Rev. Tim W. Jensen, Summer Minister

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

August 4, 1996

Prison, like youth, is wasted on people who can't appreciate it. No phone calls. No appointments. No rent. No duties. No worries or expectations. But excellent library facilities.…

I first became interested in the career of Timothy Leary pretty much by accident. I was a junior in High School, and I had the assignment of writing a report on a "famous contemporary figure" for a current affairs class. I didn't want to write about Nixon or Kissinger (for all the obvious reasons), and I happened to stumble across a copy of Leary's then-recently-published Confessions of a Hope Fiend at a local bookstore. I started thumbing through it, thinking maybe this might make an interesting report, and discovered that, not only did Tim Leary and I share a common first name, we also shared a common birthday, October 22nd. Here was the grand adventure of a respectable Harvard professor turned psychedelic guru and revolutionary outlaw -- one taste, and I was hooked! I only got a "C" on the report; my teacher appreciated my enthusiasm, but expressed a concern that I hadn't chosen a figure who would have a more enduring impact on American society (someone like Nixon, or Kissinger), but I didn't care -- I was turned on, tuned in, and in little danger of dropping out. In fact, as far as I was concerned, I was ready to take over!

Of course now, over a quarter of a century later, there are different things about Timothy Leary's life that pique my interest. I was only four years old when Leary, at age forty, started his psilocybin experiments at Harvard. Now that I am nearly forty myself, I am astonished and amazed that a middle-aged academician could still get into as much trouble as he did, and how much anger and controversy continued to surround him at age seventy-five, when he finally died this past May 31st, not from anything to do with drugs, but of prostate cancer. His final words were reportedly "Why not? Why not ? Why not?" followed sometime later by a whispered "beautiful…"

What a long, strange trip it had been. On October 22nd, 1955, Timothy Leary woke up in his home in Berkeley, California and discovered that his wife, Marianne, had taken her own life using carbon monoxide from the exhaust of their garaged automobile. He was thirty-five years old, the father of two young children: Susan, (then age eight) and Jack, (age six), a practicing research psychologist frustrated at ineffectiveness of his discipline in treating mental illness, and at his own inability to rescue even his own wife from the ravages of her chronic depression. Four years later, he was living in Florence, Italy on the proceeds of a small research grant when his friend Frank Barron put him in touch with the director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, David McClelland, who was then also on sabbatical in Florence. McClelland had read Leary's book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality and was anxious to talk with him about Leary's current project, The Existential Transaction , an early contribution to the movement now known as "humanistic" psychology. On the basis of a lunchtime interview, McClelland offered Leary a job at the Center, telling him "you're just what need to shake things up at Harvard."

At that point in his career, Leary was considered one of the front-line innovators in psychological research: a persuasive, articulate, up-and-coming hotshot who, along with colleagues like Benjamin Spock, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Harry Stack Sullivan, were revolutionizing the discipline. Soon after he arrived in Boston, Leary met a young, gay assistant professor named Richard Alpert, whose office was just down the hall from Leary's, and who shared many of Leary's own maverick attitudes toward academia. Not long after that, Leary was able to return the favor to his friend Frank Barron by recommending him for a one-year visiting professorship at Harvard. It was Barron who originally introduced Leary and Alpert to his own research on creativity and the Mexican Magic Mushroom. When Leary learned that Sandoz laboratories has synthesized the psychoactive ingredient of the mushrooms and were making it available to qualified researchers, he ordered a supply with the thought that it might prove beneficial as a catalyst for inducing long-term personality changes through the use of altered states of consciousness in a psychotherapeutic setting.

I want to talk at some length about Leary's psilocybin experiments at Harvard, because I think it is extremely difficult to appreciate just how different they look to us in retrospect than they probably appeared at the time they were initiated. The research atmosphere of 1960 was one of "heroic," (we might even say "macho") science. It was an era of physicists and brain surgeons, with rocket scientists right there on the horizon. The field of psychotherapy was dominated by Freudians, and the paradigm in medicine was "The Doctor Knows Best." The kind of "informed consent" human research protocols we take for granted today were virtually unheard of, while the idea of "better living through chemistry" was very current and compelling. The topic candidates for this "magic pill" were the amphetamines, Benzedrine and Dexedrine, with the tranquilizer Librium a close runner-up. If your Doctor told you, and you truly believed, that you could become smarter, thinner, more alert and energetic, productive, ambitious and successful simply by swallowing a pill, wouldn't you be tempted to try it? Why shouldn't this also be true in the area of religious and spiritual insight? Leary and Alpert were not the only researchers interested in the potential of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD to inspire dramatic behavioral and personality changes. Most of the research in this area was actually being done by the US military, who were hoping to develop a weapon that, in time of war, would induce enemy soldiers to throw down their guns, take off their clothes, and put flowers in their hair. These CIA experiments were ultimately unsuccessful; instead, it was an army of young Americans, in Vietnam and on college campus across the nation, who "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out," thus inspiring Richard Nixon to label Tim Leary "The Most Dangerous Man in America."

