DAVID HARRIS
In the fall of ’66, my local draft board had sent me a notice saying, “You’re 1-A,” because I hadn’t taken the student deferment. And that was followed by an order to report for a pre-induction physical. So I go to the pre-induction physical in Fresno. At that time, for the only time in its history, they were drafting for the Marine Corps, because the Marines had suffered so many casualties that they didn’t have enough volunteers to cover them, so the sergeant running my physical took great pride in saying, “We’re going to take you into the Marines, boy.” By the spring of ’67, I was essentially on notice. I was going to be drafted. At that point, myself and three other people founded the Resistance. We were essentially going to organize a national draft card return, where, on October 16, 1967, young men from around the country were going to gather at various places and collect draft cards and give them to the government. In our case, we did it in front of a San Francisco federal building. The location that got the most ink was in Boston, where Dr. Spock was. They had all these older people that the press wanted to talk about. We were just a bunch of draft-aged people. We got three hundred in San Francisco. I think there were twelve hundred that day.
The pitch was “Take your life into your own hands. Are you going to be part of the machine or are you going to be against the machine? Are you going to kill people randomly in Southeast Asia or are you going to stop that?” We went after the antiwar movement saying, “Look, saying you’re against the war is nice, but it isn’t going anywhere. If you’re against the war, then act like it. How can you be against the war when you carry a draft card in your pocket? You’ve got to put yourself on the line before you start telling other people how to behave.” It meant the potential of five years in prison. We were asking people to act proactively and to commit civil disobedience. In the classic sense of civil disobedience: no hiding. Which is why we didn’t burn draft cards. We wanted them to have the evidence.
I can remember, in San Francisco, there was a crowd of us out in front of the federal building and we sent a basket out and it came back with draft cards in it. Then all of a sudden somebody out there would say, “Come on, back here,” and we’d send it out again, and more draft cards, and send it out and more draft cards. And finally we were there on the steps of the federal building, and out came the federal attorney—who was a black man by the name of Cecil Poole. At that point, a resister from Berkeley, a guy named Dickie Harris, takes the basket of cards, walks over to Poole, and says, “Brother Poole, are you head nigger here?” and dumps the draft cards at Poole’s feet. He, of course, walks off and leaves them there, so we scoop them all back up in the basket and take them up to the federal attorney’s office, where the door is locked, so we leave this basket full of draft cards out in front of the door. It was an act of defiance, but it was also throwing down the gauntlet. You know who we are. We ain’t hiding. You want to make your law work? Then bust us. Ultimately, the idea was to disable the Selective Service System, but short of that, to make the point.
Why am I supposed to degrade myself? Rub bear grease all over my body and stay up for five nights taking meth? Make up some crazy story? Tell them I was fucking my sister? I was standing up for me, the person I was. I wouldn’t want to pretend to be somebody else in order to deal with these assholes. And whose country was it? My grandmother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution. My people have been around here a long time. Let Lyndon Johnson move to Canada. I’m not Canadian. My attitude was, We’re standing up here. We’re going to force the issue and make them lock people up in order to prosecute their war—because, if nothing else, people were going to notice.
Once we founded the Resistance, I left Stanford—with fifteen incomplete units short of a degree. I never have gotten a college degree.*7
* * *
*1 In the summer of 1964, in what was called the Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, nearly 1,500 mostly white, northern college students organized by SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) went to Mississippi to help register black voters. At the time, Mississippi had the lowest percentage of registered African American voters in the country—a dismal 6.7 percent.
*2 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 when he was accused of flirting with a white female store clerk. He was kidnapped by two white men, bludgeoned, shot to death, and dumped in a river. When his maimed body was discovered, his mother insisted that it be displayed in an open casket for two days in Chicago, and more than ten thousand people came to the viewing and the funeral. In September a panel of white male jurors found the two murderers innocent (they later confessed) despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Till’s murder sparked large protests and served as a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement. Jesse Jackson called Till’s murder the “Big Bang” of the civil rights movement.
*3 Jefferson Airplane, a band founded by Paul Kantner and Marty Balin in California in 1965, was a pioneer in the psychedelic rock genre.
*4 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a New Left student organization founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960 by student activists Tom Hayden and Alan Haber. By the late sixties it became one of the leading antiwar organizations, with about one hundred thousand members, with chapters at hundreds of colleges.
*5 Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused military induction in April 1967 and was stripped of his heavyweight title, passport, and boxing licenses. “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Viet Cong,” said Ali, who had applied for conscientious objector status because of his Muslim faith. Ali said: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.” Ali was banned from boxing for three years, but his conviction for evading the draft was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1971.
