The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Leary wasn’t sure if Metzner could handle himself in the rough-and-tumble of Concord Prison. Could he really deal with all those robbers, rapists, and murderers? Leary decided to take a chance with Metzner—betting that the determined young German could handle the psychedelic experience and the prison experience. So one cold day in early March, Metzner showed up at the doorstep of Leary’s Newton home for his first test trip.

  For Metzner, it was an experience of something he had never even imagined. Everywhere he looked he saw glowing jeweled objects. Ordinary people were instantly transformed into angels. At one point, he walked out into the snow to get some fresh air. There was some garbage by the back door, and he heard a voice tell him, “Don’t look at the garbage.” He experienced that random thought in a whole new way, seeing for the first time how his thoughts were preprogrammed. He didn’t choose to have that thought. So where did these thoughts come from? Maybe he could direct his thoughts in other ways. Isn’t that what psychotherapy was all about? We can stop thinking old habitual thoughts. The moment was a turning point, the beginning of a shift in the way Ralph Metzner looked at psychology, mysticism, and the mind.

  Metzner’s next trip was not as inspiring, at least not at first. But he would soon learn why and explain it all in The Psychedelic Experience, a book he would author with Leary and Alpert. One of the trio’s key findings on the intelligent use of psychedelics would be the importance of “set and setting” in determining the outcome of a drug trip. The “set” is the mind-set, the expectations the user has about what is going to happen. The “setting” is the environment in which the effects of a given plant or chemical are to be experienced. One’s setting should be comfortable—perhaps a dimly lit living room with large pillows and soothing music, or an open field full of spring wildflowers, or a cliff top at Big Sur. Certainly not a depressing prison hospital room with gray walls, a black asphalt floor, and bars on the windows. Certainly not a cell shared with a Polish embezzler and a heroin addict from Dorchester. Yet those two inmates were among the first volunteers to take the mushroom pills with Leary, Metzner, and Gunther Weil, another graduate student (no relation to Andrew Weil) who was helping conduct the prison research. Leary’s idea was to give the subjects predrug personality tests, guide them through the psychedelic sessions, and then have them retested to see what kind of short-term changes had occurred in their outlook on life. The first two sessions were held on March 27, 1961, and brought the Harvard psychologists together with five Concord prisoners for an encounter that none of them would ever forget.

  Metzner and two of the prisoners each took twenty milligrams of psilocybin from the prison psychiatrist, who was there to provide medical supervision. They all sat back and took in their bleak surroundings. There were four beds, a large table, and a few chairs. Leary brought along a record player, a tape recorder, and some books of classical art to try to soften the setting, but there wasn’t much you could do to transform a prison infirmary into a serene setting.

  Metzner started coming on to the drug. He stared at the gray wall before him. It was like a horror movie. All his fears were projected on the prison walls. It was like a newsreel of all the evil acts in human history. Metzner started sweating, moaning, and groaning. Then Gunther Weil came over and gently put his hand on Ralph and said, “How are you doing, man?” Suddenly, everything changed. Gunther was the mother of God, full of compassion, flowing with human kindness. The horror turned into compassion. All it took was a simple touch.

  Metzner and the Harvard team spent nine months at the prison, running monthly psilocybin sessions for about a dozen convicts. In between the sessions, the convicts would sit through group therapy sessions and take personality tests. According to Leary’s findings, these follow-up tests showed less depression and hostility, more responsibility and cooperation. More prisoners signed up for the experiment.

  Meanwhile, news of the Harvard mushroom project was getting out to the larger academic community. When visitors came to Harvard to check out the research project, Leary often took them out to Concord Prison. Among those sitting down with the convicts were Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts.

  Follow-up programs worked with prisoners after they were released. Nearly two years later, in January 1963, Leary would claim that 75 percent of the turned-on prisoners who were released had stayed out of jail. He had cut the recidivism rate in half. He’d found a way to solve the nation’s crime problem.

  Prison officials were skeptical. This was no great breakthrough. If you shower this much personal attention on inmates before and after they are released, of course you cut the return rate. It had nothing to do with mushrooms. The biggest problem with the prison project was that there was no control group of prisoners who were given that kind of attention but no mushroom pills.

  Even those working with Leary came to doubt the long-term success of the Concord Prison Project. Alpert believed that the basic therapeutic model was sound, but he thought Leary needed to stick with the project and conduct long-term studies. Metzner conceded that the researchers fell victim to “the halo effect,” putting their findings in the best possible light. Even Leary admitted that it was hard to build upon the initial revelatory insights that he and his prison subjects shared after taking the mushroom pills. “In the sessions,” he would later recall, “we were all gods, all men at once. We were all two-billion-year-old seed centers pulsing together. Then as time slowly froze we were reborn in the old costumes and picked up the tired games. We weren’t yet ready to act on our revelation.”

  Teacher: Marsh Chapel, Boston University Good Friday, 1962

  Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner were amazed by the religious experiences they were having on psychedelic drugs, but they had no context to understand those feelings of wonder, awe, and connectedness. They were having mystical experiences, but they were not mystics. They were not priests, not even scholars of religion. They were clinical psychologists. What did they really know about shamanism or mysticism?

