At 50, Deb Cohen began feeling constantly bloated and lethargic. A busy law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, the Fells Point resident had delayed her annual visit to the gynecologist. She just figured her body was changing because of menopause.

She was right about that, but didn’t know the half of it: Her symptoms were being caused by a 3.5-pound, 19-centimeter cyst, part of which was cancerous.

“The symptoms were there, I just had no clue,” Cohen says. “No one talks about menopause and what it will be like. My body was changing, and it never dawned on me that it was cancer.”

It was, in fact, Stage III ovarian cancer. So Cohen turned to what she had come to regard as her trusted team of doctors at The Weinberg Center for Women’s Health and Medicine at Mercy Medical Center, where she had been treated multiple times, beginning with the 2009 removal of a lump in her breast. To treat the cyst, she was referred to Neil B. Rosenshein, a nationally renowned ovarian cancer specialist and director emeritus of The Weinberg Center.

“I’ll never forget sitting there pre-surgery listening to him as he read the list of things that can go wrong, tears running down my face, thinking, ‘Okay, I’m signing my life away.’” But there was no one else she would trust more with a scalpel. In June 2014, Rosenshein successfully removed the cyst. “He’s an amazing man,” Cohen says.

Cohen remains close to him to this day, and continues to return to Mercy for her six-month checkups, even after moving to D.C. in 2015.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person,” she says. “I had great health care, great doctors, and lived within a mile of Mercy—you don’t get any luckier than that.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail.

The Mercy center on which she has relied is part of a historically recent health care trend of dedicated female-focused care—such women’s centers have popped up all over the country, and Baltimore now has more than half a dozen. But they raise the question, why not just go to Marcus Welby General Hospital? Because the need for such targeted care stems from biology.

“We have estrogen receptors on every organ in our body,” says Wen Shen, a gynecologist specializing in menopause medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “And you’re trying to tell me a man’s body works the same?”

And, as in the case of Cohen at Mercy, Shen says the menopause transition is when a lot of medical conditions start kicking in—issues with heart health, bone health, and brain health.

“These are all related to the lack of ovarian hormones because of menopause,” says Shen. For instance, studies have shown that women suffering from severe hot flashes are more at risk for high blood pressure and heart disease.

“The whole list of every medical specialty you can think of, I can come up with an issue in that specialty that is post-reproductive related,” Shen says.

That’s why, building on the national trend, she’s spearheading the creation of a women’s health center at Hopkins that will focus on post-reproductive years, and looking for funding to make it a reality. “We need to be able to help women specifically. Men have been getting good advice and care, because all the research is based on them. Women have been sort of short-changed when it comes to a lot of their medical care.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail: It’s celebrating its 25th anniversary, making it the oldest dedicated women’s health center in the region. It launched the center in 1994, during a period when hospitals around the country started turning to female patients as a niche in an increasingly competitive and tumultuous market. Mercy polled local women and took cues from the best women’s health centers across the country to develop its own version, eventually investing more than $40 million in the project with the goal of consolidating all the medical services in one location.

Other Baltimore-area medical centers pursued similar concepts, spawning more such women’s centers in the past 25 years (see below), but each boasts different strengths. However, a common motivation is to make health care one-stop shopping for women.

At Hopkins, oncologists have often referred patients to Shen to manage symptoms caused by radiation or chemotherapy. “Then I’ll find out that they have high risk for heart disease, that they have osteoporosis, and I refer them to specialists,” she says.

But that can mean a lot of appointments, often at different locations. And one trend doctors are seeing is that working women are developing some of the same attitudes toward wellness that men have always been blamed for—such as ignoring symptoms, procrastinating, and toughing it out because they’re too busy with work and family.

With the average age of menopause’s onset at 51 (and the average women’s lifespan at 81 years), menopause is hitting at a critical time—often at the high point in careers, when women are caring for their own families and sometimes their aging parents as well.

“Today’s woman is so overburdened it’s very hard for her to do all this,” says Shen of the many appointments required to get holistic care. That’s where a women’s center steps in.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person . . . I lived within a mile of Mercy.”

“A multidisciplinary center is like a one-stop shop. At 9 a.m. you’re going to see the oncologist, at 10 a.m. the rheumatologist, at 11 a.m. the cardiologist,” Shen explains. “The vision is to make it really efficient for the patient to get the care that she needs. Because if she had to make all these appointments with different doctors located on different campuses, across different months, requiring repeated time off from work—that’s a challenge.”

Besides having different strengths, such health centers can also target different markets. As newer hospitals such as Greater Baltimore Medical Center and MedStar Good Samaritan followed their patients to the suburbs, Mercy doubled down on its urban location on St. Paul Place, hoping to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of nearby commuters, more than half of which are women.

The move attracted Rosenshein from The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Rosenshein opened the center at Mercy and remains its director emeritus.

The Weinberg Center’s offerings, which include breast care, gynecology, plastic and reconstructive surgery, mammography, and radiation oncology, were originally scattered throughout the Mercy campus. In 2003, the hospital finally brought all the services together under one roof as Mercy cut the ribbon on a state-of-the-art, six-floor facility, made possible in part by a $10-million gift from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

Rosenshein echoes that housing all the services together allows The Weinberg Center to provide patients with holistic care. “Most of the issues we have are interrelated,” he says. “People who have ovarian cancer are at more risk for breast cancer. People who have both have genetic issues that need to be addressed.”

The refocusing has been more than a business decision for the hospital: It goes back to the mission of its founders, the Sisters of Mercy, who opened a refuge for homeless and abused women in Dublin in 1827.

This year, The Weinberg Center hit several milestones, including the 5,000th da Vinci robotic surgery performed by gynecologic surgeon Dwight D. Im, medical director of the Neil B. Rosenshein M.D. Institute for Gynecologic Care at Mercy.

By chance, Deb Cohen’s one-year checkup with Rosenshein was scheduled on the exact anniversary of her surgery. So she decided to celebrate. “I stopped to pick up a bottle of champagne for my anniversary, and I picked him up one, too,” she recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to be celebrating tonight. I don’t care what your family celebrates, but you should, too.’”

Now, she’s sharing her story to encourage other women to listen to their bodies. “I knew three or four women who [also] got this, one who died from this,” Cohen says. “I look around and think, ‘God, I was lucky.’”

Several other hospitals in the metro area have created women-centric health centers. Here’s the short list:

→ LifeBridge Sinai Hospital of Baltimore

2401 W. Belvedere Ave.

Part of LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital is home to the Louis and Henrietta Blaustein Women’s Health Center. Opened in 2005, this 24,930-square-foot center consolidated women and infant services and includes 32 labor, delivery, and recovery rooms, two operating rooms, three triage rooms, three post-anesthesia units, and three high-risk/extended stay rooms.

Best known for: Serving the needs of women during labor and after delivery, the women’s health center also houses the Institute for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, which offers prenatal testing and counseling for high-risk pregnancies, diabetes, and genetic problems. The center also houses the Jennifer Gandel Kachura Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a level III facility for newborns needing specialized care; and nutritional counseling, exercise courses, and other educational resources.

