"Liberal CIA" Control over the Psychedelics Movement: Key Names Include Luce, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, Soros, Bronfman and Pritzker

Center: Alan Watts F.l.t.r.: Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck, Dr. Richard Rockefeller, son of David Rockefeller; Rick Doblin, Amber Lyon, Adele van der Plas and Ram Dass.

Contents

"Liberal CIA [is] the best mafia you can deal with in the 20th century."

Harvard's mushroom, LSD and DMT pioneer Dr. Timothy Leary in his Flashbacks autobiography, p. 308.

Intro to a complete history of psychedelics

The purpose of this article is to provide a full, structured history of psychedelics, including all relevant substances, gurus, researchers, establishment ties and key areas of debate. Originally this article was meant to be a rather brief chapter of ISGP's Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. Such a chapter actually existed for a while, but soon turned out to be too limited in scope because psychedelics have only been a side-track of Coast to Coast AM. This much more extensive article has now replaced it. And it only took 2.5 years.

Combining mushrooms and interior design. Totally not the author's home.

For those who may wonder about it, this article is written from a pro-psychedelics point-of-view. I myself got interested in psychedelics in 2012. Working on ISGP resulted in regular pauses of a year or more (because psychedelics generally push me to stop the ISGP effort... and I'm extremely stubborn), but all in all I still managed to get into the psychedelic state for about 600 hours. In order, I took ayahuasca variations, Hawaiian Baby Rose Seeds, ibogaine, DMT (okay, I couldn't get this one to work), Mapacho, magic mushrooms, Salvia Divinorum and LSD.

Just as important to some maybe: I never smoked cigarettes. Cocaine or heroin I never took. Ketamine I never used. No experience with MDMA / XTC either, although this substance doesn't appear to be bad at all. Weed I ate once. Three grams, so I passed out for 12 hours and learned it's a little different than the earlier-mentioned psychedelics in the sense that more doesn't exactly lead to more intensity and vividness. Unlike Salvia, I never smoked weed; I'm wary of any lung damage. Being from the Netherlands, the mentioned psychedelics are legal or semi-legal. For now at least.

Coffee, tea, or Salvia?

Keep in mind though, this article is NOT about the effects of various psychedelics. It's simply about providing a history of psychedelics that is as unbiased and free of any kind of cultism or disinformation as possible. Psychedelics are very simple. You don't need politicians, jungle trips, shamans, gurus, or rituals making them more complex than they really are. All these things, except politicians, might make psychedelics more exciting in some cases - and in the process tremendously more expensive - but you can do without them. An individual, a substance, and whatever is attached to a particular substance, can work things out all by themselves (watch out with LSD in particular though!). Or better said maybe, the individual will be worked out by the substance.

With that, it appears the "back to basics" message is one of the primary messages of this article, similar to how the first psychedelic pioneers got involved in a rather playful manner. This, and planting, growing, creating and spreading psychedelics everywhere, regardless of what state laws say. A good psychedelic is worth more than a thousand psychiatrists. Governments obviously need to keep the machine running. It's hard to say to what extent psychedelics are going to interfere in that, but at the very least there should always be a back channel available in each and every country through which citizens can obtain psychedelics. People who have taken them will understand why.

Trust no one

Right off the bat, let's provide a few examples as to why information related to psychedelics and elitism is rather hard to fully trust. Although undoubtedly more than anyone ever dared to imagine, ISGP readers have already been aware for a number of years that there are all kinds of establishment ties to today's wave of psychedelic gurus. But also when one looks at supposedly independent researchers into the psychedelics community, one often sees the same peculiar ties.

About CIA, by "liberal CIA".

Take John D. Marks, author of the 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a key reference for anyone trying to understand the CIA's drug and psychedelics testing programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Reality is, Marks is a first rate "liberal CIA" intelligence asset. As the acknowledgments make clear, his book was sponsored by Robert Borosage and Morton Halperin of the Institute for Policy Studies, a key "new left" outfit that has received millions upon millions in financing from the Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society (Soros) and other key "liberal CIA" foundations. In later decades, Halperin in particular became a direct Soros employee. Marks history also came to include the Esalen Institute, Rockefeller alien abduction disinformer John Mack and two elitist think tanks, all of which is discussed in Marks' "liberal CIA" biography here on ISGP.

One of the last peculiar ties this author ran into before finishing this article is Martin Lee, the author of the popular book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond. A year after publishing this book in 1985, Lee became the long-time founding editor of Extra!, a magazine that received funds from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund and closely-allied MacArthur Foundation.

It makes one wonder if Lee, among other things, purposely left out the deep Mellon family ties of Alan Watts, while at the same time explaining the ties of the Mellon family to the Millbrook estate. The Mellon connection to Millbrook can still be written off as a coincidence, but when one takes all historical establishment connections to the psychedelics community into account, it is much harder draw the conclusion that all this is a coincidence. In fact, it is impossible to draw this conclusion. The Mellon family simply has too many ties to psychedelics, UFO and even "alt right" networks for these connections to be considered coincidental.

In other words, these examples once again indicate that the information that reaches the public is much more controlled than most people can even imagine.

PART I: HOFFMAN, HUXLEY, OSMOND, JANIGER, WASSON

The LSD, mescaline and mushroom pioneers of the 1950s

Albert Hofmann, the 1943 inventor of LSD.

Arguably the modern history of psychedelics began on April 16, 1943 when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, accidentally discovered the powerful psychedelic effects of LSD, a small amount of which he had absorbed through his skin that day. Hofmann isolated the substance from the chemically very similar natural compound LSA. This compound can be found in Hawaiian Baby Rose Seeds and, to a lesser extend, in Morning Glory Seeds. LSD is many times more powerful than LSA and, as Hofmann experienced, can even be absorbed through the skin. Three days after this accidental discovery, on April 19, Hofmann decided to give himself an experimental dose of LSD. Thinking 250 microgram would be a threshold dose to experience any effect, he actually provided himself with more than 12 times the minimally required dose of 20 micrograms. After calling in a sick day, he went on an epic psychedelic bicycle ride back home - to this day remembered by psychedelic enthusiasts as "Bicycle Day".

Unfortunately, Bicycle Day, despite its hilarious origin, falls three days after Hofmann's true discovery of LSD and thus has no legitimacy. Its 1985 inventor originally meant to celebrate it on April 16, but was forced to push it on to April 19 to make the celebration for that year fall into the weekend. For some reason the April 19 date stuck around, but the fact is, weekend or no weekend, the real Bicycle Day falls on April 16.

