Maryland Psychiatric Research Center

The Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove was the conspicuous exception to the shutdown of sanctioned psychedelic research in the United States: while dozens of programs were being closed, its researchers continued their work until 1976. Its persistence preserved a clinical line of inquiry into psilocybin and LSD during a period when psychedelic therapy was otherwise forced out of public institutions and into underground practice.

Research During the Shutdown

The center’s researchers included Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, Richard Yensen, and Walter Pahnke, who remained involved until his death in 1971. They explored the potential of psilocybin and LSD as treatments for alcoholism and schizophrenia, as well as for the existential distress experienced by cancer patients. The range of these indications made Spring Grove more than a refuge for a single experiment: it sustained several strands of clinical investigation while research elsewhere was being discontinued.

The circumstances of its survival were unusual. In October, the FDA ordered roughly sixty-six psychedelic researchers around the country to stop their work. The International Foundation for Advanced Study closed after its staff received the revocation notice, and virtually every other American research program then underway also ended. Spring Grove alone among the programs described continued through the purge and remained active for another decade.

Kurland and Institutional Protection

Why the center was permitted to continue has never been fully explained. Some researchers whose programs had been shut down speculated that Spring Grove might have provided psychedelic therapy to powerful people in Washington, or that officials wanted to learn from the research or preserve access to the drugs. Former staff members interviewed about the center doubted those explanations.

They did confirm a more concrete account of its institutional resilience: the center’s director, Albert Kurland, had a strong reputation among federal officials and exceptional connections in Washington. He used those relationships to keep the program operating and to obtain LSD, including some supplied by the government, long after research elsewhere had been stopped. In this account, the center’s survival depended not on a hidden purpose attributed to it by outsiders, but on a director able to maintain official standing and secure the practical means to continue.

Place in the Research History

Spring Grove marked a limit to the apparent finality of the 1966 shutdown. Although the center’s work ended in 1976, psychedelic research and therapy in America did not disappear altogether: after the remaining institutional opening closed, practice continued quietly underground. The change was not simply from research to silence, but from visible, sanctioned programs to work carried on beyond the law and outside ordinary professional protection.

The center also belongs to the history from which later psychedelic research resumed. Researchers returning to the field in the late 1990s were, in the broader account of the book, picking up questions earlier generations had been forced to leave behind. Spring Grove’s continued investigations form part of that interrupted history, though the later revival required old knowledge to be revisited under prevailing scientific standards. Its significance lies both in the patients and conditions its researchers studied and in the decade during which it kept clinical inquiry alive when almost every comparable American program had gone dark.