The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Michel-Gustave Hauchard, who stood to make a lot more money than Leary from the book about Leary’s prison escape, agreed to import a ghostwriter from Great Britain. His name was Brian Barritt, and his arrival was a mixed blessing. Barritt was a skinny, wide-eyed freak who’d probably taken as much LSD over the past decade as Timothy Leary had consumed. And Brian was even more of a party animal than Tim. But Barritt was also a disciplined writer. Amid all the partying, they actually got the project done. Mostly, they just sat around and talked. Barritt wrote most of the book.

  Bantam Books printed twenty-five thousand paperback copies of Confessions of a Hope Fiend, releasing the title on July 1, 1973. Michel-Gustave Hauchard held the copyright. Unlike most of Leary’s other books, it was never reprinted.

  Leary had a few more months to enjoy life in Switzerland, and to plan his next move. He had several meetings with Albert Hofmann, the chemist who had discovered LSD in his Basel lab during World War II. They met for the first time over lunch at the snack bar at the Lausanne train station. Later, the Swiss scientist showed Leary the route of Hofmann’s famous bike ride from the Sandoz lab—the scene of the world’s first LSD trip.

  Hofmann had a love/hate relationship with Leary. He publicly chastised the Harvard researcher for encouraging young people to dabble indiscriminately with the drug. “In the beginning, Albert hated him,” said Dieter Hagenbach, a Swiss publisher who knew both men. “Then people began telling Hofmann that if LSD hadn’t spread all over the world, the sixties wouldn’t have happened and you would not have become the person you are now—the famous Albert Hofmann. Later, during their meetings, they had a great time together. They were fascinated by each other. Albert and Timothy had completely different lives, but they were both great lives. He had discovered the most potent substance on this planet, and Leary let the world know about it. They were like the father and the son. LSD needed Father Albert, but it also needed the son.”

  Among the visitors who stopped by to pay their respects to Leary over that final summer in Switzerland was Richard Alpert. He arrived at the Leary chalet in his new incarnation as Ram Dass, on his way back to the West from his second pilgrimage in India. On the day Ram Dass showed up, Tim and some friends were getting together to drop acid. Ram Dass was not feeling too good, still recovering from a bout of “Delhi belly,” but he joined in by taking a little hash oil. Alpert was starting to put the drug scene behind him, and these guys were hard-core. Ghostwriter Barritt looked particularly wasted.

  Timothy Leary had long ago warned the youth of America to stay away from heroin. LSD and marijuana would get you high; heroin would only drag you down. But in the late summer of 1972, with Rosemary gone and his future prospects dim, Timothy Leary turned to smack. It didn’t help that he’d been hanging out with Keith Richards, the notorious guitarist for the Rolling Stones. The Stones were in Switzerland in 1972, recording Exile on Main St. Leary was living in exile, but Main Street seemed worlds away.

  “Rosemary’s departure left me desolate,” Leary would later explain. “After two years of prison and exile I was cut off from American contacts. No sense of mission, no source of income. Everywhere I went that summer I heard the low-down beat of the Stones celebrating Sister Morphine and Brown Sugar, Mick singing about his basement room and his needle and his spoon, wailing the profound philosophic thought of the season: ‘I stuck a needle in my arm. It did some good, it did some harm.’”

  Brian Barritt was ready with the needle and the spoon. One of Barritt’s friends, a stewardess with Swissair, showed up at the house with a large stash of pure heroin that she’d just smuggled in from Beirut. Leary remembers Barritt shaking his head after shooting up, as he prepared Tim’s first needle, mumbling something about how he’d “hate to be known as the person who got Timothy Leary hooked on heroin.” That said, he stuck the needle in Leary’s arm and pushed the plunger. Leary felt the warm flash of euphoria, a few minutes of wonder, and relaxed into nods of bliss. Then he fell into a heavy sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  After the Ecstasy . . . Four Lives

  Healer: Vail, Arizona November 2007

  Andy Weil hops out of the shower, tosses a blue terry-cloth bathrobe over his sweatpants, and walks out as the sun rises over his ranch in southern Arizona. Weil is now sixty-five years old and has, by most measures, lived a very successful life. He has published ten books, several of them best sellers. He’s done two PBS series, Dr. Andrew Weil’s Guide to Eating Well and Dr. Andrew Weil’s Healthy Aging. Time magazine put his face and his Santa Claus beard on its cover twice over the last decade, and named him one of the twenty-five most influential people in America.

