John Higgs - I Have America Surrounded

According to Huxley’s insights into how to run a positive, successful trip, the beauty of the location and the calm atmosphere were important. The key was to pay attention to what Leary called ‘set and setting’. 1 Here ‘set’ refers to the individual’s mental state, or ‘mindset’, and ‘setting’ refers to both the environment and the people present. It was important to be in a good frame of mind, not anxious or distracted by other concerns, and to be in a harmonious location with people you trusted and liked. If set and setting were good, a positive and pleasurable trip would occur. If they were lacking, however, then the horrors of a bad trip could result. LSD amplifies the surroundings and pre-existing feelings, Huxley realised, but it does not create anything that is not already present. It was the recognition of this principle that explains the different results obtained by Leary and the CIA, and why the same drug could be regarded by different researchers as causing either visionary ecstasy or profound terror. Individuals who were spiked with the drug without their knowledge, or those who were administered it in a clinical medical facility by unfamiliar doctors, were almost guaranteed to descend into nightmares.

For Leary’s party of like-minded friends, relaxing for weeks on a blissful Mexican beach, the results were about as positive as could be. The LSD sessions were joyful, and relations with the local Mexicans were good. Before they returned to America they played a baseball game against the villagers, with most of the American team still under the influence of acid. This gave them an unfair advantage, they discovered, as time kept slowing down after the baseball was pitched. They found they had all the time in the world to study the ball and line up their swings. 2 After quickly going 8–0 up, Tim instructed his team to stop scoring and let the opposition catch up in order to preserve good international relations. The game ended a draw, and ‘everybody urged us to come back next year’, Tim wrote. 3 And we planned to. Those six weeks at Zihuatanejo had given us a glimpse of Utopia.’

The following summer, however, was not a success. It started promisingly, and the guests arrived in good spirits. A 25-foot-tall wooden observation tower was built on the beach where it could be seen from every part of the complex. A relay of people would stay in the tower, tripping, for the duration of the summer camp. Being selected to be in the tower was a great honour, and there would be a ceremony whenever a new person was chosen. Ralph Metzner has since described a memorable night in the tower, ‘watching the moon rise and travel over the bay, its silvery radiance reflecting from the murmuring surf. I watched it set behind the mountains as the pink-orange light of dawn suffused the sky. Hour-long electrical storms soundlessly shattered the sky into shards of yellow, turquoise and violet.’ 4 But there were signs that such memorable experiences could not continue much longer. Tim received a telegram from Mary Pinchot Meyer in Washington warning him that his summer camp was ‘in serious jeopardy’. 5

The hotel started to attract visits from young, impoverished American travellers, people who in a few years time would be given the name ‘hippies’. They had heard about LSD and wanted to try it, but were turned away by Tim. They took to sleeping on a beach on the opposite side of the bay. Then a gruesome murder was linked by the press to their project. ‘Harvard Drug Orgy Blamed for Decomposing Body’ ran one newspaper headline, although there seemed to be no reason to connect the death to the camp. According to Tim, it had occurred in a village 100 miles away. When the police came to investigate, however, a tripping middle-aged woman, who resembled ‘the lank-haired vampire mistress from cartoonist Charles Addams’ haunted Victorian house’, jumped out at them from a doorway in a narrow corridor. She was naked except for a red and blue ink drawing of a ‘grotesque artistic parody of the crucified Christ’ on her body 6 This was not the sort of thing that went down well in Catholic Mexico.

The police informed Tim that his summer camp was being shut down. The official reason was because he was running a business on a tourist visa. His attempts to appeal against the decision failed. He was told that the President of Mexico himself was insisting that they go, for he had received calls from the American ambassador, the CIA and the Justice Department, all urging Leary’s expulsion.

If this was the case, the most likely reason for this high-level pressure was the publicity that Leary was generating. The CIA had managed to keep their work on behaviour modification relatively secret. While parts were available in academic journals, much of the rest of the work was considered to be military intelligence and should not be available to foreign states. IF-IF, however, had a press officer who naively invited the world’s press to Mexico to witness Tim’s work. Life magazine , CBS, NBC and the BBC all planned stories, and Time, Newsweek and scores of other journals and newspapers were also invited. This was Tim’s reaction to the dismissal from Harvard. As he was no longer protected by the reputation of the famous university, he needed some other form of power base to support his work. Public opinion seemed to be the best option, so he did everything he could to court the press. It made a great story too, thanks to the sacking from Harvard and the idyllic surroundings of the Mexican beach. The majority of the press coverage was negative, but the idea of the establishment stamping down on a rebel scientist who claimed to be able to create enlightenment took hold in the public imagination. Thanks to his academic background, his enthusiasm for the drug, and his willingness to talk to journalists, Tim was by now firmly established in the eyes of the press and the public as the figurehead of LSD.

While the police were shutting down the summer camp, and with the residents in the process of being deported, a few people decided to take a last acid trip. This broke the golden rule of set and setting, and the more paranoid, persecuted atmosphere helped trigger the first cases of prolonged negative effects that Leary had ever seen. One tripper came to believe that he was a gorilla. He went swinging through the trees and terrorised everyone he met. He was eventually captured by Tim and five other men, who trapped him with a rope, tarpaulin and blankets. He was given a tranquilliser and returned to some form of lucidity the next morning. Another casualty, however, went into an almost catatonic state and remained like that for many days. Tim went through this man’s wallet and found several US government identity cards that attested to high-level clearance. When the airline refused to allow him to fly back to the United States in his catatonic state, Tim sent a wire to the US Defence Department. It read, ‘Your agent Duane Marvy is in the Chapultepec Mental Hospital, Mexico City’ 7 Then Leary returned to America in order to plan his next move. His first exposure to the dangers of the drug had in no way dampened his enthusiasm for it.

By now IF-IF had a head office in a medical centre in Boston, which boasted the wonderful address of Zero Emerson Place. The first issue of their journal the Psychedelic Review 8 had been published and was a great success. It had a circulation of around 4000 copies, the majority coming from subscriptions. Tim, Richard and Ralph also completed their psychedelic reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published as The Psychedelic Experience. This was intended as a manual or a guide to navigate the realms of inner space, and emphasised the similarities between an LSD trip and the Tibetan description of the soul’s journey after death. IF-IF was clearly a productive organisation and could hardly be considered a failure, but it still had not managed to found a retreat or a centre to which people could come for a safe, guided psychedelic session.