Pubdate: Mon, 26 Jun 2006
Source: New Yorker Magazine (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
Contact: http://www.newyorker.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/847
Author: Louis Menand
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Timothy+Leary
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
ACID REDUX
The Life and High Times of Timothy Leary.
The good Lord-or maybe it was natural selection, but, when you look
at the outcome, how plausible is that, really?-gave us, in addition
to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, the fantastic
variety of fungi with which we share this awesome planet: yeasts,
rusts, mildews, mushrooms, and molds. Among them is ergot, a fungus
that destroys cereal grasses, particularly rye, and that, when eaten,
can cause hallucinations. Ergot is the natural source of lysergic
acid, from which lysergic acid diethylamide is readily
synthesized-LSD. What purpose, divine or adaptive, this substance
might serve was once the subject of a learned debate that engaged
scientists, government officials, psychiatrists, intellectuals, and a
few gold-plated egomaniacs. Timothy Leary was one of the egomaniacs.
Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest
Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the
deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the
postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the
baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since. Great
Ones, we salute you! Leary was born in 1920, in Springfield,
Massachusetts, which is also the home town of Dr. Seuss, of whose
most famous creation Leary was in many respects the human analogue-a
grinning, charismatic, completely irresponsible Lord of Misrule.
Leary's father was a dentist whose career was ruined by alcoholism;
he abandoned the family in 1934, ending up as a steward in the
merchant marine. Leary's mother was a fierce guardian of her son's
interests, which required a considerable amount of guarding. Leary
was intelligent, and he did not lack ambition, but-as Robert
Greenfield meticulously documents in his exhaustive biography,
"Timothy Leary" (Harcourt; $28)-his education was a game of chutes
and ladders: Holy Cross (where he came near to flunking out after two
years), West Point (from which he was obliged to withdraw after being
charged with a violation of the honor code), the University of
Alabama (from which he was expelled for spending a night in the
women's dorm), the University of Illinois (from which he was drafted
into the Army, where he served in a clinic for the rehabilitation of
the deaf, in Pennsylvania), Alabama again (which he talked his way
back into and from which he finally graduated, by taking
correspondence courses), Washington State University (where he got a
master's degree), and, with the help of the G.I. Bill (a welfare fund
for Great Ones), Berkeley, from which, now married and with two
children, he received a Ph.D. in psychology, in 1950.
There was no more opportune moment to become a psychologist.
Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people
that genetics does today. "It's all in your head" has the same appeal
as "It's all in the genes": an explanation for the way things are
that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel
unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living
in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can't be the
system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar
years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for
psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946,
became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National
Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems
like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego
psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was
the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the
hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients
diagnosed as mentally ill.
The belief that deviance and dissent could be "cured" by a little
psychiatric social work ("This boy don't need a judge-he needs an
analyst's care!") is consistent with our retrospective sense of the
nineteen-fifties as an age of conformity. The darker version-argued,
for example, by Eli Zaretsky in his valuable cultural history of
psychoanalysis, "Secrets of the Soul"-is that psychiatry became one
of the instruments of soft coercion which liberal societies use to
keep their citizens in line. But, as Zaretsky also points out,
leading critics of conformity and normalcy-Herbert Marcuse, Allen
Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, Wilhelm
Reich-thought that it was all in the head, too. For them, normalcy
was the neurosis, for which they prescribed various means of personal
liberation, from better drugs to better orgasms. In the early years
of the Cold War, personal radicalism, revolution in the head and in
the bed, was the safer radicalism. The political kind could get you
blacklisted.
Leary spent the first part of his career doing normative psychology,
the work of assessment, measurement, and control; he spent the second
as one of the leading proselytizers of alternative psychology, the
pop psychology of consciousness expansion and nonconformity. But one
enterprise was the flip side of the other, and Greenfield's
conclusion, somewhat sorrowfully reached, is that Leary was never
serious about either. The only things Leary was serious about were
pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when
he left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women, he
liked being the center of attention, and he liked to get high. He
simply changed the means of intoxication. Like many people in those
days, he started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff.