→ LifeBridge Northwest Hospital

5401 Old Court Rd., Randallstown

Equipped with the most up-to-date technology, Northwest Hospital’s Herman & Walter Samuelson Breast Care Center provides women with advanced screening and treatment options for holistic breast health in a spa-like atmosphere. Launched in 2010, the hospital’s Women’s Wellness Center offers obstetric and gynecological services to women alongside general health and wellness resources.

Best known for: One of Northwest Hospital’s centers of excellence, the Samuelson Breast Care Center employs dedicated breast-specialized experts including a radiologist, surgeon, and mammography technicians.

→ The Johns Hopkins Hospital

600 N. Wolfe St. and other locations

Obstetric and gynecological care at Johns Hopkins dates back to 1889, when Howard Kelly founded the department. Today, the center is well-respected in a wide range of areas, from family planning to fetal therapy and gynecologic cancers.

Best known for: Today, The Johns Hopkins Hospital is known for its Endometriosis Center, providing women with cutting-edge solutions for individualized endometriosis care, including minimally invasive and robotic surgery techniques to remove endometrial lesions while maintaining fertility. To treat heart disease, which is the No. 1 killer of women, and which often has different symptoms than those found in men, Hopkins is home to the Women’s Cardiovascular Health Center at the Bayview campus and at Johns Hopkins Cardiology in Columbia. It combines advanced medical treatment with a whole-body approach to preventing and managing heart disease, using a multidisciplinary team of experienced cardiologists with fitness, nutrition, and mental health experts.

→ MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

9000 Franklin Square Dr.

Women’s Health Services at Franklin Square Medical Center offers a full range of obstetric and gynecologic care, staffed with attending and resident obstetrician/gynecologists, sub-specialists in maternal-fetal medicine, nurse midwives, women’s health nurse practitioners, ultrasound technologists, gene counselors, social workers, and registered nurses specializing in women’s health.

Best known for: Delivering more than 700 babies each year, the center specializes in high-risk pregnancy care for mothers and babies with medical problems and other complications. The center offers patients the latest technology and treatment options for regularly scheduled well-women appointments, as well as acute care, contraception, management of Pap smear abnormalities, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, medical and surgical management of abnormal bleeding, including minimally invasive options, and mid-life and menopausal symptom management.

→ University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center

301 Hospital Dr., Glen Burnie

Women’s Services at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center include pediatric care, treatment for a wide range of women’s health issues, and labor and delivery. Its state-of-the-art surgical suite offers da Vinci Robot-assisted, laparoscopic procedures for abdominal or vaginal hysterectomies.

Best known for: The Pascal Women’s Center offers spacious labor, delivery, and recovery rooms with whirlpool tubs, private postpartum patient rooms, and dedicated operating rooms for Cesarean births. The on-site Center for Advanced Fetal Care office, Neonatal Special Care Unit, and childbirth education classes round out resources for growing families.

→ Greater Baltimore Medical Center

6701 N. Charles St., Towson

GBMC provides a full spectrum of women’s health services, including labor and delivery, obstetrics, and gynecology, on the main campus as well as throughout the community, and a level III-B Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Best known for: For women needing close monitoring during pregnancy, the 12-bed Mangione High Risk OB unit, adjacent to the delivery suite, provides specialized maternal-fetal care. It’s one of the only in the region that consolidates all prenatal services, inpatient care, and antepartum testing in one location to promote a seamless continuum of care. Its Division of Urogynecology and Reconstructive Pelvic Surgery includes doctors who are specially trained to diagnose and treat disorders of the pelvic floor. The Uterine Fibroid Center at GBMC is one of only a few centers in Maryland that provides a comprehensive approach to treating fibroids, a condition that affects 77 percent of women.

For almost a decade, Dariel Peay was afraid to hug people. Assigned the male sex at birth, Peay began presenting as a woman once she started working in the dermatology department at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2007, spending two-and-a-half hours every morning positioning pads onto her hips and pushing cotton-ball-stuffed stockings into her bra. Although filling out her dresses made her feel more feminine, she worried about someone going in for a hug and feeling the “rocks” on her chest.

“One morning, I couldn’t find the pads, and I thought I was going to lose my mind,” says Peay. “I tore up the house because I felt so uncomfortable going anywhere without them.”

She spent the next nine years trying to convince plastic surgeons and her health insurance company that her need for breast augmentation surgery was not simply cosmetic. But despite dozens of disappointing appointments, she was determined to create an outward figure that matched her true inner self.

So when she heard that Hopkins was planning to launch the Center for Transgender Health in 2017, Peay ran to the department of plastic and reconstructive surgery to get an appointment. After a months-long intake and consultation process, the day finally came. Peay woke up from surgery that October and, after calling for her mother, cautiously looked down at her chest. Two years later, she still remembers that moment as one of the first times she felt like a person.

“As reality kicked in, I couldn’t believe it really happened,” she says. “If I could’ve, I would’ve run to my doctor and thanked him so many times. He changed my life.”

While the gender-affirming surgeries and care made available by the Center for Transgender Health have created transformative opportunities for patients like Peay, many still question why these resources were missing from local health care for so many decades prior.

“Where has this been?” says Peay, reflecting on the years before her surgery. “Johns Hopkins is one of the top hospitals in America and globally—why were we not making sure that all patients were being taken care of?”

“If I could’ve, I would’ve run to my doctor and thanked him so many times. He changed my life.”

It turns out, Hopkins has a long and complicated history with what were once called “sex change” operations, now referred to as gender-affirming surgery. During the early 1960s, patients who had travelled abroad to receive gender-affirming surgeries started checking into the Baltimore hospital. Many had experienced serious side effects following the overseas procedures and turned to Hopkins to repair the damage and, in some cases, provide further reconstruction. Although a few U.S. surgeons had performed less than a dozen gender-affirming surgeries by 1965, many hospital boards refused to permit it.

But when faced with questions of how to evaluate and care for transgender patients, a small group of Hopkins professionals decided to address their own lack of knowledge. Milton Edgerton, then the hospital’s chairman of plastic surgery, asked assistant professor John Hoopes to develop a research protocol to resolve questions about the appropriate treatment of gender dysphoria—the feeling that one’s gender identity and given sex don’t match. Hoopes gave the green light for further study into how surgical procedures could play a role, and the two men began assembling an interdisciplinary committee—including psychologist John Money and endocrinologist Claude Migeon. They wanted to not only provide gender-affirming care, but also establish factors that could predict positive medical outcomes.

The Gender Identity Clinic was officially established on June 20, 1966, making Hopkins the first academic institution in the U.S. to perform gender-affirming surgeries. “I created the team and established the clinic only after much study and soul-searching and with the realization that current methods of therapy were not solving the problem,” says Hoopes, who received emeritus status and retired from the hospital in 1990.

Although the clinic began accepting patient applications almost right away, the news of the opening didn’t go public until later that year. On November 21, the front page of The New York Times read, “A Changing of Sex by Surgery Begun at Johns Hopkins.”

