The Harvard Psychedelic Club Read online

  McClelland started out the session by saying that he wanted to clear up a few misconceptions about Leary and Alpert’s drug research. “I’ve gotten reports that some graduate students feel as if they are obligated to participate in this research,” McClelland said. “Well, that is not the case. This is not part of the clinical program. If anything, participating in this project could harm you in your future career.”

  Kelman, a lecturer in social psychology, was anxiously waiting on deck. “I wish I could treat this as scholarly disagreement,” he said, “but this work violates the values of the academic community. The whole program has an anti-intellectual atmosphere. Its emphasis is on pure experience, not on verbalizing findings. It is an attempt to reject most of what the psychologist tries to do. I’m also sorry to say that Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert have taken a very nonchalant attitude toward these experiments—especially considering the effects these drugs might have on the subjects. I am not at all impressed by the way they are administering this project. What most concerns me, and others who have come to me, is how the hallucinogenic and mental effects of these drugs have been used to form a kind of ‘insider’ sect within the department. Those who choose not to participate are labeled as ‘squares.’ I just don’t think that kind of thing should be encouraged in this department.”

  Richard Alpert responded to Kelman’s critique. “With all due respect, Dr. Kelman, I must differ with your contention that our work violates the values of the academy and the university. Harvard has long been considered a fearless leader in providing a climate of encouragement for exploration and discovery. I see our research as right in the tradition of William James. These drugs we are studying are the most powerful consciousness-altering substances known to man. They certainly deserve our most serious and creative attention. In the tradition of William James, we are working toward the development of new models to conceptualize these profound mind-manifesting experiences. There is nothing to fear here. We have adequate safeguards, and no students or subjects have been coerced into participating in our research. Our procedures have already been looked at and approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the University Health Ser vices, and the Sandoz labs, the synthesizer of the psilocybin we have used in these experiments. We are studying these substances to find ways they may be safely used to further man’s growth and education. What could be more important for the future work in the psychological and sociological studies? How is this not in line with our task here at Harvard? Let me also say that the personal attacks that have been leveled against our research not only violate our academic freedom; they border on slander.”

  Smith couldn’t scribble notes fast enough. It was a tense meeting, and it went on for nearly two hours. Smith checked his watch. The deadline at the Crimson for making the morning edition was 10 P.M., but that could be pushed to 1 A.M. for major stories for the front page. Smith was determined to get the story in the next day’s edition, but he was nervous about what he was about to publish. As the top executive at the Crimson, he had regular meetings with Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard. Pusey had also made himself acting dean of the faculty, replacing none other than McGeorge Bundy, who held the dean’s post until he left the university to go work in the Kennedy White House. Pusey had tried to censor stories before, but he wouldn’t get a chance this time. Smith was the reporter, but Smith was also in charge. He had been the top editor on the daily student paper since the previous January. He had already reserved space on the front page in the next morning’s paper, even though he couldn’t really explain earlier in the day what the story was going to be about.

  At one point in the meeting, Leary declared that psilocybin could be used in nursing homes and hospices to ease the dying experience of the elderly. In fact, the drug could actually make the dying process ecstatic. Smith didn’t have much time to think about framing his story, so he thought fast. On the one hand, the whole discussion seemed like a civilized debate, on a high level, over academic freedom and new frontiers of discovery. It seemed like the “clique” aspects were secondary. Still, the lives of young people—or at least their well-being at college—were at stake. The young journalist wasn’t sure who was right—Alpert or Kelman—but he knew the debate was an important one.

  Everyone who was at the meeting was shocked to see their internal dispute splashed across the pages of the morning paper. The story was published in the March 15, 1962, edition of the Crimson, under the headline, “Psychologists Disagree on Psilocybin Research.” Smith reported: “Members of the Center for Research in Personality clashed yesterday in a dramatic meeting over the right of two colleagues to continue studies on the effects of psilocybin, a consciousness-expanding drug, on graduate student subjects. Opponents of the studies claimed that the project was run nonchalantly and irresponsibly and that alleged permanent injury to participants had been ignored or underestimated.”

  It didn’t take long for other newspapers to pick up on the story. The very next day, the Boston Herald, a Hearst tabloid, ran an article under a more sensational headline: “Hallucination Drug Fought at Harvard—350 Students Take Pills.” Actually, the story reported that 350 “subjects” had taken the drug. Many of them were not students, but the psychedelic cat was out of the university bag.

  Smith published one follow-up story on the dispute, reporting on May 28 that Alpert and Leary had agreed to have a faculty committee “advise and oversee” future research on psilocybin. Medical doctors with the University Health Ser vices had already taken possession of Leary and Alpert’s psilocybin pills. Alpert was quoted in the story as saying that he and Leary hoped to “establish guidelines to make us and the rest of the University comfortable about the project.”

  Smith graduated in June. Most of the campus community disappeared for the summer, and it looked as if the controversy surrounding Alpert and Leary had been put to rest.

  But this story, as they say in the newspaper business, had legs. The controversy surrounding the two rebel psychologists was far from over. Other events were unfolding. Alpert had gotten involved with Ronnie Winston, the undergraduate and former roommate of Andrew Weil. Classes resumed in the fall, and a new crop of reporters started trying out at the Crimson.

