The solution was undeniably radical. Leary and Alpert set up a programme to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. Their aim was to lower the recidivism rate, which at the time was running at 70 per cent. If less than 70 per cent of the inmates who were given psilocybin reoffended after release, Leary would be able to show that the drug was an effective tool for convict rehabilitation. But this was not a plan that was without its political risks and dangers. If one prisoner who had been given drugs by the programme killed or raped after release, the press would have a field day. Tim went to work and set about persuading the warden and psychiatrist of Concord State Prison to approve the plan. Both were receptive, and the psychiatrist was put on the Harvard payroll as a consultant. It would be his job to arrange the volunteers.
In March 1961 Leary entered the prison, clutching a small supply of psilocybin. He was accompanied by two graduate students, Gunther Weil and Ralph Metzner,11 and their aim was to spend the day tripping with six prisoners who were nearing release. The prisoners would use the drug to gain and share insights into why they had committed crime, and they had also agreed to participate in a support programme after release.
Tim took the drug first in order to gain the inmates’ trust. When the effects kicked in, he started to feel terrible. A windowless room in the heart of a penitentiary was not a location that was conducive to a positive trip. They had brought a record player and books of classical art with them in the hope of improving their surroundings, but they could not hide the fact that the atmosphere, and the company, was oppressive. Tim was conscious of how ugly and repulsive the bank robber at his side appeared to him. Nervously, he tried to speak, and they asked each other how they felt. The drug caused Leary to respond truthfully, so he told the prisoner that he was afraid of him. The prisoner was surprised because he was also feeling afraid of Tim.
‘Why are you scared of me?’ the convict asked.
‘Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?’
‘I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.’ They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.12
The Prisoner Rehabilitation Program continued and expanded. It was conducted in as open and public a manner as possible, and many visitors to Harvard found themselves invited to observe sessions. Word got out amongst the inmates, and the list of volunteer prisoners expanded rapidly. When the results eventually started to come in during the following year, they were astonishing. They appeared to show that recidivism amongst volunteers who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70 per cent to 10 per cent.13
It was almost too good to be true. The implications were enormous, and if it continued, prison populations could be drastically reduced. But the reaction from the academic community was notably muted. Few people were comfortable with the idea of psychedelics, and results such as these forced them onto the academic agenda. Not everyone was prepared to accept this. To the uninitiated, there is something fundamentally frightening about the idea of psychedelic trips, and while the idea of the psychologist taking the drug may have been intellectually acceptable in theory, in practice it seemed wholly irresponsible. Tim had already been gaining political enemies on campus because his work had been attracting more than its fair share of the brightest graduate students. Now he was reporting results that trod on a lot of toes.
It was never claimed that the psilocybin in itself was a ‘cure’. It was part of a system of support and therapy. As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin, the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life’s problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions. The prison programme involved an extensive support system to help the patients after release in order to help them restructure their lives following the insights of the mushroom sessions. The team helped the ex-inmates to find jobs, worked with their parole offices, and Tim even let prisoners stay at his home while they were being housed. Critics claimed that the success of the experiment was due to the extra support and not the drug. A follow-up study 20 years later found that the recidivism decline had not been significant after all, and that the original study used misleading figures in the base-rate comparison.14 It did find, however, that there was other evidence for personality change. Behaviour change, whether in convicts or psychotherapy patients, is notoriously hard to prove, but it does seem that the use of psilocybin in this particular support programme produced results that warranted further study.15
Leary’s next project did little to calm his critics. Dr Walter Pahnke from the Harvard Divinity School approached Tim in order to do a thesis on a comparison between the psychedelic experience and ‘true’ religious ecstasy. In what came to be known as the Good Friday Miracle, 30 graduate students and trained psychedelic guides arrived in the small chapel of Boston University for an Easter service. Each took a small pill. Half of the pills were nothing more than placebos and half were psilocybin. The experiment was run under strict ‘double blind’ conditions, in that no one present was aware who had been given which pill, but it soon became obvious as to who had taken the psychedelic and who hadn’t. The Easter service and the church surroundings soon had the drugged students wandering round with looks of revelation and bliss across their faces, shouting out praise to the Lord. Analysis of the volunteers’ reactions by divinity students found no differences between the experiences of 90 per cent of the tripping volunteers and that of the saints and other Christian visionaries. Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances.16 Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.17The implication here was that a state previously considered a blessing from God could be induced by man more or less at will. The Church might not be able to achieve this, but Leary’s magic pill could. He couldn’t have offended people any more if he tried.
Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. Few people were prepared to accept that a chemical-induced Gnostic revelation was comparable with the ‘real thing’. Leary was vocal in his conviction that all criticism of his work was ignorant, groundless and came from those with no experience of the subject in question, an attitude that would not help him politically. He regarded any attack as the result of the ‘Semmelweis effect’, which claims that the opposition to a scientific discovery is directly proportional to its importance.
This effect is named after the nineteenth-century obstetrician who massively reduced the mortality rate in surgery by insisting that doctors wash their hands, but who was ridiculed and cast out by his colleagues for his troubles. Semmelweis was eventually driven to madness and suicide.
At this point what Leary needed was a period of calm to reduce the political pressure and consider his next steps carefully. He did not get it. Instead his life was blown apart by a substance far stronger and dramatically more controversial than psilocybin. In November 1961 Dr Leary was introduced to LSD.