TIMOTHY LEARY'S LONG ACID TRIP

Psychedelics are supposed to destroy the ego, but they didn't stop LSD
pioneer Tim Leary, who never lost his penchant for
self-promotion.

My intersection with LSD came at a time when Dr. Timothy Leary's
legacy had been watered down to near-flavorlessness. It went as
follows: One tab of acid at a late-era Grateful Dead show at Soldier
Field, where I hallucinated a giant eagle and got mocked by a nurse
for wearing a necklace made of Fimo beads that I'd bought in Oregon;
another tab two nights later, followed by eight hours of seeing
vampires crawl across a leaky apartment ceiling in Evanston, Illinois;
and about a quarter-tab in the spring of 1994, which led to a night of
then-stereotypically freaky New Orleans French Quarter tourism.

While Leary was going about the slow process of dying online in
Beverly Hills, surrounded by web geeks who hadn't been born when he
began to expand his consciousness, I felt like I was sucking the fumes
from a bus that had long since left the station.

In these wretched drug days of widespread crystal-meth addiction,
transcontinental Xanax-popping and speed-laced Mexican ditch weed
posing as The Chron, it's harder than ever to swallow the idea that
mind-altering drug use could transform our staggering society.

That prospect becomes even harder to entertain when you consider the
most famous proponent of narcotics-fueled social change.

Robert Greenfield's comprehensive biography of Leary is an epically
thrilling, wicked epitaph for the vain, bizarre, self-promoting guru
who, depending on your perspective, either poisoned or blessed our
culture with his ridiculous "turn on, tune in and drop out" mantra.

As Greenfield boldly and correctly asserts, Leary was the "wrong man"
to inherit the future of psychedelic research.

Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the term "psychedelic," even
compared Leary to Hitler -- not for the magnitude of his crimes (which
were absurd and, other than escaping from prison, arguably not even
criminal) but for the transcendent quality of his sociopathic
megalomania, which he parlayed into drug guru status.

This 600-page tome doesn't really begin to percolate until Leary
starts taking drugs.

Until then, it's standard biography: Thoughts of an absent alcoholic
father traumatize an intelligent but self-absorbed West Point dropout.

A sad childhood leads our protagonist down the path to unfaithful
husbandry.

His first wife, the mother of his two children, commits
suicide.

That terrible event, which would shatter an ordinary life, barely
seemed to affect Leary; if psychedelics are supposed to destroy the
ego, they didn't do a very good job with Tim Leary. The book quotes an
anthropologist, experienced with tribal drug-taking cultures, who in
the fall of 1960 said that peyote had "no place in our culture or our
mythology.

We don't have anything that enables us to explain or deal with this
and therefore I don't think it is something we can introduce." But by
then it was too late. Leary had already slipped acid into the well.

In Greenfield's telling, the great decade began as self-parody in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Leary was still a lecturer at Harvard.
More specifically, it was Halloween, 1960. Leary was conducting
sleazy, absurd drug "experiments" at his house.

A houseguest ingested a lot of psilocybin. Meanwhile, Leary's preteen
daughter Susan was having a slumber party upstairs.

The guest went upstairs and lay in the bed in the middle of the room.
When Leary pulled him out, his guest referred to the girls as
"middle-class bitches" who needed him to "stir them up a little."
Leary almost let him, deciding at the last second that the party was
Susan's "trip." He said, "You have the right to do anything you want
so long as you don't lay your trip on anyone else." What Greenfield
refers to as "the first commandment of the psychedelic era" was
actually born as a way to keep a guy from sexually molesting a bunch
of girls.

I suppose Leary should, at least, get credit for preventing
that.

Greenfield systematically shatters the still-self-perpetuating myths
of what was once called the counterculture, portraying it as little
more than a freaky mirror image of mainstream celebrity-obsessed
America. He's brilliant at charting the course that self-styled 1960s
rebels took toward careerism and self-aggrandisement, though certain
characters, like Ken Kesey and Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass, come off
better than others.

