I was an impressionable college student—that is my excuse for having scribbled “Free Timothy Leary” on the cover of my Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1974. People in their late teens or early 20s think they can judge and discern wisely, but few do. The above slogan was written and spoken a lot on the UT campus at that time, so I just went along with it. Dr. Leary, I gathered, was an honorable man who had been unjustly imprisoned. The passage of time, reading and learning on my own have afforded me a somewhat broader view.
The basics: Leary, born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, got kicked out of West Point but earned a bachelor’s degree at Alabama, a master’s at Washington State and a doctorate at California before joining the Harvard faculty in 1959. A promising academic career was soon derailed when he began to proselytize and distribute drugs—most of all, LSD—to students and fellow professors. Harvard, which traditionally took care of its own, canned him. Funny, charming and charismatic, Leary spoke incessantly about psychedelic drugs and the profound changes they could bring to the individual, the country, and indeed the world. Give LSD to homeless people, and they will clean up the streets. Give it to prisoners, and the recidivism rate will plummet. Give it to political leaders, and war will disappear. So he claimed.
By 1965, Leary was one of the most prominent figures in the burgeoning American youth counterculture. The pied piper of LSD, he was loathed by millions of parents for urging their kids to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” (Leary, who had an uncanny ability to re-invent himself, later insisted he never told anybody to take drugs and quit school.) The U.S. government started a widespread suppression campaign against every variety of subversive, and Leary was surely one. Busted twice for small amounts of drugs, he was given a long sentence but escaped and went into exile. During one period, he was subject to the tender mercies of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers in Algeria. The CIA nabbed him, brought him back and he again called prison home for a couple of years. Leary got out, partly, due to squealing—in other words, ratting on others. This, according to the inmate ethos, is a very bad thing to do. The political left, ostensibly in partnership with the hippies who revered Leary, was outraged.
Tim Leary abjured the Christian faith in which he was raised, later dabbling in Buddhism, Hinduism and an obsession with our supposed interplanetary neighbors. Once, while in a squeeze in the Middle East, he offered to convert to Mohammedanism.
I really do not mean to besmirch Leary’s character, but what about his talk of drugs’ power to enlighten and liberate? He took hundreds of LSD trips, ate peyote and so-called sacred mushrooms, snorted cocaine, inhaled nitrous oxide, smoked hashish and marijuana, and injected heroin. As if that were not enough, Leary was a boozehound. The ingestion of all these substances failed to make him angelic or even more highly evolved. On the contrary, he was quite human. He had five wives, the first of whom committed suicide. He was a lousy father; his daughter also snuffed it, and his son wanted little to do with him. I look at his life and wonder whether he ever did anything of service. Who did he help or support? Leary was most of all a showman, and he chafed whenever he was not at the center of attention. He savored fame and notoriety.
Of his numerous books, I read two—Confessions of a Hope Fiend and The Politics of Ecstasy. The latter was important to me because I heavily underlined and annotated it, and had him sign it when he visited Austin in 1982. Leary died 14 years later, still dropping acid, still hanging out with young women, still espousing wild ideas and theories.
I would submit that Leary might have done better by paying attention to his family, eating a healthy diet, exercising once in a while and staying at Harvard, which is the pinnacle of success for most American college professors. All the drugging availed him little. To put it bluntly, Leary just liked getting stoned! This reminds me of the words of a recovering alcoholic I used to know by the name of Jim. “What,” he asked rhetorically, “is wrong with sobriety? It's really not so bad."
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