A Really Good Day(39)

With my newfound equanimity, I find myself willing to entertain the possibility that the problem is not the book’s but mine. Be Here Now is considered one of the most influential volumes of psychedelic spiritual literature. Certainly, the first section, in which the author details his early research and experiences with LSD, is relevant to my project, if only because it describes an important moment in the history of the drug’s promulgation. Moreover, I am, like Richard Alpert, “a good, Jewish, middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic.” There are things I can learn from this book, if only I am able to stop rolling my eyes at lines about “the big ice cream cone in the sky” or how “if you are PURE SPIRIT you are not matter!”

In the early 1960s, Ram Dass writes, his name was Richard Alpert and he was an assistant professor of social science at Harvard who had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. The invocation of these three most illustrious of institutions is meant, I know, to reassure and impress the most anxious of readers. Despite having gone to law school at Harvard,*1 and thus being fully cognizant of the essential similarity of the university to every other competitive institution, to my embarrassment I am in fact reassured and impressed. The mere fact that many of the early LSD pioneers in the United States attended or taught at Harvard establishes their credibility, doesn’t it?*2 At Harvard in the mid-1960s, Alpert teamed up with Timothy Leary, a clinical-psychology lecturer and expert in the field of the quantitative assessment of personality, with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, whom Alpert describes as having recently “been bicycling around Italy, bouncing checks.”*3 Leary, who had had a profound mystical experience while taking psilocybin in the form of what Alpert calls “Tionanactyl, the flesh of the Gods, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico,” had set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project along with (among others) Aldous Huxley, who was then a visiting professor at MIT. In addition to studying psilocybin. Leary had acquired a quantity of LSD*4 and was, Alpert writes, “busy taking it and administering it.” Alpert eagerly joined in on both the self-experimentation and the research.

Among Leary and Alpert’s research projects was the 1961 Concord Prison Experiment, designed to test the effects of psilocybin-assisted group therapy on rates of recidivism. They recruited a group of prisoners with three to five months remaining on their felony prison sentences, and administered the drug in three group-therapy situations, using standard personality tests before and after the therapy to assess the drug’s effects. Leary and his team took the drug themselves, along with their subjects, a common practice of theirs.

Leary claimed that the therapy resulted in a marked decrease in subsequent incarcerations among treated prisoners; however, a thirty-four-year follow-up study by Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), failed to find any long-term reduction in recidivism. Moreover, Doblin found Leary’s original report of the study to be rife with quantitative errors and erroneous conclusions.

During the summer of 1961, Alpert and Leary spoke at an international psychiatry conference in Copenhagen. Their talk was not well received. Some critics called it little more than a muddled and incoherent tribute to psychedelic drugs. In the wake of that conference, a series of critical articles in The Harvard Crimson and the Boston Herald, a Hearst tabloid, led to an investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Health, which, though it didn’t shut the Harvard experiments down, did require that all drugs be administered by a qualified physician. Leary turned his supply of psilocybin over to the student health services (the same place where, thirty years later, I was to have my first, decidedly unpsychedelic, therapy appointment), but he continued to distribute LSD widely to willing volunteers.

The year following the Copenhagen conference, Leary and Alpert supervised the Good Friday Experiment (also known as the Marsh Chapel Experiment), designed by a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in the history and philosophy of religion with a master’s from the Harvard Divinity School, Walter N. Pahnke. Meant to evaluate the effects of psilocybin on spiritual experience, the study was intended to be double-blind and controlled. Twenty divinity school students were matched in pairs for religious background and training, past religious experience, and general psychological health, among other factors. Ten were dosed with psilocybin; ten others swallowed capsules of niacin. Ten research assistants were meant to be sober providers of emotional support throughout the period of the test, but, over Pahnke’s objections, Leary insisted that they, too, be given psilocybin, albeit a half-dose. That was necessary, Leary claimed, to create a sense of community, but all it accomplished was a muddying of the results.

The test subjects attended a Good Friday service led by a charismatic chaplain. Though observers were not informed which students were controls and which were not, all hope of double-blind neutrality quickly evaporated. The students who were given niacin got a little nauseated, and their faces turned red. The students who were given psilocybin wandered around the chapel talking to God. Many had transcendent mystical experiences that informed the rest of their lives. A long-term follow-up study, again by Rick Doblin, determined that “the experimental subjects unanimously described their Good Friday psilocybin experience as having had elements of a genuinely mystical nature and characterized it as one of the highpoints of their spiritual life.”

Leary and Alpert ended up doing battle with the Harvard administration, which was fearful that the two were encouraging the use of “mind-distorting” drugs by students. This was, of course, exactly what they were doing. Leary and Alpert responded to their bosses that there was no evidence that psychedelic drugs were dangerous, that they were in fact “safe and beneficial.”*5 The administration was not persuaded. Leary eventually moved to California and was subsequently fired by Harvard for leaving his job without notice. Alpert was fired for distributing drugs to an undergraduate.