The popular conception of Leary is that he was a distinguished
academic who went off the deep end, a Harvard professor who blew his
mind. For obvious reasons, this account suited Leary, and even
Greenfield refers to him repeatedly as a Harvard professor (as does
the Columbia Encyclopaedia). Leary did teach at Harvard, but was not
a professor. He began his career at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in
Oakland, where he was the director of clinical research and
psychology. His early work involved personality tests; his first
book, "The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality," came out in 1957.
It was a success, but, Greenfield says, some of Leary's colleagues
felt that he had failed to credit their research. Even then, he seems
to have been blessed with an incapacity for shame, a gift for which
he had many occasions to be thankful.
Leary had already had a bad run of personal troubles. His first wife
had committed suicide on his thirty-fifth birthday. (When she
complained, during a night of heavy drinking, about his having a
mistress, he is supposed to have said, "That's your problem.") Leary
then married the mistress, but, soon afterward, he struck her, the
landlady called the cops, and the marriage ended. In 1956, Leary's
father, with whom he had just reconnected, died, destitute, in New
York City. Soon after, a former faculty adviser, a married man with
whom Greenfield believes Leary was having a sexual affair, was
arrested while cruising a public men's room, and Leary had a nervous
breakdown. He travelled to Europe, where he met David McClelland, the
director of the Center for Personality Research at Harvard, who was
on a sabbatical. McClelland was trying to start a Ph.D. program in
clinical psychology, and, impressed by Leary's charm and
intelligence, he offered him a lectureship for the 1959-60 academic
year. Leary accepted, and moved to Cambridge. At the end of the year,
McClelland advised him to cultivate a less cavalier notion of
science, but he renewed Leary's appointment. That summer, Leary went
to Mexico, and there, for the first time, he ate some "magic
mushrooms." He found the experience entirely enchanting, and when he
returned to Cambridge he set up, with McClelland's approval, the
Harvard Psychedelic Project.
The hallucinogen obtained from Mexican mushrooms is psilocybin, and
in 1960 psilocybin was not illegal. Neither was LSD, which Leary
tried for the first time in late 1961. Both were manufactured by
Sandoz Laboratories, in Switzerland, and were readily available to
researchers. It seemed to almost everyone who encountered them that
substances so potent must have a use. Hence the Harvard project, a
latecomer to organized efforts to determine what God had in mind when
he designed those curious fungi.
The great hippie drug was introduced into American life by the suits:
the medical profession and the federal government. Beginning in the
early nineteen-fifties, the military and the C.I.A. had hopes that
LSD could serve as either a truth serum or an instrument of mind
control, and, according to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's history of
the drug, "Acid Dreams," they used it often, both operationally,
during interrogations, and experimentally, frequently with unwitting
subjects. Clinical psychologists (many funded by government agencies)
regarded psychedelics as psychotomimetics: their effects appeared to
mimic psychotic states, and they were used to study psychosis and
schizophrenia.
LSD was also administered to alcoholics, drug addicts, and patients
with emotional blockages. The most famous of these patients was Cary
Grant, who took LSD under the supervision of a psychiatrist. "All my
life, I've been searching for peace of mind," Grant said. "Nothing
really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment." Allen
Ginsberg was introduced to LSD at the Mental Research Institute in
Palo Alto, in 1959, where his responses were measured by a team of
doctors as part of a federally funded research program. Ginsberg
eventually became one of the chief publicists for LSD, along with Ken
Kesey, who first used it at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, in
1960, where, in another federally funded program, he was paid
seventy-five dollars a day to ingest hallucinogens. The experience
led to Kesey's first novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and,
later on, to the Merry Pranksters, the subject of Tom Wolfe's book
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." (Wolfe, who reluctantly tried LSD
out of journalistic scruple, recalled, "I had the feeling that I had
entered into the sheen of this nubby twist carpet-a really wretched
carpet, made of Acrilan-and somehow this represented the people of
America, in their democratic glory.") Alan Watts, whose book "The
Joyous Cosmology" was published in 1962 and became, as Greenfield
says, "the model for the psychedelic experience for millions of
people," first took LSD in a program at U.C.L.A. It seems like
quackery now, but Lee and Shlain say that between 1949 and 1959 a
thousand papers on LSD were published in professional journals.
