The Secret Chief

The Secret Chief is an interview-based account of underground psychedelic therapist Leo Zeff and the practices he developed after psychedelic drugs were prohibited. First published anonymously under the name Jacob, it preserves the testimony of a practitioner who continued working outside the law and whose methods, as Myron Stolaroff argued, helped inform the later revival of psychedelic research.

Publication and identification

Published in 1997, The Secret Chief presents a series of interviews with a therapist identified as Jacob. The interviewer was Myron Stolaroff, Zeff’s close friend. The book’s anonymity reflected the risks surrounding the work it described: Zeff had chosen to continue administering psychedelics after the federal government placed them in Schedule I in 1970.

In 2004, Zeff’s family gave Stolaroff permission to reveal Jacob’s identity and republish the book as The Secret Chief Revealed. The change made the account more than an anonymous portrait of an underground therapist: it connected the reported methods and career directly to Zeff, a practitioner who had become one of the best-known figures in that hidden field.

Zeff’s turn to underground practice

Zeff was a Jungian therapist practicing in Oakland when, at forty-nine, he took LSD for the first time in 1961. He later began using a range of psychedelics in his work. In his account to Stolaroff, the medicines helped patients move past defenses, bring unconscious material into awareness, and sometimes reach spiritual insights in a single session.

The reported results led Zeff to continue when prohibition made the practice illegal. The interviews convey the personal cost of that decision: he described recurring anxiety about the risks he was taking, weighed against the changes he believed he saw in patients. The book thus documents not only a therapeutic approach but the choice to sustain it under legal pressure.

A practical code for guides

The book records protocols that Zeff helped establish among underground therapists. Guides made explicit agreements with clients, including strict confidentiality, a prohibition on sexual contact, and an expectation that clients follow the guide’s instructions during a session. The medicine could be given from a cup, a ceremonial gesture Zeff regarded as symbolically important to the experience of transformation.

Zeff’s guidance also departed from conventional therapeutic detachment. He believed guides should have personal experience with any medicine they administered, and should not try to steer a client’s journey toward a predetermined destination. Instead, he advised them to let the experience unfold. He also considered it appropriate for a guide to bring personal feeling into the relationship, including offering comforting touch or a hug when a client was having a difficult session.

Influence beyond the underground

Stolaroff’s introduction placed Zeff’s work within a wider history, suggesting that research resumed in the late 1990s had developed partly from underground therapists’ accumulated anecdotal evidence as well as from the first wave of research in the 1950s and 1960s. The interviews also illuminate how methods and knowledge traveled: underground guides often traced their professional lineage to earlier practitioners, including Zeff, Al Hubbard, Stanislav Grof, or Timothy Leary.

The boundary between underground practice and university research was not absolute. Some underground therapists helped train guides for university trials, and when the Johns Hopkins team wanted to investigate the role of music in guided psilocybin sessions, it consulted underground guides about their musical practices. In this context, The Secret Chief serves both as a record of Zeff’s individual practice and as testimony to a less visible channel through which therapeutic experience and protocols passed into the later research revival.