Created Janaury 10, 2007. Revised May 4, 2017.
Copyright 2017 by John W. Allen
The Strange Case of the Harvard Drug Scandal
By
Andrew Weil
Look Magazine, November 5, 1962
On May 27, 1963, President Nathan M. Pusey of Harvard University announced that an
assistant professor of clinical psychology and education had been fired. This was the first faculty firing since
Pusey took office in 1953, and it had overtones of the sensational. The man dismissed was Dr. Richard Alpert
[since known as Baba Ram Dass], a young Harvard psychologist, member of Harvard’s Social Relations Department
and son of George Alpert, former president of the New Haven Railroad.
Shortly after his appointment to the Harvard faculty in 1958, Alpert had become interested in
the psychological effects of a group of drugs that have since been well publicized:
the hallucinogens or psychomimetics, substances producing hallucinations and
peculiar changes of consciousness when taken by normal persons. One of these, peyote, is a cactus found in
the vicinity of the Rio Grande that has been used ceremonially for many years
by North American Indians. Aldous Huxley and numerous other writers have carefully described the startling
effects of its active principle, mescaline. Other hallucinogenic drugs are psilocybin, which was first isolated from
a species of Mexican mushroom in 1958, and LSD-25, synthesized in 1938 from a
compound in a fungus attacking rye, but not discovered to have hallucinogenic
properties until 1943. Supported by the Harvard Center for Research in Personality, Richard Alpert, with his associate
Dr. Timothy F. Leary, a lecturer on clinical psychology, set out to investigate new drugs.
Thus began, quietly and respectably, a series of events that was to lead to the formation
of a cult of chemical mystics, and was to involve state, Federal and Mexican
authorities in a whirl of investigations and lead, ultimately, to the academic
downfall of both Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary.
Many scientists had studied hallucinogenic drugs before 1960, but most of them were
physicians, interested in determining physiological effects or in using the
drugs to reproduce, under laboratory conditions, the symptoms of mental
illness. LSD, particularly, was widely
employed in the early 1950’s to cause “model psychosis’ in normal subjects, and
there was some hope that these experiments would point to an understanding of
the chemical basis of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, these early efforts produced little new or valuable
information. The biochemistry of the drugs remains to be worked out, and the dream of understanding the chemical
nature of mental illness has not materialized.
Today, there is very little medical research with the hallucinogens. But the material studies indirectly gave
rise to another kind of interest in the drugs. Many of the people who served as subjects were overwhelmed by the
experience. Some—especially artists, students and creative writers—called it the most significant experience of
their lives. A few set about popularizing the hallucinogens in magazine articles and books, and stimulated
considerable nonprofessional curiosity.
The bulk of the medical evidence indicated that LSD, mescaline and psilocybin were
not physically dangerous. Certainly, they could not cause addiction. There
were, however, alarming reports of temporary acute mental damage that resulted
form taking the drugs, and hints that unsupervised use of them could lead to
permanent adverse psychological changes. For example, in one of the early experiments, at the Harvard Medical
School, a student volunteer subject under the influence of LSD was almost
killed when he walked into rush-hour traffic on Boston’s Huntington Avenue,
“believing he was God and nothing could touch him.” Descriptions of the drugs stressed such effects as heightened
perceptions, increased awareness of one’s surroundings, tremendous insights
into one’s own mind, accelerated thought processes, intense religious feelings,
even extrasensory phenomena and mystic rapture.
In more clinical terms, the hallucinogens cause bizarre hallucinations (primarily
visual), delusions and unusual mental states. But the effects vary strikingly from person to person and from time to
time in the same individual, making it impossible to define a “typical” drug
experience.