While he was at Harvard, Leary did experiments that involved, for
example, giving psychedelic drugs to prison inmates in an attempt to
reduce recidivism rates; Leary claimed that the program was
remarkably successful, though Greenfield says that the numbers Leary
gave to support his claim don't add up. But what really attracted
Leary was an altogether different theory about the purpose of
psychedelics. This was the theory that they were designed to reveal
to mankind the true nature of the universe, and its leading exponent
was Aldous Huxley. Huxley had taken mescaline, a drug derived from
the peyote cactus, in 1953, under the guidance of a British medical
psychiatrist named Humphry Osmond. (It was Osmond who coined the term
psychedelic, which means "mind-manifesting.") In 1954, Huxley
published a short book about the experience, "The Doors of
Perception" (from which the rock group later took its name). He had
his first LSD experience in 1955; it provided him, he wrote, with
"the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as
the primary and fundamental cosmic fact."
After his experience with Mexican mushrooms, Leary read "The Doors of
Perception" with excitement. This was a style of
mystico-pseudoscience that suited him perfectly, a kind of
shamanistic psychology delightfully immune to empirical challenges.
As it happened, Huxley was then lecturing at M.I.T., and Leary
arranged a meeting. They had lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, which
was, and remains, the unlikeliest venue in which to plan the future
of a psychedelic movement. But that is what Leary and Huxley did.
Huxley's idea was that, if the world's leaders could be turned on,
the lion would lie down with the lamb, and peace would be at hand.
The vision was appealing to Leary. It was, after all, simply
psychiatric social work on a global scale, and administered not to
convicts and juvenile delinquents but to the political, social, and
artistic elites-much more fun. The person Leary eventually teamed up
with in the business of spreading acid illumination was not Huxley,
who died in 1963, on the day President Kennedy was assassinated; it
was Ginsberg, a man who took pride in knowing the address and phone
number of everyone who mattered in the cultural world. Turning
important people on was their mission.
The Harvard Psychedelic Project started going off the rails in early
1962. Self-administered drug use seems to have been the principal
form of research. "A bunch of guys standing around in a narrow
hallway saying 'Wow' " is the way one participant later described the
scene. Leary and his colleagues were confronted, at a faculty
meeting, with charges that drugs were being administered to subjects
without medical supervision, and a report about the meeting appeared
in the student newspaper. The story was picked up in the national
press, which led the F.D.A. to start regulating the use of
psychedelics. Leary was compelled to turn over his supply of
psilocybin to the university health service, and the project was shut
down. But rumors began circulating that Harvard undergraduates were
dropping acid, and at the end of the 1962-63 academic year Leary's
appointment was not renewed. This was for the official and sufficient
reason that he had stopped meeting with his classes. He had gone to
California: he told his secretary to hand out a reading list and then
dismiss the students.
Leary was not, technically, fired, but his Psychedelic Project
sidekick Richard Alpert was. Alpert was a Harvard assistant professor
from a very wealthy family; he owned a Mercedes, an M.G., a sailboat,
and a Cessna (and this was at a time when most assistant professors
at Harvard could barely afford the Cessna). He was charged with
giving LSD to a male undergraduate-according to Greenfield, in
exchange for sexual favors. Alpert's story generated huge publicity,
from which Leary, whose case was relatively mundane, benefitted. Both
men wisely adopted the pose that they were better off without
Harvard, and articles featuring them appeared in Look, Esquire, the
Saturday Evening Post, and the Times Magazine. They became famous as
the two Harvard professors-geniuses? rogues? who knew?-who had been
fired for being too far-out. A large and undiscriminating audience
for things far-out was just around the historical corner, and it was
an audience for whom being kicked out of Harvard was evidence of
righteousness. Leary managed to stay on its stage for about six years
before the law caught up with him.