*6 In January 1966 SNCC created a sensation when it became the first civil rights organization to officially oppose the war in Vietnam. The catalyst was the murder of Samuel Younge, Jr., a SNCC worker and Vietnam vet who had lost a kidney in the war. Younge, a student at the Tuskegee Institute, was murdered by a white gas station attendant for trying to use a whites-only restroom. “The murder of Samuel Young [sic] in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law,” the SNCC statement read. “In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths.” As a result of the controversial statement, the Georgia legislature refused to allow Julian Bond (SNCC’s communications director) to take the oath of office and declared the seat to which he had just been elected vacant. Bond sued and won his case, Bond v. Floyd, in the Supreme Court. SNCC and SDS created an official partnership in defiance of the draft in July 1966.
*7 David Harris announced the formation of the Resistance at a march in San Francisco on April 15, 1967, held by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Harris told the crowd: “This war will not be made in our names; this war will not be made with our hands; we will not carry rifles to butcher the Vietnamese people and the prisons of the United States will be full of young people who will not honor the orders of murder.”
CHAPTER 2
PSYCHEDELIC REVOLUTION
(1960–1967)
The danger of LSD is not physical or psychological, but social-political. Make no mistake: the effect of consciousnessexpanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, human potentialities, existence. The game is about to be changed, ladies and gentlemen….Head for the hills or prepare your intellectual craft to flow with the current.
—TIMOTHY LEARY, The Politics of Ecstasy
LSD, u
sed widely in the late 1960s, was the secret ingredient that helped to propel a transformation in attitude and lifestyle that challenged nearly every principle that had supported American society and culture in the 1950s. It was called a “revolution by consciousness,” or a “psychedelic revolution.” By 1970, at least two million Americans had dropped acid, and one-third of all college students had smoked marijuana. The escalation of the Vietnam War and resistance to the draft in the second half of the decade, combined with the psychedelic-fueled counterculture, created a nationwide spontaneous combustion.
RALPH METZNER (Harvard psychologist)
I was a graduate student in clinical psychology at Harvard, where Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were both professors. They were ten years older than me. The Harvard psychology department was dominated by behaviorists. There was one part of the psychology that was behaviorism, working with rats and pigeons. That was B. F. Skinner, the arch-behaviorist. But then there was the Department of Social Relations, which was a brilliant innovation because these were PhD students in clinical psychology, personality psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociology, all working together.
Richard Alpert was teaching there. He was a junior professor. Timothy Leary was a research psychologist. He had written a book on interpersonal diagnosis of personality—he was a hardcore behaviorist.*1 In the summer of 1960, while vacationing in Mexico, Leary ate some magic mushrooms and tumbled through the entire evolutionary process right down to a single-celled organism and back up, which is a classical mystical experience, but formulated in the terms of somebody who has a modern education and a PhD.
I think Leary was the first person that described his mystical experience in the language of modern science; the early people described it in the language of religion or oneness with God. He said, “This is reliving the entire evolutionary process.” Nobody knew that you could actually do that because people had never described it before. So Leary decided he was going to devote the rest of his life to that, which is pretty much what happened to me, too, and many other people who worked on the project.
We then started doing a number of research projects, as graduate students are supposed to do at universities like Harvard, and on one of the first ones I worked on, we recognized that LSD changes your consciousness; it doesn’t change your behavior. And so right there was the first fateful step, where Leary parted company with his department chair and other professors, because they were all stuck with “You don’t take the drugs that you’re researching. You give it to a rat or a human being or a pigeon and observe their behavior.” And Leary said, “Well, there isn’t any behavior to observe.”
It’s all interior. Leary used to say, “There’s no behavior to observe, the person who’s taking the drug is just sitting there or lying there and not saying anything, and every now and again he might say, ‘Whew, amazing!’ ” If you want to know what’s going on, you have to actually ask the person, or better still, take it yourself. It’s not true of other drugs, but LSD is not like other drugs. For example, the question people were asking, “Well, what does this drug do?” You can’t answer it, because it depends on the set and the setting, and the internal expectations and the knowledge that you bring to it.
DAVID HARRIS (Stanford student, draft resistance organizer)
I first dropped acid when I was a sophomore. At that time, right next door to Stanford in the town of Menlo Park, Richard Alpert was running clinical experiments on LSD. So there was a lot of pharmaceutical-grade, Sandoz-manufactured LSD floating around the underground at Stanford. In those days it was a spiritual experience to trip on acid. You read The Tibetan Book of the Dead before taking acid and prepared for this kind of spiritual journey. It was the spring of ’65. Timothy Leary was not yet a factor on the West Coast.
