Acid Dreams

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Ron Churgin writes
>...
>Hoffman's book, however, does not touch on what I think is the most
>fascinating theory about LSD.  This is the one that the CIA deliberately
>introduced it into the youth culture to neutralize it politically.

I'm afraid the CIA was never so smart.  I wandered around Harvard with Allen 
Ginsberg some years back when Leary was in jail for a miniscule amount of 
hemp found in his car.  Allen was trying to get HU academics to sign a civil 
rights petition for Leary, particularly in the psych department.  This 
produced some interesting memories of Leary, as you might imagine, and some 
hysterics as well.  George Homans went right off the edge, screaming "I'm a 
poet, too!!!" at AG, who took it all with laudable Bhuddist calm.  In fact 
AG took poet's revenge on Mr. Homans when he read Howl that evening (for the 
first time in ten years)---he worked in that particular scene and Homans' 
line as well.

Anyway, the more rational witnesses conveyed a more dependable history of 
Leary, Alpert, LSD, and Harvard which is entirely adequate to explain its 
introduction into the youth culture.  Leary was an ambitious young 
Personality Psychologist.  His disdain for the establishment came after his 
ejection.  Same for Alpert, same area, same ambition.  This initial 
congruence with the Harvard and academic establishment is important for the 
story, I think---Alpert, aka Ram Das, managed to elude the backlash, while 
Leary seems to have invited it.  I should say that my own point of view is 
basically anti-Harvard, but not necessarily pro-Leary (a "frontman for the 
Martians" as my brother used to call him).

Leary and Alpert ran a few semesters of experiments with prison inmates, 
using LSD to investigate personality modification.  At the time LSD was 
legal and available from Sandoz (around '58-'60 we're talking).  After a 
while, the stuff leaked out into the grad student population, via parties at 
TL's house, etc.  Leary was fired from Harvard in direct terms because he 
neglected to show up at a grad seminar he was offering for months, sort of 
dereliction of duty.  I can't imagine that some whiff of student involvement 
in "experimentation" didn't also add to the firing, but that was never an 
official issue.

This was sufficient, anyway, to start the wave in the Cambridge area.  The 
first non-commercial synthesis was done at Harvard, and a little later (and 
with more finesse!) at MIT, which continued to be a major source for some 
years to come.  Leary, in my view, was unfortunate in that he played the 
perfect opposite role for the Reagans and Nixons of the era, persecuted 
though he may have been.  This is mainstream cultural history (somewhat 
before my time, so I'm not special pleading) which needn't be trivialized 
via CIA plots and other conspiracies (not a flame...)