The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Death is the final act of every life, but for the person of faith, it is more like an intermission between this life and the next. Every world religion has its vision of the afterlife. One reason Smith was so drawn to Hinduism was its doctrine of universal salvation. Those who believe in reincarnation hold that the soul comes back to earth to take care of any unfinished business. How many times we return depends on the way we live our lives, but in the end, everyone is saved. Huston Smith never renounced the faith of his forefathers, but he always had a problem with the whole idea of eternal damnation. Smith believes in religious tolerance and mutual respect as much as he believes in God. And he had always struggled to reconcile that belief with the idea of sinners and nonbelievers burning in hell for all eternity.

  Huston Smith (Photo by Anne Hamersky.)

  For much of his life, Huston fought that monstrous doctrine. Then, one day in 1964, he found himself in the foothills of the Himalayas. He was on sabbatical from the university and off interviewing a number of gurus, trying to deepen his knowledge of the religions of India. That’s when Huston stumbled across a mysterious figure that would help him gain new understanding of his own Chris tian faith. His name was Father Lazarus, and he was a missionary with the Eastern Orthodox Church. He appeared one day in the doorway of a bungalow in the Himalayas, tall, dressed in white, and sporting a full beard. He’d spent the last twenty years in India.

  Huston and Father Lazarus spent a week tramping around the Himalayan foothills, talking nonstop about the church, the Bible, and other matters of faith. Huston shared his revulsion with the doctrine of eternal damnation, and the priest suggested that he take another look at a passage in Second Corinthians, where Saint Paul tells the story of a man caught up in the third heaven. What struck Father Lazarus about the story is the way Paul repeats a mysterious aspect of the man’s story. “Whether in the body or out of it,” Paul says, “I do not know.” The great apostle goes on to explain that, in heaven, the man in question “heard things that were not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” Father Lazarus was convinced that the secret of which Paul spoke is that there is a third heaven in which everyone is saved.

  That conversation stuck with Huston Smith, and helped him come to terms with his own passing. “After I shed my body, I will continue to be conscious of the life I have lived and the people who remain on earth. Sooner or later, however, there will come a time when no one alive will have heard of Huston Smith, let alone have known him, whereupon there ceases to be any point in my hanging around.” During his life Huston came to believe that people turn to religion the way sunflowers bend in the direction of the light. We reach for God “in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air.” Someday, Huston believes, he will turn his back on planet earth and set his gaze upon the beatific vision. Mystic by temperament, if not attainment, Huston will enjoy that sunset. Toward the end, he expects to “oscillate back and forth between enjoying the sunset and enjoying Huston-Smith-enjoying-the-sunset.”

  In the end, Huston expects to find the uncompromised sunset more absorbing. “The string will have been cut,” he says. “The bird will be free.”

  Conclusion

  Healer, Teacher, Trickster, Seeker

  Fourteen years before Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were kicked out of Harvard, another pair of Boston drug researchers conducted their own experiments on a group of undergraduate students. History has all but forgotten Dr. Max Rinkel and Dr. Robert Hyde. But their story is worth telling, if only because it provides a larger context to understand the events of this book.

  Rinkel and Hyde were using a new drug called LSD-25, which was many times stronger than the magic mushroom pills later employed by the Harvard Psilocybin Project. But the most important difference between these two research projects was the motivation behind the experiments. Both projects were playing with the minds of young Harvard students, but they came at their work with very different expectations. Leary and Alpert hoped to show that their subjects could experience joyous moments of mystical insight. Rinkel and Hyde were trying to discover how LSD could drive their subjects crazy, how it could provoke a “transitory psychotic disturbance.”

  Is this simply two ways of describing the same thing? Perhaps. But the intent of the researcher is important. And that is especially true for psychedelic researchers, whose expectations and intent almost certainly influence the outcome of their experiments.

  Historians of the psychedelic era tell us that the first LSD trip in North America was most likely the initial trip taken by Dr. Robert Hyde. It happened sometime in early 1949, just six years after the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the powerful effects triggered by LSD. Rinkel and Hyde conducted their experiments on about a hundred students at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a mental-health clinic affiliated with Harvard University. They reported their findings at the May 1950 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Yes, they concluded, LSD could easily be used to provoke temporary psychosis.

  One would think that would have been the end of their research. After all, who would want to intentionally drive research subjects crazy? What’s the social benefit behind such a twisted research agenda?

  It would be decades before we would learn the answer to those questions. The explanation would come only when it was revealed that Rinkel and Hyde’s research was secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Their experiments were part of a vast government program in the 1950s to see if LSD could be used for military purposes as a chemical warfare agent. Perhaps it could be sprayed on enemy troops—a powerful weapon of mass distraction. Maybe it could be employed as a truth serum for interrogating prisoners of war. Then there was the idea that enemy soldiers could be drugged, hypnotized, and programmed to go back behind enemy lines and sabotage their comrades in arms.

