I Have America Surrounded

Once safely back in Harvard, Tim began to establish what became known as the Harvard Psychedelics Research Program. His first task was to obtain a supply of the mushrooms, and fortunately Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland had isolated the active component, which was called psilocybin. It was a simple matter to order as much as he wanted, and soon little pink pills replaced the foul mushrooms in his research.

Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments. ‘This investigation sets out to determine the factors—personal, social—which produce optimally positive reactions to psilocybin,’ it stated. ‘Positive reactions’ were defined as ‘pleasant, ecstatic, non-anxious experiences, broadening of awareness and increased insight’. It also detailed the study’s ‘ethical and interpersonal principles, which stress collaboration, openness [and] humanistic interchange between researcher and subjects’. These included participants alternating between the roles of observer and subject, running the sessions in ‘pleasant, spacious, aesthetic surroundings’, and the right of participants to select their own dosage of psilocybin. The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn how to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal. In October 1960 Leary and his colleagues started work.

Setting up the research was stepping into uncharted territory. There were no textbooks or papers for them to follow, as no academics had attempted to do exactly what they were setting out to do. But luck was on their side, for the perfect guide arrived in Massachusetts at exactly the right time. It was a man with one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century. He was the British novelist Aldous Huxley Huxley found fame in the 1920s with books including Point Counter Point and Crome Yellow, but he is best known for his prophetic novel Brave New World (1932). This was a vision of a nightmarish future that, with the benefit of hindsight, is far more accurate and uncomfortable than other acclaimed dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984. Unlike 1984, which shows a nation oppressed by a totalitarian government, Brave New World predicted a civilisation that willingly enslaves itself in order to keep itself supplied with diverting but ultimately meaningless luxuries. As well as its observations about human nature and the political process, the book also predicted many scientific and social revolutions, and everything from genetic engineering to sexual liberation and middle-class narcotic use was prophesied with remarkable accuracy The relevance of Brave New World grows with each passing year, and with it the understanding of just how perceptive Huxley was. It is difficult to believe that the book was written as long ago as 1932.

Although some believe that Huxley was given a dose of the psychedelic cactus peyote by the occultist Aleister Crowley in 1930,6 it seems more likely that his first drug experience was in 1953, when he took mescaline. He tried LSD shortly afterwards and detailed these experiences in the books The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which have since become classics of drug literature. It was to these books that Leary turned after returning from Mexico, in an effort to understand what he had experienced. And as luck would have it, Huxley, now aged 66, was at that time a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a short distance from Harvard. Tim wrote to him and asked his advice in setting up his Psychedelic Research Program, and they met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. In one of those happy coincidences that can easily be interpreted as a good omen, the soup of the day was mushroom. They both ordered it.

Huxley was delighted that these drugs were going to be studied at Harvard, for he understood well enough the controversial nature of the research, and knew that it would take an institution with the stature of Harvard for the work to be taken seriously. It was also a pleasing coincidence that Leary’s faculty had been established by William James, who in 1902 had written The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book about his experiments with the mind-changing drug nitrous oxide.

Huxley introduced Tim to Dr Humphry Osmond, the British psychologist who had coined the word ‘psychedelic’ 7 and used mescaline to treat alcoholics in Canada. Osmond later recalled his first impressions of Leary. ‘It was the night of the Kennedy election. Tim was wearing his gray flannel suit and his crew cut. And we had a very interesting discussion with him. That evening after we left, Huxley said: “What a nice fellow he is!” And then he remarked how wonderful it was to think that this was where it was going to be done—at Harvard. He felt that psychedelics would be good for the academy. Whereupon I replied, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” Huxley replied, “You might well be right. Isn’t that, after all, what we want?”8

Osmond would later describe this impression as ‘a monumental ill judgement’.

Huxley participated in psilocybin sessions and gave advice. He warned Tim that what he was doing was not going to be easy and that the opposition would be great. His work had implications for social change and it had the potential to overturn existing scientific paradigms. But there were also religious implications. He was, after all, breaking the original taboo, for mankind had been forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The Wassons had spent years studying ancient cults and visionary religions for any hint of mushrooms or secret potions of unknown recipes that were given to initiates. They had found a considerable amount of evidence from all corners of the globe, and in later books Wasson claimed that psychoactive fungi had caused the emergence of religion in prehistory.9

This is undoubtedly a controversial idea, but it is one that has received surprisingly little criticism from the scientific community. This is arguably because that community lacks many other alternative theories to explain the emergence of the religious impulse, and because it provides a physical, chemical cause that is backed by strong historical evidence. It is hardly an idea, however, that is accepted by large, conservative religions. Such religions tend to preach against drug use and are offended by the suggestion that the visions of their founders were in any way chemically induced.

