The room had been so completely jammed with faculty and students
that no one noticed the presence of an undergraduate reporter from the
Crimson named Robert Ellis Smith, furiously taking notes. The next day’s
Crimson put the controversy on page 1: “Psychologists Disagree on
Psilocybin Research.” The day after that, the story was picked up by the
Boston Herald, a Hearst paper, and given a much punchier if not quite as
accurate headline: “Hallucination Drug Fought at Harvard—350 Students
Take Pills.” Now the story was out, and very soon Timothy Leary, always
happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was
famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced
him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of
Health Services: “Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity
in people who have not taken them.”
By the end of the year, Leary and Alpert had concluded that “these
materials are too powerful and too controversial to be researched in a
university setting.” They announced in a letter to the Crimson they were
forming something called the International Federation for Internal
Freedom (IFIF) and henceforth would be conducting research under its
umbrella rather than Harvard’s. They decried the new restrictions placed
on psychedelic research, not only at Harvard, but by the federal
government: in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy, in which a new
sedative given to pregnant women for morning sickness had caused
terrible birth defects in their children, Congress had given the FDA
authority to regulate experimental drugs. “For the first time in American
history,” the IFIF announced, “and for the first time in the Western world
since the Inquisition there now exists a scientific underground.” They
predicted that “a major civil liberties issue of the next decade will be the
control and expansion of consciousness.”
“Who controls your cortex?” they wrote in their letter to the Crimson—
which is to say, to students. “Who decides on the range and limits of your
awareness? If you want to research your own nervous system, expand
your consciousness, who is to decide that you can’t and why?”
It’s often said that in the 1960s psychedelics “escaped from the
laboratory,” but it would probably be more accurate to say they were
thrown over the laboratory wall, and never with as much loft or velocity
as by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at the end of 1962. “We’re
through playing the science game,” Leary told McClelland when he
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