September 19, 2017 • 51 mins
Idolized by some and reviled by others, Timothy Leary remains an icon of 1960s counterculture and psychedelic self-exploration. But who was this rebel, psychologist and celebrity? What did he reveal about LSD’s power and potential? Join Robert and Christian for a special two-part look at the man, the time and the drug he championed. Turn on, tune in, drop out...
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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y c C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow
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Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. And this week we're talking
about Timothy Leary. Now we're not just gonna talk about
Timothy Leary. We're also going to talk about science of LSD,
(01:07):
the history of LSD, the use of LSD and psilocybin
in various UH research projects. What these substances actually due
to the mind to the brain. But we're going to
use Timothy Leary as kind of, you know, sort of
a guiding principle, I guess for this episode. And if
you're if you're out there and you're thinking, well, I
love Timothy Learry, well, then strap in. If you're out
(01:29):
there and you're you're thinking yourself, well, I don't know
that I like this Timothy Leary guy, well, strap in
as well. Yeah, I think we've got something for everybody here.
We uh, we're basically sheltered during a hurricane this week,
and so Robert and I just binge read about Timothy
Leary for four days straight. We've got a lot to
share with you. My eyes are bleeding a little, but
(01:51):
I think you're going to be interested in this so
much so that we're going to do this as a
two parter. Yes, uh, now, just to refresh anybody out
there and too, and to inform from anyone who just
who doesn't know who Timothy Learry is. Well. Timothy Leary
was an American psychologist, author, and a key figure of
the nineteen sixties counterculture and psychedelics you know movement in general.
(02:12):
He lived nineteen twenty through nineteen, and he managed to
run a foul of pretty much every organization he was
a part of. Uh. He was arrested uh enough times
that he supposedly saw the inside of thirty six different prisons.
He earned the ire of many Americans, even as he
was able to submit a reputation as also kind of
(02:33):
a you know, a counterculture leader uh his and I
think the reason is because he has this message of
inner exploration of anti establishment thinking, and this this resonated
with folks and continues to resonate. His writings, his soothing,
sage like voice on numerous audio recordings, his his his
irresistible celebrity allure. It all made him just impossible to ignore,
(02:56):
love him or hate him. Plus he was not the
sort of guy to let the limelight go away new
and we'll and we'll get into all that he uh yeah,
he he clung to it, and people gravitated to him
as well. He was more than willing to rub elbows
with scientists like Carl Sagan, artists like hr and Geeger,
performers like John Lennon, uh, and you know, such luminaries
(03:19):
as Alan Ginsburg, a'l just Huxley, William Burrows, Jack Caro,
Whack and kin KESI. He even kept the company of
former enemies when it benefited, and such as Watergate Burglar
and later conservative radio talk show host G Gordon Liddy. Yeah,
so this guy has been widely influential. He was. I
(03:41):
have a derogatory saying that I say sometimes about people
like Leary, although I think Leary was doing this before
this guy. He was the Cato Kalin of his time.
Like he was famous for being famous he was. Yeah, Um,
it wasn't because of a very specific thing he did,
and we learned this through the research. But I have
(04:01):
to be honest that, like, my experience with him was
basically thinking, oh, this was an academic who had done
some studies and then sort of became a guru like figure,
much like Sasha Shulgin when we talked about him during
our two parter on M D M A. Now, Sasha
Shulgin was a practicing chemist who is in his laboratory
up until he died. Right, Uh, Leary was not. He
(04:24):
did do some interesting studies in the fifties and sixties,
and we're gonna get into all of that stuff, but
first I think we should probably talk about his influence
on music. Yeah, I have to say that before I
knew anything about Timothy Leary, I knew the moody blues
song legend of the mind is the has the chorus
Timothy Learies Dead, you know, yeah, and so forth. Wonderful,
(04:46):
wonderful track. I listened to it several times while researching
this episode. Other fan music fans out there might recognize
the the the the sampling of his voice in various recordings,
probably most notable a live version of Tools Third Eye,
where they have the bit to think for yourself, question authority. Um,
(05:07):
and then you'll find numerous other musical projects that make
use of his soothing voice and in fact, and he
was involved in several of these projects as well. Uh,
there's an ambient instrumental like sitar distortion album titled Turn
Onto an End Dropout, which was one of his catchphrases.
And that's actually like really good listening. I fired up
(05:27):
every now and then you just kind of, you know,
chill out and and you know, don't think about what's
being said too much. But um, the interesting thing is
we've alluded to is that there is this kind of
surface level pop culture idea of Leary and it doesn't.
It doesn't necessarily hold up when you start going into
(05:48):
the details of who he was, the sorts of research
projects he was involved in. Um Like I I really
wanted him to be more in line with with another
counterculture contra virtual character. We've talked about John C. Lily, right,
but there's not really a lot to compare the two
besides the LSD connection, right, And that's actually kind of
(06:08):
what's happening with this episode is we're getting a convergence
of two types of episodes that we normally do. We
have a history of doing these two parters on specific
psychedelics and looking at their scientific and medical applications. But
then we also have a history of doing episodes like
the John C. Lily one or the Sasha Shulgin one.
We call them our psychedelic Avengers. And we thought, oh,
(06:33):
we're gonna emerge Tim Leary and this LSD psilocybin research
together and it will be really interesting. It turns out
that that he wasn't actually contributing to the research, but
I think it does come together in a really interesting
way thematically when we get to the whole piece of this,
and in that I think he was a barometer for
America's acceptance of the idea of researching acid as being
(06:59):
a medical tool. Yeah, it's interesting how he was his
just will just discuss he was, you know, a spokesperson
for this. He represented that the supposedly a a learned
academic who was who was advocating LSD as this this
powerful tool, and yet at the same time he also
was such um an inflammatory individual as part of the
(07:20):
counterculture heat uh. A lot of people point to the
harm he did as one of one of the key
figures um more so than John C. Lily uh who
who vilified the counterculture and vilify the use of psychedelics
and one of the reasons that psychedelics were not studied
for for decades. Yeah, there are multiple researchers in the
(07:41):
notes here that we'll talk about throughout the course of
these two episodes who point to Leary as being the
reason why we haven't been able to use LSD in
UM medically approved studies for going on thirty plus years now,
longer than that, I think even it was. It's in
the notes here somewhere, but it was in the mid
sixties when it was banned. So, yeah, strap in because
(08:04):
that's the other thing, we're going to get into a
real basic primer for you on what LSD is, what's
the difference between LSD and psilocybin, and then we'll roll
into the Leary experience. Okay, So to go back to
the very beginning here, let's just go to the the
origins of l s D itself, since that's the main
(08:26):
substance that we're gonna be discussing here. So Swiss chemist
Albert Hoffman synthesized l s D and a Sandas pharmaceutical
lab on November six uh. Sandas was working on a
research project involving a parasitic fungus called ergot that grows
on rye. Now you may remember that Joe and I
(08:48):
recorded an episode titled The Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism that
dealt with the ergot and that that is the same
substance that we're discussing here. And you know, aside from
a noteworthy and truly horrifying breakouts of ergod poisoning in Europe,
it has been linked to various supernatural rights as well
as as well as allegedly individual artist and artistic traditions
(09:10):
throughout history, though I think sometimes those are mere theories, right. Yeah,
And so just to be clear here, San DAWs was
a pharmaceutical company that started in eighteen eighties six and
they began researching for more novel kind of drugs in
nineteen seventeen. They were basically looking for therapeutic leads based
on natural products. So they turned to ergot Why, well,
(09:33):
they had an example that they had already created called ergotamine.
That was a drug that they had created for treating
migraine headaches. So Hoffman came along and he started looking
at ergat and he saw the lisergic acid in it,
and he thought, well, maybe this LSD that I can
synthesize out of this will be a good respiratory stimulants.
So for instance, make maybe if you have asthma, you
(09:54):
take some LSD and it will help you breathe better. Yeah.
So he ended up derived being different compounds from lysergic acid,
and he developed several medicines, including drugs that lowered blood
pressure and improved brain function in the elderly. And he
derived the twenty five in a series of these derivatives.
It was lysergic acid dithalamide or LSD twenty five, and
(10:16):
he thought that LSD stimulate breathing circulation, but test didn't
show anything special, and Sandaz abandoned further study. But then
five years later, Hoffman's thoughts returned to LSD potential and
he felt that it hadn't been fully explored, so he
took the you know, perhaps unusual step of synthesizing another
batch further testing, and during the process he began to
(10:40):
feel strange. Um. The rest is history. He discovered the
properties of LSD and I've I've heard it described as
his his problem child, like it. Basically the rest of
his life he kept coming back to LSD and and
trying to figure out, like, you know what what it
can be used for and how you know, what are
the true properties of this. At this same time, there's
(11:01):
this kind of roller coaster of of cultural awareness of
it taking place in the background. Yeah. Yeah, And he
has that infamous bicycle ride as well, right after he
takes it for the first time that has been sort
of mythologized over the years. Yes. Now, l s D,
to be clear, is a psychedelic drug, meaning that it
alters perceptions of reality, the shape of thoughts, the connections
(11:24):
that one forms. I can't stress enough that one should
set aside any cinematic uh ideas of what acid trips
consists of, because it's it's rare to find a film
that truly feels trippy in a way that matches up
with the actual experience of ls D. You don't. You
don't see imaginary elves or anything. It's if you watch
(11:45):
just films and TV, you just assume that an LSD
trip is a dream sequence, and a dream sequence is
just an LSD trip, that these are in just interchangeable
altered states of reality, right, Yeah, exactly. I remember, like
growing up when kids would start talking about LSD and
it being available to us just all the like various
(12:09):
like bizarre urban myths that people would tell, you know, like, oh,
there's this one guy who took it and uh, he
thinks he's an orange now and he doesn't know how
stop being an orange, or like another one was like
this guy took it and he saw a bunch of
everybody looked like giant white guerrillas to him, and he
fought all these guerrillas and it's like these sort of
(12:29):
spectacular stories. Well, it does have hallucinogenic properties, there's their
mythologized Yeah, I always think back to an episode of
Strangers with Candy where there's a story of a girl
who try took alice D and tried to force herself
through a key hole. You know. Now, that's not to
say that that nothing bad can happen while while one
is on l S D. We'll have some examples of
(12:49):
that as well as we go on here. But in
terms of just like what the experience of the elics
D that basically what is the psychedelic experience? Uh? Oddly enough,
I'm I want to turn to some the words of
Timothy Leary because I thought that that he actually managed
to sum it up rather nicely here and uh, and
I'm gonna go ahead and read it in my impersonation
(13:11):
of Timothy Leary because it's more fun that way for
me and hopefully for you. Of course, the drug dose
does not produce transcendent experience. It merely acts as a
chemical key. It opens the mind, frees the nervous system
of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the
experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes
(13:34):
the preparation of the individual, including his personality, structure, and
his mood. At the same time setting is physical, the weather,
the room's atmosphere, social feelings of persons present toward one another,
and cultural prevailing views as to what is real. It
is for this reason that manuals or guide books are necessary.
