Born on October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and died on May 31, 1996, Timothy Leary became a major, highly controversial advocate of psychedelic drugs during the 1960s.
Timothy Leary was the only child born into an Irish Catholic household. His father was a dentist who left his mother Abigail Ferris when he was 14. As a young man cursed with too little discipline and too much enthusiasm for women, he bounced around in various universities and military institutions. Eventually, because of his mother's appealing to a family friend, State Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, he found a place to work as a civilian in an army psychological hospital in Pennsylvania during World War II. He then managed to finish his studies in psychology at the University of Alabama via correspondence courses.
In 1941, he was accepted to the University of Alabama through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps but he was expelled a year later for spending the night in the female dormitory. Then Larry remained in the non-commissioned track while enrolled in psychology subsection of the Army Specialized Training Program, including three months of study at Georgetown University, and six months at Ohio State University.
Georgetown University is a private research unit and the oldest Catholic and Jesuit-affiliated institution of higher education in the United States. The university has always been governed independently of the church. Founded in 1789, the program has grown to comprise 9 undergraduate and graduate schools, among which are the School of Foreign Service, School of Business, Medical School and Law School. Its main campus is located on a hill above the Potomac River, the 4th largest River along the Atlantic coast and form the borders between Maryland and Washington D.C. Notable alumni include Bill Clinton, Antonin Scalia (Supreme Court Justice), George Tenet (CIA director, and King Felipe of Spain, as well as the royalty and heads of state of more than a dozen countries.
Ohio University is a large, primarily residential, public university, founded in 1870 as a land-grant meaning a federal controlled land to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering.
Leary received an M.S. in psychology at Washington State University, a public research university, through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
In 1950, he received a Ph.D in clinical psychology from Berkeley. At this point of his life he started to belief that the only route to true psychological cure lay in the authentic insight into the nature of one's self.
By this time Leary stayed in the Bay Area as an assistant clinical professor at UCLA, San Francisco;
concurrently he co-founded Kaiser Hospital's psychology department in Oakland, California and maintained a private consultancy. In 1952, the family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant. He was at the starting point of constructing the conventional middle-class life.
Despite his nascent professional success, his marriage was strained by multiple infidelities and mutual alcohol abuse. Then everything shattered in a million pieces on his 35th birthday, in October, 1955, when Marianna, his first wife, decided to kill herself on the morning of that specific day by starting the family car, shutting the redwood garage door and inhaling the exhaust. When Leary woke up on that Saturday morning with a hangover he discovered his wife dead. The couple's two children -Susan 8, and Jack 6 panicked as they saw their father shouting for help, but there was nothing there that anyone could do. In the aftermath, he took his children and left for Spain again. After spending a few years in Europe he developed a new version of him with a wild and an exciting character.
On a vacation in Mexico he was offered the chance to try one of the magical mushrooms that had recently being discussed in an article in Life magazine. He told to his friend, the novelist Arthur Koestler, that he had learned more in those 6 hours of interaction with the mushrooms than in the previous 16 years of his life. Leary now felt that he had found a way to bring the insight he experienced to his close patients as well as to his circle of friends. He went to Harvard in 1959 not to join the academic club, but to challenge it. In that sense, he seemed the perfect man to conduct psychedelic drug experiments at Harvard's Center for Personality Research. As a clinical psychologist he conducted his experiments under the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960-62, resulting in the Concord Prison experiment and the Marsh Chapel experiment.
When the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz made lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) available in the late 1940s, researchers were encouraged to try it themselves to better understand madness. Later Leary began his research with a milder Sandoz product, synthetic psilocybin, and started to distribute it to fellow faculty members, divinity students and even prisoners, and everyone he could find who might be interested in trying it, including students in the undergraduate program, all with their consent. Although still technically legal in the late 1950s and early 1960s, giving LSD to students of any kind was considered extremely unethical. Things got out of hand. By 1963, Harvard was a hotbed of indiscriminate acid use. Larry and his colleague, Richard Alpert, a so called spiritualist, were fired from Harvard in the same year. They both used LSD to develop a philosophy of mind expansion and personal growing using the chemical reaction of the drug to block some areas of the brain and induced themselves in a strong persuasion in their minds that they found the path for spiritual enlightenment when they really got the enhancement of the pleasures of the flesh.
The chemical involved in the LSD was simply unpredictable. it produced hallucinations and paranoia, yet also proved to be helpful in controlled therapy, relaxing patients and sweeping away neuroses and even cure chronic alcoholism. Business executives and various luminaries began boasting of taking the LSD cure.
By this time, the cultural revolutions of the time were in full swing and Leary was becoming one of the principle intellectual gurus of the hippie movement. He was an audacious risk-taker. Briefly he ran for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. John Lennon wrote the song, "Come Together" to be Leary's political theme song that says: "I know you. You know me. One thing I can tell you is you got to be free." Leary's campaign was abandoned when he was convicted of possession of marijuana and sent to prison. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Leary was arrested often enough to see the inside of 36 prisons worldwide. He later escaped using his political connections.
Until then, Leary had been seen standing up in front of thousands at anti-war protesters, telling them :
"Turn yourself on, take LSD, tune yourself in, get the message, and drop out, leave your normal life behind." This was, after all, exactly what he had done. He became a crusader in the aim to turn the world on to LSD, a chemical compound derived from a fungus that grows on rye.
In 1966, as the Federal Government moved to ban LSD, Leary testified in the Senate that LSD was dangerous if used improperly -just like alcohol. When they outlawed it, Leary lashed back and wrote in his book "High Priest" in 1967, "They are right. It is as it should be."
No comments:
Post a Comment