“In a period of two weeks [following the article], we got about 3,000 letters from all over America from transsexual patients,” said Edgerton, now deceased, during an interview with the American Association of Plastic Surgeons in 2016. “[The letters] were eight to 10 pages long; people begging for surgery.”

With the world watching, the Gender Identity Clinic spent the next few years operating on trans patients from across the country. Although thousands applied, only a small percentage met the requirements for surgery, which included living as their identified gender for at least six months while undergoing hormonal therapy, as well as extensive psychological, genetic, and physical examinations. It was also difficult to find patients who could afford the cost—about $4,325 for male surgeries in 1970 (equivalent to roughly $28,190 today)—especially since most insurance companies would not pay for it.

By the beginning of 1972, the team had completed gender-affirming surgeries on seven trans women, 16 trans men, and nine others who received revisions of procedures performed elsewhere. The limited number of patients prevented them from making any definitive conclusions, but the clinic did demonstrate the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to transgender health care, with input from specialists in medicine, mental health, and surgery. And as word of its initial successes spread, the clinic became a template for other national institutions.

But despite its progress, many still disapproved of the Gender Identity Clinic’s work. Most prominently, Paul McHugh, the hospital’s then chair of the department of psychiatry, had a self-proclaimed anti-transgender bias, even publicly stating, “It was part of my intention, when I arrived in Baltimore in 1975, to help end [gender-affirming surgery].” McHugh’s view on what he called “guilt-ridden homosexual men” seeking such procedures was that being transgender was a psychological problem that should be treated with psychiatry.

Meanwhile, the clinic was facing new challenges at every turn: it lacked a stable funding source, several original team members (including Hoopes and Edgerton) left Hopkins, and new department staffers were not supportive of the surgery program. In 1979, Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit (SBCU) chair Jon Meyer conducted a study to evaluate the difference in quality of life between trans patients who did and did not undergo surgery. Later that year, he announced that, after studying 50 subjects, he could not conclude that those who had surgery were any more adjusted to society than those who had not.

Meyer’s results starkly contradicted the findings of other researchers at the clinic, including Money, who previously reported that all but one of 24 surgery recipients said they were sure they made the right decision. The conflict between Meyer’s and Money’s scientific findings played out in national newspapers and professional journals, stirring a public debate about the role and morality of these procedures.

But with the study in hand, McHugh asserted that Hopkins was “fundamentally cooperating with mental illness” and shut down the Gender Identity Clinic within two months. Many other university-based academic programs that had followed Hopkins’ lead, such as Stanford University, also closed their doors over the next few years.

“One of my big disappointments,” said Edgerton, “is that although some American surgeons took up treatment of the transsexual patient, very few did.”

“Part of the legacy of the center is helping people who are better off for having come through it.”

Without the Gender Identity Clinic, Maryland’s transgender community was at a loss. For the next three decades, those seeking gender-affirming care in the region could access hormone therapy and other health services at centers such as the SBCU or Chase Brexton Health Care, but surgery was limited to plastic surgeons and specialists willing to perform select procedures. Peay remembers being excited to start her transition process in 2008, but she was discouraged by not only the lack of coverage for trans services, but also the dearth of knowledge among local physicians.

“I remember going to one hormone appointment and the resident said, ‘Well, I don’t really know anything about that,’” she recalls. “That experience made me realize that these people didn’t have a clue about trans health.”

But by 2015, the societal shift that increased public acceptance of LGBTQ individuals had taken hold within the halls of Hopkins. Hospital leaders recognized the growing need to provide gender-affirming operations to its patients, and they pledged to resume the surgical program. They quickly assembled committees to plan the structure of what would become the Center for Transgender Health while the hospital’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion worked to educate staff about transgender care.

Paula Neira, now the center’s clinical program director, co-chaired a task force that spent months examining the strengths and weaknesses of how Hopkins treated transgender patients. As a transgender woman who previously worked as a naval officer and a lawyer on the legal team that fought to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, she is well-versed in such challenges.

“How a transgender person interacts with the health system—from being in the cafeteria and not being misgendered to interacting with security personnel to ask for directions—plays into their overall experience,” says Neira. “That means everybody in the organization has to at least have a basic understanding of how to talk to people with dignity and respect. Everyone wants to do that, but they don’t always know how.”

Hopkins leaders also recognized the need to rebuild trust within the LGBTQ community. After a 38-year hiatus in its surgical program, there was a built-up skepticism about the hospital’s commitment to its transgender patients. They conducted third-party surveys and held focus groups to learn the expectations of potential patients, such as alerting the trans community to job openings at the center.

“It was a cautious optimism [from the LGBTQ community],” says Neira. “They were happy to see Hopkins providing gender-affirming care again, but they wanted to see if we were going to put our money where our mouth is.”

But even as plans for the center came together in the fall of 2016, the 85-year-old McHugh, now a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Hopkins, co-authored a special report called “Sexuality and Gender” for the New Atlantis, a magazine published by a conservative Christian think tank. The study contended that sex and identity are innately tied and biologically determined. While it was met with alarm from many in the medical community, conservative media groups cited the paper as a reason to support legislation against transgender people.

That October, seemingly in reaction to the article, Hopkins released a statement that reiterated its “strong and unambiguous” commitment to the LGBTQ community amidst “the varied individual opinions expressed publicly by members of the Hopkins medicine community.”

As proof of the life-altering work done at the center, O’Brien-Coon points to its first-ever vaginoplasty patient—the first at the hospital in 40 years—who declared that her birthday is now the day she received her surgery. “Part of the legacy of the center is helping people who are better off for having come through it,” he says. “People can doubt it or think whatever they want, but the proof speaks for itself.”

The center involves about 30 Hopkins professionals across eight departments who work with patients to provide services such as hormone therapy, hair removal, and a host of gender-affirming surgeries. Neira says they underestimated the pent-up demand for care among the LGBTQ community and, although they only planned to serve 200 patients during the first year, they interacted with more than four times that within 14 months. As of April, the center had seen 1,400 patients and performed more than 300 surgical procedures.

Along with day-to-day care, O’Brien-Coon and a team of Hopkins researchers have spent the past two years conducting a review of transgender health care literature to determine how the center’s patient experiences can contribute to modern medical study. Because, for some questions related to gender-affirming care—such as surgery recovery times—there are still no definite answers.

One topic they aren’t running research on, though, is whether gender-affirming surgery is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. “There is no legitimate debate for those who argue that gender affirmation is still experimental,” says Neira. “There are people who discount four decades of research because it doesn’t match their worldview. And that’s not going to change.”

With the history of the clinic behind them, the center’s team keeps Neira’s credo—“ever forward”—in mind, which serves as a reminder that it’s the only direction they can go. “Today, victory is connecting one patient to the care they need,” says Neira. “We’ll do it one person at a time until we have a change in the system and the resources to do it on a larger scale.”

Looking ahead, they’ll continue to work through the center’s ongoing challenges, such as the need for more staff and resources, while carrying out the philosophy of the clinic’s founding members from all of those years ago: treating patients with the recognition that gender-affirming care can improve their quality of life.

