The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  All of the subjects in the Good Friday Experiment—including the control group, the one that got the placebo—completed questionnaires designed to determine whether they had a mystical experience. The survey asked them to what extent they experienced a sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, a sense of sacredness, a sense of objective reality, a deeply felt positive mood, ineffability, paradoxicality, and transiency. Pahnke reported that “eight out of ten of the experimental subjects experienced at least seven out of the nine categories. None of the control group, when each individual was compared to his matched partner, had a score which was higher.”

  Pahnke’s research was later cited in a story in Time magazine, which effusively reported that “all students who had taken the drug psilocybin experienced a mystical consciousness that resembled those described by saints and ascetics.” Time’ s rave review, titled “Mysticism in the Lab,” was published as a debate was raging in the United States over to what extent LSD and other psychedelic drugs should be criminalized. The forces of criminalization won, and LSD was outlawed in October 1966.

  Twenty years later, psychedelic drug researcher Rick Doblin spent three years tracking down and interviewing sixteen of the twenty students who gathered for that Good Friday ser vice in Marsh Chapel. Half of the seminarians—five who got psilocybin and five from the control group—were currently working as ministers. Others went into such professions as stockbroker, lawyer, community developer, social worker, administrative assistant, and educator. Nearly all of them were married, and all were working and self-supporting. And all but two welcomed the chance to reflect on what happened to them on that memorable day in the spring of 1962.

  Here’s one recollection:

  I was kneeling there praying and beginning to feel like I was experiencing the kind of prayer life that I experienced back when I was in the seventh grade, eleven or twelve years old. It was the kind of experiences that you knew that something great was happening. I started to go to the root of all being, and discovered that . . . you never quite get there. That was my discovery during that time. . . . It’s a philosophy and a theology that I hold yet today. You can approach the fullness of all being in either prayer, or in the psilocybin experience. You can reach out, but you can’t dive down . . . and hit that root.

  The discovery within that experience is that you could approach God by two different ways. You either get to the root, the ground of all being, or the fullness of all being. And in getting to the root, you’ll strive, you’ll come closer and closer, but it’s always half, and you’ll think another half step, another half step, and you’ll never quite get there. The fullness, to approach the fullness of God, is the only way to approach God.

  Another student—not the one chased down Commonwealth Avenue by Huston Smith—tried to leave the chapel. His mushroom trip was not an entirely positive experience:

  Shortly after receiving the capsule, all of a sudden I just wanted to laugh. I began to go into a very strong paranoid experience. And I found it to be scary. The chapel was dark and I hated it in there, just absolutely hated it in there. And I got up and left. I walked down the corridor and there was a guard, a person stationed at the door so individuals wouldn’t go out, and he says, “Don’t go outside,” and I said, “Oh no, I won’t. I’ll just look outdoors.” And I went to the door and out I went. They sent [a group leader] out after me. We went back into the building and again, I hated to be in that building and being confined because there were bars on the window and I felt literally like I was in prison. One of the things that was probably happening to me was a reluctance to just flow. I tried to resist that and as soon as resistance sets in there’s likely to be conflict and there’s likely, I think, for there to be anxiety.

  Decades after the gathering in Marsh Chapel, Huston Smith and Timothy Leary also looked back at the long-term lessons from the Good Friday Experiment. The way each remembers the event says volumes about the difference between these two members of the Harvard Psychedelic Club. For Smith, the memory was one of profound gratitude to Walter Pahnke, who died nine years later in a scuba-diving accident. Smith recalls the experiment as a profound revelation that forever changed the way he saw God, himself, and the rest of the world. For Smith, the Good Friday Experiment was about reconciliation.

  For Leary, it was different. Timothy Leary was not a reconciler. He was a rebel. In his account of the Good Friday Experiment, Leary remembers how difficult it was for Pahnke to get permission and funding for follow-up research (difficulties that no doubt stemmed from his close association with the rebel psychologist from Harvard). Smith saw the love of God on Good Friday. Leary saw something more sinister in Pahnke’s subsequent problems getting support for his research.

  “We remembered Huxley’s observation that the original sin was the ingestion of a brain-change fruit in the Garden,” Leary wrote in his autobiography. “There was not much chance that the bureaucrats of Chris tian America were going to accept our research results, no matter how objective.

  “We had run up against the Judeo-Chris tian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligent good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

  Leary was infamous for such pronouncements, and his rebel spirit helped set the tone for the counterculture of the 1960s. But those who worked closely with the man caution against oversimplifying his significance. He was more than just a rebel trying to bring down “the system.” Metzner suggests the word trickster as the best way to describe Timothy Leary.

  “In American Indian lore, the trickster is a teacher who uses jokes and trickery to get people to wake up,” Metzner said. “They don’t give you advice like a benevolent guru. They don’t want you to give up your own responsibility. Tim was provocative. He was trying to get you to think for yourself—and have fun. Take it lightly. That was part of the Irish in him. He was a rascal. A satirist. He had razor-sharp insight. He didn’t mind being provocative in his language, and he didn’t bother to correct anybody’s misconception of him. But basically, he was a very positive person, one of the most genial and incredibly intelligent people I ever met.”

