I Have America Surrounded

Much to his later embarrassment, Leary had not initially noticed the sexual element of the psychedelic experience. He had always approached a trip as a pure death and rebirth experience that needed to be treated with great respect. He had known that all the senses were heightened and that strong emotional bonds developed between participants, but he had not realised what the natural outcome of this would be until he tripped in a sensually decorated Manhattan apartment with a beautiful Moroccan model. Afterwards he felt almost embarrassed about how long it had taken him to grasp this most obvious effect. How had he been so square and inhibited all this time? He consulted Huxley. ‘Of course it’s true, Timothy’ Huxley told him, ‘but we’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag.’ 32

But if Tim had failed to notice the obvious, his growing circle of ‘converts’ were not so blind. There was a core of around 40 committed trippers at this point, and they were increasingly becoming based not in the classrooms and research labs of Harvard, but in Leary’s large communal household in the middle-class Newton Center. Rumours started to abound of wild, drug-crazed orgies in the Leary house. Locals were all too aware of the influx of junkies, homosexuals, Beatniks, foreigners and perverts to their safe Massachusetts suburb. ‘LSD is so powerful,’ Tim remarked, ‘that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours.’ In situations like this the reality rarely lives up to the events that are imagined by those on the outside. In this case, however, the straight world had no reference points to allow them even to begin to grasp what was happening. Behind the doors of the Leary household a constant stream of sexual and spiritual experimentation occurred that was far wilder than they could ever have imagined.

Although it is easy to assume otherwise, it was not just the hedonism and sexual liberation that made those early experimenters so enamoured with the drug. The main factor was intellectual, the belief that taking LSD gave them an increased awareness and understanding of the world. The drug gave insights that, although often lost after the trip was over, still affected people enough to convince them that they had become better or wiser through the experience. Such a sense of improved awareness is difficult to imagine, but it is helpful to consider the metaphor of a cup that is either half full or half empty. The idea here is that an individual decides which of these descriptions applies to his ‘take’ on life, and this indicates whether that person is optimistic or pessimistic. But to an individual who has been psychedelically informed, that concept can appear absurd because they would look at the cup and see that it is both half full and half empty. The two positions are inseparable and there is no contradiction that requires an ‘either/or’ choice. Indeed, to see the cup as either only half full or only half empty takes a lot of mental effort on the viewer’s part, as it is necessary to blind yourself to what is undeniably in front of you. After undergoing such an ‘obvious’ realisation as this, hearing anyone refer to a cup as being only half full or half empty seems somewhat blind or foolish. It was a series of insights similar to this that made those who took LSD feel that they now understood things ‘better’ than people who had not turned on. Increasingly, users of psychedelics began to feel that they had ‘outgrown’ the rest of the population. As the social critic Diana Trilling remarked, ‘I have observed a curious transformation in all the young people I know who have taken the drug; even after only one or two trips they attain a sort of suprahumanity, as if purged of mortal error.’ 33

The Havard faculty soon became aware that there was a growing black market in LSD amongst the students. It was spreading far beyond the limits of the research programme. Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they wanted their children to become the future leaders of American society They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.

The inevitable confrontation came in the form of a staff meeting organised at the request of Dr Herbert Kelman, in order to air the faculty’s growing grievances and concerns. Kelman was a respected and powerful academic who had received grants from a CIA-funded organisation.34 The turnout for the meeting was so great that it had to be held in an auditorium. A string of complaints against Leary and Alpert poured out, from concerns about the scientific validity of their methodology, to accusations of irresponsible experimentation, corrupting students and damaging the department. Academic journals that stated LSD was dangerous were debated, and a committee was appointed to oversee Leary’s and Alpert’s future work. An undergraduate journalist, Andrew Weil, was investigating the emerging Harvard drug underground and decided to attend this supposedly private staff meeting.35 His account was printed in the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson and was picked up by the Boston Herald. It made a good story, and concern about this ‘Harvard drug cult’ reached the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an organisation that had assisted the CIA in its drugs research.

