The University of New Mexico entered the book’s account of psychedelic research through a small clinical pilot, not as a detailed portrait of a campus or department. In 2015, researchers there tested psilocybin as part of treatment for alcohol dependence. The study offered an early, encouraging signal in a renewed effort to investigate psychedelics for addiction after decades in which such research had largely fallen away.

The 2015 pilot study

Ten people with alcohol dependence took part in the University of New Mexico pilot. Psilocybin was combined with motivational enhancement therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy designed specifically to address addiction. The distinction between the two parts of the intervention mattered: the psychotherapy by itself had little effect on drinking behavior, while drinking decreased significantly after the psilocybin session.

The researchers followed participants for thirty-six weeks, and the reported changes in drinking were sustained across that period. The result was preliminary evidence from a small pilot, rather than a definitive demonstration of efficacy. The study nevertheless gave researchers a concrete basis for further investigation.

Experience, treatment, and interpretation

The pilot’s findings also drew attention to the experience produced during treatment. Michael Bogenschutz, its lead investigator, reported a strong correlation between the strength of the psychedelic experience and its effect on drinking behavior. That relationship suggested that the outcome could not be understood simply as a medication acting apart from the circumstances of treatment; the therapeutic intervention joined psilocybin with structured psychotherapy and the experience it occasioned.

That combination belonged to a wider challenge confronting psychedelic research. Researchers could not easily separate a drug’s effects from participants’ expectations, the presence of guides or therapists, and the surrounding set and setting. The University of New Mexico study therefore formed part of an emerging clinical approach in which the medicine and the psychological treatment were considered together, even as the precise sources of benefit remained open to investigation.

From pilot to larger research

The results were encouraging enough to warrant a much larger phase 2 trial involving 180 volunteers. That subsequent study was being conducted at New York University by Bogenschutz in collaboration with Stephen Ross and Jeffrey Guss; it was not a continuation based at the University of New Mexico. The institutional sequence marks the pilot’s role: a small study at the University of New Mexico helped justify a broader test at another research center.

The University of New Mexico thus appears as a specific point in the revival of psychedelic treatment research for alcohol dependence. Its pilot joined a longer history of inquiry that had once included extensive LSD treatment efforts but whose evidence had been difficult to interpret. The study did not settle whether psilocybin could treat addiction; it supplied an encouraging, time-bounded result and a reason to investigate the question on a larger scale.