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Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard at the tail end of 1959. It was a good time to draw a line under the past and focus on the future. The 1960s were about to begin.

His new position called for a new outfit, so he visited a Harvard Square tailor and emerged wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a button-down shirt. With his greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and hearing aid, he looked every inch a stereotypical East Coast academic. The only clue to his rebellious instincts were the white tennis shoes that he wore everywhere. He moved into a nearby hotel and enrolled the children in yet another school.

He soon settled into life at the Harvard Center for Personality Research, and his classes made an immediate impact on the students. There was some suspicion among the more conservative members of the faculty about his ideas, but he was undeniably interesting and it was possible that he was on to something important. He made friends quickly and was soon part of a drinking group called the White Hand Drinking Society. Evenings were spent hanging out in Harvard Square bars, discussing work and generally putting the world to rights. The return to Massachusetts also brought him near to his childhood home, so he was able to spend more time rebuilding his relationship with his mother. She was horrified when she discovered that her grandchildren had never once attended mass, but at least Tim’s current position gave her cause for pride.

Tim got into the habit of returning to his small office on Divinity Avenue to read and drink wine late at night, after his children were asleep. In this relaxed atmosphere he began to attract visits from eager and curious graduate students. Tim was always welcoming and willing to give time to their questions and concerns. It was during this time that he met Assistant Professor Richard Alpert, a man also prone to late-night hours. Alpert was 10 years younger than Leary, and was shorter with a fuller build and a round, friendly face. Like Leary, he was ambitious, a trait inherited from his extremely wealthy family. His father was a noted Massachusetts lawyer who had previously been president of the New Haven Railroad, and Richard had grown up in an atmosphere of money and success. He was a warm, fast-talking, eminently likeable psychologist who was a big hit with Tim’s children. When Tim decided to spend the summer vacation in Mexico, Richard agreed to join him. Their respective methods of journeying south said much about their different personalities. Tim was planning to make the journey in an old Ford that he had just bought, a plan that struck those who had seen the car as being both dangerous and extraordinarily optimistic. Richard tackled the journey with a little more style. He bought a small aeroplane and flew himself there.

That holiday took place in a Spanish-style villa at Cuernavaca. It was an idyllic environment, with a long veranda, terrace, swimming pool and a lush green lawn surrounded by ahuehuete trees and colourful flowering vines. Tim’s daughter Susan spent the summer with friends in Berkeley, but Tim and his son Jack were visited by many friends and colleagues, including Professor McClelland, Richard Alpert and an old friend and drinking buddy from graduate school in Berkeley, Frank Barron. Frank had been instrumental in setting up Tim’s meeting with Professor McClelland in Florence, which led to the offer of work at Harvard. Tim had returned the favour by recommending him for a similar position at Harvard soon after he had arrived.

When he visited Tim in Italy in 1959, Frank had been talking enthusiastically about some ‘magic mushrooms’ that he had obtained from a Mexican psychiatrist. Tim’s response to this was fairly standard for a psychologist in the 1950s. He was disconcerted and a little embarrassed when his previously rational friend suddenly began raving about mystical states and visions, and he warned him that he was in danger of losing his scientific credibility if he ‘babbled this way’ publicly.¹

The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, the leading investment bank, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society. Together with his wife Valentina, he had travelled the world investigating the importance of toadstools in tribal society. He had spent two years in Mexico investigating an intriguing report by anthropologists who, in 1936, witnessed a ‘sacred mushroom’ ceremony in a remote Mexican village. This report seemed to provide evidence that a mushroom cult, believed to date back 4000 years, was still in existence. This cult was centred on the ingestion of a mushroom called teonanacatl, or ‘God’s flesh’. These ceremonies had been driven underground following the arrival of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The cult had been dismissed as myth, and botanists had claimed that these fungi simply didn’t exist.

The Life article, a 17-page feature in the magazine’s ‘Great Adventure’ series, detailed how the Wassons had travelled to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they eventually met a curandera, or medicine woman, from the teonanacatl cult. Being included in a ceremony wasn’t easy, for it was only permitted to enquire about the mushrooms ‘when evening and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in the hand and talking in a whisper’. The mushrooms themselves had to be picked by virgins before sunrise at the time of the new moon.² But eventually the Wassons’ perseverance paid off, and they became the first white people in recorded history to sample God’s flesh. Wasson’s sense of detached scientific observation ‘soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms’, he later wrote, and following a night spent on the dirt floor of a remote hut, with his mind flying over incredible landscapes observing wondrous visions, ‘the word “ecstasy” took on real meaning’.³