For “investigational use only”
LSD, mescaline and psilocybin are all commonly taken by mouth, and are all similar in their
action on the mind. An LSD intoxication lasts from eight to ten hours, compared to eight to twelve hours for mescaline
and four to six hours for psilocybin. All of the compounds are legally classified for “investigational use
only” under Federal food and drug laws, which means they can be obtained and
used only by “experts qualified by scientific training and experience to
investigate the safety and effectiveness of drugs”. In addition, Massachusetts and some other states have enacted
restrictive legislation. The possession of mescaline of peyote by persons other than qualified researchers is a felony
under Massachusetts law. Food and drug laws do not define the adjective “qualified,” and though a number of physicians
have urged that it be taken to mean “qualified by possession of the M.D. degree,” psychologists and others are
not necessarily barred from studying investigational drugs.
Before February, 1963, when the thalidomide disaster brought a tightening of Federal
regulations on investigational drugs, nearly anyone could purchase
hallucinogenic compounds for research purposes. Several American chemical companies supplied mescaline at about
four dollars per dose [300-500 milligrams]. Researchers could obtain LSD and psilocybin at nominal prices from
Sandoz, Inc., a Swiss drug company with branch offices in Hanover, N. J. Distributors of investigational drugs were
expected to determine the qualifications of persons they supplied by asking
purchasers to complete brief forms outlining their educational backgrounds,
research facilities and proposed investigations. With its limited staff, however, the Food and Drug Administration
could make only occasional spot checks of the files of companies suspected of violations.
Students were fascinated
Alpert and Leary ordered psilocybin from Sandoz, Inc., in 1960. Although neither of the researchers was an
M.D. (both had Ph.D.’s in clinical psychology), their respectable Harvard connections and apparently
sound research proposals convinced Sandoz of their reliability.
Unlike past investigators of hallucinogens, Alpert and Leary intended to study the mental
and emotional effects that appealed to intellectuals and artists. They were sure that “negative reactions” to
the drugs (such as severe paranoia or temporary psychosis) were due entirely to
the way in which the chemicals were administered. They felt that if one took psilocybin in an aesthetic setting
with the expectation of having a wonderful time, the results would be different.
Though hallucinogens in 1960 were still too esoteric for most people to have heard of
them, they exerted a strange fascination on college students. Only a few Harvard students knew what
mescaline and psilocybin were, but there was a fear that a university drug
project might make others curious enough to use the compounds. It seemed fortunate that Alpert and Leary
planned to work most unobtrusively under the auspices of a responsible research organization—the Center
for Research and Personality.
Leary had first come across hallucinogenic drugs at a “mushroom party” in Mexico, when
friends persuaded him to eat psilocybin-containing mushrooms. He was overwhelmed by the “consciousness
broadening” powers of the drugs.
No one seemed to realize the extent to which Alpert and Leary were committed to the value of
the drug experience before they had done extensive testing. Both were subsequently convinced that the
mystic insight one could get from psilocybin would be the solution to the
emotional problems of Western man. In their view of the world, all human behavior consisted of “games,” each with its
rules, jargon and rituals. Thus, one played the “doctor game,” the “lawyer game,” even the “psychotic game.”
The trouble, according to Alpert and Leary, was that Westerners are unable to see that they are merely playing games and
subsequently get bogged down in one particular “role.” It followed that the key to understanding
life and to integrating one’s life successfully with one’s environment was to develop the ability to see one’s
activities as games. As Leary said in a 1961 speech, “…only that rare Westerner we call ‘mystic’ or who has
visionary experience of some sort sees clearly the same structure of behavior.” This reduced the search for
happiness in life to finding a way to induce visionary experience. Taking hallucinogenic drugs
was the simplest method.
At the beginning, Alpert and Leary administered psilocybin to 38 people; professional
and nonprofessional normal volunteers, outstanding creative intellectuals and
psychological drug “addicts.” To produce the most positive reactions to psilocybin, the two experimenters ran
their studies in “pleasant, spacious, aesthetic surroundings. “Subjects were allowed to control their own
dosages (within reasonable limits): no one took the drug among strangers, and Leary and Alpert usually took
it with their subjects. The “outstanding creative intellectuals” included Aldous Huxley,
Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Seventy-five percent of the subjects reported that the psilocybin
experience was “very pleasant.” Sixty-nine percent were “judged to have attained marked broadening of
awareness.” More subjects were tested (267 in all), and the percentage of positive reactions rose still higher.
