Elder Interviews, Myron Stolaroff 1998 Part II

Ophanim – Gwyllm

Goldsmith: Contrariwise, there are individuals who have such wonderful focus and intentionality that they make wonderful progress without the substances. But the substances do provide, however, a spur or intervention, window, opportunity, a temporary suspension of defenses – effects of that nature – that can help jump-start or intervene, or even give, as Myron suggested, a profound, long-lasting change in your world view.

Greer: Yes. For example, confronting death is a real wake-up call and can shift one’s consciousness. So you can do something really dangerous to confront death – like mountain climbing, or getting involved in a risky relationship, but that can have a lot of negative consequences. I believe that a psychedelic session in a controlled setting is a much safer way to confront death, to confront oneself with all these things and, ultimately, to facilitate a transformation.

Stolaroff: One of the tragedies of our drug laws is that with the prohibition and the lack of research, this kind of understanding isn’t widespread, where it could readily help a lot of people who are fooling around with these things and not knowing what they’re doing.

Goldsmith: This is a wonderful segue to talking about the psychedelic session itself, because that type of research and practice is the kind of self-conscious, careful, professional approach that is impossible today. Practically speaking, the only avenue of exploration, is clearly illicit in societal terms.

So, George, I think you were primarily responsible for putting together the eight factors on conducting a psychedelic session with couples. Why don’t you just introduce it as you see fit.

Greer: Sure. Just as an aside here, the whole procedure that I used for conducting sessions with MDMA is published in a journal article in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs [Greer, G. And Tolbert, R. “A Method for Conducting Therapeutic Sessions with MDMA.” J. of Psychoactive Drugs, October – December 1998, Volume 30, Number 4].

Regarding our current list of factors involved in the conduct of a session, my first thought goes back to something we’ve talked about, which is sharing an explicitly expressed common goal or purpose, for the relationship and for the session and to have done this before the session, sets it up for success, because if the participants have different goals – say, one person wants to explore their childhood and the other person wants to explore the relationship – well, that’s not a common purpose for the session, and it’s not going to work out. This needs to be explicitly expressed in words, so that everybody – including the therapist or sitter – knows what everybody else knows: Why are we doing this? This sets you out with the shared intention that we talked about earlier.

Goldsmith: Is that your second factor, “Participants make a list of issues they wish to resolve, both joint and personal”?

Greer: The list of issues would derive from the common singular purpose. Like if our purpose is to know ourselves, then you might have a list of issues and ways in which you want to know yourself more. If our purpose is to know each other better – you know, the general purpose is something very general and abstract and that really has to be almost the same for the participants, or a least well aligned. Otherwise, I think it’s probably not a good idea to do a session, without a common purpose. The list of issues are the specific goals within that larger purpose.

Stolaroff: Good.

Greer: Any special comments on that, Myron?

Stolaroff: Gosh, it’s a real basic part of undertaking a session. I’ve seen it violated so much and I think it’s a shame, because, without this, I think you miss the opportunity to clear up a lot, learn a lot, and understand a lot. So, I think these requirements are very well put, George.

Greer: And it can take a while to even come to a common purpose – and that’s great. If it takes days or weeks to agree on why you’re going to do the session, that’s really good for the relationship.

Stolaroff: Absolutely.

Goldsmith: Myron, let me ask you about the methodology you used at the International Foundation for Advanced Studies in the ’50s and ’60s. Did you have an explicit way of doing this – with lists, for example?

Stolaroff: Oh, yes, yes. First of all, we didn’t have MDMA, so we’re talking about an in-depth, overwhelming-dose experience with LSD.

Goldsmith: What dosage was it?

Stolaroff: It depended on the individual. Charles Savage, our psychiatrist, usually came up with a recommended dose. There used to be a lot of talk about body weight, but we found that what was really important was the psychic armor that a person had – the more armor, the higher the dose. Of course, you always have the possibility of supplementing. So if you didn’t get it right at first, you could add more during the experience.

Goldsmith: Could you give us a general idea of the microgram range?

Stolaroff: I think a good guide is what “Jacob” used. [Note: “Jacob” is the pseudonym for an influential psychologist who practiced psychedelic psychotherapy clandestinely for many years. “Jacob” was profiled in the book The Secret Chief, (MAPS, 1998) written by Myron Stolaroff.] He generally started off with a couple hundred micrograms of LSD. Then, after an hour or so, if the person felt that he wasn’t into it as much as he wanted to be, he would add a 125-microgram booster. He’d ask every 30 minutes or so whether the person was really as deeply into the experience as he’d like to be and he would keep adding in those increments. I think that’s as good a guide as we have.

