Medicine 1963: Psychic Research: LSDùAnd All That
LSD—And All That
For a couple of freewheeling years, two young Harvard psychologists have carried on wide-ranging experiments with mind-altering drugs. At the university's Center for Research in Personality, they sent their graduate-student subjects floating off into other-worldly visions of new and fantastic forms of "reality" and a new meaning of life. Now the cosmic ball is over. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, both Ph.D.s, are being dropped from the Harvard faculty because university authorities agree with the medical profession that the drugs they used are too dangerous for campus experiments.
In Boston's newest medical building on Emerson Place last week, they were settling into plush offices with the name "International Federation for Internal Freedom." They sounded as euphoric as any of their subjects under the influence of psilocybin, their favorite "consciousness-expanding" drug. Said Leary: "This is much more important than Harvard."
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