Twenty-five percent thought that the drug session “had changed their lives for the better.”
Alpert and Leary began mimeographing these statistics for distribution to the center
staff. They predicted the use of psilocybin in psychotherapy {“instant psychoanalysis”),
called it an end to creative development and envisioned its regular use in a Harvard Graduate
seminar. “The students,” wrote Leary, “will take psilocybin once a month and spend the
intervening class sessions applying the insights to the problems in their field.”
Alpert and Leary began calling psilocybin and its sister hallucinogens
“consciousness-expanding materials” to avoid prejudices against the word
“drug.” Many Harvard students listened,
grew curious and wanted to try for themselves.
BY 1961, Alpert and Leary had a second project under way: the rehabilitation of inmates
at a local prison through psilocybin “therapy.” Again, the investigators consumed the drug w
ith the subjects. They later reported that psilocybin enabled the prisoners to see
themselves as players in a “cops-and-robbers game.”
Arguments Over Methods
By this time,
the investigators were heading towards trouble. Intradepartmental opponents of the project charged that Alpert
and Leary gave the drugs in sessions resembling cocktail parties, that they
were slipshod in collecting data and that they were in no position to make
observations when they themselves were drugged. The psychologists countered with the assertion that no one was
qualified to observe people under the influence of psilocybin unless he was in
the same state and thus able to know what his subjects were feeling.
Meanwhile, an
increasing number of students began to try to locate sources of mescaline and
to ask how they could get to be subjects in the psilocybin research. The University Administration did not really
become alarmed until two undergraduates landed in mental hospitals after taking
one or another of the drugs. There was,
of course, no way of proving that the drugs had contributed to the
breakdowns. But when the dean’s office
checked into recent affairs at the Center for Research in Personality, it
didn’t like what it found. David C.
McClelland, director of the center, vouched for the soundness of the study,
however, and the parents of the two hospitalized students, wanted everything
kept quite. Harvard may have wished to
disassociate itself from the drug project in 1961, but it had no grounds on
which to act.
In the fall of
1961, the university took a significant step to protect its most vulnerable
students. It extracted an agreement
from Alpert and Leary that no undergraduates would be used in their
research. But following its historic
tradition of noninterference with members of the university faculty, Harvard put
no other restrictions on Alpert and Leary.
Whenever they
spoke to university officials, the two psychologists gave highly credible
accounts of their research, always emphasizing that since the things they were
studying were unorthodox, their procedures had to be unorthodox. In private, Alpert and Leary chafed under
the prohibition against using undergraduates and ridiculed the stuffiness of
regulations that restrained their “applied mysticism.”
More and more
students tried to ferret out sources of the hallucinogens; some succeeded. A chemical supply house in New York City was
selling mescaline at $35 a gram (about two doses), more than four times the
normal trade price. Another Manhattan
firm sold the drug at regular prices to undergraduates. Knowing the authorities would never get
around to checking up, it let the students fill out the brief FDA forms. One student ordered quantities of dried
peyote from a Texas shipper and dispensed it to his classmates at reasonable
rates. A parcel of LSD impregnated
sugar cubes arrived from New York. The
cubes sold for one dollar apiece on the burgeoning Harvard Square market.
Alpert and
Leary believed that the Government did not have the right to deny citizens the
freedom to explore their own consciousness.
“Internal freedom” was as important as the external freedoms of speech
and religion, they asserted. To shut
off access to consciousness-expanding materials was a step towards
totalitarianism.
