TIMOTHY LEARY'S TRIP

It's 10 years since the pied piper of pharmaceuticals died. Where did
all the attention go?

Timothy Leary's dead

No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in -- "Legend of a Mind," the
Moody Blues

ALTHOUGH MAY 31 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Timothy
Leary, there will be no gathering of the tribes anywhere to
commemorate the event. Unlike Jerry Garcia, whose posthumous profile
remains so high that the toilet from his home in Marin County was
recently stolen after it was auctioned off for charity, Leary's name
has not been enshrined on a Ben & Jerry's ice cream carton.

For someone who never met an interviewer (or a drug) he did not like,
this constitutes a sad state of affairs indeed. Far more than most of
his psychedelic cohorts, Leary understood marketing. He came up with
"turn on, tune in, drop out," the catchy mantra he's remembered by
(when he's remembered at all), only after consulting with media guru
Marshall McLuhan.

Even by 1960s' standards, Leary's life was outsized. Booted out of
West Point for violating the honor code, he earned a doctorate in
clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, only to suffer a nervous
breakdown after his wife committed suicide on his 35th birthday
because he was having an affair with another woman.

After ingesting magic mushrooms in Mexico, Leary, by then an
instructor at Harvard, began turning on the leading writers, artists
and intellectuals of the day. (The university dismissed him in 1963.)
When LSD became the drug of choice for the youth of America, he
skyrocketed to fame as a genial and beneficent pharmaceutical pied piper.

While living in a sprawling mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., Leary met and
married high-fashion model Nena von Schlebrugge (now the wife of
Tibet scholar Robert Thurman and the mother of actress Uma Thurman),
only to separate from her during their honeymoon in the Himalayas.
Moving to Orange County in 1968, Leary threw his lot in with the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of spiritual surfers turned drug
dealers. He announced his candidacy for governor of California, and
he flew off to Montreal to join John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their
"bed-in" for peace.

After being sent to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo
for possession of marijuana, Leary escaped with the help of the
radical Weather Underground and fled to Algeria, where he was placed
under house arrest by fellow exile and Black Panther leader Eldridge
Cleaver. Leary then found temporary sanctuary in Switzerland, only to
be busted while trying to enter Afghanistan. Flown back to the United
States under armed guard, he was locked up in Folsom State Prison,
where his neighbor was Charles Manson. In exchange for his freedom,
Leary became an FBI informant and betrayed his former friends and associates.

In 1976, Leary moved to Los Angeles and, among other things, began
working as a "stand-up philosopher," performing in clubs on Sunset
Boulevard and hanging out with A-list celebrities such as Helmut
Newton, Susan Sarandon and Johnny Depp (then keeping company with
Leary's goddaughter, Wynona Ryder).

Leary became an early computer enthusiast, engaged in a series of
well-publicized "debates" with convicted Watergate conspirator G.
Gordon Liddy and appeared on stage at Lollapalooza. When Leary
learned he was suffering from incurable prostate cancer, he went
public with his dying, threatening at one point to commit suicide
online. Leary's ashes were shot into space on the same rocket that
carried the mortal remains of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek."

Although many of his books remain in print, it was his outrageous
conduct rather than his work that shaped the zeitgeist. Still, Leary
should not be remembered only for his unflagging advocacy of better
living through chemistry. By the end of his life, his real message
was no longer turn on, tune in, drop out, but rather think for
yourself, question authority, learn how to operate your own brain.

At a time when most people have long since given up believing that
consciousness expansion can save the world, a small, unruly
celebration would seem to be in order to honor Timothy Leary. If
nothing else, he was a man who always marched to the beat of his own
drum, whether or not anyone else was actually following along behind.