by Don Lattin
Lee, who does not suffer fools gladly, replied with something between a smile and a smirk. “Yeah, I know, man,” he replied. “I was born that way.”
Owsley tried to press some LSD into his new friend’s hand, but Lee declined. He had to give a talk at the conference the next morning. Plus it was fun enough to just watch all the antics.
Everyone was standing around by the pool, coming onto the acid and waiting for the Grateful Dead to start playing. Then one of the hosts took the microphone and announced that the owners of an adjacent horse stable were about to call the police unless everyone moved their cars. They were blocking their driveway. The news was relayed to the partygoers, and there was a great groan from the crowd, like the moan of a tired elephant seal. Everyone was ready to just lay back, trip out, and tune into the Grateful Dead. Lee was terrified that the whole conference was going to fall apart right there. People would stumble out to their vehicles and, if they could get their keys into the ignition, start running into each other like a giant game of bumper cars. Then the police would come and throw them all in jail. Lee thought to himself, This is the test. If everybody gets up and moves their cars without incident, we are going to get through this week. Miraculously, everyone got up and moved their cars in an orderly fashion. They returned to the backyard, lay back, and the band played on.
The conference at the University of California offices in San Francisco went on as scheduled. But even before Huston delivered his paper, Lee could see that the distinguished philosophy professor was getting tired of the circus surrounding the early years of the psychedelic scene. What had been going on back east was bad enough. But this West Coast scene was out of control. These were bacchanalian rites, and they were going down on an unprecedented scale. It was downright Dionysian.
Huston no longer wanted to be associated with the social movement that was coalescing around Leary and Alpert and Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. Smith looked at all the sexual immorality inspired by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and psychedelic religion and was reminded of what Friedrich Nietzsche said about Christ’s disciples—how they “should look more redeemed.” To Huston’s mind, steeped in the history of religious movements, Leary and Alpert’s actions smacked of antinomianism, the Christian heresy that asserts that true believers are exempt from moral and civil law because they’re already saved.
“Huston was a moralist,” Paul Lee would later explain. “He thought this antinomian trend was something to criticize. We said, ‘Oh, man. Come on, Huston. Lighten up. Just because you were born in China to Methodist missionaries.’ But he thought that because he was identified with all this, he had to critically comment on it. He did, and he was right. A lot of lives were damaged. Huston sounded the sour note at the conference, but in retrospect, I think that was important. But at the time, everybody just sniffed at him.”
Huston wasn’t the only one amazed at the wildness of the psychedelic celebration in San Francisco. Paul Lee couldn’t believe his own eyes. It was his first introduction to the whole West Coast scene. His first stop was the Psychedelic Bookstore on Haight Street. It all took him and most of the other East Coast scholars completely by surprise. They had no idea that all this had grown up in California. They were still buttoned-down Harvard guys. Here was a completely different style. There was none of that at Harvard. They had Joan Baez, who came and played her guitar in the apartment of Paul Tillich, the distinguished German theologian. They thought that was far-out. They were still into Pete Seeger and the Weavers. They didn’t have a clue.
Lee had suggested the West Coast LSD conference to Richard Baker, who had also studied with Tillich at Harvard. Baker would go on to become Baker-Roshi, the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, but at the time he had a job putting on conferences for the University of California. The five-day program was supposed to be held at the Berkeley campus. In addition to the Huston Smith speech, it would feature a talk by Leary titled “The Molecular Revolution” and an address by Allen Ginsberg, “Consciousness Politics in the Void.” At the last minute, university officials on the Berkeley campus saw Leary and Ginsberg on the schedule and started worrying about the revolutionary tone of the conference. Baker compromised and agreed to remove Ginsberg from the program, although the radical gay Jewish poet came anyway and hung out all week. Baker also agreed to move the program from the Berkeley campus to a less official venue in San Francisco.