Huxley advised Tim to give the drug to powerful and important people. He said that Leary should run sessions for artists, intellectuals, business leaders and politicians. In this way he would cultivate some powerful friends who could protect his work and spread the word through important networks. Contrary to public belief, psychedelic experiences were not new. They had been around since the dawn of time, but only among an elite class of priests, scholars and the rich. Secrecy, laws and privilege had been used to keep them from the general population, who were allowed only simple stimulants such as alcohol. There was a reason for this. These substances were powerful. Widespread use could threaten a functioning, stable civilisation.

Like Tim, Huxley wanted psychedelics to be better known and understood. He thought that if they were used correctly, they offered humankind a way out of its self-destructive cycles of war and oppression, and this could only be done if powerful men understood them. But it had to be done carefully. He told Tim that because of his charm and respectability, he was the perfect person to ‘front’ such a campaign. This idea appealed strongly to Leary’s ego, but he protested, and questioned whether he was already too old. Huxley replied that this might well be the case, but ultimately he was the best candidate they had.10

Where could Leary find leading artists and opinion formers who would be prepared to take his mushroom pills? The best candidates were the leading lights of the Beat Generation, few of whom were unfamiliar with drugs and all of whom were eager for new experiences. Tim ran psychedelic sessions for well-known writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs.

The poet Allen Ginsberg was an early convert who did much to help the Psychedelic Research Program. Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926. His father was a poet and his mother was active in the Communist Party USA. As a young boy he reported spontaneous visionary experiences, and this led to his later interest in Buddhism and mystical states. He was influenced by writers such as William Blake and William Carlos Williams, and developed a style of poetry reminiscent of the rhythms of jazz. His best-known work is Howl, which was banned for obscenity shortly after its publication in 1956. The ban caused outrage among supporters of the First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of speech, and was eventually overturned. By this time Ginsberg had become a prominent advocate of left-wing politics, and was considered to be a threat to internal security by the FBI.

Ginsberg approached Leary after hearing about his work from a New York psychiatrist, and in December 1960 he arrived at Harvard with his partner Peter Orlovsky, eager to experience this amazing new drug. They took the drug one evening at Leary’s house and had a profound experience, during which Ginsberg prophetically realised that it was time to start ‘a peace and love movement’. He then ran naked around the house, attempted to get Khrushchev and Kennedy on the telephone, and announced to the operator that he was God. He thoughtfully spelt this out to the operator to ensure that there was no confusion.

After the trip Ginsberg was as committed as Huxley to supporting the programme, but his advice was the opposite of Huxley’s. Drugs like this had to be wrenched away from the self-serving elites and scattered amongst the masses, he argued. Who could say that ordinary people did not have the right to experience visionary bliss, to have the veil of illusion removed and know the divine for themselves? After all, were they not Americans? Did the egalitarian foundations of their country count for nothing? It was Leary’s job, Ginsberg argued, to make sure everybody knew about what he was doing, and had access to the drugs in order to do the same themselves.

Over the next few months, while Leary and Alpert tried to assess these two conflicting arguments, they ran psilocybin sessions for over 200 colleagues, graduate students and volunteers. Typically they would take the drug with the volunteers and reassure and calm them if necessary They would also train suitable volunteers as guides to run sessions themselves. The pair made a great team, and their enthusiasm and credentials enchanted everyone they met as they travelled the country giving seminars, workshops and lectures. All the initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but what Tim really needed was some undeniable, objective method to measure these subjective effects that he and his study were reporting. He needed hard data, a set of statistics that would withstand the peer review of the scientific community and convince even the most cynical audience that psilocybin was a breakthrough in behavioural research. He also wanted to satisfy the second part of his Existential Transaction: the concept that psychology should leave the clinics and enter real-world scenarios.

The solution was undeniably radical. Leary and Alpert set up a programme to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. Their aim was to lower the recidivism rate, which at the time was running at 70 per cent. If less than 70 per cent of the inmates who were given psilocybin reoffended after release, Leary would be able to show that the drug was an effective tool for convict rehabilitation. But this was not a plan that was without its political risks and dangers. If one prisoner who had been given drugs by the programme killed or raped after release, the press would have a field day. Tim went to work and set about persuading the warden and psychiatrist of Concord State Prison to approve the plan. Both were receptive, and the psychiatrist was put on the Harvard payroll as a consultant. It would be his job to arrange the volunteers.