Shortly afterwards the axe began to fall on American LSD research. The FDA declared that LSD was dangerous, and as such should only be administered by a trained medical physician. Leary was ordered to hand over his supply. From that point on, anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to obtain permission from the FDA. Moreover, it was designated an ‘experimental drug’ and hence could only be used for research, not for general psychiatric practice. The LSD therapy community blamed Leary for the ban on their previously legitimate work, but it seems more likely that he was the excuse rather than the cause of this change in government policy. The FDA would not have made such a decision against the wishes of the CIA.36 By this point the Agency had been studying the drug for over a decade and no longer considered it reliably controllable. They had successfully deployed it in operations, but their focus was increasingly moving to a new drug, quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. BZ would knock people to the ground, and they wouldn’t move for three days. It was cheaper to produce, more reliable and, unlike LSD, could even be administered in the form of gas on a battlefield. As far as the CIA were concerned, BZ was a much better weapon than LSD.

Leary and Alpert knew that their days at Harvard were numbered, but they already had bigger plans. They started a non-profit psychedelic organisation that they hoped could expand to have bases in cities around the world. They called it IF-IF, the International Federation for Internal Freedom. It would perform research and publish a scholarly journal, but, more importantly, it would train guides who could go forth and teach others how to use the drug safely. The CIA, of course, found this very interesting. They issued a secret memo that instructed any CIA personnel involved in psychological and drug research to report all contacts with Leary, Alpert or any of their IF-IF associates.37

The idea behind IF-IF was that anyone could approach them and request a guided LSD trip, and provided they met certain standards of mental health and suitability, they would receive one. In this way, the psychedelic experience would spread far wider than if Leary and Alpert remained working solely in academia. They set up the organisation knowing that there was growing awareness of their work from the press and public, but they were unprepared for the scale of interest that followed. IF-IFs first public operation would be a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico. Five thousand applications poured in for the 50 available places.

It was while Tim was in Mexico making arrangements that he heard he had been sacked from Harvard. The official reason was that he had left classes without permission.38 He was the first Harvard Faculty member to be dismissed since the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838, who had scandalised the Harvard Divinity School with a lecture in which he urged his audience to reject organised Christianity and find God inside themselves. A month after Tim’s dismissal, Alpert was sacked for giving LSD to an undergraduate. Previously, in November 1961, he had given a written promise to the faculty that no undergraduate would receive the drug. It probably did not help matters that Richard was starting a homosexual relationship with the student in question. It certainly did not help that, according to Jack Leary, the student’s father was on the Harvard Board of Trustees and that the student went home and said: ‘Fuck you, Dad!…I’m taking acid and sleeping with a professor!’39 A deluge of press interest followed the sackings. The first Leary’s mother would know about it was when she saw it in the paper. This would be one scandal for which she’d never forgive him.

‘It tears out my heart to see what happened to them,’ remarked Professor McClelland. ‘They started out as good, sound scientists. Now they’ve become cultists.’40

In the events that followed, Leary might have behaved differently if the influence of Aldous Huxley had been stronger. But Huxley died of throat cancer on 22 November 1963, five hours after the shooting of President Kennedy.

Huxley had known he was dying when he was writing his final major novel, Island (1962), which was in many ways a more ambitious and remarkable work than Brave New World (1932). In the latter he had depicted a frighteningly real dystopia, but in his later years, following his psychedelic experiments, he realised that a far greater achievement would be to disregard the cynicism and attempt to design a genuine utopia. He wrote a pivotal death scene, in which the grandmother was guided through a psychedelic trip in order to ease her passing, as a model for his own departure.41 He had confided this to Leary a few weeks earlier, during Tim’s last visit. His final words to him were, ‘Be gentle with them, Timothy They want to be free, but they don’t know how. Teach them. Reassure them.’42 But with Huxley’s presence waning, his influence on Tim would no longer be able to counteract that of Ginsberg. Tim would eventually dedicate himself to the widespread, egalitarian advocacy amongst the young against which Huxley had strongly argued.