It took a few years for knowledge of LSD to spread. The first publication in the United States was produced in August 1950 by St. Louis State Hospital-based psychiatrists Anthony K. Busch and Warren C. Johnson. They were offered a batch of LSD by Hofmann's Sandoz corporation in Switzerland when they inquired for a drug that could "induce a transitory delirious state". Based on a small study involving 29 psychiatric patients with rather serious mental disorders, they concluded that LSD "may offer a means for more readily gaining access to the chronically withdrawn patients [and] serve as a new tool for shortening psychotherapy." The effects of LSD varied quite a bit, but in many cases the psychedelic made patients relive their past traumas and allowed them to much better discuss their issues. [1] Busch and Johnson never really became involved in the network of psychedelic researchers. They reported that LSD had some benefits to mental patients and that was it. [2]

What is nevertheless noteworthy to mention is that Anthony Busch, who served as the clinical director of St. Louis State Hospital from the 1940s to 1960s, was a nephew of the founder of the St. Louis-based Anheuser Busch brewery fortune. [3] The Anheuser Busch family basically have served as the establishment kings of St. Louis throughout the 20th century. They have been very close to the Rockefeller family, joined the 1001 Club, along with the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bechtels, Ford and Mellon, were particularly close to the Nixon administration through "Mr. Fixit", Peter M. Flanigan, a Busch family member; have maintained CIA ties and "liberal CIA" ties and have also been suspected of close relations with Opus Dei. These ties are explained a bit more in Appendix A. Also, Dr. August Busch, Oscar Janiger and fellow psychedelic researcher Sidney Cohen are known to have attended conferences of the Rockefeller and CIA MKULTRA-linked Macy Foundation. [4] Granted, it's entirely possible the majority of the participants in these Macy conferences never had a clue about these ties, but it nevertheless remains an interesting fact.

Aldous Huxley with his wife Laura and the floating head of Dr. Humphry Osmond.

Another, today much better known, early expert to become interested in LSD for its potential medical value was Dr. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who in 1951 emigrated to Saskatchewan, Canada, to study the medical value of different psychedelics at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. Apart from LSD, Osmond was very interested in mescaline, which in North America is derived from the peyote cactus and has been used in Native American rituals of the Apache, Comanche and Kiowa tribes for hundreds of years. Peyote's first reported use goes back to 3,700 B.C. to Indian tribes in Mexico, where the peyote cactus is native (apart from a tiny part of Texas). It took 5,600 years, until 1897, for mescaline to be isolated and another two decades, until 1919, before it was synthesized. Aleister Crowley, the famous British occultist, was using mescaline in his Rites of Eleusis by 1910, but widespread use didn't really catch on in the western world until Osmond got involved in the early 1950s and teamed up with famous Brave New World author Aldous Huxley. Huxley actually spent a day with Crowley on October 4, 1930. It's likely Crowley extensively lectured Huxley on mescaline, but it would take two more decades for Huxley to take the substance himself.

Huxley moved to California in 1937. Before that, and as discussed in the Fabian Socialism chapter of ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, he maintained ties to Britain's establishment, although he, along with friends as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell and his brother Julian Huxley, basically represented the most moderate and "radical" aspect establishmentarians as Nancy and David Astor still tolerated around them. Huxley, along with his new American friends, would continue to draw this hard-to-define line between "outsider" and "establishment" in the United States. Julian Huxley, who remained in England, would go on to establish the World Wildlife Fund with the backing of just about every elite family in the United States and Europe.

In May 1953 Osmond administered Aldous Huxley a dose of mescaline. Huxley went on to write a 70-page account of this experience in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, in turn inspiring the name of Jim Morrison's band, The Doors. In 1956 Osmond and Huxley were trying to come up with a proper overarching name for substances as LSD and mescaline. In a letter he wrote to Osmond, Huxley suggested the somewhat hard to pronounce "phanerothyme". His exact sentence read: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." [5] Osmond's well known reply was:

"To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic." [6]

"Psyche" means "mind". "Delic" is derived from the Greek work "Delos", meaning "to manifest". Thus literally the word "psychedelic" means "mind manifesting" or "manifested by the mind" - which can be interpreted in multiple ways. Osmond proposed his word "psychedelic" to the public in 1957. It has been in use ever since.

Dr. Humphry Osmond guiding Lord Mayhew's mescaline session for the BBC.

In 1955 the BBC made a recording of Osmond guiding Lord Christopher Mayhew through a mescaline experience. Considered too shocking, it was never broadcasted. Despite all of Osmond's research, experimenting and partaking in Native American peyote rituals, he never really found much medical benefit to the use of mescaline.

In contrast, in the 1950s Osmond reported a very impressive 50 percent cure rate among 1,000 alcoholics he had given large doses of LSD. [7] In another study involving 24 of the worst case alcoholics, Osmond and a partner found that they achieved a cure rate of about 33 percent. Another 33 percent experienced very significant benefits, if only temporary. [8] Six other studies, carried out by different researchers from 1966 to 1970, revealed roughly similar results. In one study, which involved providing a single, smaller dose of LSD to individuals in a treatment program for alcohol abuse, the consumption of alcohol was reduced in 59% of the participants. This only went for 38% of those who only received the traditional treatment. What is primarily sad about this last series of studies is that modern researchers only rediscovered these effects of LSD in 2012 and were left speculating about the effect several doses of LSD might have had. Not a word was said either by these modern researchers about the earlier studies of Osmond. [9] One would think science would have studied and acknowledged the therapeutic benefits of LSD by now.

As for Aldous Huxley, soon after he contacted Osmond over his mescaline research in 1953, he also became involved with California-based LSD researcher Dr. Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Irvine who was active in LSD research in the 1954-1962 period. Janiger carried out his own experiments with LSD and provided it to a number of celebrities, the most well known, apart from Huxley, being actor Cary Grant. [10] A key supplier of both LSD and mescaline to the Janiger-Huxley-Osmond circle in this period became a certain mysterious, wealthy, OSS veteran named "Captain" Al Hubbard. [11]