A little more than halfway through the book, as the tumult of 1968
swirls around Leary, Greenfield pinpoints the birth of the
"speaker-leader phenomenon, which made stars out of the leading
counterculture figures":

Tim was a pioneer of the lifestyle.

His view of what was going on in America was restricted to what he saw
on his way to and from the airport, the questions he answered after
his lecture, and whatever happened at the party that followed.

Like a rock star, Tim appeared, performed, and then left. Between his
own life and the lives of those more than twenty-five years younger
than he, there was virtually no connection.

Throughout, Leary comes off as a political flake, with the notable
exception of his futile but passionate attempts to get the Yippies to
call off the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests.

Otherwise, he was either behind the times or way off in his
assessments. He didn't attend his first peace rally until 1969. His
meandering testimony in front of Ted Kennedy at the 1966 Senate LSD
hearings (which Greenfield re-creates brilliantly) hurt his cause,
though maybe his cause was always self-promotion anyway.

He allowed the Weathermen to break him out of prison and then escaped
to Algeria, where he aligned himself with a clearly insane Eldridge
Cleaver.

When Leary arrives in Algeria for a period of "exile" after his
dramatic California prison break, Greenfield's book really takes off.
Zonked on more drugs and booze than seems humanly possible, Leary
continually misread his own surroundings. In an October 1970 letter to
Allen Ginsberg, he described Algeria -- an austere Muslim state ruled
by a military dictatorship -- as "perfect. Great political Satori....
Socialism works here.... Young people smiling... no irritation... no
money hustle, spirit of youth & growth." He started carrying guns and
advocating violence, praising dynamite as "the white light, the
external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha." He
encouraged the Weathermen to start hijacking planes and kidnapping
"prominent sports figures." Then the zeitgeist shifted.

Leary became a bit of an underdog.

The trip may be enjoyable and enlightening, but the hangover is always
more dramatic.

At this point, Greenfield's portrayal softens.

Leary suddenly becomes a figure of pathos, a cocaine-snorting Willy
Loman who can't understand that the world has no more use for him.
Under the strange thrall of an international arms dealer in
Switzerland, Leary runs into Andy Warhol at a party. "There are only
three real geniuses in America," Greenfield quotes him as saying to
Warhol. "You and me, and the third changes all the time." Less true
words were never spoken.

No scene in the book captures that lost hope better than an encounter
between Leary and Charles Manson, who occupied an adjacent room in
solitary confinement at Folsom Prison in the mid-1970s. Compared with
Manson, Timothy Leary was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The transcription
of their conversations comes from Leary's own writings and therefore
isn't particularly reliable, but it still illuminates.

Manson: "We were all your students, you know. You had everyone looking
up to you. You could have led the people anywhere you wanted.... And
you didn't tell them what to do." Leary: "I didn't want to impose my
realities. The idea is that everybody takes responsibility for his
nervous system, creates his own reality.

Anything else is
brainwashing." Manson: "That was your mistake.

No one wants responsibility. Everyone wants to be told what to do,
what to believe, what's really true and really real."

More than anyone else, Leary embodied the mixed-up dreams of the '60s.
It's sad that Charles Manson saw into the American psyche more
accurately than he did. If Leary's ideals got flushed away so quickly,
like a stash in an airport bathroom, he couldn't possibly have been
right.

Leary's life was one of those rare American ones with a second act.
After the 1970s he moved to Beverly Hills, went on a political
minstrel-show lecture tour with G. Gordon Liddy, snorted coke in the
Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner and hung out at the Viper Room. He
also developed some of the earliest interactive computer games.

What lessons are we to learn from such a life? Obviously, the
specifics don't apply to us ordinary mortals.

And we certainly don't want to follow Leary's lead in terms of family
life. As Greenfield painstakingly details, he was a serially bad
husband and an even worse father. Leary's careerism, while
quintessentially American, was corrosive and destructive, another
warning siren against the false promises of celebrity-obsessed modernity.