During the hour of Kennedy’s assassination, too ill to speak, Huxley wrote ‘LSD—Try it. Intermuscular, 100mm’ on his writing tablet.43His doctor reluctantly consented, and his wife Laura administered the injection herself. She sat and read to him from an advance copy of The Psychedelic Experience, a reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Leary, Metzner and Alpert had written, at Huxley’s suggestion, to guide LSD trips. The injection of LSD produced a noticeably beneficial effect in the dying man. Huxley became relaxed, comfortable and at peace. Very quietly and gently he slipped away.

CHAPTER 5 Jesus Christ, Do I Have to Fuck Every Girl Who Comes to This Place?

Tim and Richard had run a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico the previous year, in 1962, and it had been a great success. They had rented out the neglected and decaying Hotel Catalina, which sat on the beach about a mile and a half down a dirt road from the town of Zihuatanejo, 180 miles north of Acapulco. Electricity and water supplies were erratic, but the setting was idyllic and they knew they would not be disturbed. About 35 academics, students, friends and interested parties attended, and they spent six weeks running countless LSD sessions together.

According to Huxley’s insights into how to run a positive, successful trip, the beauty of the location and the calm atmosphere were important. The key was to pay attention to what Leary called ‘set and setting’.1Here ‘set’ refers to the individual’s mental state, or ‘mindset’, and ‘setting’ refers to both the environment and the people present. It was important to be in a good frame of mind, not anxious or distracted by other concerns, and to be in a harmonious location with people you trusted and liked. If set and setting were good, a positive and pleasurable trip would occur. If they were lacking, however, then the horrors of a bad trip could result. LSD amplifies the surroundings and pre-existing feelings, Huxley realised, but it does not create anything that is not already present. It was the recognition of this principle that explains the different results obtained by Leary and the CIA, and why the same drug could be regarded by different researchers as causing either visionary ecstasy or profound terror. Individuals who were spiked with the drug without their knowledge, or those who were administered it in a clinical medical facility by unfamiliar doctors, were almost guaranteed to descend into nightmares.

For Leary’s party of like-minded friends, relaxing for weeks on a blissful Mexican beach, the results were about as positive as could be. The LSD sessions were joyful, and relations with the local Mexicans were good. Before they returned to America they played a baseball game against the villagers, with most of the American team still under the influence of acid. This gave them an unfair advantage, they discovered, as time kept slowing down after the baseball was pitched. They found they had all the time in the world to study the ball and line up their swings.2 After quickly going 8–0 up, Tim instructed his team to stop scoring and let the opposition catch up in order to preserve good international relations. The game ended a draw, and ‘everybody urged us to come back next year’, Tim wrote.3 And we planned to. Those six weeks at Zihuatanejo had given us a glimpse of Utopia.’

The following summer, however, was not a success. It started promisingly, and the guests arrived in good spirits. A 25-foot-tall wooden observation tower was built on the beach where it could be seen from every part of the complex. A relay of people would stay in the tower, tripping, for the duration of the summer camp. Being selected to be in the tower was a great honour, and there would be a ceremony whenever a new person was chosen. Ralph Metzner has since described a memorable night in the tower, ‘watching the moon rise and travel over the bay, its silvery radiance reflecting from the murmuring surf. I watched it set behind the mountains as the pink-orange light of dawn suffused the sky. Hour-long electrical storms soundlessly shattered the sky into shards of yellow, turquoise and violet.’4 But there were signs that such memorable experiences could not continue much longer. Tim received a telegram from Mary Pinchot Meyer in Washington warning him that his summer camp was ‘in serious jeopardy’.5

