PART 2:ACID DREAMS: UNDER THE MUSHROOM,OVER THE RAINBOW,PREACHING LSD

Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, 
The Sixties, and Beyond 
By Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain
3 

Under The Mushroom 

Over The Rainbow 

Manna From Harvard 

Henry Luce, president of Time-Life, was a busy man during the Cold War. As the preeminent voice of Eisenhower, Dulles, and Pax Americana, he encouraged his correspondents to collaborate with the CIA, and his publishing empire served as a longtime propaganda asset for the Agency. But Luce managed to find the time to experiment with LSD,not for medical reasons, but simply to experience the drug and glean whatever pleasures and insights it might afford. An avid fan of psychedelics, he turned on a half-dozen times in the late 1950's and early 1960's under the supervision of Dr. Sidney Cohen. On one occasion the media magnate claimed he talked to God on the golf course and found that the Old Boy was pretty much on top of things. During another trip the tone-deaf publisher is said to have heard music so enchanting that he walked into a cactus garden and began conducting a phantom orchestra. 

Dr. Cohen, attached professionally to UCLA and the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles, also turned on Henry's wife, Clare Boothe Luce, and a number of other influential Americans. "Oh, sure, we all took acid. It was a creative group my husband and I and Huxley and (Christopher] Isherwood," recalled Mrs. Luce, who was, by all accounts, the grande dame of postwar American politics. (More recently she served as a member of President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees covert operations conducted by the CIA.) LSD was fine by Mrs. Luce as long as it remained strictly a drug for the doctors and their friends in the ruling class. But she didn't like the idea that others might also want to partake of the experience. "We wouldn't want everyone doing too much of a good thing," she explained. 

By this time, however, psychedelic drugs already had a certain notoriety, largely due to favorable reports in Luce's publishing outlets. In May 1957 Life magazine ran a story on the discovery of the "magic mushroom" as part of its Great Adventure series. Written by R. Gordon Wasson, the seventeen-page spread, complete with color photos, was laudatory in every way. Wasson, a vice-president of J. P. Morgan and Company, pursued a lifelong interest in mushrooms as a personal hobby. He and his wife, Valentina, journeyed all over the world, treading a unique path through the back roads of history in an effort to learn about the role of toadstools in primitive societies. Their travels took them to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they met a medicine woman who agreed to serve them teonanacati, or "God's flesh," as the divine mushrooms were called. As he chewed the bitter fungus, Wasson was determined to resist its effects so as to better observe the ensuing events. But as he explained to the readers of Life, his resolve "soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms."

We were never more awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. They evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens . The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses. 

The visions lasted through the night as Wasson lay on the floor of a tiny hut enraptured by God's flesh. "For the first time," he wrote, "the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind." 

Wasson's account constituted nothing less than a journalistic breakthrough. A mass audience was introduced to the mysterious world of chemical hallucinogens, and soon hundreds of people started flocking to Mexico to find their own curandero. At the same time Dr. Albert Hofmann conducted a chemical analysis of the divine mushroom at Sandoz Laboratories. He extracted the active ingredients and synthesized a new compound: psilocybin. Upon learning of Hofmann's achievement, the CIA immediately procured samples from Sandoz and forwarded the material to Dr. Harris Isbell at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital, where it was tested on drug addicts. 

Among those whose interest was piqued by Wasson's article in Life was a young professor named Timothy Leary. At the time of Wasson's groundbreaking explorations, Leary was pursuing a successful career as a clinical psychologist. Between 1954 and 1959 he was director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. He published extensively in scientific journals and established himself as a rising star in the field of behavioral psychology. He wrote a widely acclaimed psychology textbook and devised a personality test called "The Leary," which was used by the CIA, among other organizations, to test prospective employees.

Leary's work culminated in an appointment as a lecturer at Harvard University, where students and professors had for years served as guinea pigs for CIA and military funded LSD experiments. His first semester at Harvard was relatively quiet compared to what lay in store; he taught his classes and collaborated on another psychology textbook. While all seemed well outwardly, Leary was beginning to have second thoughts about the career he had charted for himself in the charmed circle of academe. He was mired in a mid-life crisis stemming from two failed marriages; his first wife had committed suicide. The turning point came in the summer of 1960 while Leary, then thirty-nine years old, was vacationing at a sunny villa in Cuernavaca, Mexico. A friend procured a handful of magic mushrooms from an old Indian woman, and after a bit of prodding Leary washed them down with a few slugs of Carta Blanca. At the time Leary had not even smoked marijuana. Like many who experimented with psychedelics, he found that his first trip had a profound impact on his way of viewing the world. "It was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life," he wrote later. "I discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil all lie inside my body, outside my mind." The transcendent implications of that initial journey into inner space convinced him that the normal mind was a "static, repetitive circuit." Leary reevaluated his task as a psychologist; from then on he would dedicate his efforts to exploring substances that hinted at other realities and a new conception of the human psyche. 

Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality Assessments section of the O.S.S during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance. Leary had obtained a supply from Sandoz, which distributed the new drug to researchers free of charge. 

Among those most impressed by Leary's research project was Richard Alpert, an assistant professor of education and psychology at Harvard. He and Leary became partners and together set out to investigate the emotional and creative effects of the mushroom pill. At first glance they were an unlikely, team, given their contrasting personalities. Alpert, the son of a wealthy New England lawyer, was ten years younger and obsessed with "making it" in the academic world. He seemed to be well on his way, having acquired all the accouterments of success,the sports car, the cashmere sweaters, the cocktail parties, a faculty post at a prestigious university. The last thing Alpert wanted was to rock the boat and jeopardize his career. 

Leary, on the other hand, always had a rebellious streak in him. His mother had dreams of his being a priest, and his father wanted him to become a career military officer. Neither wish came true. Leary passed up an opportunity to attend a Catholic seminary and dropped out of West Point after committing a rules infraction that led to the "silent treatment" (a form of ostracism) by the other cadets for nine months. He later enrolled at Alabama University to study psychology, only to be expelled for getting caught in a girls' dormitory. After a brief stint in the service Leary resumed his psychological studies, earning a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. And now he was ready for another tussle with the establishment. In his own words Leary was "handsome, clean-cut, witty, confident, charismatic, and in that inert culture unusually creative."

While drawing up plans for a psilocybin experiment, Leary and Alpert consulted two essays by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. By coincidence Huxley was in the area as a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. The elderly scholar was brought into the project, first as an adviser and then as a participant in a psilocybin experiment. He and Leary took the drug together, and after the session they spoke about what to do with this "philosopher's stone." Huxley felt the best way to bring about vast changes in society was to offer the experience to the talented, the well-born, the intelligent rich, and others in positions of influence. 

When Dr. Humphry Osmond passed through Boston, Huxley took him to meet Leary. It was the night of the Kennedy election. "We rode out to his place," Osmond remembered, "and Timothy 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?' Aldous replied, 'You may well be right. Isn't that, after all, what we want?'" 

Leary was a relative latecomer to the psychedelic research scene, but right from the start he and his cohorts made no bones about where they were coming from. "We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness," Leary asserted. "We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia nor the visionary state as model psychosis." 

The first formal experiment conducted by Leary's group was a pioneering venture in criminal psychology. Psilocybin was given to thirty-two inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security prison, to determine whether the drug would help prisoners change their ways, thereby lowering the recidivism rate. At least one member of Leary's research team took psilocybin with the prisoners while another observer stayed straight for the entire session. The pilot study proved successful in the short term; only 25% of those who took the drug ended up in jail again, as compared to the normal rate of 80%. 

Leary's research methodology was quite different from that of the CIA's Dr. Harris Isbell, who administered various hallucinogens, including psilocybin and LSD, to inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital. Some were kept high for six weeks at a stretch. These studies were not designed to rehabilitate criminals; on the contrary, Isbell and the CIA were interested in drugging people to gather more data on the disruptive potential of mind-altering substances. Leary rejected this manipulative approach, believing that research should be conducted with subjects rather than on them. All of the Concord inmates were briefed beforehand on the effects of the drug, and Leary encouraged his test subjects to provide input and criticism during every phase of the experiment.

Another aspect of Leary's research focused on the relationship between drug-induced and naturally occurring religious experiences. In an unusual experiment he sought to determine whether the transcendent experiences reported during psychedelic sessions were similar to the mystical experiences described in various holy scriptures and reported by saints, prophets, and religious teachers throughout the ages. Although university officials refused to sponsor the experiment, Leary and his assistant, Walter Pahnke, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, proceeded to administer psilocybin to ten theology students and professors in the setting of a Good Friday service, while ten others were given placebos. It was a "double-blind" experiment in that neither Leary nor his subjects knew who was getting the mushroom pill and who was part of the control group. The results of the study were dramatic. Nine out of ten psilocybin recipients reported having an intense religious experience, but only one person from the control group could say the same. In his doctoral dissertation Pahnke concluded that the experiences described by those who had taken the drug were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with" the classical mystical experience. 

"The Miracle at Marsh Chapel," as the Good Friday experiment came to be known, generated a highly charged discussion concerning the authenticity of "chemical" or "instant" mysticism. Some religious scholars, such as Walter Houston Clark, professor of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, supported Leary's contention that with the proper set and setting psychedelics could be used to produce mystical states of consciousness almost at will. These drugs were said to offer not only a means for enhancing spiritual sensitivity; they also opened up the possibility of bringing the religious experience into the laboratory, where it could be scrutinized and perhaps even explained in scientific terms. 

This prospect was not greeted with hosannas by orthodox religious teachers, who denigrated the drug experience as a less genuine form of revelation. Psychedelic advocates countered that the apparent ease with which the mystical experience could be triggered by drugs did not negate its spiritual validity. On the contrary, they believed that the high incidence of drug-related religious phenomena, even in cases where an exceptional set and setting were lacking, stemmed from the fact that on a fundamental level the human mind is connected with the Infinite; psychedelics simply made manifest this basic truth. According to Leary, the personal background of the subject did not matter. "You can be a convict or a college professor," he declared. "You'll still have a mystical, transcendental experience that may change your life." 

Chemical Crusaders 

In addition to a series of formal studies, Leary's group also held psychedelic sessions on their own outside the university. A clinical setting was rejected in favor of the comfortable surroundings of a private apartment where subjects could relax and listen to music by candlelight. Graduate students and selected individuals from the arts were invited to participate in these off-campus experiments, and the vast majority reported positive experiences. "Anyone who wanted to take the voyage was welcome to come along," Leary said.

In December 1960 Allen Ginsberg(L) and Peter Orlovsky(R) arrived at Leary's house in Newton. Although Ginsberg was a veteran of psychedelic trips, he had never tried psilocybin, so when the opportunity presented itself he and Orlovsky jumped at it. The environment provided by Leary was much more congenial than the research institute in Palo Alto where Ginsberg had taken LSD the previous year. After swallowing the mushroom pills, Ginsberg became slightly nauseous, but his initial queasiness subsided as the drug took command of his being. He and Orlovsky were completely overwhelmed. They took off their clothes and padded around the house, a supernatural gleam in their eyes. Ginsberg was inundated by a rush of messianic feelings. "We're going to teach people to stop hating. Start a peace and love movement," he triumphantly proclaimed. There he stood in Leary's living room, a squinting prophet (he had removed his spectacles) ready to march through the streets stark naked and preach the coming of a new age. 