  For years, he was the organic thorn in the side of the American medical establishment. Now, Andrew Weil, MD, has a prestigious post as the founding director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and is setting up similar programs at medical schools across the country.

  Weil’s Internet-based business, Dr. Weil’s Marketplace, helps fund these projects. Consumers of natural living can shop online for an array of Weil-endorsed products, including Dr. Weil for Origins Plantidote Mega-Mushroom Face Cleanser, Weil By Nature’s Path Organic Banana Manna Pure Fruit and Nut Bars, Weil By Nature’s Path Organic Chocolada Almond Hot Oatmeal, Weil’s Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon Sausage, Weil for Tea Oolong Shot, the Pro Juice Extractor by Dr. Weil, Dr. Weil’s 12˝ Wok, and Dr. Andrew Weil’s Mindbody Toolkit. That’s all on top of a lucrative business selling vitamins and other dietary supplements. In 2008, these products provided about $650,000 in profits for the foundation that supports Weil’s integrative-medicine projects.

  His 120-acre ranch sits on the edge of Saguaro National Park, just off the Old Spanish Trail. Visitors must traverse a bumpy dirt road through this stark but stunning desert landscape before arriving at a shady oasis of cypress and pine. Weil has been living in the southern Arizona desert since 1973, when his car broke down on the way back from his pilgrimage across Latin America. He’s called this circa-1924 ranch house his home since he bought this property in the mid-1990s, just as his breakthrough book, Spontaneous Healing, was settling in for its long ride at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Weil’s eight books have sold more than six million copies. His newsletter has more than one hundred thousand subscribers, and millions more have checked out his Web site. Dr. Weil has become CEO of alternative medicine in America, the guru of natural living. The ambitious freshman has become “Dr. Weil, Your Trusted Health Advisor.”

  Weil’s attempts to find a wife and raise a family have not been so successful. He remained unmarried until he was forty-seven years old. In 1990, he married Sabine Kremp, a former divorce mediator and massage therapist. They had a daughter, Diana, and tried to blend that family with three older children from Kremp’s previous marriage. For a while, the family seemed to be working—at least on the surface. People magazine profiled Weil and his family in a 1995 article and found what seemed like domestic bliss. “Dr. Andrew Weil’s house in Arizona teems with life,” People reported. “There are four kids, three dogs, a cockatiel and Coca the macaw, who chirps ‘Hello!’ to visitors and shrieks ‘Ouch!’ when his master sprays him with water to simulate his native rain-forest habitat.”

  Weil suddenly found himself with a wife and four kids—just as his long-simmering career was coming to a rapid boil. Just twenty months after the family was profiled in People magazine, the marriage went up in flames. Weil had become a national media celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of him. In addition to being his wife, Sabine Kremp was Weil’s business manager. “Running this empire,” Kremp said, “has been tough.” Andy and Sabine divorced in 1998. Kremp moved to Utah with the kids. A year later, Weil was just starting to come out of the emotional turmoil. It had been too much for him, trying to blend his wife’s family with their new daughter. “From my point of view, it was the difficulty with the stepkids,” he said. “It didn’t help that it happened during this big explos
ion of publicity.”

  Explosion is the right word. Why did his career suddenly take off? Weil had been saying the same thing since the 1970s. Weil didn’t change. America changed. Sometime in the 1990s, American culture caught up with the sixties counterculture. The counter-culture became the culture. Yoga became big business. Meditation is prescribed by the family doctor. Supermarkets stock organic produce and homeopathic cures. The Rolling Stones provide the soundtrack for computer advertisements, and Dennis Hopper promotes corporate retirement funds on network TV.

