Don Allen

Don Allen was a young Ampex engineer who left engineering to become a screener and guide at the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), a center for LSD research in Menlo Park. His importance in the account lies in two connected roles: he helped build an organized program around psychedelic sessions for healthy people, and later recalled both the reported changes in participants and the effort to test whether LSD could aid creative work. His story places him at the meeting point of engineering culture, experimental psychology, and a therapeutic practice whose knowledge traveled through personal networks as much as institutions.

From Ampex to IFAS

Allen entered the circle around Myron Stolaroff after Stolaroff’s first LSD experience led him to share his interest with friends and colleagues at Ampex. The group met about once a month to discuss spiritual questions and whether LSD might help healthy people realize more of their potential. Allen, then a young engineer, joined alongside Willis Harman, a Stanford electrical-engineering professor. Al Hubbard began visiting Menlo Park to guide the group’s psychedelic sessions and train its members to guide others; Stolaroff later remembered Hubbard as an exceptionally good therapist.

For a time, Stolaroff and Hubbard tried to reshape Ampex into what they called the world’s first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative encountered resistance when Ampex’s general manager objected to religious images Hubbard brought into his office. Meanwhile, Harman began teaching a course at Stanford on human potential, with a unit on psychedelics. These efforts did not turn Ampex into a lasting treatment center, but they show the workplace as an early testing ground for ideas that Allen would pursue more fully beyond the company.

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to work full-time on psychedelic research and established IFAS with Harman. Allen also left his engineering post and joined the foundation as a screener and guide. The staff included psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist. IFAS obtained a drug-research permit from the Food and Drug Administration and received LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. It then began processing clients, in Hubbard’s terminology, and worked with roughly 350 people over the next six years.

The Menlo Park program

IFAS chiefly worked with healthy participants, including what Fadiman called a healthy neurotic outpatient population. Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package that included personality testing before and after the session, a guided LSD experience, and follow-up. Allen’s recollections describe a structured program rather than an isolated drug session: assessment, guidance, and later evaluation formed parts of a single course of work. Hubbard remained an intermittent presence, moving in and out of the foundation as its inspiration and resident expert. He sometimes took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape especially conducive to revelatory experiences.

In papers published in the early 1960s, the foundation’s researchers reported that 78 percent of clients said their ability to love had increased, 71 percent reported higher self-esteem, and 83 percent said they had glimpsed a higher power or ultimate reality during their sessions. Participants reporting such an experience also described the most lasting benefits. Allen recalled clients emerging with substantial and fairly sustainable changes in belief, attitude, and behavior: they could be less judgmental and rigid, more open, and less defended. These outcomes were not uniformly welcome. Some participants ended marriages after concluding that they were mismatched or caught in destructive patterns. The same loosening of established perspectives that researchers associated with personal change could also unsettle important relationships.

Creativity experiments and their limits

IFAS also investigated whether LSD might improve creativity and problem-solving. The possibility was uncertain: an intense experience might just as easily distract someone from the task at hand. Fadiman and his colleagues first tried the question on themselves, asking whether they could design a credible creativity experiment while taking a relatively light dose of 100 micrograms. They concluded that they could proceed with the test.

Working in groups of four, Fadiman and Harman then administered the same dose to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists who felt stuck on particular projects. The researchers deliberately shaped the set and setting, encouraging participants to expect unusual intellectual fluidity and problem-solving ability. Participants reported greater ease of thought, better visualization of problems, and an increased capacity to recontextualize them. The researchers were impressed by the number of novel, effective solutions they said emerged from the sessions. Among those who took part were William English and Douglas Engelbart, figures who would soon help transform computing.

The experiment’s promise must be read alongside its weaknesses. It was uncontrolled, relied on participants’ own assessments of success, and stopped before completion. The account therefore presents it as an indication of a promising research direction, not proof that LSD reliably enhanced creativity. Allen’s place in the foundation connects him to this exploratory work, but the evidence identifies Fadiman and Harman as the researchers who conducted the sessions and does not assign Allen a specific role in designing or administering that experiment.

A network beyond the institution

Allen’s work at IFAS belonged to a wider circulation of people, methods, and materials. Hubbard traveled among research centers, shared clinical techniques and LSD, and trained guides; in Menlo Park, Allen became part of the staff that turned some of this knowledge into a sustained program. Later, the underground guides interviewed in the book traced professional lineages back to figures including Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, and Leo Zeff. That history situates IFAS within a broader transmission of psychedelic practice, although the account does not specify a distinct later underground career for Allen.

The foundation’s work ended when IFAS closed in 1966. Its studies left a record of reported personal changes and early attempts to investigate creativity, while their small-scale and uncontrolled methods limited what could be concluded. Allen’s recollections help make the institution more than a list of results: they describe a group that moved from informal meetings among Ampex colleagues to a permitted research program, trained guides, and tested questions extending beyond the treatment of illness. His trajectory marks that shift from engineering employment into an experimental community devoted to human potential.