A Really Good Day(40)

Leary, never overly devoted to the conventional scientific method, eventually rejected clinical inquiry entirely. He became a celebrity and a proselytizer, with a devotion to the cause of spreading the use of psychedelics that can fairly be described as religious. He believed that the drugs could change the world. Those he “turned on” included the Beats, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and three heirs to the Mellon fortune, who provided Leary and Alpert with a mansion in Millbrook, New York, in which to continue spreading the gospel of LSD. Leary said, “We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space module we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.” Hoo boy. Is it any surprise that the local assistant district attorney, a young man named G. Gordon Liddy, became obsessed with busting Leary and his pals?

In addition to Leary and, to a lesser extent, Alpert, there were others responsible in large part for the wide dissemination of LSD beyond therapeutic, mystical, or research contexts. One, Owsley Stanley, is credited with being one of the first private individuals to synthesize the drug, with the help of a young UC Berkeley chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. Owsley produced hundreds of thousands of doses of the drug in 1965 alone. All of this production was, of course, legal: the drug had not yet been criminalized. One of Owsley’s customers was a young man who had been introduced to the drug in a CIA-funded drug trial at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Ken Kesey was neither a psychological researcher nor particularly mystically inclined. He was a novelist, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the leader of a group of acolytes and hangers-on who called themselves the “Merry Pranksters.” In 1964, when the publication of Kesey’s second book required him to be in New York City, he and his pranksters loaded themselves up onto a Day-Glo-painted school bus and made their way cross-country, tripping all the way.*6 Tom Wolfe’s book about the tour, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is another classic of psychedelic literature.*7

In 1965 and 1966, Kesey organized a series of bacchanals he called “Acid Tests,” featuring music (notably the Grateful Dead), strobe and black lights, and copious amounts of LSD. With these events, the use of psychedelics left the doctor’s office and research laboratory and spread widely through the community. At this point, the drug was still legal. In 1967, at the Human Be-In, a “Gathering of the Tribes” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Leary first exhorted the assembled crowds to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” On that day, thirty thousand people tuned in to Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and turned on by swallowing thousands of doses of white-lightning LSD that had been prepared for the occasion by Owsley Stanley.

It was that exhortation—“Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Out of high school, junior executive, senior executive. And follow me!”*8—that caused the parental panic that led to Senate hearings on campus drug use. Poorly designed and ultimately debunked studies linking LSD to birth defects were trumpeted throughout the media, as were articles with headlines like “Strip Teasing Hippie Goes Wild in Larkspur on LSD.” Whereas the media had once published long interviews with, for example, Cary Grant on the personal insights and increased happiness he experienced as a result of LSD-based therapy, now Life magazine devoted a cover story to “The exploding threat of the mind drug that got out of control.” Significant fuel was added to the prohibitionist fire because, without adequate care to monitor set and setting in order to protect users, people began turning up in emergency rooms, seeking out medical care for “bad trips.” After hundreds, even thousands of panicked articles and television and radio news stories, the reputation of psychedelics was destroyed. In 1970, Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, putting LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics on Schedule I, and launching the War on Drugs with a punitive ferocity that has only just recently begun to abate.

Leary was eventually arrested crossing the border into Mexico. The charge? The possession of half an ounce of marijuana, found in a locket around his daughter’s neck.*9 While appeal of that case was pending, he was arrested again, also for marijuana possession, this time an even smaller amount. He did not, however, spend much time in prison. With the help of the Weather Underground, he escaped from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, and was smuggled to Algeria, where he came under the protection of Eldridge Cleaver. He then made his way circuitously to Kabul, but before he deplaned there he was arrested by an FBI agent. To mitigate his twenty-five-year sentence, Leary became a witness for the government in an investigation of the Weather Underground, though the information he provided was of very little value.

Meanwhile, Alpert traveled to India, where he became a follower of the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him his new name. Ram Dass, unlike Leary, did not devote himself to encouraging the widespread use of psychedelics. His focus turned to spirituality, though of course his interest in the latter stemmed in part from his experiences with the former. In 1971, Ram Dass published Be Here Now, the book that, despite my newfound patience, I am still finding impenetrable. It is at this point that the difference between the two men becomes most striking. As my friend Ian Faloona, a climatologist and experienced meditator, put it to me, Leary and Ram Dass represent “a classic paradigm of two different paths to the ultimate reality. One gets bamboozled by the powers and tricks of the altered states, and one keeps in touch with his heart, exercising it with all his power, to go beyond the realm of smoke and phantasmagoria. As Rumi said, ‘Love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.’?”