  Another leader in the “LSD cult” of the 1960s, Art Kleps, remembers Leary as a man with awesome charm: “His voice trilled and tinkled, caressing the ear with gentle melodies and punctuations. . . . He almost never raised it. Even when angry or malicious, the voice stayed within the limits of its charm. . . . His voice, as if it had some separate spirit or function of its own, did not, like most voices, simply carry Tim’s thoughts like a load in a cart; it often spoofed and laughed at what it was required to support, thereby anticipating and disarming the critical reactions of his audience. Much of Tim’s wit relied on these disarming vocal nuances; it does not come through as well in his written words.” Like Metzner, Kleps saw the trickster in Leary. “Many thought Tim was spoofing when he wasn’t, or thought he wasn’t when he was. Tim’s playfulness had no consistency, no foundation in logical analysis or a stable set of values. It was simply employed to take the edge off, to provide an escape hatch, to disarm.”

  Harvey Cox, the Harvard divinity student who declined Leary’s offer to try psychedelic drugs, has another take on the infamous psychology professor. “Later on I did experiment with psychedelics,” Cox said. “For a while I continued to think LSD had great promise—if it had been used in a controlled and careful way. But Leary was such an egotistical guy. He saw himself as forging new rules for psychological research and questioning the assumptions of the academy, eventually making himself the messiah for spiritual discovery.”

  Cox knew all four members of the Harvard Psychedelic Club and thinks Huston Smith had the most lasting positive impact on society. “Huston was one of the pioneers in how to understand world religions while remaining r
ooted in your own tradition,” Cox said. “He was a Chris tian. He never really let go of that, and showed us how having a real rooted spirituality of your own can help you understand these other traditions even better. That has come to be the currency of interfaith movement and religious studies today. All of us who teach religious studies today are more heavily into comparative religion. You have to be. This is a world of religious pluralism. You have to see what can be learned from other religious traditions, and how that can enrich your perspective. That’s the model we use now at Harvard Divinity School.”

  Another informed perspective comes from Walter Houston Clark, a professor of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary and one of the men involved in the Good Friday Experiment. He notes that Leary was a lapsed Catholic and in the eyes of many Chris tians would be considered a “sinner.” Clark suggests that saint, at least as William James defines the word, may be a better label for Timothy Leary. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James speaks of saints having “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of an Ideal Power.”

  Leary was uninterested in the worldly prestige of a Berkeley or Harvard professorship. He saw tyranny in any man’s efforts to impose standards of behavior upon him. In Clark’s view, Leary most certainly had the sense of an “Ideal Power” in his life. His life after leaving Harvard would be an adventurous and sorrowful one, with multiple prison terms, a daughter’s suicide, and a diagnosis of inoperable prostate cancer.

  “Leary’s equanimity, keenness of mind, his sense of humor, empathy and compassion under misfortunes, which could crush ordinary men, would be impossible were it not linked to some source of strength in that wider life James also connects with strength of soul. . . . All this is not to say that Timothy Leary is a second Jesus Christ, Socrates, or Francis of Assisi. He is only a first Timothy Leary. He is a human being who has made his share of mistakes,” Clark wrote in Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion, a book published in 1969, seven years after the Good Friday Experiment. “Time will tell whether Timothy Leary is a pied piper or one of the perceptive prophets of the age.”

  Chapter Four

  Crimson Tide

  Healer: Cambridge, Massachusetts May 1963

  It was a heady time to be editor in chief of the Harvard Crimson. You sat in a chair into which the name of one of your predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, class of 1904, was carved in wood. The White House was occupied by another Harvard man and former Crimson editor, John F. Kennedy, class of 1940. “If the Crimson didn’t show up at the White House, we’d get calls from Schlesinger’s office or Bundy’s office,” recalled Joseph Russin, referring to Kennedy aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr., class of 1938, and McGeorge Bundy, who served as the dean of the faculty at Harvard before Kennedy tapped him as national security adviser.

  Kennedy’s presidency—the rise and fall of Camelot—was the backdrop for some of the most extraordinary events in the lives of Huston Smith, Andrew Weil, Richard Alpert, and Timothy Leary. Kennedy was elected in the fall of 1960, the same season that Andrew Weil and the Harvard class of 1964 moved to Cambridge and began their undergraduate studies. On the very day Kennedy defeated Richard Milhous Nixon and was elected president, November 8, 1960, Aldous Huxley and his psychedelic connection, Humphrey Osmond, met with Leary and decided to work with him on the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

  Russin was the president and editor in chief of the Harvard Crimson at the height of the Kennedy presidency. He would graduate, get hired by Newsweek, and head out to Berkeley in 1964 to cover the Free Speech Movement—the campus protests at the University of California that kicked off a decade of unrest at schools across the nation. Just a year earlier, at Harvard, such a thing was inconceivable to Russin. “Going out to Berkeley was a big cultural change for me. It was a totally different place. Berkeley was action and organizing. Gestures mattered more than well-reasoned arguments, which was the way we did things at Harvard.”

