John Higgs - I Have America Surrounded

The Havard faculty soon became aware that there was a growing black market in LSD amongst the students. It was spreading far beyond the limits of the research programme. Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they wanted their children to become the future leaders of American society They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.

The inevitable confrontation came in the form of a staff meeting organised at the request of Dr Herbert Kelman, in order to air the faculty’s growing grievances and concerns. Kelman was a respected and powerful academic who had received grants from a CIA-funded organisation. 34 The turnout for the meeting was so great that it had to be held in an auditorium. A string of complaints against Leary and Alpert poured out, from concerns about the scientific validity of their methodology, to accusations of irresponsible experimentation, corrupting students and damaging the department. Academic journals that stated LSD was dangerous were debated, and a committee was appointed to oversee Leary’s and Alpert’s future work. An undergraduate journalist, Andrew Weil, was investigating the emerging Harvard drug underground and decided to attend this supposedly private staff meeting. 35 His account was printed in the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson and was picked up by the Boston Herald. It made a good story, and concern about this ‘Harvard drug cult’ reached the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an organisation that had assisted the CIA in its drugs research.

Shortly afterwards the axe began to fall on American LSD research. The FDA declared that LSD was dangerous, and as such should only be administered by a trained medical physician. Leary was ordered to hand over his supply. From that point on, anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to obtain permission from the FDA. Moreover, it was designated an ‘experimental drug’ and hence could only be used for research, not for general psychiatric practice. The LSD therapy community blamed Leary for the ban on their previously legitimate work, but it seems more likely that he was the excuse rather than the cause of this change in government policy. The FDA would not have made such a decision against the wishes of the CIA. 36 By this point the Agency had been studying the drug for over a decade and no longer considered it reliably controllable. They had successfully deployed it in operations, but their focus was increasingly moving to a new drug, quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. BZ would knock people to the ground, and they wouldn’t move for three days. It was cheaper to produce, more reliable and, unlike LSD, could even be administered in the form of gas on a battlefield. As far as the CIA were concerned, BZ was a much better weapon than LSD.

Leary and Alpert knew that their days at Harvard were numbered, but they already had bigger plans. They started a non-profit psychedelic organisation that they hoped could expand to have bases in cities around the world. They called it IF-IF, the International Federation for Internal Freedom. It would perform research and publish a scholarly journal, but, more importantly, it would train guides who could go forth and teach others how to use the drug safely. The CIA, of course, found this very interesting. They issued a secret memo that instructed any CIA personnel involved in psychological and drug research to report all contacts with Leary, Alpert or any of their IF-IF associates. 37

The idea behind IF-IF was that anyone could approach them and request a guided LSD trip, and provided they met certain standards of mental health and suitability, they would receive one. In this way, the psychedelic experience would spread far wider than if Leary and Alpert remained working solely in academia. They set up the organisation knowing that there was growing awareness of their work from the press and public, but they were unprepared for the scale of interest that followed. IF-IFs first public operation would be a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico. Five thousand applications poured in for the 50 available places.

It was while Tim was in Mexico making arrangements that he heard he had been sacked from Harvard. The official reason was that he had left classes without permission. 38 He was the first Harvard Faculty member to be dismissed since the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838, who had scandalised the Harvard Divinity School with a lecture in which he urged his audience to reject organised Christianity and find God inside themselves. A month after Tim’s dismissal, Alpert was sacked for giving LSD to an undergraduate. Previously, in November 1961, he had given a written promise to the faculty that no undergraduate would receive the drug. It probably did not help matters that Richard was starting a homosexual relationship with the student in question. It certainly did not help that, according to Jack Leary, the student’s father was on the Harvard Board of Trustees and that the student went home and said: ‘Fuck you, Dad!…I’m taking acid and sleeping with a professor!’ 39 A deluge of press interest followed the sackings. The first Leary’s mother would know about it was when she saw it in the paper. This would be one scandal for which she’d never forgive him.

‘It tears out my heart to see what happened to them,’ remarked Professor McClelland. ‘They started out as good, sound scientists. Now they’ve become cultists.’ 40

In the events that followed, Leary might have behaved differently if the influence of Aldous Huxley had been stronger. But Huxley died of throat cancer on 22 November 1963, five hours after the shooting of President Kennedy.

Huxley had known he was dying when he was writing his final major novel, Island (1962), which was in many ways a more ambitious and remarkable work than Brave New World (1932). In the latter he had depicted a frighteningly real dystopia, but in his later years, following his psychedelic experiments, he realised that a far greater achievement would be to disregard the cynicism and attempt to design a genuine utopia. He wrote a pivotal death scene, in which the grandmother was guided through a psychedelic trip in order to ease her passing, as a model for his own departure. 41 He had confided this to Leary a few weeks earlier, during Tim’s last visit. His final words to him were, ‘Be gentle with them, Timothy They want to be free, but they don’t know how. Teach them. Reassure them.’ 42 But with Huxley’s presence waning, his influence on Tim would no longer be able to counteract that of Ginsberg. Tim would eventually dedicate himself to the widespread, egalitarian advocacy amongst the young against which Huxley had strongly argued.

During the hour of Kennedy’s assassination, too ill to speak, Huxley wrote ‘LSD—Try it. Intermuscular, 100mm’ on his writing tablet. 43 His doctor reluctantly consented, and his wife Laura administered the injection herself. She sat and read to him from an advance copy of The Psychedelic Experience , a reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Leary, Metzner and Alpert had written, at Huxley’s suggestion, to guide LSD trips. The injection of LSD produced a noticeably beneficial effect in the dying man. Huxley became relaxed, comfortable and at peace. Very quietly and gently he slipped away.

Tim and Richard had run a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico the previous year, in 1962, and it had been a great success. They had rented out the neglected and decaying Hotel Catalina, which sat on the beach about a mile and a half down a dirt road from the town of Zihuatanejo, 180 miles north of Acapulco. Electricity and water supplies were erratic, but the setting was idyllic and they knew they would not be disturbed. About 35 academics, students, friends and interested parties attended, and they spent six weeks running countless LSD sessions together.