Leary was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of one of his test subjects wandering around in public without any clothes in the middle of the winter. He convinced Ginsberg this was not the best tactic. But the beat poet was still full of fire. He wanted to get Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Mao Tse-tung on the phone in a cosmic rap session that would rid them of their petty hangups about warfare. This being impractical, he decided to call Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, the bible of the beat generation. Kerouac was then living with his mother in Northport, Massachusetts. When the operator came on the line, Ginsberg identified himself as God wanting to talk to Kerouac. He repeated his name, spelling it out: G-O-D. When he realized he didn't have Kerouac's number, he shuffled through his address book and tried again. This time he reached Kerouac and insisted that he take the mushroom pills. "I can't leave my mother," Kerouac replied. Ginsberg urged him to bring his mother. Kerouac said he'd take a rain check. 

As Ginsberg and Orlovsky were coming down from the six-hour psilocybin high, they put on robes and sat around the kitchen table sipping steamed milk and talking with Leary about the pills. Ginsberg had some forthright ideas about what to do with the synthetic mushroom. As far as he was concerned, psilocybin had vast implications far beyond the world of medicine; psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind and ushering in a new millennium and therefore no one had the right to keep them from the average citizen. 

Whereas Huxley had suggested turning on opinion leaders, Ginsberg, the quintessential egalitarian, wanted everyone to have the opportunity to take mind- expanding drugs. His plan was to tell everything, to disseminate as much information as possible. The time was ripe to launch a psychedelic crusade and what better place to start than Harvard University, the alma mater of president-elect John F. Kennedy? Leary seemed ideally suited to lead such a campaign. A respected academic, he had short hair, wore button-down shirts, and took his role as a scientist quite seriously. How ironic, Ginsberg noted, "that the very technology stereotyping our consciousness and desensitizing our perceptions should throw up its own antidote. Given such historic Comedy, who should emerge from Harvard University but the one and only Dr. Leary, a respectable human being, a worldly man faced with the task of a Messiah".

Ginsberg's vision of a historic movement that would transform human consciousness struck a responsive chord in Leary. "We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard," the LSD doctor recalled, "believing that it was time (after the shallow and nostalgic fifties) for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed; knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, and that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum." Leary felt that the limited vision of reality prevailing in modem society was partly attributable to the dominant drugs, alcohol and coffee. Change the drugs, and a change of heart would naturally follow: "Politics, religion, economics, social structure, are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical." 

The task that lay before them was formidable. Ginsberg pulled out his little black address book and began reeling off the names of people they could turn on: painters, poets, publishers, musicians, and so on. In addition to being one of the most important poets of his time, Ginsberg was a cultural ambassador of sorts. He traveled in various circles, and his contacts were international in scope. He would carry the message to everyone he knew. 

Ginsberg was off and running. He returned to New York armed with a stash of psilocybin. At the Five Spot in Greenwich Village he gave the mushroom pills to Theolonius Monk, the great jazz pianist. A few days later Ginsberg dropped by Monk's apartment to check on the results. Monk peered out from behind a crack in the door, smiled, and asked if he had anything stronger. Ginsberg also turned on Dizzy Gillespie, who was evidently quite pleased by the gesture. "Oh yeah," he laughed, "anything that gets you high." 

In a sense it was Ginsberg's way of returning a historical favor; the jazz musicians had given marijuana to the beats, and now the beats were turning the jazz cats on to psychedelics. Word of the new drugs spread quickly through the jazz scene, and numerous musicians, including many of the preeminent players in the field, experimented with psychedelics in the early 1960's. John Coltrane, the acknowledged master of the tenor saxophone, took LSD and reported upon returning from his inner voyage that he "perceived the interrelationship of all life forms." 

It was through Ginsberg that the existence of Leary's research project came to the attention of the beat network. When Neal Cassady heard about the mushroom pills he bolted up to Cambridge for a session with the professor. "It's philosophical!" Cassady exclaimed. "This is the Rolls Royce of dope, the ultimate high." Kerouac arranged to sample the mushroom extract without leaving his mother. A "Dear Coach" letter from Kerouac to Leary described his experience tripping at her house on the day President Kennedy was inaugurated.

Mainly I felt like a floating Khan on a magic carpet with my interesting lieutenants and gods. We were at the extremist point goofing on clouds watching the movie of existence. Everybody seemed innocent. It was a definite Satori. Full of psychic clairvoyance (but you must remember that this is not half as good as the peaceful ecstasy of simple Samadhi trance as I described it in Dharma Bums). The faculty of remembering names and what one has learned is heightened so fantastically that we could develop the greatest scholars and scientists in the world with this stuff. 

The letter was signed, "Well, okay. Touch football sometime?"

Another writer Ginsberg brought into Leary's circle was the poet Charles Olson, formerly rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. A man of overpowering intellect, Olson was fifty years old at the time of his psychedelic initiation. He stood a towering six feet seven inches, had unruly strands of white hair, and spoke in a deep resonant voice. Olson remembered the first time he tried psilocybin: "I was so high on bourbon that I took it as though it was a bunch of peanuts. I kept throwing the peanuts and the mushroom into my mouth." He described the experience as "a love feast, a truth pill  it makes you exactly what you are." 

Olson had a strong affinity for the mushroom. He thought it a "wretched shame that we don't have it in the common drugstore as a kind of beer, because it's so obviously an attractive and useful, normal food." But he also sensed immediately that psychedelics were a profound threat to the status quo. After the drug wore off, his first words to Leary were, "When they come after you, you can hide at my house." Leary, being an apolitical creature, shrugged off the remark without much thought. Little did he know that the CIA was already keeping an eye on his escapades at Harvard. 

Olson admired Leary for his chutzpah, but he also considered the good professor a bit foolhardy in thinking that happiness would descend in one fell swoop if the world was suddenly be mushroomed. "Leary used to argue that this was the decade of the mushroom," Olson commented, "and if we didn't get peace from turning everybody on, the race would be destroyed. I myself think that was rather thin politics to begin with." 

In retrospect Ginsberg admitted, "We were probably too proselytizing." It may have been his messianic enthusiasm that rankled Robert Lowell, the New England poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, who was turned on to psilocybin by Ginsberg. Lowell did not report favorably at the end of the session in his apartment. As Ginsberg was leaving, he tried to reassure Lowell by telling him, "Love conquers all." To which the distinguished poet replied, "Don't be too sure." Writer Arthur Koestler was also critical of the mushroom experience. "This is wonderful, no doubt," he told Leary the day after he tripped. "But it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism. There's no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was." 

But the sternest rebuke to the high-flying optimism of the Harvard group was yet to come. Leary was eager for William Burroughs to take the mushroom pills. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, was something of a mentor to the beat generation. In the summer of 1961 Leary traveled to Tangiers, where Burroughs was living at the time. He was working on a new novel, The Soft Machine, smoking a considerable amount of Moroccan kit, and experimenting with a flicker machine developed by his friend Byron Gysin that caused hallucinations similar to mescaline or LSD. The poets Alan Ansen and Gregory Corso were there for the session along with Leary and Ginsberg. Things got off to a swimming start as they sauntered in the warm moonlight high on psilocybin. But the mood quickly changed once it became apparent that the mushroom was not to Burroughs's liking. "No good, no bueno," he kept shaking his head. He split from the others and waited out the "high" in seclusion.

Burroughs was never into drugs simply for a good time. Despite his psilocybin bummer he agreed to go to Cambridge to participate in further experiments in consciousness alteration. Burroughs looked forward to working with sensory deprivation and submersion tanks, stroboscopes, machines to measure brain waves, and all the technical wonders that a prestigious university could supply. But his hopes were dashed as soon as he arrived at Harvard. All he found was a semi permanent cocktail party with a bunch of starry-eyed intellectuals talking some half-assed jive about brotherly love. Leary kept touting psilocybin as an enlightenment pill, a cure-all for a sick society. To Burroughs, this view was far too simplistic. While agreeing that hallucinogenic drugs could open the doors of perception, he recognized that only the deliberate cultivation of new habits of consciousness could endow such visions with enduring significance. "Remember, anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways," he insisted. "You don't need drugs to get high, but drugs do serve as a useful shortcut at certain stages of training." Burroughs had already tried drugs as a means of self-realization and was attempting to move on. After a short stint in Cambridge he dropped out of the psychedelic clan for good. 

Burroughs was acutely aware of the darker side of American politics, and he had some ominous premonitions about the impending psychedelic revolution. Despite rampant enthusiasm for hallucinogens among his peers, he suspected that sinister forces were also interested in these drugs and that Leary and his sidekicks might be playing right into their hands. Burroughs feared that psychedelics could be used to control rather than liberate the vision-starved masses. He understood that the seeker of enlightenment was especially vulnerable to manipulation from without, and he sounded an urgent warning to this effect in the opening passages of Nova Express, published in 1964. 

At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction and history is fiction I must say this: 

Bring together state of news Inquire onward from state to doer Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Time Life and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours?  Listen: Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer . Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit. Stay out of the Garden of Delights. Throw back their ersatz Immortality. Flush their drug kicks down the drain. They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs learn to make it without any chemical corn. 

Shortly after Burroughs left Cambridge another figure arrived on the scene who was destined to up the ante considerably. His name was Michael Hollingshead, and he had a profound impact on Leary and his cohorts. An artful Englishman with a keen sense of humor, Hollingshead had once worked for the British Cultural Exchange. While living in New York City, he acquired a full gram of LSD-25 (enough for ten thousand doses), which he divided with his associate Dr. John Beresford. They mixed the LSD with powdered sugar and distilled water, tasting the divine confection as they spooned it into a mayonnaise jar. Hollingshead had smoked grass and hashish before, but this was another matter entirely. The doors of perception not only swung wide open, they flew off the jambs: "What I had experienced was the equivalent of death's absolution of the body. I had literally stepped forth from the shell of my body into some other strange land of unlikeness which can only be grasped in terms of astonishment and mystery, an ecstatic nirvana."

When he came down from his initial psychedelic voyage, he called Aldous Huxley to ask his advice about what to do with the magic gram of acid. At that point Hollingshead was unsure whether LSD was more confusing than illuminating. The drug had disrupted his sense of self: "The reality on which I had consciously based my personality had dissolved into maya, a hallucinatory facade. Stripped of one kind of reality, and unwilling or unable to benefit from the possibilities of another one, I was acutely aware of my helplessness, my utter transience, my suspension between two worlds, one outside and the other wholly within." Moreover, he was financially destitute and his marriage was falling apart. Huxley was sympathetic. He suggested that Hollingshead go to Harvard and meet Timothy Leary. If there was any single investigator in the United States worth seeing, Huxley assured him, it was Dr. Leary. 

