Oprah Features Pioneer Psychedelics Scientist Dr. Roland Griffiths: Lessons On Gratitude

The conversation on psychedelics has made its way to Oprah Winfrey’s daily show, where the beloved host invited Dr. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., to talk about a topic that, in her words, “so many people want to avoid, but it’s one that every one of us is going to have to face in our lifetime: our mortality.”

After learning about Dr. Griffiths’ viewpoint on matters relating to life and death in a recent NYT Magazine column, Oprah says she wanted to have him on the show to talk about, among other things, the importance of choosing to look at mortality with gratitude, rather than fear.

Dr. Griffiths is a longtime psychedelics researcher and a pioneer of their use in treating terminally-ill patients. He also founded the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to further study how altered brain states can affect worldview and spirituality, or “whether psychedelics would have anything informative to tell me about the nature of this mystery, the humbling sense that we truly don’t know what’s going on here,” as Griffiths told Oprah.

He shared that what the research team found time and again, since the first study, is that people taking a psychedelic under their setting conditions (after careful screening and preparation) would have experiences that shifted their entire sense and worldview.

Dr. Griffiths was recently diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Having contemplated his own death, he told Oprah he had “no real sense” of how he would respond to such a diagnosis. And then, he understood what his patients had described all along. 

“I can’t quite explain it. What occurred was this incredible opening, awakening, if you will, to the preciousness of life. And it immediately became something to celebrate,” he said.

Driven by a strong feeling of human interconnectedness, Dr. Griffiths is dedicating efforts to the continuation of his life’s work through the new Roland R. Griffiths Professorship Fund at Johns Hopkins to establish an empirical psychedelics research program on secular spirituality and well-being.

Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash