The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Frank Barron had some other news—some more-practical information that might help this destitute father of two find a job back in the States. Barron had run into one of their colleagues, Professor David McClelland of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, who just happened to be on sabbatical in Florence. McClelland had just read The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality and was very impressed with Leary’s work. The next day, Leary found himself sitting down with McClelland over a bottle of Chianti. By the time they finished lunch, McClelland had offered him a job back at Harvard. As Leary remembers the conversation, McClelland told him, “There’s no question that what you’re advocating is the future of American psychology.

  “You’re spelling out front-line tactics,” his new boss proclaimed. “You’re just what we need to shake things up at Harvard.”

  Healer: Philadelphia Summer 1942

  Andrew Weil was born in Philadelphia on June 8, 1942. His parents were secular Jews and ran a hat shop and millinery supply house. As a young child, Andy liked to grow flowers in small pots and on a tiny plot of land behind their row house. It was a pastime he picked up from his mother and grandmother, and it would blossom into a lifelong interest in botany.

  Andy was an only child. Both of his parents worked, so he spent a lot of time by himself. He had what child psychologists would call “a very active interior life.” He’d make up stories in his mind, and the stories seemed as real as reality itself. The boundary between his imagination and the world around him was a thin one. As an adult, Andy would build a successful career around the idea that what one sees in one’s mind can actually change physical reality—that the mind can heal the body. Weil would keep this conviction throughout his education, even through his years at Harvard Medical School.

  Decades later, many of his old med-school colleagues would scoff at Weil’s ideas about the human body healing itself through such far-out techniques as guided imagery, breathing exercises, and self-hypnosis. One of his old teachers from Harvard would eventually condemn him as a snake-oil salesman. But others in the American medical establishment would come to see that Weil was onto something—that mainstream Western medicine had seriously underestimated the connection between a patient’s mental state and his physical health.

  These were ideas that would resonate with many baby boomers, including those whose extraordinary experiences on psychedelic drugs forced them to reexamine conventional ideas about body, mind, and spirit. By the 1990s, Weil would preside over a natural-foods and alternative-heath-care empire that would include his own medical center, television series, vitamin business, cosmetics line, and a series of three health and diet books that would all reach the top of the New York Times best-seller list. By the dawn of the new millennium, Dr. Weil would be known by such monikers as “Mr. Natural” and “the CEO of alternative medicine in America.”

  Andy’s first encounters with American medicine were positive ones. Growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he had a family doctor who was just a three-block walk from his parents’ home in northwest Philadelphia. He could tell that his general practitioner—who made house calls and rarely prescribed pharmaceutical drugs—loved his profession. He spent lots of time with his patients, and his example inspired Andy to start thinking about becoming a doctor when he grew up.

  One of the boy’s earliest childhood memories involves a hospital stay where he was given ether by an anesthesiologist. He remembers drifting off in a strange trance. Like many children, Andy experimented with various means of altering his state of consciousness—not through drugs, but by such practices as spinning around and around and whirling himself into a vertiginous stupor. In his first book, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and Higher Consciousness, Weil would cite these mind-altering games as evidence to support the book’s major thesis: that the “desire to alter consciousness periodically is an innate, normal drive analogous to hunger or the sexual drive.

  “Anyone who watches very young children without revealing his presence will find them regularly practicing techniques that induce striking changes in mental states,” he would write. “To my knowledge these practices appear spontaneously among children of all societies, and I suspect that they have done so throughout history as well. In our society, children quickly learn to keep this sort of play out of sight of grownups, who instinctively try to stop them. The sight of a child being throttled into unconsciousness scares the parent, but the child seems to have a wonderful time.”

  Like most children coming of age in the 1950s, Weil learned that consuming alcoholic beverages was the socially accepted way to alter one’s state of consciousness. He remembers his grandmother Mayme getting the giggles after downing an after-dinner Brandy Alexander. Little Andy loved those moments, and tried to intensify the effect by tickling his tipsy grandma. The giggles turned into uncontrollable laughter, which would go on for ten minutes or so, leaving the old lady flushed and wet with tears. His parents were often embarrassed by the outbursts, but not Andy. He got a terrific contact high from those games with grandma, and he always suspected that she was onto something. Growing up, he would be known as quite the practical jokester, a habit that allowed him plenty of opportunities to fall into that altered state of consciousness known as hysterical laughter. Decades later, he would still be advising patients to practice “laughter yoga.”

  No one in his family was a big drinker, but young Weil was allowed occasional sips of cocktails or after-dinner drinks. He didn’t discover a real alcoholic high until his senior year in high school, when he started going to weekend drinking parties where the idea was to get as drunk as possible. But the novelty soon wore off. Weil still went to the parties, but he drank in order to fit in with the crowd, not to get smashed.