Hollingshead took off for Cambridge with his mayonnaise jar. Leary went out of his way to help his visitor. He offered Hollingshead a free room in his attic, loaned him some money, and invited him to join the psilocybin research team. Naturally Leary gave his guest a mushroom session, and though Hollingshead had a good trip, the drug was not as strong as LSD. Hollingshead obliged by offering his host some acid, but Leary was not eager to take it. He was apparently of the opinion that if you had tried one psychedelic you had tried them all. 

One night Hollingshead was driving around outside Leary's house with Maynard Ferguson, the trumpet player, and his wife, Flo. They were smoking a joint in the car because illegal drugs were not allowed inside. Hollingshead told them about LSD, and they became very curious. Eventually he fetched his mayonnaise jar, and they all took a hit. Within an hour the drug had started to come on. Flo thought it was fantastic, and Maynard had to agree; it definitely got you there. When Leary noticed that Ferguson's face was glowing like an electric toaster, he decided to join them. He took a heaping spoonful, and soon he was flying. 

It came sudden and irresistible. An endless deep swamp marsh of some other planet teeming and steaming with energy and life, and in the swamp an enormous tree whose branches were foliated out miles high and miles wide. And then this tree, like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, went ssssuuuck, and every cell in my body was swept into the root, twigs, branches, and leaves of this tree. Tumbling and spinning, down the soft fibrous avenues to some central point which was just light. Just light, but not just light. It was the center of Life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything,sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the hard eye of God. Merged with this pulsing flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama. 

Leary was stunned by the power of the drug. In the wake of his first acid trip he wandered about dazed and confused. What to do, he asked himself, now that the mundane routines of life seemed so futile and artificial? Not knowing quite where to turn, he latched onto Hollingshead as his guru. Leary followed him around for days on end, treating the Englishman with awe. He was convinced that this pot-bellied, chain-smoking prankster whose face was pink-veined from alcohol was a messenger from the Good Lord Himself. Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, two of Leary's closest associates, were vexed to see him in such a helpless state. They thought he had really blown his mind, and they blamed Hollingshead. But it was only a matter of time before they too sampled the contents of the mayonnaise jar. Hollingshead gave the drug to all the members of the psilocybin project, and from then on LSD was part of their research repertoire.

Those early days at Harvard were charged with a special mystery and excitement. "Turning on" had not yet become identified with a particular lifestyle or set of values, and there were no maps or guideposts to chart the way. To those who embarked upon these shattering inner journeys, anything and everything seemed possible. It was as if all the fetters were suddenly removed. "LSD involved risk," Hollingshead said. "It was anarchistic; it upset our apple carts, torpedoed our cherished illusions, sabotaged our beliefs. Yet there were some of my circle who, with Rimbaud, could say, 'I dreamed of crusades, senseless voyages of discovery, republics without a history, moral revolution, displacement of races and continents. I believed in all the magics.'" 

Not everyone was enchanted by the renegade psychedelic scene at Harvard. A confidential memorandum issued by the CIA's Office of Security, which had utilized LSD for interrogation purposes since the early 1950's, suggested that certain CIA connected personnel might be involved with Leary's group. This prospect was disconcerting to Security officials, who considered hallucinogenic drugs "extremely dangerous." "Uncontrolled experimentation has in the past resulted in tragic circumstances and for this reason every effort is made to control any involvement with these drugs," a CIA agent reported. The document concluded with a specific directive: "Information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately. In addition, any information of Agency personnel involved with Dr's. ALPERT or LEARY, or with any other group engaged in this type of activity should also be reported." 

It is known that during this period Leary gave LSD to Mary Pinchot, a painter and a prominent Washington socialite who was married to Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official. (Meyer oversaw the CIA's infiltration of the US National Student Association and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe, which provided financial support to numerous Cold War liberal intellectuals and writers.) Leary and Pinchot struck up a cordial friendship during her occasional visits to Cambridge in the early 1960's. She asked him to teach her how to guide an LSD session so she could introduce the drug to her circles in Washington. "I have this friend who's a very important man," she confided to Leary. "He's very impressed with what I've told him about my own LSD experience and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself." Leary was intrigued, but Pinchot wouldn't tell him who she intended to turn on. Nor did she inform her LSD mentor of her marriage to a CIA bigwig. 

Leary explained the basic rules about set and setting, emphasizing the importance of a comfortable, sensuous environment for an LSD trip. From time to time Pinchot reported back to him. "I can't give you all the details," she said, "but top people in Washington are turning on. You'd be amazed at the sophistication of some of our leaders. We're getting a little group together" Leary had no way of knowing that Mary Pinchot was one of President Kennedy's girlfriends and that she and JFK smoked pot together in the White House. Pinchot was murdered less than a year after Kennedy was assassinated, and her diary disappeared from her home. 

When Leary learned of Pinchot's death, he recalled their conversations about LSD. At various times she had hinted that the CIA was monitoring his activities. Since drug research is of vital importance to American intelligence, Pinchot told him that he'd be allowed to conduct his experiments as long as it didn't get out of hand.

But Leary ignored her advice. In the spring of 1962 he published an article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists warning that the Russians might try to subvert the United States by dumping a few pounds of LSD into the water supply of major cities. The only way to prepare for such an attack, Leary maintained, was to dose our own reservoirs first as a civil defense measure so that people would know what to expect. Not surprisingly, this suggestion didn't go over well in the scientific community. A number of CIA and military-sponsored researchers launched vociferous attacks on Leary and Alpert. Dr. Henry Beecher, an esteemed member of the Harvard Medical School faculty who conducted drug experiments for the CIA, ridiculed Leary's research methodology, stating that it reminded him "of De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater rather than a present-day scientific study of subjective responses to drugs." Dr. Max Rinkel, a veteran of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, denounced Leary in the Harvard Alumni Review, as did Dr. Robert Heath, a longtime CIA and army contract employee. As Heath saw it, the whole notion of consciousness expansion was a meaningless abstraction, and impairing the human nervous system with dangerous chemicals could only result in pathological states that might have long-term negative repercussions. 

As word of Leary's acid escapades spread around Harvard, university officials began to get edgy. Tensions reached a boiling point during a faculty meeting in March 1962. Leary's opponents charged that he conducted his drug studies in a nonchalant and irresponsible fashion. Specifically they cited the fact that trained physicians were rarely present; moreover, Leary himself got high with his test subjects. While admitting that he was operating outside the medical framework, Leary stuck to his guns and emphasized that taking LSD with a patient was common practice among many psychiatrists. Besides, since psychedelics were educational as well as medical tools, they should be made available outside the medical profession for investigatory purposes. Just because someone was a physician did not mean he was qualified to administer LSD, Leary argued, especially if he had never tried the drug himself. 

Although Leary's volunteers rarely suffered untoward effects, a number of faculty members still had grave misgivings about the psilocybin project. As Dr. Herbert Kelman, recipient of a small grant from the CIA-connected Human Ecology Fund, put it at the meeting, "I question whether this project is being pursued as an intellectual endeavor or whether it is being pursued as a new kind of experience to offer an answer to man's ills." 

The following day a sensationalized account of the faculty tussle appeared in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper. The story was immediately picked up by the Boston press, prompting an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration, which assisted the CIA's drug testing efforts, A month later Leary was notified that he could not continue his research unless a medical doctor was present when the drugs were administered. LSD, the F.D.A maintained, was too powerful and unpredictable to be left in the hands of irresponsible individuals, especially when they advocated using it not for scientific or medical purposes but to conjure up so- called religious experiences.

In effect the government had sided with the medical establishment, thereby legitimizing it as the sole authority on these matters. Leary and Alpert were ordered to surrender their supply of psilocybin to the university health service, and a special faculty committee was formed to advise and oversee future experiments. By the end of the year the psilocybin project had been officially terminated. "These drugs apparently cause panic and temporary insanity in many officials who have not taken them," Leary quipped as he grudgingly forked over his stash. The rebellious professor felt that the doctors had a vested interest in keeping psychedelics out of the hands of laymen. He accused the government and the medical establishment of conspiring to suppress valuable methods of research. 

Leary's rambunctious style infuriated members of the academic community. Even some of his would-be allies suggested that he tone it down a bit. They feared that his antics might jeopardize other psychedelic researchers. This was also the opinion of Captain Al Hubbard, the incorrigible super spy who visited Leary at Harvard. "I liked Tim when we first met," Hubbard recalled, "but I warned him a dozen times." In no uncertain terms the Captain told Leary to keep his research respectable, to play ball with the system. Hubbard was keenly aware of the potency of Harvard's name and tried to lend a hand by supplying drugs to the young professor. But eventually the two LSD pioneers had a falling-out. "I gave stuff to Leary," said the Captain, "and he turned out to be completely no good. He seemed like a well-intentioned person, but then he went overboard." 

The dispute over Leary's research methodology quickly became tangled up with reports that sugar cubes laced with LSD were circulating on the Harvard campus. Unconfirmed stories about wild LSD parties and undergraduates pushing trips on the black market were rife. Leary did little to placate his superiors. "LSD is so powerful," he observed wryly, "that one administered dose can start a thousand rumors." While Leary was never directly accused of dealing drugs, his reputation as a freewheeling and euphoric type led many to assume that he was connected with the underground supply. It was a case of guilt by alleged association, and it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. 

In May 1963 Richard Alpert was summarily dismissed from his teaching post for violating an agreement not to give LSD to undergraduate students. It was the first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the twentieth century. "Some day it will be quite humorous," he told a reporter, "that a professor was fired for supplying a student with 'the most profound educational experience in my life.' That's what he told the Dean it was." A few days later the academic ax fell on Leary as well, after he failed to attend an honors program committee meeting,a rather paltry excuse, but by this time the university higher-ups were glad to get rid of him on any pretext. 

Leary was unruffled by the turn of events. LSD, he stated tersely, was "more important than Harvard." He and Alpert fired off a declaration to the Harvard Review blasting the university as "the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness contractors," an "intellectual ministry of defense." The Harvard scandal was hot news. In the coming months most of the major US magazines featured stories on LSD and its foremost proponent. Leary was suddenly "Mr. LSD," and he welcomed the publicity. The extensive media coverage doubtless spurred the growth of the psychedelic underground.

Rebuffed by the academic and medical authorities, Leary decided to take his case directly to the people in particular, young people. He was convinced that the revelation and revolution were at hand. The hope for the future rested on a simple equation: the more who turned on, the better. It would be a twentieth-century remake of the Children's Crusade, with legions of stoned youth marching ever onward to the Promised Land. Leary would assume the role of High Priest, urging his brethren to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." With the help of the media his gospel would ring throughout the land. "From this time on," he said, "we saw ourselves as unwitting agents of a social process that was far too powerful for us to control or to more than dimly understand." 