  Philip Slater, one of the Harvard graduate students who administered LSD under the supervision of Dr. Hyde, had no idea that two CIA front groups were funding their research. Slater was twenty-five years old when he signed on to assist Robert Hyde, but he didn’t find out about the CIA connections until sometime in the 1980s, when Slater was in his sixties. Slater worked on the project from 1952 to 1954. He estimates that about half of the subjects were undergraduates. He doesn’t recall exactly what the students were told they would be given, but he believes they knew it would somehow affect their mental processes. At the time, the word psychedelic had not been coined, and the Cambridge researchers classified LSD as a “psychotomimetic” drug, meaning that it mimicked psychosis. Their job was to find out exactly what kind of psychosis the drug induced. Student volunteers were dosed individually and in groups. About three hours after they took the drug, when they were at the peak of their experience, they would be sent down to the hospital’s admitting psychiatrist for diagnosis. Such categories as schizophrenic, paranoid, and manic-depressive were used to describe their condition.

  Not surprisingly, some of the subjects were deeply disturbed by all this. “We lost a couple,” Slater recalled. “One had to be hospitalized. Another went out in the street to see if cars were real. That really scared us.”

  Hardly anyone had heard of LSD in the early 1950s. Aldous Huxley had yet to take his first mescaline trip and write The Doors of Perception. R. Gordon Wasson had not yet returned from Mexico to sing the praises of magic mushrooms in the pages of Life magazine. If Slater, Rinkel, and Hyde had any preconceptions about LSD—ideas that would affect the actual experience of taking the drug—their expectations were that their subjects would go through a period of temporary psychosis.

  Slater initially saw LSD as a test of his sanity, so when he resisted the experience, he found that it produced relatively mild effects. There were no hallucinations. But then he and other friends started sneaking doses out of the hospital. They began taking the drug in less formal settings. They began to see something else. “All you had to do was walk off and look at a plant and you’d start having all these visual changes,” he said
. “It definitely felt like we were expanding our consciousness. From that moment, we saw the world differently than people who had not had the experience.”

  Like Timothy Leary, Slater couldn’t take the academic world all that seriously after his psychedelic experience. He taught sociology at Harvard and Brandeis. He played the game for fifteen years. He went out to the West Coast for a teaching job at the newly established University of California at Santa Cruz, but he knew that his taking the post was just an excuse to get away and change his life. Slater taught at Santa Cruz for only a couple of years. Like Leary, he’d seen the absurdity of academic pretension. Then, in 1971, his book The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point became a surprise bestseller.

  Decades later, I made an appointment to meet Phil Slater at a coffee house in Santa Cruz. I was sitting outside when a guy pulled up on a bicycle. Could that be him?

  Slater had to be well into his eighties. This trim man with a full head of gray hair looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. It was Slater. At the time, I was still interviewing people for this book, and just starting to figure out what it all might mean. Something told me this psychedelic pioneer, this rebel sociologist, could point me in the right direction.

  “What Leary did more than anything else was activate conservative anxiety in America,” Slater said. “The way he phrased the rejection of the status quo fit the hippies and the political left, and he did it in a way that scared people hugely. While all the hippies and feminists and the radicals and the civil rights people argued about which was the most important way to go, the only people who really understood that it was all one thing was the right wing.”

  That’s most certainly true. Timothy Leary helped provoke the “war on drugs” and Richard Nixon’s larger campaign against the sixties counterculture and the New Left. He was also a factor in the rise of Ronald Reagan and the conservative backlash of the 1980s. After all, Timothy Leary was the acid trickster, the joker who danced around Reagan’s earlier campaign to become governor of California. But Leary did something else. There was more to all this than simply the backlash against it.

  “Leary was the mouth,” Slater said. “He gave voice to something people were feeling privately. ‘Oh, this is not just me. This is not just my experience. This is reality. This is essential reality.’”

  There’s the key, the Rosetta stone that brings together the work of the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Andrew Weil, and Huston Smith did nothing less than inspire a generation of Americans to redefine the nature of reality. People who have taken LSD or other psychedelic drugs see the world differently than those who have not. But the story does not stop there. The psychedelic experience is a powerful experience, but it does not end with the experience. What happens next? How do we live our lives? What happens after the ecstasy? We see the world in a different way, but what do we do with that realization?

  None of the men of the Harvard Psychedelic Club officially fall into that demographic leviathan known as “the baby boomers,” but the generation born in the aftermath of World War II was their primary audience. Many of these kids were Spock babies, so-called because they were raised by parents taking the advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock, the influential American pediatrician. His main message was that children need to think that anything is possible. Those of us boomers who grew into counterculturists or revolutionaries tried to live out that prescription, and many of us turned for a time to psychedelic drugs to broaden our vision of what was possible. We did not always live out our visions, but at least we sought them out. Perhaps the historical importance of Leary, Alpert, Weil, and Smith is not so much any particular vision, but the very process of envisioning. For a moment in time, we had the experience of expanding our minds, and one of the side effects of that condition is envisioning an alternative way to live.

