by Don Lattin
Weil saw a double standard in Alpert’s embrace of Ronnie Winston. It was obvious that some undergraduates—and not just Ronnie—were being brought into the fold. Why not Andy? What was wrong with him? Ronnie had been a good friend. He’d even been Weil’s guide during their mescaline sessions in Claverly Hall. But that friendship ended when Winston started hanging out with Alpert.
Weil would find a way to get back at Richard Alpert and, in the process, put an end to his relationship with Ronnie Winston. Weil was determined to bring down the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and he would take on the assignment with the zeal of a jilted lover.
Chapter Three
Sinners and Saints
Trickster: Concord State Prison March 1961
Timothy Leary had a foreboding feeling the first time he entered the cage, through the imposing metal doors, and into the cell block. His surroundings seemed both strange and familiar. This time he was just visiting. He was a Harvard researcher with revolutionary ideas about how to reform the American prison system. By the end of the decade, Leary would walk into another prison and find the cell door slammed behind him. By then, he would be a real revolutionary, the guy Richard Nixon would call “the most dangerous man in America.”
In the spring of 1961, Leary started calling the Harvard Psilocybin Project the “Harvard Psychedelic Project,” and the research was in full swing. There were some interesting results. They’d given psychedelic drugs to some two hundred subjects—graduate students and faculty members from Harvard and MIT. Huston Smith had survived his New Year’s Day trip. Dick Alpert had his night of snowy bliss. The vast majority of the other subjects reported that the sessions were among the most powerful, educational, and enlightening experiences of their lives. But Leary was a scientist, not a therapist. His job was to show that these drugs could benefit society. They needed a population they could accurately measure. What better place to go than into a prison system plagued with a history of rehabilitative failure—where some 70 percent of released inmates soon found themselves back behind bars. “What a boon to society—converting violent criminals to law-abiding citizens,” Leary told a friend. “If we could teach the most unregenerate how to wash their own brains, then it would be a cinch to coach non-criminals to change their lives for the better.”
Two years later, when the Harvard administration decided it was time for Leary and Alpert to move on, the embattled duo would cite two research projects in their failed bid to justify their academic existence—the Concord Prison Project and the Good Friday Experiment. The prison research sought to show how drug-induced insight could lower recidivism rates. The Good Friday subjects were to demonstrate that psychedelic drugs could produce genuine experiences of religious mysticism. Leary and Alpert would argue—unsuccessfully—that they had done research on the best and the baddest, on the saints and the sinners of American society.
By the summer of 1963, a more powerful drug, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), would replace psilocybin as the preferred chemical compound in Leary and Alpert’s crusade to turn on a sleepy nation. It was a much stronger—and more dangerous—drug. And while they would become the most infamous psychedelic drug researchers in North America, they were by no means the first scientists to explore these realms.
LSD’s bizarre effects on the human mind had been discovered two decades earlier when its inventor, Dr. Albert Hofmann, of the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, became dizzy and had to stop working after accidentally dosing himself. The Swiss chemist had first synthesized the drug on November 16, 1938, while doing research on medical uses of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread. But Hofmann had put it on the shelf and forgotten about it until the spring of 1944. Hofmann had the world’s first intentional LSD trip late in the afternoon of April 19, three days after getting the accidental dose. About fifty minutes after taking the drug, the chemist scribbled in his notebook what he was feeling in his mind, reporting “slight dizziness, unrest, difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances, marked desire to laugh.” Hofmann was soon too stoned to write. He asked his assistant to accompany him home. They rode bikes from the lab to Hofmann’s house, a trip that would be forever remembered in the annals of psychedelic history. “My field of vision swayed before me,” Hofmann would later write. “Objects appeared distorted like the images in curved mirrors. I had the impression of being unable to move from the spot, although my assistant told me afterwards that we had cycled at a good pace.”
His condition only worsened once he got home:
The faces of those present appeared like grotesque colored masks; strong agitation alternating with paresis; the head, body and extremities sometimes cold and numb, a metallic taste on the tongue; throat dry and shrilled; a feeling of suffocation; confusion alternating with a clear appreciation of the situation.
I lost all control of time; space and time became more and more disorganized and I was overcome with fear that I was going crazy. The worst part of it was that I was clearly aware of my condition though I was incapable of stopping it. Occasionally I felt as being outside my body. I thought I had died. My “Ego” was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa. I observed and registered clearly that my “alter ego” was moving around the room, moaning.
It was an amazing journey, but what was equally amazing to Hofmann was that he experienced all this with such a tiny—0.25 mg—dose of LSD. This new drug was two to three thousand times stronger than mescaline, which scientists once thought to be the most powerful chemical agent available to alter the human mind. All of Leary and Alpert’s early research was done with psilocybin, the drug that put the magic in those Mexican mushrooms, and mescaline, which is found naturally in the peyote cactus. Leary didn’t even try LSD until December 1961, eighteen months after his first mushroom trip at the villa in Cuernavaca.