The Crackdown 

When LSD was first introduced to the United States in 1949, it was well received by the scientific community. Within less than a decade the drug had risen to a position of high standing among psychiatrists. LSD therapy was by no means a fad or a fly by night venture. More than one thousand clinical papers were written on the subject, discussing some forty thousand patients. Favorable results were reported when LSD was used to treat severely resistant psychiatric conditions, such as frigidity and other sexual aberrations. A dramatic decrease in autistic symptoms was observed in severely withdrawn children following the administration of LSD. The drug was also found to ease the physical and psychological distress of terminal cancer patients, helping them come to terms with the anguish and mystery of death.* And chronic alcoholics continued to benefit from psychedelic therapy. One enthusiastic researcher went so far as to suggest that with LSD it might be possible to clean out skid row in Los Angeles. 

* The CIA used terminal cancer patients as guinea pigs for testing knockout drugs and psychochemical weapons under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA.

The rate of recovery or significant improvement was often higher with LSD therapy than with traditional methods. Furthermore, its risks were slim compared to the dangers of other commonly used and officially sanctioned procedures such as electroshock, lobotomy, and the so-called anti-psychotic drugs. Dr. Sidney Cohen, the man who turned on Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, attested to the virtues of LSD after conducting an in-depth survey of US and Canadian psychiatrists who had used it as a therapeutic tool. Forty-four doctors replied to Cohen's questionnaire, providing data on five thousand patients who had taken a total of more than twenty-five thousand doses of either LSD or mescaline. The most frequent complaint voiced by psychedelic therapists was "unmanageability." Only eight instances of "psychotic reaction lasting more than forty-eight hours" were reported in the twenty-five thousand cases surveyed. Not a single case of addiction was indicated, nor any deaths from toxic effects. On the basis of these findings Cohen maintained that "with the proper precautions psychedelics are safe when given to a selected healthy group."

By the early 1960's it appeared that LSD was destined to find a niche on the pharmacologist's shelf. But then the fickle winds of medical policy began to shift. Spokesmen for the American Medical Association (A.M.A) and the Food and Drug Administration started to denounce the drug, and psychedelic therapy quickly fell into public and professional disrepute. Granted, a certain amount of intransigence arises whenever a new form of treatment threatens to steal the thunder from more conventional methods, but this alone cannot account for the sudden reversal of a promising trend that was ten years in the making. 

One reason the medical establishment had such a difficult time coping with the psychedelic evidence was that LSD could not be evaluated like most other drugs. LSD was not a medication in the usual sense; it wasn't guaranteed to relieve a specific symptom such as a cold or headache. In this respect psychedelics were out of kilter with the basic assumptions of Western medicine. The F.D.A's relationship with this class of chemicals became even more problematic in light of claims that LSD could help the healthy. Most doctors automatically dismissed the notion that drugs might benefit someone who was not obviously ailing. 

In 1962 Congress enacted regulations that required the safety and efficacy of a new drug to be proven with respect to the condition for which it was to be marketed commercially. LSD, according to the F.D.A, did not satisfy these criteria. From then on, authorized distribution of the drug was tightly controlled. Anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to receive special permission from the F.D.A. The restrictive measures were supposedly designed to weed out "the bad apples," as one report put it, and thereby insure against the misuse of regulated substances. The FDA maintained that it did not want to inhibit legitimate researchers who were "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities." 

By designating LSD an "experimental drug," the F.D.A had in effect ruled that it could only be used for research purposes and never as part of general psychiatric practice. Consequently it became nearly impossible for psychiatrists to obtain psychedelics legally. Some of the most distinguished and experienced investigators were forced to abandon their work, and the conditions that might have demonstrated LSD's therapeutic potential virtually ceased to exist. "It was a very intense period," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "The drug experience brought together many people of diverse interests. We built up a sizable amount of data  and then the whole thing just fell in on us. Many who formerly were regarded as ground breakers making an important contribution suddenly found themselves disenfranchised. " 

Certain officials suggested that those who practiced psychedelic therapy were themselves to blame for the crackdown on LSD research. In a thinly veiled reference to Leary, Dr's. Jonathan Cole and Robert Katz of the National Institutes for Mental Health expressed concern that some investigators "may have been subject to the deleterious and seductive effects of these agents." AMA president Roy Grinkler harped on the same theme, proclaiming, "At one time it was impossible to find an investigator willing to work with LSD-25 who was not himself an 'addict.'" 

As far as Grinkler was concerned, the elimination of psychedelic studies was necessary to insure the health and safety of the American public. In a widely circulated editorial that echoed the psychosis-producing view of hallucinogens, the AMA president stated, "Latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology. Psychic addiction is being developed." He issued an urgent warning to the psychiatric profession that "greater morbidity, and even mortality, is in store for patients unless controls are developed against the unwise use of LSD-25."

Many LSD researchers were quick to point an accusing finger at Leary for bringing the government's wrath down on everybody. But is it plausible that one wayward individual was single-handedly responsible for provoking a 180-degree shift in official government policy with respect to psychedelic research? Was the FDA simply overreacting to Leary's flamboyant style, or were there other forces at work? 

Up until the early 1960's LSD studies had flourished without government restrictions and the CIA had sponsored numerous research projects to enhance its mind control capabilities. In 1962, however, the Technical Services Staff, which ran the MK-ULTRA program, began to orient its behavioral activities exclusively toward operations and away from peripheral long-range studies. This new strategy resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers. Extensive LSD testing was no longer a top priority for the MK-ULTRA crew, which had already learned enough about the drug to understand how it could best be applied in selected covert operations. They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe." While acid was still an important part of the cloak-and-dagger arsenal, by this time the CIA and the army had developed a series of super hallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. 

The CIA and the military were not inhibited by the new drug laws enacted during the early 1960's. A special clause in the regulatory policy allowed the FDA to issue "selective exemptions," which meant that favored researchers would not be subject to restrictive measures. With this convenient loophole the FDA never attempted to oversee in-house pharmacological research conducted by the CIA and the military services. Secret arrangements were made whereby these organizations did not even have to file a formal "Claim for Exemption," or IND request. The FDA simply ignored all studies that were classified for reasons of national security, and CIA and military investigators were given free reign to conduct their covert experimentation. Apparently, in the eyes of the FDA, those seeking to develop hallucinogens as weapons were somehow more "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities" than independent researchers dedicated to exploring the therapeutic potential of LSD. 

In 1965 Congress passed the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, which resulted in even tighter restrictions on psychedelic research. The illicit manufacture and sale of LSD was declared a misdemeanor (oddly enough, possession was not yet outlawed). All investigators without IND exemptions were required to turn in their remaining supplies to the FDA, which retained legal jurisdiction over psychedelics. Adverse publicity forced Sandoz to stop marketing LSD entirely in April 1966, and the number of research projects fell to a mere handful. 

The decision to curtail LSD experimentation was the subject of a congressional probe into the organization and coordination of federal drug research and regulatory programs. The inquiry in the spring of 1966 was led by Senator Robert Kennedy (D- N.Y), whose wife, Ethel, reportedly underwent LSD therapy with Dr. Ross MacLean (a close associate of Captain Hubbard's) at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver. Senator Kennedy asked officials of the FDA and the N.I.M.H to explain why so many LSD projects were suddenly canned. When they evaded the issue, Kennedy became annoyed. "Why if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren't they worthwhile now?" he demanded repeatedly. The dialogue seesawed back and forth, but no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. "Why didn't you just let them continue?" asked the senator. "We keep going around and around. If I could get a flat answer about that I would be happy. Is there a misunderstanding about my question?"

Kennedy insinuated that the regulatory agencies were attempting to thwart potentially valuable research. He stressed the importance of a balanced outlook with respect to LSD: "I think we have given too much emphasis and so much attention to the fact that it can be dangerous and that it can hurt an individual who uses it  that perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly." 

Kennedy's plea fell on deaf ears. The FDA steadfastly refused to alter the course it had chosen. In 1967 a Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee (a joint FDA/N.I.M.H venture) was established to process all research applications. Members of this committee included Dr. Harris Isbell and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, two longtime CIA contract employees. Shortly thereafter the N.I.M.H terminated its last in-house LSD project involving human subjects. In 1968 the Drug Abuse Control Amendments were modified to make possession of LSD a misdemeanor and sale a felony. Responsibility for enforcing the law was shifted from the FDA to the newly formed Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Two years later psychedelic drugs were placed in the Schedule I category,a classification reserved for drugs of abuse that have no medical value. 

While above ground research was being phased out, the CIA and the military continued to experiment with an ever more potent variety of hallucinogens.* In effect the policies of the regulatory agencies were themselves "regulated" by the unique requirements of these secret programs. As an official of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (of which the FDA was part) explained, "We are abdicating our statutory responsibilities in this area out of a desire to be courteous to the Department of Defense rather than out of legal inability to handle classified materials." The same courtesy was proffered to the CIA. The FDA collaborated with the Agency in other ways as well. FDA personnel with special security clearances served as consultants for chemical warfare projects. Information concerning new developments in the field of psychopharmacology was exchanged through confidential channels. The FDA also provided laboratory facilities and samples of new drugs that might prove useful to the CIA. 

 * During this period the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA's Office of Research and Development initiated a project to create new compounds "that could be used offensively." A major portion of the OFTEN/CHICKWIT Program, as the joint effort was called, was geared toward incapacitants. A CIA memo dated March 8, 1971, indicates that a backlog of more than twenty-six thousand drugs had been acquired "for future screening." Information gathered from this screening process was catalogued and data-banked in a "large, closely/held" computer system that monitored worldwide developments in pharmacology. Under the auspices of OFTEN/CHICK-WIT at least seven hallucinogens similar to BZ were tested; inmates at Holmsburg prison in Pennsylvania were used as test subjects for some of the drugs. Very little is known about these experiments, although CIA documents mention "several laboratory accidents" in which a drug designated EA-3i67 produced "prolonged psychotic effects in laboratory personnel."

In light of the FDA's relationship with the intelligence community, it is highly unlikely that a major policy decision regarding LSD would have been made against the wishes of the CIA. If the Agency had wanted above ground LSD studies to proliferate, they would have. But this type of research was no longer essential as far as the CIA was concerned. The spymasters viewed LSD as a strategic substance, as well as a threat to national security, by virtue of its psychotomimetic properties, which had been fully explored during the 1950's. Creative or therapeutic considerations were not part of the covert game plan. When push came to shove, the medical establishment implemented a policy based on the psychosis-producing view that is to say, the CIA's view of hallucinogens, even though this perspective was vigorously contested by many scientists. 

By the early 1960's, when the new regulatory policy was enacted, a large number of people had already heard about LSD. Some were eager to try the drug, but they no longer had access to psychedelic therapists, who were the original "gatekeepers," so to speak. "The whole thing was just moving geometrically," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "Obviously those people who couldn't get it from us would be seeking to get it elsewhere." A certain momentum had been generated thanks in no small part to the CIA and it quickly reached a point where the government could no longer contain it. Black market acid began to turn up on the street to meet the growing demand. This remarkable social phenomenon continued to gather strength despite the repeated admonitions of educators, doctors and politicians. Soon the "laboratory" would stretch across the entire continent as millions of young investigators undertook their own experiments with this consciousness-quaking chemical.