The hotel started to attract visits from young, impoverished American travellers, people who in a few years time would be given the name ‘hippies’. They had heard about LSD and wanted to try it, but were turned away by Tim. They took to sleeping on a beach on the opposite side of the bay. Then a gruesome murder was linked by the press to their project. ‘Harvard Drug Orgy Blamed for Decomposing Body’ ran one newspaper headline, although there seemed to be no reason to connect the death to the camp. According to Tim, it had occurred in a village 100 miles away. When the police came to investigate, however, a tripping middle-aged woman, who resembled ‘the lank-haired vampire mistress from cartoonist Charles Addams’ haunted Victorian house’, jumped out at them from a doorway in a narrow corridor. She was naked except for a red and blue ink drawing of a ‘grotesque artistic parody of the crucified Christ’ on her body6 This was not the sort of thing that went down well in Catholic Mexico.

The police informed Tim that his summer camp was being shut down. The official reason was because he was running a business on a tourist visa. His attempts to appeal against the decision failed. He was told that the President of Mexico himself was insisting that they go, for he had received calls from the American ambassador, the CIA and the Justice Department, all urging Leary’s expulsion.

If this was the case, the most likely reason for this high-level pressure was the publicity that Leary was generating. The CIA had managed to keep their work on behaviour modification relatively secret. While parts were available in academic journals, much of the rest of the work was considered to be military intelligence and should not be available to foreign states. IF-IF, however, had a press officer who naively invited the world’s press to Mexico to witness Tim’s work. Life magazine, CBS, NBC and the BBC all planned stories, and Time, Newsweek and scores of other journals and newspapers were also invited. This was Tim’s reaction to the dismissal from Harvard. As he was no longer protected by the reputation of the famous university, he needed some other form of power base to support his work. Public opinion seemed to be the best option, so he did everything he could to court the press. It made a great story too, thanks to the sacking from Harvard and the idyllic surroundings of the Mexican beach. The majority of the press coverage was negative, but the idea of the establishment stamping down on a rebel scientist who claimed to be able to create enlightenment took hold in the public imagination. Thanks to his academic background, his enthusiasm for the drug, and his willingness to talk to journalists, Tim was by now firmly established in the eyes of the press and the public as the figurehead of LSD.

While the police were shutting down the summer camp, and with the residents in the process of being deported, a few people decided to take a last acid trip. This broke the golden rule of set and setting, and the more paranoid, persecuted atmosphere helped trigger the first cases of prolonged negative effects that Leary had ever seen. One tripper came to believe that he was a gorilla. He went swinging through the trees and terrorised everyone he met. He was eventually captured by Tim and five other men, who trapped him with a rope, tarpaulin and blankets. He was given a tranquilliser and returned to some form of lucidity the next morning. Another casualty, however, went into an almost catatonic state and remained like that for many days. Tim went through this man’s wallet and found several US government identity cards that attested to high-level clearance. When the airline refused to allow him to fly back to the United States in his catatonic state, Tim sent a wire to the US Defence Department. It read, ‘Your agent Duane Marvy is in the Chapultepec Mental Hospital, Mexico City’7 Then Leary returned to America in order to plan his next move. His first exposure to the dangers of the drug had in no way dampened his enthusiasm for it.

By now IF-IF had a head office in a medical centre in Boston, which boasted the wonderful address of Zero Emerson Place. The first issue of their journal the Psychedelic Review8 had been published and was a great success. It had a circulation of around 4000 copies, the majority coming from subscriptions. Tim, Richard and Ralph also completed their psychedelic reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published as The Psychedelic Experience. This was intended as a manual or a guide to navigate the realms of inner space, and emphasised the similarities between an LSD trip and the Tibetan description of the soul’s journey after death. IF-IF was clearly a productive organisation and could hardly be considered a failure, but it still had not managed to found a retreat or a centre to which people could come for a safe, guided psychedelic session.