  Looking back on it all, Weil sees a direct connection between his experiences on psychedelic drugs and his later career in holistic health. “Those experiences showed me that what’s inside your head is connected to what’s outside your head and that you change things outside by working on things inside,” he said. “And there is a clear application to health there. State of mind, belief, and expectations absolutely influence health and the course of illness. In those days, that kind of thinking was pretty much out of the mainstream. Now that has really changed.”

  That’s true, but there was more to Weil’s meteoric rise than the culture catching up. Something else changed in the selling of Andy Weil. The marketing changed. Weil had been a niche author. Deciding it was time to roll himself out to a wider audience, Weil switched agents. He had been represented by Lynn Nesbit, a New York literary agent, who infamously quipped, “If Andy Weil really wants to make it, he’s got to shave off his beard.” Andy Weil loves his beard. If he could, he would trademark that, too. Weil’s new agent, Richard Pine, declined to take credit for his client’s new-found audience. “Like many truly innovative people, he was just ahead of his time,” Pine said. “In 1995, consumers and the mass media were ready to hear and read what he had to say. It wasn’t me that made him viable in a big way. It was the crisis in mainstream medicine.”

  Mainstream medicine fought back. Leading the attack was Dr. Arnold S. Relman, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine—a man who helped Weil learn the physician’s trade when Relman taught at Harvard Medical School back in the 1960s. Relman wrote a lengthy critique of Weil’s work and had it published in the New Republic. He said Weil’s endorsement of herbal supplements, claims of miracle cures, and reliance on various “mind-body” exercises were often based on “notions totally at odds with science, common sense, and modern conceptions of the structure and the function of the human body.” Weil and other practitioners of alternative medicine “do not appear to recognize the need for objective evidence, asserting that the intuitions and the personal beliefs of patients and healers are all that is needed to validate their methods.”

  Relman conceded that some of Weil’s criticisms of mainstream medicine were valid, and helped explain the public’s embrace of diet supplements, meditation techniques, herbs, homeopathic cures, and Chinese healing techniques such as acupuncture. It is true, Relman wrote, that doctors are too quick to resort to surgery, costly technology, and potent drugs when simple, less invasive methods could work just as well. He also speculated that Weil’s vigorous endorsements of healing herbs “stem from his earlier training in botany and his long interest in the psychedelic properties of plants.

  “Weil would seem at first to be ideally suited to be a leader of the alternative medicine movement at this juncture,” Relman continued. “He is articulate, self-assured, intellectually nimble—and wonderfully ambiguous. Ambiguity, after all, should be helpful to those who would defend systems of healing that are based on irrational or non-existent theories and are supported by no credible empirical evidence.”

  Weil is sensitive to such criticism, and responded in 2005 in his next book, another national best seller, titled Healthy Aging. He points out that he does change his recommendations on the value of various supplements by keeping up with current scientific research, and that he has always favored greater government regulation of dietary supplements. Weil and Relman sparred for a year or two, but Andy Weil just kept enlarging his audience and expanding his market, selling more books and products on his burgeoning Web site. As the new millennium began, Weil took to endorsing everything from gourmet olive oil to his own line of cookware. Ten years after the 1995 release of his breakthrough book, Weil was back on public television to promote Healthy Aging. The children of the sixties were heading into their golden years, and Andy Weil was right there with them. The guy who once offered advice on how to find the most potent magic mushrooms was now peddling tiny bottles of Plantidote Mega-Mushroom Face Serum, guaranteed to bring “renewed radiance and clarity” to the wrinkled skin of aging hippies.

  Here, on this November morning in the dry Arizona desert, Weil seems happy, even ready to slow down a bit. On a clearing in the scrubby desert, not far from his office in the old horse barn, Weil has constructed a stone labyrinth, a meandering circular path used for periods of walking meditation and reflection. In recent years, these pathways of spiraling concentric circles—patterned after one built into the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France more than eight centuries ago—have been popping up in church parking lots and New Age retreat centers across the country and around the world. Weil’s labyrinth is a simple one, with the pathway outlined with stones laid out on a round patch of the desert floor. Weil’s ranch foreman has ended his tour here, explaining that this simple design replaced a more elaborate labyrinth that was washed out by a flash flood that swept over the property in the summer of 2006, causing significant damage and washing away books, records, papers, and other items Weil had collected over the course of his life.