Not many
outside Harvard’s Social Relations Department had yet heard of Alpert and
Leary. Although the coterie of
interested undergraduates was growing, it represented only a tiny fraction of
the students. The first “leak” was an
article on mescaline and psilocybin published in the February 20, 1962, issue
of The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily student newspaper. It gave a sketchy description of the work
going on at the center and compared psilocybin to the soma of Huxley’s Brave
New World. “Ethical and
philosophical questions raised by the availability of such a compound are
staggering, in complexity, yet they will have to be faced,” the article
concluded. “The work going on now in
Cambridge may force us to find answers to them in the very near future.”
The researchers reply
The very near future
turned out to be just around the corner.
Alpert and Leary immediately sent a letter to The Crimson,
explaining that they were not “unbounded in their enthusiasm” for psilocybin,
as the article had stated, but rather unbounded in their concern—“concern for
the many problems created by the consciousness-expanding drugs.” They emphasized that their research was
carefully controlled and in strict adherence to university codes. “All subjects are informed volunteers. No undergraduates or minors.”
A few days later, the
director of Harvard University Health Services, Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, wrote a
letter of his own to The Crimson, in which he suggested that mescaline
could do a great deal of harm.
“Actually,” he wrote, “the ingestion of this drug can precipitate psychotic
reactions in some apparently normal persons.
It has been known to increase slight depressions in suicidal ones and to
produce schizophrenic like reactions.”
The little skirmish in The
Crimson’s mail column encouraged critics of the psilocybin project to speak
out. The resulting dispute led to a
private meeting for all members of the Center for Research in Personality on
March 14, 1962. Sitting quietly in the
room, unknown to the organizers of the discussion was a reporter for The
Crimson.
Herbert C. Kelman,
lecturer on psychology, summed up the feelings of the hostile faction. “The program,” he argued, “has an
anti-intellectual atmosphere. Its
emphasis is on pure experience, not on verbalizing findings.” He also charged that graduate students who
had participated in the project had formed an insider sect that considered
nonparticipants square. Others accused
Alpert and Leary of running irresponsible, party-like psilocybin sessions and
of ignoring or underestimating possible permanent psychological damage to
subjects. Leary defended his unorthodox
research methods; Alpert pointed out that Health Services physicians were on
24-hour call in case they were needed.
The Crimson’s account of o the stormy meeting touched off violent
reactions. Participants in the center
debate, including Dr. Kelman, strongly protested the newspapers intrusion on a
private meeting. Other faculty members
who had not previously heard of the controversy over psilocybin now joined the
battle.
The squabble had gotten
out of the family, and Harvard administration was apprehensive. Quickly, the Boston Newspapers seized on the
affair. A psychopharmacologist in the
Massachusetts Public Health Department expressed the belief that one person not
under the influence of the drug should be present during all experiments. On March 20, five days after The
Crimson’s first story appeared, the state food and drug division announced
that it had launched an investigation of psilocybin research at Harvard.
President Pusey said
that the university planned no investigation of its own and added that he was
confident that David McClelland, director of the center, would satisfy the
state inspectors. Other Harvard officials said they had not interfered with the
project because to have done so would have been an abridgment of academic
freedom. Dr. Dana Farnsworth stated
that University Health Services had not taken any action because there was “no
evidence of any direct harm to any individual involved.”
Legal issues arose. The
deputy commissioner of the Health Department told reporters he thought
psilocybin fell into the category of drugs that had to be administered by a
physician. He explained that state law permitted physicians alone to administer
"hypnotic or somnifacient" (sleep-producing) drugs. If psilocybin was
a "harmful drug" under Massachusetts law, he warned, "those who
gave it would be subject to prosecution even if they had discontinued their
work."
One
inquiry ends
The state finished its
inquiry in mid-April. It decided that the psilocybin research could go on if
simple medical precautions were taken, and it dropped the matter of the
legality of work done before March, 1962. The only demand the state made was
that a licensed physician be present when the drug was actually administered;
he would not have to stay for the whole of the session The Crimson reported:
"Massachusetts authorities have apparently adopted a friendly attitude
toward the research and are insisting on medical precautions in order not to
violate state laws or upset public opinion." It seemed that the storm had
blown over.
