occur to me that spending time in this area might actually be far more
important and far more fulfilling than what I had been doing” as a
computer engineer.
While on a sabbatical from Oracle (he would leave for good in 1995),
Jesse set up a nonprofit called the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP),
with the aim of “making direct experience of the sacred more available to
more people.” The website downplays the organization’s interest in
promoting entheogens—Bob Jesse’s preferred term for psychedelics—but
does describe its mission in suggestive terms: “to identify and develop
approaches to primary religious experience that can be used safely and
effectively.” The website (csp.org) offers an excellent bibliography of
psychedelic research and regular updates on the work under way at Johns
Hopkins. CSP would also play a role in supporting the UDV lawsuit that
resulted in the 2006 Supreme Court decision.
The Council on Spiritual Practices grew out of Jesse’s systematic
exploration of the psychedelic literature and the psychedelic community
in the Bay Area soon after he moved to San Francisco. In his highly
deliberate, slightly obsessive, and scrupulously polite way, Jesse
contacted the region’s numerous “psychedelic elders”—the rich cast of
characters who had been deeply involved in research and therapy in the
years before most of the drugs were banned in 1970, with the passing of
the Controlled Substances Act, and the classification of LSD and
psilocybin as schedule 1 substances with a high potential for abuse and no
recognized medical use. There was James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained
psychologist who had done pioneering research on psychedelics and
problem solving at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in
Menlo Park, until the FDA halted the group’s work in 1966. (In the early
1960s, there was at least as much psychedelic research going on around
Stanford as there was at Harvard; it just didn’t have a character of the
wattage of a Timothy Leary out talking about it.) Then there was
Fadiman’s colleague at the institute Myron Stolaroff, a prominent Silicon
Valley electrical engineer who worked as a senior executive at Ampex, the
magnetic recording equipment maker, until an LSD trip inspired him to
give up engineering (much like Bob Jesse) for a career as a psychedelic
researcher and therapist. Jesse also found his way into the inner circle of
Sasha and Ann Shulgin, legendary Bay Area figures who held weekly
dinners for a community of therapists, scientists, and others interested in
frankie
(Frankie)
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