The mushrooms grew on a line of volcanic peaks just north of the villa where Tim and his friends spent the days lounging in the sunshine by the pool. A frequent visitor to the villa, Gerhart Braun from the University of Mexico, thought that he could obtain some of these fabled mushrooms. Did Tim want to try them? The stories about the mushrooms were undeniably intriguing, but the idea of taking them was a little frightening. Tim’s life had turned a corner and seemed to be on the right track, and there was no reason to jeopardise what he now had with the risk of madness. Yet there was also a professional curiosity involved. Frank had claimed that these strange fungi might play a role in their search for meaningful behaviour change, and this fitted with Leary’s suspicion that the ‘transactional element’ between doctor and patient that he had been searching for might only be possible with a chemical key—a drug.

And he was on vacation. He agreed to try them.

Braun and several friends headed off to the old Indian town of San Pedro, near the volcano Toluca. Here he met a curandera known as Crazy Juana, and by the side of a church away from the market she sold him a bag of the mushrooms. They ate them the following Saturday.

They were black and mouldy. They smelt rotten and damp and tasted bitter and stringy. Sitting in swimming costumes by the side of the pool, all but two of the party joined in. They ate six or seven each, and sat back to see what would happen. One abstainer, a friend of a friend named Bruce, was appointed as the official observer and was given the job of recording the reactions of the rest. After half an hour the effects of the drug started, and the world just came alive. Tim looked at Bruce, who was diligently writing down his observations, and was struck by the realisation that Bruce had no idea at all what he was observing. He found this realisation incredibly funny, and the earnestness and detachment of the scientific community suddenly appeared to him as ludicrous ignorance. How could they even begin to understand something that they were so separated from? The giggles kept coming and soon Tim was engulfed in uncontrollable laughter. Gathering his wits together, he saw to it that the children went into town to catch a movie, and headed indoors for a lie down. Then the visions really started, his mind gently split open and he was away.

When normality returned, Tim was a changed man. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered the entire world. Time and space had been different, and he had understood the world with a clarity that he had never previously believed possible. ‘In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,’ he later wrote.⁴ Could this be the key to making genuine changes to the mind? And had he stumbled on a method to explore the methodologies he argued for in The Existential Transaction? If a psychologist took the drug with a patient he would no longer be an uninvolved observer in therapy. The role of the doctor would become that of a guide, reassuring the patient and steering them towards understanding the causes of their destructive behaviour.

But he had experienced something else as well, something inexplicable. He had felt himself slipping back down what can only be described as his genetic history. He had been able to stop and feel each life on his evolutionary ladder. He had mentally travelled back through the aeons, from the time of the simplest land animals to that of life in the oceans, from times of jungles and great ferns back to the start of life on earth. It was a powerful, vivid experience, and it differed from a dream in one important respect. Dreams are imaginative jumbles of experience based on past events and memories. But where had his mushroom visions come from? He had no previous experience to account for the things he saw and felt. The brain had done something that, according to all the literature, was simply impossible.

How should he respond to the experience? Tim could still remember his own reactions to Frank’s admission of his mushroom use, and he knew that he would receive the same uncomfortable reaction when he talked about what had happened. But now he knew that the effect was real, and if all existing theories of the mind were unable to explain it, surely it was the duty of a scientist to investigate further? Surely any scientific model of the mind had to include these inexplicable experiences if it was to be comprehensive and accurate?

It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the pivotal moment in Timothy Leary’s life. He had a new sense of purpose, as if his life’s work had just begun. From that day on he dedicated himself to understanding the psychedelic experience, never doubting the intrinsic value of the experience or the importance of chemicals in exploring the mind. But somehow he had to convince the rest of the world. And the only way he could do that, it was clear, was to persuade other people to try them.

The return to Harvard was an adventure. Tim and Jack accepted Richard’s offer of a flight back in his Cessna. ‘I didn’t tell him I didn’t have a licence yet,’ recalled Alpert later;⁵ ‘that would have scared him, I thought.’ Some fundamental flying errors led to the threat of arrest at a Mexican airport, a situation that could have become more serious if it had been discovered that Jack was smuggling an iguana into America, and Richard was smuggling two pounds of grass. Leary’s response was calm and unconcerned. ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ he suggested, before smoothing things over with a bribe of $20. This was the start of a pattern that would emerge over the next few years. Whenever Tim and Richard were together, something unlikely would invariably happen and they would always end up having an adventure.

Once safely back in Harvard, Tim began to establish what became known as the Harvard Psychedelics Research Program. His first task was to obtain a supply of the mushrooms, and fortunately Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland had isolated the active component, which was called psilocybin. It was a simple matter to order as much as he wanted, and soon little pink pills replaced the foul mushrooms in his research.

Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments. ‘This investigation sets out to determine the factors—personal, social—which produce optimally positive reactions to psilocybin,’ it stated. ‘Positive reactions’ were defined as ‘pleasant, ecstatic, non-anxious experiences, broadening of awareness and increased insight’. It also detailed the study’s ‘ethical and interpersonal principles, which stress collaboration, openness [and] humanistic interchange between researcher and subjects’. These included participants alternating between the roles of observer and subject, running the sessions in ‘pleasant, spacious, aesthetic surroundings’, and the right of participants to select their own dosage of psilocybin. The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn how to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal. In October 1960 Leary and his colleagues started work.

Setting up the research was stepping into uncharted territory. There were no textbooks or papers for them to follow, as no academics had attempted to do exactly what they were setting out to do. But luck was on their side, for the perfect guide arrived in Massachusetts at exactly the right time. It was a man with one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century. He was the British novelist Aldous Huxley Huxley found fame in the 1920s with books including Point Counter Point and Crome Yellow, but he is best known for his prophetic novel Brave New World (1932). This was a vision of a nightmarish future that, with the benefit of hindsight, is far more accurate and uncomfortable than other acclaimed dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984. Unlike 1984, which shows a nation oppressed by a totalitarian government, Brave New World predicted a civilisation that willingly enslaves itself in order to keep itself supplied with diverting but ultimately meaningless luxuries. As well as its observations about human nature and the political process, the book also predicted many scientific and social revolutions, and everything from genetic engineering to sexual liberation and middle-class narcotic use was prophesied with remarkable accuracy The relevance of Brave New World grows with each passing year, and with it the understanding of just how perceptive Huxley was. It is difficult to believe that the book was written as long ago as 1932.

Although some believe that Huxley was given a dose of the psychedelic cactus peyote by the occultist Aleister Crowley in 1930,⁶ it seems more likely that his first drug experience was in 1953, when he took mescaline. He tried LSD shortly afterwards and detailed these experiences in the books The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which have since become classics of drug literature. It was to these books that Leary turned after returning from Mexico, in an effort to understand what he had experienced. And as luck would have it, Huxley, now aged 66, was at that time a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a short distance from Harvard. Tim wrote to him and asked his advice in setting up his Psychedelic Research Program, and they met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. In one of those happy coincidences that can easily be interpreted as a good omen, the soup of the day was mushroom. They both ordered it.

Huxley was delighted that these drugs were going to be studied at Harvard, for he understood well enough the controversial nature of the research, and knew that it would take an institution with the stature of Harvard for the work to be taken seriously. It was also a pleasing coincidence that Leary’s faculty had been established by William James, who in 1902 had written The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book about his experiments with the mind-changing drug nitrous oxide.

Huxley introduced Tim to Dr Humphry Osmond, the British psychologist who had coined the word ‘psychedelic’ ⁷ and used mescaline to treat alcoholics in Canada. Osmond later recalled his first impressions of Leary. ‘It was the night of the Kennedy election. Tim was wearing his gray flannel suit and his crew cut. And we had a very interesting discussion with him. That evening after we left, Huxley said: “What a nice fellow he is!” And then he remarked how wonderful it was to think that this was where it was going to be done—at Harvard. He felt that psychedelics would be good for the academy. Whereupon I replied, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” Huxley replied, “You might well be right. Isn’t that, after all, what we want?”⁸

Osmond would later describe this impression as ‘a monumental ill judgement’.

Huxley participated in psilocybin sessions and gave advice. He warned Tim that what he was doing was not going to be easy and that the opposition would be great. His work had implications for social change and it had the potential to overturn existing scientific paradigms. But there were also religious implications. He was, after all, breaking the original taboo, for mankind had been forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The Wassons had spent years studying ancient cults and visionary religions for any hint of mushrooms or secret potions of unknown recipes that were given to initiates. They had found a considerable amount of evidence from all corners of the globe, and in later books Wasson claimed that psychoactive fungi had caused the emergence of religion in prehistory.⁹

This is undoubtedly a controversial idea, but it is one that has received surprisingly little criticism from the scientific community. This is arguably because that community lacks many other alternative theories to explain the emergence of the religious impulse, and because it provides a physical, chemical cause that is backed by strong historical evidence. It is hardly an idea, however, that is accepted by large, conservative religions. Such religions tend to preach against drug use and are offended by the suggestion that the visions of their founders were in any way chemically induced.

