Читать книгу I Have America Surrounded - John Higgs - Страница 10

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.

Much of what is known about the US government’s experiments with LSD was revealed in 1977, during Senate hearings in which Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, attempted to discover the extent of a CIA programme called Operation MK-Ultra. Operation MK-Ultra was the umbrella programme that covered all of the CIA’s research into chemical and biological weapons during the Cold War. Much of the work was shockingly immoral. Hundreds of mentally ill patients had been used as guinea pigs in research into brainwashing and mind control, and they were dosed with a variety of drugs without their consent or knowledge. At a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, researchers had given inmates LSD daily for up to 76 days in a row. An American doctor⁵ who had sat on the Nuremberg tribunal against Nazi war criminals was discovered to have since undertaken work that clearly violated the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics. Perhaps the most scandalous experiments involved spiking random, unsuspecting members of the public. Drug-addicted prostitutes in San Francisco were hired to pick up men and bring them back to a CIA safe house that was operating as a brothel. Here the prostitutes would administer the drug in drinks so that the CIA could observe the results. The agent in charge of this operation was named George Hunter White. He used to sit on a toilet behind a two-way mirror sipping martinis while he observed the action. He then used pipe cleaners to make models of people in whatever sexual positions he felt were most effective in removing their will and causing them to let secrets slip, and he sent these models to his superiors for analysis.⁶ White would later praise his job on the grounds that ‘it was fun, fun, fun’. He went on to add about his time working for the CIA, ‘Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?’⁷

During this time the CIA were also monitoring, and at times covertly funding, other research on the drug in civilian medical and academic circles. Some of these experiments, such as the work of Dr Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, were based on the Agency’s pet theory that the drug mimicked madness. Dr West, who was a CIA contract employee, conducted an experiment in which he gave an elephant the equivalent of 2000 human-sized doses of LSD, in order to see what would happen.⁸ The elephant in question lay down and never moved again. Any possibility of repeating this experiment in order to confirm these findings was dashed, unfortunately, when Dr West attempted to revive the elephant with a variety of chemical stimulants, and accidentally killed it.

But there was also work going on that seemed to contradict what the CIA understood about the drug. Doctors and psychiatrists, notably Dr Humphry Osmond in Canada and Dr Oscar Janiger in Los Angeles, were using the drug therapeutically. LSD was being used to cure alcoholism, study creativity and was even being given to patients in therapy. It became fashionable in Hollywood, and was administered to patients including James Coburn, Anaïs Nin and André Previn. Jack Nicholson used his treatment as the basis of his screenplay for the film The Trip.⁹ Cary Grant took over 100 trips to treat depression after the failure of his marriage, and claimed that as a result he had been ‘reborn’.¹⁰

This was baffling to the CIA. As they understood it, LSD was an ‘unconventional weapon’ that had the power to send people temporarily insane. They had successfully used it as a form of torture in interrogations. How could this be prescribed by psychiatrists in order to improve mental health? The effects of drugs are supposed to be predictable; a doctor should be able to prescribe a drug and be confident that he knows what it will do. LSD was not like that at all. Somehow it was able to produce totally different effects in different experiments. It just didn’t make any sense.

Leary was introduced to LSD by an Englishman named Michael Hollingshead. Hollingshead was working for the British American Cultural Exchange Institute in New York when he, together with his friend Dr John Beresford, bought a gram of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories for £285. Obtaining it was simple; they wrote to Sandoz on a piece of paper with a New York hospital letterhead, and claimed that they wanted to use it as a control drug in bone marrow experiments. The drug arrived in a small brown vial and, in order to make it a more manageable strength, Hollingshead mixed it with water and icing sugar and transferred it to a 16-ounce mayonnaise jar. Then he licked the spoon.

Fifteen hours later, when he came back down again, he knew that he had something unprecedented on his hands. He had a jar containing 5000 doses of a life-changing chemical, but no idea what to do with it. As he had first heard about LSD from Aldous Huxley, he called Huxley and asked for some advice. After a bit of thought, Huxley suggested that he contact Leary. ‘If there’s any one single investigator in America worth seeing,’ Huxley assured him, ‘it is Dr Leary. He is a splendid fellow’.¹¹

Leary invited Hollingshead to Harvard but initially declined his offer of a spoonful of LSD from his mayonnaise jar. This was partly because the drug had already got a dubious reputation from the CIA’s military experiments, and partly because he believed that one psychedelic was more or less the same as any other. But when he saw the faces of people who had taken a dose, his curiosity got the better of him. He took a trip from which he would never really return. It was much stronger than psilocybin.

