belowground psychedelic worlds is permeable in certain places; a couple
of the people I befriended while reporting on the university psilocybin
trials were willing to introduce me to “colleagues” who worked
underground. One introduction led to another as people came to trust my
intentions. By now, I’ve interviewed fifteen underground guides and have
worked with five.
Considering the risks involved, I found most of these people
unexpectedly open, generous, and trusting. Although the authorities have
so far shown no interest in going after people practicing psychedelic-
assisted therapy, the work remains illegal and so is dangerous to share
with a journalist without taking precautions. All the guides asked me not
to disclose their names or locations and to take whatever other measures
I could to protect them. With that in mind, I have changed not only their
names and locations but also certain other identifying details in each of
their stories. But all the people you are about to meet are real individuals,
not composites or fictions.
Virtually all of the underground guides I met are descended in one way
or another from the generation of psychedelic therapists working on the
West Coast and around Cambridge during the 1950s and 1960s when this
work was still legal. Indeed, just about everyone I interviewed could trace
a professional lineage reaching back to Timothy Leary (often through one
of his graduate students), Stanislav Grof, Al Hubbard, or a Bay Area
psychologist named Leo Zeff. Zeff, who died in 1988, was one of the
earliest underground therapists, and certainly the most well-known; he
claims to have “processed” (Al Hubbard’s term) three thousand patients
and trained 150 guides during his career, including several of the ones I
met on the West Coast.
Zeff also left a posthumous (and anonymous) account of his work, in
the form of a 1997 book called The Secret Chief, a series of interviews
with a therapist called Jacob conducted by his close friend Myron
Stolaroff. (In 2004, Zeff’s family gave Stolaroff permission to disclose his
identity and republish the book as The Secret Chief Revealed.) On the
evidence of his interviews, Zeff is in many ways typical of the
underground therapists I met, in both his approach and his manner; he
comes across rather as folksy, or haimish, to use a Yiddish word Zeff
would have appreciated, rather than as a renegade, guru, or hippie. In a
photograph included in the 2004 edition, a smiling Zeff, wearing a big
frankie
(Frankie)
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