Goldsmith: Thank you.

The Witching Hours – Iteration /Gwyllm

Greer: For the MDMA, we would vary between 75 and 150 milligrams, generally giving more to men – and I’m not sure if it was body weight, because men are heavier, or other factors. Then we would let the person decide if they subjectively wanted a low, medium or high dose so that they had some control over it and we could advise them of the range.

Goldsmith: I would point out at this juncture, that there’s been some research showing neurotoxicity with MDMA at high doses in rats. However, the researcher who’s done much of this research – George Ricaurte of Johns Hopkins – also gave a normal therapeutic dose similar to what you indicate, George – and on a weekly basis – and found no detectable neurotoxic effects at all.

Greer: That’s correct – and those normal doses were administered to primates, that are more similar to us than the rats. We’re in the middle of a huge controversy over this entire issue and we don’t need to get into it in any detail, but the people I’ve known who have given MDMA therapeutically – even in underground settings – for many, many years, have not noticed any problems, anecdotally. That’s all we can say, really.

Goldsmith: Again, even among those who have done the research on neurotoxicity – no one claims to have found any ill effects of any sort in normal therapeutic doses.

Greer: Right. Most of the human toxicity studies are done with recreational users, who are generally abusing other drugs and are using huge and frequent amounts of MDMA – hundreds of milligrams, hundreds of times – often every week. So it’s just a completely other world from providing a therapeutic dose maybe every few months.

Goldsmith: I also wanted to ask you if you could generalize about the kinds of people or conditions that are most amenable to MDMA in relationship work.

Greer: I think the general criteria would be the same for couples therapy as for couples therapy with MDMA. First, they both have a genuine goal to have the relationship continue, to work hard and to be good to each other – sharing that intention.

The second criteria would be in the screening out of people who have severe personality disorders, that could be exaggerated or just get into even greater denial in the fear-free state of MDMA. Someone with a serious personality disorder or another kind of psychiatric disorder that removes insight, like a psychotic, manic, or dissociative type of problem, may feel the freedom to project even more. It’s a continuum – if people with more severe problems need to do it, the therapist needs to have spent much more time with them beforehand – maybe starting with a lower dose. Fifty milligrams or even 25 milligrams of MDMA probably wouldn’t bother almost anybody.

The core though, is just sharing a common goal to have the relationship work. Beyond that, it can be sexual incompatibilities, work style, lifestyle, bad breath, you name it. An MDMA session could really help any couples therapy in those areas.

Goldsmith: Because they’re really generalized tools, I guess, that operate on a deeper level – that enable the relationship work to be effective.

Greer: Yes. It really enables the couple to solve their own problems. It might end up where one or both of them say: “Gee, I really need to do my own individual therapy on this sort of thing. To deal with the baggage I’m bringing into the relationship, and stop the projecting and expectations.”

Shall we go on with the session factors? In the framework I laid out here, first you agree on a general purpose for the session – which, in Leary’s framework, we would call the “set” of the session or the mind-set of the participant. Once that’s done, you then need to establish the setting – the context or situation – and develop explicit agreements about the structure of the session setting. Things like when the session is going to be over; that we’re not going to make phone calls; that we’re not going to be violent; that the therapist will be here. We commit to keeping these agreements, until we both agree that the session’s over.

It’s very important to make these explicit agreements, because they allow the ego to take a break. If you take care of all the ego-survival concerns beforehand, in the normal state of mind, you then have this sacred time and space to explore your relationship and consciousness in yourself, without worrying about the details of life. Worrying about the details during a session calls up a whole set of fear-based, survival-based instincts to the ego. So, it’s important to be very concrete about those agreements in advance.

In Myron’s book, The Secret Chief, the sets of agreements are very good. With a couple, there are some special issues. For example, there can be sexuality in a session with a couple and that’s really up to that couple, but it certainly can be very positive. Sex certainly should not occur with people who are not a couple and certainly not with any sitter or therapist. So, a no-sex agreement in that regard is critical – and no violence, no destructive behavior, and an agreement on not communicating with people outside the session. Those are all excellent and, as Myron relates in the book, “Jacob” used those agreements for many years and felt they were very effective.

