William Richards

William Richards earned graduate degrees in theology and psychology while studying the use of psychedelics in medical and religious contexts. Since 1999 Richards and his primary co-researcher, Roland Griffiths — along with a team of doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore — have legally given psilocybin to hundreds of patients who suffer from anxiety, depression, nicotine addiction, and other ailments, as well as to healthy volunteers who are interested in personal or spiritual growth. Richards recently published Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. He is also the coauthor, with Walter Pahnke, of the early psychedelic article “Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism.”