  Enter Huston Smith.

  Here was the member of the team who really knew something about the varieties of religious experience. Smith had already written the book on the great world religions. He had described those exotic faiths to the American public in the first public-television program to explore that territory. He had been practicing yoga for more than a decade. But even Huston Smith was not quite ready for what he was about to experience in Marsh Chapel on a fateful Friday in 1962.

  It would go down in the annals of psychedelic history as the Good Friday Experiment. The project was the brainchild of Walter Pahnke, a medical doctor and Protestant minister who designed this research project for his PhD in Religion and Society at Harvard. Leary was his principal academic adviser. Twenty seminary students from nearby Andover Newton Theological Seminary were selected for a double-blind experiment in which half the seminarians were given capsules containing thirty milligrams of psilocybin and half were given an active placebo containing nicotinic acid, which induced a tingling sensation. Pahnke thought that might fool those students into thinking they had gotten the psychedelic drug. All twenty students were to gather in a small basement sanctuary at Marsh Chapel, across the Charles River from Harvard, on the Boston University campus. Upstairs, the Reverend Howard Thurmond, a black clergyman who helped inspire the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King, delivered his Good Friday sermon to a congregation unaware of the experiment being conducted downstairs. Thurmond’s sermon, the hymns, and other sounds from the ser vice were piped down so the research subjects could follow along.

  Pahnke was no typical Harvard student. He already had a medical degree when he arrived at the divinity school. He rode a bicycle with balloon tires, and pedaled around campus with fearsome energy. There was something strident in the way he pedaled up to a building, tossing his bike down and marching into class.

  His Good Friday Experiment was trying to determine if psilocybin could produce an “authentic religious experience.” Le
ary was not thrilled with Pahnke’s protocol. He thought Pahnke himself should experience the effects of psychedelic drugs to truly understand what he was talking about, but Pahnke refused. Leary also knew that few of the students who got nicotinic acid would be fooled into thinking they had gotten psilocybin, and those who got the psychoactive drug would certainly know they had the real thing. Years later, when he returned to Harvard with Alpert to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their ouster from the university, Leary would praise Pahnke’s work but laugh at some of his presumptions. “It was probably the greatest Good Friday in two thousand years—or it was for half of the subjects. The control subjects got to sit there and read the Bible,” Leary quipped. “If we learned one thing from that experience it was how foolish it was to use a double-blind experiment with psychedelics. After five minutes, no one’s fooling anyone. We also learned that we all had to do the work together, with no principal investigator, because once you put that pill in your mouth, you are the principal investigator—like it or not.”

  Leary was right about the placebos. Once the psilocybin kicked in, it was clear who the real test pilots were in the basement of Marsh Chapel. The small underground room where the day’s events unfolded has a low roof, giving it the feel of a tomb. The only natural light shines from three tiny stained-glass windows, including one depicting Jesus holding an open Bible. “And ye shall know the truth,” it reads. “And the truth shall set you free.” On that eventful Good Friday back in 1962, ten of the divinity students sat in their pews before the altar, politely following the readings and hymns that were being piped down from upstairs. Those who got the real thing were lying back on the pews, or on the floor. Others were wandering around murmuring prayers of wonderment. “God is everywhere,” one cried out. “Oh, the Glory.”

  Huston Smith was one of the preselected guides for the Good Friday Experiment, none of whom knew in advance whether they would get the drug or the placebo. Huston got the drug. Until that day, Smith had never had a direct personal encounter with God, the kind of experience that Indian yogis and Pentecostal Chris tians talk about. Smith hadn’t had that experience in his previous psychedelic sessions, as powerful as those trips had been, but this time was different. Maybe it was the Protestant worship ser vice—a setting that fostered a deep connection with Smith’s upbringing as a child of Methodist missionaries. Huston’s mother had been a music teacher, and passed along her acute sensitivity to harmonic resonance. Upstairs in the main chapel, a soprano was delivering a solo. Listening to it piped downstairs—through the audio system and the prism of the mushroom pills—Smith knew this was no human voice he heard. It was the song of an angel. He would never forget the opening and closing verses of that consciousness-expanding hymn:

  My times are in Thy hand;

  My God, I wish them there;

  My life, my friends, my soul I leave

  Entirely to Thy care.

  My times are in Thy hand,

  I’ll always trust in Thee;

  And after death, at Thy right hand

  I shall forever be.

  That Good Friday ser vice was a powerful, cosmic homecoming for Huston Smith, but the ser vice commemorating Christ’s crucifixion was not without its comic moments. One of the seminary students who’d gotten the drug escaped from the chapel and headed down Commonwealth Avenue, oblivious to Smith’s pleas for him to return to the church. Huston would later learn that the student had become convinced that God had chosen him to announce the dawning of the Messianic Age—that the world was about to experience one thousand years of universal peace. To the passersby on Commonwealth Avenue, he just looked like a guy zonked out of his mind. Huston ran after the student, who was heading toward the building that housed the Boston University School of Theology. When the student reached the front steps, he accosted a postman who was carrying a special-delivery letter for the dean of the school. The would-be messiah grabbed the letter out of the startled postman’s hand and crumpled it up. There was nothing special about this delivery. He had the special delivery in his heart—and it was good news for the dean of theology and the rest of mankind. Huston managed to get the letter back by prying loose the crazed student’s fingers. Then Huston and another of the guides overpowered the kid and dragged him back to the chapel. Pahnke gave the divine messenger a shot of Thorazine to settle him down.