Huxley advised Tim to give the drug to powerful and important people. He said that Leary should run sessions for artists, intellectuals, business leaders and politicians. In this way he would cultivate some powerful friends who could protect his work and spread the word through important networks. Contrary to public belief, psychedelic experiences were not new. They had been around since the dawn of time, but only among an elite class of priests, scholars and the rich. Secrecy, laws and privilege had been used to keep them from the general population, who were allowed only simple stimulants such as alcohol. There was a reason for this. These substances were powerful. Widespread use could threaten a functioning, stable civilisation.

Like Tim, Huxley wanted psychedelics to be better known and understood. He thought that if they were used correctly, they offered humankind a way out of its self-destructive cycles of war and oppression, and this could only be done if powerful men understood them. But it had to be done carefully. He told Tim that because of his charm and respectability, he was the perfect person to ‘front’ such a campaign. This idea appealed strongly to Leary’s ego, but he protested, and questioned whether he was already too old. Huxley replied that this might well be the case, but ultimately he was the best candidate they had.¹⁰

Where could Leary find leading artists and opinion formers who would be prepared to take his mushroom pills? The best candidates were the leading lights of the Beat Generation, few of whom were unfamiliar with drugs and all of whom were eager for new experiences. Tim ran psychedelic sessions for well-known writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs.

The poet Allen Ginsberg was an early convert who did much to help the Psychedelic Research Program. Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926. His father was a poet and his mother was active in the Communist Party USA. As a young boy he reported spontaneous visionary experiences, and this led to his later interest in Buddhism and mystical states. He was influenced by writers such as William Blake and William Carlos Williams, and developed a style of poetry reminiscent of the rhythms of jazz. His best-known work is Howl, which was banned for obscenity shortly after its publication in 1956. The ban caused outrage among supporters of the First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of speech, and was eventually overturned. By this time Ginsberg had become a prominent advocate of left-wing politics, and was considered to be a threat to internal security by the FBI.

Ginsberg approached Leary after hearing about his work from a New York psychiatrist, and in December 1960 he arrived at Harvard with his partner Peter Orlovsky, eager to experience this amazing new drug. They took the drug one evening at Leary’s house and had a profound experience, during which Ginsberg prophetically realised that it was time to start ‘a peace and love movement’. He then ran naked around the house, attempted to get Khrushchev and Kennedy on the telephone, and announced to the operator that he was God. He thoughtfully spelt this out to the operator to ensure that there was no confusion.

After the trip Ginsberg was as committed as Huxley to supporting the programme, but his advice was the opposite of Huxley’s. Drugs like this had to be wrenched away from the self-serving elites and scattered amongst the masses, he argued. Who could say that ordinary people did not have the right to experience visionary bliss, to have the veil of illusion removed and know the divine for themselves? After all, were they not Americans? Did the egalitarian foundations of their country count for nothing? It was Leary’s job, Ginsberg argued, to make sure everybody knew about what he was doing, and had access to the drugs in order to do the same themselves.

Over the next few months, while Leary and Alpert tried to assess these two conflicting arguments, they ran psilocybin sessions for over 200 colleagues, graduate students and volunteers. Typically they would take the drug with the volunteers and reassure and calm them if necessary They would also train suitable volunteers as guides to run sessions themselves. The pair made a great team, and their enthusiasm and credentials enchanted everyone they met as they travelled the country giving seminars, workshops and lectures. All the initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but what Tim really needed was some undeniable, objective method to measure these subjective effects that he and his study were reporting. He needed hard data, a set of statistics that would withstand the peer review of the scientific community and convince even the most cynical audience that psilocybin was a breakthrough in behavioural research. He also wanted to satisfy the second part of his Existential Transaction: the concept that psychology should leave the clinics and enter real-world scenarios.

The solution was undeniably radical. Leary and Alpert set up a programme to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. Their aim was to lower the recidivism rate, which at the time was running at 70 per cent. If less than 70 per cent of the inmates who were given psilocybin reoffended after release, Leary would be able to show that the drug was an effective tool for convict rehabilitation. But this was not a plan that was without its political risks and dangers. If one prisoner who had been given drugs by the programme killed or raped after release, the press would have a field day. Tim went to work and set about persuading the warden and psychiatrist of Concord State Prison to approve the plan. Both were receptive, and the psychiatrist was put on the Harvard payroll as a consultant. It would be his job to arrange the volunteers.

In March 1961 Leary entered the prison, clutching a small supply of psilocybin. He was accompanied by two graduate students, Gunther Weil and Ralph Metzner,¹¹ and their aim was to spend the day tripping with six prisoners who were nearing release. The prisoners would use the drug to gain and share insights into why they had committed crime, and they had also agreed to participate in a support programme after release.