Leary's immortal message to this audience-"Turn on, tune in, and drop
out"-was quickly picked up on and widely pastiched. Greenfield cites
a commercial for Squirt: "Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and
drop out of the cola rut." This is not very surprising, for a couple
of reasons. One is that in the mid-nineteen-sixties the language of
commercial culture was drug vernacular. Almost everything advertised
itself as the moral, legal, and sensory equivalent of a drug
experience, from pop music to evangelism. (Billy Graham: "Turn on
Christ, tune in to the Bible, and drop out of sin.") All sorts of
products claimed to turn you on, get you high, blow your mind. But
the other reason Leary's phrase was adopted as an advertising slogan
is that it was designed to be an advertising slogan. The inspiration
came from a fellow pop visionary, Marshall McLuhan. In 1966, McLuhan
and Leary had lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York City; there, in
Leary's account, the media-wise McLuhan offered the following counsel:
The key to your work is advertising. You're promoting a product. The
new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current
tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the
good things that the brain can produce-beauty, fun, philosophic
wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical
romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get
your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.
Also:
Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry.
It's okay if you come off as flamboyant and eccentric. You're a
professor, after all. But a confident attitude is the best
advertisement. You must be known for your smile.
Whether or not McLuhan ever uttered these precepts, they guided Leary
for the rest of his public life. He was a counterculture salesman,
and he wore, on every occasion, the same blissed-out smile, a rictus
somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's
frozen stare into the flashbulbs. One of his ex-wives described it as
"the smile of the ego actually eating the personality."
Leary's "drop out" advice is one of those things which give
historians the illusion that mass behaviors are driven by popular
ideas, when it is usually the case that ideas are made popular by
mass behaviors already under way. Because of the spike in the birth
rate that began in 1946, the number of eighteen- to
twenty-four-year-olds in the United States grew from fifteen million
in 1955 to twenty-five million in 1970; during the sixties, college
enrollment more than doubled, from three and a half million students
to just under eight million. Times were prosperous; these were the
"go-go" years on Wall Street, the era of guns and butter, Vietnam and
the Great Society. Government spending primed the pump. Young people
dropped out because dropping out was economically sustainable, and
because there were more of them in the pipeline than the system could
absorb. The phenomenon was more complicated, of course-social systems
don't self-regulate quite so tidily-but young people found it natural
to renounce grownup ambitions in the nineteen-sixties, and they got
their mantras from grownups like Leary.
Leary unveiled his slogan at a conference on LSD at Berkeley, in
1966. (Possessing LSD was still not illegal, although its
unauthorized manufacture had just become a misdemeanor.) He was on
the crest of his personal wave. After leaving Harvard, Leary and
Alpert had tried to set up shop at a hotel near Acapulco, where they
explored the religious potential of psychedelics and offered
customers an experience in transcendental living, but the Mexican
government had them deported. They were rescued by a wealthy young
stockbroker named Billy Hitchcock, who made available his family's
twenty-five-hundred-acre estate, Millbrook, in Dutchess County, two
hours north of New York City. Millbrook became the scene of an
extended countercultural happening, a place where dozens of residents
(many of them with children, who were fed drugs as well) and a
changing cast of visitors engaged in chanting, meditation, sex games,
and psychedelic-drug consumption, with Leary and his third wife, Nena
von Schlebrugge (later the mother of Uma Thurman), and fourth wife,
Rosemary Woodruff, presiding. The god Krishna enjoyed an unexpected
surge in prayers directed his way from upstate New York, and the
Beatles were on the record-player twenty-four hours a day. At one
point, the Merry Pranksters' bus pulled in, with Neal Cassady, the
male muse of the Beats and the hero of "On the Road," at the wheel.
But the Pranksters were accustomed to horsing around with Hell's
Angels; they had little patience for spaced-out peaceniks, and the
visit went badly. Bummer.
By this time, Leary had confected a science of psychedelics, which he
laid out in a long interview in Playboy, billed as "a candid
conversation with the controversial ex-Harvard professor." LSD, Leary
explained, puts the user in touch with his or her own ancestral past
and with the genetic memory of all life forms, which is encoded in
each person's genes. In a psychedelic future, Leary explained, "each
person will become his own Buddha, his own Einstein, his own Galileo.
Instead of relying on canned, static, dead knowledge passed on from
other symbol producers, he will be using his span of eighty or so
years on this planet to live out every possibility of the human,
prehuman, and even subhuman adventure." The interviewer, an admirable
straight man, asked whether this meant that time travel was possible.