(13:54):
Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the
new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as roadmaps
for new interior territories which modern science has made accessible.
So to give you an idea of what LSD is
like outside of the experience, outside of getting turned on,
as Leary would not right, It starts without about an
(14:16):
hour of when you first take it, and it can
last up to twelve hours. Uh, there's a peak about
halfway through that experience. And the effects very widely, but
biologically they include dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, high body temperature, dizziness, sweat,
blurred vision, and tingly hands and feet. The primary effects, though,
(14:38):
are visual, which is more what Leary is describing there.
You get stronger colors, brighter lights, trails, halos, and patterns. Overall,
people say it provides a sense of happiness and euphoria.
That's very emotional. However, though, as we said, this can
also lead to impulsive behavior. And poor judgment. When you're
under the effects of this euphoria. Yeah, you you feel
(14:59):
you're body as if it's something new, something different. You
smell and taste the world in a different way, visual stimulized, processed,
and with new areas of focus, new details, and and
the same can be said for cognition. Uh. And the
same can be said for the basic processing of time.
And so indeed, that is the that is the essential
psychedelic experience, uh, in a nutshell. And there's one thing
(15:20):
I'd like to point out before we go further here,
which is that we don't actually know how it affects
the brain entirely. And why don't we know that because
there's never been any scientific research on how it affects
the brain because it has been banned largely in the
United States and some other countries for for the last
couple of decades, as we mentioned, So this is kind
(15:41):
of a problem. We've got this thing on our hands.
Everybody knows about it, we have a general understanding of it,
but we haven't done the research. Yeah, and we've touched
on this. So when we've talked about marijuana, so a
cybin as well as m d M A you have
these substances that just became banned. Research into their properties right,
was at the very least professionally taboo for so long.
(16:03):
So yeah, despite the fact that they clearly have powerful properties,
we don't necessarily understand them all that much. It's believed
that LSD works similar to serotonin, a neurotransmitters responsible for
regulating moods, appetite, muscle control, sexuality, sleep, and sensory perception.
And ls D seems to interfere with the way the
(16:24):
brain serotonin receptors work, so it may inhibit neurotransmission, stimulated
or both. It also affects the way that the retinas
process information and conduct that information to the brain. So
you might be listening to this and saying, well, hold on,
I've never taken any of this stuff before, and you're
just kind of throwing these terms around. What's the difference
(16:45):
between LSD and psilocybin. While psilocybin is a fun guy,
and that's classified by botanists and my cologists people to
study mushrooms. While they were used by the Aztecs in
religious rituals, the American public didn't really find out about
psilocybin until nineteen fifty seven, and this was when an
article in Life magazine recounted the adventures of a New
(17:08):
York banker in Mexico where he tried it. H Yeah,
LSD totally different. It is colorless, odorless, and tasteless and ingesting.
Just twenty five micrograms is enough to feel effects. Now,
to give you an idea of what twenty five micrograms is,
that's less than the weight of two salt grains. It
is very quickly metabolized by the human body. Now, as
(17:30):
previously established, LSD is a chemical that synthesized in a
laboratory setting, whereas psilocybin is a fun guy that's grown
in nage. One is natural one is created in a lap.
Several chemicals that could go into l s D are
currently sales restricted here in America or are monitored by
the Drug Enforcement Agency. And there's all kinds of different
(17:53):
recipes on how to make it. Some start with lysergic
acid that's derived from morning glory seeds. Others use that
ergot fungus that we talked about earlier and how it
was discovered. They culture that and they extract ergot alkaloids
from it. This fungus and LSD itself can break down
when exposed to light, and that's important to note as well.
In this ergot recipe, the solvents and reagents involved are
(18:16):
also very dangerous. They're poisonous, carcinogenic, and explosive. So it's fun.
I would imagine marking on this stuff, like if you've
got your little laboratory, you've got to be really careful.
You know. This is like uh um, some Jesse and
Walter White stuff where you've got to be really careful
about what kind of stuff you're concocting and what you're
breathing in and whether you're not you blow up your trailer. Yeah,
(18:38):
this is straight up chemistry. And that's the other different
psilocybin is uh is ultimately uh, it's it's about I
guess scavenging or or growing naturally occurring organism. Uh. This
is chemistry. So the way you do it is you
synthesize the ergot alkaloid into a life surgic acid compound,
and you do this by adding chemicals and applying heat.
(18:59):
After word, you isomerize the compounds so that the atoms
in its molecules rearrange. This involves some cooling, mixing, it
with an acid, an actual acid, not the term acid,
also a base, and then evaporating it. The remnants are
iOS lysergic dithalamide, which is then isomerized again and that
(19:20):
produces what's called active LSD. So finally you purify it,
you crystallize it. Afterward, LSD can be made into tablets,
or it's dissolved into liquid or made into gelatine squares.
Most often it's dissolved into ethanol, and then that ethanol
is added to sheets of blotting paper that are then dried,
cut up into little pieces, and people get tabs. It
(19:41):
looks just like the candy that you can buy. I'm
not really sure on the history of that. Can you
know the one where it basically looks like blot Yeah?
Like which came first. It's a good question this is
this like candy cigarettes or is it just a happy
coincidence that this terrible candy looks like acid? Yeah? That
is curious. If any listeners know, please let us in
(20:02):
on the secret. There A lot of you have probably
also heard about bad trips. We mentioned them earlier. Well,
it's not really clear what causes these bad trips, but
they result in fear and paranoia, and treatment usually requires
basically going to a quiet space so that the user
can just come down, but sometimes you have to administer
anti anxiety medication or tranquilizers, so that that's important to
(20:25):
remember as well. Yeah, this makes me think of a
lot of the research involving psilocybin um that really ultimately
kind of backs up some of what Leary said in
that that bit that I read in that a lot
of it comes down to priming, preparing the individual for
what the trip is going to consist of, and then
of course personal medical and personal psychiatric history is going
(20:48):
to play into that scenario. Yeah. Absolutely. Now you've also
probably heard of flashbacks, right, this is the other thing
like when when I was in high school, like all
the legends, it was like, Oh, he's gonna see those
White Guerrillas every year for the rest of his life,
right like something like that. Oh yeah, it's this is
something that is that pops up in films and TV
from time to time, and it's either just completely ridiculous,
(21:09):
like the White Guerrillas, or even when it is a
lot cooler and more believable, say with the first season
of True Detective, there's still a lot a lot of
doubts from some individuals to to what extent this is
a thing or or a realistic depiction of it if
it is. Yeah, here's the deal with flashbacks. There's no
evidence to support the idea that LSD remains in your
(21:30):
body forever in amounts inside your brain or spinal fluid.
People say that, but we don't have any evidence on it.
Why because we really haven't been able to study it. Right. Uh.
Some people think though, that this is what causes flashbacks.
The majority of users the report never having had flashbacks,
and of those who have reported it, many are mentally ill,
(21:52):
and some doctors believe that what they're perceiving is actually
a form of psychosis that emerged due to the LSD use.
There's actually a medically recognized disorder called hallucinogen persisting perceptive disorder,
and this is for people who constantly experience visual hallucinations
after they take LSD. This is a little different than
(22:14):
the idea of flashbacks, right. I mean, it's also worth
noting that the visual hallucinations can occur for a number
of reasons. Um, So it's it's entirely possible that one
could could could take LSD and then what a year later,
they experienced some sort of visual hallucination and one of
the main ways they can describe it is the narrative
of acid flashbacks and then they're going and then that
(22:36):
becomes encoded in memory. So one last thing I want
to make clear about ls D before we we cap
off this summary here. LSD is not an addictive drug.
So if somebody tells you you know you're gonna take that,
you're gonna get hooked on it or something like that,
that's just patently untrue. Uh. The real basic way that
it works is that if you take it a lot,
(22:59):
your body is going to get used to it, and
subsequently the effects are going to lessen over time. So
that's the opposite of something that you become addicted to.
It doesn't work in the same way as something like heroin.
Right though then some people may point out there's the
whole idea that like, the first time you take heroin
is the best, and then you're always chasing that dragon. Uh.
(23:20):
But still, the LSD, psilocybin, d m T, any of
these psychedelic substances that we've discussed on the program before,
they are they are not addictive in the the very
literal way that stuff like heroin is. Alright, we're gonna
take a quick break and we come back. We're going
to continue to talk about the psychedelics, and in particular,
we're gonna talk about psychedelics in medicine. Alright, we're back. So,
(23:45):
according to Timothy Leary's archivist, a guy named Michael Horowitz,
before Leary, the research being done on psychedelics was mostly
done by the CIA and the Army. Uh makes us
think of d and stranger things. Yeah, but they were
looking to weaponize it, dosing subjects without their knowledge. Now,
(24:07):
what he's actually talking about is the CIS attempts with
stuff like Project Bluebird and Project mk Ultra to develop
mind control techniques. We actually have an episode about Stranger
Things coming up in the next couple of weeks where
we're going to talk more about this stuff. The basic
idea here that I'm gonna boil it down quickly is
that they were inspired by Nazi research experiments in the
(24:27):
Dakow concentration camp. Subsequently, they tested on helpless populations like prisoners,
drug addicts, and mental patients, and at one point the
government reportedly ordered over a hundred million doses of LSD
from sand DAWs, that company that discovered it, so that
they could experiment with contaminating a water supply. So they
(24:48):
wanted to weaponize this and basically see like, can we
put a whole bunch of LSD in one of our
enemies water supplies? You know this really sad thing about this,
uh portion of the story is the it underlies, uh
you know, a fact about military first research. You know
that essentially mility military researchers come in and say, okay,
(25:10):
can we use it to kill people? Better? Can we
use it to enable our our our our warfare in
some way, shape or form, And if not, well then
we're done with it. We see this time and time
again on the show, and whenever we dig deep into topics,
whether it be uh the weaponization of animals we've done
an episode on, or a lot of our space based
stuff is usually related to weaponizing space at some point. Uh. So, Actually,
(25:35):
the government Sandas wouldn't supply them that much, so they
turned to another company. They wanted the company to break
sandas is patent and produce the chemical, but the whole
thing never came to pass, and the government essentially deemed
LSD too unpredictable for their general use. Now, Leary pioneered
research into how psychedelics could reveal the nature of human
(25:56):
consciousness and possibly help people with depression and anxiety, but
he also precipitated a backlash against psychedelics that criminalized them
and made it impossible for others to do research on them. Uh.
