John Higgs - I Have America Surrounded

By now, the psychedelic revolution was firmly under way. The publicity Tim received from IF-IF and his Harvard dismissal had created snowballing interest in, and awareness of, the psychedelic experience. It was spreading by word of mouth through colleges and communities, and underground chemists were turning out home-made LSD in quantities of at first thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and soon millions of individual doses. It was global in nature, and in terms of its scale, it was a movement unprecedented in history. Never before had so many people undergone such a radical change in consciousness at the same time. Putting an accurate figure on its size is never going to be possible but, based on the number of LSD doses produced according to the government’s drug agency, a commonly quoted statistic is that seven million Americans took the drug during this period. In the press and on the streets, Tim was the undisputed figurehead of the entire movement. Yet what was happening, and what Tim believed was happening, were two subtly different things.

Tim saw the LSD movement as a revolution that was entirely spiritual in nature, for he knew how LSD produced religious rapture and ecstasy in himself. By now he had discarded his old academic identity and saw himself as a guru. He wrote an autobiographical account of his discovery of psychedelics which he called High Priest. It seemed to be a fitting title, for hadn’t his mother wanted him to become a priest? Those who read Leary or Huxley soon came away with the impression that the drug was nothing less than a holy sacrament. Many people who took LSD came to view Leary as a saint, a holy man, or a messenger from God. Indeed, there were plenty who considered him to be God incarnate. There were even satanists at the time who took to inverting images of Leary in black magic rituals.

There seemed little reason for Tim to doubt his identification of LSD with a religious sacrament. As well as his own experience and that of his colleagues, hadn’t they proved that the drug produced genuine Gnostic revelations in the Harvard ‘Good Friday’ experiment? The results of that and similar experiments had certainly been impressive, with up to 90 per cent of volunteers reporting a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug in a religious setting. But 90 per cent is not 100 per cent, and now that the drug was out on the streets there were few who went to the bother of arranging a religious set and setting. Tim had been a psychologist, not a sociologist, and his viewpoint was geared to an individual rather than society as a whole. He had seen some bad trips, but he had always been able to analyse what happened and identify fault with the guide, or the environment, or the individual’s mental baggage. There was no reason why, with work, these faults could not be worked on and the individual could not experience a beneficial trip. This approach is fine when working with individuals, but starts to fall down when the number of trippers increases exponentially. By the time that millions of people are experimenting with the drug, that minority of individual failures quickly becomes a significant social statistic.

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