In the spring of 2009, I drove into the depths of the Sarasota, Florida, suburbs to visit a building known as Arcturus. I had a lot of decisions to make at the time. I was graduating from college, and something called a mortgage-backed security had significantly limited my life’s prospects. I didn’t know where I was going to live, but a house begun in 1975 by the founder of the foremost research organization on psychedelics seemed as good a place as any to figure it all out.
Like practically all things in Florida, my destination was approached by car. The house sits at the end of an otherwise unremarkable, dead-end suburban street, closer to the road than the rest of the homes, which have ample front yards divided by yawning concrete driveways. Arcturus has only a rough curve of mulch that brings you to a pair of hulking wooden doors held up by thick bands of wrought iron. The entire house is essentially a timber-sided right triangle pointed to the northern sky. The first floor walls’ vertical wood paneling merges almost seamlessly with the privacy fence that surrounds the wooded lot. Attached to the triangle just off center is a turret with windows all around that also connects to a sundeck. You’re only 15 minutes away from the nearest Walmart, but here, under the live oaks draped in Spanish moss, it feels like you’re looking at a spaceship landed in a secluded glade, a place just for you and your chosen family to touch the face of God and each other.
Inside the four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, two-story home, you step onto a river-gravel floor. Nestled among the smooth stone set in polyurethane is a single penny that looks like you can reach down and pick it up—one of many “jokes” hidden in the house. Look up and you can marvel at a stained-glass mural titled The Discovery of Nuclear Energy, which depicts a woman holding a man by the wrist, his opposite hand reaching above her. Her other hand is wrapped around a blue ball. A rainbow enters the top of the man’s head before inverting its colors and exiting beneath him.
“ as in ‘nuclear family,’” explains Rick Doblin, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which he founded