Anything that you want to say about that, Myron, on agreements?

Stolaroff: Gee, George, I think you’ve covered it beautifully, and I have nothing to add. I just want to reinforce that these things are very important to agree to.

Greer: Yes. Stan Grof was really one of the first people to discover how to make LSD work. A lot of psychiatrists did a lot of LSD therapy and published on it, but Grof really developed an effective therapeutic method and wrote books on it. I know others learned how to make it work, for example, I don’t know a lot about the work of Al Hubbard – just what I’ve heard from you and people that had contact with him, but it sounds like he certainly knew, too. These are hard-won methods and I certainly don’t want to claim that “This is the only method,” but it is a method that’s been generally used and tried over about 30 years, and it’s a good place for any therapist or psychiatrist to start in doing further research – or even in taking things a next step further, which certainly you’d do.

So, we’ve now covered the shared purpose, the setting, and the agreement. So the couple is ready to have a session – and I think it’s good one more time just to have the participants look into themselves, to check inside, emotionally and intuitively, at that moment and make sure that having a session is still the right thing for them to do in that time frame. This is because we know things can change – emotions in life change. Once the person and the couple put themselves on this launching pad, when the external world and intellectual purpose, as well as the inner emotional world and intuition all say we’re go for a liftoff – then that really sets one up to have the best possible session that one can have.

Goldsmith: So, these agreements and lists are most valuable for how they can tune the mind-set before a session.

Visions – Gwyllm

Greer: Exactly. In fact, if you have a strong urge to call your old partner, or a relative and that’s not the agreed structure, then confronting that urge is the same as confronting any other urge in yourself that is not going to lead somewhere and so lots of learning can happen. Some people, particularly with MDMA, just feel open and released and can have strong attractions to someone in the session – such as a therapist through strong transference – and want to be intimate or sexual. Just sitting with that desire, and not acting out in that way, can also be a tremendous learning experience and an opportunity to heal sexual issues from the past.

A lot of these factors are beliefs that are simply offered to the person. A therapist can’t tell a person what to believe, but these factors act as suggestions of beliefs to have for a particular therapeutic mind-set. In this context, our next important factor or belief is that there should be no attachment, no grasping, or expectation about what the outcome of the session will be. Especially about how the other person is going to change: “Gee, if we just do this MDMA session, then my husband will be the kind of person I know that he really wants to be, and that’s really good for him and will be good for me, too.” That’s an expectation that can be deadly to the relationship, because generally neither person in the couple knows what the deepest unknown core or direction of the other is.

Earlier, we were talking about being open – setting aside all preconditions and this is very critical to overcoming projections in relationships. People can definitely project on each other in psychedelics. Maybe a little less so with MDMA, because it doesn’t distort cognition. But I have heard of people having sessions with MDMA, having a wonderful experience of each other and resolving all their differences during the session – this is even more likely with high doses. Then, two weeks later, the relationship’s a mess. So they’re really only relating well on MDMA – it’s not a panacea. In fact, lower doses of MDMA are probably better for relating and communicating and high doses are better for more being alone and getting in touch with one’s spiritual essence.

Generally, the way we did the sessions, the people would start out by themselves, and they’d have an experience of themselves in that state, and grounded themselves spiritually and emotionally. Then, when they felt ready to talk – when both are ready to talk – then they would start relating – maybe after an hour and a half or a couple of hours.

Goldsmith: Oh, that’s very interesting. The entire experience is relatively short, as well – so is that past the peak of the experience?

Greer: Yes. The peak of MDMA is usually between one and two hours. So either during the peak, or as the peak is subsiding, is generally when people would come together and start to talk. And you encourage them to just completely ground themselves in that fearless and loving state – before they try to engage in any explicit “therapy.” This is because when you try to act and do something – to work your cognitive capacity – it takes vital attention away from your core. So it’s important for each participant to really fill up on that primary focus, to just drink from that essence and feel completely satisfied – then they can come into the relating from the best possible place and more easily work through the difficulties.

As people begin to come down from the MDMA, that’s when the difficult part – and the learning, therapeutic part – happens. That’s when the therapeutic changes take place. At about three to six hours, during the coming-down phase, people can feel bad, they can feel waves of depression or even despair or hopelessness, or just a lack of energy. For the couple, being with each other in the peaks and the valleys – “in sickness and in health” – that’s what relationships are about. Having a couple experience each other in the whole range of experience is really a wonderful way to expand the capacity of the relationship.