‘It was the most shattering experience of my life,’ he would write later.¹² ‘It has been 20 years since that first LSD trip with Michael Hollingshead. I have never forgotten it. Nor has it been possible for me to return to the life I was leading before that session. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, or the social world quite so seriously. Since that time I have been acutely aware that everything I perceive, everything within and around me, is a creation of my own consciousness. And that everyone lives in a neural cocoon of private reality. From that day I have never lost the sense that I am an actor, surrounded by characters, props, and sets for the comic drama being written in my brain.’

Leary’s work had already started to create a slight separation, or dislocation, between his sense of self and the world at large. Over the years he had come to reject the notions of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and instead saw all behaviour patterns as nothing more than ‘games’ that individuals had been trained to play. He saw himself at the time as simply playing the ‘psychologist game’. His daughter was performing the ‘schoolgirl game’ just as, for example, a murderer would be performing the ‘murderer game’. This viewpoint is not intended to deny moral responsibility entirely, but it does tend to dissociate the ethical element from behaviour patterns. It also removes the sense of seriousness from people’s responsibilities, and makes it harder to take social and institutional rules seriously. They are, after all, merely part of the ‘game’. When a Harvard colleague joked that they should form a ‘Psychopath Club’ with those who followed this philosophy, Leary had replied that he genuinely was a psychopath.¹³ He told his colleagues that he had violated ‘every part of the American Psychological Society’s code of ethics’, particularly the part about not sleeping with patients.¹⁴

But it was only after acid that Leary felt himself became truly distinct from the everyday world as other people understood it. This is not to say that he retreated, ignored or dismissed the world of normal consciousness. He just no longer viewed it as being the ultimate reality He now knew that what he was really living in was not reality itself, but a model of reality created by his own brain. He knew that he had constructed this model, and that he was responsible for it. He also knew that he could change it.

It’s generally accepted that what we ‘know’ to be the real world is not the real world itself, but a model constructed by our brains based on our senses and our previous experience. The brain receives information from the five senses,¹⁵ which it collates in order to produce a mental model of the world, and it is this that we inhabit. This model differs from ‘true’ reality in many ways. We may look at a car and see that it is red, for example, but the car itself has no intrinsic colour. Our notion of ‘red’ comes from the way our visual system interprets the way some photons of light are reflected from the car while others are not. We may see a chair and believe that it is solid, yet science assures us that this churning soup of particles and energy is mostly empty space. It only appears to support our weight because what particles are there repel us. We also know that there is a lot of information ‘out there’ that we do not perceive, such as television signals, or the fluctuations in the magnetic fields that certain animals can use to navigate. However, we generally assume that while our model of reality is not perfect, it is at least reasonably accurate and consistent with the real world. We certainly believe that we are passively observing the world we live in, rather than participating selectively in its construction.

Increasingly, it seems that this is not the case. Research done in areas such as assessing the validity of eye-witness reports has shown that individuals are prone to see only what they expect to see, and can ignore anything that seems anomalous or contradictory to their beliefs. In a famous experiment at Harvard University, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris showed volunteers a recording of a basketball game and asked them to count the number of passes made. Around 40 per cent of volunteers completely failed to register that, early in the footage, a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court, remaining clearly visible for about 45 seconds. This concept was used by Douglas Adams in his novel Life, the Universe and Everything to create a spaceship that could land on the pitch of a busy sporting event and not be seen by the crowd. The brains of the observers, the spaceship’s owner knew, would reject the visual information that their eyes reported, regard it as ‘somebody else’s problem’, and refuse to acknowledge its existence.

Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experience, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own ‘world view’. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn’t changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the ‘true’ street in its entirety¹⁶ The same principal applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this is that the ‘world’ in which we live is not an objective, distinct environment, but a model constructed in our own image. In the words of Alan Watts, the influential writer on Eastern religions, ‘Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot’. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote back in 1860, ‘People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.’

Leary called these personal mental models ‘reality tunnels’.¹⁷Each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else, and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality. To be truly ‘free’ it is necessary to recognise this for, in the words of the Discordians, ‘Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts.’¹⁸ This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is profoundly important in understanding both Leary and his influence. It is the concept that explains the post-modern move away from the rational beliefs of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, which viewed reality as an absolute that could be understood through rational inquiry Enlightenment thinkers assumed that everyone operates in the same reality, but that, Leary believed, was just not true on a practical level. Concepts, relationships and events were now relative, and could only really be understood when analysed alongside the reality tunnels that created them. Our understanding of the physical world had been fundamentally changed when Albert Einstein recognised the importance of relativity, and now, Leary thought, it was time for the mental world to undergo a similar revolution.

