Myron Stolaroff, psychedelic researcher

Myron Stolaroff was an Ampex engineer whose LSD experience turned a private search into a research career. He helped create the International Foundation for Advanced Study, explored the drug’s potential to expand human personality and creativity, and later recorded the work of underground therapists. His path joined three worlds often kept apart: corporate engineering, formal investigation, and the informal networks that carried psychedelic therapy forward when it was no longer legally practiced in public.

From Ampex engineer to psychedelic researcher

In the early 1960s, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms of LSD supplied by Sandoz. Over several hours, he experienced a sweeping vision of the planet’s history, from its formation through the development of life and humanity, which culminated in a reliving of his own birth. He later described that birth experience as painful and formative, and recalled that the journey also brought a sense of human oneness and the reality of God. He regarded the experience as a decisive opening; afterward, he committed himself to the work.

Stolaroff shared what had happened with a small group of friends and colleagues at Ampex. Meeting about once a month, they discussed spiritual questions and whether LSD might help healthy people realize more of their potential. Don Allen and Willis Harman joined the group. Al Hubbard began traveling to Menlo Park to guide their journeys and train them to guide others; Stolaroff later remembered Hubbard as an exceptionally good therapist.

For a time, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to reshape Ampex into what they imagined as a psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The effort foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to the Christian images Hubbard brought into his office, including representations of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. The episode showed both the group’s ambition to bring psychedelic experience into working life and the practical limits imposed by differences in religious outlook.

The International Foundation for Advanced Study

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself full-time to psychedelic research. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study to investigate whether LSD could enhance personality and creativity. The project grew out of their earlier discussions, but gave the inquiry an institutional form: the foundation obtained an FDA research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline from Hubbard.

Stolaroff assembled a team with distinct clinical and research roles. Psychiatrist Charles Savage became medical director, while James Fadiman joined as staff psychologist and Don Allen left his engineering position to work as a screener and guide. The foundation’s work belonged to a period when researchers were asking whether psychedelics might serve not only as treatments for illness but also as tools for the development of healthy people. That broader aim had already shaped the Ampex group’s meetings and the attempted corporate workshops.

Documenting underground therapy

Stolaroff’s influence extended beyond the foundation through his friendship with Leo Zeff, an early underground therapist. In 1997, Stolaroff published The Secret Chief, a series of interviews with a therapist identified as Jacob. Zeff’s family later permitted Stolaroff to reveal Jacob’s identity and republish the book as The Secret Chief Revealed in 2004. The interviews preserved an account of practice that had become difficult to discuss openly, while presenting its practitioner as a working therapist rather than simply an outlaw or guru.

In the introduction to the 2004 edition, Stolaroff argued that the legitimate psychedelic research resuming in the late 1990s had developed partly from the anecdotal evidence accumulated by underground therapists such as Zeff, as well as from the first wave of research in the 1950s and 1960s. He recognized that university researchers could be reluctant to acknowledge this inheritance, even as knowledge and practice moved between underground and institutional settings. His book therefore served not only as a portrait of Zeff but also as a record of a professional lineage that might otherwise have remained obscured.

A bridge between research generations

Stolaroff’s career traces a movement from personal experience to collaborative inquiry and then to historical testimony. His LSD journey helped prompt the Ampex group; the group’s work led to a dedicated research foundation; and his later book made the underground therapeutic tradition more visible to readers as formal research resumed. In documenting Zeff, he emphasized continuity across a rupture: clinical work had been interrupted by cultural and institutional pressures, but its knowledge had not disappeared. His contribution was thus both experimental and archival—helping investigate psychedelic experience and preserving the history of those who continued to work with it beyond official science.