The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Over time, Smith, like Huxley, would come to question the zeal Leary and Alpert employed to spread the psychedelic gospel. Smith and another theologian on the team, Walter Houston Clark, joined forces with Leary and Alpert to form the International Federation for Internal Freedom, known to those in the know as “if . . . if.” But Clark and Smith would eventually part ways with the two men who would become forever associated with the great adventure at Harvard.

  Leary and Alpert were antiestablishment rebels. Walter and Huston thought of themselves as reformers, not revolutionaries. They were not ready to give up on the university.

  Huston Smith had come to MIT in 1958. He was thirty-nine years old and just hitting his stride as a scholar and commentator on the world’s religions. Nearly five decades later, he sits in a sunny window in the living room of his home in Berkeley, California. He’s still married to Kendra, but he’s an old man now. He has trouble hearing, and with the help of a walker he can barely make it from his study to his living-room chair. But when he tells the story of that New Year’s Day in Timothy Leary’s living room, his eyes widen and he seems to lose ten years.

  “What a way to start the sixties,” he says, laughing.

  Seeker: Newton, Massachusetts February 1961

  Richard Alpert would have taken the magic mushrooms in Mexico with the rest of the gang, back in the summer of 1960, but he arrived a few days after Leary’s first trip. Everyone was still aglow in the aftermath of the experience, but the mushrooms were gone. Richard would have to wait nearly nine months before he got his own psychedelic baptism back home in Timothy Leary’s living room.

  Back in Mexico in the summer of 1960, Leary was still feeling the mystic wonder of it all when he met Alpert at the Mexico City airport. Richard had quite an adventure just getting there. He’d just bought his flying teacher’s Cessna and had decided to fly from San Francisco to Mexico City—over the startled objections of his instructor.

  “There’s no way you can do that,” his teacher warned. “That’s a really difficult airport to fly into. Traffic control is a mess down there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alpert said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He bought the plane on a Saturday and flew down on Sunday. He had not told his flight teacher he was going to fly down tomorrow. If he had he probably wouldn’t have gotten the keys. Alpert had already rounded up a Stanford anthropologist who needed a lift to Mexico, but he didn’t tell him he had just bought the Cessna the day before. Mexico City is at a high elevation, making it a difficult place to land. His passenger sat next to Alpert with a terrified look on his face as Richard dodged other airplanes on his approach.

  “Don’t worry,” Alpert said. “We’ll be fine.”

  They arrived and found Leary waiting in the terminal. Richard was eager to tell Tim about the terrors of his airplane trip, but it turned out Leary had an even more amazing trip to talk about.

  They stood in the lobby as Alpert told the story about buying the plane and flying down to Mexico the next day.

  “That’s quite a trip, Richard,” Leary said. “You know, I’ve been doing some flying myself—internally.”

  They got to the villa, and all the guests were sitting around the pool talking up the mushrooms. But the magic fungi were gone, and no one knew how to find Crazy Juana and score some more. Meanwhile, Leary was already planning his mushroom research project and wanted to begin as soon as he got back to Harvard. He and Alpert were trained clinicians, but this was not going to be like other drug tests. They were going to change the world.

  “We’re going to take a whole new approach with this research,” Leary told Alpert. “Everyone thinks these drugs cause psychosis, but that’s because they’ve been controlled by psychiatrists. Of course they’re going to view this as psychosis. That’s all they know. But there is really something deeper going on here, Richard. Wait until you try them. I learned more about psychology from these mushrooms than I did in graduate school. These drugs can revolutionize the way we conceptualize ourselves—not to mention the rest of the world. It’ll be great. We’ll give them to philosophers, poets, and musicians.”

  Alpert had been working with Leary for about a year at Harvard. Richard might have had the bigger office at the Department of Social Relations, but Tim was clearly the mentor in their relationship. There were about ten research psychologists in the department, all of them interested in the dynamics of the human personality. As he got to know Leary, Alpert started changing the way he looked at Harvard, and the way he looked at himself. Until Tim showed up, Richard was happily playing the professor role. He’d go to faculty meetings, sit in big chairs, and have tea from a silver tea ser vice. It was easy to let the whole experience go to your head. Alpert would walk through Harvard Yard and begin to think he really was somebody. He was a member of the Harvard faculty. But Tim wasn’t like that. He was the first guy Alpert ever met who was not impressed by Harvard. It was just a job.

  Their relationship went beyond the office—even before they made the psychedelic bond. Tim arrived at Harvard with two children and no wife. Richard started hanging out with the kids, Susan and Jack, and began taking care of them. They started calling him “Uncle Dick,” and he started acting out the role of surrogate mother. Richard was a bachelor. Tim was a bachelor with kids. Sometimes they’d find another baby sitter and go out drinking in Harvard Square. Lots of drinking, as in that 1950s kind of drinking.

  Alpert had missed out on the mushrooms in Mexico and wasn’t in Cambridge in the fall of 1960, when Leary started gathering together the tribe that would become the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Alpert had been teaching that semester as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, but he was getting lots of fascinating reports about what was happening back at Harvard. He couldn’t wait to get back and join the party, and his chance finally came one day in February 1961.

