Myron Stolaroff
1920-2013
Electrical engineer who left Ampex in 1960 to fund and direct one of the first sustained clinical studies of LSD therapy in the United States.
Born in 1920 in Roswell, New Mexico, Stolaroff earned a Master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1941 and joined Ampex Corporation, where he worked on the first magnetic tape recorder. He took LSD for the first time in 1956 and afterwards described it as the most important discovery he had encountered. In 1960 he left Ampex to found the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) in Menlo Park.
As president of IFAS from 1960 to 1970, Stolaroff ran clinical studies of LSD and mescaline. Between 1961 and 1965 the foundation administered psychedelics to several hundred subjects under controlled conditions. His collaborators included the engineer Willis Harman, the psychiatrist Charles Savage, and the philosopher Gerald Heard. In 1965 the FDA began revoking research permits, and IFAS wound down its studies.
From 1978 to 1986 Stolaroff conducted private sessions with novel psychoactive compounds and kept detailed records of the results. He later wrote Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration and The Secret Chief, a portrait of the underground therapist Leo Zeff.
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Stolaroff served on the board of the Albert Hofmann Foundation and as a consultant to the Heffter Research Institute, and was an active figure in the renewed clinical research of the 1990s and 2000s.
Stolaroff died in 2013 at the age of 92, leaving behind an important archive that is in the process of being catalogued and digitized at Erowid.org.
Notes and references
- Sherwood, John N., Myron J. Stolaroff, and Willis W. Harman. "The psychedelic experience: a new concept in psychotherapy." Journal of Neuropsychiatry 4 (1962): 69-80.
- Stolaroff, Myron. Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration, 1994.
- Stolaroff, Myron. "Using Psychedelics Wisely." Gnosis, Winter 1993.