For Peay, that means taking hours off of her getting-ready routine and feeling like her body is one step closer to matching her true self. “I see Dr. O’Brien-Coon all the time at work, and when I do, I want to hug him and thank him,” she says. “And all he did was give me the opportunity to have the body that I’ve always wanted.”

“I’m a hugger now,” she says, beaming. “I finally feel free.”

“Life is so interesting, isn’t it?,” says 98-year-old Lois Blum Feinblatt. She should know. In 1966, when most women her age were stay-at-home moms, she was already a trailblazer, working in Baltimore’s department of welfare, where she screened every couple in the city who was interested in adopting a child.

“I loved it,” she says, but even five decades ago, Feinblatt—twice married, twice widowed, with three kids, two step-children, and seven grandchildren—was never one to settle. One weekend, a friend showed her a headline in The Baltimore Sun. “Hopkins to Train Housewives as Psychotherapists,” it read.

Feinblatt was intrigued, as she still often is. At almost 100, sitting on a flower-patterned upholstered chair in her spacious and art-filled north Baltimore apartment, her gray hair tucked into a bun that frames a soft face and curious blue eyes, she remains sharp and quick-witted while recalling decades-old details of her life.

Before her job with the department of welfare, Feinblatt had volunteered as a Parent Teacher Association president at a city public school and was endlessly fascinated by what she saw—the complexity and desire of the human mind. “If I had my choice then, I would have been a psychiatrist,” she says.

And suddenly, right there in the newsprint before her, was an unlikely opportunity. A program like the one advertised had been organized a few years earlier at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., which sought to train therapists drawn from what was then described as an untapped resource pool of married women.

Now Johns Hopkins wanted to do the same. The ad specified that applicants should be over 35 and have “successfully” raised a family.

More than 400 women applied. And Feinblatt, then 45 years old with three kids—Patty, 17, Jeff, 19, and Larry, 23—was one of only eight hired.

“She brought an enormous amount of life experience to her job,” says Dr. Chester Schmidt, who worked with Feinblatt for four decades. For the first two years, Schmidt, now the clinic’s medical director, was among the psychiatrists who helped train the group of eight, who immediately started seeing patients.

By 1970, hospital leadership made plans to start a first-of-its-kind clinic modeled after the work of pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who had shocked the public with candid and demystifying talk about orgasms and sexual dysfunction. When they stopped in Baltimore at the hospital to present their research, Feinblatt, who was forced to sit on top of a baby grand piano because the auditorium was so crowded, was fascinated. Later, she was asked to be part of the startup Johns Hopkins Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit, which began to see heterosexual couples in a therapy setting in which they were seen together by male and female therapists.

“It was a wonderful job from the very beginning,” Feinblatt says. “People had all kinds of sexual problems. Some people were very shy about sex, or some people had their own ideas and their wife or husband didn’t think they could go along with that. Everybody’s needs and wants are so different.”

If there is anyone who might be an expert on the secrets and nuances of love—and sex—it would be Feinblatt, a pioneering therapist who has seen four decades worth of patients: women, men, straight, gay, transgender. “She often jokes, ‘A marriage license is not like a driver’s license,’” says Dr. Chris Kraft, co-director of clinical services at what’s now known as The Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic. “You need all this training to drive a car, but you don’t have to have training to be in a relationship.”

Until fairly recently, Feinblatt continued to head to the office almost every day. “One of the biggest things going on now,” she says, “is that we have a transgender person almost every week,” a drastic change from when she started.

Indeed, Feinblatt’s career and remarkable life have spanned sweeping social changes—from the pre-birth control era to internet porn addictions, from abstinence before marriage to legal gay marriage and marrying outside of one’s religion. Years ago, when she was just 7, her uncle married a Catholic girl, and her Jewish grandmother hung blankets over the mirrors in her house as if the family was sitting shiva. “It’s so amazing how much everything has changed in my lifetime,” she says.

Feinblatt has seen and heard just about everything in matters of the head and heart, but even she hesitates to articulate the meaning of it. “Love,” she muses, “Well, it’s a difficult thing to try to get your brain around, because it’s sort of not a brain thing.”

A friend showed her a headline in The Sun: “Hopkins to Train Housewives to Be Psychotherapists.”

The start of Feinblatt’s own love story reads like a script to a romantic black-and-white movie. On a spring break from Frederick’s Hood College, then Lois Hoffberger—one of three children of Gertrude and Sam, a prominent city lawyer who was active in the Democratic party and a major shareholder and director of the National Brewing Company—met Irv Blum, six years her senior, at an engagement party held for one of his friends. The night ended at the Belvedere Hotel. There, Irv asked her to dance, their images reflecting in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors of the first-floor Charles Room. “It’s amazing,” she says. “It’s 75 years ago now, and I can remember it so well, seeing myself dancing with him.”

He drove her back to Hood in his snazzy convertible, wind whipping as they headed east through the mountains. He sang a German song, “Yours Is My Heart Alone.”

“He was being so romantic,” she says. It was practically love at first sight. With the clouds of World War II brewing, they wed in 1941 and started a family. But only eight months after Lois gave birth to their first child, Irv was overseas with the Army as the white captain of an all-black transport unit, known as the 524th Quartermaster Car Company.

It was then that the handwritten letters, addressed to “Sweetheart”—he to her, her to him—were exchanged nearly every day for the two years Irv was deployed, about 1,400 correspondences in total. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—Lois wrote: “I’m sure you know how much I have thought of you today. Although 3,000 miles apart, I know we’ve spent this most important day in our history together.”

In a letter dated three days later, addressed from “Somewhere in England,” he acknowledged the anxiety his young wife must have felt, and said he was okay. “Everyone is imbued with the idea of getting the job over with,” he wrote. In other letters, Lois, then 23, mentioned the Wives Club she was a part of and how she spent time volunteering at the American Red Cross.

“They developed an intimacy through these letters,” says Feinblatt’s daughter Patty Blum, a human-rights lawyer who is working with her mother on a book about her parents’ correspondence. “Until I started reading them, I had no concept of everything their relationship had gone through, the experiences and challenges they had as this young couple separated for close to two years, and how they maintained their intimacy despite this distance.”

Lois Feinblatt’s own love story reads like a script to a romantic black-and-white movie.

By 1945, Irv had returned from the war and gone to work at his father’s department store. When their youngest child was in second grade, Lois and Irv agreed that it might be a good idea for her to take a job to help foster their children’s independence. After nine years at the department of welfare, Feinblatt landed her dream job at Hopkins.

Although she can’t divulge any specific details about her patients, Feinblatt says some cases were as simple as correcting bad habits that had formed, while other patients struggled with more complicated issues. “Homosexuality was on the list of abhorrent behaviors in 1966, and that went on for a long time,” she says. Patients came in hoping to be cured. She saw one lesbian couple, from a conservative Pennsylvania town, for two years.