1979. F.l.t.r.: Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary and Dr. Oscar Janiger.

In 1991, Oscar Janiger commented - undoubtedly jokingly - that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should." [12] Getting details on Hubbard's life indeed isn't easy, even today. During the prohibition years of 1920 to 1923, Hubbard had been a rum runner. By World War II he was running supplies and arms from the supposedly still "neutral" U.S. to Canada on behalf of FDR and the OSS. These supplies were then secretly shipped to England, which was trying to survive a Nazi onslaught. After World War II and after a presidential pardon for his smuggling operations, Hubbard managed to become president of the Vancouver Uranium Corporation (seemingly a first-rate national security responsibility), making him a Rolls Royce-owning multi-millionaire who was able to build all kinds of largely unspecified high level connections. In the book Acid Dreams, for example, Hubbard's connections are summarized as, "His prestigious government and business connections read like a Who's Who of the power elite in North America." [13] How enlightening! Apparently his connections of the 1950s and 1960s included the Joint Chiefs [14] and the pope. [15] His involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in SRI at the invitation of Willis Harman, an old LSD convert of Hubbard [16], most certainly would earn him the label "liberal CIA". Looking at its trustees and international board, SRI was controlled by the Bechtels and their Bohemian Grove and 1001 Club friends, certainly from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Hubbard first took LSD in 1951 while staying in England. It was administered to him by Dr. Ronald Sandison, the first clinical experimenter with LSD in Great Britain. Sandison had met with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1950 when Hofmann was dosing spiders with LSD to observe changes in the manner in which they would spin their webs. According to his own account, Sandison had limited interaction with some of the more well-known American researchers. [17] Still, by the 1990s he was serving as a trustee of the Hofmann Foundation, a hub of all international psychedelic gurus that was set up in 1988. The international board may have hardly ever met, but he was invited nevertheless. He has also served as a scientific advisor to the Soros-allied Beckley Foundation, founded in 1998 by Countess Amanda Feilding, an individual historically tied to the Leary group in England. Creating ISGP's "liberal CIA" oversight has come in handy.

Hubbard's first experience with LSD sparked a huge interest in him in the transcendental value of psychedelics. In 1953 Hubbard invited Osmond to the Vancouver Yacht Club in order to score a little mescaline. It marked the first time these two men met. [18] Soon after, Hubbard became a monthly supplier to the Janiger-Huxley group in California, Osmond in Canada [19], as well as other experts who had trouble obtaining various psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin in particular.

Osmond and especially Hubbard actually developed the idea to dose world leaders with LSD in order to change the consciousness of the planet. They had some limited success with "a prime minister, assistants to heads of state, UN representatives, and members of the British parliament" [20], but names and details remain a carefully guarded secret. Hubbard's efforts of supplying experts and leaders of society alike earned him the nickname "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD" among his friends. [21]

Gordon Wasson and his 1957 Time Life article on magic mushrooms.

In June 1957, LSD and mescaline enthusiast Aldous Huxley, followed in close succession by Al Hubbard and Dr. Humphry Osmond, met with Gordon Wasson [22], the public relations vice president for Morgan Guaranty Trust and amateur ethnomycologist who just a month before, in May, had his article Seeking the Magic Mushroom published in Life magazine. The article described Wasson's 1955 quest to Mexico to find and experiment with "strange and hitherto unstudied mushrooms with vision-giving powers." With that article, he brought another powerful psychedelic to the public's awareness apart from LSD and mescaline: psilocybin-containing psychedelic mushrooms. The same article also discussed Wasson's subsequent trip in 1956 "to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study."

Life magazine's owner, Pilgrims Society member Henry Luce, and especially his Dame of Malta [23] wife Claire Boothe Luce, were major supporters of psychedelic drugs as LSD and mushrooms. [24] While not Eastern Establishment by birth, Wasson did manage to become a Morgan banker and CFR member. He had been a Century Association member as early as 1939, along with Henry Luce, easily explaining how the Luce couple heard about his adventures through mutual friends and invited him to write an article about his experiences. [25] Huxley, Hubbard and Osmond did not get along too well with Wasson, by the way. They were a little taken aback by his open display of wealth and refusal to take any other psychedelic serious. [26]

Names photocopied from a historic Century Association membership list (right click and save from here). For a listing of the most important Century Association names, look here in ISGP's NGO list.

The Life article inspired a number of individuals to do their own field research into psychedelic mushrooms. One was the incredibly curious Andrija Puharich, a major disinformation pusher on the supernatural and future mentor of Uri Geller who went to visit the same remote shaman as Wasson in 1960 on an expedition financed by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at Edgewood Arsenal, the University of Washington and the Aluminum Company of America. [27]

In fact, the 1956 trip of Wasson had been financed under the CIA's MKULTRA program, Subproject 58 to be exact. While speaking about this in the late 1970s to author John Marks, both made it appear as if the CIA had infiltrated Wasson's second expedition. [28] What wasn't mentioned is that CIA director Allen Dulles was another long-time Century Association member who frequently corresponded with Wasson throughout the 1950s, the first time many years before Wasson went to Mexico. [29] While Wasson and Luce on the one hand and Dulles and his CIA on the other had different objectives in mind with regard to researching psychedelic drugs - personal interest vs. offensive and defensive use in interrogation and brainwashing - their close ties are undeniable and has let to a lot of speculation and misdirection over the years.

Another person inspired by Wasson's adventures in Mexico was the UCLA-educated psychologist Frank Barron. He went to Mexico in 1958 and came back with a large bag of magic mushrooms. [30]

PART II: LEARY'S GROUP AT HARVARD

The mushroom years of 1960-1962

Frank Barron.

There's a lot more to Barron. After graduation from UCLA, he went to work for the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at UCLA Berkeley and became a nationally renowned expert on creativity. [31] According to Leary, IPAR was a think tank "funded and staffed by former OSS-CIA psychologists", with his friend Barron twice refusing to become "director of psychological personnel of the CIA." [32] The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Ford Foundation were all used as conduits for "Rockefeller CIA" funds to witting and unwitting candidates, so it is hard to figure out who exactly Barron was, especially upon noticing he also was a co-founder of the Esalen Institute. He certainly has "liberal CIA" written all over him.

The relationship between Leary and Barron goes back to graduate school at UCLA, where the two were drinking buddies. By 1959 Leary is concluding a career as director of psychiatric research at the rather elite Kaiser Memorial Hospital. [33] Despite creating a psychology test that has been implemented by the CIA, Leary has developed doubts about the effectiveness of psychology. [34] Also, his wife has just committed suicide. He goes to live with his two children in Florence, Italy.