Psychedelic, the word used to describe the experience one has on mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, was just coming into popular use in the early 1960s. Huxley and the man who turned him on, the English psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, invented the word. Osmond had begun experimenting with psychedelics in the early 1950s, first with mescaline in England and then more systematically with LSD at Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, where he received funding for his research from the Canadian government and the Rockefeller Foundation. Osmond’s studies came to the attention of Huxley, who wrote the psychiatrist in the winter of 1953 and invited him to come by for a visit if he ever found himself in Los Angeles. Huxley was even kind enough to include a signed copy of his newest book, The Devils of Loudun, a nonfiction account of demonic possession and religious fanaticism in seventeenth-century France. Los Angeles seemed a world away from Osmond’s remote Saskatchewan home, but three months later he was invited to deliver a paper at the American Psychiatric Association convention in Los Angeles. He wrote back to Huxley telling him that, as chance would have it, he would soon be in southern California.
Huxley was at the breakfast table with his wife, Maria, the morning Osmond’s letter arrived.
“Why don’t we invite the chap to stay with us,” Aldous suggested.
“Aldous, you don’t like having people stay here. You don’t even like it when Julian stays here,” Maria replied, referring to the novelist’s famous brother, the biologist Sir Julian Huxley.
For some reason, Huxley insisted on having someone he’d never met stay at their home, extending that invitation to Osmond by return post.
Osmond was surprised at Huxley’s generosity but told his wife he thought it would be better not to impose on the famous couple. He’d be more comfortable just staying at the convention hotel.
“Do what you want,” Jane Osmond replied. “But if you do, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
Jane was right. Osmond wound up staying at the Huxley home and serving as the guide for a mescaline trip that would be immortalized in Huxley’s next book, The Doors of Perception.
Huxley’s 1953 mescaline trip revealed many things, including th
e limitations of using the word psychotomimetic to describe his experience. Yes, these drugs could mimic the psychotic state. They could give the user feelings of paranoia. But they could also promote positive insight. They could reveal mystical realms. “Aldous and I decided that the words we were using for these strange chemical instruments were idiotic,” Osmond later recalled. “We wanted to encourage people to use them intelligently.”
Another researcher had begun using the word fantastica to describe the psychedelic experience. That was a fun word, Osmond and Huxley agreed, but it kind of begged the question. It biased the user to expect something strange and bizarre—based in fantasy. You could call these drugs hallucinogens, but not everyone who took them actually had hallucinations, and even if they did, that seemed to place a negative connotation on the visions and insight that could be obtained from the drugs. They needed a more neutral term.
Huxley and Osmond exchanged a series of letters in which they suggested various words to describe these powerful drugs, sometimes composing a little rhyme to try them out in a creative context. Huxley suggested phanerothyme, which meant “to make the soul visible,” along with the poem:
To make this trivial world sublime
Take half a gramme of phanerothyme.
Not bad, Osmond thought, but not quite right. It sounded a bit too botanical. Osmond had a little guide of Latin terms that was designed for use by medical students. Consulting that reference book, he decided that psyche was more neutral than psycho, and then he came across the word delos, “to reveal.” There it was. Psychedelic would be the word, and Osmond’s little poem sealed the deal:
To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
Humphrey Osmond was also the author of a much-discussed study in the 1950s that reported some success in treating alcoholics with LSD. Osmond initially thought the drug produced symptoms similar to delirium tremens. Producing a terrifying artificial delirium might frighten an alcoholic into change. Between 1954 and 1960, Osmond and his colleagues treated some two thousand alcoholics under carefully controlled conditions and came to see that it was insight, not terror, that seemed to help these drunks reform.
It was this research that would briefly bring Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, into the early psychedelic scene. Wilson was—like Huston Smith—a big fan of Gerald Heard. “Bill W.,” as he is known to his AA minions, was a hard-drinking businessman who got sober in the 1930s with the help of an evangelical Chris tian movement known as the Oxford Group. He was the primary author of the so-called Big Book, the classic self-help volume that outlines AA’s twelve-step program for sober living and spiritual recovery. Wilson was clearly influenced by the evangelical movement, but he was also a somewhat eclectic spiritual seeker; this inclination can be seen in the twelve-step program’s emphasis on alcoholics turning to a self-defined “higher power,” to God “as we understood Him.”
In August 1956, one year after Wilson turned over the AA leadership to an elected board of directors, Heard guided Wilson on an LSD trip that would have a profound impact on the world’s best-known recovering alcoholic. Wilson took what was probably his first LSD trip at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital on August 29, 1956. According to notes taken by Heard, the founder of AA felt “an enormous enlargement,” and his insights included the realization that “people shouldn’t take themselves so damn seriously.” Shortly after that acid trip, Huston Smith accompanied Heard on a trip to Kansas City and spent two hours in a hotel room listening to Wilson and Heard talk about the acid trip. Wilson was blown away by the drug and said the experience was a dead ringer for the famous night in the 1930s when he fell down on his knees and had an epiphany about founding his twelve-step program.