4 

Preaching LSD 

High Surrealism 

After their expulsion from Harvard, Leary and Alpert were determined to carry out additional studies in the religious use of psychedelic drugs. They set up a grassroots nonprofit group called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (I.F.I.F), whose ranks quickly swelled to three thousand dues-paying members. Local offices sprang up in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. I.F.I.F believed that everyone should be allowed to use mind-expanding chemicals because the "internal freedom" they provided was a personal and not a governmental matter. They envisioned a society in which large numbers of people would seek higher consciousness, ecstasy, and enlightenment through hallucinogens. "It's only a matter of time," Leary stated confidently, "until the psychedelic experience will be accepted. We see ourselves as modest heroes, an educational tool to facilitate the development of new social forms. We're simply trying to get back to man's sense of nearness to himself and others, the sense of social reality which civilized man has lost. We're in step with the basic needs of the human race, and those who oppose us are far out." 

In the summer of 1963 I.F.I.F moved its headquarters to a hotel in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, a lush tropical paradise two hundred miles north of Acapulco. There they sponsored an experiment in transcendental living based on the Utopian writings and visionary insights of Aldous Huxley. Leary invited Dr. Albert Hofmann to participate in a seminar on drug research at the hotel, emphasizing that broadcast and print journalists from the most important mass media would be present. Hofmann demurred; he was disturbed by Leary's publicity-conscious approach. Huxley declined an offer to join the fledgling movement on similar grounds. He was seriously ill at the time. On November 22, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, Huxley passed away after receiving his last request: an intravenous injection of LSD- 25 given by his wife. As she administered the psychedelic, Laura Huxley saw "this immense expression of complete bliss and love." She whispered, "Light and free you let go, darling, forward and up  you are going toward the light." 

During its short but spectacular career the chemical Utopia at Zihuatanejo was deluged with over five thousand applicants far more than I.F.I.F could handle. The group's activities revolved around a tower on the beach in which at least one person at all times maintained a solemn vigil while high on LSD. The ritual changing of the guard took place at sunrise and sunset, and to be chosen for a stretch in the tower was considered a privilege. Beatnik and bohemian types were not allowed to participate in the program, but that did not stop them from pitching tents nearby. Smoking marijuana and lounging in the sun, these scruffy uninvited guests did little to enhance I.F.I.F's reputation; nor did rumors of the all-night orgies that were supposedly commonplace in the hotel. Scarcely six weeks after they had arrived, lurid reports in the Mexican press led to the expulsion of the LSD colonists. 

Leary and Alpert returned to the US with their small but energetic band of followers and began to look for an alternative base of operations. During this period they rubbed shoulders with some of the richest jet-setters on the Eastern seaboard, including William Mellon Hitchcock, a tall, handsome stockbroker in his twenties. Hitchcock was the grandson of William Larimer Hitchcock, founder of Gulf Oil, and a nephew of Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary during Prohibition.

Thanks to a sizable inheritance and a family trust fund that provided him with $15,000 per week in spending money, Billy Hitchcock was in a position to offer a lot more than moral support to the psychedelic movement. He first turned on to LSD after his sister, Peggy, the director of I.F.I.F's New York branch, introduced him to Leary. They hit it off immediately, and Hitchcock made his family's four-thousand- acre estate in Dutchess County, New York, available to the psychedelic clan for a nominal five-hundred-dollar monthly rent. At the center of the estate sat a turreted sixty-four-room mansion known as Millbrook, surrounded by polo fields, stables, beautiful pine forests, tennis courts, a lake, a large gatehouse, and a picturesque fountain. Two hours from New York City by car, this idyllic spread served as the grand backdrop for the next phase of the chemical crusade. 

With a new headquarters at Millbrook, I.F.I.F was disbanded and replaced by another organization, the Castalia Foundation, named after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Leary, a great fan of Hesse, felt that this particular book illuminated many of the problems he and his cohorts would confront while trying to apply the psychedelic experience to social living. Specifically Leary was concerned about the relationship between the mystic community and the rest of society. He did not want Millbrook to degenerate into a haven for isolated intellectuals. His group would avoid this perennial pitfall by remaining socially relevant. They would undertake the spiritual search in a communal setting and report back to the rest of the world. They would keep records, compile statistics, and publish articles in their own journal, The Psychedelic Review. Above all they would become an active, educative, and regenerative force, an example for others to follow. 

A core group of approximately thirty men and women gathered at Millbrook, including many acid veterans from the early days at Harvard. They were rejoined by Michael Hollingshead, who had left the group in early 1963 to work in New York City with an organization known as the Agora Scientific Trust. Hollingshead had quite a scene going for a while at his Fifth Avenue apartment. The entire place was laced with LSD,the food, the furnishings, etc. and anyone who came through the door (even the knobs were spiked) inevitably wound up stoned. He threw some wild parties at which everybody was dosed; those in attendance included people from the United Nations whom he knew from his days at the British Cultural Exchange. But when Hollingshead learned of Hitchcock's generous offer, he knew it was time to pack his bags and head upstate. That's where the action was, and he wanted to be part of it.

The Millbrook residents were a tight-knit group. They shared a common lifestyle geared toward exploring the realities of their own nervous systems in a creative rather than a clinical setting. Their goal was to discover and cultivate the divinity within each person. The permanent members of the household regularly tripped together, rotating as shaman in "follow the leader" sessions involving high doses of LSD-25. The elusive aim of these group sessions was to break through to the other side without losing the love and radiance of the acid high during the crucial reentry period. Various methods were devised to facilitate a permanent spiritual transformation. Since many in the group had backgrounds in behavioral psychology, it came natural to them to keep a scorecard of their changing states of consciousness. On certain days a bell would ring four times an hour starting at 9:00 A.M. The bell was a signal to stop and record what they were doing then, what "game" they were playing. They thought that by paying more attention to shifting motivations and interpersonal dynamics they could learn to transcend their habitual routines. They compared scorecards and rapped endlessly about how LSD was affecting them. 

In many ways the scene at Millbrook was like a fairy tale. The mansion itself was beautifully furnished with Persian carpets, crystal chandeliers, and a baronial fireplace, and all the rooms were full of elaborate psychedelic art. There were large aquariums with unusual fish, while other animals,dogs, cats, goats,wandered freely through the house. People stayed up all night tripping and prancing around the estate. (A stash of liquid acid had spilled in Richard Alpert's suitcase, soaking his underwear, when the psychedelic fraternity was traveling back from Zihuatanejo, so anyone could get high merely by sucking on his briefs.) Everyone was always either just coming down from a trip or planning to take one. Some dropped acid for ten days straight, increasing the dosage and mixing in other drugs. Even the children and dogs were said to have taken LSD. 

Millbrook was a constant party, but one infused with a sense of purpose and optimism. The residents saw themselves as the vanguard of a psychic revolution that would transform the entire society. Victory seemed inevitable because they thought they had a means of producing guaranteed mystical insight. As Hollingshead described it, "We lived out a myth which had not yet been integrated into our personalities. Millbrook was itself the work of art. Like Kafka's Castle, it gave out messages into the aether in the form of one high resonant sound which vibrated on the ears of the world, as if it were trying to penetrate beyond the barrier separating 'us' from 'them.' We felt satisfied that our goal was Every Man's, a project of Every Man's private ambition. We sought for that unitary state of divine harmony, an existence in which only the sense of wonder remains, and all fear gone."

Billy Hitchcock, the millionaire patron, never really entered into the close camaraderie of the Millbrook circle. He lived a half-mile from the "big house" in his own private bungalow, a four-bedroom gardener's cottage with a Japanese bath in the basement. There he carried on a social life befitting a scion of one of the country's wealthiest families. Hitchcock never totally broke with his old routines even though he had begun turning on. He still kept in close contact with his friends from New York and with various brokers and investors who visited his bungalow for private parties. Some of these people were introduced to LSD through Hitchcock, but it became a running joke at Millbrook that you should not turn on your lawyer or anyone who had to take care of business for you, lest he drop his briefcase and head for the psychedelic sunset. Hitchcock would usually be on the phone all morning talking with Swiss and Bahamian bankers, setting up business meetings and fast- money deals. By afternoon he had taken care of his monetary affairs and would occasionally join the scene at the mansion. 

Why Hitchcock decided to throw his weight behind the psychedelic cause is still something of a mystery. Was he simply a millionaire acid buff, a wayward son of the ruling class who dug Leary's trip? Or did he have something else up his sleeve? "Mr. Billy," as his servants affectionately called him, claimed he got involved with LSD because kicking the establishment in the teeth was exciting. Of course, since Hitchcock was the establishment, some questioned what he was really up to. Michael Hollingshead, for one, never fully trusted him. Most residents, however, thought Hitchcock a charming fellow. As one insider commented, "It hardly registered that he owned the place. He had a happy, open way of talking, perfect manners,a sort of Frank Merriwether type who had somehow fallen into a pool of gold and come up smelling like marijuana." 

Hitchcock got along well with Leary and often joined the acid fellowship in group trips. At times he became very emotional and vulnerable on LSD. One night he had to be reassured that he did indeed own the estate. But unlike the others, Mr. Billy tended not to verbalize his feelings. He never developed any metaphysical system about the LSD experience, which was rather peculiar since everyone at Millbrook was into some kind of half- or full-cocked philosophy. Hitchcock's interest in LSD did not appear to be a simple matter of spiritual enrichment. He was not one to wax poetic over the prospect of merging with the Oversoul. When asked at the outset of one group session what question he wanted answered by the acid trip, he replied, "How can I make more money on the stock market?" 

Timothy Leary, the eternal optimist, did not seem bothered by such rock-hard considerations. The early days at Millbrook were in many ways a felicitous time for him. He married a beautiful Swedish model named Nina Schlebrugge in an open-air wedding on the grounds of the estate, with everyone decked out in Elizabethan attire. Tripped out on the surrealistic spectacle they had created, the guests passed through the reception line with gifts of cocaine, reefer, and psychedelics. For their honeymoon (it proved to be a short-lived marriage) Leary and his princess made a pilgrimage to India, where they tripped on acid at least once a week and smoked hash the rest of the time. During this meditative hiatus Leary ruminated upon what lay ahead. He now conceived of himself as a "neurologician," having discarded his academic career forever. He was convinced that it would be a psychedelic century. Tim laid out blueprints for man's next five hundred years, surpassing even his own stoned hubris. When he returned to Millbrook a month and a half later, he shared his insights with the group.