  Leary was The Trickster; his rebel spirit provided the signal to those of us who chose to listen. It was time to move beyond the limited vision of the 1950s, time to search for something new, even if we weren’t sure what it was. Alpert was The Seeker. He took the search to the Far East and brought it back for those of us who couldn’t go there in body but longed to be there in spirit. Smith was The Teacher, continuing the journey to all the religions of the world, showing us that in the most basic way, the spirit remains the same. He moved us beyond the drug experience into a deeper understanding of the mystical experience as something that should bring us together, not drive us apart. In the end, Weil became The Healer. He worked to bring the psychedelic vision down to earth, to more fully understand the connection between the body and the mind and, through that understanding, change the way we look at sickness and disease, health and well-being.

  That’s all true, but there’s another side to the story of the psychedelic sixties. We shouldn’t get too swept away in all the oneness and the wonder and the healing. Let’s not forget the many lives that were lost along the way. Many of us took the potion but never found the cure. We see those damaged children of the sixties in the life of Hunter Thompson, the gonzo journalist who consumed at least as much LSD as Timothy Leary. Hunter never seemed to get beyond the bemused cynicism that limited so many of us. “What Leary took down with him,” Hunter wrote, “was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create—a generation of permanent cripples and failed seekers who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture, the desperate assumption that somebody or at least some force was tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”

  There’s some hard truth in Hunter’s words, but they come from a tortured soul who blew his mind out with drugs before blowing his brains out with a handgun. Hunter was right, up to a point. Many people were crippled by the acid culture, but many more were not. It’s easy to parody the spiritual seekers who flocked to India in the 1960s and 1970s, but many of them returned with the central truth that helped them live better lives.

  Many of us danced with the angels of the drug culture, only to be brought down by the demon of addiction. There was a serious problem of drug abuse in this country in the 1960s and the 1970s. There was also a serious problem of drug abuse in this country in the 1950s and the 1980s, especially if one includes alcoholic beverages in the category of “recreational drugs.” The only thing that changes is which drugs are licit and which drugs are illicit, which ones doctors prescribe, which ones are sold at your local supermarket, and which ones are peddled on the street.

  If we can believe the various surveys of drug use in America, the percentage of young people taking LSD increased until the mid-1970s. Those numbers declined in the 1980s, but were back to 1975 levels by the mid-1990s. Then LSD use sharply declined in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Experts disagree over the reasons behind the sudden drop-off in recent years, but it appears to have been caused by an interruption in the supply of ingredients needed to produce LSD, along with the rise of other drugs, such as Ecstasy (MDMA) and salvia divinorum, a powerful psychedelic plant that was legal and easy to obtain over the Internet. Another clear trend over the last twenty years has been an increase in the recreational use and abuse of drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical companies—especially downers like OxyContin and Vicodin, and uppers like Ritalin and Adderall.

  America has been calling for temperance or declaring war on (some) drugs since 1785, when Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote an anti-liquor tract titled An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind. Over the last century, Prohibition came and went. Cocaine was touted as a wonder drug, an invigorating tonic, a relatively harmless party drug, and a poison responsible for the breakdown of the African-American communities across the nation.

  Timothy Leary did not inspire the war on drugs all by himself. Yet he was largely to blame for the crackdown on responsible psychedelic drug research in the United States. Leary rarely pops up in the headlines anymore, but he did in the spring of 2007,
when Time magazine asked the question “Was Timothy Leary Right?” The article discusses how—for the first time since Leary and Alpert were disciplined in 1963—both Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health were doing research into the therapeutic use of Ecstasy. That’s the drug that fueled all those late-night raves way back in the 1990s. Time also reports in that story that a British foundation had just gotten government approval to begin the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.

  Leary remained a dropout, but Huston Smith, Richard Alpert, and Andrew Weil each found their way back into mainstream culture and helped transform it. Weil abandoned his plans for a career in the medical establishment, but only to take a more holistic approach to health care. Smith saw the hedonism of the drug movement and the messianic complex of its leader. He cut his ties to Leary and went back to the classroom. Alpert abandoned his career as a university research psychologist and became a spiritual teacher. None of them followed Leary’s advice. They turned on, tuned in, but they did not drop out—at least not permanently.

  All four of these characters played a role in the social and spiritual changes that made the sixties such a pivotal decade in recent American history. They stirred up the water and then rode a wave of social change. The difference is that Timothy Leary never found an anchor, the stability needed to bring those changes into his life in a positive, long-lasting way. Instead of finding an anchor, Leary tried to walk on the water.