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Winding Down A wide range of difficulties began affecting our psychedelic drug stud- ies. Their cumulative effect led to my leaving New Mexico and stopping the research. I will begin describing those events in this chapter. ronment. 278 Some difficulties were built into the study from its very inception, and it was only a matter of time before they began causing problems. The biomedical model was the most obvious of these concerns. Others resulted from a series of unfortunate events. Such was the case of the university's Human Research Ethics Committee not allowing us to take the psilocybin project out of the hospital into a more pleasant envi- Many of the stumbling blocks were ones I dimly saw but chose to minimize, hoping they might "take care of themselves": There should have been little surprise that a critical mass of collaborators at the Uni- versity of New Mexico failed to materialize as promised. I suspected, but needed to see for myself, that there would be few sustained beneficial effects on our volunteers from isolated high-dose DMT sessions. I kept on