  Like Russin, Bruce Paisner, the new managing editor that fall , was surprised when Andy Weil approached him about following up on the story that Robert Smith had done the previous year. Paisner was befuddled on a couple of levels. First of all, Weil was not a news reporter. He’d always seemed more interested in theater and other artsy stuff. On the other hand, Weil had written a couple of science stories, a subject most of the liberal-arts students working at the paper had trouble covering. Nevertheless, Paisner was skeptical about the story Weil now wanted to write. He talked it over at an editorial meeting at the Crimson office.

  “Something’s funny here,” he said. “Is this real? Why has Andy suddenly shown up here so excited about this story?”

  Paisner, who would go on to a career as a top executive with the Hearst Corporation in New York, had other reasons to be confused. He had never heard of “psychedelics” or some drug called “psilocybin.” He had heard of marijuana, which was seen at the time as the dangerous drug everyone was supposed to be worrying about. So he sat down with Weil to get more details about the controversy.

  “So what is this drug we’re talking about here, Andy?”

  “It’s a different sort of drug,” Weil replied. “It distorts the mind. It produces hallucinations.”

  “Really?” Paisner said. “Talk about your New Frontier. OK. There may be something there. Why don’t you check into it some more and get back to us?”

  Neither Paisner nor Russin, who replaced Robert Smith as the new president of the Crimson, knew that Weil himself had run a series of psychedelic drug tests just around the corner from the newspaper office during his freshman year, over at Claverly Hall. And Paisner didn’t have a clue that Weil was moonlighting as a spy for the Harvard administration, helping President Pusey get
the goods on Richard Alpert. He also didn’t know that the undergraduate whom Weil was pressuring to testify against Alpert was Ronnie Winston—his old friend from Claverly.

  “All of us who were active at the newspaper saw the administration at Harvard in a largely adversarial light,” Paisner would later say. “We regarded our job as shining bright lights in dark corners, wherever they might be. I would not have sanctioned going out undercover as a Crimson reporter and then turning over information to the administration.”

  Russin, who went on to work as a manager at the Los Angeles Times and several West Coast television stations, did know that Weil was helping the university administration gather evidence against Alpert. “We did turn over a lot of stuff to the university after the article ran. In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have done that. But at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. My reason was I had become convinced that these guys shouldn’t be there and that we should help the university out on it. But we had a lot of trouble getting people to talk. I had the impression that something cultish was going on at the house out there in Newton. So I didn’t have qualms about turning some of our research over to the university. But if this had all happened ten years later, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

  Weil had various motives for going after Richard Alpert. “For whatever reason,” he says, “I got into this role as investigative reporter. The university really wanted to get rid of Alpert. They were looking for something to use against him, and they didn’t have anything. At the same time, the Massachusetts criminal-justice people got wind of the stories and they were looking into it. They wanted to subpoena our files. So, under pressure from this criminal investigation, we decided we’d just turn our information over to the university. They called all the people we mentioned in our reports and everyone denied everything except this one undergraduate [Ronnie Winston] who said Alpert had given him this drug on this occasion. Alpert had given him psychedelics after promising not to give them to undergraduates. That’s what they used to fire him.”

  Alpert says he was not all that surprised that Weil was the guy who brought them down. They never trusted him. “Andrew Weil wanted very much to take the drugs. Tim and I had a discussion that this was a guy at the Crimson who probably just wanted to get a story. So we said no.”

  What enraged both Ronnie Winston and Richard Alpert were the tactics Andrew Weil used to get his former friend to incriminate Professor Alpert.

  “Andrew kept simmering about our relationship,” Alpert said. “He went to Harry Winston, Ronnie’s father, and he said, ‘Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we’ll cut out your son’s name. We won’t use it in the article.’”

  So, under pressure from his father, Andrew Weil, and the Crimson, Winston reported to the dean’s office, where he was asked:

  “Did you take drugs from Dr. Alpert?”

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Ronnie confessed. “And it was the most educational experience I’ve had at Harvard.”

  Years later, Weil would confirm Winston and Alpert’s account of what happened. He would explain that the Crimson had to get someone to tell the truth about what was going on with Leary and Alpert. “Everyone else we had information on said they would deny everything. Ronnie was the only person who might confirm what we had. So we went to his parents. We talked to Harry and told him that this was probably going to appear in the press, and there was a chance that Ronnie would be named in all this. Harry got Ronnie to go in and talk to the dean, so we said we could keep his name out of it.”

  Weil’s attack on Leary and Alpert did not stop at Harvard and the college newspaper. He went on to get national exposure by writing another article, “The Strange Case of the Harvard Drug Scandal,” and getting it published in Look magazine in November 1963. In that piece, Weil reveals all kinds of inside information about the drug scene at Harvard and the details of Alpert’s undergraduate liaisons. But he never reveals that he was a big part of that undergraduate drug scene. Weil writes in Look that students were getting mescaline from the supply houses that did few background checks on their customers, never mentioning that he was one of those customers. Weil also does not reveal that he was a friend of the undergraduate who testified against Alpert, and that he pressured his friend into doing so.