But in the spring of 1961, these events were all still far in the future. Leary and Alpert's original research project involved two very different groups of experimental subjects. The first of these were convicts at the Concord State Prison in Massachusetts. The research design called for the researchers as well as the subjects to ingest the drug, so that the former might act as experienced "guides" to the latter in exploring the altered state of consciousness. For the first session at the prison, Leary and three of the prisoners took the drug together, while two graduate students and three other convicts also remained in the room and acted as observers. This episode is the source of one of my favorite anecdotes about Leary. Shortly after taking the drug, Leary began to experience all of the classic symptoms of a "bad trip." There he was, locked in a penitentiary, surrounded by criminals whom he could see all too clearly. In order to overcome his panic, he turned to one of the convicts and asked:

"How ya doing, John?"

"I feel fine. How you doing, Doc?"

"I feel lousy."

"What's the matter, Doc?"

"I'm afraid of you," Leary replied. The convict began to laugh.

"Well, that's funny Doc, 'cause I'm afraid of you. Why are you afraid of me?"

"Because you're a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?"

"I'm afraid of you 'cause you're a fucking mad scientist."

From that moment on, the ice was broken. The project expanded into on-going program called CONTACT which used the Altered State of Consciousness experience in order to help convicts identify new alternatives for their lives, and then build an empathetic community of support that could sustain them in their new life choices. After two years, Leary claimed to have reduced the rate of recidivism in his experimental group from 70% to 10%.

The second population that Leary and Alpert drew upon for their experiments were Divinity Students from the Harvard and Andover Newton Divinity schools. And it was here that their research began to sail into troubled waters. It is one thing to give drugs to criminals in the effort to turn them into productive citizens. It is quite another to give them to productive citizens, the future spiritual leaders of the nation, and to watch discover the difference between studying religion and experiencing it. As more and more of Harvard's best and brightest began babbling about Blake and the Bardos and Buddhism, the conservative elements of the Harvard establishment began to scrutinize more closely this serpent peddling fruit from the tree of knowledge whom they had recklessly embraced in their bosom. Although Leary potentially had some powerful allies in respected intellectuals like Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith, he and Alpert did little to try to defend themselves; by now, they were both deeply under the spell of their "little experiment" themselves, and truly believed they were about to change the world. Instead, they found themselves fired by Harvard in a scandal that made them both pariahs in academia and celebrities in the media, setting the stage for everything that would follow.

Funded by an heir to the Andrew Mellon fortune, Leary and his entourage set up housekeeping in a 60-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where his drug experiments quickly shifted to an exploration of the more hedonistic and sensual aspects of the experience. As the political establishment scrambled to pass legislation making the use of psychedelic drugs illegal, Millbrook became a kind of salon for the emerging counter-culture; and with his charismatic personality and charming Irish blarney, Leary himself took quite readily to his role as gadfly and "cheerleader for change." He saw himself as a philosopher, another Socrates persecuted for introducing new gods and corrupting youth. In doing so, he also made himself a high-profile target for those who disagreed with everything the counter-culture stood for.

In the fall of 1965, while returning to Texas after being refused entry into Mexico for a family vacation, Leary's car was searched and a small quantity of marijuana was found in the possession of his daughter Susan. Leary took responsibility for the drugs, was arrested, and given a 30 year prison sentence, later overturned on appeal.

The following May, while Leary was free on bail awaiting the appeal of his Texas conviction, the mansion at Millbrook was raided by an ambitious young Assistant District Attorney named G. Gordon Liddy, who would later use his notoriety from the raid as a springboard to an important position of responsibility in the Nixon administration.

Leary was able to avoid jail on these charges as well, but in 1968 he was arrested again after a search of his car during a contrived traffic stop allegedly produced two half-smoked marijuana cigarettes, which Leary claimed had been planted by the police. Convicted on these charges, Leary was denied appeal bond and sentenced to the maximum term of 10 years. While being processed into the California prison system at the State Correctional Institute in Chino, Leary was administered the same psychological tests that he himself had help to create some twenty years earlier while a psychologist at Berkeley. As he wrote in his autobiography, he used his knowledge of the tests to manipulate the results for his own purposes.

The test of intelligence was to get the highest possible score. My answers to the personality tests were calculated to make me appear normal, non-impulsive, docile, conforming. My vocational tests revealed aptitudes in forestry and farming together with hopeless incompetence in clerical tasks. I was angling for transfer to a minimum-security prison where escape would be possible.