Tim set off to Dominica, on an ultimately futile journey to seek a suitable location in the Caribbean. That he was starting to become a little desperate was shown in his attempts to settle here, for he considered the location to be far from the idyllic paradise demanded by the laws of set and setting. At night the black sands and thick jungle seemed oppressive and sinister. The island was poverty-stricken and dependent for survival on the foreign corporations that ran the banana industry.

Initial approaches to the island’s officials were highly favourable, however, until a sudden change of mind further up the chain of command led to being told to leave. Tim has claimed that this was because of an approach to the island’s governor by the CIA. He left the island and headed to Antigua, where he met Richard Alpert. Alpert was still in the process of travelling to Dominica and was furious that Tim had got himself thrown off the island before he had even arrived. They set up in an old seafront bar called the Bucket of Blood, which was deserted and almost devoid of furniture, in order to investigate the possibility of establishing themselves in Antigua. They were now about $50000 in debt and Richard had taken to selling his antiques and his Mercedes to support their efforts. The pair began to fight during a group acid trip. ‘There were, like, 14 people sitting around us in a circle,’ Alpert recalled, ‘and Tim felt that what we were really fighting about was sexual in nature and so he took off all his clothes and offered himself to me, really. And the whole thing was totally bizarre. So we rolled around on the floor and then worked it out and we all went swimming the next morning. There wasn’t any real sex between us; not that time or ever. Tim was threatened by homosexuality. I think he’d had some unpleasant episodes in his life that he wanted to forget.’9

One of those present, a man called Frank Ferguson, who was working as Tim’s secretary, had a psychotic episode during the trip. The group was attempting to befriend the leading psychiatrists on Antigua in order to gain support, and one of these was known to be a specialist in lobotomies. As the IF-IF members had come to view the brain as an almost sacred organ, they viewed performing a lobotomy as an almost evil act. Ferguson was troubled by the ethics of dealing with this man. While under the influence of LSD, he decided that the only thing to do was approach the unsuspecting doctor and offer to be voluntarily lobotomised himself, as a sacrifice.10 This he promptly did and the resulting scandal wiped out any hope of IF-IF being accepted in Antigua.

Their luck didn’t improve when they flew back to the USA. Their LSD was in a mouthwash bottle in Alpert’s luggage, and he saw his bag fall to the ground whilst being loaded into the cargo hold. The bottle was smashed, and the drug soaked into his white linen suit. Obtaining new supplies of LSD was difficult now that it was regulated by the FDA, so for the next few months they were reduced to nibbling the suit when they wanted to trip.11

Fortunately, their luck improved considerably once they returned. They found the base that they had been searching for.

The house at Millbrook was a 64-room Gothic mansion in Duchess County, New York, about 80 miles north of Manhattan. The grounds covered 2500 acres across landscape where Rip Van Winkle, the stories said, had once encountered the Dutch elves. There were orchards, hills, pine forests, a waterfall, a three-storey gatehouse and a separate bungalow. It was empty and deserted when Richard first saw it, exploring its labyrinth of rooms by candlelight, and despite it being an ‘exquisitely horrible house’, he knew that they had found their home.

The house had recently been bought by Billie and Tommy Hitchcock, two grandchildren of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil. The Hitchcocks were young businessmen, and their trust funds alone give them an income of around $7 million a year each. Their sister Peggy had been a strong supporter of Tim’s since Harvard, and she arranged for Richard to introduce Billie to acid in order to convert him to the cause. Once enlightened, he agreed to allow Tim, Ralph, Richard and a fluctuating group of between 10 and 20 of their friends and families to set up a communal home at Millbrook for a nominal rent.

It was a fitting home for the history-shaping research that they intended to pursue. ‘Big houses with intricate floor plans figure prominently in the drama and fantasy life of individuals and races,’ wrote a Millbrook resident, Art Kleps. ‘One expects, quite reasonably, on the basis of experience, personal and vicarious, that if one is destined to perform noble deeds or to encounter great and mysterious figures, that such a setting will be provided. We do not expect history to be made in hovels.’12