Leary allowed that it was:
LEARY: That happens to be the particular project that I've been
working on most recently with LSD. I've charted my own family tree
and traced it back as far as I can. I've tried to plumb the gene
pools from which my ancestors emerged in Ireland and France.
PLAYBOY: With what success?
Being your own Einstein sounds pretty cool; still, the magazine's
readers probably felt that other uses of LSD mentioned by Leary spoke
more directly to their immediate concerns.
LEARY: An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is
released under LSD-most especially including sexual energy. There is
no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man.
PLAYBOY: Would you elaborate?
But the seeds of destruction were already planted. Leary had been
arrested in 1965, in Laredo, Texas, on federal marijuana charges. At
the trial, he asserted his First Amendment right to the free exercise
of religion, an argument that the judge, Ben Connally, the brother of
John Connally, the governor of Texas, undoubtedly took into account
in handing down a thirty-year sentence. Still, the trial was good for
publicity. Greenfield says that in the hundred and eight days after
the verdict the Times ran eighty-one articles about LSD.
Leary remained free on appeal, but, meanwhile, the activities at
Millbrook had attracted the attention of local law enforcement.
Leary's chief nemesis there was the assistant district attorney for
Dutchess County, G. Gordon Liddy, who staged a raid on the house, and
had Leary arrested on marijuana-possession charges. Then, in 1968,
Leary was pulled over while driving through Laguna Beach and, along
with his wife and children, arrested again after drugs were found in
the car. Leary's son, Jack, was so stoned that he took off his
clothes in the booking room and started masturbating. When he was
shown what his son was doing, Leary laughed. Rosemary was sentenced
to six months, Jack was ordered to undergo psychiatric observation,
and Leary got one to ten for possession of marijuana.
He was sent to the California Men's Colony Prison in San Luis Obispo,
and this is where the story turns completely Alice in Wonderland.
Assisted by the Weathermen, Leary escapes from prison and is taken to
a safe house, where he meets with the kingpins of the radical
underground-Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd. With their help,
he and Rosemary (in violation of her probation) are smuggled out of
the country and flown to Algiers, where Leary is the house guest of
Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' minister of defense. Cleaver
would seem to be Leary's type, since his book "Soul on Ice" contains
such sentences as "The quest for the Apocalyptic Fusion will find
optimal conditions only in a Classless Society, the absence of
classes being the sine qua non for the existence of a Unitary Society
in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved" and (to explain
why white women want black men) "What wets the Ultrafeminine's juice
is that she is allured and tortured by the secret, intuitive
knowledge that he, her psychic bridegroom, can blaze through the wall
of her ice, plumb her psychic depths, test of the oil of her soul,
melt the iceberg of her brain, touch her inner sanctum, detonate the
bomb of her orgasm, and bring her sweet release." But, alas, the
visionaries do not get along.
Though the Panthers hold a press conference in New York to announce
that Leary, formerly contemptuous of politics, has joined the
revolution-Leary's new slogan: "Shoot to Live / Aim for Life"-Cleaver
is eager to get him out of Algeria, an Islamic country not exactly
soft on drugs. He begins to harass Leary and his wife, and they
manage to get to Switzerland. There Leary meets a high-flying
international arms dealer named Michel Hauchard, who agrees to
protect him in exchange for thirty per cent of the royalties from
books that Leary agrees to write, and then has Leary arrested, on the
theory that he is more likely to produce the books in jail, where
there is less to distract him. Thanks to his wife's exertions, Leary
is released after a month in solitary, but she leaves him. He takes
up with a Swiss girl, and begins using heroin, then meets a
jet-setter named Joanna Harcourt-Smith Tamabacopoulos D'Amecourt, who
becomes his new consort.
Leary's visa is expiring, so he and Joanna seek refuge in Austria,
where Leary issues a statement that Austria "for us personally and I
think for the world at large exists as a beacon of compassion and
freedom." (Half of all Nazi concentration-camp guards were from
Austria.) It is not clear that Austria feels equally warmly about
Leary, and, after Leary's son-in-law shows up, a plan is hatched to
go to Afghanistan, where there are friends among the hashish
suppliers. Leary flies to Kabul-it is now January, 1973-and is
immediately busted. The son-in-law, it turns out, had set him up.
