No Illusions
Newsweek
June 10, 1963
"Doc, this is it! This is what life is all about!
We'll never live more than we are right now, this minute."
"Doc," a 42-year-old Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary- listened
attentively. His test subject was "high" on psilocybin, a mushroom
derivative and one of the family of hallucinatory drugs along with LSD (
lysergic acid diethylamide ) and mescaline. Through such tests, Leary and
his Harvard colleague, assistant professor Richard Alpert, pursued the
ageless vision that drug-induced "insights" can be used to make men wiser,
kinder, more creative.
Harvard and its president Nathan Pusey, however, thought otherwise.
Exercising the power to discharge faculty members for "grave misconduct
and neglect of duty" for the first time in a century, Harvard fired Leary
and Alpert. The reason given for Alpert's dismissal was that he had
reneged on a promise not to give hallueillatory drugs to undergraduates.
But the real reason was that Alpert, like Leary, has become a propagandist
for thc drugs. "Every American citizen has the right to use them to
explore his own consciousness," he insists
Changes: Last year, the two psychologists established the incredibly
named International Federation for Internal Freedom to foster
transcendental living through drugs; the IFIF now maintains two Newton,
Mass., homes for "communal living." Both men took the drugs
themselves-Alpert says he has "had the drug experience" more than 100
times in three years. The sessions, he said last week, "led to very
dramatic changes-I'm not a Harvard professor any more." Becoming serious,
he added: "I now have increased openness with other people, and more
creativity in dealing with intellectual problems."
But, according to Dr. David C. McClelland, head of Harvard's Department
of Social Relations, the more drugs Leary and Alpert took. "the less they
were interested in science."
Kaleidoscope: Actually, Leary's and Alpert's use of hallucinatory drugs
is embarrassing to other researchers, who point out that LSD and related
compounds are yielding important new information on how the mind works.
The chief effect, University of Maryland psychiatrist Dr. Gerald Klee
suggests in the current Archives of General Psychiatry, seems to be a
stimulation of that brain's sensory centers combined with a blocking of
the areas that make sense of the information. The result is a kaleidoscope
of stimuli assaulting a mind which has lost memory, reasoning power, and
time sense. In anyone who already has a poor grasp of reality,
psychiatrists warn, the drugs may awaken latent psychotic tendencies.
The drugs are not habit-forming, but under new Federal regulations
research on them must be approved bv the Food and Drug Administration. The
deposed researchers apparently aren't even going to apply; last week Leary
was in the Mexican fishing village of Zihuatanejo near Acapulco where the
IFIF has taken a 22-month lease on a hotel which can accommodate 52
people.
Leary Claims he has turned down "more than 100 people" who want to come
to his utopia at $200 a month plus $6 for each hallucinatory "experience."
The plan, he says, is to train "doctors and psychologists in administering
LSD and other drugs in IFIF joy an happiness centers in the U.S."
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