This idea is reflected in modern research, too. “There’s a feeling that in order to really be empathetic and sensitive to what potentially is going on in the mind of the volunteer, you need to have some experience of these radically alternative states of consciousness, yourself,” Johns Hopkins researcher Bill Richards told me in a recent interview. During earlier psychedelic research of the 1960s, he recalls, “we wouldn’t allow a new employee, even a psychiatric nurse, in the room if he or she hadn’t had two LSD sessions, which was part of on-the-job training that we provided.”