One of the main tenets of the group’s recovery program is that alcoholics and other drug addicts must go through some kind of spiritual awakening to overcome their addiction. Wilson thought an LSD trip could be an effective tool for AA members who had little interest—or negative feelings—about religion and spirituality. The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous had several LSD sessions in the mid-1950s, including one with researchers working with Dr. Sidney Cohen at UCLA. Wilson had a group drug session with Tom Powers, a close Wilson associate who handled public relations for AA. Cohen had proposed a low-dose session with the two AA leaders, but he made the mistake of giving Wilson another option.
“Well, there are more pills available should you want them,” Cohen said.
“Don’t ever tell that to a drunk,” said Wilson, who insisted on taking a double dose.
Bill Wilson would have another cameo appearance in the psychedelic story. In a letter to Timothy Leary dated July 17, 1961, Wilson wrote that Huxley had “referred enthusiastically to your work.” Wilson goes on to write that “though LSD and some kindred alkaloids have had an amazingly bad press, there seems no doubt of their immense and growing value.” The AA founder also hints that he knew of Leary’s own problems with alcohol, adding that Tim might “find some interest in Alcoholics Anonymous—its principles and mechanism.”
It was Humphrey Osmond’s research that originally inspired Wilson to try LSD. “Early on I told Bill this was good news,” Osmond said, “but he was far from pleased with the idea of alcoholics being assailed by some strange chemical. But later on Bill got extremely interested. He likened his experience to his original AA vision of seeing this chain of drunks around the world. This caused quite a scandal in Alcoholics Anonymous. They became very ambivalent about their great founder, even though they wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t had an adventurous kind of mind.”
Osmond’s work also intrigued another American with an adventurous kind of mind—Timothy Leary. If Osmond was able to help alcoholics break their patterns of destructive behavior, why not try psychedelic drugs on hardened criminals? Leary invited two administrators from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Concord to join him for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss his ideas. Not wanting to scare them off with his gleaming white tennis shoes, Leary decided to switch into more conventional leather footwear. The shoes went unnoticed, and the meeting went well. These prison wardens would try anything—even mushroom pills—to reduce their recidivism rate. But Leary first had to get the support of the prison psychiatrist, which necessitated that first trip out to Concord Prison and that strange feeling that he’d been there before and would be there again. But Leary’s mood lightened when he met the prison shrink. To his surprise, the guy was an African-American—the first black psychiatrist Leary had ever met. His name was Dr. Madison Presnell, and he and Leary really hit it off. Leary found Presnell gracefully hip. He had a twinkle in his eye and a wise, cool way about him. Here was a guy ready to try something new.
Once he got prison officials on board, Leary put together a group of Harvard graduate students to help interview prisoners, run the drug sessions, and monitor their progress. One of the first guys Leary turned to was Ralph Metzner, a German-born, twenty-six-year-old graduate student who’d gotten his bachelor’s degree from Oxford University in England and had been awarded a scholarship to do his doctoral work at Harvard. Metzner was attracted to the Harvard Department of Social Relations because of the program’s interdisciplinary approach—the way it brought together social psychology, clinical psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. Metzner had taken a seminar with Leary the semester before they started the mushroom project. Leary was working out a philosophy he called “Existential-Transactionalism,” which built upon Eric Berne’s writings on game theory. Berne would later write the best-selling book I’m OK, You’re OK. In the early 1960s, Leary and Alpert were constantly talking about all the games people play. They were playing the “professor game.” Students were playing the “student game.”
Metzner was impressed with how Leary questioned the roles academics and psychologists play out in their work—something Leary was doing long before his first psychedelic experience. Metzner agreed with Lear
y that the usual relationships that psychologists have in their work, such as doctor-patient or experimenter-subject, are artificial, asymmetric power relationships. One person is always superior to the other person, by the nature of the relationship. Leary was looking for another way to relate to patients, and to people in general. If someone needs psychological help, why not just go to the guy’s house, sit around the kitchen table, drink some coffee, and talk about it? Psychologists should present themselves as resources, not as doctors or authority figures. Metzner found Leary’s method very egalitarian, and very refreshing.
Leary’s approach to the prisoners who were to be his research subjects was equally egalitarian. It was not unusual for prisoners to act as guinea pigs in drug experiments, putting their own health at risk in the hopes of an early parole. Leary’s approach was different. Magic mushrooms had given him a life-changing experience. He wanted to share that experience with the inmates. It was essential, Leary stressed, that the Harvard researchers actually take the drugs with the prisoners. That was the revolutionary approach, not the fact that the inmates were getting some experimental drug.
At the time, the star of the Harvard psychology department was B. F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist. Skinner had no interest in human “consciousness” and believed that the best way to understand human behavior was through the stimulus/response model. Leary was going against the grain, and that was great news to Ralph Metzner. He and his fellow graduate students were sick and tired of sitting around plugging numbers into calculators. It seemed like all they did were boring statistical studies. And here was Leary, talking about experiences, very meaningful experiences. Metzner was ignorant, and a bit anxious, about taking the drug. But he was also intrigued by Leary’s requirement that all his graduate students try out the drugs they would be giving to the prisoners. They were even encouraged to trip with the prisoners.