Goldsmith: So, what we were talking about earlier with Myron about the more individual side of personal development as a grounding for the couples work – applies here. The benefit in the actual session comes, in part, because each party establishes an individual, pychospiritual grounding first.

Greer: That’s exactly right.

Goldsmith: That’s interesting. Myron, a question about couples work. When you had the International Foundation for Advanced Studies and were doing treatment and research, did you ever work either with couples, or with both members of a couple separately?

Stolaroff: We did have a lot of couples go through, but they went through individually. They learned enough so that they became much better as a couple. So we didn’t actually work with couples. If we did, it was rare, but we did follow many of the procedures that George mentioned. We had each person write out a complete autobiography and an outline – this procedure was actually developed by Al Hubbard and Ross McLean at the Hollywood Hospital near Vancouver.

The questions we asked in preparation were of a nature to point out all their relationships and problem areas, beliefs, and the like. Then they saw a therapist several times and went through these factors – to discuss and get a better understanding of the individual’s key issues. Then, before the session, they were asked to write a list of all the things they wanted to accomplish during the session.

Basically, that was our preparation. You have to remember, this is quite a while ago, and we were just kind of feeling our way into these things.

Goldsmith: I imagine seeing both members of a couple, even in series, would have beneficial effects on the relationship similar to a joint session.

Stolaroff: It had very beneficial effects – because each one got a better view, both of themselves and how they were functioning – if they were doing anything to disrupt the relationship – and of the other person. So, for example, when there was a lot of resentment, very often they found that deep down they truly loved the other person and could see ways of expressing that love and overcoming some of the issues that caused dissension between them. So, when both members of the couple had that as individual experiences, when they came together, they were very much better off as a couple as well.

Greer: Also, we should point out here that you were working with LSD, which has tremendous cognitive distortion, compared to MDMA. I wouldn’t say that LSD is an enhancer of coherent verbal communication between couples. It’s just a whole different type of experience.

Goldsmith: Can you tell us a little bit about your later research, when you worked with couples and sometimes groups and moved more to MDMA?

Stolaroff: Well, this point hasn’t been made and I think this is important: in a group – even in a small group, as small as a couple – there is a group energy that develops. There is an energy field or a mind field that develops as the day goes on, in that each person comes to terms with his own individual issues and releases material from the unconscious which has been in the way. This always leads to a jump in awareness, a heightened energy and heightened joy and it begins to move through the whole group. So at the end of the day, everybody is quite in love with each other. [Laughs.] Everything is so wonderful – it’s pretty hard to find anything wrong, anywhere. I believe that happened lots of times.

Greer: That’s a great experience to have with a group of people and then it comes to be more your normal state. I think there can be a lot of carryover from that kind of group bonding. People actually can get along and live together.

Stolaroff: Right and also, when you have a group like that, individual differences show up and you find yourself confronting people with characteristics and dynamics that you haven’t experienced before and it may take a little while to resolve that, but it expands your own experience and understanding. I think “Jacob” was very wise in moving from the individual to the group experiences – because the way that he did it, you still had your individual experience and toward the end of the experience have emotion to relate with others. You could do this on a personal-choice basis, and sometimes maybe several people would get together. It offers a lot of dimensions for deepening relationships and understanding.

Greer: On the other hand, factor six is that neither member of the couple should be expected to make personal sacrifices for the other or expect them – if it could lead to later resentment. What I’m talking about here – if one member in the couple is going through a difficult experience, there can be a felt obligation to hold their hand, to hug them, to focus on what’s happening with them instead of with oneself. For example, if the wife is having a difficult time, the husband might focus his attention on her, as opposed to his own process, because: “She needs my help now.” That’s fine to do if the husband checks into himself and says: “Okay, yes – I really do want to do this. I’m not going to resent it later and if I do, I’m willing to deal with that.” Basically, if he can just release himself from the obligation of guilt he’ll have a healthier relationship. Because, it’s not really necessary to help each other. We’re all here in the world, and the Universe will provide, according to or not according to our expectations. So whether you get help or comforted from your partner or not, it still can be a great learning experience.

Stolaroff: In a stressful situation, people can become more aware of the potential that they have. If they can get into the position of committing themselves to achieving that potential, they will need to learn how to do it all on their own.