  Andrew Weil at his Arizona ranch (Photo courtesy of Weil Lifestyle, LLC.)

  Life on the ranch was just getting back to normal, as was the rest of Weil’s existence. He had just built a luxurious getaway house up in British Columbia, on Cortes Island, where Weil can escape during the blistering days of summer. “It’s where I go to disconnect,” he explained.

  It’s been more than four decades since Weil first made headlines with his damning exposé of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Weil is not proud of what he did back then. He feels like he made up with Leary before The Trickster’s 1996 death. One turning point came in 1983 when Leary, the old LSD guru and sixties relic, was coming out with an autobiography, appropriated titled Flashbacks. The publisher had sent a galley of the new book to Weil’s office in Tucson, hoping for a favorable blurb from the man who’d replaced Leary as the go-to guy on mind-altering drugs. “Flashbacks is filled with good stories, celebrities, zaniness, and solid information about the psychedelic revolution of the sixties and the man who was its chief proponent,” Weil wrote.

  It was a nice blurb. But it would take more than a literary endorsement to mend the fences with Richard Alpert. Weil has made several attempts over the years to apologize and reconcile with Ram Dass—the man who had a lot to do with Weil getting interested in yoga and meditation. Weil did a benefit to help raise money for Ram Dass and the medical expenses he incurred following a severe stroke in 1991. They later met in Hawaii, where Weil was giving a talk. Ram Dass showed up. On the surface, it looked like they had reconciled, but Weil kept hearing from mutual friends that Ram Dass was still upset about the way Weil went after him back at Harvard.

  “There’s still some stuff there that he hasn’t expressed to me,” Weil said. “He’s a complicated guy.”

  Seeker: Maui, Hawaii January 2008

  Ram Dass struggles to get out of his wheelchair and into the over-stuffed recliner. It’s been more than a decade since the stroke, and he still has trouble talking. The right side of his body remains paralyzed. There have been other medical problems that almost did him in. He says he’s come to Maui to die.

  He’s spent much of his life talking about his transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass, but there are parts of the story he has tried to keep to himself. At first, he doesn’t really want to talk about what happened with those two undergraduates back at Harvard, Ronnie Winston and Andrew Weil. Something inside him still tig
htens up with the mere mention of the name Andrew Weil.

  “It’s a complicated relationship,” he says.

  It has been a tough ten years for The Seeker. The struggle began one evening in February 1997. Ram Dass was at his home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, working on his next book, tentatively titled Conscious Aging, when he fell into a dream. He dreamed that he was a very old man with failing eyesight and failing legs. In the dream, one of his legs was numb, and he fell over when he got up to answer a phone call. “R.D.? Are you there?” The man in the dream mumbled some incoherent answer. The guy on the other end of the phone, an old friend from Santa Fe, realized that this was not a dream. This was real, and something was very wrong with Ram Dass. He called one of Ram Dass’s secretaries, who lived nearby. She rushed over, found him on the floor, and called an ambulance. He had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Doctors gave him a 10 percent chance of survival.

  Ram Dass survived, but it hasn’t been easy. For years, he had been the helper. He even wrote a book called How Can I Help? Now he was the one who needed help. He had spent years working with the dying, hearing stories of great visions and grand epiphanies that come at the end. He was writing a book on aging, but until the stroke, he didn’t think of himself as old. He was a vibrant sixty-six-year-old guy tooling around in his MG—the life of the party. But the stroke showed him—once again—how God has a strange sense of humor, and that he still had some work to do on himself. He’d come face-to-face with death and felt nothing—no long tunnels, no white light. “Here I am, ‘Dr. Spiritual,’ and in my own death I didn’t orient toward the spirit. I flunked the test.”