One day, in Florence, apparently on a sabbatical to this very same town, Barron decides to visit his friend here. He tells Leary about his experiences with magic mushrooms, but Leary is skeptical and advises caution to prevent him from losing his credibility. As a parting gift, Barron offers Leary $500 of his Ford Foundation grant to go and interview Arthur Koestler in London. In addition, Barron informs him that David McClelland, head of Harvard's Center for Personality Research, happens to be in Florence as well, has read Leary's book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, and might be interested in hiring him to Harvard. [35] McClelland indeed is in Florence - on a Guggenheim Fellowship. [36]

Leary takes Barron up on this last offer and has lunch with McClelland the very next day. After elaborating a bit more on his very progressive views on psychiatric treatment, McClelland hires him with the remark, "There's no question that what you're advocating is going to be the future of American psychology. You're not a lone voice. ... You're just what we need to shake things up at Harvard." [37] With that, Leary returns to the United States to become a professor at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality, where he is allowed to teach graduate students based on his own, modern, practical views of psychology. [38] Alternately, Leary described his assigned as having to come up with "better methods of behavior change" for psychiatric patients. [39]

Timothy Leary (left) and Richard Alpert at Harvard in 1961.

McClelland staffed the Harvard Center with several "maverick instructors", according to Leary. Among them is a certain Richard Alpert, the well-to-do son of the last president of the New Haven Railroad. This actually is the aspect Leary will end up mentioning in his biography, including that Alpert enjoyed his apartment penthouse and limousines. [40] His father's wealth also explains why Alpert was in the possession of a pilot license at such a young age, complete with his own Cessna airplane. He used it at one point to pick up Leary in Mexico and fly him back to the United States. [41] A little additional checking reveals that the biography of Richard Alpert's father, George Alpert, is really impressive. He was one of the leading Zionist leaders of the United States of his time with ties not only extending to the White House, but also to leading Jewish families as Warburg, Bronfman, Lehman and Oppenheimer. It even looks as if Alpert was part of the Mossad-allied Jewish intelligence underground in the United States known as the Sonneborn Institute. It took a while to compile George Alpert's biography. Here's what it looks like:

Born in 1898. Graduated from Boston University Law School and became a district attorney.

Boston lawyer and founder of the law firm Alpert & Alpert with his brother. [42]

At the end of World War II, Alpert was a trustee of Associated Jewish Philanthropies, Combined Jewish Appeal and Hebrew Teachers College, a director of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA.org), as well as president of Middlesex University, all of it in Boston. [43]

Trustee of the American Institute for International Information, Franklin Hospital and Temple Ohabei Shalom, also at the end of World War II. [44]

Key founder of Brandeis University in Boston and the university's first chair/president 1946-1954, and after that a lifetime trustee. Elites as Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman and Philip Klutznick have been deeply involved in Brandeis over the years. [45] The university used to be known as Middlesex University, of which Alpert was president, and briefly was known as the Albert Einstein Foundation, of which Alpert was a director. It was the first secular Jewish American university in existence. [46]

National co-chairman of United Jewish Appeal at the end of World War II. [47]

National vice-chairman of the United Palestine Appeal at the end of World War II, with Albert Einstein serving as honorary chairman. UPA's honorary co-chairman and U.S. Haganah/Sonneborn Institute leader Rudolf G. Sonneborn served as chairman of the national council at the time. [48]

Director of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from at least 1944 to at least 1961, co-vice chairman in the late 1940s, and chairman of the New England Region. Key names of the JDC in this period (and beyond) were Edward Warburg and wife; Abe Bronfman, Samuel Bronfman, Herbert H. Lehman (CIA-tied), Harry Oppenheimer (1001 Club) and others. [49]

Director of the New Haven Railroad 1952-1954 and last president 1956-1961. Went back to his Alpert & Alpert law firm after that.

Key founder/fundraiser, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, in the 1953-1955 period, together with Pilgrims Society members Walter Annenberg, Thomas Dewey and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as then-U.S. vice president Richard Nixon. [50] Member, board of overseers, until at least 1966, together with Annenberg, Max Stern and Laurence Tisch. [51]

Present at a dinner with President Richard Nixon in 1969 with Gabriel Hauge and a number of other influential persons. [52]

Died in 1988, with an obituary in the New York Times. [53]

I guess we're all aware that to a large extent Harvard is reserved for the sons and daughters of the establishment, but these connections still are a little mind-blowing. Most people are looking at Leary and Alpert as anti-establishment figures, yet they themselves, and so many of their closest associates, have the most incredible establishment ties imaginable.

In any case, Leary takes a liking to Alpert at Harvard. At the time, everything still seems relatively mundane. Both professors are guiding graduate students, Alpert still is very much Alpert - instead of "Ram Dass" - and there is little to no talk about psychedelics. Once again, Frank Barron is about to change that.

Six weeks after his own hiring, Leary is asked by his superior, David McClelland, if he knows anyone for a one-year appointment to the Center for Research in Personality faculty. Leary suggests Barron, who is promptly hired as a visiting professor for a year. Leary is surprised at how close the ties are between Harvard's Center for Personality Study and California's IPAR, where Barron is working, prompting him to remark:

"At the top level everyone seemed to know everyone. I was interested in how these power networks worked, especially when they involved psychology and the government." [54]

One thing Leary's friend Barron and Leary's boss McClelland certainly have in common is the Ford Foundation. Barron received financing from the foundation when visiting Leary in Florence, while McClelland - coincidentally also in Florence at the time he recruited Leary and that on a Guggenheim Fellowship - used to be director of psychological studies for the Ford Foundation in 1952 and 1953. [55]

As already documented in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article (a term actually coined by Tim Leary) and The Cold War Rockefeller CIA network section of ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, the Ford Foundation, even more so at the time, was completely synonymous with CIA operations and completely controlled by Allen Dulles, David Rockefeller (who received full briefings of Allen Dulles and his CIA division chiefs, including on MKULTRA, and had promised Dulles the Ford Foundation presidency if Eisenhower would not make Dulles CIA chief), John McCloy and a number of their friends. "CIA" doesn't even cut it. Both Harvard and the Ford Foundation were, and are, two of the most valuable pearls in the Eastern Establishment's power structure. Permanent private sector CIA operations have always been part of that. As documented in the articles just linked, John McCloy at one point argued to staffers who had grown wary of the Ford Foundation's relationship with the CIA "that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at the lower levels." The only thing McCloy forgot to mention is that he and his closest establishment friends actually were (and are) the CIA, State Department and media - all in one.

That does make one wonder if there was anyone besides McClelland who decided that Leary would be a suitable candidate for Harvard. That doesn't have to be anything nefarious, certainly not at the time. The CIA and establishment had far less to hide in that period, the internet didn't exist, and conspiracy thinking, apart maybe from big business influence on politics, hardly existed until the years after the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

Still, the ties of individuals as Anthony Busch, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Janiger, Al Hubbard, Gordon Wasson, Frank Barron and Richard Alpert do make one wonder what on Earth was going on within the early psychedelics community. Even Leary has countless establishment and intelligence ties from birth. These involve General Douglas MacArthur, General George Patton, UCLA, Frank Barron, possibly the Kaiser Hospital, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the Mellon family, the neoconservative Hudson Institute, and Gianni Agnelli-linked Joanna Harcourt-Smith. It's really too much to discuss here, so maybe we should list everything in appendix B. As the reader will see, this trend doesn't end here either.

Cuernavaca, South-West Mexico.

As a visiting professor at Harvard throughout 1960, where he sets up a center for drug studies, Barron is able to get Leary excited about magic mushrooms, in no small part by showing him Gordon Wasson's May 1957 article in Life magazine Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Leary spends the summer of 1960 in Mexico, ingesting the exact same mushrooms as Wasson did. That August, the whole Harvard clique spends summer in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Barron, Leary and Alpert are situated in a villa, along with Leary's children and a number of associates. McClelland is situated 10 miles away on a working vacation in which he's trying to stimulate the local economy through psychological means and a supposedly superior Protestant work ethic. It is here that Leary first ingests the magic mushrooms. As with Wasson and Barron, he is sold rather quickly: "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 years as a diligent psychologist." [56]

Back at Harvard, Alpert - who didn't take the mushrooms in Mexico - is quickly won over to the cause. With the consent of their superiors at Harvard, Leary and Alpert begin to include the psilocybin, the synthesized active ingredient of magic mushrooms, in their experimental psychological treatments on volunteer prisoners in the Concord Prison Experiments and with students at Harvard. It is during the beginning stages of these experiments that even more names of the emerging psychedelics scene begin to coalesce. On November 8, 1960, on the day of John F. Kennedy's election, LSD and mescaline enthusiasts Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond arrive in Cambridge (Harvard) where they meet for the very first time with Leary. Huxley is given his first dose of psilocybin and quickly decides to join the prison experiments. [57]

The mysterious Captain Al Hubbard plays a role in the Harvard saga too. He may well have been the first to supply the Leary group with a batch of psilocybin pills or possibly supplied them in a period that they were impossible to get from Hofmann's Sandoz Corporation in Switzerland. At a 1979 meeting of many psychedelic pioneers, Leary exclaims to Hubbard, "Oh Al, I owe everything to you. The galactic center sent you down at the exact right time!" after which Hubbard explains to have first met Leary around 1960 while providing him with a batch of 500 tablets. As Leary responds a little absent-minded with, "I remember that," the room bursts out in laughter. [58] A lot of the details of their first meeting appear to be unknown.

Then there are some of the other pioneers, as described by Leary:

"I was visited by a graduate student named Ralph Metzner. ... He wanted to work on the prison project. ...



"Ralph, Gunther [Weil], and I, feeling a sense of camaraderie as a result of the [psilocybin] session, drove out to the Concord prison to meet the six candidates Jefferson had selected from the pool of volunteers. Two murderers. Two armed robbers. One embezzler. One black heroin pusher.



"[Soon] the convicts spoke about their mystical experiences to ... Alan Watts ... William Burroughs [and] Aldous Huxley..." [59]

Let's take a look at these new names in Leary's circle. Ralph Metzner we'll meet several times more in this article, but by the 1990s his psychedelics research was co-financed by Laurance Rockefeller through the Heffter Research Institute.

Gunther Weil has been a psychology student at Harvard since 1961 who also served as an elite Fulbright Scholar. A Harvard student until 1965, Weil was not just involved in the Concord Prison Experiments, but also the IFIF project and Millbrook. With Leary and Metzner he edited The Psychedelic Review, an irregularly published magazine in the 1963-1971 period that featured articles of just about every prominent psychedelic researcher and enthusiast: Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Alan Watts, Gerald Heard, Humphrey Osmond, etc. Even the notorious Bronfman agent and CIA asset, Ira Einhorn, who later fled the country for murdering his girlfriend, was published in here. [60] Some of these individuals still need to be discussed.

After graduation in 1965, Weil was invited by Abraham Maslow - the most influential psychologist involved in the Esalen Institute - to teach at the Jewish Brandeis University, where Richard Alpert's father was deeply involved in. Weil went on to become a successful psychologist with clients that included "JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Credit Suisse ... Harvard JFK school [and] MIT Media Lab." [61]

Meanwhile, Weil kept involved in "alternative" circles. In 1978, for example, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee gave a lecture at his house. Present in the room was the notorious Ira Einhorn, a long-time friend of Weil. [62] In 1981 Weil brought qigong master Mantak Chia to Harvard, taught him how to teach to groups instead of just individuals, and continued a life-long association with him. [63] From 1994 to 1998 Weil was founding chairman of the National Qigong Association. His Media Lab appointment starting in 2012 demonstrates that Weil kept his old friendships even in old age, because he was hired here by director Joi Ito, a godson and very close friend of Timothy Leary. [64]

William Burroughs II was a gay, drunken, heroin-addicted Beat Generation author who back in 1944 shot his estranged wife to death in a failed William Tell enaction. In 1953 he traveled to Peru in search of ayahuasca, sending letters of his travels and experiences with the vine back to the United States to poet Allen Ginsberg, a cousin of LSD pioneer Dr. Oscar Janiger. [65] Ginsberg quickly followed Burroughs to Peru to experience ayahuasca for himself. [66] In 1963 the two men published Burrough's letter under the title The Yage Letters. By that time both Burroughs and Ginsberg had become intimately involved in Leary's circle at Harvard. Burroughs was directly part of the Concord Prison Experiments; Ginsberg more on the periphery. Leary and Barron first introduced Ginsberg to mushrooms on November 26, 1960 at Leary's Harvard residence. [67] Like Alpert and many others, he was quickly won over.

Interestingly, Burroughs came from a wealthy family. He even was a nephew of Ivy Ledbetter Lee [68], a member of the elite Pilgrims Society [69]. In 1914, in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre on striking miners and their wives and children, Ivy Lee became the public relations agent for the Rockefellers. Along with Edward Bernays, he is actually considered the father of public relations and corporate propaganda. At the time of his death in 1934 he was involved in U.S. cartel negotiations with I.G. Farben in Nazi Germany. [70]

As for Alan Watts, we need to spent a little more time on this individual.