Although a legal crackdown was a subject few were willing to contemplate, some of the Millbrook residents had a clear premonition that they only had a few trouble-free years to play with this fantastic new energy. If so, they had to make the most of it. They experimented with drugs in a bold, innovative, sometimes reckless fashion, and the results were often surprising. One night Richard Alpert retired early with a bad cold. Hollingshead and a friend named Arnie Hendin decided to fix him up. When they couldn't rouse him, they gave him a shot of D.M.T (a short-acting super psychedelic) in the buttocks. Alpert sat bolt upright, and before the D.M.T wore off they fed him an additional 800 mikes (micrograms) of LSD in a spoon. Three stereo systems were blasting Coltrane, Stockhausen, and Beethoven simultaneously. A sea of rocky sounds enveloped Alpert as he swirled through a neurological flux. When he came down from his trip, he found that his cold symptoms had completely disappeared. 

Richard Alpert had come a long way since the days when he was moving up the academic ladder at Harvard University. "I had a lot of identities that I called Richard Alpert. I played the cello, I flew an airplane, I was charming. I was a Jewish boy making good in Boston." But he gave it all up for a new cause, which he embraced with the zeal of a true believer. His faith was such that he became convinced during an acid trip at Millbrook that he could actually fly. To test this hypothesis in the soundest empirical fashion, he jumped out a second story window. Alpert broke his leg but endured the discomfort amiably; the experiment, he thought, had been a noble one. 

Millbrook was Psychedelic Central for the whole East Coast. Like a magnet, it attracted illustrious visitors from all walks of life. The doors were always open, and people were constantly coming and going. Among the musicians who passed through the estate were Maynard Ferguson, Steve Swallow, Charles Lloyd, and the irascible genius of the acoustic bass, Charles Mingus. Other guests included philosopher Alan Watts, psychiatrists Humphry Osmond and R. D. Laing, cartoonist Saul Steinberg, and actress Viva Superstar, a prominent figure in Andy Warhol's avant-garde art circle in New York City 

During the mid-1960's at the Factory, as Warhol's aluminum-foil-walled studio was called, people indulged in every drug they could get their hands on. Occasionally members of Warhol's eyelash set dropped in on the ever-obliging "Dr. Jake" for a quick poke of euphoria. When he came to Millbrook, Dr. Jake added psychedelics to his speed ball injections, much to everyone's immediate gratification. As it turned out, Dr. Max "Feelgood" Jacobson served as John F. Kennedy's personal physician during the Camelot presidency. He often administered "vitamin" injections that left JFK flushed and excited, leading some to speculate that the shots included methamphetamine and/or cocaine. 

Paul Krassner, editor of a satirical journal, The Realist, and a future founding father of the Yippies, also had a session at Millbrook. "My LSD experience began with a solid hour of what my guide (Hollingshead] described as cosmic laughter," Krassner recalled. "The more I laughed, the more I tried to think of depressing things specifically, the atrocities being committed in Vietnam,and the more wild my laughter became." He laughed so hard that he threw up. Krassner (who later gave acid to fellow comedians Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce) tried to put his first trip into perspective: "LSD was fun  but if I never take it again, I'll be happy. I enjoy coping with reality. Napalm is burning someone to death in Vietnam this very minute, but I'm alive, and that's what I was really laughing at:the oneness of tragedy and absurdity. The climactic message I got while high was: IT'S VERY FUNNY."

One day a NASA scientist named Steve Groff turned up at Millbrook. Dr. Groff wanted to observe how Leary and his clan ran their sessions. They gave him some acid, and he in turn provided samples of a secret drug known only as J.B-118, which the military had developed as an incapacitating agent. Similar to the army's B.Z, this potent super-hallucinogen simulated a kind of free fall, at the same time triggering bizarre visions. (NASA reportedly gave hallucinogenic drugs to astronauts in training as a way of preparing them for the weightlessness of outer space.) A few of the Millbrook regulars tried the space drug, and Ralph Metzner described the results. 

Objects are seen that are not objectively there, and other objects that are present, are not perceived. For example, one subject saw a man sitting on a chair in the middle of the room and talked with him. When the subject walked close, man and chair disappeared. All of the subjects reported, and were observed, walking into doors or furniture, which they had not seen. Sometimes the basis of the hallucinations was clear, e.g., a coat on a bed would be seen as a small dog. In other instances, no such transformation seemed to underlie the hallucination. For example, one subject saw a friend of his, the size of a three story building, crawling around the garden on his hands and knees, eating the tops of trees. 

Things were considerably less dramatic for the common folk and the curious who paid to attend weekend experimental workshops at Millbrook. These bimonthly seminars were tongue-in-cheek affairs for the regular residents, but they were necessary in order to raise money for rent and living expenses. The idea was to offer people an opportunity to explore psychedelic-type realities by means of Buddhist meditation, yoga, encounter groups, and other non-chemical techniques. When the visitors arrived, a rule of silence was imposed so that the general vibe was not brought down by frivolous discussion. And to keep the food bill at a minimum, breakfast was turned into an experience in sensory association. Guests were told to think about how their tastes were color-conditioned, after which they were served a meal of green scrambled eggs, purple oatmeal, and black milk (accomplished through non-psychedelic vegetable dye). Few ate heartily. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of letters asking about LSD poured into Millbrook from those who couldn't make it in person. A ten-point scale was devised for replies, with "one" calling for a dull "Dear Sir" form letter and "ten" meaning a totally way-out response. The replies to Arthur Kleps, a virtual unknown who would soon make his presence felt at Millbrook, were consistently in the eight and nine point range. 

In 1960, while still a graduate student in psychology, Kleps sent away to the Delta Chemical Company for five hundred milligrams of mescaline sulfate. After swallowing the bitter powder, he spun through an unforgettable ten-hour journey: "All night I alternated between eyes-open terror and eyes-closed astonishment. With eyelids shut I saw a succession of elaborate scenes which lasted a few seconds each before being replaced by the next in line. Extraterrestrial civilizations, jungles. Organic computer interiors. Animated cartoons. Abstract light shows" For the next four years Kleps kept this experience more or less to himself, "thinking about small things like sex, money, and politics." However, when he discovered that there was a group of intellectuals taking psychedelics on the grounds of a country estate, writing papers about trip realities, and having a great time, Kleps decided he was "just being chicken." School psychology went out the window; it was high time to start catching up with the psychedelic pacesetters, and the only way to do that was to join them. Kleps did not fit into the scene so readily. The first time he took acid at Millbrook he wound up brandishing a gun, and Hollingshead promptly threw him out of the house. Despite this initial faux pas, Kleps was later admitted as a resident of the gatehouse. He was more of an epistemological hard-liner than the others, who in his opinion wanted nothing better than to have unusual experiences and proclaim them religiously significant. Kleps was straining to develop a metaphysical system that would encompass the far-reaching implications of psychedelics, brooding over such basic questions as "What is mind?" and "What is the external world?" His solipsistic excursions were frowned upon as nit-picking, strictly a downer. "You're on a bad trip. Art," said Leary, who scolded the newcomer for drinking too much and not grooving with a more cosmic perspective. 

In those days a high dose of LSD was viewed as a solution for almost anything, and someone had the bright idea that it might solve the "Kleps problem." One of his comrades,Kleps swore it was Hollingshead,placed a few thousand mikes of pure Sandoz in a snifter of brandy beside his bed stand. Before he even rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, Kleps downed the brandy. A few minutes later he realized he was having trouble brushing his teeth. "I was knocked to the floor as all normal sensation and motor control left my body. The sun, roaring like an avalanche, was headed straight for me, expanding like a bomb and filling my consciousness in less time than it takes to describe it. It swirled clockwise, and made two and one half turns before I lost all normal consciousness and passed out, right there on the floor." As he groveled on all fours he got a shot of Thorazine in the rear, but it failed to bring him down. He spent the last hours of the trip sitting in a bed in the lotus position. As Kleps told it, a big book appeared, suspended in space about three feet in front of him, the pages turning automatically, every letter illuminated in gold against sky- blue pages. It was only years later, when he read a description of the two and one half turns that characterize the classic kundalini experience, that he came to an understanding of what he went through the day he'd been "bombed," as the parlance had it. None of the Millbrook priests would acknowledge that a release of kundalini energy was what happened to Kleps; maybe they thought he wasn't spiritually mature or pure enough to have had "the big one." 

Kleps, however, thought himself sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path to found his own psychedelic religion, the Neo-American Boohoo Church. Formed in 1966, the Boohoos claimed that their use of LSD was sacramental, similar to the peyote rituals practiced by Indians of the Native American Church, and should therefore be protected under law. Not surprisingly, the Boohoos lost their case in court when the judge ruled that an organization with "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as its theme song was not serious enough to qualify as a church. "Apparently," Kleps concluded, "those in control of the instrumentality of coercive power in the United States had no difficulty in recognizing a psychedelic religion as a psychedelic religion when that religion was safely encapsulated in a racial minority group living outside the. mainstream of American life." 

Kleps, whom Leary described as the "mad monk" and an "ecclesiastical guerrilla," was particularly sensitive to the dangers of elevating institutional forms to the level of eternal verities, and so included elements of foolishness and buffoonery in his church. The church catechism is contained in his Boohoo Bible, full of cartoons, true- or-false tests, and a variety of hilarious liturgical observations on such topics as "How to Guide a Session for Maximum Mind Loss" and "The Bombardment and Annihilation of the Planet Saturn." Small monthly dues entitled members to a psychedelic coloring book as well as copies of the religious bulletin Divine Toad Sweat, emblazoned with the church motto, "Victory over Horse-shit." Leary was a bit miffed: "Art, this is not a psychedelic love message. It's a whiskey trip." But the Chief Boohoo was adamant: "It's my trip, take it or leave it." 

Kleps sent diploma-like announcements to five hundred people across America certifying that they were Boohoos. Billy Hitchcock became a Boohoo during the same period in which he was immersed in some questionable financial dealings with Resorts International, a Bahamian-based gambling consortium suspected of having ties to organized crime. Kleps was always on Hitchcock's case, trying to pump him for money or wheedle him out of it or steal it. This didn't seem to bother Hitchcock much. What the hell, he figured, at least Kleps was more interesting than most of the others. 

The Psychedelic Manual 

Life at Millbrook had a mythic dimension that was nourished by a sense of having embarked upon a journey into unknown waters. Once they had eaten the apple of expanded consciousness, there was no going back. The umbilical cord that tied them to the world of the mundane was irretrievably sundered. Caught between a past that was no longer accessible and a future without precedent, they had only one option: to plunge headlong into the moment, to ride the crest of the wave that was still building, even if they could not see where it would take them. All they had was each other, their audacity and sense of humor, and plenty of LSD. Sooner or later, as everyone realized, the trip would have to come to an end. And what then? They celebrated their own transience by bathing in an atmosphere of hi-jinks and adventure. The incredible had become commonplace; ecstasy merged with confusion; dream and reality were interchangeable.