Yet his life contained surprising pockets of peace, extraordinary
grace notes. When Leary's famous commune in Millbrook, New York,
wasn't being raided by local authorities or invaded by trashy
jet-setting hipsters, people achieved transcendence there, or at least
had a lot of fun. As Greenfield writes, "When Charlie Mingus heard the
tap in the sink yowling, followed by banging noises, he took out his
bass and began playing counterpoint." Of all the crazy scenes in the
book, that's the one I would have most liked to see, though I also
enjoyed the one where Leary's wife attempts a seduction of Jerry Brown
in order to blackmail Leary out of prison.

Used in the right doses by the right people, under controlled
circumstances, certain drugs have creative potential.

Despite Leary's many ego-fueled missteps, his ideas about the
transformative powers of psychedelic drugs still hold some water.

In his mind-bending book Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck --
who is rapidly becoming our generation's foremost proponent of
controlled psychedelic experimentation--called Leary the "central
villain in the psychedelic saga...naive, charismatic, sloppy,
self-promotional and out of control." It's hard to argue with that
assessment, but in later interviews, Pinchbeck softened this view,
saying that Leary was a product of his time, a temporal blip in human
understanding of psychedelic substances.

While I find Leary's writing bloated, self-absorbed and, let's face
it, hippy-dippy and dated, Pinchbeck makes a far more persuasive,
modern case for psychedelics. Breaking Open the Head is The Doors of
Perception written from a skeptical East Village perspective.
Pinchbeck's latest book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, expands on
his thesis, arguing that psychedelics may be opening a portal to a
transformation of consciousness that has the potential to change the
world forever.

I can't say whether I believe that or not, and I certainly hope the
Phoenix Suns win an NBA title before this evolution happens, but
Pinchbeck's skeptical, analytic reportorial approach to the subject
appeals to my brain far more than Leary's musty counterculture rhetoric.

It was, in fact, Pinchbeck who led me to start experimenting with
psychedelic drugs again last year. I had neither the time, the
resources nor the physical energy to go on an acid trip again, and I
didn't have much interest, either.

But I was really into the idea of trying something called Salvia
divinorum.

Salvia is a branch of the sage family that has long been known to have
psychotropic qualities. According to Pinchbeck, the trips are short,
pleasant and revelatory (though not to be taken lightly), and they
don't cause much of a hangover. Salvia visions tend to center around a
whimsical spirit that appears to be half-woman, half-plant. She
occupies a domain that appears as a combination of fairy garden
wonderland and surrealist painting. That sounded interesting to me.

I did some research and found the dosage I thought would suit me best.
Though the drug is still legal where I live, it's sold in some pretty
sketchy stores.

I found one and made the buy. Later that night, I settled into my easy
chair with a big cup of water by my side and smoked a bowl.
Immediately, I felt myself being pressed back into my chair, and then
I closed my eyes. I traveled through a series of doors that slammed
behind me as I passed them, while hearing a strange, but not scary,
rhythmic chant, something along the lines of "welcome, welcome," and
then I was hurtling through space.

I landed in a garden, and sure enough I met the spirit.

She showed me around for a couple of minutes, and then I opened my
eyes. The trip was over.

About ten days later I went on another voyage, which proved pretty
similar. Another night I smoked the Salvia; it seemed to have little
effect. I fell asleep instead of tripping.

In the middle of the night, I perceived that a flash of light had
filled the room, though it didn't wake up my wife. I heard, and even
felt, an enormous thud. A squat, thick stone warrior was standing at
the foot of my bed, unmoving, unspeaking. It was like he'd been sent
to me as a gift or an offering, or maybe a warning.

Dude. That was freaky.

Salvia has definitely altered my perception of the
world.

I now walk around wondering if there really are other dimensions out
there, untouched and unnoticed by our under-used brains.

Timothy Leary would have been proud.

But if we can learn anything from Leary's experience, it's that we
don't need drug prophets, and that collective tripping isn't going to
transform reality; it's just going to shift our present reality around
a little.

I share my experience because I think it's interesting, not because I
recommend it. This is my trip, and I'm not going to lay it on anyone
else.