Alan Watts' road to Harvard - and the birth of Esalen

Alan Watts was born in 1915 in faraway England. From an early age he took a huge interest in religion, spirituality and philosophy, so much so that by age 16 he was secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge, a group established by the Theosophist Society. Zen Buddhism always remained Watts' main interest, but he also became highly educated on Taoism, Hinduism, Theosophy and Christianity, as well as psychology - Jungian in particular. [71]

Still in his late teens, in 1934, Watts also was a follower of Dimitrije Mitrinovic, a strange cult-like figure along the lines of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley who headed the New Britain Movement. The movement involved author H.G. Wells and future prime minister Harold MacMillan, but lasted no more than a few years. Mitrinovic later set up his very own New Atlantis Foundation. Watts had discussions with Mitrinovic at his home and was quite in awe of him. Despite that, it is clear from his biography that Watts considered Madame Blavatsky and her successor, Alice Bailey and her Lucis Trust, to be complete frauds. He didn't believe a word of them about secret masters operating from hidden Tibetan monasteries where lost knowledge about (never-existing) lost continents as Atlantis and Lemuria could be found. [72] Refreshing.

Alan Watts, around 1945.

In 1938 Watts moved from London to New York City and lectured around to make some semblance of a living. In 1945 he became an ordained Episcopal priest here, a function he was forced to step down from in 1950 over marriage and personal belief issues. By that time Watts lived in a country house in Poughkeepsie, close to the (future) Millbrook estate, north of New York City, and was becoming a close friend of a certain Joseph Campbell [73], a well-known mythologist who had just finished writing his seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces book. Interesting detail? Campbell was supported for life by Laurance Rockefeller and Paul Mellon. [74] Mellon was a Pilgrims Society member, with both men later becoming 1001 Club members. Laurance Rockefeller's brothers, David and Nelson, as well as their father, were Pilgrims Society members.

Watts benefited in kind. He credits Campbell with "saving his life" by arranging for him grants from the Bollingen Foundation, according to Watts, the only foundation to "pay any attention to off-beat people interested in such matters as Oriental philosophy, medieval alchemy, and Egyptian magic" at that time. [75] In turn, Campbell has stated, "I don't know if anybody would ever have heard of me if it hadn't been for Bollingen," a reference to Bollingen publishing his seminal 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces after his initial publisher rejected it. [76] Laurance Rockefeller loved the book. It influenced his thinking, alongside the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and, much later, Deepak Chopra. [77]

Watts' first grant from Bollingen involved researching "spiritual documents of the Orient", awarded to him in 1951. [78] His publisher became the closely-linked Pantheon Press. He first established a relationship with the owners of Pantheon - Kurt and Helen Wolff - around 1946. [79] The Bollingen Foundation was founded in 1942 by Paul Mellon and his wife Mary [80]. Despite World War II and the foundation briefly having to cease its activities, in 1943 Mary sought out the then-new, small-time Pantheon Press to become the foundation's (future) publisher. She negotiated the deal with the exact same persons who would soon approach Watts: the then-freshly-immigrated German couple Kurt and Helen Wolff. [81] Unfortunately, Mary died in 1946 and as a result John D. Barrett took the helm of the Bollingen Foundation. Watts, Campbell and Barrett became good friends [82], with Campbell joining the foundation's board of trustees in 1960. [83] Paul Mellon, Campbell's benefactor alongside Laurance Rockefeller, always stayed in charge of the foundation until disbanding it in 1973. By that time the foundation had already been winding down its operations for a decade, starting in December 1963. [84]

Mary Mellon's interest in myths and mystery religions didn't start with the founding of the Bollingen Foundation. Even before that she was the key financier of the annual Eranos conferences in Switzerland. [85] Founded in 1933, these conferences brought together the psychologist Carl Jung, a major inspiration of Mary Mellon, with leading experts on yoga, meditation, myths, ancient religions and ancient mystery religions. These conferences were interrupted in 1942 due to World War II. Finances had to be cut while Paul Mellon and his brother-in-law, David Bruce, another leading Pilgrim (from an ancient Templar family), became OSS chiefs. The OSS chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, a future Pilgrims vice president and CIA director, stood in contact with the Eranos leadership: founder Olga Frobe and Carl Jung. [86]

From 1945 on, the Bollingen Foundation of the Mellons continued its efforts to restart the Eranos Conferences, financially backing its founder, Olga Frobe, and many of the speakers until at least the 1960s. "At enormous expense" the foundation also had numerous Eranos-related books translated into English and distributed in the United States. [87]

Alan Watts had hardly made the "life saving" acquaintance of Joseph Campbell in 1950 and received his first Bollingen grant for studying "spiritual documents of the Orient" in 1951, or he was leaving New York for San Francisco to become the main lecturer of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. It appears this move was part of his grant, because Bollingen Foundation funds to Watts only stopped in 1953. [88]

The American Academy of Asian Studies was financed by businessmen Louis Gainsborough, with Frederic Spiegelberg as its chief organizer. [89] Spiegelberg was an old friend of Watts whom he followed from London to New York and then from New York to San Francisco. By the time Spiegelberg brought Watts to San Francisco he was an extremely popular professor of Asian studies - especially Indian - for quite a number of years. In 1948-1949 he was studying Tibetan monasteries and Indian nationalist and spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation [90], immediately after which he went back to India on an almost equally elite Fulbright scholarship. [91] It is at this point that Gainsborough, about whom not much is known with regard to establishment connections, approached Spiegelberg to set up the American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS).

Spiegelberg brought his Stanford student Haridas Chaudhuri with him as a main staffer. His old friend Alan Watts he brought in from New York City. [92] According to Spiegelberg, Michael Murphy was the first Stanford student who signed up for classes with the AAAS with Chaudhuri and Watts. [93] Dick Price, another Stanford student, came to study with Chaudhuri and Watts at the AAAS in late 1955 and early 1956 after returning from postgraduate work at Harvard. [94] Allen Ginsberg, the Oscar Janiger cousin who became part of Leary's Harvard group, is also known to have attended some of the (very popular) conferences at the AAAS in the 1950s. [95]

In 1962 Michael Murphy and Dick Price famously founded the Esalen Institute. Less well-known is the fact that they founded this institute based on advice coming from older generation mentors as Aldous Huxley [96], Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell [97], the latter two supported by Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation, with Laurance Rockefeller being another major supporter of Campbell. Laurance Rockefeller also was an important behind-the-scenes advisor to Michael Murphy since the founding stages of Esalen and donated millions to the institute. [98] The Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation and Carnegie Foundation all had some involvement with the Esalen Institute in the 1960s and early 1970s, which otherwise appears to have been reasonably profitable on its own. [99] It should be clear what forces were behind the founding of Esalen, an institute we will get back to in a later chapter.

