Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 to May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist who became the most prominent public advocate of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and, in his final decades, a promoter of personal computers, space colonization, and radical life extension. Trained as a research psychologist and briefly a respected figure in personality theory, he ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960 until his dismissal in 1963, popularized the slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out," and was described by Richard Nixon, according to widely repeated accounts, as "the most dangerous man in America." He drew, often unknowingly, on drug-research networks whose funding traced back to the CIA's MKULTRA program, and was himself placed under documented CIA surveillance. In his final decades he promoted the personal computer as a tool of consciousness expansion and became a celebrated figure in the transhumanist and cyberculture scenes of the 1980s and 1990s.¹²¹²

From Personality Psychology to Harvard

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of a Catholic family, attended the College of the Holy Cross, was expelled from the United States Military Academy at West Point after a cheating-and-honor dispute, and finished his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama. He took a doctorate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950, and his early academic work was conventional and well regarded: he directed clinical research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland from 1954 to 1959 and published The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (1957), whose circular model of personality, the "interpersonal circumplex," remained influential in clinical assessment and became the basis for personality-assessment tools later used by the CIA and the military. He joined the faculty of Harvard University's Center for Research in Personality in 1959.¹³¹¹

The turn came in the summer of 1960, when Leary ate psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico, an experience he later called more profound than anything in his prior training. Back at Harvard he and his colleague Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, founded a research program to study the psychological effects of psilocybin, which the Swiss firm Sandoz supplied in synthesized form.³⁴

The Harvard Psilocybin Project

Leary established the project in the fall of 1960, obtaining psilocybin free from Sandoz and running sessions in both formal research settings and informal apartment gatherings with music and candlelight. The studies, by later methodological standards, blurred the line between researcher and subject, with the experimenters frequently taking the drugs alongside their volunteers. The Concord Prison Experiment (1961 to 1963) administered psilocybin to inmates to test whether the experience reduced recidivism, and the Marsh Chapel Experiment, or "Good Friday Experiment," run by the graduate student Walter Pahnke in 1962, tested whether the drug could induce genuine mystical experience.⁴⁵

The project's advisers and broader circle traced, in several cases, to networks the CIA had funded. Aldous Huxley, then a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, urged Leary to offer the experience to "talented, well-born, intelligent rich" people and to work discreetly within institutions rather than provoke public controversy; the poet Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who visited Leary's house in Newton, Massachusetts in December 1960, pressed the opposite case, that the drugs should be distributed as widely as possible. Henry Murray, chairman of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, who had run the personality-assessment section of the OSS during World War II, approved the project and volunteered for it. Leary's own interest had been stimulated by Gordon Wasson's 1957 Life article on Mexican psilocybin mushrooms, an expedition partly facilitated by the CIA contractor James Moore, and he cited in his published work the research of the CIA contractor Harold Abramson and others brought together for drug conferences by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, a sometime Agency conduit.¹¹¹²

The Good Friday Experiment

In collaboration with the doctoral candidate Walter Pahnke, Leary administered psilocybin double-blind to ten theology students and professors during a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1962, with ten others receiving a placebo. Nine of the ten psilocybin recipients reported intense religious experiences, and Pahnke's dissertation concluded that the experiences were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with," classical mystical experience.⁵¹¹

The experiment became one of the most cited studies in the psychology of religion, and a long-term follow-up decades later found that most of the original subjects still regarded it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. It also exemplified the methodological looseness that alarmed Harvard, since the researchers themselves participated and the setting was a working religious service rather than a laboratory.⁵

The Harvard Firing

Tension with Harvard administrators escalated through 1962, triggered in part by a sensationalized Harvard Crimson account of a faculty meeting that prompted a Food and Drug Administration investigation. On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted to relieve Leary of his teaching duties and terminate his salary on the grounds that he had failed to keep classroom appointments. Alpert was separately dismissed on May 27, 1963, for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment, making the two the first Harvard faculty fired in the twentieth century for such reasons. By then federal regulators were tightening control of the drugs, and Leary's work moved outside the university entirely.¹⁴¹¹

IFIF, Millbrook, and the League for Spiritual Discovery

After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which attracted roughly 3,000 dues-paying members, and attempted a summer session in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, that the Mexican government shut down after about six weeks following negative press. The community then settled at a large estate in Millbrook, New York, lent by Billy Hitchcock, an heir to the Mellon and Gulf Oil fortune, who provided the roughly 4,000-acre property in Dutchess County for about 500 dollars a month. There Leary ran the Castalia Foundation, named for the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, published The Psychedelic Review, hosted high-dose group sessions and a wide circle of visitors including Charles Mingus, Alan Watts, R.D. Laing, and the journalist Paul Krassner, and in 1966 founded a quasi-religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, whose initials spelled LSD and which he used to argue for the sacramental, constitutionally protected use of psychedelics.³¹¹

