LEARY, Timothy Francis

(b. 22 October 1920 in Spring-field, Massachusetts; d. 31 May 1996 in Beverly Hills, California), Harvard psychology professor whose experiments with psychedelic drugs led him to proclaim them as a panacea.

Leary was the only child of U.S. Army Captain Timothy Leary, a dentist, and Abigail Ferris, a teacher. He attended Holy Cross from 1938 to 1939, then the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1940 to 1941, leaving both institutions before graduating because of discipline problems. Leary graduated from the University of Alabama with a B.A. in 1943. After serving in the U.S. Army as a psychologist in the Medical Corps, he obtained a doctorate in psychology in 1950 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor from 1950 to 1955. After a stint as director of psychiatric research for the Kaiser Foundation from 1955 to 1958, during which he devised a personality evaluation that was used by many organizations, in 1959 Leary became a lecturer at Harvard University's Center for Personality Research. He married Marianne Busch, a college instructor, in 1944. The couple had a daughter and a son; Marianne died in 1955. Leary would remarry several times, including to one woman twice (actress Rosemary Woodruff, whom he wed in 1967 and 1995).

Leary wanted to apply scientific paradigms to the study of psychology, including the use of chemicals to change consciousness. In 1960, while in Mexico, Leary tried psilocybe mushrooms, undergoing a profound and life-changing experience. He returned to Harvard and, with associates Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner, began to experiment with psilocybin (a synthetic version of the mushroom) and the similar drug mescaline. In 1961 he began experimenting with LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide). Using student and prisoner volunteers, Leary found LSD useful in the treatment of alcoholism and schizophrenia.

Harvard was displeased with the controversy over these experiments, and it dismissed Leary and Alpert in 1963. After a brief attempt to settle in Mexico, from which the government expelled them, they went on to found the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which operated in Millbrook, New York. Here Leary attempted to introduce the drug to other intellectual leaders, with varying results. (Allen Ginsberg was wildly enthusiastic; Arthur Koestler was not.)

Leary's enthusiasm for LSD and other psychedelics was so great that he began publicizing them. By 1963 LSD was known to avant-garde elements all over the nation's campuses and artistic communities. In a few years its recreational use would be a fad.

Leary also noticed the similarity between his experiences and the ideas of Eastern religion. In 1964 he, Alpert, and Metzner published The Psychedelic Experience, which used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a paradigm for the death and rebirth experience often associated with the use of psychedelics, and in 1965 Leary visited India and converted to Hinduism. The following year he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religious organization that would use LSD as a sacrament, just as the Native American Church used the psychedelic peyote.

By this time Leary had become a celebrity, and the controversies were swirling. Not only was LSD popular among hippies and creative artists of all sorts, but even such establishment figures as the military planner Herman Kahn and the publisher Henry Luce and his wife, the playwright and public official Clare Boothe Luce, said that the drug had expanded their minds. On the other side, activists of the political New Left charged Leary with offering a hedonistic distraction from civil rights and the Vietnam War, while more conservative sorts simply said that he was giving children drugs that would drive them crazy.

Neither of these critical views was entirely mistaken. Certainly the widespread experimentation with powerful chemicals, often contaminated by other substances, by inexperienced users was leading to some bad experiences and even long-term effects, though not as many as the media suggested. It must also be said that Leary, in the throes of enthusiasm, did not always present a consistent, reasoned position. Sometimes he seemed to be urging revolution, psychological or political; other times he seemed to be peddling a new snake oil that would provide spiritual enlightenment and more and better orgasms.

Because Leary advocated violating drug laws, attempts were made to catch him doing just that. The most famous of these, a police raid of IFIF headquarters led by G. Gordon Liddy, failed to find anything to arrest him for, but he was caught bringing a minute quantity of marijuana into the country from Mexico and sentenced to ten years in jail. That conviction was overturned, but in 1970 Leary began serving a ten-year sentence on similar charges at the state prison in San Luis Obispo, California, where, like all incoming convicts, he was asked to fill out the personality evaluation he had designed. After an escape, aided by the radical Weather Underground, he eventually was recaptured in Afghanistan and returned to California to serve out his sentence.

Paroled in 1976, Leary turned from drug advocacy to a more science-based approach to human development, which he called SMI²LE, for Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension. He welcomed the arrival of personal computers and became a software designer.

In the 1990s the mass media began treating Leary with affection, as an interesting thinker or, at worst, a lovably eccentric old uncle. Perhaps one reason for the change was the obvious fact that his well-publicized adventures in mind alteration had not left him non compos mentis.

In 1995 Leary learned that he had terminal prostate cancer and faced death as the last, greatest adventure. There was some talk of having his body, or at least his head, frozen to await improvements in medical technology, but when the cancer finally killed him in 1996, he was cremated. The next year his ashes were launched into orbit around Earth, with those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and others.

There are those who say that Leary's great mistake was to make LSD a public fad, rather than patiently introducing it through health professionals, and in his last years he came to agree with them. The harm caused by his decision included not only the destructive effects of bad trips and excessive, unsupervised use of the drug, but the loss of the healing potential Leary, Stanislav Grof, and others found in the use of LSD in controlled, therapeutic conditions. The panic of the mid-1960s led to laws forbidding even its most benign uses, laws that are still in effect today. Nevertheless, Leary opened doors, not all of which should have remained shut, and there still many who feel that their lives were enriched by the chemical he offered them.

Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks, was first published in 1983, then in a revised version, with an introduction by William S. Burroughs, in 1990. Book-length studies of the LSD movement and Leary's role in it include Michael Hollingshead, The Man Who Turned On the World (1973); Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams (1985); and Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987). An obituary by Laura Mansnerus was published on the front page of the New York Times (1 June 1996).

Arthur D. Hlavaty