The
appointments of both Alpert and Leary were to expire on June 30, l963, and
Harvard's governing body—the Corporation—had voted not to renew their terms.
This meant the two psychologists would be around for only one more year, with
further trouble unlikely. In May, 1962, the Center for Research in Personality
named a faculty committee to "advise and oversee" future work with
psilocybin. Alpert happily agreed to the idea, commenting, "We hope to
establish guidelines to make us and the rest of the university comfortable
about the project."
But several
persons were distinctly unhappy. One was Alfred J. Murphy, senior food and drug
inspector of the Health Department, who had supervised the state inquiry.
Sadly, he recalled how Harvard had thwarted him in the late 1950's after his
office learned that an undergraduate had a supply of peyote. When Murphy
arrived on campus with a search warrant, the university seemed to him to be
using every trick possible to delay him until the student had disposed of the
illegal drug. Murphy said he had run into a similar faculty conspiracy to
protect the Alpert and Leary psilocybin project.
A
committee gives up
Also unhappy were the
Harvard people appointed to the faculty advisory committee on psilocybin
research. One of the first things they urged was that Alpert turn over his full
supply of psilocybin to University Health Services for safekeeping. When Alpert
said he would keep some for "personal use," the committee members
insisted he relinquish all of his drugs. Alpert vehemently told them he had a
"citizen's right" to have and use all the psilocybin he wanted. The
committee gave up. It never met again.
One Harvard junior told a
friend that Alpert had persuaded him to take psilocybin in a "self
exploratory" session at Alpert's apartment. Alpert tried out a new
short-acting hallucinogen, dimethyltryptamine (DMT); he gave it to himself by
injection, found he could stay "up" for thirty blissful minutes, and
reported it was "like taking an internal shower." An undergraduate
group was conducting covert research with mescaline. There were stories of
students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and
homosexual.
Farnsworth called Alpert in
and demanded that he turn over his entire stock of psilocybin for safekeeping
during the summer. Alpert reluctantly complied. Later, by accident, Farnsworth
found out that Alpert had not given him everything. He had kept a batch for
himself and had supplied some to an outside institution. There was as well
evidence of Leary's having used Harvard stationery to order more psilocybin
from Sandoz.
To get away from it all,
Alpert, Leary and friends took off for Mexico, where they had rented for the
summer a resort hotel in the seaside town of Zihuatanejo, near Acapulco. People
interested in exploring their consciousness joined them. Some Harvard students
dropped in.
The Alpert and Leary who
returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1962 were noticeably different from the
men who had embarked on an interesting research project in 1960. The old Alpert
had said his greatest ambition was to get a tenured position at Harvard. The
new one said he couldn't care less that the Corporation had not renewed his
appointment; the university was petty, uninteresting and closed-minded. Both
Alpert and Leary seemed determined to show everyone they had the answer to
man's problems. And if the university refused to listen, they would take their
arguments to the public.
Within a few weeks of the
opening of the fall semester, the campaign began. The two maintained the drugs
offered hope to an ailing society, but warned that there were those who wanted
to suppress information about them and keep them unavailable. The issue, they said,
was whether anyone had a right to prevent you from experiencing the ecstasy of
consciousness expansion. Everyone had to fight for "internal
freedom."
In October, Leary
dramatically announced the formation of a private organization, the
International Federation for Internal Freedom, to carry on the fight. It would
"encourage, support and protect research on psychedelic (mind manifesting)
sub stances." Students were encouraged to join and form "research
cells," through which they would eventually be able to obtain and use the
drugs.
Consciousness expansion
became the most popular subject of dinner table conversation at Harvard. A few
undergraduates took the university's rugged introductory organic chemistry
course solely to develop the skill necessary to synthesize mescaline. And to
capitalize on the vast market that had been created in Cambridge, a new
character appeared in Harvard Square: the professional "junk"
peddler. Instead of pushing morphine or heroin, salesmen offered high-grade marijuana,
mescaline and sugar cubes with LSD in them.
