course LSD. “Whenever you are photographed, smile. Wave reassuringly.
Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry. It’s okay if you come
off as flamboyant and eccentric. You’re a professor after all. But a
confident attitude is the best advertisement. You must be known for your
smile.”
Leary took McLuhan’s advice to heart. In virtually all of the many
thousands of photographs taken of him from that lunch date forward,
Leary made sure to present the gift of his most winning grin to the
camera. It didn’t matter if he was coming into or out of a courthouse,
addressing a throng of youthful admirers in his love beads and white
robes, being jostled into a squad car freshly handcuffed, or perched on
the edge of John and Yoko’s bed in a Montreal hotel room, Timothy Leary
always managed to summon a bright smile and a cheerful wave for the
camera.
So, ever smiling, the charismatic figure of Timothy Leary looms large
over the history of psychedelics in America. Yet it doesn’t take many
hours in the library before you begin to wonder if maybe Timothy Leary
looms a little too large in that history, or at least in our popular
understanding of it. I was hardly alone in assuming that the Harvard
Psilocybin Project—launched by Leary in the fall of 1960, immediately
after his first life-changing experience with psilocybin in Mexico—
represented the beginning of serious academic research into these
substances or that Leary’s dismissal from Harvard in 1963 marked the
end of that research. But in fact neither proposition is even remotely true.
Leary played an important role in the modern history of psychedelics,
but it’s not at all the pioneering role he wrote for himself. His success in
shaping the popular narrative of psychedelics in the 1960s obscures as
much as it reveals, creating a kind of reality distortion field that makes it
difficult to see everything that came either before or after his big moment
onstage.
In a truer telling of the history, the Harvard Psilocybin Project would
appear more like the beginning of the end of what had been a remarkably
fertile and promising period of research that unfolded during the
previous decade far from Cambridge, in places as far flung as
Saskatchewan, Vancouver, California, and England, and, everywhere,
with a lot less sound and fury or countercultural baggage. The larger-
than-life figure of Leary has also obscured from view the role of a
frankie
(Frankie)
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