  Smith—still stoned on the psilocybin but able to snap out of it enough to attend to the escaping student—returned to the chapel and another rowdy scene. Ten of the subjects were enraptured, but the other half were feeling left out and disgruntled. They responded to the stoned students’ profound utterances with derisive laughter and incredulous hoots. Smith himself turned to one of his colleagues, Paul Lee. Huston’s eyes were wide with the wonder of it all. “It’s true, isn’t it?” Smith said, certain that his profound proclamation needed no elaboration. Lee had gotten the placebo and didn’t have the slightest idea what the blissed-out philosophy professor was talking about, but decided to play along.

  “Yeah, Huston. ‘It’ is true—whatever it is.”

  “It” was the religious outlook, God, and everything that flows from God’s reality. And it was something Smith would keep with him for the rest of his life. His encounter that Good Friday was the most powerful experience he would ever have of God’s personal nature. Sure, he always believed that God was love, that God loves him and he loves God, but he had never experienced that love in such a profound and personal way. From that moment on, he knew that life is a miracle, every moment of it, and that the only appropriate way to respond and be mindful of that gift of God’s love was to share it with the rest of the world. It wasn’t all that different from the message of the would-be messiah. Huston was just a bit more contained in his delivery.

  Rather than instant enlightenment, however, Paul Lee got a severe case of prickly heat courtesy of the nicotine acid that was supposed to fool him into thinking he got the drug. Lee was not fooled. He’d already had his first psychedelic trip, and he knew what he was missing. He was one of the guys laughing at the stoned divinity students, especially the one who went up to the piano and started giving a sermon about his beatific vision.

  Lee knew something about Chris tian theology. At the time, he was working as the teaching assistant to Paul Tillich, the great German-born theologian who taught at Harvard Divinity School from 1954 to 1962. To the sober Lee, there was nothing profound about the silly scene unfolding in Marsh Chapel. “It was the stupidest thing you ever saw in your life,” he later told a friend. “Guys were crawling around you on the floor on their hands and knees.”

  Paul Lee had been brought into the circle by Huston Smith, who’d invited him over to his house one day for a meeting with Timothy Leary.

  “Tim is looking to get some people from the divinity school,” Huston told him. “They want to turn around the psychologists’ understanding of these substances. They want to replace the psychotic model with a mystical model, but these guys don’t know beans about mysticism.”

  Leary was particularly intent on recruiting Harvard theologians and divinity students as research subjects for his drug tests. Among those he approached was Harvey Cox, who was studying at Harvard Divinity School.

  “We’re working with these inmates over at Concord Prison, and they keep coming up with all this religious imagery,” he told Cox. “Some are seeing hell. Others are having all sorts of beatific visions.”

  Cox would go on in 1965 to publish The Secular City, an international best seller that made him one of the best-known theological voices of the 1960s and 1970s. He almost signed up but changed his mind at the last minute, unsure that he was psychologically prepared for a quick trip to heaven or hell.

  Alpert and Leary even tried to turn on Paul Tillich, a theologian best known for his description of God as “the ground of being.” They ran into him one morning at a restaurant. They went over to the great man, introduced themselves, and began describing their research. Tillich—the absolute parag
on of the German theology professor—was not impressed.

  “Do you really think that this is for someone like me? Someone who grew up in a medieval town where my father was the minister—a walled German town with all its culture? Do you really think all that tradition can be found in the form of a pill?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! We think it can,” Alpert exclaimed.

  “Yes, sir,” Leary added. “That is now the case.”

  Like Harvey Cox, Professor Tillich politely passed on the psychedelic invitation. But Paul Lee took the bait.

  Lee’s first trip was on a Saturday evening at Leary’s house. Leary couldn’t make the session, so he sent one of his graduate students over to administer the psychedelic sacrament. It was quite a production. Someone put Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” on the record player. Dum-da-da-da-dum. Dum-da-da-da-dum. Dum-DA-DA-DA-dum. Dum-da-da-da. Someone vomited. Then the fireplace backed up and filled up with smoke. At one point, a grad student who was also tripping started making aggressive moves toward his wife, pretending to smash her skull with his fist, pounding it into the pillow next to her head. They managed to quiet him down, and after an hour or two things settled into a more spiritual mood.

  It was the height of the Cold War, and everyone was thinking about the Russians and the bomb. For Paul Lee, the psychedelic journey felt like an atomic bomb going off in his mind. Your structured rationality exploded. The experience fascinated him. It was so intense, and then it would be over, and he couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. Things seemed to happen in an instant, but then he’d see that hours had actually gone by. His sense of time seemed so distorted on the drugs, or maybe it was his normal sense that was distorted. On the drugs, it seemed like the eternal now. It was amazing, but it was also frightening—kind of like jumping out of an airplane.