The university, through
John Monro, dean of Harvard College, and Dana Farnsworth of the Health
Services, issued a stern warning to undergraduates that hallucinogenic drugs
"may result in serious hazard to the mental health and stability even of
apparently normal persons." A few days later, Monro called the drugs
"a serious psychiatric hazard" and added, "I don't like anyone
urging our undergraduates to use them."
When this appeared in The
Crimson, Alpert and Leary in reply labeled the warnings "reckless and
inaccurate," scientifically. They said there was no reason to believe
"that consciousness-expanding drug experiences are any more dangerous than
psychoanalysis or a four-year enrollment in Harvard College." They
predicted that "the control and expansion of consciousness" would be
a "major civil-liberties issue of the next decade." Finally, they
defended their own use of the drugs and exhorted Harvard men to "place
your trust not in Dean Monro's 'grown-up responsibility of faculty members'
(including the authors of this letter) but in the scientific data and in your
own experienced judgment."
On the day the Alpert-Leary
letter was printed, the director of the Boston branch of the Federal Food and
Drug Administration announced that the FDA had begun an investigation of
possible illegal sales in Cambridge of mescaline, psilocybin and LSD. The
situation seemed as black as it had been the previous spring.
Then the university had
another surprise: Alpert was going to be around longer than expected. He had
received a verbal promise of a one-year appointment at the Graduate School of
Education from the dean of the school. The university felt obligated to honor
this commitment, and on January 7,1963, the Corporation voted a year's
extension to Alpert.
Little more than a week
later, Leary announced a program for the International Federation for Internal
Freedom-known as IFIF. The organization had applied for incorporation and was
starting to set up branch centers in cities across the country IFlF's biggest
project was the establishment of a summer "Freedom Center" in Mexico
at the resort the Alpert-Leary group had taken over in 1962. A closer to home
undertaking was "an experiment in multifamilial living" that began with
the purchase of a spacious house on Kenwood Avenue in suburban Newton.
Meditation
in Newton
Alpert, Leary and his young
daughters, a married Harvard senior with wife and baby, and several friends
moved into the house to form a "transcendental community," where they
could "maintain a level of experience which cuts beyond routine ego and
social games.' One feature of the house was a specially constructed
"meditation room," accessible solely by a ladder. The only
furnishings were mattresses and cushions on the floor. A tiny light gave just
enough illumination to see the Buddha statue in one corner. The fragrance of
incense completed the effect. To this room, residents of the house came
frequently for "active meditation," whether drug-induced or not.
Otherwise, they led casual, if unusual, lives. The students went to their
classes and did their work (except when they found themselves involuntarily
"turned on" —something that happened occasionally to people who took
the drugs regularly.
Alpert continued to conduct his course in motivation at Harvard for
undergraduates and graduates. Leary taught his graduate seminars in research
methods. And IFIF executives took care of official correspondence. Anyone who
wandered into the house in Newton was welcome to stay, meditate or move
in.
In February, IFIF began
mailing packets of literature to Harvard undergraduates. graduate students,
faculty and anyone else interested. Each got a resume of the Alpert-Leary
psilocybin experiments on over 400 subjects ("91 per cent of our subjects
enjoyed pleasant experiences; about 66 per cent reported insights and positive
life-change"). A covering letter gave the assurance that this research had
been "congenially separated" from Harvard in the fall of 1962. There was
an application blank for membership in IFIF (dues, $10 per year) and another
blank for joining the Freedom Center in Mexico, during the summer of 1963 at
$200 a month for room and board ("half rates for children").
Alpert had been fund
raising among wealthy citizens of Boston and New York. He would interest them
in his work, introduce them to the drug experience, then urge them to
contribute to IFIF. Many did. Meantime a second "multifamilial
dwelling" opened in Newton, and IFIF-Los Angeles began operations. Alpert
and Leary went on radio in Boston to explain their mission.
The city of Newton was not
converted. In March, Alpert was accused of violating the housing code's ban on
multifamily dwellings. Neighbors had complained of strange goings-on. Local
residents were sure that the inhabitants of the big white house on Kenwood
Avenue practiced everything from free love to communism. Alpert claimed his
transcendental community was a single-family unit "in a larger
sense." He has not been bothered since.
In April, Leary, without
giving any formal notice to the university, disappeared from Cambridge. He
turned up shortly afterward in Los Angeles. President Pusey and the dean of the
faculty took the matter to the Harvard Corporation, which promptly relieved
Leary of teaching duties and stopped his salary. Leary wrote to David
McClelland, explaining that he had been "on leave" from the
university. He hinted at a suit if he were not reinstated.
The university had other
problems. Couriers were now bringing drugs to Harvard each weekend, and more
and more students were experimenting for themselves to see if Alpert and Leary
had the right idea. One could arrange to buy marijuana and mescaline in local
sandwich shops. The newest fad, which sprouted in May, was the consumption of
morning-glory seeds, supposed to cause visions and all the rest.
About mid-May, the
university decided Alpert and Leary had become intolerable. Armed with a list
of sources of information on the two, the dean of the faculty and the dean of
the college set out to investigate.
One senior talked
Patiently, they assured
each person they questioned that no action would be taken against students;
they only wanted facts on Alpert and Leary. To their discouragement, all but
one of the people involved refused to help. Most showed absolute allegiance to
the two psychologists. One senior, who thought that others had talked, told the
deans that Alpert had given him psilocybin in a personal session in 1962. It
was just what the university was looking for.
On Tuesday, May 14,1963,
President Pusey called Alpert into his office and charged him with giving an
undergraduate psilocybin, in defiance of the prohibition on using
undergraduates in his research, and then later assuring officers of the
university that he had not given the drug to any undergraduate after the
prohibition went into effect. Alpert admitted that he had done it, but said
that the incident had not been part of his research; it was an extracurricular
affair, quite apart from the concerns of the university. President Pusey
disagreed. He told Alpert he would bring before the Corporation at its next
meeting the matter of the termination of Alpert's contract.
The following day, Alpert
wrote a long letter to Pusey and the members of the Corporation in which he
explained the importance of his research and urged the university not to oppose
the exploration of man's consciousness. The Corporation, unconvinced, voted on
Monday, May 27, to terminate both of Alpert's appointments (the one that was to
expire June 30, 1963, and the School of Education appointment that was to run
through 1964) immediately.
The Crimson applauded the
university's action in a special edition. "In firing Richard Alpert,"
the paper editorialized, " Harvard has dissociated itself not only from
flagrant dishonesty but also from behavior that is spreading infection
throughout the academic community."
Alpert responded with the
announcement that he and Leary would now devote full time to IFIF and that IFIF
had just moved its offices from Boston to Cambridge—two blocks from Harvard
Square. "We welcome anyone interested," Alpert wrote The Crimson, but
added that, because of restrictive FDA regulations, "we will continue an
active research and training program in Mexico."
Harvard
considered its responsibilities in the matter discharged.
Alpert and Leary had opened their Mexican Freedom Center. Irked by reports of
odd happenings at Zihuatanejo, the Mexican Government in June gave the whole
IFIF group five days to leave the country. Reluctantly, Alpert and Leary
returned to Cambridge, looking, they said, for another country in which to
carry on.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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COMING SOON
Harvard Crimson, Feb 20, 1962
Tuesday, February 20, 1962 - News
'Better Than
a Damn'
From the Bottle
By ANDREW T. WEIL
When Aldous Huxley published his essay "The Doors of
Perception" in 1954, he did much to publicize a very strange drug.
"Mescaline," he writes, "admits one to an other-world of
light, color, and increased awareness. In some cases there may be
extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary
beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and
meaningfulness of naked existence. . . ."
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