Leary supporters argue, that's not Leary's fault. This would have
happened anyways, you know, And I can see, you know,
(26:17):
I can see both sides of that. But he was
undoubtedly m a key figure and in a in a
very um, you know, ultimately a very like hateable figure.
Like part of his his charisma and his charm, it
just worked like poison against the people who already had,
you know, a conservative bent. Yeah, it's true, and we're
(26:37):
going to see time and time again people turn against him,
and not the kind of people that you would expect. Right,
So let's back up for a second here, what about
before Leary? How we're scientists and researchers looking at it
before that. Well, in the nineteen fifties, some researchers began
investigating whether psychedelics could treat mental health disorders or addiction.
The federal government funded a hundred and sixteen of these studies.
(26:59):
But between nineteen fifty three and nineteen seventy three, again
I turned to our episode on M D, M A
and Sasha and Shulgin. They're perfect example of this. Along
those lines is kind of what was going on with
psychiatrists and various researchers working with LSD and patients to
see how it could work. Sandaz was essentially selling it
(27:21):
as a psychiatric product, right and these and these were
reputable research operations. We had not yet gotten to the
point where Leary comes along or or John C. Lily
comes along and you know, starts giving it to dolphins, yeah, exactly,
or or giving it to himself while he's hanging out
with dolphins. Uh. Now, the sam Does Company patented it,
(27:42):
but they sold it as Della sid beginning in nineteen
forty seven, and they sold it in twenty five microgram
tablets that were designed for analytical psychotherapy. They suggested that
the psychiatrists themselves take it so that they could better
understand their patients experiences. Now, when they stopped making it,
they said, this is about the fact that there's a
(28:02):
lack of regulation and that there's inaccurate information being perpetuated
about this drug. But between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty five,
forty thousand patients were given Delhi sid tablets basically legal LSD,
and Dr Max Wrinkle was the first to bring LSD
to the United States and then test it on a
(28:22):
population of a hundred volunteers. He and his colleague Dr
Paul Hope noted that LSD produced effects that quote mimic
schizophrenic psychosis. So this is you can see what there's
some as Another theme that we come back to over
and over again on the show is early psychological theory
(28:43):
seems to be very uh generalized and biased, right, and
this is another example of that. They're like, oh, there's
this thing. It just seems to make you schizophrenic, you know,
and there just wasn't enough research behind it. But recreational
drug use increased dramatically in the sixt s, such that
as many as two million people had dropped acid by
(29:04):
the nineteen seventies. So by nineteen sixty five there were
very few researchers who were allowed to possess LSD. Only
six projects were conducted in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen seventy,
the US Congress added psychedelics into the government War on Drugs,
and the federal government declared these drugs had no medical use.
The chairman for New Jersey's Narcotic Drug Study Commission called
(29:28):
LSD the greatest threat facing the country today, more dangerous
than the Vietnam War. It seems like a little hyperbot.
By nineteen seventy four, the National Institutes for Mental Health
declared that LSD had quote no real therapeutic value. So
there was a strong establishment bent against this drug, which
(29:50):
Timothy Leary unfortunately did not help with his antics. UH. Today,
though l s D is a Schedule one drug in
the United States, it's under the Controlled subs sens Is Act.
This basically means the government believes that it has high
abuse potential, which we've already established that's not addictive. UH,
it has a lack of accepted safe uses when taken
(30:11):
under medical supervision. We'll talk a little bit about how
there actually are some of those, and that it basically
has no current medical use in their minds. Again, there's
evidence that it does. Now. I want to remind everybody
that by placing it as a Schedule one, they're placing
it in the same category as marijuana and uh, and
they're placing it in a stricter category than category two,
(30:32):
which includes cocaine. Yep. So since then, only a small
number of studies have been conducted. You've got small sample sizes,
so there's not a lot of research that we can
rely on. The early results are broad. They suggest that
when used by people without a family history or risk
of psychological problems, psychedelics can actually make us kinder, calmer,
(30:55):
and better at our jobs. They also help us solve
problems more creatively and make us more open minded and generous. Yeah,
it's it's interesting when you look at the research here
about these potential uses for psychedelics that one is insolute
reminded of meditation, because both both meditation and psilocybin have
been shown to shut down the default fault mode network,
(31:18):
that constant stream of worry chat about past and future
in your brain um, and that the brain activity is
similar even if the experience you know, obviously isn't going
to always be the same though there there is often
a certain amount of crossover UM and we'll have to
get into that more when we do a focus on
meditation in the future. Yeah, I mean, what Robert's referring
(31:39):
to is the default mode and network. This is a
group of structures in the brain. They're found in the
frontal and prefrontal cortex. That's what's responsible for our ego
and our sense of self, and it's why we as
humans have very rigid habitual thinking that let's face it,
we can obsess over right on psychedelics that slows down
and the boundaries betwe in the self in the world dissolve,
(32:01):
allowing for therapy sessions that can be more effective. Yeah. Yeah,
there are a number of excellent studies here. At two
thousand and eleven study at John Hopkins University gave high
doses of psilocybin to fifty one test subjects and according
to ABC News, a thirty of these individuals experienced measurable
personality changes that lasted more than a year. So as
(32:23):
of twenty six, a year ago, about five hundred people
have participated informal psilocybin experience. That's not LSD. It's worth
remembering though, that these volunteers are self selected and are
carefully screened and then are guided by therapists. So psychedelics
used outside of control settings, yes, they can cause problems,
(32:45):
including bad trips where the users feel extremely anxious and depressed.
This doesn't account for the occasional flashbacks that we talked
about earlier, whether that's a real thing or not. Right,
the possible future of research is very promising. Patients are
recommend ended for treatment by a doctor, for instance, This
might be what we we look at in a few years. Right,
you get recommended for LSD R psilocybin treatment by your doctor.
(33:09):
They get you screened for mental illness, They look at
your heart to see if you have any heart conditions.
Then they're prepping you about what to expect. You're monitored
by a medical professional while you're under the effects. This
is someone that they have, you know, established a trusting
relationship with you. Is not just some scary orderly who
stands there the whole time. They have to work with
(33:30):
you for at least six to eight hours ahead of time.
Then the experience you have is contained, so it's something
you can build a life around, right, you can you
can figure out how to solve the problems that you're
going in for around this. Across the board, though, like you,
we're looking at at openness is one of the key
positive results of psaulocybin use other hallucinations that have been
(33:54):
explored in these various research programs. Yeah, and so you
look at what are the possibilities here. If we can
get the FDA to reschedule it, what can we do
with it? Well, there, I've already been studies that have
looked at how psilocybin or LSD can be used to
help terminal patients deal with the end of life anxiety.
You can potentially help people who have addictive problems. There's
(34:16):
been studies that have been done on smoking cessation and
alcoholism related to it. Uh. And then also psychedelics can
potentially help mental wellness. There's been a number of studies
that have been done basically looking at how it can
prolong positive changes in attitude and mood. Um. When I
think about LSD or psilocybin for myself, I've never taken either,
(34:42):
But when I hear these very controlled laboratory conditions described
as somebody who's never taken it, that's actually more appealing
to me. The idea of it being done in a
controlled setting like that. Well, you know, the crazy part
about it is that like the idea of of say
(35:02):
people or young people taking LSD, solocybin or whatever and
not really knowing what they're doing and having, you know,
maybe a positive experience, maybe a negative like that's that's
not in keeping a with the clinical use of it.
But but all but be with the with the traditional
use of some of these substances, where you would have
not a scientist but a shaman to administer these things.
(35:23):
There were rituals, there were there was a process. It
was communal. Yeah, it was a communal experience with lots
of priming. Yeah. Now, so just from my perspective, because
I know I have a history of depression and anxiety,
and my family has a history of depression and anxiety,
I've always worried, well, I don't want to take this
because I might have a bad reaction, right, Remember what
they said some of the setup was because they needed
(35:46):
to screen you for certain things. I'm also curious though
they say things like it's going to increase your interest
in fantasy and imagination, and I want to know how
much more interested in fantasy and imagination I can get,
because I'm already pretty well down that rabbit hole. One
of the things that these researchers say is that when
they take a look at it. It can help change
(36:06):
your personality if you're having personality problems, right that the
general idea is that personality is fixed after the age
of thirty, but with the help of psychedelics, you may
be able to overcome some you know, boundaries that you're
facing in that respect. And I just think that's interesting.
I've always just kind of anecdotally thought about it about
ten years later than that. Like pretty much everybody I know,
(36:30):
by the time they're forty, they are who they are
and they're going to be that way. I have not
seen anybody make any drastic changes, but it seems like
if they have really difficult emotional problems in life that
they're trying to get over, it seems like there's a
possibility here that if we were only able to study
this further, it might be an option for people like that. Yeah,
(36:50):
I mean, I guess it's one of those things where
you know, we we like, we may think of ourselves
a set in stone after a certain point, but but
we're not. We're not really. I mean, we know that
the mind is in memory is more malleable than that.
Uh So, psychedelics come in as a as a possible
means to loosen things up so that they can be reset. Uh.
(37:12):
And of course that being said, drugs are not the
only thing that I think that they can allow a
person to do that. I mean, sometimes something is simple,
is say travel, uh, new experiences, um, reading a book
you wouldn't have otherwise read this sort of thing. Generally,
having a creative curiosity about life uh can can change
(37:33):
who you are. I think one of the interesting things
some of these studies of is that it makes you wonder, like,
is the person that has administered the substance. Are they
this the kind of person that is not a novelty seeker?
They're not. They don't seek out new experiences otherwise. Like
maybe that's the kind of individual for whom some potential
(37:54):
future treatment would be best used. Like somebody who's who
really can't shake some thing negative in their life. Uh.
