The Right Chemistry: Timothy Leary was a pioneer in research on 'magic mushrooms' (2024)

The place? Room 1742, The Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The date? June 1, 1969. The event? A recording of Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their celebrated “bed-in for peace,” a nonviolent protest against war.

Also heard on the recording are guests John and Yoko had invited. Tommy Smothers plays guitar, poet Allen Ginsberg, comedian Dick Gregory, singer Petula Clark and Timothy Leary sing along. Yes, that Timothy Leary. The former Harvard professor who became an icon of the counterculture movement with his promotion of psychedelics and his mantra of “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

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The “turn on” referred to LSD and psilocybin, mind-altering drugs Leary claimed would “enable each person to realize he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye.” Leary’s path from respected scientist to psychedelic celebrity is an intriguing one.

Having just obtained a PhD from Berkley in psychology, Leary was hired by Harvard University in 1959. His early academic career, studying social relationships and psychotherapy, was standard and unremarkable. But that was all to change in 1960 with a vacation to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Sitting around the pool one day, a conversation with colleague Anthony Russo turned to the latter’s experience on a previous trip during which he had eaten “magic mushrooms.” He had read about these in a 1957 article in Life Magazine titled Seeking the Magic Mushroom by Robert Gordon Wasson, an amateur mycologist.

Wasson recounted how in 1955 he had convinced Maria Sabinia, a traditional healer, to allow him to take part in an ancient Indigenous ritual using “sacred mushrooms.” His description of the effects, particularly visions, sparked immense interest, including in Russo, who then travelled to Mexico to try the fungi. He now wanted to repeat the experience, and with help from University of Mexico anthropologist Gerhardt Braun who had studied the use of hallucinogens in Mesoamerica managed to procure some mushrooms.

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Russo, Braun and Leary then embarked on a psychedelic trip that Leary would describe as “a classic visionary voyage from which he came back a changed man.” He had learned more about psychology during the five-hour trip, he said, than he had in 15 years of studying the subject as an academic. From that moment on, Leary’s research would take on a new phase. The psychedelic effect, he concluded, needed further exploration.

Leary quickly learned Wasson had sent a sample of the mushrooms he had consumed to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had achieved fame by synthesizing LSD while working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company. Did some component of the mushroom perhaps resemble LSD, Wasson wondered?

Hofmann was able to identify psilocybin as the compound in the “sacred mushrooms” that was indirectly responsible for the psychedelic effect. In the body, psilocybin is quickly metabolized to psilocin, a compound, like LSD, has a chemical similarity to the neurotransmitter serotonin. The hallucinogenic effect is due to the overstimulation of serotonin receptors on cells of the nervous system. Hofmann also was able to synthesize psilocybin, which Sandoz then made available for medical research.

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Back at Harvard, Leary shifted his research to the effects of psilocybin, which at the time was totally legal. At first, he followed proper scientific methodology and investigated the possibility of aiding alcoholics with psilocybin and using it to rehabilitate released prisoners. The Concord Prison Experiment, in which Leary claimed his use of psychotherapy combined with psilocybin reduced the rate of released prisoners returning to criminal activity from 60 to 20 per cent, received extensive publicity.

Follow-up studies contested Leary’s results, but by that time he and colleague Richard Alpert had gone on to experimenting with the effects of psilocybin on human consciousness by administering it to volunteers. Issues began to be raised by other faculty members about the way this research was being conducted. Apparently, some disturbing side-effects were not disclosed, and some of the research was carried out when Leary and Alpert were under the influence of psilocybin. There were also allegations the duo were actively promoting the use of hallucinogens for recreational purposes and had been giving drugs to undergraduates. This did not sit well with the Harvard administration and in 1963 both Leary and Alpert were dismissed.

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There would be no more academic appointments in Leary’s future, but his promotion of the use of psychedelics under controlled conditions “for serious purposes, such as spiritual growth, pursuit of knowledge and personal development” would make him an icon for the counterculture movement of the ’60s. In a famous interview with Playboy Magazine in 1966, he curiously claimed “in a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred org*sms.” He then went on to say “your life before was a still photograph that with LSD comes alive, balloons out to several dimensions and becomes irradiated with colour and energy.”

President Richard Nixon wanted no part of any such ballooning and called Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” The legal system did, indeed, treat him as a dangerous man, ridiculously sentencing him to 30 years in prison for possession of a small amount of cannabis. That conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but not before he had spent time in prison, including one stint in Folsom Prison in a cell next to murderer Charles Manson. In the ’70s and ’80s, Leary spoke on campuses, wrote articles and continued to describe his own experimentation with an array of psychedelic drugs. Being leery of the law, Leary was careful about promoting their use.

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There is no question the name of Timothy Leary has to appear prominently in any discussion of psychedelics. While some of his unorthodox experiments deserve rightful criticism, his claim of improved creativity and cognition with the use of small doses of psychedelics is now getting traction with researchers studying “microdosing.”

Today, Montrealers and tourists walking along a path on Mount Royal can recall the epic day when Timothy Leary crooned along with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The path features a sculpture of limestone slabs, each one engraved with the phrase “Give Peace a Chance” in one of 40 languages. We need to bring some world leaders here to walk that path.

joe.schwarcz@mcgill.ca

Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m.

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