  “One Harvard junior told a friend that Alpert had persuaded him to take psilocybin in a ‘self exploratory’ session at Alpert’s apartment,” Weil wrote in Look. “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.”

  About a decade later, Weil published his first book, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. He begins the book by revisiting that remark in Look about Alpert and the “stories of seduction, both heterosexual and homosexual,” and offered an apology. “There were stories of students and others doing many other less titillating things with hallucinogens, but I picked that one for its journalistic value, and Look printed it for the same reason,” Weil writes. “When I gave up the point of view of a journalist, I came to see that it was one of the most distorted ways of interpreting observations about drugs and I resolved not to make use of it again.”

  That apology was an olive branch to Leary and Alpert, but Weil did not come clean about his role in the whole affair. He blames “journalism.” He does not mention that he violated journalistic ethics by failing to reveal his role in the Harvard drug scandal and by working as an undercover agent for one of the institutions he was reporting on for the student newspaper. A reporter’s intent is an important factor in judging a journalist’s ethics, not to mention an important consideration in libel law. In this case, there was a motive and at least the possibility that Weil got onto this story with “malicious intent.”

  Nearly half a century after Weil brought down Leary and Alpert, Winston and others involved in the affair were still mad about the whole series of events. “I hope Andrew Weil is ashamed about what he did,” said Paul Lee, sitting in his backyard in Santa Cruz, California, in the spring of 2008. “He is the top guy on my list to punch out if I ever meet him. He was a spy for the administration. He went around interviewing people, including me, then reported it to the administration. I told him things candidly and in confidence and he betrayed me. He submitted my interview to the authorities. That was dirty pool. He was just out to get fame by doing in Leary and Alpert.”

  Andrew Weil was only eighteen years old when he first walked into the offices of the Center for Research in Personality and volunteered to be a research subject in Leary’s psychedelic study. Weil would go on to graduate from Harvard Medical School and become a best-selling author. His career would take off when he emerged in the 1970s as an expert, sympathetic witness for the burgeoning drug culture. He replaced Leary and Alpert as the most trusted advice doctor for connoisseurs of recreational drugs. Decades later, Weil’s books on holistic health and natural living would put him on the cover of Time magazine and on such television programs as Oprah and Larry King Live.

  Only in retrospect does it become clear that Weil’s career began with his betrayal of Ronnie Winston. He scored points with the university in his crusade to gather incriminating evidence against Leary and Alpert. His university career began, and Leary and Alpert’s ended, on the night of May 27, 1963, when Weil and his Crimson editor knocked on the front door of Alpert’s house and presented the professor with a copy of the exposé they were planning to run in the next day’s newspaper.

  Accompanying the news story was a devastating, unsigned editorial written by Weil and Russin. It accused Leary and Alpert of being “propagandists” prone to “making the kind of pronouncement about their work that one associates with quacks.” Alpert was singled out for “behavior that is spreading infection throughout the academic community.

  “The shoddiness of their work as scientists is the result less of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of scientific ways of looking at things. Le
ary and Alpert fancy themselves prophets of a psychic revolution designed to free Western man from the limitations of consciousness, as we know it. They are contemptuous of all organized systems of action—of what they call the ‘roles’ and ‘games’ of society. They prefer mystical ecstasy to the fulfillment available through work, politics, religion, and creative art. Yet like true revolutionaries they will play these games to further their own ends.”

  Weil’s journalistic scoop and editorial assault got the attention of newspapers across the nation. It put Leary and Alpert on the national media map as the leaders of a counterculture rebellion that would help define the 1960s. Weil’s investigation focused the attack on Leary and Alpert. At the same time, the two Harvard researchers were probably destined to leave the restrictive confines of the university, with or without the investigative zeal of Andy Weil. They needed a bigger stage.

  Seeker: Newton, Massachusetts Spring 1963

  Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, and the other folks living in the big white house on Kenwood Avenue—the same home Weil visited with a copy of his exposé—were more than just roommates. Strong bonds tend to form among people who share psychedelic drugs. Taken under the right conditions, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, Ecstasy, LSD, and other mind-altering drugs break down the protective wall that the ego builds around the self. This powerful experience can be both terrifying and transformative. It can drive an unstable person over the edge, and it can spark extraordinary levels of interpersonal communion.

  Susan Leary, the daughter of Timothy Leary, stands next to Richard Alpert outside the house on Kenwood Avenue on May 28, 1963, the day after Andrew Weil’s exposé in the Harvard Crimson got Leary and Alpert kicked out of Harvard. (Photo by Robert Backoff, Boston Globe.)

  All of these things were happening to the students, faculty, and other research subjects who took psychedelic drugs under the supervision of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. So it didn’t take long for their research project to morph into an extended family, spiritual community, religious cult, and, finally, social movement. Many of Leary and Alpert’s students wanted to live together, and love together, so Alpert purchased another large home in Newton, just around the corner from Leary’s rented house on Homer Street, at 23 Kenwood Avenue.