Timothy Leary's Transformation From Scientist To Psychedelic Celebrity

Timothy Leary in 1961. (NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division)

Timothy Leary’s life is now open to the public. The archives of the one-time Harvard psychologist who became an evangelist for the mind-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s have found a new home at the New York Public Library, which recently threw a party to celebrate their release.

I was born too late to witness Leary’s transition from scientist to counterculture celebrity, and I hoped the archives might offer a little hint of what it was like to be there. So I got myself invited to the opening in hopes of being enlightened.

By Leary standards the party was pretty tame â€" people sipped wine, a man handed out peacock feathers, a flatscreen in the corner looped strange video games Leary helped develop late in life (he died in 1996). But hints of a wilder past could be found in a glass case that displayed a few artifacts, including a 1960 letter from the beat poet Allen Ginsberg asking Leary if he could score some mescaline for the great abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

A serious scholar â€" or any curious person â€" could spend months poring over the archives. But I only had a few hours, so I decided to check out the files from Leary’s days at Harvard in the early 60s.

In April I attended the Psychedelic Science conference and wrote an article on the recent resurgence of scientific research on psychedelic drugs. Scientists have become interested once again in these drugs both for what they could reveal about the nature of human consciousness and for their potential to help people with depression and anxiety. Leary pioneered this research. But some of those working on it today blame him for ruining it for everybody else. His later antics, they say, precipitated a backlash that criminalized psychedelics and made it impossible to do serious research on them for decades.

Some of Leary’s Harvard files. Photo: Alex Welsh/WIRED

After my article came out, I got a couple emails from Leary supporters, including his stepson Zach, complaining that they’re sick of hearing people blame all this on Leary. I met Zach briefly at the party and asked him to elaborate. What squashed the fledgling psychedelic research movement was the cultural and social upheaval of the times, not the actions of any one person, he said. “The fucking sixties happened, man.”

It seemed like a fair point. But I was still curious about Leary’s early research. Was it actually legit? Would there be tabs of acid tucked inside folders of charts and graphs?

There would not be. For one thing, Leary was having a hard time getting his hands on LSD in those days, assistant curator Thomas Lannon explained as he spread out files for us to look at on a huge wooden table in one of the library’s reading rooms. The research mainly used psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, and occasionally DMT, a potent and fast-acting hallucinogen derived from plants. (Grace Slick, the lead singer for Jefferson Airplane, said that if LSD is like being sucked up a straw, DMT is like being shot out of a cannon).

My short tour of the archives did seem to show an interesting evolution.

Lannon laid out stacks of mimeographed research proposals, protocols, and data Leary and his colleagues collected at Harvard. There were highly detailed “session reports” of their subjects’ â€" and their own â€" experiences on psilocybin and DMT.

In those days, behaviorism was a dominant force in the Harvard psych department thanks to the looming presence of its founding father, B.F. Skinner. Leary rejected this philosophy, which holds that psychologists should concern themselves only with observable behavior and forget about trying to explore thoughts, beliefs, and other internal mental states.

Scenes of Leary and friends eating psychedelic mushrooms in Mexico. Photo: Alex Welsh/WIRED

Leary’s PhD thesis at UC Berkeley, which he completed in 1950, and work he did in the ensuing years, focused on interpersonal psychology. Unlike Skinner, he was very much interested in internal states, and in the interactions between experimenter and subject, or therapist and patient.

Leary and colleagues took detailed notes on their psychedelic drug sessions, some of which were carefully scripted. Lannon showed me an intriguing and enigmatic script for a DMT session that reads in part:

Minute 12: Open eyes, you are in a world where consciousness has left the robot.

Minute 14: Assemble plastic dolls

Minute 16: Decompose the plastic dolls. Wave vibrations.

In the famous Concord Prison Experiment, Leary and colleagues guided soon-to-be-paroled inmates at a nearby prison through psilocybin trips intended to get them to rethink their ways and become law-abiding citizens. The aim was to reduce recidivism.

“Leary goes to Harvard and he doesn’t want to lecture kids and wear fancy outfits, he wants to go into the prisons and teach people how to solve their own problems,” Lannon said. “It’s kind of a noble scientific ambition at first.”

The  archives contain detailed records from the prison experiment â€" fat folders for each prisoner with personal histories, batteries of personality tests and psychological profiles. There are tables of data and statistics. Superficially at least, it looks like a scientific process.

One of Leary’s DMT session reports. Photo: Alex Welsh/WIRED

At the same time, other materials in the archive from the same time period tell a different side of the story. Leary may have taken his day job seriously, but at night the experiments got a little wilder.

Lannon spread out a series of black and white photos taken at Leary’s rented house in Cambridge. They show a young woman who’s clearly tripping. In some photos she’s laughing and dancing ecstatically, her hair flying. In a couple, a man is running his fingers through her hair and her face conveys that this is an intensely interesting experience. Like, whoa. In others, she looks far away, wary, maybe even a little afraid.

Lannon showed me a bill for damages Leary received from his landlord in 1961. It goes on for pages. It includes a dining table marred by scratches that “appear to be hammered with tines of fork.” It lists broken doors, burnt lampshades, a rug defiled by a dog then rolled up and shoved in the pantry,  and â€" perhaps the most predictable of all: “phonograph speaker â€" completely blown out.”

Leary’s session reports of his own psychedelic experiences seem to change during the Harvard years. In the beginning his notes are detailed and neatly handwritten; some of them are typed. Later reports adhere less strictly to reality. In one, filled out in March 1963, just weeks before he got kicked out of Harvard, Leary prints in big block letters. He puts down a question mark for his age and lists his occupation as “ANGEL.”

Shortly before getting the boot from Harvard, Leary set up a research foundation called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (or IFIF), which was a kind of early citizen science project in which groups of six to 10 people could apply for membership, take consciousness expanding drugs and report their findings back to Leary. “At this point Leary is still appealing to science,” Lannon said.

In March of 1963, Leary wrote to Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss chemist of LSD asking him to send 100 grams (hundreds of thousands of doses) to further this endeavor in the name of science. Hoffmann politely declined.

I told Lannon it sounded a bit like Leary was just using his scientific credentials as a front for getting drugs at this point. “I don’t know,” he said. “Even if he’s just trying to get some acid, it’s remarkably well organized.”

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