Reading the wikipedia entry on Mr. Leary, I had trouble understanding how the courts cooked up the penalties he faced.
He was found, in 1965, with a quantity of marijuana small enough to fit in his underwear. By some unlikely turn of events, the police searched him and found it, and he was ultimately sentenced to 30 years for this crime.
Despite a 30 years sentence, he’s still out of jail in 1968?! and caught with a couple additional joints. That’s another 10 years, 5 years per joint.
The prison issues an inmate with a 40 year sentence the “Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test” among others, he cheats the test, and makes it look like he’s a conformist who will do best performing forestry and gardening. So they let him out in the gardens, and he escapes.
He then has various hijinks in various countries, not content to merely wait in a single safe country from extradition, he ultimately travels to Afghanistan and is turned in to the Americans by corrupt policemen. Somehow staying in Switzerland safe from the law isn’t good enough.
So now he’s in the pokey in 1972 and is declared “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon. He faces 95 years in prison.
Yet, in 1976 the governor lets him loose and he spends the rest of his life a free man.
What gives? This sounds like the justice system in Leary’s case was about as consistent as an Ouija board.
Authorities love to make an example of famous people who break the law. Other authorities love to show leniency to famous people who break the law. Or in some cases instead of “famous” read “people like us”.
No doubt the government were wanting to make an example of him. I also have little doubt that the wiki article and your post are being biased with the narrative of events.
“on the U.S.-Mexico bridge when Rosemary remembered she had a very small amount of marijuana in her possession. It was impossible to throw it out on the bridge, so Susan put it in her underwear”
My emphasis. The above sounds innocent, lovely and a hurried decision. However, getting your underage daughter to shove drugs down her vajajay as you cross the border is not to be admired imo. Such a slimey decision is a well known tactic of criminals. Get underage kids to take the risks.
One thing to remember is that 1976 was a jillion years away from 1966, or 1972 for that matter. Just about everybody’s attitudes had changed in re small amounts of marijuana. (Please note that Dick’s calling Leary what he did was absolutely valueless in a court of law).
Leary wasn’t being punished for the dope. He was punished for corrupting the youth of America. Which corrupting he was actually doing, depending on your definition of corruption. Leary was also a professor, who was influential on college campuses. Replace Glenn Beck or Nancy Pelosi’s name with Leary’s, (whichever one of them you don’t like) have them influencing college students to use LSD, turn on, tune in and drop out, and all that that entails, throw in Diana Linkletter’s (see Wikipedia) cautionary tale, and you’ll think the same thing as Nixon did. You probably already think that the one you chose deserves the 95 years, without the dope being thrown in!
The laws allowed for the punishments that were handed to Leary, and the judiciary that were involved in the case saw no mitigating factors that would allow for his receiving anything less.
I dislike both Glenn Beck and Nancy Pelosi; I don’t know that either one of them deserves to be locked away for 95 years, even if they peddled acid on the side.
And for the record, the Wikipedia article you mention says that
“a toxicology test later determined that Diane Linkletter had no drugs in her system the day she died.”
Neither did Amy Winehouse. Very few would argue that drink and drugs did not contribute to a whole lot of fuck up in her life.
Im pro legalisation of most illegal drugs. However, it is noteworthy that legalisation advocates invariably try to ignore the bad consequences of taking such drugs for many, many people: just as those opposed to legalisation invariably play up the bad consequences. Im a libertarian. People have a right to screw up their own lives. However, let’s not ignore the fact that some people can easily become addicted, others less so. And that those on the higher socio-economic scale are less likely to suffer the most dire consequences of legalisation.
See the one on the top right, i.e. the one with the highest dependence potential, far above both alcohol and caffeine? That’s heroin. What Amy Winehouse used to do.
See the one on the bottom left, i.e. the one with the lowest dependence potential, far below both alcohol and caffeine? That’s LSD. What Diane Linkletter used to do.
The two cannot be compared. At all.
So bringing up heroin in a thread about Leary - who was all about LSD (and fame!) - strikes me as very odd indeed. Like bringing up Stalingrad in a thread about bar fights.
He was tentatively sentenced to thirty years, pending (per the Supreme Court) “completion of a study and recommendations to be used by the District Court in fixing his final sentence”.
He was out on bail pending appeal.
By the time of his second conviction, he had won the appeal of his first conviction. His case was sent back for retrial, during which he was reconvicted and sentenced to 10 years. So, 20 years in total. And he was obviously a nonviolent offender.
By 1976 we were in the lull between the Nixon-era and Reagan-era Wars on Drugs. Attitudes had loosened. It was the era of Hunter Thompson books and Cheech and Chong movies. Leary was never brought to trial on federal charges related to his escape, partly because he cooperated with authorities. He was paroled from the federal marijuana sentence at the same time that Jerry Brown commuted the rest of his state sentences for both drug possession and escape from prison.
There were suggestions that Leary did a deal with the FBI, turning in information on his former friends etc… no idea if thats true, but i have heard it suggested.
That was just Nixon “silent majority” PR. 1972 was the same year an 18-year-old friend got 2-7 years in Mansfield for a 1/4 oz bag of weed. It was within three years small amount like that were decriminalized in this state. Sign of the times.
Aye, the two did their debate tour sporadically throughout the '80s; I think the last one they did was in 1990. There’s an excellent film documenting the tour called Return Engagement. I know it was released on VHS (that’s how I saw it) but I doubt it’s been released on DVD or BR.
Leary’s son, on the other hand, said “My father was always more interested in drinking than in LSD.” Underneath all the progressive posturing, Timothy Leary was just a run-of-the-mill Irish drunk.
Slightly off-topic nitpick, but this isn’t true. Despite early rumors that it might have been some sort of withdrawal reaction because she was thought to be clean at the time, the autopsy showed it was a straightforward case of alcohol poisoning. Amy Winehouse - Wikipedia
Don’t give a shit about Linkletter; just looking at the public perception of same. That’s why I said ‘cautionary tale’, not ‘the awful facts surrounding her drug-induced death.’
(I had already read the ‘real’ story.)
Incidentally, research has been made into the subject of using LSD to combat alcoholism (alas, .pdf behind paywall). Looks fairly promising, according to pop sci write-ups such as this one. Though I guess it didn’t work in the case of Mr. Leary.
Not that there’s any argument that one can die as a result of drug abuse without actually having drugs in your system at the time (Jerry Garcia is a good example) but Winehouse wasn’t one of them. IMHO Linkletter wasn’t either, but nobody really knows for sure. At any rate it certainly wasn’t the “bad trip” Art claimed it was.
In the early 60s, marijuana was considered more dangerous than LSD. I remember the Dragnet episode where some kid is arrested* for having LSD and his parents protest to Friday that “it wasn’t like he had marijuana or anything!”.