  Alpert returned just as the biggest storm of the season dumped two feet of snow on the streets of Newton. Leary invited him over to his house for a Saturday-night initiation. By now, Leary and his growing band of graduate students had started experimenting with a new batch of drugs they’d gotten from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. The drug was a synthesized form of psilocybin, the active ingredient in the magic mushrooms of Mexico. The psychic effects were the same, but the dose was easier to control.

  While Alpert had been in California, Leary had begun to assemble an eclectic squadron of test pilots at his increasingly chaotic home. They included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson; William Burroughs, the legendary novelist and heroin addict; and Alan Watts, the popular Buddhist writer and commentator. Ginsberg was sitting at Leary’s kitchen table the day Alpert burst in from the cold. Alpert joined them at the table, upon which stood a bottle of pink pills from Sandoz labs. He measured out ten milligrams of the drug and washed the pills down with a few gulps of beer.

  Allen and Tim and Richard sat down in the kitchen and waited. Right away there was a bit of a melodrama. Tim’s son, Jack, was upstairs when the boy’s dog ran out of the house. The dog had been out galloping around in deep snow and came in panting heavily. They all started thinking, “Oh, no! The dog is dying!” Then they figured out that they really couldn’t tell if the dog was dying because they were so high. Their thinking and senses were too distorted. Jack was eleven years old. He was upstairs watching television and a bit peeved that these silly adults were bothering him. He came down, assured them that the dog was fine, then marched back upstairs to the TV.

  Alpert started really coming onto the psilocybin. There was too much talking in the kitchen, so he walked into the living room, a darker and more peaceful setting. He sat down on the sofa and tried to collect himself. Looking up, he saw some people over in the corner. Who were they? Were they real? Then he started to see them as images of himself in his various roles. They were hallucinations, but they seemed so real. There was the professor with a cap and gown. There was a pilot with a pilot’s hat. There
was the lover. At first, he was a bit amused by the vision. Those are just my roles. That role can go. That role can go. I’ve had it with that role. Then he saw himself as his father’s son. The feeling changed. Wait a minute. This drug is giving me amnesia! I’ll wake up and I won’t know who I am! That was terrifying, but Alpert reminded himself that those roles weren’t really important. Stop worrying. It’s fine. At least I have a body. Then Alpert looked down on the couch at his body. There’s no body! Where’s my body? There’s no-body. There’s nobody. That was terrifying. He started to call out for Tim. Wait a minute. How can I call out to Tim? Who was going to call for Tim? The minder of the store, me, would be calling for Tim. But who is me? It was terrifying at first, but all of a sudden Alpert started watching the whole show with a kind of calm compassion.

  At that moment, Richard Alpert met his own soul, his true soul. He jumped off the couch, ran out the door, and rolled down a snow-covered hill behind Leary’s house. It was bliss. Pure bliss.

  At the time, Alpert’s parents were also living in Newton. Their home was just five blocks from Leary’s house on Homer Street. It was three in the morning, but that didn’t stop a stoned Richard Alpert from storming through the snow to go see his parents. When he got to his parents’ house, he saw that no one had shoveled the deep snow off their walkway. So he went into the garage and got the shovel. In his drugged state, he saw himself as a young buck coming to the rescue. He was all-powerful. He would save his parents! It all seemed so mythological. Then he looked up at the window and saw his parents standing there. They were obviously peeved, or at least confused. Then they assumed that their son must have been drinking with Leary. Alpert saw them up in the window and waved at his startled parents. Then he stuck the shovel in the snow and started dancing around it. He felt so fine, perfectly fine.

  Alpert recounts this tale of snowy bliss just a few days shy of the forty-seventh anniversary of the event, yet he remembers it like it was last night. As he tells the tale he’s sitting beside a large picture window overlooking the rugged coast on the island of Maui. He says he’s come here to Hawaii to die. But when he tells the story of that wondrous winter night his eyes light up like those of an excited little boy. He was twenty-nine years old then. He’s seventy-six years old now. Leary is dead. Ginsberg is dead. Alpert is no longer a young buck. A nearly fatal stroke a decade earlier has left him paralyzed on his left side and confined to a wheelchair. The stroke nearly destroyed his ability to find words and speak them. He struggles mightily to tell the story, once again, of the events that changed his life.

  “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people’s eyes,” he says. “What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.”

  Healer: Cambridge, Massachusetts Fall 1960

  Andy Weil and Ronnie Winston were friends and dorm mates in Claverly Hall. They were both incoming Harvard freshmen when they walked into Leary’s office on Divinity Lane and volunteered to be research subjects in his psychedelic research project. Weil had grown up in a middle-class family. Winston was the son of Harry Winston, the wealthy diamond and jewelry manufacturer whose creations hung around the necks of trophy wives and Hollywood starlets from coast to coast. Neither of them would officially take part in the project, but they would both play an important, little-known role in the rise and fall of Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary.

  Winston would eventually be brought into the psychedelic family. Weil would not, and the implications of that unequal treatment would forever alter the careers and life paths of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.

