How to Change Your Mind

were getting religion. (And have it still: I know of one Bay Area tech
company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A
handful of others have instituted “microdosing Fridays.”)
In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to dedicate himself full-time to
psychedelic research. With Willis Harman, he established the orotundly
titled International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) to explore the
potential of LSD to enhance human personality and creativity. Stolaroff
hired a psychiatrist named Charles Savage as medical director and, as
staff psychologist, a first-year graduate student by the name of James
Fadiman. (Fadiman, who graduated from Harvard in 1960, was
introduced to psilocybin by Richard Alpert, though not until after his
graduation. “The greatest thing in the world has happened to me,” Alpert
told his former student, “and I want to share it with you.”) Don Allen also
left his engineering post at Ampex to join IFAS as a screener and guide.
The foundation secured a drug research permit from the FDA and a
supply of LSD and mescaline from Al Hubbard and began—to use an Al
Hubbard term—“processing clients.” Over the next six years, the
foundation would process some 350 people.
As James Fadiman and Don Allen recall those years at the foundation
(both sat for extensive interviews), it was a thrilling and heady time to be
working on what they were convinced was the frontier of human
possibility. For the most part, their experimental subjects were “healthy
normals” or what Fadiman described as “a healthy neurotic outpatient
population.” Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package that
included before-and-after personality testing, a guided LSD session, and
some follow-up. Al Hubbard “would float in and out,” Don Allen recalls.
He “was both our inspiration and our resident expert.” James Fadiman
says, “He was the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research.” From
time to time, Hubbard would take members of the staff to Death Valley
for training sessions, in the belief that the primordial landscape there was
particularly conducive to revelatory experience.
In half a dozen or so papers published in the early 1960s, the
foundation’s researchers reported some provocative “results.” Seventy-
eight percent of clients said the experience had increased their ability to
love, 71 percent registered an increase in self-esteem, and 83 percent said
that during their sessions they had glimpsed “a higher power, or ultimate
reality.” Those who had such an experience were the ones who reported