The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 32 of 125
The Secret Chief's clandestine network
Jacob continued to expand this clandestine network throughout his sixties and seventies. By the end he estimated he had initiated some four thousand people, a large percentage of them psychotherapists and health care professionals, into the use of psychedelics—particularly, from the mid ’80s onward, into Ecstasy. There was never a serious mishap. No psychotic episodes were triggered. No one informed on him, and Jacob continued “tripping” people, as he nicely phrased it, until his death in the ’90s. The Secret Chief, slight a book though it was, had a hugely demystifying effect on the way I saw LSD psychotherapy. Push comes to shove, I thought, I can work out this stuff for myself. Instinctively I had realized that the material that came up in a session needed to be worked through subsequently, and I was doing my best with the trip journal. Equally I had found out about the use of photos on my own, and whatever the block I had run into with them, I would find some way of solving it. Hadn’t the first therapists taught themselves? And if they could, then why couldn’t the rest of us?