Mostly, though, she treated women having sexual intimacy issues with their husbands, including extramarital affairs. “I know we can cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary problems,” she says. It was so important, Feinblatt says, to provide a safe space where couples could actually address those problems. “You can have meals with other people, have fun with other people, or go on vacations with other people,” she says. “But marital fidelity is something that you and your partner have just with each other.” Which, of course, is where a licensed therapist comes in.

Feinblatt continued her work against the backdrop of tumultuous times, which was fitting given the liberal bent sewn into the fabric of her upbringing. She marched to help desegregate Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in 1963, was the first woman on the board at Sheppard Pratt Hospital, has since founded scholarships to the Maryland Institute College of Art, and helped to start Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Baltimore, which seeks to protect foster kids.

In 1965, Johns Hopkins Hospital drew national attention for being the first academic institution in the U.S. to perform sex reassignment surgeries. These were done in conjunction with the sex clinic, which required—and provided—two years of pre-surgery therapy. There were some staffers at the hospital who were ambivalent, at best, about the surgeries, but Feinblatt wasn’t one of them. She supported a person’s right to define their own gender, even when that was a controversial opinion.

Then again, Feinblatt was always putting her patients first. Schmidt, the clinic’s budget administrator for three decades, said Feinblatt, who was financially comfortable, donated fees she earned from patient work back to the department. “I thought it was terrific,” he says, “but I wasn’t surprised. That’s just the kind of thing she’d do.”

And the clinic gave her a lot, too, providing a much-needed professional focus when her dear husband Irv, who had been a president of the Associated Jewish Charities, died at age 58, in 1973, after becoming sick from glomerulonephritis, a kidney disease. To help her work through her grief, the clinic gave Lois more patients to help occupy her time, and she co-founded an organization dedicated to supporting adoptive families.

Three years later, she married Eugene Feinblatt, who had been Irv’s lawyer and the college roommate of her older brother Jerold (a former president of the National Brewing Company and one-time owner of the Baltimore Orioles). “I was lucky,” Feinblatt says. “I had two fabulous husbands, and such really wonderful men and interesting men. Both were important in the community, and ethical, and brilliant minds.”

Lois and Eugene were married for 15 years, until he died in 1998 from heart failure at age 78. Once again, she moved through her grief by continuing to work. A year after Eugene’s death, she started a teacher-mentoring program in the city. “Life is a challenge, and bad things happen to good people,” she says. “The best thing that can happen to you is your partner, so you at least can deal with things together. If you really think that you’re in love, you’re lucky.”

She treated women having intimacy issues with their husbands, including extramarital affairs.

Just five years ago, at age 92, Feinblatt stood on stage at Morgan State University to give a 13-minute TED Talk entitled “Choices We Make.” Making “sometimes hard or unusual choices,” she said, “is what we all must do in order to live an interesting, fulfilling, and worthwhile life. As times change, so must we.”

Today, with the aid of a walker, Feinblatt still regularly attends art exhibits, dines at the newest restaurants, welcomes company, and hosts dinner parties, as is evident by the liquor tray in her apartment. “You see her everywhere,” says Kate Thomas, another co-director of clinical services at the Johns Hopkins clinic. “She’s a Renaissance woman, and we all adore her.”

In October, Feinblatt was honored at the Open Society Institute’s 20th anniversary celebration at The Baltimore Museum of Art for her philanthropy and service to the city. Alicia Wilson, a senior vice president and legal counsel to Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Development Company, introduced Feinblatt, whom Wilson met when she was 18. “She taught me that being authentically me is the best gift I can give to this world,” Wilson said.

Sitting beside Wilson on the auditorium stage, Feinblatt took her turn at the mic. “They gave me the choice to speak or not,” she said. “I thought a few minutes, and I decided, I’m 97-and-a-half years old. . .” Applause interrupted. “I can’t depend on being asked to speak again.” The crowd broke out laughing.

As for her longevity and sharpness, Feinblatt attributes it to luck and diet. “When Birds Eye [frozen] food came out, that was a big thing that changed our family’s eating habits,” she points out. Feinblatt is often quick with a quip about her advanced age. “You don’t have many people almost 100 years old to ask [that question to],” she cracks at one point during an interview at her home. But she is also reflective.

“The two things that have made my life as good as it’s been are love and luck,” Feinblatt says. “You have to have luck, too. But I really believe that love is like a cushion. If I’d been sitting here all this time on a hard, little iron chair, I would be miserable. But love is like the cushion that’s around you, that makes you be able to think about things in a sweeter way.”

Strains of a rare virus that has been blamed so far for killing 10 children and sickening dozens of others in New Jersey pediatric-care facilities have Baltimore doctors on alert for an outbreak here.

According to New Jersey state health authorities, there have been 27 cases of the adenovirus infection at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation center in Haskell, New Jersey, where the affected children had severely compromised immune systems. One death was a young adult.

The state also confirmed to the Associated Press four adenovirus cases among pediatric patients at New Jersey’s Voorhees Pediatric Facility, just across the river from Philadelphia, but preliminary tests suggest it’s a different strain of the virus.

The department said it’s working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the illness and announced earlier this week that infection control teams were being sent to New Jersey’s four long-term pediatric centers to help with training.

At Baltimore hospitals, doctors are watching carefully for the spread of the virus, says pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. James Campbell, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“We have been following the events of this institutional adenovirus outbreak and our hearts go out to the patients, families, and staff [in New Jersey],” says Campbell. “Adenoviruses are a common cause of respiratory diseases and may also cause gastrointestinal illness. The illnesses they cause range from very mild to life-threatening. More common manifestations are things like the common cold, sore throat with pink eye, and ear infections. In some people, they can cause pneumonia, heart infections, or other serious diseases.”

Particularly at risk are those with compromised health, he says. “These more serious problems tend to occur in people with underlying medical problems or problems with fighting off infections. Institutional epidemics of pneumonia can occur in dormitories, military barracks, and other places, like chronic-care facilities.”

Campbell says adenoviruses are spread by “respiratory droplets,” just like other viruses that cause colds and pneumonias. “That means that you get them when people sneeze or cough near you or you shake hands or touch surfaces where others were sneezing or coughing,” he says. “The best way to reduce your risk of infection is by hand washing.”

At Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital, infection prevention coordinator and R.N. Erica Jones echoed the increased danger such viruses pose to the very young, medically fragile, or hospitalized children.

Jones says that, besides hand washing (use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer when soap and water aren’t available), there are other steps people can take to avoid spreading viruses. “Avoid close contact with other people, especially infants or children who may be immune-compromised, stay home from work and school when you are sick to help prevent spreading illness, and cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing,” she says.

As someone who deals with very sick kids every day, Jones tries to empower parents to speak up for the safety of their children.

“Parents often tell me they are uncomfortable speaking up when strangers approach their infant or child wanting to touch their hands or belongings,” she says. “A well-intended gesture can prove harmful if germs are passed along. I also let parents know that when their child goes home, it is okay to remind family members and friends not to visit when sick and to wash their hands.”