Leary escaped from the California Men's Colony-West at San Luis Obispo on September 12th, 1970 -- forty days before his fiftieth birthday. He escaped by pulling himself upside-down along a telephone cable that ran from the prison over the fifteen-foot high barbed wire fence to the road outside: a feat he said he'd hoped to perform with the smoothness of Errol Flynn, but which turned out more like the slapstick of Harold Lloyd. Assisted by Bernadine Dohrn and members of the Weather Underground, he fled first to a safe house in Seattle, and then to Algiers, where for several months he was the reluctant "guest" of exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Parting ways with the Panthers, he lived for awhile in Switzerland, where he hoped to obtain political asylum, then was re-arrested by DEA agents in an airport in Afghanistan and returned to the United States, where he was incarcerated again, this time at Folsom prison, in a maximum security cell adjacent to that of Charles Manson.

Leary was eventually released from prison in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. He embarked upon a new career as a visiting speaker on the college lecture circuit. Leary's frequent touring partner throughout much of the eighties was his old nemesis the days at Millbrook, G. Gordon Liddy, who had also recently been released from prison following his conviction for the role he had played in the Watergate break-in. It is hard to imagine two more different personalities, yet in very many ways there was a strange and powerful chemistry between them. Leary's role was that of the brilliant yet impulsive and erratic visionary maverick. He was playful, irreverent, at times a little random, yet insightful in a way that defied conventional wisdom and reminded me, more than anything else, of the non-conventional wisdom of former Dominican author and philosopher Matthew Fox. Liddy, on the other hand, was clearly not as bright as the one-time Harvard professor; yet his intellect was somehow more focused and disciplined. Liddy could be at once both pointed and blunt, and while his opinions were often just as outspoken as those of the notorious mad scientist he had labored so long to arrest, they were internally consistent in a manner that was almost spooky in the rigidity of its twisted logic.

The most interesting part of the program, however, was not the contrast between the two antagonists, but rather the three intriguing places where Liddy and Leary agreed. Their first point of agreement was that America needs to offer more to its youth than it does. They had very different ideas about what these things should be, but both agreed that what was now being offered was not nearly enough. The second thing they agreed about was that prison, despite its excellent library facilities, is not a very fun place to hang out. And their third point of agreement was that the future destiny of humanity resides in outer space. It was fascinating to watch them together on the stage, debating back and forth with the teasing hostility of two jealous siblings competing for the attention and approval of a distant parent, for in a very real way, each of them had helped to invent and create the other. Without the demon, there can be no exorcist. It's tough to be a hero without a villain.

But I didn't come here this morning to rehash the "Politics of Ecstasy" and the "War on Drugs." I come from a generation, frankly, where a lot of folks inhaled. I've seen bright young minds burned out on drugs, and I've seen promising young lives ruined, not so much by the drugs themselves, as by the encounters with the criminal underworld, and then the criminal justice system, to which such exploration inevitably leads. And I've seen many, many more young people go on to productive careers as physicians, attorneys, even ministers, with no more ill effect than a lingering suspicion and distrust of authority, and a profound, burning desire to know and experience "the Truth" for themselves. I think it also needs to be acknowledged that there is a world of difference between experimenting in a safe and relatively controlled environment with drugs manufactured in the laboratories of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company (which is how the Harvard experiments started out), and partying on the weekend with a substance cooked up by a bathtub chemist in somebody's kitchen and then sold by the sheet on the street.

It is instructive as well to contrast Leary's career to that of his junior colleague, Richard Alpert. Alpert traveled to India following the disintegration of the psychedelic commune at Millbrook, where he studied Yoga, and took on the new name of Baba Ram Dass. While Leary craved the celebrity of the media limelight, and was eventually driven underground by it, Ram Dass continued his inner exploration -- an exploration perhaps initially inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, but in the end no longer fueled by them. Since leaving Harvard, Ram Dass has developed into a legitimate "guru" in the strictest and most respectable sense of that word. He has cultivated a disciplined religious knowledge to compliment his mystical experience, thereby attempting to integrate the spiritual with the rational in a way that strongly reflects the Harvard Divinity School's own traditional motto: "Faith seeking Understanding." You may not necessarily feel sympathetic to Ram Dass's religious philosophy, and Harvard may not want him back, but he nevertheless has remained faithful to the vision that first inspired him when he was a young assistant professor there, and for this he should be admired. This vision is a simple one, and it deserves to be take seriously. For the future destiny of humankind may well reside as much in the exploration of inner space as it does in outer space. We begin to change the world, when we begin to change ourselves.…

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Tim W. Jensen. All rights reserved.