I Have America Surrounded. John Higgs

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СКАЧАТЬ a campaign. This idea appealed strongly to Leary’s ego, but he protested, and questioned whether he was already too old. Huxley replied that this might well be the case, but ultimately he was the best candidate they had.¹⁰

      Where could Leary find leading artists and opinion formers who would be prepared to take his mushroom pills? The best candidates were the leading lights of the Beat Generation, few of whom were unfamiliar with drugs and all of whom were eager for new experiences. Tim ran psychedelic sessions for well-known writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs.

      The poet Allen Ginsberg was an early convert who did much to help the Psychedelic Research Program. Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926. His father was a poet and his mother was active in the Communist Party USA. As a young boy he reported spontaneous visionary experiences, and this led to his later interest in Buddhism and mystical states. He was influenced by writers such as William Blake and William Carlos Williams, and developed a style of poetry reminiscent of the rhythms of jazz. His best-known work is Howl, which was banned for obscenity shortly after its publication in 1956. The ban caused outrage among supporters of the First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of speech, and was eventually overturned. By this time Ginsberg had become a prominent advocate of left-wing politics, and was considered to be a threat to internal security by the FBI.

      Ginsberg approached Leary after hearing about his work from a New York psychiatrist, and in December 1960 he arrived at Harvard with his partner Peter Orlovsky, eager to experience this amazing new drug. They took the drug one evening at Leary’s house and had a profound experience, during which Ginsberg prophetically realised that it was time to start ‘a peace and love movement’. He then ran naked around the house, attempted to get Khrushchev and Kennedy on the telephone, and announced to the operator that he was God. He thoughtfully spelt this out to the operator to ensure that there was no confusion.

      After the trip Ginsberg was as committed as Huxley to supporting the programme, but his advice was the opposite of Huxley’s. Drugs like this had to be wrenched away from the self-serving elites and scattered amongst the masses, he argued. Who could say that ordinary people did not have the right to experience visionary bliss, to have the veil of illusion removed and know the divine for themselves? After all, were they not Americans? Did the egalitarian foundations of their country count for nothing? It was Leary’s job, Ginsberg argued, to make sure everybody knew about what he was doing, and had access to the drugs in order to do the same themselves.

      Over the next few months, while Leary and Alpert tried to assess these two conflicting arguments, they ran psilocybin sessions for over 200 colleagues, graduate students and volunteers. Typically they would take the drug with the volunteers and reassure and calm them if necessary They would also train suitable volunteers as guides to run sessions themselves. The pair made a great team, and their enthusiasm and credentials enchanted everyone they met as they travelled the country giving seminars, workshops and lectures. All the initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but what Tim really needed was some undeniable, objective method to measure these subjective effects that he and his study were reporting. He needed hard data, a set of statistics that would withstand the peer review of the scientific community and convince even the most cynical audience that psilocybin was a breakthrough in behavioural research. He also wanted to satisfy the second part of his Existential Transaction: the concept that psychology should leave the clinics and enter real-world scenarios.

      The solution was undeniably radical. Leary and Alpert set up a programme to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. Their aim was to lower the recidivism rate, which at the time was running at 70 per cent. If less than 70 per cent of the inmates who were given psilocybin reoffended after release, Leary would be able to show that the drug was an effective tool for convict rehabilitation. But this was not a plan that was without its political risks and dangers. If one prisoner who had been given drugs by the programme killed or raped after release, the press would have a field day. Tim went to work and set about persuading the warden and psychiatrist of Concord State Prison to approve the plan. Both were receptive, and the psychiatrist was put on the Harvard payroll as a consultant. It would be his job to arrange the volunteers.

      In March 1961 Leary entered the prison, clutching a small supply of psilocybin. He was accompanied by two graduate students, Gunther Weil and Ralph Metzner,¹¹ and their aim was to spend the day tripping with six prisoners who were nearing release. The prisoners would use the drug to gain and share insights into why they had committed crime, and they had also agreed to participate in a support programme after release.

      Tim took the drug first in order to gain the inmates’ trust. When the effects kicked in, he started to feel terrible. A windowless room in the heart of a penitentiary was not a location that was conducive to a positive trip. They had brought a record player and books of classical art with them in the hope of improving their surroundings, but they could not hide the fact that the atmosphere, and the company, was oppressive. Tim was conscious of how ugly and repulsive the bank robber at his side appeared to him. Nervously, he tried to speak, and they asked each other how they felt. The drug caused Leary to respond truthfully, so he told the prisoner that he was afraid of him. The prisoner was surprised because he was also feeling afraid of Tim.

      ‘Why are you scared of me?’ the convict asked.

      ‘Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?’

      ‘I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.’ They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.¹²

      The Prisoner Rehabilitation Program continued and expanded. It was conducted in as open and public a manner as possible, and many visitors to Harvard found themselves invited to observe sessions. Word got out amongst the inmates, and the list of volunteer prisoners expanded rapidly. When the results eventually started to come in during the following year, they were astonishing. They appeared to show that recidivism amongst volunteers who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70 per cent to 10 per cent.¹³

      It was almost too good to be true. The implications were enormous, and if it continued, prison populations could be drastically reduced. But the reaction from the academic community was notably muted. Few people were comfortable with the idea of psychedelics, and results such as these forced them onto the academic agenda. Not everyone was prepared to accept this. To the uninitiated, there is something fundamentally frightening about the idea of psychedelic trips, and while the idea of the psychologist taking the drug may have been intellectually acceptable in theory, in practice it seemed wholly irresponsible. Tim had already been gaining political enemies on campus because his work had been attracting more than its fair share of the brightest graduate students. Now he was reporting results that trod on a lot of toes.

      It was never claimed that the psilocybin in itself was a ‘cure’. It was part of a system of support and therapy. As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin, the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life’s problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions. The prison programme involved an extensive support system to help the patients after release in order to help them restructure their lives following the insights of the mushroom sessions. The team helped the ex-inmates to find jobs, worked with their parole offices, and Tim even let prisoners stay at his home while they were being housed. Critics claimed that the success of the experiment was due to the extra support and not the drug. A follow-up study 20 years later found that the recidivism decline had not been significant after all, and that the original study used misleading figures in the base-rate comparison.¹⁴ It did find, however, that there was other evidence for personality change. СКАЧАТЬ