Moving back in time a little, in 1953, in addition to his service as dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies, the vocally very blessed Alan Watts was provided with his own radio program at KPFA, greatly aiding him in expanding his audience. KPFA was owned by the Ford Foundation-financed Pacifica Radio. Watts retained his program at Pacifica until his death in 1973. [100]

The LSD years of 1962-1963

In early 1962, Alan Watts all of sudden moves back east again, to New York City and Harvard University, to become part of the Concord Prison Experiments in which prisoners are dosed with psilocybin. As already discussed, these experiments are being carried out by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs, with Al Hubbard, Allen Ginsberg, Humphry Osmond and Gordon Wasson all dropping in on occasion. It actually marks the first time Watts meets in person with Timothy Leary. [101]

Harvard University.

Interestingly, it again appears we find the influence of Paul Mellon in this move of Watts to Harvard, as Watts' 1962-1964 research fellowship at Harvard coincides with another grant of Mellon's Bollingen Foundation for 1962-1964. [102] Meanwhile, due to the family wealth of the Alpert family, the Leary group is able to improve its Harvard headquarters to "a three-story six-bedroom house". [103]

It is only in December 1961, three months after the start of the Harvard Psychedelic Project, that Leary takes his first LSD. That's quite a surprise considering a number of Leary's friends have already been exposed to LSD for a number of years at this point. Granted, the Harvard Psychedelic Project of 1961-1963 is what largely brought the East and West Coast psychedelic pioneers together. And it wasn't until the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, Denmark, that Leary met Aldous Huxley, a key member of "LSD West" with Dr. Oscar Janiger and Al Hubbard. [104] At this conference, Leary, Alpert, Huxley, Frank Barron and a certain Henry A. Murray, the former chief of Leary's psychological department who by then was creating the future Unabomber in a top secret CIA MKULTRA research project he was running at Harvard, all held speeches. [105] Meeting Huxley appears to have expedited the Leary group's discovery of LSD.

The immediate person responsible for "turning on" Leary is British aristocrat Michael Hollingshead. Leary receives a first letter from Hollingshead in late October 1961. Soon after, the two meet and Leary invites Hollingshead to participate in the Concord Prison Experiments. [106] On an interesting side-note, Hollingshead's letter arrived the same day as one from Allen Ginsberg, whom Leary had introduced to psilocybin the previous year at Harvard. This time Ginsberg wasn't in search of ayahuasca in South America, but was smoking weed on the Ganges in Calcutta with India's holy men, who "wear beards, long hair [and] don't wash." [107]

To expand a little on the Hollingshead story, in 1960 this person became an acquaintance of Aldous Huxley, after ringing up the California-based author in the hope of obtaining a little mescaline. Instead, Huxley made Hollingshead aware of Albert Hofmann and the potency of LSD. Using a friendly doctor, Hollingshead promptly ordered a gram, enough for 5,000 doses. He mixed the LSD with sugar and kept it all in a mayonnaise jar. After his first experience, leading to an instant spiritual crisis, Hollingshead called back Huxley and was given the advice that he should meet with Timothy Leary at Harvard. It didn't take long for Hollingshead to show up there with said mayonnaise jar under his arm. As LSD had played a major role in him losing his job, he was also broke and desperate for income. That situation played a role in Leary offering him a job. [108]

Michael Hollingshead.

Interestingly, until weeks before arriving at Harvard, Hollingshead had been secretary of the New York City-based Institute for British American Cultural Exchange. Here he shared the board with a variety of Anglo-American elites, including Lionel Trilling, a Cold War Rockefeller CIA asset deeply involved in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and Farfield Foundation network - not entirely unlike Aldous' brother, Julian Huxley. [109] The Institute's headquarters was located in the 50th Avenue office - right next to the United Nations building - of board member Huntington Hartford, a multibillionaire who was a member of the Pilgrims Society, a super-elite group we come across all the time in relation to psychedelic researchers. There's more. Hollingshead described his daily activities as secretary of the Institute until the summer of 1961, when he forced himself to quit: "Most of the time I spent smoking grass; and, towards the end, getting stoned on acid [LSD]... some of my time was spent meeting and talking with executives of the large Foundations like the Carnegie and the Rockefeller Institute, to try to get more money for our programmes." [110] There it is again, the Rockefeller connection, not to mention the overall "liberal CIA" one.

Already in late 1960, while still employed at the British American Cultural Exchange for some time, Hollingshead founded the Agora Scientific Trust on New York's Fifth Avenue. Officially a "research" institute, it is said to have been the site of many parties where anything from doorknobs to the food was laced with LSD. It is also said that quite a few dignitaries, including United Nations officials, were "turned on" in this establishment. [111]

Key financier of the Agora Scientific Trust is obscure Long Island-based millionaire Howard Teague. Another key supporter is Victor Lownes, the number 2 guy in Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire, which for many years supported LSD and marijuana legalization. Psychologist and former LSD researcher Jean Houston was a co-founder. [112] Houston was extremely close to Margaret Mead of the Macy Foundation conference. She wrote a bunch of new age books and in 1996-1997 worked as a controversial spiritual and psychological advisor to Hillary Clinton at the White House. In no small part through Houston, Laurance Rockefeller got his bogus UFO disclosure initiative to the White House. [113] When the Clinton-Houston cooperation became controversial, Houston complained that she had "lost income, grants and an opportunity to serve on the board of a Laurance Rockefeller foundation." [114] Considering their shared interests, the link between the Macy Foundation and the Rockefeller family, and Houston's involvement in the Laurance Rockefeller-backed Esalen Institute since at least the early 1970s [115], one wonders to what extent a relationship already existed between the two. Certainly Houston represents a second important Rockefeller link of Hollingshead.

At the time Hollingshead came to Harvard on the advise of Aldous Huxley, he also served as a semi-personal envoy of Eileen Garrett, a super-wealthy alleged medium and founding president of the New York Parapsychology Foundation, which, along with its Nice, France chapter and the U.S. and London-based Societies for Psychical Research [116], has all the hallmarks of being curious control structures over paranormal thinking. Richard Alpert and others described Hollingshead as a criminal, as "manipulative and immoral", a "con man" and a "scoundrel". [117] Even Leary continually wondered about Hollingshead's theatrics, but gave him a chance anyway. [118] With that, Hollingshead ended up becoming a long-time associate of the Leary group, first at Harvard and later at Millbrook.

