I was wondering what the general opinion around here is of Timothy Leary. Was he good or bad for the psychedelic movement?
I’m of the opinion that one of Dr. Leary’s greatest legacies is that he taught us how not to go about advancing “the cause”. It seems that at the start of the 60s there were two possible ways to go: There was the “HUXLEY” approach: Allow the “thinkers” of our society to experience a “trip”–dose architects, artists, selected politicians & policymakers. Keep things quiet…don’t make waves…get research done, so when the time comes, we’ll have all the data in & our counter-arguments formed. And then there was the “LEARY” approach: Since the establishment can’t cope with this radical of a change, efforts should be aimed at getting the segment of society most willing to take risks to try it: the youth. Leary tried to market psychedelia with the tactics of Madison Avenue…coming up with media-friendly soundbites like, “Tune-in, Turn-On, Drop-out”, etc. LSD can sometimes have “ego-expanding” properties, and this might have been a cause for Leary’s increasingly “Messianic”-type style. After the establishment was faced with a generation of youth throwing off their cultural programming–dressing strangely, talking about “returning to nature”–not getting a job with a corporation, and rioting on campuses and urban centers, the government tried putting the genie back in the bottle by indiscriminately prohibiting almost all entheogenic drugs!
By taking this view of Dr. Leary, I’m not dismissing the research he contributed. But notions like his theory of the “eight potential circuits of the nervous system” were better articulated by people like Robert Anton Wilson, who explained and popularized the ideas without antagonizing “the system”.
I cringe when I hear someone today described as a “Tim Leary” of the new century. I think the prominent people in this area have learned from the mistakes Leary made, and are keeping things much more quiet. Dennis McKenna is one the best examples of this route. No wild-eyed grand claims, just research, science, and doing his best to not give the gov’t another reason to restart the inquisition.
I’m of the mindset that it’s inevitable the US gov’t will get in step with the rest of the world and rethink it’s position on personal drug use. But hopefully this time we’ll learn from the mistakes of the 1960s and do it right…
I’m with you on that. Although, I was waaaaay too young to properly understand what was going on. I’m a buyer of the Huxley approach.
Leary was a giant egotistical nut brain. I deleted the word “just” from that sentence, because he certainly was not “just” an egotistical nut brain. When I met him around 1981, he was pretty fried and a walking poster child for why you shouldn’t abuse drugs.
Can’t resist grabbing my old copy of “The Politics of Ecstasy” off the shelf. Flicking through it, I find the same assumption as the OP. There is such a thing as “a psychedelic movement”.
There never was one. You can’t escape planet Earth by taking drugs. I’m a big fan of surrealist, mind-expanding artists - 13th Floor Elevators and Jefferson Airplane as well as Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. But the late 60s “psychedelic movement” was a contrived aesthetic form and lifestyle. Good fun, maybe. But there is no movement to be had. The real world exists. Deal with it.
I’m not sure what the psychedelic movement means exactly, but I like the poplularizing approach to some degree. The fact that the government made it illegal only contributed to mistrust of the government which in my mind can be a healthy thing.
Hmmm… wait a sec, I think getting into the illegal drug scene was a bad move because people took it like it was any other drug. LSD is powerful stuff, I’ve seen people freak out completely on it. If you have any hidden demons, they come out in a hurry. People seriously damaged their psyche because they thought it was some party drug. If it didn’t have the ilicit appeal, the set and setting that Leary proposed would have been much better.
Being high on drugs is not a sustainable lifestyle. While it was good for me to have my world view shaken up and realize just how many assumptions I was making, I found LSD to be exhausting and overwhelming. I can’t imagine doing it regularly without it taking its toll.
Taking up meditation, and lucid dreaming is a much better way to reach the same understandings. Albeit getting high might be the first realization for people that they might want to reach those understandings.
My big problem with Leary is that it was REALLY FUCKING EASY for him to get up and warble on about “turning on, tuning in and dropping out of college, graduate school etc.”
Easy for him to do 'cause he didn’t have to worry about finding a place to sleep or having enough to eat, unlike the vast majority of teenagers who ran all the way over to Haight-Ashbury and found themselves living on the streets as panhandlers.
Guin, both Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, nee Richard Alpert, were full professors at Harvard in the late 50s. You can find out all about their fall from grace in a cultural history of LSD called Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stevens.
A Harvard student, the brother of my wife’s classmate, wound up permanently insane thanks to experiments with dear Prof. Leary. I remember in Berkely, circa 1965, driving past the fresh body of a young woman who had run through her apartment window and fallen to her death under some Psychedelic illusion.
I don’t care about the well-being of the “psychedelic movement?” I want to see it dead!
december, you got a cite for those? The “flying out a window while on LSD” sounds like the Diane Linkletter canard. Also, did the permanently insane gentleman, by any chance, believe he was an orange? Because this mysterious character apparently also lives in our local mental hospital. My drug education teacher told me so.
I would be suprised if your anecdote is accurate. It is very consistent with popular notions of LSD driven behaviour, but not consistent with the reality.
The medical reality is that the incidents of insanity in LSD users are no higher than the general population. Suicides that are attempted or carried out while under the influence of psychodelics are generally conceived prior to their ingestion. While the dive out the window could be as you stated, I would like to see what people who were there, in the room, with the young lady when she decided to take the plunge had to say before I came to any strong conclusions.