Tim took the drug first in order to gain the inmates’ trust. When the effects kicked in, he started to feel terrible. A windowless room in the heart of a penitentiary was not a location that was conducive to a positive trip. They had brought a record player and books of classical art with them in the hope of improving their surroundings, but they could not hide the fact that the atmosphere, and the company, was oppressive. Tim was conscious of how ugly and repulsive the bank robber at his side appeared to him. Nervously, he tried to speak, and they asked each other how they felt. The drug caused Leary to respond truthfully, so he told the prisoner that he was afraid of him. The prisoner was surprised because he was also feeling afraid of Tim.

‘Why are you scared of me?’ the convict asked.

‘Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?’

‘I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.’ They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.¹²

The Prisoner Rehabilitation Program continued and expanded. It was conducted in as open and public a manner as possible, and many visitors to Harvard found themselves invited to observe sessions. Word got out amongst the inmates, and the list of volunteer prisoners expanded rapidly. When the results eventually started to come in during the following year, they were astonishing. They appeared to show that recidivism amongst volunteers who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70 per cent to 10 per cent.¹³

It was almost too good to be true. The implications were enormous, and if it continued, prison populations could be drastically reduced. But the reaction from the academic community was notably muted. Few people were comfortable with the idea of psychedelics, and results such as these forced them onto the academic agenda. Not everyone was prepared to accept this. To the uninitiated, there is something fundamentally frightening about the idea of psychedelic trips, and while the idea of the psychologist taking the drug may have been intellectually acceptable in theory, in practice it seemed wholly irresponsible. Tim had already been gaining political enemies on campus because his work had been attracting more than its fair share of the brightest graduate students. Now he was reporting results that trod on a lot of toes.

It was never claimed that the psilocybin in itself was a ‘cure’. It was part of a system of support and therapy. As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin, the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life’s problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions. The prison programme involved an extensive support system to help the patients after release in order to help them restructure their lives following the insights of the mushroom sessions. The team helped the ex-inmates to find jobs, worked with their parole offices, and Tim even let prisoners stay at his home while they were being housed. Critics claimed that the success of the experiment was due to the extra support and not the drug. A follow-up study 20 years later found that the recidivism decline had not been significant after all, and that the original study used misleading figures in the base-rate comparison.¹⁴ It did find, however, that there was other evidence for personality change. Behaviour change, whether in convicts or psychotherapy patients, is notoriously hard to prove, but it does seem that the use of psilocybin in this particular support programme produced results that warranted further study.¹⁵

Leary’s next project did little to calm his critics. Dr Walter Pahnke from the Harvard Divinity School approached Tim in order to do a thesis on a comparison between the psychedelic experience and ‘true’ religious ecstasy. In what came to be known as the Good Friday Miracle, 30 graduate students and trained psychedelic guides arrived in the small chapel of Boston University for an Easter service. Each took a small pill. Half of the pills were nothing more than placebos and half were psilocybin. The experiment was run under strict ‘double blind’ conditions, in that no one present was aware who had been given which pill, but it soon became obvious as to who had taken the psychedelic and who hadn’t. The Easter service and the church surroundings soon had the drugged students wandering round with looks of revelation and bliss across their faces, shouting out praise to the Lord. Analysis of the volunteers’ reactions by divinity students found no differences between the experiences of 90 per cent of the tripping volunteers and that of the saints and other Christian visionaries. Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances.¹⁶ Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.¹⁷The implication here was that a state previously considered a blessing from God could be induced by man more or less at will. The Church might not be able to achieve this, but Leary’s magic pill could. He couldn’t have offended people any more if he tried.

Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. Few people were prepared to accept that a chemical-induced Gnostic revelation was comparable with the ‘real thing’. Leary was vocal in his conviction that all criticism of his work was ignorant, groundless and came from those with no experience of the subject in question, an attitude that would not help him politically. He regarded any attack as the result of the ‘Semmelweis effect’, which claims that the opposition to a scientific discovery is directly proportional to its importance.

This effect is named after the nineteenth-century obstetrician who massively reduced the mortality rate in surgery by insisting that doctors wash their hands, but who was ridiculed and cast out by his colleagues for his troubles. Semmelweis was eventually driven to madness and suicide.

At this point what Leary needed was a period of calm to reduce the political pressure and consider his next steps carefully. He did not get it. Instead his life was blown apart by a substance far stronger and dramatically more controversial than psilocybin. In November 1961 Dr Leary was introduced to LSD.