  Andy was often lonely as a child, and he would remain something of a loner for his entire life. At the same time, his solitary childhood gave him a fiercely independent spirit. He learned how to operate on his own and think for himself. When he was a teenager attending Central High School in Philadelphia, one of his favorite stories was J. D. Salinger’s “Teddy,” the tale of a precocious, mystical boy who questions the advice given by conventional doctors, only to get noticed by scholars as a boy wonder. The short story unfolds on an ocean liner, where a professor is talking to the ten-year-old genius.

  “Ever think you might like to do something in research when you grow up? Medical research, or something of that kind?”

  Teddy answered, but without sitting down. “I thought about that once, a couple of years ago,” he said. “I’ve talked to quite a few doctors.” He shook his head. “That wouldn’t interest me very much. Doctors stay too right on the surface.”

  Andy Weil turned into J. D. Salinger’s Teddy.

  At age seventeen, the year before he entered Harvard, Andy won a scholarship from the American Association for the United Nations and embarked on a nine-month trip around the world, living with families in Greece, Thailand, and India. One experience on that trip had a profound impact. It occurred in December 1959 in Calcutta about halfway through his year abroad. One night when the moon was full, Andy and a classmate wandered down to a small Hindu temple on the banks of the Hugli River. They were just starting to explore the shrine when Andy felt a hand on his right shoulder. He quickly turned and saw that an old sadhu, an Indian renunciate in rags and long beard, was reaching out to him. Before he could say a word, the temple caretaker let out the most extraordinary sound the boy had ever heard. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. Andy looked with amazement into the old man’s radiant face, shining there in the light of the moon. Later that evening, he and his friend would learn that they had just heard the sacred sound of aum, a healing tone that encompasses all the sounds of the universe. When he closed his eyes, the awestruck teenager could still feel the mysterious vibrations deep down in his soul.

  Andy came home convinced that much of American culture and science was clueless about the rest of the world. There was another reality out there, one far more
interesting than what they were talking about in high school. Over the summer before college, he came across an article in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin about a southern California college student who had allegedly died from an overdose of mescaline. What got Weil’s attention was not that the student had died, but that he’d been taking the drug to get inspiration for a class in creative writing. The article described how mescaline produces powerful visions—including “galaxies of exploding colors.”

  Andrew Weil, (left) when he graduated from Harvard in 1964 (Photo courtesy of Andrew Weil.)

  That was something Andy Weil wanted to try. He couldn’t find much at the local library about mescaline, but he did discover a six-year-old book by a British writer named Aldous Huxley. It was called The Doors of Perception. It describes Huxley’s experience after ingesting a dose of mescaline in his home in the Hollywood hills in the spring of 1953. Huxley was sitting in his library, where his books began to take on a strange significance. “Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.” Even the writer’s gray flannel trousers came alive, supercharged with the “is-ness” of trousers. The draperies in his study became “so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye,” inspiring a transformative appreciation of “the miraculous fact of sheer existence.”

  These descriptions of Huxley’s visions still danced in Andy Weil’s mind when he arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1960. At first, the young student had no idea what he wanted to study. (He’d wind up with a bachelor’s degree in botany and an undergraduate thesis titled “The Use of Nutmeg as a Psychotropic Agent.”) One of Weil’s freshman classes was a sociology course taught by Professor David Riesman, for which Weil proposed a paper on American social attitudes toward psychoactive drugs.

  Riesman was open to such topics. Ten years earlier, in 1950, he had published The Lonely Crowd, one of the most influential studies of the American character. Riesman had identified several American character types, including people who are mostly “other-directed” and those who are primarily “inner-directed.” The 1950s, a decade that would become synonymous with unquestioning conformity, had seen the rise of the other-directed character—all those middle-class, upwardly mobile businessmen and consumers who focused on other people’s opinions of them. By the early 1960s, however, more and more Americans were starting to follow an inner voice. There was a new kind of empathic individualism, a nonconformist mentality that would soon see full flowering in the psychedelic drug culture. One way to see this change is through film and theater—the social journey from Death of a Salesman to Easy Rider.

  Weil discussed his idea for his class paper with one of Riesman’s teaching assistants.

  “If you’re interested in studying psychoactive drugs, you’re sure in the right place,” the graduate student told him. “Go check out this psychologist who’s working with David McClelland. His name’s Leary, and he’s into some pretty interesting stuff.”

  Weil couldn’t believe his luck. He called and made an appointment to come over for his visit. Over the phone, Leary told Weil that he had a tiny office over at the Center for Research in Personality.

  “We’re easy to find,” Leary said with a chuckle. “We’re located at Five Divinity Avenue.”