Most people, however, go through life without ever questioning the validity of the world they inhabit, for these personal realities are convincing, seductive and consistently coherent. It is difficult to recognise their limitations, although the practice of meditation is useful for ‘switching off’ the brain’s participation in what is perceived. Not everyone would want to do this, of course. The realisation that what you believe to be ‘reality’ is in fact a flawed, personal construction can be a frightening idea, which can leave you feeling groundless, lost or alone. This explains the importance of religious, social and political movements, such as Christianity, environmentalism or communism. Movements like these attempt to ‘synchronise’ the individual realities of a large mass of people around accepted priorities and attitudes—a process that can be personally comforting.¹⁹

The idea that the world we are aware of is just an abstract of ‘true’ reality is fundamental to Leary’s later ideas, his behaviour and his sense of humour. The concept, however, existed for a long time before Tim.

It existed in the fifth century BC, in Plato’s claims that the world we are aware of is like the ‘shadows on the wall of a cave’. It is also a fundamental concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, where it is known as Maya, the world of illusions. But Leary was one of the first to approach the concept from an empirical, scientific viewpoint, and one of the first to use a synthetic chemical to see through the veils of Maya. As a result, he could make others experience this awareness without them undergoing years of religious training and practice. And unlike earlier mystics, who went to extraordinary lengths to achieve even a glimpse of the larger reality, he was also able to achieve this state whenever the mood took him. Indeed, he got into the habit of achieving it at least once a week.

Tim believed that LSD allowed you to reject a personal reality and imprint a different one. He argued that it was crazy to live in a reality that was negative and unrewarding because there were an infinite number of other ‘realities’ that the brain could use instead. This is the idea that underpins the majority of Leary’s philosophy. It is made explicit in the titles of some of his work, such as the LP You Can Be Anyone This Time Around or the book Changing My Mind, Among Others, and in remarks such as ‘You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind’. By understanding how to reprogram your brain, you could step out of one reality and into another. It was a theory that Leary would repeatedly put into practice. His personal reality and his associated persona had changed before, but slowly, under the natural evolution of time. He had been a choirboy, a soldier, a sophisticated professional and an academic, and his version of reality had been shaped differently in each of these guises. From now on, however, Tim would be changing his version of reality every few years, or even every few months. Ideas and beliefs that had been intrinsic and crucial to him would be casually swept away by changing circumstances. Should his present reality prove to be inadequate, he would simply adopt a new one. But this was not a technique that would be easy on those around him.

People who met Tim now could tell almost instantly that there was something different about him. Some found him cold and slightly sinister, even almost inhuman. The majority, though, were spellbound. ‘I knew, the day he walked in, I’d never met anyone like him,’ recalled one of his students.²⁰ ‘For a few years, I believed that he was the most creative human being that I had ever imagined,’ recalled his colleague and friend Richard Alpert, ‘He was head and shoulders above anybody else at Harvard or anyone else I’d ever met.’²¹ He seemed to have developed a knack of not imposing himself on people, but rather allowed those he met to project their own interpretation onto him. In this way he could be all things to all people—friend, scientist, charlatan, genius or irresponsible idiot. It is noticeable today, over 40 years later, that those who knew him at the time still describe him more as a legend than a real person. The impact he had on people has not faded with time. It may be tempting to blame, or thank, LSD for creating these reactions, but as his friend Lisa Bieberman once remarked, ‘To attribute Leary’s personality to acid is absurd, for there have been millions of LSD users, but only one Timothy Leary’ ²²

After LSD, any thought of toning down his work to appease his critics at Harvard went out of the window. From now on psilocybin was out. LSD was the only tool strong enough for him. The fact that the use of this more controversial drug would only inflame his critics further was not a concern. Leary believed that LSD was more important than Harvard, and he wanted everyone to know it.

One problem the research team faced was that the existing medical terminology for ‘abnormal’ states was overwhelmingly negative. The language that typified the LSD reports emanating from the CIA and their partners used terms such as ‘manic’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘psychotic’. The researchers who were actually taking the drug themselves began to search for words that better described the bliss and awe that they were experiencing. When the scope of psychology proved inadequate for their needs, they found themselves drawn more and more to referencing Eastern religions, which had spent many thousands of years attempting to describe these ineffable states. This seemed a natural progression because those who had done most to popularise Eastern thought during the 1950s, the Beats, were the very same people who were participating in the research.

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.’ ²³

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’.²⁴ 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.²⁵

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?’²⁶

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.²⁷Initially 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.²⁸ 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 1964.²⁹ 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.³⁰

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’.³¹

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.’ 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.