Serving on the conference advisory committee with Paul Lee and Huston Smith were Richard Alpert, Frank Barron, and Dr. Sidney Cohen, who had emerged as a leading voice of caution warning that the psychedelic revolution was spinning out of control.
Cohen, Alpert, and Life magazine photographer Lawrence Schiller had just published a short, point/counterpoint book debating the wisdom of the psychedelic revolution and the prospects for its future. The book, simply titled LSD, was filled with photographs that Schiller took of young people stoned on acid. Alpert, who revealed in the text that he had ingested psychedelic chemicals 328 times over the last five years, made a series of predictions, some of which came to pass. He said LSD would spark new interest in Eastern thought, music, and art, “along with the increase in popularity of Eastern methods of expanding awareness such as yoga, diets, meditation, and karate.” Alpert was less on the mark when he envisioned the creation of “Ecstasy Centers” where people could gather to legally explore psychedelic drugs.
Cohen predicted, accurately, that the next few years would see greater consumption and greater abuse of the drug. “The hedonistic cults take over, the dance gets wilder, anything goes, the music is louder, the strobe lights flash faster,” Cohen wrote. “Let’s not speak of the dangers.”
By the time Huston flew to San Francisco to deliver his paper, the tide had already turned in the public debate over LSD. Media coverage had shifted, and a drug that once offered “instant nirvana” was now portrayed as a dire threat to the mental health of an entire generation. The truth was, of course, somewhere in between, but the middle road is rarely taken once Time magazine and congressional subcommittees get into the act. Time declared in March 1966 that the nation was in the midst of an LSD epidemic. “The disease is striking in beachside beatnik pads and in the dormitories of expensive prep schools,” Time intoned. “It has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus at Berkeley. And everywhere the diagnosis is the same: psychotic illness resulting from the unauthorized, non-medical use of the drug LSD-25.”
This is not to deny that there were many real casualties from the psychedelic drug craze. Millions of young Americans were turning on, and hundreds of them were showing up in hospital emergency rooms, suffering from panic attacks and psychotic reactions. Others complained of LSD “flashbacks,” the onslaught of hallucinations weeks or even months after taking the drug. In New York, the news media went into overdrive in the spring of 1966 when a Harvard graduate and medical-school dropout named Stephen Kessler stabbed his mother-in-law to death with a kitchen knife. According to media reports, the “LSD killer” told police he’d been “flying for three days on LSD.” There were reports of freaked-out users jumping off of buildings or taking their lives in other ways under the influence of the drug. The most famous casualty would be Diane Linkletter, the daughter of television personality Art Linkletter, who jumped to her death from the kitchen window of her sixth-floor apartment in West Hollywood. Her death in the fall of 1969 kicked off a protracted public-relations war between Timothy Leary and Art Linkletter, who claimed Leary had “murdered” his daughter through his LSD advocacy.
LSD was still legal in the summer of 1966, when Huston Smith delivered his paper at the University of California. But it would not be for long. Possession of the drug was outlawed under California law on October 6, 1966. Two years later, the drug was banned under federal law. In 1967, in an article published in the journal Christian ity and Crisis, Smith announced that he was stepping back from his “initial, rather optimistic appraisal of the promise entheogens [‘God-enabling’ drugs] ho
ld for religion.”
Huston Smith in the 1960s
Smith agreed that psychedelic drugs can produce the experience of religious mysticism, but he did not find very much evidence that those experiences had the conviction behind them to carry over into the nondrugged state. LSD and other drugs may reshuffle the brain’s neurological pathways, stimulate the “euphoria center,” and make one feel at one with the world. But that was just not enough to support “the all-too-common, too vague, too uncritical claim that psychedelics expand consciousness.
“Everything seems wonderful because at the moment in question euphoria fills our horizon,” he wrote. “The entire world seems wonderful because the world has been collapsed to include only the rose-tinted things we have in mind at the moment.”
