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The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America
Don Lattin
By
Published: Jun 12, 2012
Category:
Non Fiction
Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan is an award-winning actor, singer and playwright. He has recently completed a memoir about his adventures, internal and otherwise.
California criminalized LSD possession in October, 1966. Federal law banned it two years later. Don Lattin’s crisp and colorful volume tells of four men whose lives are woven into the back story of why this drug, the most powerful chemical ever synthesized, became infamous enough to send legislators on both coasts into tizzies of prohibition. As his subtitle puts it, “How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.”
LSD was actually a latecomer to the study that Leary and Richard Alpert (as Ram Dass was then called) undertook within the Harvard Psychology Department in the fall of 1960. In that year, they were seeking to understand the effects of psilocybin, the wow component of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis. Andrew Weil was an entering freshman (this was decades before his beaming bearded familiarity on book jackets, Time covers, and PBS). Smith, an acclaimed authority on world religions then teaching at MIT, invited his friend Aldous Huxley to come and lecture. Huxley, whose book about mescaline Smith admired, reciprocated by introducing him to “this interesting chap over at Harvard, whose name is Leary.” All of them were curious about psilocybin’s similarities to a psychoactive drug called lysergic acid diethylamide, manufactured by a Swiss chemical company and far easier to obtain than Mexican mushrooms.
Thus was an epoch born. And a revolution aborted.
Lattin skillfully pulls together all the strands of place, time and event in a complicated story that, despite its pop culture drama, ultimately hinges on profound philosophic questions. What defines human nature? What is consciousness? What is enlightenment? Is the universe purposeful, random, or both? What do we make of the fact that, in addition to our ordinary waking reality, there are unforeseen levels of awareness, both blissful and terrifying, that challenge our standard interpretations of experience? Questions like these, and the chemicals that inspired them, might have been welcomed instead of suppressed, if only the four horsemen of the Psychedelic Club had acted differently. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
But each of these pioneers had limitations that ricocheted off the others. And the consequences of those limitations, Lattin tells us, still remain unresolved not only among the three who survive (Timothy Leary died in 1996) but within the wider culture. If Leary and Alpert had been more prudent with the Harvard administration, or more accepting of Weil, or Smith more accepting of Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead, would we be living in a very different America?
At least as far back as Thoreau and Whitman, our most visionary thinkers have sought to breach the wall of American puritanism, but no Pied Piper ever swayed as much of a whole generation as Timothy Leary, who emerges as the raffish ringleader of the book. A rebel long before ingesting his first mind-blowing dose, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty on the strength of youthful academic writing that questioned the power imbalance of conventional therapist-patient roles. Eating mushrooms in the summer of 1960 alerted his mind to the pervasive restrictions that social role-playing imposed all across American culture. Half a decade later, as war protest and rock music were shattering the assumptions of young Baby Boomers, Leary presented himself as chief spokesman for a radical new consciousness. Lattin depicts him with such flair and vividness that it sometimes seems that this irresistible, indefatigable, God-intoxicated con man is in the room with you.
Labeled “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon himself, Timothy Leary went to prison, escaped, fled the country, was captured and imprisoned again. After his relationship with Leary fell apart, Alpert sought spiritual redemption and found it with an Indian guru, returning with a devotional name and, as Ram Dass, publishing Be Here Now, the 1971 bible of New Age spirituality and questing hippiedom. Andrew Weil finished his medical studies at Harvard, pursued further mind-expansion in the Amazon jungle, and book by book built the reputation as alternative health guru he enjoys today. Huston Smith, now in his nineties, continued to travel the globe, documenting his meetings with the great and obscure from the Dalai Lama to Australian aborigines, always in search of the link that unifies humanity’s divergent religious traditions, always inquiring, learning, celebrating.
For those who participated and those born too late, the lapse of interest in psychedelic lore may be regrettable, but Lattin’s book isn’t regretful. His admiration for his heroes, despite their evident failings, keeps the tone light and playful. He respects his subjects, and writes of the mystical experience without the condescension that plagues so much neo-atheist cant, never forgetting that the legacy of mind-expansion is joy. It’s an attitude befitting a parallel universe where the psychedelic revolution actually succeeded. We may discover it yet.
