How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  But this new form of spiritual mass tourism had not yet received much advertising or promotion before the spring of 1962. That’s when news of controversy surrounding the Harvard Psilocybin Project first hit the newspapers, beginning with Harvard’s own student paper, the Crimson. Harvard being Harvard, and Leary Leary, the story quickly spread to the national press, turning the psychology professor into a celebrity and hastening his, and Alpert’s, departure from Harvard, in a scandal that both prefigured and helped fuel the backlash against psychedelics that would soon close down most research.

  Leary and Alpert’s colleagues had been uncomfortable about the Harvard Psilocybin Project almost from the start. A 1961 memo from David McClelland had raised questions about the absence of controls in Leary and Alpert’s “naturalistic” studies as well as the lack of medical supervision and the fact that the investigators insisted on taking the drugs with their subjects, of whom there were hundreds. (“How often should a person take psilocybin?” he asked, referring to Leary and Alpert.) McClelland also called the two researchers out on their “philosophical naivete.”

  “Many reports are given of deep mystical experiences,” he wrote, “but their chief characteristic is the wonder at one’s own profundity.” The following year, in a detailed critique of Ralph Metzner’s Concord Prison Experiment, McClelland accused the graduate student of failing to “analyz[e] your data objectively and carefully. You know what the conclusions are to be . . . and the data are simply used to support what you already know to be true.” No doubt the popularity of the Psilocybin Project among the department’s students, as well as its cliquishness, rankled the rest of the faculty, who had to compete with Leary and Alpert and their drugs for a precious academic resource: talented graduate students.

  But these grievances didn’t leave the premises of 5 Divinity Avenue—not until March 1962. That’s when McClelland, responding to a request by Herb Kelman, called a meeting of the faculty and students to air concerns about the Psilocybin Project. Kelman asked for the meeting because he had heard from his graduate students that a kind of cult had formed around Alpert and Leary, and some students felt pressure to participate in the drug taking. Early in the meeting Kelman took the floor: “I wish I could treat this as scholarly disagreement, but this work violates the values of the academic community. The whole program has an anti-intellectual atmosphere. Its emphasis is on pure experience, not on verbalizing findings.

  “I’m also sorry to say that Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert have taken a very nonchalant attitude toward these experiments—especially considering the effects these drugs might have on the subjects.

  “What most concerns me,” Kelman concluded, “and others who have come to me, is how the hallucinogenic and mental effects of these drugs have been used to form a kind of ‘insider’ sect within the department. Those who choose not to participate are labeled as ‘squares.’ I just don’t think that kind of thing should be encouraged in this department.” Psychedelic drugs had divided a Harvard department just as they would soon divide the culture.

  Alpert responded forcefully, claiming the work was “right in the tradition of William James,” the department’s presiding deity, and that Kelman’s critique amounted to an attack on academic freedom. But Leary took a more conciliatory approach, consenting to a few reasonable restrictions on the research. Everyone went home thinking the matter had been closed.

  Until the following morning.

  The room had been so completely jammed with faculty and students that no one noticed the presence of an undergraduate reporter from the Crimson named Robert Ellis Smith, furiously taking notes. The next day’s Crimson put the controversy on page 1: “Psychologists Disagree on Psilocybin Research.” The day after that, the story was picked up by the Boston Herald, a Hearst paper, and given a much punchier if not quite as accurate headline: “Hallucination Drug Fought at Harvard—350 Students Take Pills.” Now the story was out, and very soon Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: “Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”

  By the end of the year, Leary and Alpert had concluded that “these materials are too powerful and too controversial to be researched in a university setting.” They announced in a letter to the Crimson they were forming something called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and henceforth would be conducting research under its umbrella rather than Harvard’s. They decried the new restrictions placed on psychedelic research, not only at Harvard, but by the federal government: in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy, in which a new sedative given to pregnant women for morning sickness had caused terrible birth defects in their children, Congress had given the FDA authority to regulate experimental drugs. “For the first time in American history,” the IFIF announced, “and for the first time in the Western world since the Inquisition there now exists a scientific underground.” They predicted that “a major civil liberties issue of the next decade will be the control and expansion of consciousness.”

  “Who controls your cortex?” they wrote in their letter to the Crimson—which is to say, to students. “Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to decide that you can’t and why?”

  It’s often said that in the 1960s psychedelics “escaped from the laboratory,” but it would probably be more accurate to say they were thrown over the laboratory wall, and never with as much loft or velocity as by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at the end of 1962. “We’re through playing the science game,” Leary told McClelland when he returned to Cambridge that fall. Now, Leary and Alpert were playing the game of cultural revolution.

