The Harvard Psychedelic Club
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* The CIA had already funded its own psychological research at Harvard. One of its most infamous subjects was an undergraduate named Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, Alston Chase documents how Kaczynski’s participation in CIA-funded psychological stress tests in the 1950s contributed to his mental breakdown. Those experiments were run by the influential Harvard psychologist Harry Murray, who during World War II worked for the Office of Strategic Ser vices, the precursor of the CIA. Late in his Harvard career, Murray was one of the few members of the Harvard faculty who volunteered to participate in Leary’s psilocybin experiments.
* Among those inspired by Ram Dass was Wayne Dyer, the best-selling self-help writer and public-television guru. “To me, Ram Dass was and is the finest speaker I have ever heard,” Dyer wrote. “He was my role model on stage. . . . He was the voice of Applied Spirituality—his life was the model.”