I was in the second-floor dormitory room in Stern Hall with my buddy Peter Kaukonen, who was the younger brother of the lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, Jorma Kaukonen, and the first guy I’d ever seen with long hair. He and I took acid together. The first two hours, you’re untethered. Part of what happened culturally was having the experience of being outside of control. You were suddenly in a psychic state that you couldn’t control. You had no option but to flow with it. It was one of those moments where you let go. And once you let go, then all of a sudden things were a whole lot different in the world. This was still at a time on the Stanford campus when drugs were a pretty minority proposition. I can remember, with Peter, sitting in the student union passing a joint back and forth, and nobody had a clue what the fuck we were doing.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW (Grateful Dead lyricist)
I was raised a fairly devout Mormon in Wyoming, and actually became more devout than my parents were, as an early teenager, but was hit hard by adolescence. I got a motorcycle, turned my whole Boy Scout troop into a motorcycle gang, quit going to church, and stopped believing in any kind of coherent divine force, but I missed it a lot.
So when I heard that there was this substance that would make you experience the holy, I was really interested, and started trying to seek it out among the various circles that I had available to me at Wesleyan. Dick Alpert was a graduate student at Wesleyan not long before I got there—it was just that kind of a place. Wesleyan had a wonderful Indian music program where Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, and all the big stars played. They would have these curry concerts out in a beautiful farmhouse in the woods of Connecticut on Friday nights. It’s sort of surprising that I took it for the first time so insouciantly, especially now that I realize that, in some fundamental way, you only take LSD once. I was a different person after that than the person that I’d been before, and it certainly had the desired effect as far as I was concerned.
I started out getting the experience listening to Ravi at a farmhouse in Connecticut in 1966 and then wandering out into the snowy woods and looking at every snowflake individually for the miracle that it was, and became a true believer. I think the world would generally be a better place if everybody dropped acid, under the right circumstances. But I was very much of the view that it was something that needed to be done with presence of mind and a lot of care taken to be in the right setting.
DAVID HARRIS
About the same time I took acid for the first time, Ken Kesey*2 was doing his Trips Festival in the city. Kesey was also a figure around Stanford, because he lived up in the hills in the back of Stanford in a town called La Honda. Eventually, we all knew Kesey and we actually took acid with Kesey several times.
A lot of hippies at the time were looking to get stoned and dance and play. We were all for getting stoned and dancing and playing, but the serious business was how to deal with the machine that’s chewing up Southeast Asia. All those things were mingled together and they were all part of the same uprising of young people who insisted on writing their own ticket. Because the tickets that were being written for them were bad at best and criminal at worst.
And it wasn’t just acid, it was the whole thing. Growing your hair out, wearing clothes that didn’t come from J. C. Penney’s or Saks Fifth Avenue. You’ve got to remember we grew up in the fifties. The fifties was a time of no options. There was one way to be. When I grew up in Fresno, we had three choices: You could be John Wayne in the Sands of Iwo Jima, or John Wayne in the Sands of Iwo Jima, or John Wayne in the Sands of Iwo Jima. That was it. So what happened in the sixties, in what is summarized as “hippie,” was making options. There were other ways to be than the one that everyone was insisting we were supposed to be, and we were going to find them.
RALPH METZNER
I knew Albert Hofmann well until he passed on at age 102 in 2008. He liked that term, “passed on.” He was a very conservative Swiss scientist—a materialist, actually. He was a chemist working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz in Switzerland, and he accidentally ingested some lysergic acid; that’s the mythology, and it’s wildly improbable. Swiss chemists are probably the most compulsively exact people on the planet. Think about it. They’re handling ch
emicals in micro amounts. But the amount of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, that’s an effective dose is so minute you can’t actually see it. It happened and he didn’t know how. He didn’t know that there was the possibility of a drug that would affect consciousness in that way. It wasn’t a tranquilizer, it wasn’t a stimulant, it didn’t have any other medical properties. At first they ignored it. Then they were synthesizing all these chemicals and ergot alkaloids, and four years later he decided on an intuitive impulse, “Let’s look at this one again.”
It was 1943, which is an interesting synchronicity, because that was the same year as the first atomic reaction leading to the building of the atomic bomb. It’s very strange when you look at all the synchronicities. It has all of the hallmarks of divine intervention. Hey, we need something here to open people’s minds. Let’s have this guy invent this. He was the perfect person for it, a very conservative, cautious scientist.
MICHAEL RANDALL (LSD manufacturer/dealer)
My friend Johnny Griggs had read an article in Life magazine in 1966*3 about these Harvard doctors and this new drug, and he told me he wanted to try it. It wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t on the street yet. It was still experimental. About thirty of us went to White Point on the ocean in San Pedro, took acid, and wandered off looking into these tide pools filled with little hermit crabs, and the water was clear and beautiful. It was there that I woke up and realized that there is an intelligence that has created this world and the living, breathing universe that is infinite beyond imagination. I had a deep, spiritual, religious experience. We all did, and we decided that we should form a church.
Witness to the Revolution Page 5