Hospitals take other steps, too, to avoid spreading illnesses, says Dr. Aaron Milstone,
a Johns Hopkins Hospital epidemiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at Hopkins School of Medicine. “In a health-care setting, we also require our staff to wear personal protective equipment, such as gloves and gowns, when treating patients with contagious infectious diseases,” he says.

And they’re always on the lookout for such viruses: “Adenoviruses are common and can be detected with available tests, but at Johns Hopkins’ five hospitals in Maryland and Washington, D.C., we are seeing a low and typical number of cases.”

The diagnosis of Clark Martin’s liver cancer came at the same time as the birth of his daughter, with doctors informing the clinical psychologist that he likely had about a year and a half to live. “It was emotionally very upsetting,” the soft-spoken Martin recalls. “Not because of the dying, but because of my daughter.”

His late-stage cancer, however, proved one of the rare cases that responded to the initial chemotherapy. “I was lucky,” he says. But not out of the woods. During the next two decades, cancer cells would reappear in his lungs, metastasizing into tumors. On each occasion, Martin battled the disease into remission, but the endless regimens and surgeries and ever-looming threat of cancer drove him into bouts of anxiety and depression as he obsessed over his health and micro-managed his treatment plans. “I have a scientific background and became very narrowly focused,” he says. “I felt like I needed to know more than the doctors. I withdrew from life.”

Ultimately, his friends and daughter—entering college by this time—convinced him that he needed to address his mental wellbeing. He tried counseling, but it didn’t improve his outlook. Neither did antidepressants. Partly from desperation to “pop out” of his funk and partly out of professional curiosity, the Vancouver, WA-based Martin flew to Baltimore to participate in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins where he would ingest a powerful dose of psilocybin—the naturally occurring psychoactive ingredient found in “magic” mushrooms.

After several screening and counseling visits, Martin found himself sitting on a couch in a converted medical office/living room on Hopkins’ Bayview campus. Surrounded by a statue of the Buddha, abstract expressionist paintings, soft table lamps—he lifted a blue capsule of synthetic psilocybin from a handmade Mexican chalice and placed it in his mouth. He pulled on eyeshades and laid back, listening to classical music on headphones as two clinical guides suggested he relax and focus his attention inward.

“All of a sudden, things in the room, things you feel inside, start feeling unfamiliar. Like my brain was going offline,” Martin says. “The experience in my head was just of being in a void,” he continues. “I’m a boater and I’ll use this analogy: Imagine you fall off a sailboat into the open ocean and when you turn around, the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.

“At one point, though, I was in a stadium-like building with stained glass—it may have been a giant cathedral. At another point I had the feeling of living on a bubble. I had my space on the bubble and other people had theirs. But mostly there was just an experience of tranquility,” Martin continues. “No people, no architecture, no thoughts, no ideas—nothing. Just calm presence.”

Today, six years later, Martin credits psilocybin—as well as the preparation and guidance that went with it—with parting the fog of his depression. He also credits his psychedelic session with transforming and opening his relationships with his daughter, friends, and even his Alzheimer’s suffering father. “I still think about it every day,” he says, choking up for a moment. “I’m still unpacking and integrating what I learned into my daily life.”

Martin describes his clinical “trip” with the Schedule I drug—like LSD, it was banned during the Nixon administration because it reputedly offered no medical purpose—as among the most profound spiritual experiences in his life. It turns out that this is not unusual. In fact, it puts him among the overwhelming majority of now more than 200 clinical trial subjects at Hopkins, says Roland Griffiths, professor in the departments of psychiatry and neurosciences, and the lead architect of psilocybin studies at the medical school’s Bayview campus.

“After our first few sessions, I realized we had to develop new questionnaires if we were going to capture what people were experiencing and trying to express,” Griffiths says. “I would ask people what they meant by one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives and they’d compare it afterward to the birth of their first child or the recent death of a parent. When we followed up with them at two months, and again at 14 months, it persisted.

“When we initiated the study, I hoped we would come across something interesting,” Griffiths continues, “but in all honesty, I was unprepared for these kinds of reports—especially when they proved enduring.”

Ten years ago, Hopkins researchers, led by Griffiths and Bill Richards, a 76-year-old clinical psychologist whose work with psilocybin dates back to the heady days of psychedelic research in the early ’60s, published their first paper on their new pilot studies. Cited as a landmark report by former National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Charles Schuster, the ongoing research at Hopkins—and now other universities—has begun revealing a host of potentially dramatic therapeutic applications for the ancient psychedelic used by indigenous Mexican and South American communities in religious rituals for thousands of years. Two examples: Hopkins’ initial trial with heavy smokers documented an 80 percent abstinence rate more than a year out from the subject’s session—an unheard of success rate that is roughly 2.5 times better than reported results of those taking varenicline, the active compound in Chantix, generally considered the most effective smoking cessation treatment option. In London, an Imperial College pilot study of a dozen individuals suffering from major depression for an average of 18 years—and who had previously tried at least two standard antidepressants—found that psilocybin sessions provided a reprieve from the depression in all 12 volunteers for three weeks and kept it at bay in five subjects for three months.

Meanwhile, early returns from other university studies are indicating that psilocybin has the potential to become a revolutionary tool in treating alcoholism, drug addiction, OCD, as well as anxiety and depression associated with cancer diagnoses such as Martin suffered. Other studies show psychedelic treatment could be useful therapy for ex-offenders, in terms of reducing recidivism, by reducing substance abuse and domestic violence. Researchers acknowledge it’s not exactly clear how psilocybin manages to reduce, and in some cases eliminate, depression and the fear of death, or, ironically cravings for other drugs and substances. What is known is new fMRI imaging shows one of the immediate effects of psilocybin is decreased activity in the region of the brain that involves habitual behaviors and thinking patterns (known as the default mode network) and the perception of the self—the ego, in other words. And, that throughout recorded history, transcendent mystical experiences have produced life-altering changes in human beings. Think St. Paul’s white-light conversion on the road to Damascus; the visions of the peasant girl Joan of Arc in France; Siddhartha Gautama’s awakening beneath the Bodhi tree.

Peter Hendricks, a University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher investigating the effects of psilocybin on people addicted to cocaine, has collaborated with the Hopkins’ team. He says psychedelic sessions, properly guided, can produce a kind of therapeutic “reboot.” Which doesn’t mean he diminishes the epiphany experience and cosmic consciousness that so many psilocybin trial subjects describe. “I call it the Ebenezer Scrooge moment,” Hendricks says. “Something profound happened to Ebenezer Scrooge.”

As strange—or alarming—as it may sound to some, it’s the belief of scientists at Hopkins and elsewhere that if FDA-approved Phase II and Phase III trials currently underway continue along the same trajectory, it may not be long before psilocybin is removed from its Schedule I classification. Researchers envision a future where psilocybin, which works in similar fashion as LSD—though its effects wear off in six to seven hours, as opposed to LSD’s eight to 10 hours—is legally available for physicians and licensed counselors for use in hospice, rehab, clinical care, and therapeutic settings. Griffiths and his team are quick to caution that powerful substances such as psilocybin are not appropriate for everyone by any means, and that trial subjects are carefully screened and guided through their experience. Nonetheless, their enthusiasm is hard to overstate.