With Ralph Metzner and Alpert he adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead into The Psychedelic Experience (1964), a manual for guiding drug sessions that John Lennon later cited as the source for the song "Tomorrow Never Knows." The Millbrook period coincided with the criminalization of LSD, banned in California in 1966 and federally soon after, and with mounting legal pressure: in April 1966 the Dutchess County assistant district attorney G. Gordon Liddy, later of Watergate, led an early-morning raid on the estate that turned up only a small amount of marijuana, a charge later dismissed. Leary's public role hardened into that of a movement figurehead, the "high priest" of the psychedelic movement, a role he both cultivated and was assigned by a hostile press.⁶¹¹

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Leary gave the counterculture its best-known slogan at the Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on January 14, 1967, where he told a crowd of tens of thousands to "turn on, tune in, drop out." He later complained that the phrase was widely misunderstood as a call to passive disengagement, explaining that he meant by it to activate one's neural equipment, to interact harmoniously with the world, and to detach from involuntary commitments, not to drop out of school or society. The line nonetheless became a shorthand for the era and fixed Leary's image as an apostle of dropping out.²⁷

Legal Troubles, Prison, Escape, and Exile

Leary was first arrested in December 1965 at the Laredo, Texas border crossing on a marijuana charge that carried a potential thirty-year sentence; he fought it to the Supreme Court, which in Leary v. United States (1969) struck down the Marihuana Tax Act on self-incrimination grounds. A second arrest followed in Laguna Beach, California, in December 1968, and in February 1970 he was convicted on both the Laredo and California charges and given a combined twenty-year term at the California Men's Colony near San Luis Obispo. On September 12, 1970, he escaped over a highwire across the prison fence in an extraction arranged through the radical Weather Underground, who were paid by the psychedelic-dealing Brotherhood of Eternal Love.¹¹¹

He fled abroad, first to Algeria, where the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver briefly held him under a kind of house arrest over his LSD advocacy, then to Switzerland, Austria, and Afghanistan, where American agents seized him in Kabul in 1973 and returned him to Los Angeles, where bail was set at five million dollars, then the highest ever set for an American citizen. Facing decades of confinement, he provided information to federal investigators about the radicals and lawyers who had aided his escape, a cooperation that drew lasting bitterness from former allies, though prosecutors said it led to no convictions. He was paroled in 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown. The prison years produced a body of idiosyncratic writing in which Leary recast his ideas in the language of neurology and futurism, most notably the "eight-circuit model of consciousness," set out in Exo-Psychology (1977, later revised as Info-Psychology).¹³⁸

CIA Surveillance

On November 1, 1963, the CIA issued a memorandum ordering all domestic field offices to report immediately on any involvement with Leary, Alpert, or the International Federation for Internal Freedom. The monitoring preceded Leary's public emergence as an LSD spokesman by several years, covering the period when his research was still primarily academic. Neither the specific content of any CIA reporting on Leary nor any operational use of surveillance findings has been declassified.¹²¹³

Leary's research network traced back to CIA-funded programs in ways he likely did not know at the time. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, introduced to LSD by Harold Abramson, arranged Ginsberg's first LSD experience through a federally funded research program, and Ginsberg carried that experience to Leary's house. The Macy Foundation, which had served as a CIA conduit for behavioral-research conferences, hosted the scholars whose published work Leary cited, and the Geschickter Fund, another CIA front, financed related research at overlapping institutions.¹²

The Cyberdelic Turn

From the late 1970s Leary promoted a futurist program he summarized with the acronym SMI2LE, for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension, holding that humanity's next evolutionary step lay in leaving the planet, raising intelligence by technological means, and defeating death. In the 1980s and 1990s he recast the personal computer as the successor to the psychedelic drug, telling interviewers that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and adopting "think for yourself, question authority" as a personal motto. He designed early interactive software, performed spoken-word and multimedia shows, appeared at technology conferences, and became a fixture of the "cyberdelic" scene around Mondo 2000 magazine and the emerging digital culture of the San Francisco Bay Area.²⁹

Leary was associated with the extropian movement around Max More, shared its interest in cryonics and human enhancement, and at one point planned to have his body or head cryonically preserved. Diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, he made his dying a public performance, documenting his decline on an early website and declaring his intent to script his own death; he ultimately decided against cryonic suspension after a falling-out with the provider, and after his death on May 31, 1996, a portion of his ashes was launched into orbit in April 1997 aboard a Celestis rocket that also carried remains of the Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.⁹¹⁰

The Finders

Marion David Pettie, the founder of The Finders, stated that he and Leary had a close connection during the 1960s. According to Pettie, when Leary was based in New York he would send people down to Pettie's communal property in Virginia, and when people at Pettie's place grew tired of something they would go up to Leary's. Leary gave Pettie LSD, which Pettie claimed he never took, keeping it in his refrigerator until a person connected with Leary accidentally burned down a house on the property while installing a sauna, destroying the LSD in the process.¹⁴