2010 MAPS psychedelic science conference

The 2010 MAPS psychedelic science conference made visible a part of psychedelic work that had largely remained out of sight: underground guides whose practices connected to, but were not confined by, university research. Its most revealing moment came not in a formal scientific presentation but in an early-morning meeting called by James Fadiman. The turnout—about a hundred guides, rather than the handful he expected—suggested that this dispersed network shared more than an interest in psychedelics. Documents that appeared soon afterward gave evidence of common purposes, accumulated know-how, and an emerging ethic of care.

A gathering across boundaries

Organized by MAPS, with sponsorship from the Heffter Research Institute, the Beckley Foundation, and Bob Jesse’s Council on Spiritual Practices, the conference took place in a Holiday Inn in San Jose in 2010. Together, the four nonprofit sponsors funded most of the psychedelic research then under way. More than a thousand people attended, among them several dozen scientists presenting research, guides from university trials and underground practice, and people who regularly used psychedelics for spiritual, therapeutic, or recreational purposes.

That mix brought distinct worlds into the same space. The underground guides were not simply researchers in another setting: many worked with psychedelic substances according to carefully prescribed practices intended to help people heal or develop spiritual, creative, or emotional potential. Some risked their professional licenses as well as their freedom by doing this work. Yet the boundary between underground practice and formal research was already permeable. University researchers had sought advice from guides, including when the Johns Hopkins team surveyed their musical practices for a study of guided psilocybin sessions. The conference made that traffic harder to overlook.

Fadiman’s early-morning meeting

Fadiman attended on the science track to speak about the value of the guided entheogenic journey. Wondering how many underground guides might be in the audience, he announced that they should meet at eight the next morning. He later recalled, “I dragged myself out of bed at 7:30 expecting to see maybe five people, but a hundred showed up! It was staggering.” The surprise was not just the size of the turnout. A group of practitioners who might have seemed to be working separately had gathered in numbers, ready to recognize themselves as a shared field of practice.

The meeting did not turn that group into a formal organization. The guides remained disparate, and the conference account does not describe a governing body or a single agreed method. But interviews with more than a dozen guides suggested shared outlooks, practices, and standards of conduct. Soon after the San Jose meeting, a collaborative website appeared, offering a place to circulate documents and develop material together. Its existence gave the gathering a practical aftermath: a means for a scattered network to articulate, preserve, and share some of what its members knew.

Purposes, safeguards, and accumulated practice

Among the website’s documents was a draft charter that described the aim as making profound, prized experiences more available to more people. It referred to states such as unitive and non-dual consciousness, and recognized that meditation, breathwork, and fasting could be among the ways people sought them. At the same time, the draft identified the judicious use of psychoactive substances as one of the guides’ principal tools, treating them as powerful spiritual catalysts rather than as ends in themselves.

The site also linked to printable legal releases, medical questionnaires, and ethical agreements. Its Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides recognized the psychological and physical risks of a journey, and placed ultimate responsibility for the client’s well-being on the guide. Because participants in religious practice could be particularly open to suggestion or exploitation, the code called on guides to disclose risks, obtain consent, maintain confidentiality, protect participants’ health and safety, guard against ambition and self-promotion, and accommodate clients regardless of their ability to pay. These provisions framed the work not as unregulated personal experimentation but as a practice carrying obligations toward vulnerable participants.

A companion document, Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides, gathered practical advice for both participants and guides. It addressed set and setting, preparation, possible drug interactions, intentions, the stages of a session, frightening material, and post-session integration. In this way, the conference’s unexpected meeting led into a record of practices extending beyond the event itself: how to prepare, how to respond when a journey became difficult, and how to make sense of it afterward.

Significance

The conference exposed a tension at the heart of psychedelic research. The scientific presentations and the presence of researchers from university trials placed the gathering within an effort to establish clinical legitimacy; the guides’ work also depended on experience, ritual, and careful attention to context. Psychedelic effects could be difficult to separate from expectation, the guide’s presence, and set and setting, complicating the scientific ideal of isolating a single variable. The meeting and the documents that followed did not resolve that problem. They showed, instead, that practitioners were building a framework for working with it.

The ethical and practical materials also challenged the assumption that underground guides were merely isolated individuals improvising on their own. Their practices drew on knowledge passed down from figures including Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Stanislav Grof, and Leo Zeff, and had acquired protocols and agreements of their own. The 2010 gathering therefore marked both continuity and change: underground practice remained outside formal medical institutions, but its accumulated experience could inform university research and train a new generation of guides. The conference’s importance lies in making that largely informal infrastructure visible—and in showing how a meeting of practitioners could give a dispersed practice shared language and safeguards.