I Have America Surrounded. John Higgs

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      But if Tim had failed to notice the obvious, his growing circle of ‘converts’ were not so blind. There was a core of around 40 committed trippers at this point, and they were increasingly becoming based not in the classrooms and research labs of Harvard, but in Leary’s large communal household in the middle-class Newton Center. Rumours started to abound of wild, drug-crazed orgies in the Leary house. Locals were all too aware of the influx of junkies, homosexuals, Beatniks, foreigners and perverts to their safe Massachusetts suburb. ‘LSD is so powerful,’ Tim remarked, ‘that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours.’ In situations like this the reality rarely lives up to the events that are imagined by those on the outside. In this case, however, the straight world had no reference points to allow them even to begin to grasp what was happening. Behind the doors of the Leary household a constant stream of sexual and spiritual experimentation occurred that was far wilder than they could ever have imagined.

      Although it is easy to assume otherwise, it was not just the hedonism and sexual liberation that made those early experimenters so enamoured with the drug. The main factor was intellectual, the belief that taking LSD gave them an increased awareness and understanding of the world. The drug gave insights that, although often lost after the trip was over, still affected people enough to convince them that they had become better or wiser through the experience. Such a sense of improved awareness is difficult to imagine, but it is helpful to consider the metaphor of a cup that is either half full or half empty. The idea here is that an individual decides which of these descriptions applies to his ‘take’ on life, and this indicates whether that person is optimistic or pessimistic. But to an individual who has been psychedelically informed, that concept can appear absurd because they would look at the cup and see that it is both half full and half empty. The two positions are inseparable and there is no contradiction that requires an ‘either/or’ choice. Indeed, to see the cup as either only half full or only half empty takes a lot of mental effort on the viewer’s part, as it is necessary to blind yourself to what is undeniably in front of you. After undergoing such an ‘obvious’ realisation as this, hearing anyone refer to a cup as being only half full or half empty seems somewhat blind or foolish. It was a series of insights similar to this that made those who took LSD feel that they now understood things ‘better’ than people who had not turned on. Increasingly, users of psychedelics began to feel that they had ‘outgrown’ the rest of the population. As the social critic Diana Trilling remarked, ‘I have observed a curious transformation in all the young people I know who have taken the drug; even after only one or two trips they attain a sort of suprahumanity, as if purged of mortal error.’ ³³

      The Havard faculty soon became aware that there was a growing black market in LSD amongst the students. It was spreading far beyond the limits of the research programme. Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they wanted their children to become the future leaders of American society They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.

      The inevitable confrontation came in the form of a staff meeting organised at the request of Dr Herbert Kelman, in order to air the faculty’s growing grievances and concerns. Kelman was a respected and powerful academic who had received grants from a CIA-funded organisation.³⁴ The turnout for the meeting was so great that it had to be held in an auditorium. A string of complaints against Leary and Alpert poured out, from concerns about the scientific validity of their methodology, to accusations of irresponsible experimentation, corrupting students and damaging the department. Academic journals that stated LSD was dangerous were debated, and a committee was appointed to oversee Leary’s and Alpert’s future work. An undergraduate journalist, Andrew Weil, was investigating the emerging Harvard drug underground and decided to attend this supposedly private staff meeting.³⁵ His account was printed in the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson and was picked up by the Boston Herald. It made a good story, and concern about this ‘Harvard drug cult’ reached the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an organisation that had assisted the CIA in its drugs research.

      Shortly afterwards the axe began to fall on American LSD research. The FDA declared that LSD was dangerous, and as such should only be administered by a trained medical physician. Leary was ordered to hand over his supply. From that point on, anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to obtain permission from the FDA. Moreover, it was designated an ‘experimental drug’ and hence could only be used for research, not for general psychiatric practice. The LSD therapy community blamed Leary for the ban on their previously legitimate work, but it seems more likely that he was the excuse rather than the cause of this change in government policy. The FDA would not have made such a decision against the wishes of the CIA.³⁶ By this point the Agency had been studying the drug for over a decade and no longer considered it reliably controllable. They had successfully deployed it in operations, but their focus was increasingly moving to a new drug, quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. BZ would knock people to the ground, and they wouldn’t move for three days. It was cheaper to produce, more reliable and, unlike LSD, could even be administered in the form of gas on a battlefield. As far as the CIA were concerned, BZ was a much better weapon than LSD.

      Leary and Alpert knew that their days at Harvard were numbered, but they already had bigger plans. They started a non-profit psychedelic organisation that they hoped could expand to have bases in cities around the world. They called it IF-IF, the International Federation for Internal Freedom. It would perform research and publish a scholarly journal, but, more importantly, it would train guides who could go forth and teach others how to use the drug safely. The CIA, of course, found this very interesting. They issued a secret memo that instructed any CIA personnel involved in psychological and drug research to report all contacts with Leary, Alpert or any of their IF-IF associates.³⁷

      The idea behind IF-IF was that anyone could approach them and request a guided LSD trip, and provided they met certain standards of mental health and suitability, they would receive one. In this way, the psychedelic experience would spread far wider than if Leary and Alpert remained working solely in academia. They set up the organisation knowing that there was growing awareness of their work from the press and public, but they were unprepared for the scale of interest that followed. IF-IFs first public operation would be a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico. Five thousand applications poured in for the 50 available places.

      It was while Tim was in Mexico making arrangements that he heard he had been sacked from Harvard. The official reason was that he had left classes without permission.³⁸ He was the first Harvard Faculty member to be dismissed since the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838, who had scandalised the Harvard Divinity School with a lecture in which he urged his audience to reject organised Christianity and find God inside themselves. A month after Tim’s dismissal, Alpert was sacked for giving LSD to an undergraduate. Previously, in November 1961, he had given a written promise to the faculty that no undergraduate would receive the drug. It probably did not help matters that Richard was starting a homosexual relationship with the student in question. It certainly did not help that, according to Jack Leary, the student’s father was on the Harvard Board of Trustees and that the student went home and said: ‘Fuck you, Dad!…I’m taking acid and sleeping with a professor!’³⁹ A deluge of press interest followed the sackings. The first Leary’s mother would know about it was when she saw it in the paper. This would be one scandal for which she’d never forgive him.

      ‘It tears out my heart to see what happened to them,’ remarked Professor McClelland. ‘They started out as good, sound scientists. СКАЧАТЬ