“Why wouldn’t you want to use something like psilocybin that has been shown it can be administered safely, that’s not toxic or addictive, and makes that kind of impact in people’s lives?” Richards says. “Think of the number of people who die from smoking-related diseases alone each year. What’s the dangerous drug here?”

The questions Richards poses, of course, have a loaded history.

In the 1950s and 1960s, before former Harvard professor Timothy Leary became the self-anointed pied piper of psychedelics, thousands of promising psychiatric case studies involving hallucinogens, including the treatment of depression and alcoholism, were documented and widely shared. (The efficacy of LSD in treating alcoholism, in particular, received great publicity with Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, even touting its use to occasion the “spiritual awakening” he believed was required to help recover from the disease.) Multiple international conferences were held as it was hoped psychedelic therapy could replace psychosurgery and electroconvulsive treatment. But the political backlash against the Vietnam War era counterculture led to the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which outlawed psychedelics for recreational use and, for all intents and purposes, quashed studies into such drugs. Nixon once dubbed the happily anti-authoritarian Leary, “the most dangerous man in America.”

“For 30 years, medical and psychiatric research into psychedelics was virtually non-existent. It just went dark for non-science reasons—universities didn’t want to touch it—and for professors it looked like career suicide,” says Griffiths. “In modern times, there’s nothing else like this.”

The idea that plants could possess medicinal (or in this case, existential) value wasn’t new when Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann— working with the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels—became the first person to synthesize lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD. In 1943, after accidentally absorbing the compound through his fingertips, Hofmann experienced a feeling of joyful unity with nature similar to an evocative memory of a walk in the forest that had stuck with him since childhood. A few days later, curious and naïve, Hofmann intentionally ingested a much stronger dose of LSD that altered his consciousness more dramatically—frighteningly so. In fact, it took several hours before a sense of calm and beauty emerged. (That day, April 19, later became celebrated as the first “acid” trip and “Bicycle Day” among psychedelic advocates after the scientist famously recounted riding his bike home from his lab that afternoon.)

Hofmann jotted down the vivid imagery and fantastic shapes and colors he saw and developed an intense interest in “sacred” plants, leading to expeditions to Mexico where he witnessed religious mushroom rituals. Eventually, he isolated and synthesized the hallucinogen in that fungus as well, naming it psilocybin, which a curandera, a native healer and shaman, confirmed had “the same power” as the indigenous mushrooms.

It was Hofmann’s employer, Sandoz Laboratories (pharma giant Novartis today), that later supplied mail-order psychedelics for Leary’s experiments—as well as those of another Harvard Psilocybin Studies pioneer, Walter Pahnke, a psychiatrist and minister working on a Ph.D. dissertation in Religion and Society under Leary’s supervision. Pahnke later worked with Richards in Germany and, a few years after that, joined Richards on the Spring Grove State Hospital psychiatric research team in Catonsville in the late 1960s. He died in a scuba accident in 1971, but remains renowned for conducting the Good Friday Experiment, one of the most influential psychedelic studies ever.

His groundbreaking double-blind experiment with 20 theology students took place at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel during the Good Friday service there in 1962. His hypothesis was that psilocybin could reliably—in the right setting, with spiritually inclined people—induce a religious experience similar to the direct encounters of recognized mystics such as Plotinus, Shankara, and Saint Teresa of Avila. (The Mystical Experience Questionnaire, formulated later by Pahnke and Richards, is still the basis of the survey commonly used in studies.)

In Pahnke’s experiment, half of the graduate students received psilocybin and the other half a huge dose of a Vitamin B “active” placebo that would at least create some itchy skin and flush the face. Meanwhile, the Good Friday service—including organ music and singing from the choir—was broadcast from the main sanctuary into the basement chapel where they were under supervision. Eight of the 10 divinity students receiving a capsule of psilocybin—overcome with feelings of “unity” and “eternity” for the first time—expressed their experience as an ineffable transcendence of time and space. Tears of joy streamed down the cheeks of one student; another said he seemed to be relinquishing his life “in layers,” experiencing a greater sense of “oneness” at each step. Rev. Randall Laakko, then a divinity student, initially fled the chapel when the psilocybin first induced panic and paranoia. He believed he was “in hell” until he stepped outside on that sunny spring day and walked into a suddenly transcendent experience. “Everything in the world just seemed to glow inwardly with life,” he later recounted in a BBC documentary. “It changed my life . . . That day demonstrated the reality of God’s presence in all the world.”

Six of 10 overall also felt a sense of “sacredness” during their trial trip and Pahnke concluded that the reports from the eight who received the psilocybin were “indistinguishable from, if not identical” to the classic experiences described by mystics in their own words and chronicled in William James’ seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902.

Though more rigorous and diverse, the current crop of psilocybin studies are essentially reprises of Pahnke’s dissertation study. (Griffiths has a copy in his file cabinent.) But the Good Friday Experiment also resonates today because it points to the conundrum of quantifying the psychedelic phenomenon in scientific terms. Depending on one’s view, the psilocybin trials raise questions—or confer answers—about the existence of God, the collective unconscious, the true nature of reality, chemistry, neurobiology, and quantum physics. “Little things like that,” Richards says with a chuckle in his home office near Leakin Park.

To that end, one of Hopkins’ current psilocybin projects is looking at the effects of the compound on the brains of longtime meditators via fMRI imaging. Another experiment, in partnership with New York University, is giving psilocybin to clergy from various faith traditions in an effort to examine how those in the religious community assimilate the experience into their lives and/or vocation.

Richards is deeply interested in the neuroscience, but for him, the veracity of spiritual experiences described by subjects won’t be found in brain scans. He says “the fruits” of a given subject’s experience provide the real testament. “Does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?”

That it was Griffiths and Richards who partnered in the first successful re-launch of U.S. research into the possible psychiatric benefits of psilocybin is a bit of local serendipity. Richards, six years older than Griffiths, spent much of his early career—including a stretch from 1967-1977 at Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center—doing some of the very last clinical work and research with psychedelics in the U.S. until the recent renaissance. “Maybe that’s because we were close to Washington and they could keep an eye on us,” jokes Richards, whose gentle demeanor is regularly punctuated with hearty belly laughs. “But the money for research dried up. That’s what happened everywhere. I was just the last person out the door.”

Although Richards and Griffiths had worked in the same city for decades, they’d never met until they were introduced through Bob Jesse, a former Oracle vice president who founded the Council on Spiritual Practices in the early-’90s.

(Jesse, who coincidentally grew up in Baltimore County and studied computer engineering at Hopkins, was—and remains—focused in exploring the connections between the use of psychedelics and potential spiritual and psychological benefits for healthy individuals. He notes, for example, that the Native American Church in the U.S. has had the right to use peyote in its religious rituals for several decades. And, more recently, that a U.S. sect of the Brazilian church, União do Vegetal—literally “union of the plants”—with a brief filed on its behalf by no less than the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—challenged and got around a ban on DMT, another Schedule I substance and principle ingredient of ayahuasca tea, which is key to UDV’s rituals imported from South America. “Psychedelics should not just be available for people who need treatment,” Jesse says. “They should be available for people who want to become happy individuals as well.”)