Even though they became more familiar with the psychedelic terrain over the years, the profound sense of disorientation that characterized their first trips lingered to some degree among the Millbrook residents. LSD had opened the floodgates of the unconscious, both personal and collective, and all kinds of strange flora and fauna were emerging. They didn't know quite what to make of it; some of it made sense, some of it didn't. Not enough time had elapsed for their insights to take root and mature. They tried to put their fingers on a definite truth, but there was nothing solid to grasp. It was all slippery, ambiguous, dialectical; everything implied its opposite. Old meanings had been annihilated, new ones were yet to be articulated. In searching for a language to describe essentially non-verbal experiences, they kept running up against a built-in credibility gap. As Kleps put it, "For every clarification that one arrives at by discussing these matters with others, there is a corresponding reinforcement of an illusion or misunderstanding. The only reliable way to get there is by closing one's eyes and jumping blindly into nowhere. It is only in such leaps, motivated by whatever passion, perversity, or dedication, that the adhesive grip of duality is escaped and the way made clear for the unconditioned light." 

Despite all the changes they had undergone, Leary and his associates were still basically psychologists who felt compelled to figure it all out. But acid had overturned their dogmas and left them dangling precariously in an intellectual limbo that was reinforced by the hermetic environment of the Millbrook estate. As far as they were concerned, nothing less than the entire history of human thought had to be reconsidered in light of the psychedelic experience. Kleps parodied their dilemma in his chronicle of the Millbrook years, describing the arrival of LSD as "The Big Crash" in whose wake the intellectual history of mankind fluctuated madly on the cosmic exchange. 

Zen and Buddhist stock rose sharply while Yoga, Brahmanist and Vedantist issues plummeted. In London, Blake enjoyed a mild rise, Hume skyrocketed, Aldous Huxley weakened, then held, and penny-a- share issues such as Aleister Crowley and Yeats disappeared entirely from view.  In Paris, former glamour stocks like Sartre and Camus began to look a little green around the gills. such superficially disparate stocks as Thoreau, Nabokov, Borges, and Norman. Brown were driven to undreamed of levels. All the Zen masters spiraled into the blue. Freud and Jung went through wild gyrations resembling an aerial dogfight, before both sank gradually to earth. the I Ching went through the roof. The Gita crashed. Shakespeare, unlike almost every other stock being traded, remained absolutely stable. 

The sense of psychic displacement was felt most acutely by Timothy Leary. Even though years had passed since his first acid trip, he could still say, "I have never recovered from that shattering ontological confrontation. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, and the social world around me seriously." Now that he was aware of "countless realities," routine existence had been revealed to him as "illusory"; but that did not make it any less problematic. He confided to Kleps that at times he had the uncanny sensation that his head was running down his shoulders, and that he had even considered having himself committed. Whenever Leary took LSD, he relived a "recurring science fiction paranoia. Suddenly I am on camera in an ancient television show. All my life routines a pathetic clown act."

Leary particularly wanted to develop an organized framework for understanding the potentials released by psychedelic drugs. He set out to devise a manual or program that would serve as a guide for acid initiates on their jaunts through higher consciousness. Given that there were no extant myths or models in his own tradition, he looked to the only sources that dealt directly with such matters,the ancient books of the East. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Leary found a text that was "incredibly specific about the sequence and nature of experiences encountered in the ecstatic state." With a little intellectual tinkering the self-proclaimed priest-scholars Leary, Alpert, and Metzner produced an "updated" interpretation of the ancient scripture. They represented it not as a treatise for the dead but as an instruction manual on how to confront the Clear Light of the Void during the acid peak "with a minimum of fear and confusion. " 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead was first linked to the psychedelic experience by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. Huxley reported that at one point he felt himself on the verge of panic, terrified by the prospect of losing his ego. He compared his dread with that of the Tibetan dead man who could not face the Clear Light, preferring rebirth and "the comforting darkness of self hood." Huxley said that if you began a trip the wrong way "everything that happened would be proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot." He thought that perhaps he could hold the terror at bay by fixing his attention on what The Tibetan Book of the Dead called the Clear Light, but only "if there were somebody there to tell me about the Clear Light. One couldn't do it by oneself. That's the point, I suppose, of the Tibetan ritual somebody sitting there all the time and telling you what's what." 

Leary took Huxley's remarks literally and turned The Tibetan Book of the Dead into a psychedelic manual. While Huxley had referred to it in an essay written after his psychedelic experience in order to clarify it, Leary promoted the book as a guide before and during the trip. This strategy represented a significant departure from the procedures employed by Dr. Humphry Osmond and other psychedelic therapists of the previous decade who simply sought to help subjects relax and remain open to the experience without defining what was supposed to occur. Leary now presented turning on as a process of initiation into a great brotherhood of free souls christened by the mind-blowing apprehension of the Clear Light during the peak of an acid trip. While the Eastern vibes surrounding the acid sessions at Millbrook may have been benign, Leary's methodology was in some ways analogous to that of the CIA and the military, which also "programmed" trips, although with a very different objective. Eventually Ralph Metzner and Michael Hollingshead were forced to admit that programming a trip was much more difficult than they had originally anticipated. LSD did not easily lend itself to step-by-step goal-oriented instructions, which more often than not created more confusion than they dispelled. 

There was a great deal of disagreement among seasoned acid veterans as to the real meaning of the vision of the Clear Light. Hollingshead experienced something akin to it but did not consider it the final nirvana: "Let's face it LSD is not the key to a new metaphysics of being or a politics of ecstasy. The 'pure light' of an acid session is not this,it may even be the apotheosis of distractions, the ultimate and most dangerous temptation. But it does allow one to live at least for a time in the light of the knowledge that every moment of time is a window into eternity, that the absolute is manifest in every appearance and relationship."

The experience in which eternity takes root in the waking state is brief, yet its significance is profound. It may take months, years, even a lifetime to come to terms with this fleeting moment of vision. Any experience so overwhelming, so incomprehensible to normal waking consciousness, carries with it a tendency to rationalize it as quickly as possible. Art Kleps felt that the peak of a major death rebirth experience was no time for making formulations; on the contrary, he insisted that one should fight this urge: "If you can't let go and instead grab the first lifesaver or bit of wreckage that floats near your thrashing form, you will come down firmly believing that the lifesaver you grabbed was the meaning of the trip rather than the exit from it. Your new personality will be defined, not in terms of the truth, but in terms of the particular lie you happened to grab at the crucial moment." 

It would appear that Leary succumbed to this "LSD temptation" when he developed the notion that a person could tune in to his genetic code while high on acid. "Is it entirely inconceivable" he mused, "that our cortical cells, or the machinery inside the cellular nucleus, 'remembers' back along the unbroken chain of electrical transformations that connects every one of us back to that original thunderbolt in the pre-Cambrian mud?" Leary suggested that by taking LSD he could commune with the "evolutionary program" and actually make contact with the ultimate source of intelligence: DNA. He turned his cellular visions into a kind of psychedelic Darwinism, positing the reading of the individual genetic code as a universal truth: "God does exist and is to me this energy process; the language of God is the DNA code." 

Kleps took issue with Leary's conception of a good trip. He insisted that people who never had mystical experiences on acid could learn just as much as those who did. He thought Leary placed too much emphasis on pleasurable visions. "Nine times out of ten, talk about bad trips resolves itself into a naive identification of pleasurable visionary scenes and sensory appreciation of the present (during the trip) with 'goodness.' When such people find themselves in a few Hell-worlds here and there, they think that something is seriously amiss." For Kleps LSD was never supposed to be easier than traditional methods of self-realization; it was only "faster and sneakier." According to the Chief Boohoo, you could be devoured by demons during a psychedelic experience and it still might be a good trip if you came out of it feeling that it was worthwhile. Kleps maintained that striving for a preconceived visionary end in the acid high only complicated things and led to bummers. 

It is as if [Leary] deliberately and with malice aforethought polluted the stream at its source and gave half the kids in psychedelic society a bad set to start out with. Almost every acid head I talked to for years afterwards told me he had, as a novice, used The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a "guide",and every one of them reported unnecessary anxiety, colossal bummers, disillusionment, and eventual frustration and exasperation, for which, in most cases, they blamed themselves, not Tim or the book. They were not "pure" enough, or perhaps the "Lord of Death" did not deign to transform them because they were not worthy of His attentions, etc., etc.

The psychedelic biography of Allen Ginsberg illustrates the futility of the programmed trip, be it self-initiated or imposed from without. Ginsberg found that even self- programming could create formidable psychic tensions often resulting in awful bummers. His desire for a heavenly illumination, which he sought through LSD, was a carry-over from a powerful non-drug experience he had in 1948. Ginsberg was then living in a sublet apartment in Harlem. While reading William Blake's "Ah, Sunflower!" he heard a deep resounding voice. He immediately recognized it as Blake's own voice emerging from the dead. Ginsberg felt his body afloat, suffused with brilliance. Everything he looked at appeared in a new light. He was struck by an overpowering conviction that he had been born to experience this universal spirit. 

When Ginsberg began using psychedelic drugs, his Blake vision was his reference point. As he put it, LSD gave access to "what I, as a poet, have called previously aesthetic, poetic, transcendental, or mystical awareness." But he ran into trouble when he attempted to recapture the cosmic heights of his Blakeian episode via drugs. He wanted to write a poem under the influence of LSD that would evoke a sense of divinity, but he found that the act of writing interrupted the multitudinous details inundating his nervous system. The tension between the romantic vision of illumination and the simultaneous urge to communicate it turned his divine quests into bum trips. Ginsberg described his frustration in numerous poems he composed while high on acid and other psychedelics: "The Reply," "Magic Psalm," "Mescaline," and "Lysergic Acid." 

Ginsberg had been painting himself into a corner with drugs, thinking that he should take acid to cleanse his soul and trying too hard to attain some sort of satori. He felt a compulsive obligation to use LSD again and again to break down his identity and conquer his obsession with mortality. His growing paranoia with regard to psychedelics came to a climax when he ingested yage in Peru in 1960. Again he was primed for divine revelation, but instead "the whole fucking cosmos broke loose around me, I think the strongest and worst I've ever had it. I felt faced by Death got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe or a Jivaro in head-dress with fangs vomiting up in realization of the murder of the Universe my death to come everyone's death to come all unready I unready. " 

Toward the end of 1961 Ginsberg undertook a spiritual pilgrimage to India to come to terms with his unsettling drug visions. On the way he stopped in Israel to talk with Martin Buber, the eminent Jewish philosopher, who emphasized human relationships and advised him not to get caught up in confrontation with a nonhuman universe. Ginsberg received a similar message in India from Swami Sivananda, who told him, "Your own heart is your guru." These encounters set the stage for a sudden realization that came to him a few months later, during the final days of his long journey. While riding a train in Japan in mid-1963, he had an ecstatic conversion experience, an inexplicable but deeply felt resolution of his trials with psychedelics. The relief was so great that he wept on the train. Inspired by this breakthrough, he pulled out a pencil and wrote a poem called "The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express," which signaled a turning point in his spiritual search.