And they have a pretty established routine if how things are,
But at the same time they recognize that there's something
about that routine that is dysfunctional for them or for
the world around. Yeah, there's some sort of cycle that
needs to be broken. Uh, there's something that needs to
(38:15):
be you know, just pulled apart so it can be
put back together. In a slightly different form. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's a good way to approach it. So
why don't we take another break, and then when we
get back, we're gonna officially dive into the Leary stuff,
and we're gonna start right at the beginning. Thank thank Alright,
we're back. Okay, So we're gonna talk about Timothy Leary
(38:38):
for the rest of this episode and then into the
next episode as well. Uh, you know, we're gonna start
at the beginning because I think a lot of the
stuff that happens on early on in his life is
going to be key. And it's interesting when we talk
about this in terms of like, at what point is
someone's personality set? At what point is somebody's destiny kind
of set? Well, according to Robert Greenfield, who wrote to
(39:01):
Timothy Learry a biography, yeah you can. You can sort
of see a lot of that in Leary's early life.
So he was born October ninety and Springfield, Massachusetts to
an Irish Catholic family. His father with a stroll as
a struggling dentist, and his mother was a working mother.
That's my neck of the woods, Stoffield, Massachusetts. Yeah, my
(39:21):
uncle works there. It's just my whole family is from
the western part of that state. So I have a
very clear picture in my head now of what his
his young upbringing was like. So, according to Greenfield's biography,
you can really attribute a lot of learies rebel rebellious
spirit to his relationship with his father Tote, an alcoholic
(39:43):
who brought imbalance to the home and depended on charity
from family loans to prop up his struggling dental practice.
And now the young Tim Larry you know, occasionally stood
up to his father, but was also forced to hide
from him on the roof on some occasions, and then
total left the family when Tim was on fourteen UH,
leaving him to find solace in books about mythic heroes
(40:04):
and UH legends, and he was determined to become something better,
greater than his father, and his mother obsessed as well
over her her child's future, like how can I engineer
uh somebody for success? And so Greenfield argues that we
see the seeds of Leary's relationships with authority figures throughout
his life, you know, pinpointed in his early life as
(40:27):
well as his relationships with women. He would go through
periods of finding structure within an within an institution, but
would ultimately rebel against its order, and in times of
distress he'd seek out women and for positive father figures.
He turned to UH, not to his own father, of course,
but to a flamboyant and sometimes dramatic family members. And
he depended on the emotional and financial support UH first
(40:51):
of all of his mother and UH and in Greenfield
identifies a pattern of his leaving most of them along
the way. Yeah. I mean, I think like one of
the off whole themes that we're going to notice by
the time we get to the end of this two
parter is that he left a a wake behind him
of either abused people or dead people. I mean, well,
(41:14):
we're gonna get into it. Yeah. There are a number
of self destructive tendencies in Timothy Learry's life, al right.
So in terms of his his school and his essentially
pre psychedelics career, UH Learry attended classical high school alongside
American author, a biographer and historian William Manchester. Somebody might
(41:35):
be a familiar with him from a world lit only
by fire The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, which is
an excellent book. And he also went to the same
school as a Theodore Geisel or Dr Seuss. He went
to the College of Holy Cross and Worcester, uh is
a strict Catholic school that of course inspired rebellion from Larry.
He made money gambling on sports. He frequently hopped the
(41:57):
wall with other adventure seekers in or Or to go
out drinking in town and chase girls. My father from Worcester.
So also, like this is like connecting the dots. So
to give you an idea here if if you're not
familiar with messages at all, Springfields in the western part
of the state, Worcester sort of in the middle, but
between Springfield and Boston. So it's not I mean, it's
(42:19):
like forty five minutes probably from where he grew up.
All right, Well, the next place we're going on the
map here for Leary is west Point, and this is
where he initially just goes all in on the culture
of West Point. He wrote, according to the Greenfield, he's
writing back to his mom with just the maximum amount
of west Point lingo you can possibly use. And this
(42:39):
is telling to like he'll start off really into a
culture and then he rebels, and indeed he does. He
returns to his old ways, even faces a court martial
for drunken behavior. He's acquitted, but then he ends up
facing what's known as the silence, or was known as
the silence. This was a policy that Australized cadets who
broke the honor code, and this was discontinued in seventy three.
(43:01):
And Uh. He ultimately ends up resigning and is honorably
discharged by the army. Then he applies to colleges across America.
The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa accepted in first, so
that's where he went. He met Dr Donald Angus Ramsdell,
a Harvard psychology PhD, a man who Leary would later
(43:22):
refer to as Dr d which I found that interesting
given our episodes on the real Doctor John Dyah. And Uh.
He soon immersed himself in the study of psychology and
in biology, and now having lost his draft de term deferment,
he enrolled in r OTC to avoid a draft. And
then he also ran a foul of the school here
(43:45):
due to womanizing so much though the dean even accused
him of sullying quote the honor of Southern womanhood, and
he was expelled. Man like just from my point perspective
from you know, being from up in New England and
in the tooth thousands moving to the South into a
progressive southern city. I had a lot of culture shock.
(44:06):
I'm trying to imagine what it was like for this guy,
you know, all these years ago, Uh, just transitioning and
jumping around and getting into trouble and just really shaking
things up everywhere he went. Well, it's interesting. One of
the sort of side things in in Greenfield's biography that
he points out is that apparently at the time the
university in Tuscaloosa, you had these various liberal academics and
(44:30):
in many cases, um homosexual academics who had found sort
of a safe environment in which to thrive. So in
a in a sense like if Timothy Leary was going
to go to anywhere in the American South at that point,
Tuscaloose was probably one of the places to go. And
he did find people who who valued him and embraced him,
(44:50):
you know initially, but he wasn't quite able to to
finish his his academic duties. Oh of course not now.
On the advice of Dr d he goes on to
a role in the univer of Illinois he lines up
work in the psychology department, and he eventually completes his
education at Tuscaloosa remotely. But uh yeah, it's one of
(45:11):
these situations where, um, you just see this pattern over
and over again. As Greenfield writes, a clear pattern in
his life had already emerged whenever Tim Leary began accepting
the kind of success for which he had been programmed
since birth by his mother, he would stop the process
by indulging, just as his father had done before him,
in self destructive behavior. So Leary then goes on to
(45:33):
get his master's degree at the University of Washington. We're
talking about Washington State now, So he's already jumped from
New England to Alabama, to Illinois, and now up to
Washington State. He received his doctorate in psychology in nineteen
fifty from the University of California at Berkeley. So then
he jumps down to California. Here he decided that conventional
psychotherapy was useless and he began experimenting with group therapy
(45:58):
and transactional analysis. So this gives you an idea of
like where he was that sort of academically disciplined wise
before he was introduced to psychedelics. His first wife, Mary Anne,
committed suicide during this time. This was in nineteen fifty five.
This left him to raise their two children alone. We
have more on this obviously. Yeah, this was just a
(46:21):
real sad situation for a number of reasons. But basically,
uh he he and Mary Anne had a very open relationship.
Well yeah, but also just a chaotic relationship, but just
a lot of according to to Greenfield's account in the biography,
just a lot of negative vibes in this uh, in
this relationship, a lot was not working. Leary was apparently
(46:44):
looking to end the relationship in the very near future anyway,
and then she committed suicide and it was It's not
like Leary wasn't an unfeeling person like this had a
huge effect on him, like he would write about it,
just essentially a pit that he wasn't able to emerge
from emotionally, for you, for for decades even, and then
(47:06):
you know, to to say nothing then of the children
as well. Now, the urban legend of this goes this
is what you know. I can't imagine how many articles
and books Robert and I read for this, but it
probably popped up in every single one of them. Is
that the night before they were having an argument about
their open relationship and about that he was in a
relationship with a woman that he loved more than Mary
(47:27):
and his wife, and that she was upset about this
and she wanted him to break it off, and he
went into the bedroom and said, it's your problem, not mine,
and closed the door. When he woke up in the morning,
she was dead. She had suffocated herself in the garage
inside the family car. Yeah. In Greenfield's account, he he
(47:47):
kind of points to the different versions of the story,
so like there's the there's like a slightly different version
that he that he tells the authorities and then he
writes about later, and you know, you can sort of
try to find the truth between all of these. Uh uh.
And yeah, it's just a really ugly situation with an
ugly ending it is, but it's also, unfortunately, I think,
(48:10):
an important sign of things to come with this guy
and and sort of where his priorities were, right. Uh.
And I don't want to end this this episode because
we're about to wrap up our first part here, but
I don't want to end it on such a super downer. Uh.
He went on afterwards to teach at Berkeley and he
actually was the director of psychological research at the Kaiser
(48:32):
Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, from nineteen fifty five until
nineteen fifty eight. Now, during this period, uh, after his
wife's suicide, Uh, he he also ends up going to
uh to Europe a few times. He goes to Spain,
he goes to Italy, and uh, this is kind of key.
There was this, um, there was this period of time
(48:53):
when he was when he was in Spain and he
suddenly experienced this some sort of mysterious illness, so swelling pain. Uh.
He was attended to buy a Danish doctor and he
ends up passing this night in misery, ends up sending
the kids to stay with another couple of of of
Americans were staying close by, and he says, he said
(49:15):
that he felt like he died during this time, that
he that he let go and they put the past
behind him. But you know, in a very interesting way,
it was kind of his first psychedelic experience, like a
taste of this altered state as a you know, not
to be confused with all the times he'd gotten just
blindly drunk in the past, because he had previously and
for a lot of his life, had a severe alcohol problem.
(49:39):
But it's it's shortly after that too, that Frank Baron,
who was who was a colleague from Berkeley. Uh. He
he visited Leary during an unproductive stay in Florence, Italy.