Leary is flown to Los Angeles in the custody of an agent of the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics and remanded to Folsom Prison, where he
is put in the cell next to Charles Manson's. King Kong meets Godzilla.
The rest is bathos. The United States Supreme Court had thrown out
the Laredo conviction, but Leary clearly faced major jail time. He
met the problem head on: he cooeperated fully with the authorities
and informed on all his old associates, including his lawyers and his
former wife Rosemary, who had gone underground. Leary also wrote
articles for National Review, William F. Buckley's magazine, in which
he attacked John Lennon and Bob Dylan ("plastic protest songs to a
barbiturate beat"), in order to demonstrate that he was
rehabilitated. When he was released, in 1976, he was placed in the
Witness Protection Program. He eventually made his way to Los
Angeles, where he thrived in a B-list Hollywood social scene. Larry
Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, was a friend, and Leary became a
regular contributor to the magazine. He was also a welcome guest at
the Playboy Mansion, and he went on the road "debating" his former
adversary Gordon Liddy. His new promotion was space migration. He
fell out of touch with his son; his daughter committed suicide, in
1990. He died, of prostate cancer, in 1996.
The best that can be said about Greenfield's biography of Leary is
that it will never be necessary to write another one. Greenfield
spent a long time with his subject; they first met in Algiers in
1970, when Leary was a guest of the Panthers. He has been thorough,
but not efficient. It is good that he interviewed many of the
survivors of those years; it is not so good that he let them ramble
on unedited in his text. Oral history is an unreliable genre to begin
with; in an era when most of the witnesses were intoxicated much of
the time, the quotient of credibility that attaches to their
anecdotes is low. The job of the historian is to select and condense.
Also, to tell a story.
Greenfield's Leary is a heartless and damaged man. The portrait is
convincing. Still, people did find him magnetic-not only beautiful
women but colleagues and fellow-celebrities. He was obviously
reckless, fatuous, exasperating, and full of himself, but people
liked him, and they liked being around him. The career that Leary's
most resembles is that of another renegade psychologist, Wilhelm
Reich, whose orgone box-meant to accumulate the energies of the
cosmic life force-was a fad among enlightened people in the
nineteen-fifties. Norman Mailer used an orgone box; so did Dwight
Macdonald and Saul Bellow.
In the early days, LSD, too, was an elite drug. Many people
unconnected with the counterculture "experimented" with it: Henry
Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, were enthusiasts. (Mrs. Luce
thought that LSD ought to be kept out of the hands of ordinary
people. "We wouldn't want everyone doing too much of a good thing,"
she said.) Leary administered psilocybin to the founder of Grove
Press, Barney Rosset, who didn't like it ("I pay my psychiatrist
fifty dollars an hour to keep this from happening to me," he
complained). Psychedelics were tried by Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx,
and Arthur Koestler ("I solved the secret of the universe last night,
but this morning I forgot what it was," he said). Leary, in
accordance with Huxley's policy, would have been happy to restrict
the use of psychedelics to people like these and to administer them
in controlled environments, but at a certain point psychedelics got
onto the street, and he found himself preaching to kids. The
popularization of LSD wasn't Leary's doing; it was the music's. When
he finished listening to "Sgt. Pepper's" for the first time, at
Millbrook in 1967, Leary is supposed to have stood up and announced,
"My work is finished." Psychedelia had become a fashion.
It didn't last long. Congress made the sale of LSD a felony and
possession a misdemeanor in 1968, and handed regulation over to the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. In 1970, psychedelic drugs
were classified as drugs of abuse, with no medical value. Scientific
reports circulated that LSD caused genetic damage; recreational drug
use began to acquire a negative aura. And after 1968 the economy
began to tighten. It was the Nixon recession; people were anxious
about moving on with their careers. Getting wasted was for losers.
And where were all those great insights, anyway? Huxley probably
believed that LSD provided a window onto the hidden essence of things
as a matter of conviction, and Leary probably believed it as a matter
of convenience. But the LSD experience is completely suggestible.
People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and feel, or
what they have been told they will see and feel. If they expect that
the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that's what
they will find. An illusion, no doubt, but it's as close as we're
likely to get.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake