Continuation of Psychedelic Research at Spring Grove

The psychedelic research program at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove was the striking exception to the nationwide shutdown of 1966: while dozens of U.S. projects were ordered to stop, its clinicians continued working with LSD and psilocybin until 1976. The decade of research that followed depended on an institutional foothold and the connections of its director, even as the reasons the program was allowed to survive remained partly uncertain.

The Exception to the Shutdown

In October 1966, the FDA ordered researchers across the United States to stop their work. The timing made the cutoff immediate and tangible at the International Foundation for Advanced Study: James Fadiman received the revocation letter just as he had dosed four participants for a problem-solving session. By the following day, that program and virtually every other psychedelic research program then operating in the country had closed. Spring Grove alone endured the purge.

At the Maryland center, Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, Richard Yensen, and Walter Pahnke continued investigating LSD and psilocybin. Their clinical work encompassed alcoholism, schizophrenia, and the existential distress of cancer patients, among other indications. Pahnke remained part of the research team until his death in 1971; the program itself continued until 1976, ten years after the broader shutdown.

How Spring Grove Stayed Open

The center’s survival puzzled researchers who had lost their own programs. Some speculated that psychedelic therapy might have been available to influential people in Washington, who valued the treatment, wanted to learn from the research, or hoped to retain access to the drugs. Former staff members interviewed about the possibility doubted that explanation, distinguishing rumor from what they knew of the institution.

They confirmed that the center’s director, Albert Kurland, had an excellent reputation among federal officials and was exceptionally well connected in Washington. He used those relationships to keep the program operating and secure LSD, including some supplied by the government. The book presents those connections as the practical means of preserving the work, without resolving every question about why Spring Grove was spared when other research centers were not.

Research Across a Wider Network

Spring Grove’s continuity belonged to a field built through more than formal institutions. In the late 1950s, Al Hubbard moved among research centers across North America, bringing Sandoz LSD, therapeutic techniques, and clinical experience to collaborators including Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in Weyburn and researchers in Los Angeles. The account depicts this circulation of expertise and supplies as a network that could carry practice between scattered sites, though it does not identify Hubbard as the reason Spring Grove remained open.

Other networks also carried experimental practice forward. At Menlo Park, Al Hubbard guided members of Myron Stolaroff’s Ampex group and trained them to guide others; Stolaroff later established the International Foundation for Advanced Study with Willis Harman. These examples place Spring Grove’s institutional continuity alongside a broader ecology of researchers, guides, and research projects rather than presenting it as the field’s sole source of survival.

From Institutional Work to Underground Practice

The end of the Spring Grove program in 1976 did not end psychedelic research and therapy in the United States. As legal research contracted, the work continued quietly underground. Later guides traced professional lineages to figures including Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Al Hubbard, and Leo Zeff, whose work helped transmit therapeutic practices beyond the institutions of the first research wave.

Myron Stolaroff argued that legitimate university research resuming in the late 1990s had developed partly from underground therapists’ anecdotal experience as well as from the research of the 1950s and 1960s. The boundary between the worlds was not absolute: underground therapists helped train some guides for university trials, and the Johns Hopkins team consulted underground practitioners when studying music in guided psilocybin sessions. Spring Grove’s survival preserved one formal setting for a decade after the purge; the later history shows a wider, less visible continuity in which knowledge also traveled through people and practice.