He was always going on these trips to try and
you know, to to write various things. And at this
point Barren told him that during his research into creativity
he had interviewed a psychiatrist who had used matt Aig
(50:00):
mushrooms to produce visions and trances, and that Baron had
tried them as well, resulting in a mystical transcendental insight. Now,
interestingly enough, Leary warned him that he might lose his
scientific credibility to be babbled on about this sort of thing. Um,
And that, my friends, is what we call foreshadowing. Yes,
so in the next episode we will get into the
(50:23):
psychedelic experience of of Leary, basically one continuous psychedelic experience
that lasted his entire life and uh basically dragged American
culture with Yeah, please make sure that you tune into
that second part. It's got a lot more of the
juicy details of Timothy Leary's life and the science and
research that he did into LSD and psilocybin. If you
(50:44):
want to reach out to us about this episode and
any of the stuff we brought up today regarding LSD
research or possibly Timothy Leary's history, you can always get
us on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter,
we're on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. And if
you want to get into was the old fashioned way,
just shoot us an email at blow the Mind at
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(51:15):
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y c C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow
(00:46):
Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. And this week we're talking
about Timothy Leary. Now we're not just gonna talk about
Timothy Leary. We're also going to talk about science of LSD,
(01:07):
the history of LSD, the use of LSD and psilocybin
in various UH research projects. What these substances actually due
to the mind to the brain. But we're going to
use Timothy Leary as kind of, you know, sort of
a guiding principle, I guess for this episode. And if
you're if you're out there and you're thinking, well, I
love Timothy Learry, well, then strap in. If you're out
(01:29):
there and you're you're thinking yourself, well, I don't know
that I like this Timothy Leary guy, well, strap in
as well. Yeah, I think we've got something for everybody here.
We uh, we're basically sheltered during a hurricane this week,
and so Robert and I just binge read about Timothy
Leary for four days straight. We've got a lot to
share with you. My eyes are bleeding a little, but
(01:51):
I think you're going to be interested in this so
much so that we're going to do this as a
two parter. Yes, uh, now, just to refresh anybody out
there and too, and to inform from anyone who just
who doesn't know who Timothy Learry is. Well. Timothy Leary
was an American psychologist, author, and a key figure of
the nineteen sixties counterculture and psychedelics you know movement in general.
(02:12):
He lived nineteen twenty through nineteen, and he managed to
run a foul of pretty much every organization he was
a part of. Uh. He was arrested uh enough times
that he supposedly saw the inside of thirty six different prisons.
He earned the ire of many Americans, even as he
was able to submit a reputation as also kind of
(02:33):
a you know, a counterculture leader uh his and I
think the reason is because he has this message of
inner exploration of anti establishment thinking, and this this resonated
with folks and continues to resonate. His writings, his soothing,
sage like voice on numerous audio recordings, his his his
irresistible celebrity allure. It all made him just impossible to ignore,
(02:56):
love him or hate him. Plus he was not the
sort of guy to let the limelight go away new
and we'll and we'll get into all that he uh yeah,
he he clung to it, and people gravitated to him
as well. He was more than willing to rub elbows
with scientists like Carl Sagan, artists like hr and Geeger,
performers like John Lennon, uh, and you know, such luminaries
(03:19):
as Alan Ginsburg, a'l just Huxley, William Burrows, Jack Caro,
Whack and kin KESI. He even kept the company of
former enemies when it benefited, and such as Watergate Burglar
and later conservative radio talk show host G Gordon Liddy. Yeah,
so this guy has been widely influential. He was. I
(03:41):
have a derogatory saying that I say sometimes about people
like Leary, although I think Leary was doing this before
this guy. He was the Cato Kalin of his time.
Like he was famous for being famous he was. Yeah, Um,
it wasn't because of a very specific thing he did,
and we learned this through the research. But I have
(04:01):
to be honest that, like, my experience with him was
basically thinking, oh, this was an academic who had done
some studies and then sort of became a guru like figure,
much like Sasha Shulgin when we talked about him during
our two parter on M D M A. Now, Sasha
Shulgin was a practicing chemist who is in his laboratory
up until he died. Right, Uh, Leary was not. He
(04:24):
did do some interesting studies in the fifties and sixties,
and we're gonna get into all of that stuff, but
first I think we should probably talk about his influence
on music. Yeah, I have to say that before I
knew anything about Timothy Leary, I knew the moody blues
song legend of the mind is the has the chorus
Timothy Learies Dead, you know, yeah, and so forth. Wonderful,
(04:46):
wonderful track. I listened to it several times while researching
this episode. Other fan music fans out there might recognize
the the the the sampling of his voice in various recordings,
probably most notable a live version of Tools Third Eye,
where they have the bit to think for yourself, question authority. Um,
(05:07):
and then you'll find numerous other musical projects that make
use of his soothing voice and in fact, and he
was involved in several of these projects as well. Uh,
there's an ambient instrumental like sitar distortion album titled Turn
Onto an End Dropout, which was one of his catchphrases.
And that's actually like really good listening. I fired up
(05:27):
every now and then you just kind of, you know,
chill out and and you know, don't think about what's
being said too much. But um, the interesting thing is
we've alluded to is that there is this kind of
surface level pop culture idea of Leary and it doesn't.
It doesn't necessarily hold up when you start going into
(05:48):
the details of who he was, the sorts of research
projects he was involved in. Um Like I I really
wanted him to be more in line with with another
counterculture contra virtual character. We've talked about John C. Lily, right,
but there's not really a lot to compare the two
besides the LSD connection, right, And that's actually kind of
(06:08):
what's happening with this episode is we're getting a convergence
of two types of episodes that we normally do. We
have a history of doing these two parters on specific
psychedelics and looking at their scientific and medical applications. But
then we also have a history of doing episodes like
the John C. Lily one or the Sasha Shulgin one.
We call them our psychedelic Avengers. And we thought, oh,
(06:33):
we're gonna emerge Tim Leary and this LSD psilocybin research
together and it will be really interesting. It turns out
that that he wasn't actually contributing to the research, but
I think it does come together in a really interesting
way thematically when we get to the whole piece of this,
and in that I think he was a barometer for
America's acceptance of the idea of researching acid as being
(06:59):
a medical tool. Yeah, it's interesting how he was his
just will just discuss he was, you know, a spokesperson
for this. He represented that the supposedly a a learned
academic who was who was advocating LSD as this this
powerful tool, and yet at the same time he also
was such um an inflammatory individual as part of the
(07:20):
counterculture heat uh. A lot of people point to the
harm he did as one of one of the key
figures um more so than John C. Lily uh who
who vilified the counterculture and vilify the use of psychedelics
and one of the reasons that psychedelics were not studied
for for decades. Yeah, there are multiple researchers in the
(07:41):
notes here that we'll talk about throughout the course of
these two episodes who point to Leary as being the
reason why we haven't been able to use LSD in
UM medically approved studies for going on thirty plus years now,
longer than that, I think even it was. It's in
the notes here somewhere, but it was in the mid
sixties when it was banned. So, yeah, strap in because
(08:04):
that's the other thing, we're going to get into a
real basic primer for you on what LSD is, what's
the difference between LSD and psilocybin, and then we'll roll
into the Leary experience. Okay, So to go back to
the very beginning here, let's just go to the the
origins of l s D itself, since that's the main
(08:26):
substance that we're gonna be discussing here. So Swiss chemist
Albert Hoffman synthesized l s D and a Sandas pharmaceutical
lab on November six uh. Sandas was working on a
research project involving a parasitic fungus called ergot that grows
on rye. Now you may remember that Joe and I
(08:48):
recorded an episode titled The Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism that
dealt with the ergot and that that is the same
substance that we're discussing here. And you know, aside from
a noteworthy and truly horrifying breakouts of ergod poisoning in Europe,
it has been linked to various supernatural rights as well
as as well as allegedly individual artist and artistic traditions
(09:10):
throughout history, though I think sometimes those are mere theories, right. Yeah,
And so just to be clear here, San DAWs was
a pharmaceutical company that started in eighteen eighties six and
they began researching for more novel kind of drugs in
nineteen seventeen. They were basically looking for therapeutic leads based
on natural products. So they turned to ergot Why, well,
(09:33):
they had an example that they had already created called ergotamine.
That was a drug that they had created for treating
migraine headaches. So Hoffman came along and he started looking
at ergat and he saw the lisergic acid in it,
and he thought, well, maybe this LSD that I can
synthesize out of this will be a good respiratory stimulants.
So for instance, make maybe if you have asthma, you
(09:54):
take some LSD and it will help you breathe better. Yeah.
So he ended up derived being different compounds from lysergic acid,
and he developed several medicines, including drugs that lowered blood
pressure and improved brain function in the elderly. And he
derived the twenty five in a series of these derivatives.
It was lysergic acid dithalamide or LSD twenty five, and
(10:16):
he thought that LSD stimulate breathing circulation, but test didn't
show anything special, and Sandaz abandoned further study. But then
five years later, Hoffman's thoughts returned to LSD potential and
he felt that it hadn't been fully explored, so he
took the you know, perhaps unusual step of synthesizing another
batch further testing, and during the process he began to
(10:40):
feel strange. Um. The rest is history. He discovered the
properties of LSD and I've I've heard it described as
his his problem child, like it. Basically the rest of
his life he kept coming back to LSD and and
trying to figure out, like, you know what what it
can be used for and how you know, what are
the true properties of this. At this same time, there's
(11:01):
this kind of roller coaster of of cultural awareness of
it taking place in the background. Yeah. Yeah, And he
has that infamous bicycle ride as well, right after he
takes it for the first time that has been sort
of mythologized over the years. Yes. Now, l s D,
to be clear, is a psychedelic drug, meaning that it
alters perceptions of reality, the shape of thoughts, the connections
(11:24):
that one forms. I can't stress enough that one should
set aside any cinematic uh ideas of what acid trips
consists of, because it's it's rare to find a film
that truly feels trippy in a way that matches up
with the actual experience of ls D. You don't. You
don't see imaginary elves or anything. It's if you watch
(11:45):
just films and TV, you just assume that an LSD
trip is a dream sequence, and a dream sequence is
just an LSD trip, that these are in just interchangeable
altered states of reality, right, Yeah, exactly. I remember, like
growing up when kids would start talking about LSD and
it being available to us just all the like various
(12:09):
like bizarre urban myths that people would tell, you know, like, oh,
there's this one guy who took it and uh, he
thinks he's an orange now and he doesn't know how
stop being an orange, or like another one was like
this guy took it and he saw a bunch of
everybody looked like giant white guerrillas to him, and he
fought all these guerrillas and it's like these sort of
(12:29):
spectacular stories. Well, it does have hallucinogenic properties, there's their
mythologized Yeah, I always think back to an episode of
Strangers with Candy where there's a story of a girl
who try took alice D and tried to force herself
through a key hole. You know. Now, that's not to
say that that nothing bad can happen while while one
is on l S D. We'll have some examples of
(12:49):
that as well as we go on here. But in
terms of just like what the experience of the elics
D that basically what is the psychedelic experience? Uh? Oddly enough,
I'm I want to turn to some the words of
Timothy Leary because I thought that that he actually managed
to sum it up rather nicely here and uh, and
I'm gonna go ahead and read it in my impersonation
(13:11):
of Timothy Leary because it's more fun that way for
me and hopefully for you. Of course, the drug dose
does not produce transcendent experience. It merely acts as a
chemical key. It opens the mind, frees the nervous system
of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the
experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes
(13:34):
the preparation of the individual, including his personality, structure, and
his mood. At the same time setting is physical, the weather,
the room's atmosphere, social feelings of persons present toward one another,
and cultural prevailing views as to what is real. It
is for this reason that manuals or guide books are necessary.