  Russin’s last big story at the Crimson would involve two psychology professors named Alpert and Leary, but a staff writer named Andy Weil proposed the investigation and did most of the digging. To Russin, it seemed like a strange story for Weil to be covering. Until then, Weil had mostly done arts coverage for the paper—theater reviews and things like that. He had also worked as an editorial writer on the opinion page. Weil is best remembered not for his Crimson journalism but as an overweight, cigar-chomping practical jokester. At the time, a ribald rivalry raged between the Crimson staff and the kids over at the Harvard Lampoon. The famous satirical magazine has a statue of an ibis on top of its building. “Andy stole the bird,” Russin said. “Then we’d take pictures of it in various locations and send the photos over to taunt the Lampoon.”

  Weil was not kidding around when it came to his opinions about Leary and Alpert’s research project. “Andy came to me when I was president of the Crimson and told me that he thought we really ought to look into what Leary and Alpert were doing,” Russin recalled. “They were giving LSD to students who were undergraduates, including some who were psychologically on the fence, some of whom were going nuts. There was a guy on Crimson staff who had been hospitalized for a mental condition after getting LSD from the Leary and Alpert crowd. Andy thought there was more of this, and either way, they were not following the deal they made with the university, which was not to give the drugs to undergraduates.”

  Andrew Weil deserves most of the credit—or blame—for being the guy who brought down Leary and Alpert. But he was not the first Crimson reporter to break the story about all the controversy surrounding their drug research. One year before Weil got onto the case, in the spring of 1962, another Crimson editor, Robert E. Smith, broke the first story on the dispute raging within the Center for Research in Personality over Leary and Alpert’s research methods. Smith’s roommate, Graham Stellwagon, an undergraduate studying under Alpert, tipped him off.

  Graham was one of the heavier drinkers in their dorm. In one drinking session of soon-to-graduate seniors, he told Smith about a strange scene that was developing around Leary and Alpert.

  “There’s a clique there. You might even call it a cult,” he told Smith. “You should check it out. There’s a real in crowd. Some are in and some are out. I’m out, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t get it, Graham,” Smith replied. “What’s the story?”

  “How the hell do I know? I’m not in the in crowd. But there is something going on. Leary and Alpert are taking some kind of pills with a bunch of students.”

  Smith got interested and started thinking about how he could get more inside information. He’d been covering the university administration, sports, and state politics—not intrigue within academic departments.

  Then Graham gave him the lead he needed to break the story wide open.

  “There’s this prof over there, Herbert Kelman, who doesn’t like what’s going on,” Stellwagon said. “Actually, they’re having this big showdown meeting about Leary and Alpert’s research. I think it’s next week sometime. I can get you the details. It’s at this old mansion over on Divinity Avenue. Just slip into the meeting. It’s just supposed to be for people in the department, but they never said it was off limits to outsiders. Chances are nobody will even notice you.”

  Smith was worried that he might be seen as an interloper, but he decided to give it a shot. Throughout his senior year, as the top editor at the Crimson, he had been on shaky ground with the university president and several faculty members. He was nonconfrontational by nature. If anyone at the meeting asked him who he was, Smith wouldn’t lie. He expected that he might be asked to leave.

  David McClelland had convened the March 14, 1962, gripe session in an effort to calm things down over in the Department of Social Relations, the university division that included the Center for Personality Research. There were two camps in the department—those taking the drugs, an
d those who were not. Opposing Leary and Alpert in the department were Herb Kelman and another professor named Brendan Maher.

  Leary couldn’t stand Maher. “I’m sick of these old lab rats, these dour experimentalists,” he said. “If they had their way, we’d still be teaching students the way they were back in the Middle Ages.” Leary thought Kelman was just jealous because all the bright students were gravitating toward him and Alpert. “What does he expect?” Leary said. “Who wants to spend two years filling out his lame questionnaires?”

  At first glance, the intradepartmental dispute looked to be one of those petty personality clashes that often break out among faculty members working in the ivory tower. But there was a bit more to this controversy. Kelman believed that Leary and Alpert had gone way beyond the confines of scientific research. To him, it looked like they were starting a drug cult, promoting an ideology of spiritual enlightenment through modern chemistry. McClelland called the showdown meeting after Kelman reported that some students in the department had complained that they felt pressured into taking hallucinogenic drugs.

  “You’ve got to do something,” Kelman told McClelland. “These drugs are dangerous. One student was almost ready to kill himself after one of their sessions.”

  David McClelland was surprised when he walked into the room to convene the meeting. The place was packed. Where did all these people come from? he thought.

  The turnout made it easy for Smith to slip into the session. There were far more undergraduates at the meeting than anyone expected. So no one seemed to care that Smith was sitting in their midst, furiously scribbling in his reporter’s notebook.