Here is a good example of why: About the time I was graduating from high school, a friend of mines sister that I knew moderately well took her life. This was about 1987 or 88. She had recently had a painful split with her boyfriend and decided to end her life. In examining things after the fact, it was appearent that she spent several days preparing for her act. In the end, she took a large quantity of poison, slashed her wrists, and hung her self with wire from a jungle gym in a grade school yard. The hanging did the job first. It was also revealed that she had ingested ecstacy that night as well. To the family and investigators, it was fairly appearent she had hatched a plan to kill herself and taking mdma for courage was just part of that plan.
However, if you just happened to live in the neighbor and witness the cops cutting her down in the morning or just heard about it and watched the papers for the story, you would have been significantly misled. The story was just as expected, something along the lines of “Ecstacy drives young women to suicide”. An uninformed reader would be thrust to the conclusion that her mdma use that evening drove her to suicide nearly, if not completely, single handedly. The opposite was quite true, it is quite likely she would have carried out her plan even in the absence of the substance.
Confronting the OP, I feel pretty certain that LSD would have been outlawed regardless of Leary. However, I find it very likely that he drew alot of attention to the substance in such a way as to accelerate the inevitable. His work probably substancially increased the public stigma and fear of it as well. LSD was popular amongst a culture that the establishment felt very threatened by. If for no other reason, it was almost certain to be outlawed as a weapon against that culture.
Well occ, LSD is dangerous stuff. No doubt there are all kinds of urban legends out there, but plenty of people have been hurt by it.
Regarding the Harvard student, I take my wife’s word. She’s pretty careful about what she says, so I believe her. She was at Wellesley from 1960 -1964; IIRC it was a specific classmate’s older brother, who had already been institutionalized for several years when this was told to her. I admit that she didn’t maintain contact with the classmate, so I can’t be certain that he was locked up for life.
As far as the woman’s corpse goes, I actually saw it on the sidewalk of Dwight Ave. A policeman had just arrived. They hadn’t yet closed the street to automobile traffic.
If you’ve been assuming that LSD was safe and that the warnings were bogus, then I hope I’ve opened your eyes.
LSD is one of the physically safest substances known. Far safer than aspirin for example.
So, someone who had used LSD went insane (possibly). Was he headed that way already? There is absolutely ZERO evidence LSD has ever caused insanity in a mentally healthy person. There is some evidence that some people with impending psychosis might have been pushed over the edge by the experience. People who were probably heading that way soon anyway and were just waiting for their next emotionally strong situation to begin their decent. Statistically there is no difference in the rates of insanity between LSD users and the gereral public. That leaves little to no room for cases of insanity caused by LSD.
And you know that LSD was the root cause of her jumping from this window how? Her boyfriend might have got tired of her and pushed her out that window and his first story was that she took LSD and jumped. During that era, the LSD and jumping story would be published regardless of how flimsy the story was. If evidence to the contrary came out later, you would probably have to dig pretty deep in the paper to find it.
I think your “Huxley” approach pretty much happened but to a lesser extent. Not with politicians and policymakers, per se, but nearly 20 years of research had been done by the time Timothy Leary got his hands on LSD (1962). I think enough was known about it that politicians and policymakers probably shouldn’t take it, anyway.
To Leary’s credit, he did advocate the importance of setting as opposed to an anyplace-anytime method, which can lead to the worst of bad trips.
I suppose the media gravitated towards Leary since he was a Harvard professor, an authority, and was supposed to know what he was talking about. Also, I think that no matter how sober your research might be, when the media gets a hold of it they need headlines and sound bites and Leary was their guy.
I think most LSD users eventually learned (and continue to learn) that a psychedelic lifestyle (at least one based on LSD) is unsustainable, so if there ever was a psychedelic movement, or “cause”, it probably fizzled out not because of anything Leary said, but because people either quit drugs to save their sanity, or they became so tripped out that hey could not be taken seriously, which is pretty much what happened to Leary.
By any medical source, the lethal dose of LSD is conservatively 5000 typical doses, maybe as high as 100,000 doses. It is unlikely in the extreme that even a dealer would have sufficient quantities on hand to even deliberately suicide by overdose. There has not been any documented cases of death by LSD overdose, even among those that had were trying.
LSD has not been shown to damage any internal organs, not even irritate the stomach. Also, risk of dependency is for all practical purposes non existant.
You will find the same info in all the current medical research. It is commonly and widely available.
Even the “Partnership for a Drug Free America” page on the substance has little bad to say about it. What they have to say about flashbacks is inaccurate, but you will notice they specifically say non addictive and the page is completely lacking any dire warnings about overdose or long term heath risks. I assure you, if there was even a hint of those issues, they would be blasted all over the page. Even this highly biased agency can’t bring itself to continue scare mongering with tales of insanity, chromosome damage, or overdose.
Safety is normally measured by the difference between the ED50(amount of the substance necessary to produce the desired effect in 50 percent of the population) and the LD50(the amount that is lethal in 50 percent)
As you can see, physically speaking, LSD is in fact MUCH, MUCH safer than aspirin. Of course this says nothing about the psychological dangers, but I’ll leave that for more qualified people to discuss.