Greer: Exactly.

Stolaroff: Sometimes – in fact, I see this with my grandkids – if the parents are over-solicitous – if they want to help too much – they can prevent the child from growing in areas that require challenge.

Greer: Yes, exactly. I understand that “Jacob” went through many stages, doing various kinds of therapy and work during sessions, but ended up where people just lie down and have their experience. Even if the person doesn’t get help – and this is true for traditional psychotherapy, as well – they still have the experience of: “I did this myself and so I can handle anything in life myself.” If a person is self-sufficient, he or she is much better equipped to be in a relationship than if they depend on the other person to fulfill something about their life that they can’t fill themselves.

This takes us into the next session factor, the importance of having a trained and experienced therapist or sitter, who has taken MDMA before with a similar set and setting, available to take care of practical things and do the care giving that might be needed: holding hands; bringing a glass of water; helping you to the bathroom; talking to you to release your partner from having to do that all the time. It’s a lot more work and effort, but it really is worthwhile to have that third person there who is not taking the drug, at least the first time the couple has a session.

Stolaroff: Someone who is qualified as a guide.

Greer: A guide, yes.

The Gift – Gwyllm

Stolaroff: I’d like to emphasize this point even more strongly – that one of the real problems often encountered in undergoing these experiences is the fear and resistance to having deep-seated psychological issues come up. So, if you have a sitter who is genuinely and effectively supportive and is really doing everything possible for you to be safe, so you can do whatever you wish – then you can begin to experience “whatever you wish” without judgment or criticism. That’s what opens the door to allowing yourself to have a deeper experience.

Greer: Right. Now, a lot of people obviously have had wonderful and valuable experiences without a third person present and generally I feel those people are more experienced and have already done a lot of work, or therapy, in this format, and know themselves very well. So, it’s not that it can’t work unless there’s someone else there – but I think it really takes a person more experienced with these states to have a session work out without the third person.

Goldsmith: This is very intriguing – just to drop back a bit for a moment and talk on the policy level – what you describe is not what you would consider the AMA approach to the use of pharmaceuticals in psychiatric practice. We’re talking about how valuable these substances can be to experienced people with right intentionality – even alone under certain circumstances. It needs to be acknowledged that ultimately there’s a policy issue here. George, you said that for a number of reasons, your work had been primarily with people without serious problems.

Greer: Right.

Goldsmith: That raises the issue of using drugs with normal people to make them even better and to do so in a context that while not recreational, also isn’t fully medicalized. I wonder if you both could comment on this. It’s especially relevant, in light of all the underground work that’s been undertaken over the past 25 years or so.

Greer: There is a tremendous amount of underground work that goes on and, hopefully, people who do that will read this and benefit whatever from what we’re saying here. When I was doing the MDMA work, people would have the session with me and/or my wife, Requa Tolbert, a Master’s psychiatric nurse, present. Once I became confident that they could do this on their own, I would give them a dose – either for that individual or for that couple – for them to take on their own, without one of us there. That was only after I had worked with them and knew them well and so had screened them. Most people had one or two sessions, maybe three – where sometimes a second or third would be without me or my wife there. That worked out very well, but only after careful screening and preparation.

In essence, I would prescribe a dose. I wouldn’t prescribe a bottle of 30: “Here, take ’em when you want.” It was more like the couple would say: “We want to plan this one session; this is our intention for this session” and we would go through a lot of these things beforehand over the phone and maybe in person. So they would be given the medication, the MDMA, for one session – and then they would report back to me. That’s the extent of it.

So, that was the medical model of treatment. It was perhaps a little unorthodox, but it wasn’t simply: “Oh, here’s some MDMA for you to have around when you feel like it.” None of that.

Goldsmith: Nor was it just a methodology arrived at willy-nilly, but after consideration of the character of not just the individuals, but of the drug itself. Someone might suggest a similar progression enabling people to take the classic hallucinogens – LSD, for example – on their own.

Greer: Sure. Obviously, millions of people do this on their own all the time and they don’t have a problem with it. So what I’m describing is just another approach. Even so, as a physician there is another level of responsibility in the doctor-patient relationship – people who get the drugs underground don’t have that relationship. It’s another level of responsibility. Any comments on this, Myron?

