The 1970s

The 1970s were a hinge in the history of psychedelic therapy: sanctioned clinical work came to an end, while practitioners carried its methods into an illegal underground. The decade did not simply extinguish an earlier research movement. It altered where knowledge could be practiced and transmitted, and left later researchers to recover both a buried clinical record and a body of experience that had survived outside medical institutions.

From clinical work to underground practice

In 1970, the federal government placed psychedelics in Schedule I, prohibiting their use for any purpose. The change forced practitioners who wished to continue psychedelic therapy outside the law. The broader history of clinical research was already vulnerable: the work that had proceeded through the 1950s and 1960s was discontinued as sanctioned therapy ended in the 1970s, and its findings became difficult to retrieve within a psychiatric profession that no longer routinely discussed them. A later researcher, Stephen Ross, described discovering a body of knowledge that had been effectively buried by the time he trained in psychiatry in the 1990s.

This institutional break had a human and professional cost. The underground guides described in later reporting included credentialed therapists who risked their licenses as well as religious professionals and practitioners from alternative therapeutic traditions. They worked with different psychedelic substances, aiming not only to treat illness but also to support spiritual, creative, or emotional development. Because their work remained illegal, guides asked that their identities, locations, and other identifying details be changed in published accounts. The anonymity was not a literary device: it reflected the risks attached to preserving a practice that had lost legal standing.

The underground’s inherited lineages

The underground did not arise without predecessors. Many of the guides encountered by the narrator traced their professional lineage to the earlier generation of psychedelic therapists, often through Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Al Hubbard, or Leo Zeff. This passage of knowledge was personal and dispersed rather than organized through universities. It linked the legal research era to practitioners who continued working after the institutional route had closed.

Leo Zeff became a particularly important intermediary. He was a Jungian therapist practicing in Oakland when he first took LSD in 1961; after the 1970 prohibition, he decided to continue psychedelic work underground. Over a long career, he said he had processed about 3,000 patients and trained 150 guides. His influence extended beyond choosing to continue: he helped articulate working protocols, including strict confidentiality, a prohibition on sexual contact, and an expectation that clients follow the guide’s instructions during a session. He also regarded first-hand experience with a medicine as important for guides, and argued that they should not attempt to steer a client’s journey toward a predetermined result. In his approach, the therapist could set aside professional detachment and offer reassurance, including comforting touch, during a difficult experience.

These practices distinguished underground work from conventional therapy, but they also formed a practical inheritance. Later university research did not develop in isolation from it. Myron Stolaroff, Zeff’s close friend, argued that the research returning in the late 1990s had evolved partly from the anecdotal record built by underground therapists and partly from the earlier formal studies. Some underground practitioners were later recruited to help train guides for university trials, a cautious traffic between worlds that publicly preferred to appear separate.

A culture of practice and safeguards

The underground was not a single organization. Later interviews suggested a loose professional culture whose members shared an outlook, practices, and a code of conduct. A draft charter on a collaborative website described its aim as making profound experiences more available; it treated psychoactive substances as one tool among others, alongside meditation, breathwork, and fasting. The site also offered prospective guides legal-release forms, ethical agreements, medical questionnaires, and guidance for preparing for and integrating a session.

The ethical material addressed the unequal vulnerability of a participant during an intense experience. It emphasized disclosure of risks, informed consent, confidentiality, physical and psychological safety, and protection against a guide’s ambition or self-promotion. It also stated that access should not depend on a client’s ability to pay. These commitments did not make underground practice legal, nor did they erase the risks involved; they show how practitioners tried to set boundaries and responsibilities where ordinary institutional oversight was absent. The guidance collected practical knowledge about preparation, intentions, possible drug interactions, difficult material, and post-session integration, treating the session as a process rather than an isolated dose.

The decade’s therapeutic claims and later reassessment

The underground years also followed a period in which psychedelic treatment for alcoholism had been used on a large scale. Thousands of people received LSD and other psychedelics in the 1950s and 1960s, and Saskatchewan at one point adopted the treatment as a standard approach. The evidence was uneven: reports could be enthusiastic, but many studies were poorly designed or controlled. Outcomes also varied with the therapeutic context. Results appeared stronger when treatment was provided by sympathetic, experienced therapists, and weaker when inexperienced investigators administered large doses without adequate attention to the participant’s expectations or surroundings.

That uncertain record was reassessed in 2012, when a meta-analysis of the six strongest randomized controlled studies from the 1960s and 1970s, comprising more than 500 patients, found a statistically robust and clinically significant benefit from a single LSD dose for alcohol misuse, lasting as long as six months. The later analysis did not make the earlier studies methodologically uniform; rather, it gave a more systematic basis for taking their results seriously. Its authors’ question about why the treatment had been largely overlooked points back to the rupture that the 1970s represented: a promising line of inquiry could be interrupted not only by results, but by cultural and institutional pressures.

A boundary between medicine and experience

The therapeutic model that survived underground was difficult to fit into standard medical categories. Psychedelic treatment could involve a single high-dose session intended to produce a major psychological change, rather than a succession of ordinary weekly appointments. It also made the therapist’s role and the surrounding context central. The drug could not easily be studied as a separable chemical effect when expectations, the presence of a guide, and the conditions of the session might all influence what happened. Even later clinical trials faced a basic problem of blinding: many participants and guides could tell whether Psilocybin or a placebo had been administered.

Researchers therefore confronted more than a technical obstacle. Psychedelic experiences were often described as spiritual, while modern psychiatry increasingly favored biochemical explanations of mental life. Charles Grob called the therapeutic approach applied mysticism, a formulation that exposed the tension rather than resolving it. The 1970s left that tension in place: practice moved outside the clinic, but its methods continued to depend on relationships, preparation, and meaning as well as pharmacology. When university studies resumed, they had to recover historical knowledge and test it by contemporary standards without assuming that the experience could be reduced to the drug alone.