In March 1961 Leary entered the prison, clutching a small supply of psilocybin. He was accompanied by two graduate students, Gunther Weil and Ralph Metzner,11 and their aim was to spend the day tripping with six prisoners who were nearing release. The prisoners would use the drug to gain and share insights into why they had committed crime, and they had also agreed to participate in a support programme after release.

Tim took the drug first in order to gain the inmates’ trust. When the effects kicked in, he started to feel terrible. A windowless room in the heart of a penitentiary was not a location that was conducive to a positive trip. They had brought a record player and books of classical art with them in the hope of improving their surroundings, but they could not hide the fact that the atmosphere, and the company, was oppressive. Tim was conscious of how ugly and repulsive the bank robber at his side appeared to him. Nervously, he tried to speak, and they asked each other how they felt. The drug caused Leary to respond truthfully, so he told the prisoner that he was afraid of him. The prisoner was surprised because he was also feeling afraid of Tim.

‘Why are you scared of me?’ the convict asked.

‘Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?’

‘I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.’ They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.12

The Prisoner Rehabilitation Program continued and expanded. It was conducted in as open and public a manner as possible, and many visitors to Harvard found themselves invited to observe sessions. Word got out amongst the inmates, and the list of volunteer prisoners expanded rapidly. When the results eventually started to come in during the following year, they were astonishing. They appeared to show that recidivism amongst volunteers who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70 per cent to 10 per cent.13

It was almost too good to be true. The implications were enormous, and if it continued, prison populations could be drastically reduced. But the reaction from the academic community was notably muted. Few people were comfortable with the idea of psychedelics, and results such as these forced them onto the academic agenda. Not everyone was prepared to accept this. To the uninitiated, there is something fundamentally frightening about the idea of psychedelic trips, and while the idea of the psychologist taking the drug may have been intellectually acceptable in theory, in practice it seemed wholly irresponsible. Tim had already been gaining political enemies on campus because his work had been attracting more than its fair share of the brightest graduate students. Now he was reporting results that trod on a lot of toes.

It was never claimed that the psilocybin in itself was a ‘cure’. It was part of a system of support and therapy. As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin, the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life’s problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions. The prison programme involved an extensive support system to help the patients after release in order to help them restructure their lives following the insights of the mushroom sessions. The team helped the ex-inmates to find jobs, worked with their parole offices, and Tim even let prisoners stay at his home while they were being housed. Critics claimed that the success of the experiment was due to the extra support and not the drug. A follow-up study 20 years later found that the recidivism decline had not been significant after all, and that the original study used misleading figures in the base-rate comparison.14 It did find, however, that there was other evidence for personality change. Behaviour change, whether in convicts or psychotherapy patients, is notoriously hard to prove, but it does seem that the use of psilocybin in this particular support programme produced results that warranted further study.15

Leary’s next project did little to calm his critics. Dr Walter Pahnke from the Harvard Divinity School approached Tim in order to do a thesis on a comparison between the psychedelic experience and ‘true’ religious ecstasy. In what came to be known as the Good Friday Miracle, 30 graduate students and trained psychedelic guides arrived in the small chapel of Boston University for an Easter service. Each took a small pill. Half of the pills were nothing more than placebos and half were psilocybin. The experiment was run under strict ‘double blind’ conditions, in that no one present was aware who had been given which pill, but it soon became obvious as to who had taken the psychedelic and who hadn’t. The Easter service and the church surroundings soon had the drugged students wandering round with looks of revelation and bliss across their faces, shouting out praise to the Lord. Analysis of the volunteers’ reactions by divinity students found no differences between the experiences of 90 per cent of the tripping volunteers and that of the saints and other Christian visionaries. Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances.16 Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.17The implication here was that a state previously considered a blessing from God could be induced by man more or less at will. The Church might not be able to achieve this, but Leary’s magic pill could. He couldn’t have offended people any more if he tried.

Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. Few people were prepared to accept that a chemical-induced Gnostic revelation was comparable with the ‘real thing’. Leary was vocal in his conviction that all criticism of his work was ignorant, groundless and came from those with no experience of the subject in question, an attitude that would not help him politically. He regarded any attack as the result of the ‘Semmelweis effect’, which claims that the opposition to a scientific discovery is directly proportional to its importance.

