The post Who is Matthew W. Johnson? appeared first on Psychedelia.
By Garrett Rudolph
To the general public, it started with a single tweet: “It’s official. I just received a UO1 grant from NIDA to study #psilocybin for tobacco addiction,” Matthew W. Johnson announced on his Twitter account, @Drug_Researcher, on September 20, 2021. “To my knowledge, it’s the 1st grant from the US government in over half a century to directly study therapeutics of a classic #psychedelic. A new era in the legitimacy of psychedelic science.”
In the coming weeks, news organizations throughout North America would seize on the story, and psychedelic research, already bubbling with some excitement and cache, made an even bigger splash into the mainstream.
Newsweek, NBC News, Forbes, and Axios all interviewed Johnson, the Susan Hill Ward Professor in Psychedelics and Consciousness at Johns Hopkins University, touching on various aspects of his psilocybin research and the $4 million grant he’d received.
Although Johnson is the type of person normally known only within specialized scientific communities, he’s quickly becoming a rock star in the greater psychedelic space.
Behind the scenes, Johnson is your typical family man, with “the best wife in the world” and a 4-year-old son. He likes gardening, spending time in nature and playing the bass guitar in his spare time. He has eclectic tastes when it comes to music, from modern jazz and bluegrass to heavy metal and hardcore punk. He saw Iron Maiden, one of his favorite bands, at an unforgettable show in Prague, though most concerts he attends are smaller, somewhat underground affairs.
But at his core, he’s a passionate and committed scientist, forward-thinking in his approach and attracted to areas that are often deemed to be outside the realm of traditional science.
“I like pushing the boundaries of science,” he says. “I’m a psychologist, so broadly speaking, I’m kind of most interested in studying behavior and behavioral change.”
His interest in drug research — and the possibility of turning that curiosity into a legitimate scientific career — began as a sophomore at Eastern Oregon University, a school more than 2,500 miles from where he grew up in Maryland, nestled in an area more known for rodeos than cutting-edge research. Psychopharmacology drew him in almost immediately. He’s since studied just about every intoxicating substance out there, researching cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, among a wide range of other drugs. He eventually earned his Ph.D. in 2004, focusing on experimental psychology at the University of Vermont. And for a scientist studying the human mind, with a specific interest in drug interactions, psychedelics were sort of a treasure trove.
“I’m always sort of fascinated by kind of the big, philosophical questions in life,” he says, “which is part of my interest in psychedelics, because it’s pretty frequently that people, even if they don’t come out with definitive answers, seem to wrestle with the big questions when they start psychedelics.”
Psychedelics are also a fascinating subject for research because of the potential for therapeutic applications, the deep history of psychedelic research in the 1950s that many people are unaware of — including the CIA’s mind-control program, MKUltra, which lasted from 1953 to 1973 — and the fact that psychedelic research was almost non-existent for decades until a small handful of researchers began to revive it about 20 years ago.
“There’s no other drug where, after one or just a few exposures, people have such salient things to say about it,” Johnson says. “No one claims that they use caffeine or cocaine one time, and it had this positive, lasting benefit in their lives.”
When Johnson started studying psychedelics 17 years ago, there was a palpable stigma about substances like psilocybin, MDMA and DMT. At that time, no one could have predicted NBC News would run a story asking, “Could mushrooms, molly and acid be the new wave of mental health care?” Psychedelics were still viewed as highly dangerous, the domain of some random hippies and burnouts.
“I had a number of people tell me, like, ‘Holy cow, Matt, you’re on this incredible career vector; why would you want to risk it with this?’” he remembers.
Johnson didn’t see it that way. He saw psychedelics as an incredible tool in psychology and one with limited downsides; while there are risks associated with psychedelic drugs, the possibilities of addiction and/or lethal overdose do not appear to be among the perils.
“By any objective analysis, there’s a whole lot of freakishly perfect things about this drug class,” Johnson says.
However, Johnson wants to be perfectly clear: “I’m not encouraging anyone to use psychedelics,” he says. “There are risks, and they are illegal. I don’t want to send the wrong message.”
But his research could lead to a potential breakthrough in addiction therapy and truly usher in a “new era in legitimacy of psychedelic science.”