  Teacher: Soochow, China Spring 1919

  Huston Smith—a man who would devote his life to helping the materialist West understand the mysterious East—was born in Soochow (Suzhou), China, on May 31, 1919. His parents were Methodist missionaries, as were his mother’s parents.

  Huston’s grandparents first set out in 1883 for the monthlong voyage from New York to China, settling down in Zhenjiang. Huston’s father felt the missionary call while studying for his master’s degree at Vanderbilt University, where he came across a group of young Chris tian activists, the Student Volunteer Movement, who had set out to “Chris tianize the world in this generation.” One evening his father was listening to a recruiter who pulled a stopwatch from his vest pocket and proceeded to shock his audience with the bad news of how many Chinese souls were going to hell as each second passed. “Who among you are willing to join us to save those lost souls, to preach the Good News?” the orator asked, inspiring Huston’s father to raise his hand.

  His mother and father met at the Methodist university in Soochow, a city about fifty miles west of Shanghai. His father was teaching English at the university while learning Chinese. Their first son died at age two from one of the many infectious diseases that swept through the crowded city. Huston was the second of three other sons born in Soochow before his parents headed to the interior of the vast pagan nation, inspired to find a town “where Christ had never been preached.”

  They settled in Dzang Zok (Changshu), a small town about thirty miles north of Soochow. Huston’s earliest memory as a very young child is of being on fire, a feeling that came from one of the raging fevers that would infect him and his brothers. Like Andrew Weil, whose earliest memories revolved around strange visions sparked by hospital anesthesia, Huston Smith recalls his childhood fevers as his first taste of an altered state of consciousness. His high fevers caused him to hallucinate and then feel like he was rising up out of his own body. His spirit rose up into the corner of the room, looking down at a sick little boy lying in bed. Then his body began to inflate like a giant balloon, filling the entire room.

  Huston recovered, and learned to love the magic and misery of China. He’d often wake up in the middle of the night and walk outside to gaze up at the wonder of star-strewn skies. A few times, he woke up in the morning to find someone’s unwanted infant left on the doorstep of his missionary parents’ home.

  Their house was the only one in town that had a porch. It smelled of roses from all the vines that covered the small veranda. A city wall encircled Dzang Zok, whose gates were locked after 10 P.M. to protect the town from warlords and their bandits. The narrow lanes in the crowded town were so compact that even as a boy Huston could stretch his arms far enough to touch the little row houses on either side of the street. As a boy, he was fascinated by the shamanism and superstition of Chinese popular religion. Empty bottles—nozzles pointed outward—lined the lintels of their small homes. They served as little canons mounted to warn demon spirits that they would be blown to pieces if they tried to enter the house and cause mischief.

  When he was twelve years old, Huston was sent off to an American boarding school in Shanghai. He thought he was ready for the adventure, barely looking back as the little boat pulled away from the town dock and headed down the canal to the big city. He loved his first week, but on the weekends, when the pressure of classes was lifted, he’d sometimes walk out to the middle of the deserted athletic field, bury his face in his arms, and cry his heart out in homesickness. That devastating sadness lasted only a few weeks, but the memories of his childhood desperation would stay with him a lifetime.

  Huston always assumed that he would follow his father into the Methodist ministry. His only role model in the little Chinese town was his father, so he grew up thinking that missionaries were what missionary sons grew up to be. When he was seventeen years old, Smith set sail for his first visit to the United States. His destination was Central College in Fayette, Missouri, a small Bible college chosen by his father for Huston’s missionary training. Smith had no idea what he was about to experience. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was just a little Missouri town of three thousand people, but to Huston it was bright lights, big city.

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  Huston Smith stands behind his mother in a family photo taken in China in the 1920s. (Photo courtesy of Huston Smith.)

  Smith had planned to return to rural China as a missionary—plans that lasted about two weeks once he landed in the United States. The obvious alternative was to stay and find his calling as a Methodist
minister, but after two years on that track, Smith decided that teaching—not preaching—was his true calling. Like his father, Huston would be ordained as a minister in the United Methodist Church. But the son would reject the theology of the father. Huston Smith had no desire to “Chris tianize the world.”

  Huston’s theological ideas had begun to shift at Central College, where he met a philosophy professor who introduced the young Bible student to the work of Henry Nelson Wieman, an influential liberal theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Smith was very much taken by Wieman’s ideas, but he was even more infatuated with the professor’s daughter, Kendra. They met in the summer of 1941 at a packed campaign rally for Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who was running for president on the Socialist Party of America ticket. Huston had gone to college with Kendra’s brother. At first, she was not too sure about her new suitor. Kendra was a sophisticated young lady. She was already calling herself a Buddhist. “Huston’s parents are very conservative,” she told a friend. “They are set against cards and dancing. His mother dresses up to the neck. Huston doesn’t know a thing about sex.”