This effect is named after the nineteenth-century obstetrician who massively reduced the mortality rate in surgery by insisting that doctors wash their hands, but who was ridiculed and cast out by his colleagues for his troubles. Semmelweis was eventually driven to madness and suicide.

At this point what Leary needed was a period of calm to reduce the political pressure and consider his next steps carefully. He did not get it. Instead his life was blown apart by a substance far stronger and dramatically more controversial than psilocybin. In November 1961 Dr Leary was introduced to LSD.

CHAPTER 4 Then He Licked the Spoon

The story of LSD starts with a hunch: on 16 April 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann responded to a ‘strange feeling’1 that he should revisit a certain ergot derivative that he had synthesised five years earlier. Ergot is a rye fungus that is rich in alkaloids, and Hofmann, in his role as a research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, was attempting to find a circulatory stimulant more efficient than aspirin.

This particular compound was the twenty-fifth that he created in a series of lysergic acids. Initial tests had proven unpromising, and he had left it to gather dust since 1938. But on this day some unexplained urge persuaded him to mix up a new batch of this substance, lysergic acid diethylamide-25. He would later claim that he believed that ‘something more than chance’2 was behind this decision. A minute amount was absorbed through his skin and, following a three-hour ‘remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication’, he realised that he had something interesting on his hands. After thinking it over during the weekend, he returned to work on the following Monday and swallowed the first deliberate dose of LSD. He took a mere 250 micrograms, a millionth of an ounce, convinced that the effect of such a tiny dose would be negligible. This was not the case, and his journey home from work that day has gone down in history as perhaps the most memorable and harrowing bicycle ride ever.3

Hofmann’s creation was noticed by the CIA, which at the time was trying to discover an odourless, colourless truth drug. They would ultimately spend many millions of dollars researching LSD, which they described in 1954 as a potential new agent in ‘unconventional warfare’. But during that time they never managed to pin down just exactly what it was that the drug did. Initial reports, greeted with much excitement, claimed that it not only acted as a truth drug, but it also caused prisoners to forget what they had told their interrogators after it had worn off. Later reports declared that it was utterly useless as a truth drug, and went as far as recommending that agents be equipped with a dose that they could self-administer if they were captured and interrogated.

This would prevent them from being able to reveal secrets, or, indeed, say anything coherent at all.

It was then decided that LSD was a psychotomimetic, a drug that re-created the symptoms of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and was therefore a useful tool for the study of these conditions in laboratory conditions. The drug could also be secretly administered to enemy leaders to discredit them, and it showed great promise for use in psychological torture. Work continued along these lines for a while, but eventually it was admitted that the effects were really nothing at all like the symptoms of any known mental illnesses. It was almost as if the drug were mocking all attempts to understand it, giving hints and suggestions but always remaining one step ahead of researchers. The CIA would not be the only people working with the drug who would fall prey to its innate trickster qualities.

Despite not knowing what LSD really did, there is no doubt that there was much enthusiasm for it at the Agency. Alarmed by the idea that enemy agents might spike CIA operatives with the drug, the Americans started administering it to their own agents in order to train them to recognise the effects. Initially this was done in controlled circumstances, but eventually it was felt that it would be more valuable to spike operatives without their knowledge. Clearly on a roll now, this scheme was broadened so that it covered not just the unit involved in the research, but the entire Agency, and for a while surprise hallucinations and incapacity became something of an occupational hazard. The scheme was eventually stopped after a plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA office party was discovered, amid general concern that the whole thing had got blatantly out of hand.4 Hundreds of Agency staff took LSD during this period, some on numerous occasions. There has been speculation that this might have been linked to some of the more bizarre CIA programmes that emerged at this time, such as research into Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP), or the idea of dusting Fidel Castro’s shoes with a chemical that would make his beard fall out.

The military was also investigating the drug, and it was US army scientists who coined the word ‘trip’ to describe the period of its effects. It was clear that LSD could have a profound effect on the battlefield, and over the course of research it was administered to nearly 1500 military personnel. The British army also experimented with the drug, and a unit was filmed attempting to undergo manoeuvres in a wood whilst under its influence. Unable to understand their maps, radio equipment and rocket launchers, the soldiers became increasingly hysterical and eventually gave up, at which point one man climbed a tree in an effort to feed the birds. Much to the surprise of the authorities, American soldiers began stealing this horrific, madness-inducing weapon, and began using it at parties.