Smith took greatest exception to Leary’s infamous advice that people “turn on, tune in, drop out.” That glib message, Smith argued, does not constitute the alternative social vision necessary for the establishment of a viable new religious movement. “If the psychedelic movement were apocalyptic, revolutionary, or utopian, it would present an alternative to the status quo,” he wrote. “Being none of these, its social message comes down to ‘Quit school. Quit your job. Drop out.’ The slogan is too negative to command respect.” He also questioned the claim by Leary and others that the psychedelic movement should be treated like any other religious movement, free to consume its mind-bending holy sacrament. Smith saw “no sign of the makings of a church.” But Huston went out of his way to avoid directly criticizing Leary, the man who turned him on that memorable New Year’s Day in 1961 in Newton, Massachusetts. “The psychedelic movement does have a charismatic leader,” Smith wrote, “a man of intelligence, culture, and charm who is completely self-assured and apparently absolutely fearless.”
Healer: San Francisco December 1968
Andrew Weil missed the first flowering of the San Francisco counterculture. He finished his undergraduate work in 1964, and as he’d always planned, he entered Harvard Medical School. He didn’t head out to the West Coast until 1968, when he began a yearlong medical residency at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.
“I got to San Francisco a bit late,” he would later lament. “The psychedelic era was turning into the amphetamine era.”
“Speed Kills” had replaced “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” as the received pharmacological wisdom. By 1968, there was a harder edge to the drug scene in San Francisco. Many of the casualties were winding up at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, where Weil worked as a volunteer. Young runaways from across the country came looking for love and peace, but many of them found themselves broke and living on the street, victimized by a variety of sexual and chemical predators.
By the end of his undergraduate years, Andy had stopped experimenting with psychedelic drugs and focused on his academic/medical career. There had been flashes of another reality back during those freshman mescaline trips in Claverly Hall, but Weil was not ready to seriously consider another way of living, another way of experiencing the world. “They were important experiences, but I couldn’t deal with them,” Weil would later recall. “It threatened my value system and the path I was on. So I really threw myself into being a good Harvard student and getting ready for medical school.”
It wasn’t until he arrived in San Francisco that Weil felt like he had the space and the time to continue his explorations into other states of consciousness. He reconnected with marijuana and psychedelics. He started dating a nurse at Mount Zion. It was an intense political time. San Francisco was ground zero for the national counterculture. It was such a different cultural scene at Harvard, which was full of intellectuals. In San Francisco, Weil was hanging out with artists and musicians, people he’d never spent time with at Harvard. The years of 1968 and 1969 were the turning point in the life of the bright, ambitious kid from Philadelphia. There was no going home. After that, he tried to go back east, but he felt like a fish out of water.
His time in San Francisco also inspired Weil to look back on what he had done five years earlier to bring down Leary and Alpert. He didn’t like what he saw. Weil owed Leary and Alpert an apology, or at least an explanation.
Weil called Leary, and Leary agreed to get together with his old nemesis. “That was a good meeting,” Weil recalled. “I told him about the transformations that I’d been through since then, and how I look back on that time. He was easy to be with. It seemed like he’d really let it go.”
Weil had a feeling it might be harder to reconcile with Alpert, and he was right. “I told Leary that I wanted to speak with Alpert,” Weil recalled, “and he said that would be very difficult.”
“Dick is still very angry about the whole thing,” Leary replied.
While he didn’t know it at the time, Weil was about to go through his own battle with an entrenched bureaucracy—a fight that would be eerily reminiscent of what Leary and Alpert had experienced back at Harvard. Andrew Weil, MD, was about to run up against an administration that did not like his conclusions about a popular street drug.
Talk about karma.
This time the drug was marijuana. It began in December 1968 when Weil authored a report that was published in Science magazine. At the time, Weil was only twenty-six years old and still working as an intern at Mount Zion, but the report made headlines across the country.