Stolaroff: Yes, I have a couple things to add. First, I think you know that one of the things that I really want to get across – and I use every opportunity in publication to set this forth – is the concept of the trained user. I consider these substances to be amazing and powerful learning tools – and if we’re learning, then we should be able to learn how to use them better and better.

In general, I think the movement into being a trained user and being able to use these substances more and more on your own, requires that the really difficult areas in the unconscious – places of repressed pain and anger, judgment, all these things – have been pretty well worked through. If you take something like LSD, in the early stages, it’s almost impossible to try to hold your focus on any particular thing – because the pressure of the unconscious wants to release itself, so that there’s an intense flow of imagery.

I think the flow of all this material, sort of like dreams, is relieving the unconscious and exposing and resolving a lot of the things that we keep there. Then, as this material gets cleared out of the way, we find that we have more and more volition and that we can focus more on where we want to focus and learn in specific areas. So this would come into play in developing the ability to work more independently.

At the same time, I also want to point out that there is a potential trap there, too, that one should always be aware of, in that you never know when, with a powerful psychedelic, that some subconscious door isn’t going to open that you never suspected – and then you would be very, very glad to have another person around.

So, in general, I think there are times one can benefit from doing these substances alone, but I think it’s well to have a safety precaution. If anything develops, there should be somebody you can call, bring to the scene. I’ve had rather powerful experiences that indicate that this might be a wise idea.

Greer: I would agree with that, Myron, and I was certainly available when people were having these experiences.

I guess there’s only one more factor here, but we may have completely covered it: Using the non-defensiveness of MDMA to clear up differences. That’s the lack of fear. You can communicate, directly and honestly, positive and negative things and then remember how to do that.

There’s one more point to make here. I’m reminded of Stephen Levine, who’s a meditation teacher and a speaker-writer on death-and-dying issues and meditation. His point about relationships is that if the goal of the relationship is truth, anything is workable. If the purpose of your relationship – and your session – is to know the truth in its most basic way, and you share that goal, then any differences the two of you have about reaching that goal can be cleared up.

Stolaroff: Isn’t that the truth!

City Of The Golden Road – Gwyllm

Greer: It may take a while – it may not feel good – but you’re not putting anything in the way of eventually getting there.

Goldsmith: That’s a beautiful way to sort of round out those issues. Are there any other thoughts or issues I’ve left out?

Greer: Not me – I feel very satisfied. I’m surprised that we covered the meaning of life in the Universe – and how to do therapy – in an hour and a half. [Laughter.] I’m sure there’s always more to say, but I feel we’ve laid down the basics. I just thank you for this opportunity to get it out there more.

Stolaroff: I feel very good about the coverage and, George, I really want to thank you. I’ve learned a great deal from you, and really appreciate the experience and wisdom that you have.

Greer: Thanks for saying that, Myron. I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of you and other people, who had to learn the hard way – in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s – to get to where we were when I started in 1980.

Goldsmith: I would like to close by saying how thoroughly charmed and fascinated and educated I’ve been by hearing you two speak. It’s been a real honor and a privilege for me to participate and I thank you both very much for your time and wisdom.

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George Greer, M.D. is the Medical Director of the Heffter Research Institute, www.heffter.org, and a psychiatrist in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 1992 to 1998, he was the Clinical Director of Mental Health Services for the New Mexico Corrections Department. From 1980 to 1985, he and his wife, Requa Tolbert, a psychiatric nurse, conducted over 100 therapeutic sessions with MDMA for 80 individuals. Their review of this work remains the largest published study of the therapeutic use of MDMA as of 2004. Dr. Greer was involved in hearings with the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985 to keep MDMA available for medical research and coordinated a lobbying campaign in Congress to prevent restrictions on research with new psychedelic drugs. Dr. Greer is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and Past President of the Psychiatric Medical Association of New Mexico.

Myron Stolaroff holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In industry, he reached the position of assistant to the president in charge of long range planning at Ampex Corporation. From this perspective of the technical world, he declared, after his first experience with LSD in 1956, that LSD was the most important discovery of mankind. In 1961, he founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, where research with LSD and mescaline was conducted for 3½ years, processing some 350 participants and resulting in six professional papers. Additional work continued after 1970 with a variety of unscheduled phenethylamine compounds until the Analogue Drug Bill of 1986. Stolaroff is especially interested in how appropriate knowledge of psychedelics can enhance meditation practice. He is the author of two books as well as several papers on psychedelics.

Golden Dawn – Gwyllm

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