her brain that had gone to sleep, she said, had awakened. The reference to William Wordsworth links that regained wonder to a poetic vision of attention renewed by the world, rather than to a narrowly clinical account of changing a habit.

Reframing smoking and breath

O’Donnell connected the journey’s vastness directly to smoking. Against the scale of the universe and the possibility of so much to see and do, she said, “killing yourself seemed like a dumb idea.” Smoking, once a pressing habit, seemed “very unimportant” and “kind of stupid.” The change she described was a shift in proportion: smoking lost some of its hold not because she recounted a struggle of willpower, but because the experience made life itself feel more expansive and worth protecting.

She also pictured throwing out the junk in her house and emptying its attic and basement, an image of clearing away what she no longer needed. From that image she drew a simple priority: “the most important thing of all is the breath.” She emerged convinced “that you should cherish your breath.” In her account, the breath was not an abstract symbol detached from the attempt to quit; it was the basic condition of being alive, and therefore a reason to treat smoking as a diminished priority.

Lasting change and the study’s findings

O’Donnell reported that she had not smoked since her Psilocybin journey. When a craving arose, she returned in memory to the session, recalling the experiences and how it felt to be on “that much higher plane.” The memory thus became a resource she could draw on after the dosing itself had ended: the journey’s meaning persisted as part of how she responded to the familiar pull of smoking.

The study’s results offered a broader, cautiously qualified context for her account. It was small and not randomized, but 80 percent of its volunteers were confirmed abstinent six months after their sessions; at one year, the figure was 67 percent, still higher than the best treatment then available. Volunteers who reported the most complete mystical experiences had the best outcomes. O’Donnell’s story illustrates the connection described in the study between an encompassing experience and a practical change, without by itself establishing why that change occurred or proving the treatment’s effectiveness.