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  • • •

  THE LARGER COMMUNITY of psychedelic researchers across North America reacted to Leary’s provocations with dismay and then alarm. Leary had been in regular contact with the West Coast and Canadian groups, exchanging letters and visits with his far-flung colleagues on a fairly regular basis. (He and Alpert had paid a visit to Stolaroff’s foundation in 1960 or 1961; “I think they thought we were too straitlaced,” Don Allen told me.) Soon after arriving at Harvard, Leary had gotten to know Huxley, who was teaching for a semester at MIT. Huxley had become extremely fond of the roguish professor, and shared his aspirations for psychedelics as an agent of cultural transformation, but worried that Leary was moving too fast and too flagrantly.* During his last visit to Cambridge (Huxley would die in Los Angeles in November 1963, on the same day as John F. Kennedy), Huxley felt that Leary “had talked such nonsense . . . that I became quite concerned. Not about his sanity—because he is perfectly sane—but about his prospects in the world.”

  Soon after Leary announced the formation of the International Federation for Internal Freedom, Humphry Osmond traveled to Cambridge to try to talk some sense into him. He and Abram Hoffer were worried that Leary’s promotion of the drugs outside the context of clinical research threatened to provoke the government and upend their own research. Osmond also faulted Leary for working without a psychopharmacologist and for treating these “powerful chemicals [as] harmless toys.” Hoping to distance serious research from irresponsible use, and troubled that the counterculture was contaminating his formerly neutral term “psychedelic,” Osmond tried once again to coin a new one: “psychodelytic.” I don’t need to tell you it failed to catch on.

  “You must face these objections rather than dissipate them with a smile, however cosmic,” Osmond told him. There it was again: the indestructible Leary smile! But Osmond got nothing more than that for his troubles.

  Myron Stolaroff weighed in with a blunt letter to Leary describing the IFIF as “insane” and accurately prophesying the crack-up to come: It will “wreak hav
oc on all of us doing LSD work all over the nation . . .

  “Tim, I am convinced you are heading for very serious trouble if your plan goes ahead as you have described it to me, and it would not only make a great deal of trouble for you, but for all of us, and may do irreparable harm to the psychedelic field in general.”

  But what exactly was the plan of the IFIF? Leary was happy to state it openly: to introduce as many Americans to “the strong psychedelics” as it possibly could in order to change the country one brain at a time. He had done the math and concluded that “the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969.”

  As it would turn out, Leary’s math was not far off. Though closer to two million Americans had tried LSD by 1969, this cadre had indeed blown the mind of America, leaving the country in a substantially different place.

  But perhaps the most violent response to Leary’s plans for worldwide mental revolution came from Al Hubbard, who had always had an uneasy relationship with the professor. The two had met soon after Leary got to Harvard, when Hubbard made the drive to Cambridge in his Rolls-Royce, bringing a supply of LSD he hoped to trade for some of Leary’s psilocybin.

  “He blew in with that uniform,” Leary recalled, “laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!”—a subject on which Leary was certainly qualified to judge. Hubbard “started name-dropping like you wouldn’t believe . . . claimed he was friends with the Pope.

  “The thing that impressed me is, on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most impressive people in the world in his lap, basically backing him.”

  But Leary’s legendary charm never had much traction with Hubbard, a deeply conservative and devout man who disdained both the glare of publicity and the nascent counterculture. “I liked Tim when we first met,” he said years later, “but I warned him a dozen times” about staying out of trouble and the press. “He seemed like a well-intentioned person, but then he went overboard . . . he turned out to be completely no good.” Like many of his colleagues, Hubbard strongly objected to Leary’s do-it-yourself approach to psychedelics, especially his willingness to dispense with the all-important trained guide. His attitude toward Leary might also have been influenced by his extensive contacts in law enforcement and intelligence, which by now had the professor on their radar.

  According to Osmond, the Captain’s antipathy toward Leary surfaced alarmingly during a psychedelic session the two shared during this period of mounting controversy. “Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea . . . I became much concerned he might shoot me.”

  Hubbard was probably right to think that nothing short of a bullet was going to stop Timothy Leary now. As Stolaroff put the matter in closing his letter to Leary, “I suppose there is little hope that with the bit so firmly in your mouth you can be deterred.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE SPRING OF 1963, Leary had one foot out of Harvard, skipping classes and voicing his intention to leave at the end of the school year, when his contract would be up. But Alpert had a new appointment in the School of Education and planned to stay on—until another explosive article in the Crimson got them both fired. This one was written by an undergraduate named Andrew Weil.

  Weil had arrived at Harvard with a keen interest in psychedelic drugs—he had devoured Huxley’s Doors of Perception in high school—and when he learned about the Psilocybin Project, he beat a path to Professor Leary’s office door to ask if he could participate.

  Leary explained the university rule restricting the drugs to graduate students. Yet, trying to be helpful, he told Weil about a company in Texas where he might order some mescaline by mail (it was still legal at the time), which Weil promptly did (using university stationery). Weil became fascinated with the potential of psychedelics and helped form an undergraduate mescaline group. But he wanted badly to be part of Leary and Alpert’s more exclusive club, so when in the fall of 1962 Weil began to hear about other undergraduates who had received drugs from Richard Alpert, he was indignant. He went to his editor at the Crimson and proposed an investigation.