In many ways, Richards and Griffiths backgrounds were far removed from each other for most of their careers. The image of Leary and the reputation of psychedelics, if anything, Griffiths says, probably dissuaded him from looking into psilocybin research earlier. But Griffiths’ own sense of self had shifted over the years after beginning a personal meditative practice and when he expressed interest in the psychedelic research the Council on Spiritual Practice was looking to rejuvenate and privately fund—the two-generation old stigma continues to keep a lid on public research money—Jesse knew whom he had to meet.

As a graduate student in Germany, Richards volunteered for an psilocybin experiment in 1963, which sparked a lifelong interest in psychedelic research and clinical work, as well as the psychology of religion. When he returned to the U.S., Richards soon got to know Leary—not long after Harvard had expelled the controversial professor. Among other early researchers, Richards also knew Leary’s close colleague with the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, former professor Richard Alpert, the spiritual teacher who wrote the 1971 best-seller on spirituality, yoga, and meditation, Be Here Now, after traveling to India where he received the Sanskrit name Ram Dass (“servant of God”) from a Hindu guru. Richards also counts 97-year-old Huston Smith—a more cautious participant in the Harvard scene and considered one of the world’s foremost comparative religion scholars—as a mentor. And Richards recently published his first book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, which draws parallels between the unitive, interconnected experience people often describe after a psilocybin session or LSD trip with the “holy” consciousness and encounters with the divine described by religious mystics across millenniums, cultures, and continents.

Griffiths, for his part, became one of the nation’s most respected researchers in the field of behavioral pharmacology, mood-altering drugs, and addiction while earning appointments at Hopkins. The author of more than 300 journal articles, his research has been largely funded by National Institutes of Health grants. He’s been a consultant to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of psychotropic drugs (such as those prescribed to treat depression and anxiety) and he is currently a member of the expert advisory panel on drug dependence for the World Health Organization. His sterling reputation at Hopkins and relationships with FDA officials was critical in getting various review boards to sign off on the pilot trials with psilocybin.

Tall and lean with a tussle of white hair and twinkling blue eyes, Griffiths possesses a certain professorial exterior, but also an easy affability.

“Our résumés are different,” Richards says. “But we complement each other. We make a good team.”

Dan Kreitman, a 55-year-old upholsterer and smoker for nearly 40 years, is one of the Hopkins’ psychedelic studies living proofs. Grabbing a chair in his workshop in his Baltimore County garage, the gregarious Kreitman recounts his psilocybin sessions that were a part of the smoking cessation trials. “Three years later, I’m totally amazed by it,” he says, taking a break on a warm Saturday afternoon. “Bringing it up, I remember how good it was—and all the positive feelings come right back.

“I’m going to warn you,” adds Kreitman. “When I talk about it, I can get emotional.”

Kreitman not only wanted to quit smoking for years without success, he’d become ashamed of his habit—sneaking cigarettes when his son, daughter, and wife weren’t around. Given his age, that he didn’t eat great and was overweight, his family also pressed him to quit. “It was my son, who was 18 then, who heard about the Hopkins’s studies and told me.” As part of his preparation, Kreitman was asked to keep a smoking diary—writing down the times of day when he picked up a cigarette. He also went through about six to eight counseling sessions, which included guided meditation exercises in the run-up before receiving his “magic” blue capsules of psilocybin.

Kreitman actually took three capsules of psilocybin in three separate sessions, in progressively stronger doses, he believes. The first session was very positive. “My father had recently committed suicide, but no demons or dragons,” he says. “Happy thoughts.”

The second experience was more of everything. “More vivid colors, more crazy shapes.” More happy thoughts.

“The third session, I left Earth and saw infinity,” Kreitman says. “It was so intense, so holy, I don’t know how to talk about it. A lot of stars, planets, a lot of the cosmos. It was so colorful and beautiful—I’m still blown away.

“And I saw my dad,” he continues. “He was in a boat floating down a river and he smiled and waved. I also saw an image of an old rabbi, somebody who looked like the God of the Old Testament with the white beard—the image of God I grew up with—steering the boat.”

The overwhelming feeling, Kreitman says, was of going out into the universe. Although he wasn’t sure if he’d be coming back or not. “It didn’t matter,” he says, wiping the corner of his eye. “Everything was okay.”

Smokers are considered good test cases in terms of addiction because their lives are often less chaotic and they have suffered fewer acute consequences than say, a heroin addict, says Matt Johnson, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of psychiatry and lead author of the smoking cessation study. Nonetheless, adds Johnson, cigarette addiction and dependence on other substances usually involves more than physical cravings. There’s a social dynamic when two or more smokers gather. There’s also a repetitive ritualistic component that can serve as an emotional crutch throughout the day.

Both addiction and depression create a sort of self-perpetuating tunneling of the brain’s default mode network—a downward spiraling in thinking patterns and behavior—that only burrows over time. Psilocybin, on the other hand, Johnson says, generates “a whole lot more cross-talk across the brain,” which can have the effect of breaking apart these tunnels and dramatically shifting a subject’s perspective. “All of a sudden people go from talking about the strange colors they’re seeing to talking about a communion with a higher power, who some call God,” he says. “It’s this insight they experience that provides a new, ‘big picture.’ It becomes a spiritual guidepost and stays with them. They realize, ‘I’m a miracle. I can quit smoking.’”

Kreitman describes himself today as more in rhythm with people, and with the world around him. “If I’m getting off the train and someone drops something,” he says, “it’s like I’m immediately aware this person needs help and I’m bending over to help them.” He’s also more open to new things. His appreciation of music, which he’s always loved, has deepened.

Whenever he feels the smallest funk coming on, he says, all he has to do is put on a CD of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” which he listened to during his third session.

He’s also eating better and has lost 15-20 pounds. He’s down to about 180 pounds now on his 5-foot-7 frame. “But I still grab some fried chicken on the weekend when I get a chance,” he chuckles. He’s also going to synagogue more, but adds with a smile that it might be because his cousin who goes regularly lives closer to him than in the past.

He says that he used to picture himself at 70, sitting on the porch with emphysema—a can of beer in hand. “Now, a whole new chapter of my life has opened up that I never expected,” Kreitman says. “Is that a religious experience? If not, I don’t know what is.”

As far as the smoking goes, he put out his last Camel on the drive to the Bayview clinic before his final psilocybin session. “I don’t feel like an ex-smoker,” Kreitman says. “I feel like a non-smoker—like I was never a smoker. My wife and I will be outside Giant or someplace and we’ll walk past employees out front smoking and I’ll catch myself saying to her, ‘They shouldn’t let people stand near the doors and smoke like that.’

“She just laughs at me.”

Update: This article has been updated to contain a sponsored link from treatment4addiction.com.