The mushrooms grew on a line of volcanic peaks just north of the villa where Tim and his friends spent the days lounging in the sunshine by the pool. A frequent visitor to the villa, Gerhart Braun from the University of Mexico, thought that he could obtain some of these fabled mushrooms. Did Tim want to try them? The stories about the mushrooms were undeniably intriguing, but the idea of taking them was a little frightening. Tim’s life had turned a corner and seemed to be on the right track, and there was no reason to jeopardise what he now had with the risk of madness. Yet there was also a professional curiosity involved. Frank had claimed that these strange fungi might play a role in their search for meaningful behaviour change, and this fitted with Leary’s suspicion that the ‘transactional element’ between doctor and patient that he had been searching for might only be possible with a chemical key—a drug.
And he was on vacation. He agreed to try them.
Braun and several friends headed off to the old Indian town of San Pedro, near the volcano Toluca. Here he met a curandera known as Crazy Juana, and by the side of a church away from the market she sold him a bag of the mushrooms. They ate them the following Saturday.
They were black and mouldy. They smelt rotten and damp and tasted bitter and stringy. Sitting in swimming costumes by the side of the pool, all but two of the party joined in. They ate six or seven each, and sat back to see what would happen. One abstainer, a friend of a friend named Bruce, was appointed as the official observer and was given the job of recording the reactions of the rest. After half an hour the effects of the drug started, and the world just came alive. Tim looked at Bruce, who was diligently writing down his observations, and was struck by the realisation that Bruce had no idea at all what he was observing. He found this realisation incredibly funny, and the earnestness and detachment of the scientific community suddenly appeared to him as ludicrous ignorance. How could they even begin to understand something that they were so separated from? The giggles kept coming and soon Tim was engulfed in uncontrollable laughter. Gathering his wits together, he saw to it that the children went into town to catch a movie, and headed indoors for a lie down. Then the visions really started, his mind gently split open and he was away.
When normality returned, Tim was a changed man. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered the entire world. Time and space had been different, and he had understood the world with a clarity that he had never previously believed possible. ‘In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,’ he later wrote.4 Could this be the key to making genuine changes to the mind? And had he stumbled on a method to explore the methodologies he argued for in The Existential Transaction? If a psychologist took the drug with a patient he would no longer be an uninvolved observer in therapy. The role of the doctor would become that of a guide, reassuring the patient and steering them towards understanding the causes of their destructive behaviour.
But he had experienced something else as well, something inexplicable. He had felt himself slipping back down what can only be described as his genetic history. He had been able to stop and feel each life on his evolutionary ladder. He had mentally travelled back through the aeons, from the time of the simplest land animals to that of life in the oceans, from times of jungles and great ferns back to the start of life on earth. It was a powerful, vivid experience, and it differed from a dream in one important respect. Dreams are imaginative jumbles of experience based on past events and memories. But where had his mushroom visions come from? He had no previous experience to account for the things he saw and felt. The brain had done something that, according to all the literature, was simply impossible.
How should he respond to the experience? Tim could still remember his own reactions to Frank’s admission of his mushroom use, and he knew that he would receive the same uncomfortable reaction when he talked about what had happened. But now he knew that the effect was real, and if all existing theories of the mind were unable to explain it, surely it was the duty of a scientist to investigate further? Surely any scientific model of the mind had to include these inexplicable experiences if it was to be comprehensive and accurate?
It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the pivotal moment in Timothy Leary’s life. He had a new sense of purpose, as if his life’s work had just begun. From that day on he dedicated himself to understanding the psychedelic experience, never doubting the intrinsic value of the experience or the importance of chemicals in exploring the mind. But somehow he had to convince the rest of the world. And the only way he could do that, it was clear, was to persuade other people to try them.
The return to Harvard was an adventure. Tim and Jack accepted Richard’s offer of a flight back in his Cessna. ‘I didn’t tell him I didn’t have a licence yet,’ recalled Alpert later;5 ‘that would have scared him, I thought.’ Some fundamental flying errors led to the threat of arrest at a Mexican airport, a situation that could have become more serious if it had been discovered that Jack was smuggling an iguana into America, and Richard was smuggling two pounds of grass. Leary’s response was calm and unconcerned. ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ he suggested, before smoothing things over with a bribe of $20. This was the start of a pattern that would emerge over the next few years. Whenever Tim and Richard were together, something unlikely would invariably happen and they would always end up having an adventure.
Once safely back in Harvard, Tim began to establish what became known as the Harvard Psychedelics Research Program. His first task was to obtain a supply of the mushrooms, and fortunately Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland had isolated the active component, which was called psilocybin. It was a simple matter to order as much as he wanted, and soon little pink pills replaced the foul mushrooms in his research.
Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments. ‘This investigation sets out to determine the factors—personal, social—which produce optimally positive reactions to psilocybin,’ it stated. ‘Positive reactions’ were defined as ‘pleasant, ecstatic, non-anxious experiences, broadening of awareness and increased insight’. It also detailed the study’s ‘ethical and interpersonal principles, which stress collaboration, openness [and] humanistic interchange between researcher and subjects’. These included participants alternating between the roles of observer and subject, running the sessions in ‘pleasant, spacious, aesthetic surroundings’, and the right of participants to select their own dosage of psilocybin. The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn how to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal. In October 1960 Leary and his colleagues started work.
Setting up the research was stepping into uncharted territory. There were no textbooks or papers for them to follow, as no academics had attempted to do exactly what they were setting out to do. But luck was on their side, for the perfect guide arrived in Massachusetts at exactly the right time. It was a man with one of the sharpest