that it might actually be possible to erase history (there was that acid
again) and start the world over again from scratch.
But to the extent that the upheaval of the 1960s was the result of an
unusually sharp break between generations, psychedelics deserve much
of the blame—or credit—for creating this unprecedented “generation
gap.” For at what other time in history did a society’s young undergo a
searing rite of passage with which the previous generation was utterly
unfamiliar? Normally, rites of passage help knit societies together as the
young cross over hurdles and through gates erected and maintained by
their elders, coming out on the other side to take their place in the
community of adults. Not so with the psychedelic journey in the 1960s,
which at its conclusion dropped its young travelers onto a psychic
landscape unrecognizable to their parents. That this won’t ever happen
again is reason to hope that the next chapter in psychedelic history won’t
be quite so divisive.
So maybe this, then, is the enduring contribution of Leary: by turning
on a generation—the generation that, years later, has now taken charge of
our institutions—he helped create the conditions in which a revival of
psychedelic research is now possible.
• • •
BY THE END OF 1966, the whole project of psychedelic science had collapsed.
In April of that year, Sandoz, hoping to distance itself from the
controversy engulfing the drug that Albert Hofmann would come to call
his “problem child,” withdrew LSD-25 from circulation, turning over
most of its remaining stocks to the U.S. government and leading many of
the seventy research programs then under way to shut down.
In May of that year, the Senate held hearings about the LSD problem.
Timothy Leary and Sidney Cohen both testified, attempting valiantly to
defend psychedelic research and draw lines between legitimate use and a
black market that the government was now determined to crush. They
found a surprisingly sympathetic ear in Senator Robert F. Kennedy,
whose wife, Ethel, had reportedly been treated with LSD at Hollywood
Hospital in Vancouver—one of Al Hubbard’s outposts. Grilling the FDA
regulators about their plans to cancel many of the remaining research