(13:54):
Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the
new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as roadmaps
for new interior territories which modern science has made accessible.
So to give you an idea of what LSD is
like outside of the experience, outside of getting turned on,
as Leary would not right, It starts without about an
(14:16):
hour of when you first take it, and it can
last up to twelve hours. Uh, there's a peak about
halfway through that experience. And the effects very widely, but
biologically they include dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, high body temperature, dizziness, sweat,
blurred vision, and tingly hands and feet. The primary effects, though,
(14:38):
are visual, which is more what Leary is describing there.
You get stronger colors, brighter lights, trails, halos, and patterns. Overall,
people say it provides a sense of happiness and euphoria.
That's very emotional. However, though, as we said, this can
also lead to impulsive behavior. And poor judgment. When you're
under the effects of this euphoria. Yeah, you you feel
(14:59):
you're body as if it's something new, something different. You
smell and taste the world in a different way, visual stimulized, processed,
and with new areas of focus, new details, and and
the same can be said for cognition. Uh. And the
same can be said for the basic processing of time.
And so indeed, that is the that is the essential
psychedelic experience, uh, in a nutshell. And there's one thing
(15:20):
I'd like to point out before we go further here,
which is that we don't actually know how it affects
the brain entirely. And why don't we know that because
there's never been any scientific research on how it affects
the brain because it has been banned largely in the
United States and some other countries for for the last
couple of decades, as we mentioned, So this is kind
(15:41):
of a problem. We've got this thing on our hands.
Everybody knows about it, we have a general understanding of it,
but we haven't done the research. Yeah, and we've touched
on this. So when we've talked about marijuana, so a
cybin as well as m d M A you have
these substances that just became banned. Research into their properties right,
was at the very least professionally taboo for so long.
(16:03):
So yeah, despite the fact that they clearly have powerful properties,
we don't necessarily understand them all that much. It's believed
that LSD works similar to serotonin, a neurotransmitters responsible for
regulating moods, appetite, muscle control, sexuality, sleep, and sensory perception.
And ls D seems to interfere with the way the
(16:24):
brain serotonin receptors work, so it may inhibit neurotransmission, stimulated
or both. It also affects the way that the retinas
process information and conduct that information to the brain. So
you might be listening to this and saying, well, hold on,
I've never taken any of this stuff before, and you're
just kind of throwing these terms around. What's the difference
(16:45):
between LSD and psilocybin. While psilocybin is a fun guy,
and that's classified by botanists and my cologists people to
study mushrooms. While they were used by the Aztecs in
religious rituals, the American public didn't really find out about
psilocybin until nineteen fifty seven, and this was when an
article in Life magazine recounted the adventures of a New
(17:08):
York banker in Mexico where he tried it. H Yeah,
LSD totally different. It is colorless, odorless, and tasteless and ingesting.
Just twenty five micrograms is enough to feel effects. Now,
to give you an idea of what twenty five micrograms is,
that's less than the weight of two salt grains. It
is very quickly metabolized by the human body. Now, as
(17:30):
previously established, LSD is a chemical that synthesized in a
laboratory setting, whereas psilocybin is a fun guy that's grown
in nage. One is natural one is created in a lap.
Several chemicals that could go into l s D are
currently sales restricted here in America or are monitored by
the Drug Enforcement Agency. And there's all kinds of different
(17:53):
recipes on how to make it. Some start with lysergic
acid that's derived from morning glory seeds. Others use that
ergot fungus that we talked about earlier and how it
was discovered. They culture that and they extract ergot alkaloids
from it. This fungus and LSD itself can break down
when exposed to light, and that's important to note as well.
In this ergot recipe, the solvents and reagents involved are
(18:16):
also very dangerous. They're poisonous, carcinogenic, and explosive. So it's fun.
I would imagine marking on this stuff, like if you've
got your little laboratory, you've got to be really careful.
You know. This is like uh um, some Jesse and
Walter White stuff where you've got to be really careful
about what kind of stuff you're concocting and what you're
breathing in and whether you're not you blow up your trailer. Yeah,
(18:38):
this is straight up chemistry. And that's the other different
psilocybin is uh is ultimately uh, it's it's about I
guess scavenging or or growing naturally occurring organism. Uh. This
is chemistry. So the way you do it is you
synthesize the ergot alkaloid into a life surgic acid compound,
and you do this by adding chemicals and applying heat.
(18:59):
After word, you isomerize the compounds so that the atoms
in its molecules rearrange. This involves some cooling, mixing, it
with an acid, an actual acid, not the term acid,
also a base, and then evaporating it. The remnants are
iOS lysergic dithalamide, which is then isomerized again and that
(19:20):
produces what's called active LSD. So finally you purify it,
you crystallize it. Afterward, LSD can be made into tablets,
or it's dissolved into liquid or made into gelatine squares.
Most often it's dissolved into ethanol, and then that ethanol
is added to sheets of blotting paper that are then dried,
cut up into little pieces, and people get tabs. It
(19:41):
looks just like the candy that you can buy. I'm
not really sure on the history of that. Can you
know the one where it basically looks like blot Yeah?
Like which came first. It's a good question this is
this like candy cigarettes or is it just a happy
coincidence that this terrible candy looks like acid? Yeah? That
is curious. If any listeners know, please let us in
(20:02):
on the secret. There A lot of you have probably
also heard about bad trips. We mentioned them earlier. Well,
it's not really clear what causes these bad trips, but
they result in fear and paranoia, and treatment usually requires
basically going to a quiet space so that the user
can just come down, but sometimes you have to administer
anti anxiety medication or tranquilizers, so that that's important to
(20:25):
remember as well. Yeah, this makes me think of a
lot of the research involving psilocybin um that really ultimately
kind of backs up some of what Leary said in
that that bit that I read in that a lot
of it comes down to priming, preparing the individual for
what the trip is going to consist of, and then
of course personal medical and personal psychiatric history is going
(20:48):
to play into that scenario. Yeah. Absolutely. Now you've also
probably heard of flashbacks, right, this is the other thing
like when when I was in high school, like all
the legends, it was like, Oh, he's gonna see those
White Guerrillas every year for the rest of his life,
right like something like that. Oh yeah, it's this is
something that is that pops up in films and TV
from time to time, and it's either just completely ridiculous,
(21:09):
like the White Guerrillas, or even when it is a
lot cooler and more believable, say with the first season
of True Detective, there's still a lot a lot of
doubts from some individuals to to what extent this is
a thing or or a realistic depiction of it if
it is. Yeah, here's the deal with flashbacks. There's no
evidence to support the idea that LSD remains in your
(21:30):
body forever in amounts inside your brain or spinal fluid.
People say that, but we don't have any evidence on it.
Why because we really haven't been able to study it. Right. Uh.
Some people think though, that this is what causes flashbacks.
The majority of users the report never having had flashbacks,
and of those who have reported it, many are mentally ill,
(21:52):
and some doctors believe that what they're perceiving is actually
a form of psychosis that emerged due to the LSD use.
There's actually a medically recognized disorder called hallucinogen persisting perceptive disorder,
and this is for people who constantly experience visual hallucinations
after they take LSD. This is a little different than
(22:14):
the idea of flashbacks, right. I mean, it's also worth
noting that the visual hallucinations can occur for a number
of reasons. Um, So it's it's entirely possible that one
could could could take LSD and then what a year later,
they experienced some sort of visual hallucination and one of
the main ways they can describe it is the narrative
of acid flashbacks and then they're going and then that
(22:36):
becomes encoded in memory. So one last thing I want
to make clear about ls D before we we cap
off this summary here. LSD is not an addictive drug.
So if somebody tells you you know you're gonna take that,
you're gonna get hooked on it or something like that,
that's just patently untrue. Uh. The real basic way that
it works is that if you take it a lot,
(22:59):
your body is going to get used to it, and
subsequently the effects are going to lessen over time. So
that's the opposite of something that you become addicted to.
It doesn't work in the same way as something like heroin.
Right though then some people may point out there's the
whole idea that like, the first time you take heroin
is the best, and then you're always chasing that dragon. Uh.
(23:20):
But still, the LSD, psilocybin, d m T, any of
these psychedelic substances that we've discussed on the program before,
they are they are not addictive in the the very
literal way that stuff like heroin is. Alright, we're gonna
take a quick break and we come back. We're going
to continue to talk about the psychedelics, and in particular,
we're gonna talk about psychedelics in medicine. Alright, we're back. So,
(23:45):
according to Timothy Leary's archivist, a guy named Michael Horowitz,
before Leary, the research being done on psychedelics was mostly
done by the CIA and the Army. Uh makes us
think of d and stranger things. Yeah, but they were
looking to weaponize it, dosing subjects without their knowledge. Now,
(24:07):
what he's actually talking about is the CIS attempts with
stuff like Project Bluebird and Project mk Ultra to develop
mind control techniques. We actually have an episode about Stranger
Things coming up in the next couple of weeks where
we're going to talk more about this stuff. The basic
idea here that I'm gonna boil it down quickly is
that they were inspired by Nazi research experiments in the
(24:27):
Dakow concentration camp. Subsequently, they tested on helpless populations like prisoners,
drug addicts, and mental patients, and at one point the
government reportedly ordered over a hundred million doses of LSD
from sand DAWs, that company that discovered it, so that
they could experiment with contaminating a water supply. So they
(24:48):
wanted to weaponize this and basically see like, can we
put a whole bunch of LSD in one of our
enemies water supplies? You know this really sad thing about this,
uh portion of the story is the it underlies, uh
you know, a fact about military first research. You know
that essentially mility military researchers come in and say, okay,
(25:10):
can we use it to kill people? Better? Can we
use it to enable our our our our warfare in
some way, shape or form, And if not, well then
we're done with it. We see this time and time
again on the show, and whenever we dig deep into topics,
whether it be uh the weaponization of animals we've done
an episode on, or a lot of our space based
stuff is usually related to weaponizing space at some point. Uh. So, Actually,
(25:35):
the government Sandas wouldn't supply them that much, so they
turned to another company. They wanted the company to break
sandas is patent and produce the chemical, but the whole
thing never came to pass, and the government essentially deemed
LSD too unpredictable for their general use. Now, Leary pioneered
research into how psychedelics could reveal the nature of human
(25:56):
consciousness and possibly help people with depression and anxiety, but
he also precipitated a backlash against psychedelics that criminalized them
and made it impossible for others to do research on them. Uh.
