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TIMOTHY LEARY AND LSD

Winning the Game

Leary was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard who became one of the most recognizable figures of 1960s counterculture by espousing the value of the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, known as LSD. Leary believed that LSD could be used as a tool against what he called the cultural game which regulates and prescribes the behavior of all members of society. Religion, politics, family life, and other social institutions have roles, rules, goals, and jargon all their own: to this extent, Leary claimed, they resemble baseball or basketball. The way out, the way to recognize that such social games could be played or not played as one chose, is to expand the consciousness; and the most effective way of doing that is through the use of hallucinogens.

Leary's Vision

Leary himself first experimented with hallucinogens in Mexico in 1960 by taking mushrooms purchased from an Indian spiritual healer. As he recalled, the experience made him want to tell everyone he could, "Listen! Wake up! You are God! You have the divine plan engraved in cellular script within you. Listen! Take this sacrament! You'll see! You'll get the revelations! It will change your life! You'll be reborn!" Returning to Harvard that fall, he was ready to begin experiments to determine the potential therapeutic effects of a psychedelic experience. He encouraged graduate students and fellow faculty members to participate, and he led them through weekly sessions in which they took doses of psilocybin, the chemical compound that gave the Indian mushrooms their hallucinogenic properties. He also gave psilocybin pills to 175 members of the public, mostly young men, and recorded their responses.

The Creativity Pill

Administrators at Harvard were initially enthusiastic about Leary's research; but they became nervous as word of the "creativity pill" study in Cambridge became widespread. In 1960 and 1961 Leary's experiments drew a series of notable visitors to Harvard, including jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, British author Aldous Huxley (who had for years been an enthusiastic supporter of hallucinogens), and beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg. The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary proved to be an especially important influence on Leary's research and on the Beat literary movement. At the poet's urging a steady stream of the East Coast's cultural elite came to enjoy a psilocybic weekend in the suburbs of Boston. Surrounded by the beautiful people, and frequently on psilocybin himself, Leary found it increasingly difficult to maintain scientific standards in his research. He came up with a new research project, one in which the conditions were undeniably more restricted: giving psilocybin to selected inmates at Massachusetts's Concord Prison. Again, the subjects reported generally favorable responses to the experience. In the fall of 1962, to the dismay of his colleagues, twenty-seven of the Harvard psychology department's thirty-two graduate students signed up to assist Leary in his research.

Enter LSD

The Harvard researchers' supply of psilocybin was impounded in 1961, but Leary had by then shifted his interest to LSD, a more powerful hallucinogen with not-always-pleasant effects. First synthesized by a Swiss chemist in 1943, LSD was used extensively by American psychiatrists and researchers in California in the early 1960s. By 1962 the psychiatric establishment was expressing concern about irresponsible overuse of the drug by therapists. That summer the U.S. Congress passed a law which gave the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) control over all research projects involving experimental drugs. To ensure a supply of hallucinogens from the government, Leary helped found the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The mission of the IFIF, as Leary and his comrades envisioned it, was to create a network of groups of psychedelic experimenters; each would be led by an IFIF-trained guide. Their project had a religious quality to it; Leary and his sympathizers had turned to Eastern philosophy, believing that mysticism, rather than science, contained the keys to understanding their psychedelic life-style. Their goal was nothing less than changing the American consciousness.

On the Run

The IFIF did not get very far along in its mission, however. The group was gaining national attention from articles in Playboy and Time and psychedelic memoirs such as Adelle Davis's Exploring Inner Space and Thelma Moss's Myself and I; but their communal style of living made them unpopular with their Cambridge neighbors, and they were viewed with suspicion by local and federal authorities and by Harvard administrators. The university declined to renew the teaching contracts of Leary and his fellow researchers when they expired in 1963. Consequently, the IFIF decided to try to seek haven abroad in Central and then South America. By the end of the year they were back in the United States, living in upstate New York on a sprawling estate owned by the family of one of the group's psychedelic supporters, again playing host to the curiosity seekers of New York's jet set.

The Merry Pranksters

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the country, a group called the Merry Pranksters was doing its part to spread the gospel of tripping. The group was led by Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Neal Cassady, the original beatnik, whose exploits as a wanderer and a rogue in the 1940s inspired his friend Jack Kerouac to write On the Road. Also on hand was Cassady's fellow Beat, Ginsberg. As their name implies, the group approached LSD with more of a sense of fun than did Leary and his comrades. They had begun organizing huge public parties that they called Acid Tests: LSD-laced punch flowed freely, the Pranksters dressed in outlandish costumes, and everyone (sometimes thousands) danced wildly to loud, distorted guitar rock by bands such as the Warlocks (who later changed their name to the Grateful Dead).

The Government Clamps Down

LSD was becoming as vital a part of the youth rebellion against the Establishment as long hair and free love, and the Establishment decided to strike back in 1966, making possession of the hallucinogen illegal in October of that year. More rational LSD experts than Leary or Kesey, such as Sidney Cohen, author of The Beyond Within (1967), encouraged continued scientific experimentation with the drug, but their voices were drowned out by sensational mainstream press coverage, which was Filled with lurid stories of LSD-induced madness, sex, and violence. As the government clamped down on the LSD supply, enterprising under-ground chemists stepped in to fill the void. Acid was increasingly plentiful around the country, prompting Time magazine to warn of an epidemic of acidheads in March 1966.

The Haight

Young people who were looking for ways to react against the sometimes stifling pressure to con-form of the 1950s, however, were not all deterred. Many of them converged at the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Some 15,000 hippies had taken up residence in Haight-Ashbury by the summer of 1966, and tripping was one of the cornerstones of their new culture. Leary announced in September of that year the formation of an organized psychedelic religion which would have the motto "Turn on, tune in, drop out." But the hippies felt that they had gone beyond Leary: they had a social revolution already going in the Haight.

Leary and the Law

Leary spent the last years of the 1960s attempting to evade several possible jail terms he faced from a long series of drug arrests. In September 1970 he reported to a minimum-security prison in San Luis Obispo, California, but escaped less than a month later with the help of the Weathermen, a violent radical faction of the SDS. Leary spent the next several years underground, living abroad in Europe and Asia. In 1972 he was rearrested in Afghanistan and deported to the United States. He served nearly three more years in prison and was released in 1976. By then interest in LSD had subsided considerably, but Leary was pursuing new enthusiasms, about which he told audiences on his lecture circuit. He has remained a popular, if frequently obscurantist, social commentator.