  Weil and Winston had both read The Doors of Perception, Huxley’s book about the insights the British writer gleaned from his 1953 mescaline trip. They walked into Leary’s little office on Divinity Avenue eager to fly off on their own mystical journey. They were a bit nervous when they sat down, but Leary soon put them at ease with his soft-spoken charm.

  “Yes,” Leary said, “Huxley was the trailblazer. You know, I didn’t have a clue as to the potential of this research until I had my own experience with psilocybin mushrooms over the summer. At its core, you have to understand that this is not an intellectual exercise. It is experiential. It is, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, religious. But it is more than religious. It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite potentialities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed. I feel like I’ve awakened from a long ontological sleep.”

  Weil and Winston were on the edge of their seats.

  “Anyway,” Leary continued, “the research is pretty straightforward. Our subjects take a controlled dose of synthesized psilocybin. We make sure they are in a safe and comfortable setting. We’re trying to get people from all walks of life, not just graduate students. We’re giving this stuff to priests and prisoners and everyone in between. They do a session about once a month and are expected to write up a two-to three-page report describing the experience. Between sessions, we get together and discuss whatever insights we’ve gleaned from all this. Now, I assume neither of you have had any experience with these substances.”

  “No, sir, we have not,” Weil replied. “But we are ready, willing, and able.”

  “I can see that,” Leary said. “But I think we may have a little problem. How old are you boys?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. You see, our agreement with the university does not allow us to use undergraduates in this research.”

  “That’s what we were afraid of,” Weil said. “To tell you the truth, some of us over at Claverly were thinking of running our own series of tests, and we were wondering if you could clue us in on how we might obtain some of these pills.”

  “Well, I could, but I’d better not do that, boys,” Leary replied. “But if you’re persistent, I’m sure you can find your own source.”

  Weil met separately with Professor Alpert. The answer was still the same. No, he could not participate in the experiments at the Center for Personality Research. They had made an agreement with the university not to use undergraduate subjects in their research. To Weil, the meeting with Alpert had a very different feel than the get-together with Leary. Weil found Alpert uncomfortable to be around. Leary was a charmer. He was easygoing. Alpert was intense. He seemed too wrapped up in the role of the Harvard professor.

  Weil and Winston were persistent. They weren’t able to obtain their own psilocybin pills, but they did manage to get a supply of mescaline, a psychedelic drug synthesized from the peyote cactus. Weil wrote to Huxley, who suggested they try a company called Delta Chemical. Weil obtained some Harvard stationery and got to work. He couldn’t fool the folks at Delta, who required too much official paperwork, but Weil found another company with looser drug-procurement procedures.

  Once they got the drugs, Weil, Winston, and some other undergraduates started their own experiments in Claverly Hall. They were basically doing the same thing Leary was doing over at the Center for Personality Research. They’d take the drugs and write up reports about their experiences. Then they’d sit around and discuss them. Weil emerged as a leader of the little drug ring operating out of Claverly Hall. He collected about thirty reports on undergraduate mescaline trips. He didn’t see the experiences as just an excuse to get high. He wasn’t rebelling against anything. He was just curious, eager to understand what was going on inside his own brain.

  Not much happened the first time he took mescaline. He was apprehensive. He’d later see that he was unconsciously resisting the drug. He didn’t feel much of anything, and that disappointed him. He’d wanted to experience all the visual images he’d read about in those wild accounts of other mescaline eaters. That’s what really fascinated him, but he didn’t get any of that. On his second trip, he did have a more powerful emotional experience. Not hallucinations, but a kind of spiritual transcendence. It was
a kind of serene feeling of connection with something higher. Everything just felt right—like he was seeing into the essence of things. But there was also something frightening about the experience. Andy was reluctant to just go with the flow. He didn’t dare up the dose and go deeper. He could see that having any more of these insights might convince him that Harvard was a complete waste of time.

  Weil was a calculating, ambitious young man. He had the next ten years of his life all mapped out. He’d later see that he’d somehow put the psychedelic experience in a box. He stopped experimenting with drugs. If he hadn’t, he might have dropped out of school. Who knows what would have happened to him?

  Meanwhile, Ronnie Winston had begun his own adventure with Richard Alpert. They’d met at a party. Ronnie was there with a girl Alpert knew, and the student and the professor started talking. Alpert invited Ronnie out to lunch, then for a ride in his airplane. They both came from wealthy East Coast families and had much in common. Alpert became infatuated with the young student. Ronnie was a brilliant, romantic-looking figure. He drove a Jaguar. He was a liberal arts student but had this idea for a project over at MIT involving solid rocket fuel. They didn’t have sex, but they developed a kind of intimate friendship. Alpert shared some of his psilocybin with Winston. In Alpert’s mind, Ronnie was a social friend—not a research subject—so he wasn’t violating his agreement to keep undergraduates out of the psilocybin project.

  Ronnie had made it into the inner circle around Leary and Alpert. Andy had not. At one point, Leary and Alpert had a conversation about Andy Weil. They didn’t trust him. Alpert didn’t like him. He was up to something. He had another agenda. They noticed that Weil had started covering the arts for the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper. Maybe that was it. Maybe Weil was trying to infiltrate the project and write an exposé.