The publication of the New York University and Johns Hopkins University cancer trials in December 2016 marked a turning point in the public standing of psilocybin research: results once confined to a marginal field appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology, accompanied by broad support from mental-health leaders. The studies offered an encouraging clinical signal, not a final answer. Their small scale left the findings in need of replication, even as they helped move psychedelic therapy closer to institutional acceptance.

From sacrament to public controversy

The renewed clinical interest arrived after a long and contested history. Psychoactive mushrooms had been used in Indigenous religious and healing practices in Mexico, but their sacramental use was driven underground after the Spanish conquest. Sixteenth-century accounts describe varied experiences and practices; they do not reduce the mushrooms to a single, universal search for God. By the twentieth century, Mazatec use included healing and divination. R. Gordon Wasson, however, approached the practice with a theory that psychoactive fungi lay at the roots of religious experience, and his account tended to interpret the ceremony through that prior idea rather than its contemporary local purposes.

Wasson’s 1957 article in Life brought the subject to a mass audience. Its headline helped establish the phrase magic mushrooms, and its reach extended through further media coverage and public attention. That early enthusiasm was later displaced by alarm. By 1966, sensational accounts of LSD had helped create a moral panic, and even Life shifted from promoting psychedelic interest to presenting the drug as a threat. The contrast is part of the background to the 2016 announcement: the new clinical results were not simply research findings, but a return to respectable public discussion after decades in which psychedelic work had been pushed to the margins.

The 2016 findings

The results appeared in December 2016 in a front-page New York Times story and in a special issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The issue included nearly a dozen commentaries from prominent figures in mental health, among them two former presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, who welcomed the findings. The response signaled that the research had gained serious attention within the mental-health establishment.

Across the two trials, about 80 percent of the cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression. Those reductions lasted at least six months after the psilocybin session. The intensity of participants’ reported mystical experiences closely correlated with the degree of symptom relief. That relationship was notable, but it was a correlation: the studies did not establish why a mystical experience might accompany relief, or whether it caused the improvement.

The evidence also had a clear limit. The trials included eighty subjects in total, a small sample that would need to be followed by larger studies before the government could consider rescheduling psilocybin and approving the treatment. The results therefore offered a promising signal rather than settled proof. The papers provided little theory to explain the apparent effects, and the association with mystical experience left an important question open: how, and in what way, does the character of an experience translate into lasting changes in anxiety and depression?

Institutional consequences

The findings prompted a visible shift in institutional behavior. Dozens of medical schools sought to take part in future trials, and funders stepped forward to support that work. New York University, which had once tolerated the research only grudgingly, began publicly promoting its results. Stephen Ross was invited to move his treatment room from the dental college into the main hospital; the university’s cancer center, initially reluctant to refer patients to the trial, then asked him to establish a treatment room there for an upcoming study.

These changes did not amount to regulatory approval or resolve the scientific questions. They did show that the research had crossed an important boundary: psychedelic therapy was becoming credible enough for major institutions to seek a role in its further study. The publication thus joined a dramatic clinical result to a change in status. After decades in the shadows, the field had become respectable again, though not yet beyond dispute.