  Weil developed leads on a handful of fellow students whom Alpert had turned on in violation of university rules. (Weil would later write that “students and others were using hallucinogens for seductions both heterosexual and homosexual.”) But there were two problems with his scoop: none of the students to whom Alpert supposedly gave drugs were willing to say so on the record, and the Crimson’s lawyers were worried about printing defamatory charges against professors. The lawyers advised Weil to turn over his information to the administration. He could then write a story reporting on whatever actions the university took in response to the charges, thereby reducing the newspaper’s legal exposure. But Weil still needed a student to come forward.

  He traveled to New York City to meet with the prominent father of one of them—Ronnie Winston—and offered him a deal. As Alpert tells the story,* “He went to Harry Winston”—the famous Fifth Avenue jeweler—“and he said, ‘Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we’ll cut out your son’s name. We won’t use it in the article.’” So young Ronnie went to the dean and, when asked if he had taken drugs from Dr. Alpert, confessed, adding an unexpected fillip: “Yes, sir, I did. And it was the most educational experience I’ve had at Harvard.”

  Alpert and Leary appear to be the only Harvard professors fired in the twentieth century. (Technically, Leary wasn’t fired, but Harvard stopped paying him several months before his contract ended.) The story became national news, introducing millions of Americans to the controversy surrounding these exotic new drugs. It also earned Andrew Weil a plum assignment from Look magazine to write about the controversy, which spread the story still further. Describing the psychedelic scene at Harvard in the third person, Weil alluded to “an undergraduate group . . . conducting covert research with mescaline,” neglecting to mention he was a founding member of that group.

  This was not, suffice it to say, Andrew Weil’s proudest moment, and when I spoke to him about it recently, he confessed that he’s felt badly about the episode ever since and had sought to make amends to both Leary and Ram Dass. (Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass.) Leary readily accepted Weil’s apology—the man was apparently incapable of holding a grudge—but Ram Dass refused to talk to Weil for years, which pained him. But after Ram Dass suffered a stroke in 1997, Weil traveled to Hawaii to seek his forgiveness. Ram Dass finally relented, telling Weil that he had come to regard being fired from Harvard as a blessing. “If you hadn’t done what you did,” he told Weil, “I would never have become Ram Dass.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HERE, UPON THEIR EXIT from Harvard, we should probably take our leave of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, even though their long, strange trip through American culture still had a long, strange way to go. The two would now take their show (with its numerous ex-students and hangers-on) on the road, moving the International Federation for Internal Freedom (which would later morph into the League for Spiritual Discovery) from Cambridge to Zihuatanejo, until the Mexican government (under pressure from U.S. authorities) kicked them out, then briefly to the Caribbean island of Dominica, until that government kicked them out, before finally settling for several raucous years in a sixty-four-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, owned by a wealthy patron named Billy Hitchcock.

  Embraced by the rising counterculture, Leary was invited (along with Allen Ginsberg) to speak at the first Human Be-In in San Francisco, an event that drew some twenty-five thousand young people to Golden Gate Park in January 1967, to trip on freely distributed LSD while listening to speakers pr
oclaim a new age. The ex-professor, who for the occasion had traded in his Brooks Brothers for white robes and love beads (and flowers in his graying hair), implored the throng of tripping “hippies”—the term popularized that year by the local newspaper columnist Herb Caen—to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The slogan—which he at first said he had thought up in the shower but years later claimed was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan—would cling to Leary for the rest of his life, earning him the contempt of parents and politicians the world over.

  But Leary’s story only gets weirder, and sadder. Soon after his departure from Cambridge, the government, alarmed at his growing influence on the country’s youth, launched a campaign of harassment that culminated in the 1966 bust in Laredo; he was driving his family to Mexico on vacation, when a border search of his car turned up a small quantity of marijuana. Leary would spend years in jail battling federal marijuana charges and then several more years on the lam as an international fugitive from justice. He acquired this status in 1970 after his bold escape from a California prison, with the help of the Weathermen, the revolutionary group. His comrades managed to spirit Leary out of the country to Algeria, into the arms of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther, who had established a base of operations there. But asylum under Cleaver turned out to be no picnic: the Panther confiscated his passport, effectively holding Leary hostage. Leary had to escape yet again, this time making his way to Switzerland (where he found luxurious refuge in the chalet of an arms dealer), then (after the U.S. government persuaded Switzerland to jail him) on to Vienna, Beirut, and Kabul, where he was finally seized by U.S. agents and remanded to an American prison, now maximum security and, for a time, solitary confinement. But the persecution only fed his sense of destiny.