I Have America Surrounded

This did little to calm the concerns of other faculty members that Leary and Alpert’s work was becoming increasingly unscientific.

Harvard academics were clearly not sure how to react when they discovered Swami Vishnudevananda performing a headstand on the conference table in the Centre for Personality Research clad only in a loincloth. Tim seemed unconcerned by the reactions his work and life were generating. His house in the Newton Center district had become a multi-family commune, with Leary, Alpert and Metzner living together with various children and partners. This was unheard of at the time, and neighbours filed suit with the city, claiming that they were in violation of zoning laws that limited occupancy to single families. The old lady next door complained to everyone she could about ‘weird people who all wear beatnik uniforms’. A young man who had grown his hair down to his shoulders was a particular concern. ‘Every time I look at him,’ she confessed, ‘I want to vomit.’

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It has been claimed that by the end of 1962 the house had become increasingly chaotic. The English author Alan Watts, who is credited with popularising Buddhism in the West, was amazed at the mess that he found in Leary’s house. He could not understand how anyone who had experienced such expanded awareness could live in such squalor. Those who lived in the house, however, find this reaction a little unfair. Ralph Metzner lived in the commune throughout its existence and claims that the mess was ‘no more than average, although on some days it might have seemed excessive’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Metzner also doubts claims that psilocybin pills were left lying around where they could be found by children, for there was very little psilocybin available during the time of the Newton Center commune and people were very protective of their supplies. Jack Leary, however, has claimed that he found and ate some when he was aged 12. He later recalled staring at the dog, trying to understand how it could be sitting normally and jumping up in the air at the same time. The dog was equally mystified, as Jack had fed it some of the pills beforehand.

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Huxley was becomingly increasingly concerned about Leary’s progress. He was not treading the cautious, considered path that they had discussed. Indeed, he seemed to be almost wilfully courting controversy ‘Yes, what about Timothy Leary?’ Huxley wrote to Osmond in December 1962. ‘I spent an evening with him here a few weeks ago—and he talked such nonsense…that I became quite concerned. Not about his sanity—because he is perfectly sane—but about his prospects in the world; for this nonsense-talking is just another device for annoying people in authority, flouting convention, cocking snooks at the academic world; it is the reaction of a mischievous Irish boy to the headmaster of his school. One of these days the headmaster will lose patience…I am very fond of Tim…but why, oh why does he have to be such an ass?’

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Huxley’s words, as ever, were prophetic. The CIA had been keeping an eye on Tim’s work. They were aware of all LSD research because they were alerted by Sandoz Laboratories to every purchase of the drug.

(#litres_trial_promo)Initially they were content to monitor activities quietly in the hope that his results would be of interest. But it soon became clear that Leary and Alpert were a touch too evangelical and too public with their work, and that their influence was spreading.

Leary had been crossing the country turning on influential people and talking to whoever would listen. He had taken the drug to Hollywood, where his growing fame made him an honoured guest at many film industry parties.

(#litres_trial_promo) It had also taken him to Washington, where he had been approached by a woman called Mary Pinchot Meyer, whom he trained to guide people on LSD trips. Meyer had recently divorced Cord Meyer, an influential CIA agent noted for his work in covert operations. She explained that she intended to organise LSD sessions for a group of ‘very powerful men’ and their wives and mistresses. Meyer has since gone on to feature in a number of conspiracy theories; a mistress of JFK, she was shot dead by an unknown assailant on a canal towpath in October 1964.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was Meyer, Leary claimed, who convinced John F. Kennedy to try acid, which he took, as well as other drugs, while in the White House.

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Tim loved all this attention. He loved being in the company of the rich, the famous and the brilliant. He loved his own growing sense of fame and notoriety. The volunteers who came to the project knew that Tim was the oldest, the smartest and the most psychedelically experienced of the group. It was around this time that, in the words of Ralph Metzner, ‘the issue of leadership, with its associated complex of idealization and disappointment, was beginning to rear its ugly head’.

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It soon became apparent that the participants in the programme were looking to Tim for guidance and expected him to lead them. This seems to have initially bothered Leary, but once he accepted that this was to be his role, he grasped the nettle firmly and never let go. Soon he was the unquestioned alpha male of the psychedelic project, and this position was strengthened with each new person he turned on. Under the influence of the drug, the tripper would often see the guide and drug-giver as an almost divine figure, the benign patriarch who had blessed them with this experience. It was an effect that Tim understood well, for during his first trip he had seen Michael Hollingshead in the same light. It had taken a couple of weeks for this perception to wear off, during which time he had embarrassed Alpert by following Hollingshead around like a lost puppy. For many people to whom he gave the drug, Tim became the personification of LSD itself. Young women in particular would fall hopelessly for him. It was a situation that was easy to take advantage of.

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.’

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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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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!’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)His 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? (#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo)Here ‘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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’