“The most carefully controlled study to date on the physical and psychological effects of smoking marijuana has concluded that the drug is a ‘relatively mild intoxicant with minor, real, short-lived effects,’” the New York Times reported. Out on the West Coast, the San Francisco Chronicle reported its own interpretation of the study: “Persons who smoke marijuana for the first time do not thereby put themselves on the road to habitual use of the drug, a young scientist declared yesterday.”
Weil and two other Boston researchers—a Harvard psychiatrist and a Boston University graduate student—had carried out the study in the spring of 1967, when Weil was still a senior medical student at Harvard. A battery of physiological and psychological tests were given to two groups of college students—nine first-time users of marijuana and eight “chronic users” of the drug. In his report, Weil noted that “it proved extremely difficult to find marijuana-naïve persons in the student population of Boston,” adding that “nearly all persons encountered who had not tried marijuana admitted this somewhat apologetically.”
At the same time, Weil was careful not to come across as an advocate of marijuana use. Writing later in the New England Journal of Medicine, Weil warned that some novice pot smokers may experience mild depression, panic attacks, or “toxic psychosis.” Pot smokers who have previously taken LSD, he warned, might have frightening hallucinogenic flashbacks.
In an article published in Nature, a British scientific journal, Weil sought to explain why potheads seem so spaced out. After studying tape recordings of stoned subjects trying to verbally express themselves, Weil scientifically confirmed what anyone talking to a stoner at a party knew all too well. “Subtle speech retardation” is caused by a failure of “ultra-short-term memory,” Dr. Weil reported. He had discovered that people who are high on pot experience a “simple forgetting of what one is going to say next and a strong tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents because the line of thought is lost.”
Those findings were laughable (albeit true) to anyone in the know, but the most important aspect of Weil’s marijuana studies was that there were any studies at all. At the time, it was next to impossible to get government permission to legally use marijuana in official research projects. Weil was able to get federal support for his studies. He even got permission to administer marijuana to subjects who had never before taken the drug.
In 1968, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had cleared the way for him to get research-grade marijuana for his experiments. “I looked over the literature on marijuana,” he said. “I couldn’t believe there was no experimental basis for statements made about marijuana by pharmacologists and reputable textbooks. It s
eemed to me the time was ripe to do a study that should have been done thirty years ago.”
What inspired Harvard and federal drug agencies to trust Andrew Weil?
Weil believes it was his “reward” for getting the goods on Leary and Alpert back in 1963. “I suspect that the only reason I was allowed to do those marijuana experiments in 1968 was because of the fact that I was the person who wrote the exposé on Leary and Alpert,” he said. “One thing I learned was that is the way you advance in that kind of system. I had bought into the value system of that society. Internally, there was this real inconsistency in my life. I had those mystical [drug-induced] experiences, but to get through medical school I had to stuff all that. It was not until my internship in San Francisco in 1968 that I saw this totally different culture.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Weil was living a divided life, not unlike Richard Alpert’s experience of being a private homosexual and a public heterosexual. Weil was living half in the straight world and half in the stoned world. In 1970, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health cited Weil’s study in his testimony before Congress, saying the young scientist’s research was producing “troublesome facts” that “make it impossible to give marijuana a clean bill of health.” His conclusion shows how Weil was able to offer something for everyone in his study. Marijuana advocates and opponents cited his work, and he was rewarded with a job in the drug-study division of the federal mental-health institute. That prompted him to leave San Francisco in late 1969 and move to Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Weil came to San Francisco to study the hippies, but he’d gone native, and there was no turning back. His transformation can be seen in photographs that ran with newspaper stories about him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He appeared in December 1968 as a chubby, bald, and clean-shaven physician in a black tie, white shirt, and white lab coat. By the summer of 1971, he’d grown the wild, bushy beard that would become his trademark feature. He’d discarded the coat and tie for faded blue jeans and a work shirt. And he’d slimmed down so much that the New York Times observed in a headline that the “Meat-Eating, 230-Pound Doctor Is Now a 175-Pound Vegetarian.”