Leary supporters argue, that's not Leary's fault. This would have
happened anyways, you know, And I can see, you know,
(26:17):
I can see both sides of that. But he was
undoubtedly m a key figure and in a in a
very um, you know, ultimately a very like hateable figure.
Like part of his his charisma and his charm, it
just worked like poison against the people who already had,
you know, a conservative bent. Yeah, it's true, and we're
(26:37):
going to see time and time again people turn against him,
and not the kind of people that you would expect. Right,
So let's back up for a second here, what about
before Leary? How we're scientists and researchers looking at it
before that. Well, in the nineteen fifties, some researchers began
investigating whether psychedelics could treat mental health disorders or addiction.
The federal government funded a hundred and sixteen of these studies.
(26:59):
But between nineteen fifty three and nineteen seventy three, again
I turned to our episode on M D, M A
and Sasha and Shulgin. They're perfect example of this. Along
those lines is kind of what was going on with
psychiatrists and various researchers working with LSD and patients to
see how it could work. Sandaz was essentially selling it
(27:21):
as a psychiatric product, right and these and these were
reputable research operations. We had not yet gotten to the
point where Leary comes along or or John C. Lily
comes along and you know, starts giving it to dolphins, yeah, exactly,
or or giving it to himself while he's hanging out
with dolphins. Uh. Now, the sam Does Company patented it,
(27:42):
but they sold it as Della sid beginning in nineteen
forty seven, and they sold it in twenty five microgram
tablets that were designed for analytical psychotherapy. They suggested that
the psychiatrists themselves take it so that they could better
understand their patients experiences. Now, when they stopped making it,
they said, this is about the fact that there's a
(28:02):
lack of regulation and that there's inaccurate information being perpetuated
about this drug. But between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty five,
forty thousand patients were given Delhi sid tablets basically legal LSD,
and Dr Max Wrinkle was the first to bring LSD
to the United States and then test it on a
(28:22):
population of a hundred volunteers. He and his colleague Dr
Paul Hope noted that LSD produced effects that quote mimic
schizophrenic psychosis. So this is you can see what there's
some as Another theme that we come back to over
and over again on the show is early psychological theory
(28:43):
seems to be very uh generalized and biased, right, and
this is another example of that. They're like, oh, there's
this thing. It just seems to make you schizophrenic, you know,
and there just wasn't enough research behind it. But recreational
drug use increased dramatically in the sixt s, such that
as many as two million people had dropped acid by
(29:04):
the nineteen seventies. So by nineteen sixty five there were
very few researchers who were allowed to possess LSD. Only
six projects were conducted in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen seventy,
the US Congress added psychedelics into the government War on Drugs,
and the federal government declared these drugs had no medical use.
The chairman for New Jersey's Narcotic Drug Study Commission called
(29:28):
LSD the greatest threat facing the country today, more dangerous
than the Vietnam War. It seems like a little hyperbot.
By nineteen seventy four, the National Institutes for Mental Health
declared that LSD had quote no real therapeutic value. So
there was a strong establishment bent against this drug, which
(29:50):
Timothy Leary unfortunately did not help with his antics. UH. Today,
though l s D is a Schedule one drug in
the United States, it's under the Controlled subs sens Is Act.
This basically means the government believes that it has high
abuse potential, which we've already established that's not addictive. UH,
it has a lack of accepted safe uses when taken
(30:11):
under medical supervision. We'll talk a little bit about how
there actually are some of those, and that it basically
has no current medical use in their minds. Again, there's
evidence that it does. Now. I want to remind everybody
that by placing it as a Schedule one, they're placing
it in the same category as marijuana and uh, and
they're placing it in a stricter category than category two,
(30:32):
which includes cocaine. Yep. So since then, only a small
number of studies have been conducted. You've got small sample sizes,
so there's not a lot of research that we can
rely on. The early results are broad. They suggest that
when used by people without a family history or risk
of psychological problems, psychedelics can actually make us kinder, calmer,
(30:55):
and better at our jobs. They also help us solve
problems more creatively and make us more open minded and generous. Yeah,
it's it's interesting when you look at the research here
about these potential uses for psychedelics that one is insolute
reminded of meditation, because both both meditation and psilocybin have
been shown to shut down the default fault mode network,
(31:18):
that constant stream of worry chat about past and future
in your brain um, and that the brain activity is
similar even if the experience you know, obviously isn't going
to always be the same though there there is often
a certain amount of crossover UM and we'll have to
get into that more when we do a focus on
meditation in the future. Yeah, I mean, what Robert's referring
(31:39):
to is the default mode and network. This is a
group of structures in the brain. They're found in the
frontal and prefrontal cortex. That's what's responsible for our ego
and our sense of self, and it's why we as
humans have very rigid habitual thinking that let's face it,
we can obsess over right on psychedelics that slows down
and the boundaries betwe in the self in the world dissolve,
(32:01):
allowing for therapy sessions that can be more effective. Yeah. Yeah,
there are a number of excellent studies here. At two
thousand and eleven study at John Hopkins University gave high
doses of psilocybin to fifty one test subjects and according
to ABC News, a thirty of these individuals experienced measurable
personality changes that lasted more than a year. So as
(32:23):
of twenty six, a year ago, about five hundred people
have participated informal psilocybin experience. That's not LSD. It's worth
remembering though, that these volunteers are self selected and are
carefully screened and then are guided by therapists. So psychedelics
used outside of control settings, yes, they can cause problems,
(32:45):
including bad trips where the users feel extremely anxious and depressed.
This doesn't account for the occasional flashbacks that we talked
about earlier, whether that's a real thing or not. Right,
the possible future of research is very promising. Patients are
recommend ended for treatment by a doctor, for instance, This
might be what we we look at in a few years. Right,
you get recommended for LSD R psilocybin treatment by your doctor.
(33:09):
They get you screened for mental illness, They look at
your heart to see if you have any heart conditions.
Then they're prepping you about what to expect. You're monitored
by a medical professional while you're under the effects. This
is someone that they have, you know, established a trusting
relationship with you. Is not just some scary orderly who
stands there the whole time. They have to work with
(33:30):
you for at least six to eight hours ahead of time.
Then the experience you have is contained, so it's something
you can build a life around, right, you can you
can figure out how to solve the problems that you're
going in for around this. Across the board, though, like you,
we're looking at at openness is one of the key
positive results of psaulocybin use other hallucinations that have been
(33:54):
explored in these various research programs. Yeah, and so you
look at what are the possibilities here. If we can
get the FDA to reschedule it, what can we do
with it? Well, there, I've already been studies that have
looked at how psilocybin or LSD can be used to
help terminal patients deal with the end of life anxiety.
You can potentially help people who have addictive problems. There's
(34:16):
been studies that have been done on smoking cessation and
alcoholism related to it. Uh. And then also psychedelics can
potentially help mental wellness. There's been a number of studies
that have been done basically looking at how it can
prolong positive changes in attitude and mood. Um. When I
think about LSD or psilocybin for myself, I've never taken either,
(34:42):
But when I hear these very controlled laboratory conditions described
as somebody who's never taken it, that's actually more appealing
to me. The idea of it being done in a
controlled setting like that. Well, you know, the crazy part
about it is that like the idea of of say
(35:02):
people or young people taking LSD, solocybin or whatever and
not really knowing what they're doing and having, you know,
maybe a positive experience, maybe a negative like that's that's
not in keeping a with the clinical use of it.
But but all but be with the with the traditional
use of some of these substances, where you would have
not a scientist but a shaman to administer these things.
(35:23):
There were rituals, there were there was a process. It
was communal. Yeah, it was a communal experience with lots
of priming. Yeah. Now, so just from my perspective, because
I know I have a history of depression and anxiety,
and my family has a history of depression and anxiety,
I've always worried, well, I don't want to take this
because I might have a bad reaction, right, Remember what
they said some of the setup was because they needed
(35:46):
to screen you for certain things. I'm also curious though
they say things like it's going to increase your interest
in fantasy and imagination, and I want to know how
much more interested in fantasy and imagination I can get,
because I'm already pretty well down that rabbit hole. One
of the things that these researchers say is that when
they take a look at it. It can help change
(36:06):
your personality if you're having personality problems, right that the
general idea is that personality is fixed after the age
of thirty, but with the help of psychedelics, you may
be able to overcome some you know, boundaries that you're
facing in that respect. And I just think that's interesting.
I've always just kind of anecdotally thought about it about
ten years later than that. Like pretty much everybody I know,
(36:30):
by the time they're forty, they are who they are
and they're going to be that way. I have not
seen anybody make any drastic changes, but it seems like
if they have really difficult emotional problems in life that
they're trying to get over, it seems like there's a
possibility here that if we were only able to study
this further, it might be an option for people like that. Yeah,
(36:50):
I mean, I guess it's one of those things where
you know, we we like, we may think of ourselves
a set in stone after a certain point, but but
we're not. We're not really. I mean, we know that
the mind is in memory is more malleable than that.
Uh So, psychedelics come in as a as a possible
means to loosen things up so that they can be reset. Uh.
(37:12):
And of course that being said, drugs are not the
only thing that I think that they can allow a
person to do that. I mean, sometimes something is simple,
is say travel, uh, new experiences, um, reading a book
you wouldn't have otherwise read this sort of thing. Generally,
having a creative curiosity about life uh can can change
(37:33):
who you are. I think one of the interesting things
some of these studies of is that it makes you wonder, like,
is the person that has administered the substance. Are they
this the kind of person that is not a novelty seeker?
They're not. They don't seek out new experiences otherwise. Like
maybe that's the kind of individual for whom some potential
(37:54):
future treatment would be best used. Like somebody who's who
really can't shake some thing negative in their life. Uh.
