Retrospective: LSD and Dr. Tim

LSD
TIME Magazine
Mar. 29, 1963

For a couple of freewheeling years, two young Harvard psychologists have carried on wide-ranging experiments with mind-altering drugs. At the university's Center for Research in Personality, they sent their graduate-student subjects floating off into other-worldly visions of new and fantastic forms of "reality" and a new meaning of life. Now the cosmic ball is over. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, both Ph.D.s, are being dropped from the Harvard faculty because university authorities agree with the medical profession that the drugs they used are too dangerous for campus experiments. But the two psychologists are acting blithely unconcerned.

In Boston's newest medical building on Emerson Place last week, they were settling into plush offices with the ostentatious title "International Federation for Internal Freedom'' on the door. They sounded as euphoric as any of their experimental subjects still under the influence of psilocybin, their favorite "consciousness-expanding" drug. Said Alpert, who has taken the drug himself 50 times: "Two years ago, dismissal from Harvard would have frightened me very much. But now, with deeper, intuitive understanding of myself, I'm perfectly comfortable." Said Leary: "This is much more important than Harvard."

Potential Hazards. "Our research has almost limitless possibilities for the expansion of the human mind." say Leary and Alpert, and they plan to pursue that expansion through their federation as long as their supplies of psilocybin hold out. Before Harvard cracked down, they had already given 3,500 doses of the drug to 400 subjects, mostly graduate students in psychology and theology, plus a smattering of M.D.s, artists, and inmates of a state prison.

The controversy that has flared over the Leary-Alpert work and similar studies at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, Calif., is largely a result of the extraordinary potency of the drugs. Psychiatrists, who have been using them for a dozen years and are fully aware of their hazards, call them hallucinogens (giving rise to hallucinations) or psychotomimetic drugs (mimicking the psychoses, the most crippling of mental illnesses). There are three in wide use.

? MESCALINE, the oldest, is extracted from the tops, or buttons, of peyote, a cactus common in the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico. The buttons are used as a communion host by the Native American

Church, which claims 200,000 Indian adherents. They are taken for kicks by beatniks and hipsters, from San Diego to Greenwich Village, whenever they are available. The effect on the user is a widescreen, three-dimensional vision, usually in Technicolor, with the dimensions of time and space distorted.

? LSD-25 (short for D-lysergic acid diethylamide), by far the most potent, is a chemical relative of the ergot drugs, synthesized in 1943 by Swiss Chemist Albert Hofmann. As Discoverer Hofmann found, and countless psychiatrists have since confirmed, a dose of LSD-25 can be so small as to be almost invisible and still destroy a man's mental equilibrium, at least temporarily. As little as four-millionths of an ounce is sometimes enough to throw an emotionally wobbly individual into a mental hospital. One victim, ill for months, was a psychologist who was trying out LSD himself.

? PSILOCYBIN, which Hofmann first extracted from Mexican mushrooms and then synthesized in 1958, has much the same effect as the other two. It apparently falls somewhere between mescaline and LSD in potency.


Unqualified Buddies. Just who is entitled to use the drugs has long been a difficult legal question. They are not narcotics. The Food and Drug Administration has authority over the manufacture and distribution of LSD and psilocybin, which it has cleared for investigational use only. These two drugs are produced only by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals of Basel, with U.S. offices in New Jersey. Sandoz has supplied them to dozens of investigators, mostly psychiatrists, and to clinical psychologists working closely with psychiatrists. But some imported supplies of all three drugs, and especially LSD, have appeared on the black market. A competent organic chemist, with the proper raw materials and the know-how spelled out in patents, could make LSD in his own lab.

By last fall, it became clear that some psychiatrists and some investigators who were supposed to be experimenting only with animals were slipping LSD to unqualified buddies, who were using the drug for kicks. In Los Angeles, beatniks and assorted addicts lapped the stuff up, buying (for $1 apiece) lumps of sugar in which a drop of the potent raw material had been absorbed. Leary and Alpert, in their Harvard days, got a supply of psilocybin from Sandoz. Then, under last October's amendments to the Food and Drug Act, came stricter control. Sandoz, in an earnest effort to keep the drugs out of unlawful channels, promptly cut down its clientele to animal experimenters and scientists who are getting federal or state grants for research with human subjects.

Kaleidoscopic Future. According to some psychiatrists, all three drugs are useful, but only if they are given in small doses under the strictest supervision. Then the drugs sometimes speed up psychotherapy by increasing insight, and LSD has been acclaimed as a trigger mechanism that enables many alcoholics to face the emotional bases of their addiction.

But psychiatrists and other physicians in general are solidly arrayed against non-medical application of such potent drugs. They report many cases of mental illness precipitated by their unwise, unprofessional use. Clinical psychologists, who are on the borderline of qualification to use the drugs, are themselves divided. The Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists has gone on record resolving that "no psychologist shall collaborate with a physician in the use of any experimental drug, such as LSD, except for research purposes in a hospital or university setting."

To Leary and Alpert, though, the controversy represents a power struggle over the control of human consciousness. They accuse psychiatrists of being behind the times and interested only in mental illness. (But I.F.I.F. has a medical director, Dr. W. Madison Presnell, a qualified psychiatrist, who now supervises the giving of all drugs.) They see a kaleidoscopic future for men with expanded consciousness.

Soon Leary and Alpert plan to set up a Utopia in an old hotel in Mexico, billed as a "community of transcendental living.'' Within staid Massachusetts, they hope to have "multi-familial transcendental living" in big old houses—if they can get around current zoning regulations. They dream of perfecting an "experiential typewriter." to record the pink elephants, rampaging musical waterfalls and the other phenomena their subjects experience—"so far beyond our normal experience that they cannot be expressed in our language."

"If anybody shows us a better road to happiness," says Leary, "we'll drop our research. But we don't think they will."