Ginsberg had been seeking divinity through out-of-the-body trips on psychedelics. In trying to superimpose the acid high on his old memory of a cosmic vision, he was not living in the present; he was blocking himself. Now he saw the futility of attempting to conjure visions of a blissful imaginary universe when the secret lay within his own mortal flesh. In this moment of profound insight he understood that truth could only be experienced within the framework of the body; therefore, the overarching mystical imperative was to become one with his own skin. He was not so much renouncing drugs as refusing to be dominated by them or by the obligation to take psychological risks with chemicals to enlarge his consciousness. "I spent about fifteen, twenty years," Ginsberg reflected, "trying to recreate the Blake experience in my head, and so wasted my time. It's just like somebody taking acid and wanting to have a God trip and straining to see God, and instead, naturally, seeing all sorts of diabolical machines coming up around him, seeing hell's instead of heaven's. So I did finally conclude that the bum trip on acid as well as the bum trip on normal consciousness came from attempting to grasp, desiring a preconceived end, a preconceived universe, rather than entering a universe not conceivable, not even born, not describable." 

Secure in his sense of self, his mind calmed, Ginsberg had a different personal set for his subsequent LSD trips, which took on a whole new character for him. He began to enjoy himself while he was high. After all he had been through, Ginsberg finally realized that the experience of peaking on LSD is above all one of an open horizon, a field of presence in the widest sense. Any clutching at the Eternal or the Clear Light or the hidden message of the DNA code necessarily became a fixation, an objectification, and therefore an inauthentic relationship to the infinite openness of psychedelic consciousness. Once Ginsberg was able to direct his attention outside himself, there were no heavy judgments required by acid, just an appreciation of the world that lay before him. 

The Hard Sell 

Despite criticisms of trip programming, Leary still saw advantages in working with a manual: if a particular spiritual state could be consistently reproduced, there was a good chance the psychedelic movement would really take off. Hence the adoption of the The Tibetan Book of the Dead as the first LSD guidebook. Since the movement's only "activism" was the psychedelic session, the first step was to persuade people to take the drug. Leary aimed his message at those whose hearts and minds were still up for grabs: the younger generation. He saw himself as the orchestrator of a mass cultural phenomenon. His goal was to encourage large numbers of American youth to de-condition themselves away from the work-duty ethic by means of psychedelic drugs. Leary insisted that the insane rat race was the real "narcotic escape" and that people could find a new kind of harmony by dropping out and "sanitizing" themselves with large helpings of LSD. He advised taking the drug repeatedly in order to transcend the mind's habitual fixations: "Find the wisdom in yourself. Unhook the ambitions and the symbolic drives and the mental connections which keep you addicted and tied to the immediate tribal game."

To those in the inner circle it quickly became apparent that the psychedelic movement "would be sold like beer, not champagne," as Kleps put it. Whether or not the liberation was bogus, the style was strictly Madison Avenue. Leary not only hyped LSD as a shortcut to mystical enlightenment but also fused it with something that had proven mass appeal: sex. In his 1966 Playboy interview he discussed psychedelics in the broad social context of "erotic politics" and "hedonic engineering." Acid was portrayed as a "cure" for homosexuality and a means of inhabiting a supremely sensual reality. "In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session," Leary stated, "a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and make love with a woman. That is what the LSD experience is all about. Merging, yielding, flowing, union, communion. It's all love-making. The sexual impact is, of course, the open but private secret about LSD."

Leary had a knack for telling his audiences exactly what they wanted to hear. He could be all things to all people; whatever guise he chose, the gist of the message was essentially the same. "It's all God's flesh," he insisted. "LSD is always a sacrament: whether you are a silly thirteen-year-old popping a sugar cube on your boyfriend's motorcycle, or a theatrical agent giving pot to a girl to get her horny  or even a psychiatrist giving LSD to an unsuspecting patient to do a scientific study."

Leary's public pronouncements were calculated to seduce and frighten. He taunted his critics and prospective followers with brazen epigrams: "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." As he saw it, Western culture had reached such a critical impasse that one couldn't afford not to experiment with LSD. Regardless of how dangerous such a venture might seem to the uninitiated, the potential benefits were simply too great to pass up: "I would say that at present our society is so insane, that even if the risks were fifty-fifty that if you took LSD you would be permanently insane, I still think that the risk is worth taking, as long as the person knows that that's the risk."

Leary was a kind of carnival barker for the psychedelic movement. He had no compunctions about using the media to promote LSD. "Tim had what we needed," said Kleps. "He had the 'dreams' of the true salesman." Leary was quite candid about his role as a media mogul. "Of course I'm a charlatan," he often joked in public. "Aren't we all?" To Leary the PR was all pretense, a cosmic put-on. That was what he had learned from LSD,all social roles were a game, and he could change personalities like so many different sets of clothing as the occasion warranted. His close friends never took him seriously as a guru or prophet or high priest. As Hollingshead commented, "It was easier to see him as an inspired impresario, an Apollinaire or Cocteau."

During the mid-1960's, Millbrook attracted considerable publicity. TV crews filmed regularly at the estate, bringing even more notoriety to Leary, who quickly became one of the most famous and controversial figures in America. Leary knew he could get more coverage by making provocative statements, and he played upon the public's infatuation with the sensational. He realized that the press was not an organ for disseminating truth, no matter what one said, it would always be distorted by straight journalists. Thus, even when the media castigated him as everything from an "irresponsible egotist" to a "madman" hooked on acid, he was not in the least flustered. On the contrary, such outbursts seemed to be grist for his mill. Any publicity was a walking stick, as far as Leary was concerned, and if it came down to choosing between no publicity and bad publicity, he would opt for the latter. Leary was confident that the subliminal message,LSD could take you to extraordinary places,would come through between the lines and young people would turn on in greater and greater numbers. 

The Millbrook clan not only had their sights set on America; their aspirations were international in scope. In September 1965 Michael Hollingshead returned to his native London armed with hundreds of copies of the updated Book of the Dead and five thousand doses of LSD (which he procured from Czech government laboratories in Prague). Hollingshead felt there was very little understanding of LSD in England, but he intended to change that. He proceeded to establish the World Psychedelic Center in the fashionable Kings Road district of London, attracting the likes of Jo Berke (a psychiatrist working with R. D. Laing), the writer and philosopher Alexander Trocchi, multimedia artist lan Sommerville, filmmaker Roman Polanski, and numerous musicians including Donovan, Peter and Gordon, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones. 

London was a swinging scene in the mid-1960's, and psychedelics were an intrinsic part of the cultural renaissance that revolved around the rock music explosion. Strangely enough, hardly anyone under twenty-one listened to the radio in England, as the BBC monopolized the airwaves with dance music and symphonies. To compensate for the lack of commercial channels, a group of go-getters organized a network of pirate radio stations that operated offshore beyond the three-mile national limit but within transmitting distance of population centers all along the coast. The entire country was surrounded by small sea craft, and when they started beaming rock music, everyone bought transistors and tuned in. Hollingshead dug the setup. Every week he would emerge from his London apartment wearing his long coat, pink glasses, and wry smile, to be taken by motorboat to a floating pirate station near the Thames. He tripped with the deejays, rapped, played music, and laughed. There was no censorship of any kind. Needless to say, the British authorities were not amused. 

During this period Hollingshead smoked pot and hash constantly, dropped acid three times a week in doses often exceeding 500 micro-grams, and began using hard drugs. He obtained a doctor's prescription for Methedrine, and after working up to seven injections a day he found himself at the mercy of a non-miraculous addiction. His gargantuan appetite for drugs turned him into a near zombie. In this condition he was hardly capable of keeping his own house in order, let alone leading a psychedelic revolution in Britain. All hell finally broke loose one night at a party thrown by Hollingshead and his wacked-out colleagues. They decided to offer punch with LSD and without, but someone went ahead and spiked the whole batch. Suddenly there were over a hundred and fifty people at his pad stoned out of their minds, including a lot of unsuspecting folks. Among those who turned on accidentally were a couple of undercover policemen masquerading as hipsters.

When reports of this gala event surfaced in the London press, Hollingshead suspected his number might be up. A few days later the bobbies came to his flat and arrested him for possession of less than an ounce of hash. Hollingshead showed up in court high on LSD and who knows what else, and was sentenced to twenty-one months in Wormwood Scrubs. He managed to smuggle an ample supply of acid into prison, but it was not his custom to turn on other inmates. However, he made an exception in the case of George Blake, the convicted spy who penetrated the highest echelons of British intelligence and passed information to the Russian KGB. Blake was serving the sixth year of a forty-three-year sentence when he met Hollingshead. His interest was aroused as soon as he learned that Hollingshead had hung out with Leary, and they arranged one Sunday afternoon to take LSD behind bars. As the session progressed, Blake became noticeably tense and paranoid. He thought he had been given a truth serum, and he accused Hollingshead of being a secret service agent. The spy finally settled down and spent the last hours of his trip reflecting upon his future and whether he'd be able to stand many more years of incarceration. A few weeks later Blake escaped by scaling the prison wall with a rope ladder. When last heard from, he was living in Moscow and working in the Cairo section of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. 

Hollingshead wasn't the only one in legal trouble. Leary had been busted in December 1965 after he and his daughter were caught transporting three ounces of pot across the Mexican border into Laredo, Texas. Leary was fined $30,000 in addition to receiving a maximum sentence of thirty years. While his lawyers appealed the verdict, Leary returned to Millbrook, but the political harassment continued. Relations between the acid commune and the affluent townsfolk of conservative Dutchess County were always a bit strained, to say the least. When the town bigwigs heard that some of the local teenagers were hanging around Millbrook, they pressured the sheriff to put an end to the shenanigans of Leary and company. At the time the Dutchess County prosecutor was none other than G. Gordon Liddy, the future Waterbugger whose arsenal of dirty tricks included LSD and other hallucinogens to neutralize political enemies of the Nixon administration. But these events were still a few years in the offing. 

As far as Liddy was concerned, Leary and his pernicious band of dope fiends epitomized the moral infection that was sweeping the land. He was eager to raid the Millbrook estate, where, as he put it, "the panties were dropping as fast as the acid." He and a team of deputies staked out the mansion for months, waiting for the right moment to make an arrest that would stick. Early one morning in April 1966 they decided to act. Crouched behind the bushes with their binoculars, they noticed some kind of film being shown in the house. Splendid, thought Liddy, jockeying for a peek at what he hoped was a pornographic display; the prospect of exposing a citadel of smut as well as a den of dopers was fine by him. He must have been disappointed to find that the film only showed a waterfall.

The deputies made their entry in classic "no-knock" fashion, kicking in the front door and charging up the main stairwell. They were greeted by Leary bouncing down the stairs in nothing but a shirt. A warrant was read aloud, and Leary was finally persuaded to put on a pair of pants. The search continued for five hours; a small amount of marijuana was found, but no other drugs. Leary accused the police of using Gestapo tactics and violating his constitutional rights. When the Supreme Court ruled that suspects must be informed of their legal rights at the time of arrest, the bust was thrown out of court. Leary had escaped on a technicality, but Liddy was still hot on the case. Roadblocks were set up around the estate, and anyone who wanted to visit had to submit to a lengthy, humiliating strip search. The state of siege grew more intense, until the commune was forced to disband in the spring of 1967. The golden age of anarchy at Mill-brook had come to an end.

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5 The All-American Trip