PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
Data were collected during the experiment and at various
times up to six months afterward. On the experimental day,
tape recordings were made both of individual reactions immediately
after the religious service and of the group discussions
that followed. Each subject wrote an account of his experience
as soon after the experiment as was convenient.
Within a week all subjects had completed a 147-item questionnaire
which had been designed to measure the various
phenomena of the typology of mysticism on a qualitative,
numerical scale. The results of this questionnaire were used
as a basis for a one-and-one-half-hour, tape-recorded interview
which immediately followed. Six months later each subject
was interviewed again after completion of a follow-up
questionnaire in three parts, with a similar scale. Part I was
open ended; the participant was asked to list any changes that
he felt were a result of his Good Friday experience and to
rate the degree of benefit or harm of each change. Part II
(fifty-two items) was a condensed and somewhat more explicit
repetition of items from the post-drug questionnaire.
Part III (ninety-three items) was designed to measure both
positive and negative attitudinal and behavioral changes that
had lasted for six months and were due to the experience.
The individual descriptive accounts and Part I of the
follow-up questionnaire were content-analyzed with a qualitative,
numerical scale by judges who were independent of
the experiment and who knew only that they were to analyze
twenty accounts written by persons who had attended a religious
service.
Prior to the experiment, the twenty subjects had been
matched in ten pairs on the basis of data from the pre-drug
questionnaires, interviews, and psychological tests. Past re-
ligious experience, religious background, and general psycho-
logical make-up were used for the pairings, in that order of
importance. The experiment was designed so that by random
distribution one subject from each pair received psilocybin
and one received the control substance, nicotinic acid. This
division into an experimental and a control group was for the
purpose of statistical evaluation of the scores from each of the
three methods of measurement that used a numerical scale: