Menlo Park psychedelic research hub was a place where the first wave of psychedelic work reached beyond treating illness and began testing whether LSD might change how healthy people thought, felt, and worked. Centered first on a group of Ampex colleagues and then on the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the Menlo Park effort linked engineering, psychology, guided sessions, and a far-flung network of practitioners. It produced striking self-reports, practical training, and an institutional experiment that ended when federal permission to continue was withdrawn.

From Ampex to a research foundation

Myron Stolaroff’s commitment began with his own LSD experience. Afterward, he shared the news with a small circle of friends and colleagues at Ampex, who met periodically to discuss spiritual questions and whether LSD could help people realize their potential. Don Allen, a young engineer at the company, and Willis Harman, a Stanford University professor of electrical engineering, joined the group. Al Hubbard came to Menlo Park to guide their sessions and train them to guide others. Stolaroff later remembered Hubbard as an especially capable therapist, and colleagues described him as a continuing source of inspiration and expertise.

For a time, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s assistance, to reshape Ampex into what they imagined as a psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The project faltered when Ampex’s general manager objected to the Christian images Hubbard brought into his office, including images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. Meanwhile, Harman turned toward the human-potential movement in his teaching at Stanford University, introducing a course that concluded with a unit on psychedelics. The episode captured the ambitions of the Menlo Park circle: to bring the drug’s perceived capacity for transformation into professional life, while also exposing how difficult it was to reconcile that ambition with the beliefs and norms of a workplace.

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself full-time to psychedelic research. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study, based in Menlo Park, to investigate whether LSD could enhance personality and creativity. The foundation hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist. Allen also left Ampex, joining as a screener and guide. The project secured a research permit from the Food and Drug Administration and obtained LSD and mescaline through Hubbard. Over the following six years, the foundation worked with about 350 people.

Methods, participants, and reported effects

The foundation primarily worked with healthy participants, described by Fadiman as a healthy neurotic outpatient population. A client paid $500 for a package combining personality tests before and after the session, a guided LSD experience, and follow-up. Hubbard remained a mobile presence in the project, coming and going as an expert and mentor. He also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its ancient landscape particularly conducive to revelatory experiences. The work thus depended not on the drug alone but on a structured sequence of preparation, guidance, and later assessment.

The foundation’s published papers reported that 78 percent of clients said their ability to love had increased, 71 percent reported greater self-esteem, and 83 percent said they had glimpsed a higher power or ultimate reality during their sessions. Participants who reported such an experience also described the most lasting benefits. Allen recalled changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that seemed to him both notable and durable: clients became less judgmental and rigid, more open, and less defended. These results were reports from the foundation’s own work, not a demonstration that every participant benefited. Several clients, for example, abruptly ended marriages after concluding that they were mismatched or caught in destructive patterns. The same capacity for reevaluation that researchers regarded as liberating could unsettle established relationships.

A hub in a wider network

Menlo Park was not an isolated laboratory. Hubbard moved among research and treatment centers across North America, carrying LSD, clinical experience, and techniques for guiding sessions. His circuit included work with researchers in Weyburn and Los Angeles, and he later added Menlo Park to his travels. At the foundation, he helped the staff learn to conduct sessions themselves, extending his influence beyond the people he directly treated. Stolaroff’s project joined this informal circulation to a formal study: it had a research permit, paid clients, staff roles, and published findings, yet depended in part on Hubbard’s personal supply and practical knowledge.

The foundation also helped connect the early research generation to later practice. Nearly all the underground guides interviewed by the book’s narrator could trace a professional lineage to figures from the period when psychedelic work was still legal, including Hubbard and Fadiman’s former collaborators. Stolaroff’s account of the underground therapist Leo Zeff suggested that later university research had developed partly from evidence accumulated by underground practitioners as well as from the earlier studies. The boundary between the worlds was not absolute: when the Johns Hopkins team wanted to investigate music in guided psilocybin sessions, it sought information from underground guides. Menlo Park’s historical significance therefore lay partly in the people it trained and the knowledge that continued to travel after its own research ended.

Revocation and aftermath

The foundation’s work stopped amid a broad federal crackdown on psychedelic research. In October, the Food and Drug Administration sent letters ordering roughly sixty researchers across the United States to end their work. Fadiman remembered that the Menlo Park letter arrived just as he had finished dosing four participants for a problem-solving session. Rather than interrupt the session, he proposed that colleagues treat the letter as if it had arrived the next day. The following day, the International Foundation for Advanced Study closed, along with virtually every other U.S. psychedelic research program then operating.

One large program continued at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove, where researchers pursued work on alcoholism, schizophrenia, and the existential distress of cancer patients until 1976. Menlo Park, by contrast, did not resume its program. Its interruption marked both the vulnerability of research dependent on regulatory permission and the dispersal of a network built through training and collaboration. The center’s people and practices outlasted the institution: some knowledge passed into underground therapy, while later academic researchers cautiously drew on that experience. Menlo Park’s story is thus not simply one of a research site opening and closing, but of a short-lived formal center whose methods and relationships continued beyond its official life.