And they have a pretty established routine if how things are,
But at the same time they recognize that there's something
about that routine that is dysfunctional for them or for
the world around. Yeah, there's some sort of cycle that
needs to be broken. Uh, there's something that needs to
(38:15):
be you know, just pulled apart so it can be
put back together. In a slightly different form. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's a good way to approach it. So
why don't we take another break, and then when we
get back, we're gonna officially dive into the Leary stuff,
and we're gonna start right at the beginning. Thank thank Alright,
we're back. Okay, So we're gonna talk about Timothy Leary
(38:38):
for the rest of this episode and then into the
next episode as well. Uh, you know, we're gonna start
at the beginning because I think a lot of the
stuff that happens on early on in his life is
going to be key. And it's interesting when we talk
about this in terms of like, at what point is
someone's personality set? At what point is somebody's destiny kind
of set? Well, according to Robert Greenfield, who wrote to
(39:01):
Timothy Learry a biography, yeah you can. You can sort
of see a lot of that in Leary's early life.
So he was born October ninety and Springfield, Massachusetts to
an Irish Catholic family. His father with a stroll as
a struggling dentist, and his mother was a working mother.
That's my neck of the woods, Stoffield, Massachusetts. Yeah, my
(39:21):
uncle works there. It's just my whole family is from
the western part of that state. So I have a
very clear picture in my head now of what his
his young upbringing was like. So, according to Greenfield's biography,
you can really attribute a lot of learies rebel rebellious
spirit to his relationship with his father Tote, an alcoholic
(39:43):
who brought imbalance to the home and depended on charity
from family loans to prop up his struggling dental practice.
And now the young Tim Larry you know, occasionally stood
up to his father, but was also forced to hide
from him on the roof on some occasions, and then
total left the family when Tim was on fourteen UH,
leaving him to find solace in books about mythic heroes
(40:04):
and UH legends, and he was determined to become something better,
greater than his father, and his mother obsessed as well
over her her child's future, like how can I engineer
uh somebody for success? And so Greenfield argues that we
see the seeds of Leary's relationships with authority figures throughout
his life, you know, pinpointed in his early life as
(40:27):
well as his relationships with women. He would go through
periods of finding structure within an within an institution, but
would ultimately rebel against its order, and in times of
distress he'd seek out women and for positive father figures.
He turned to UH, not to his own father, of course,
but to a flamboyant and sometimes dramatic family members. And
he depended on the emotional and financial support UH first
(40:51):
of all of his mother and UH and in Greenfield
identifies a pattern of his leaving most of them along
the way. Yeah. I mean, I think like one of
the off whole themes that we're going to notice by
the time we get to the end of this two
parter is that he left a a wake behind him
of either abused people or dead people. I mean, well,
(41:14):
we're gonna get into it. Yeah. There are a number
of self destructive tendencies in Timothy Learry's life, al right.
So in terms of his his school and his essentially
pre psychedelics career, UH Learry attended classical high school alongside
American author, a biographer and historian William Manchester. Somebody might
(41:35):
be a familiar with him from a world lit only
by fire The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, which is
an excellent book. And he also went to the same
school as a Theodore Geisel or Dr Seuss. He went
to the College of Holy Cross and Worcester, uh is
a strict Catholic school that of course inspired rebellion from Larry.
He made money gambling on sports. He frequently hopped the
(41:57):
wall with other adventure seekers in or Or to go
out drinking in town and chase girls. My father from Worcester.
So also, like this is like connecting the dots. So
to give you an idea here if if you're not
familiar with messages at all, Springfields in the western part
of the state, Worcester sort of in the middle, but
between Springfield and Boston. So it's not I mean, it's
(42:19):
like forty five minutes probably from where he grew up.
All right, Well, the next place we're going on the
map here for Leary is west Point, and this is
where he initially just goes all in on the culture
of West Point. He wrote, according to the Greenfield, he's
writing back to his mom with just the maximum amount
of west Point lingo you can possibly use. And this
(42:39):
is telling to like he'll start off really into a
culture and then he rebels, and indeed he does. He
returns to his old ways, even faces a court martial
for drunken behavior. He's acquitted, but then he ends up
facing what's known as the silence, or was known as
the silence. This was a policy that Australized cadets who
broke the honor code, and this was discontinued in seventy three.
(43:01):
And Uh. He ultimately ends up resigning and is honorably
discharged by the army. Then he applies to colleges across America.
The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa accepted in first, so
that's where he went. He met Dr Donald Angus Ramsdell,
a Harvard psychology PhD, a man who Leary would later
(43:22):
refer to as Dr d which I found that interesting
given our episodes on the real Doctor John Dyah. And Uh.
He soon immersed himself in the study of psychology and
in biology, and now having lost his draft de term deferment,
he enrolled in r OTC to avoid a draft. And
then he also ran a foul of the school here
(43:45):
due to womanizing so much though the dean even accused
him of sullying quote the honor of Southern womanhood, and
he was expelled. Man like just from my point perspective
from you know, being from up in New England and
in the tooth thousands moving to the South into a
progressive southern city. I had a lot of culture shock.
(44:06):
I'm trying to imagine what it was like for this guy,
you know, all these years ago, Uh, just transitioning and
jumping around and getting into trouble and just really shaking
things up everywhere he went. Well, it's interesting. One of
the sort of side things in in Greenfield's biography that
he points out is that apparently at the time the
university in Tuscaloosa, you had these various liberal academics and
(44:30):
in many cases, um homosexual academics who had found sort
of a safe environment in which to thrive. So in
a in a sense like if Timothy Leary was going
to go to anywhere in the American South at that point,
Tuscaloose was probably one of the places to go. And
he did find people who who valued him and embraced him,
(44:50):
you know initially, but he wasn't quite able to to
finish his his academic duties. Oh of course not now.
On the advice of Dr d he goes on to
a role in the univer of Illinois he lines up
work in the psychology department, and he eventually completes his
education at Tuscaloosa remotely. But uh yeah, it's one of
(45:11):
these situations where, um, you just see this pattern over
and over again. As Greenfield writes, a clear pattern in
his life had already emerged whenever Tim Leary began accepting
the kind of success for which he had been programmed
since birth by his mother, he would stop the process
by indulging, just as his father had done before him,
in self destructive behavior. So Leary then goes on to
(45:33):
get his master's degree at the University of Washington. We're
talking about Washington State now, So he's already jumped from
New England to Alabama, to Illinois, and now up to
Washington State. He received his doctorate in psychology in nineteen
fifty from the University of California at Berkeley. So then
he jumps down to California. Here he decided that conventional
psychotherapy was useless and he began experimenting with group therapy
(45:58):
and transactional analysis. So this gives you an idea of
like where he was that sort of academically disciplined wise
before he was introduced to psychedelics. His first wife, Mary Anne,
committed suicide during this time. This was in nineteen fifty five.
This left him to raise their two children alone. We
have more on this obviously. Yeah, this was just a
(46:21):
real sad situation for a number of reasons. But basically,
uh he he and Mary Anne had a very open relationship.
Well yeah, but also just a chaotic relationship, but just
a lot of according to to Greenfield's account in the biography,
just a lot of negative vibes in this uh, in
this relationship, a lot was not working. Leary was apparently
(46:44):
looking to end the relationship in the very near future anyway,
and then she committed suicide and it was It's not
like Leary wasn't an unfeeling person like this had a
huge effect on him, like he would write about it,
just essentially a pit that he wasn't able to emerge
from emotionally, for you, for for decades even, and then
(47:06):
you know, to to say nothing then of the children
as well. Now, the urban legend of this goes this
is what you know. I can't imagine how many articles
and books Robert and I read for this, but it
probably popped up in every single one of them. Is
that the night before they were having an argument about
their open relationship and about that he was in a
relationship with a woman that he loved more than Mary
(47:27):
and his wife, and that she was upset about this
and she wanted him to break it off, and he
went into the bedroom and said, it's your problem, not mine,
and closed the door. When he woke up in the morning,
she was dead. She had suffocated herself in the garage
inside the family car. Yeah. In Greenfield's account, he he
(47:47):
kind of points to the different versions of the story,
so like there's the there's like a slightly different version
that he that he tells the authorities and then he
writes about later, and you know, you can sort of
try to find the truth between all of these. Uh uh.
And yeah, it's just a really ugly situation with an
ugly ending it is, but it's also, unfortunately, I think,
(48:10):
an important sign of things to come with this guy
and and sort of where his priorities were, right. Uh.
And I don't want to end this this episode because
we're about to wrap up our first part here, but
I don't want to end it on such a super downer. Uh.
He went on afterwards to teach at Berkeley and he
actually was the director of psychological research at the Kaiser
(48:32):
Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, from nineteen fifty five until
nineteen fifty eight. Now, during this period, uh, after his
wife's suicide, Uh, he he also ends up going to
uh to Europe a few times. He goes to Spain,
he goes to Italy, and uh, this is kind of key.
There was this, um, there was this period of time
(48:53):
when he was when he was in Spain and he
suddenly experienced this some sort of mysterious illness, so swelling pain. Uh.
He was attended to buy a Danish doctor and he
ends up passing this night in misery, ends up sending
the kids to stay with another couple of of of
Americans were staying close by, and he says, he said
(49:15):
that he felt like he died during this time, that
he that he let go and they put the past
behind him. But you know, in a very interesting way,
it was kind of his first psychedelic experience, like a
taste of this altered state as a you know, not
to be confused with all the times he'd gotten just
blindly drunk in the past, because he had previously and
for a lot of his life, had a severe alcohol problem.
(49:39):
But it's it's shortly after that too, that Frank Baron,
who was who was a colleague from Berkeley. Uh. He
he visited Leary during an unproductive stay in Florence, Italy.
He was always going on these trips to try and
you know, to to write various things. And at this
point Barren told him that during his research into creativity
he had interviewed a psychiatrist who had used matt Aig
(50:00):
mushrooms to produce visions and trances, and that Baron had
tried them as well, resulting in a mystical transcendental insight. Now,
interestingly enough, Leary warned him that he might lose his
scientific credibility to be babbled on about this sort of thing. Um,
And that, my friends, is what we call foreshadowing. Yes,
so in the next episode we will get into the
(50:23):
psychedelic experience of of Leary, basically one continuous psychedelic experience
that lasted his entire life and uh basically dragged American
culture with Yeah, please make sure that you tune into
that second part. It's got a lot more of the
juicy details of Timothy Leary's life and the science and
research that he did into LSD and psilocybin. If you
(50:44):
want to reach out to us about this episode and
any of the stuff we brought up today regarding LSD
research or possibly Timothy Leary's history, you can always get
us on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter,
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you want to get into was the old fashioned way,
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(51:15):
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