Oddly, it actually takes several weeks of persuasion by Hollingshead to get Leary to take LSD. Leary is of the opinion that psilocybin is more than exciting enough for the time being and has the idea that LSD is less spiritual because it has been created in a laboratory. He only changes his mind in early December 1961 after observing a young female friend on Hollingshead's acid uttering incredibly spiritual words, while in ordinary life this girl, who never finished high school, never even expressed the slightest interest in philosophy or religion. Leary's LSD session lasts all night.

In the morning Leary goes out for another day of work to the Concord Prison, but his thinking has been completely transformed. From this moment on he feels like he's just an actor, creating his own reality. Dr. George Litwin, a Harvard colleague of his who happened to be present in Leary's house the night before and decided to sample from Hollingshead's mayonnaise jar as well, has also not fully descended to Earth yet. Both men need to spent a few days in contemplation of what they just experienced, away from friends and colleagues. [119] Almost immediately Alpert realizes that with LSD Leary and Litwin have gone beyond merely psychedelic psychotherapy and into something much more spiritual and missionary. Sensing that "LSD spelled the downfall of our plans to win Nobel Prizes and full-professor posts at Harvard", Alpert is hesitant for a while to take LSD. [120] Eventually he takes the plunge. Whereas Leary came out on the other side of his LSD trip as the "high priest", Alpert essentially is reborn as "Ram Dass". It will still take a few years before these men fully take on these respective roles, but the LSD seeds are firmly planted.

In this same period the Leary group establishes connections with the Swiss inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, who not only provides the group with LSD, but also psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms that chemically is very similar to DMT. In 1959 Hofmann learned to synthesize psilocybin from mushrooms through batches supplied by Gordon Wasson. [121] As Leary explained it, "we owed our psilocybin supply to the diligence of a New York banker [Wasson] and the craft of a Basel chemist [Hofmann]." Wasson would soon visit Harvard for a private meeting with the Leary group. [122]

The first DMT tests

During the first two years of the Harvard Psychedelic Project, rumors begin to surface about a new psychedelic "nuclear bomb" named dimethyltryptamine (DMT). By that time DMT has become known as "the terror drug" due to the enormous amount of intense and negative experiences being reported by people on it. William Burroughs took it in London and fully agrees with the notion. Dr. Oscar Janiger is the one to have introduced DMT into Californian circles some time after 1957. He learned about the potential of DMT, found only two references to it, both Hungarian and dating to 1957; decided to have a batch of it made, and injected himself (more powerful than smoking it). He later admitted it was "a dangerously stupid, idiotic thing to do." Next Janiger phoned up Alan Watts to "bet him that he had a drug that could finally shut him up." According to Janiger, Watts indeed didn't utter a word for the half hour that he was under the influence of DMT. Janiger's next step was to hand the drug to Al Hubbard - still making monthly supply runs to Janiger's clique - and tell him to distribute it along his network and gathering experience reports. Apparently, "Everyone who took DMT agreed that it was a hellish half hour, with absolutely no redeeming qualities." [123]

Similarly, in the fall of 1962 a psychiatrist informs Leary that less than 4% of his more than 100 test subjects have had a positive experience with DMT. Without having taken the drug at this point, Leary suggests that all these negative experiences are simply the result of self-fulfilling and self-sustaining prophecies, in large part due to the clinical laboratory setting. Both men, Leary and the psychiatrist, agree to take DMT at the home of the latter, with a doctor, a Hindu monk, and female companions present. Turns out, both have a very positive experience, with Leary colorfully comparing his experience to "being fired out the muzzle of an atomic cannon with neon-byzantine barreling." Leary experiences DMT - which also he takes in its most potent form: intravenously - to be even stronger than LSD. Experimental sessions will follow on more than 100 volunteers, this time with over 90% describing their experiences as positive. [124] It appears not only the setting, but also trust in the safety of the drug and the experience matters a lot.

John Lilly: Isolation tanks, Ketamine, dolphins... banker father

Through a close association with John Lilly, the inventor of the isolation tank in 1954, the Leary group is also aware that sensory deprivation can induce altered states of consciousness. [125] In fact, in 1961 Aldous Huxley reports to Timothy Leary that he has spoken with the somewhat notorious Dr. Joly West about the hallucinogenic effects of improved isolation tanks that West is experimenting with. [126]

John Lilly.

Lilly isn't just seen as a pioneer of the isolation tank, but is also well known for his Ketamine experimentation starting in the early 1970s and his dolphin research. This last type of research is partly funded by new age transvestite Reed Erickson, also one of the discoverers of questionable remote viewer Ingo Swann. Leary and his wife enjoy swimming sessions with Lilly's dolphins, with Lilly becoming a follower of "Ram Dass", the Hindu guru Richard Alpert is transforming into. But while Alpert sticks to LSD and the occasional mushroom or DMT trip, Lilly goes overboard with his use of Ketamine (and cocaine, according to his friend Rick Doblin), destroying his mental and physical health. [127]

Ketamine is a very interesting psychedelic for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. Unfortunately, and in contrast to virtually all other psychedelics, Ketamine tends to be addictive. It is also increasingly cast into a negative light now that it has become the new drug of choice for many cocaine users looking for something more exciting. [128]

Not entirely insignificant is the fact that Lilly came from one of the wealthiest, most influential families in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father, Richard C. Lilly, was president of First National Bank of St. Paul from at least the 1920s until 1945 and then chairman from 1945 to 1955. First National Bank used to be an asset of the J.P. Morgan empire, headed by his primary agent, George F. Baker (and his father). George F. Baker, Jr. became a director of the bank in 1949. Both the Morgans and Bakers were Pilgrims Society. The Pilgrim James Stillman Rockefeller was president of First National Bank from 1952 to 1959 - thus during the Saint Paul chairmanship of Richard Lilly - and chairman from 1959 to 1967. First National became Citibank, Citicorp, and eventually Citigroup. Its New York City headquarters has always been dominated by Pilgrims Society members.

Lilly studied at Caltech under Paul Dirac and other famous physicists. This study he could have financed by himself through a scholarship. After that, through his father he was able to have a sit-down with Charles Horace Mayo of the elite-funded Mayo Clinic, who advised him to go to Dartmouth Medical School. Lilly complied, but after two years decided to move to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a career in medical research instead of therapeutic practice. After graduation here in 1942, Lilly worked at the Johnson Foundation under Detlev Bronk [129], a key and very elite Rockefeller scientist and one of the few with that occupation to join the Pilgrims Society. In the 1950s Bronk joined John D. Rockefeller, III is his Population Council, a project co-funded by the Richard Coyle Lilly Foundation in later decades. [130] For the most part, donations of this foundation aren't particularly noteworthy, except maybe Planned Parenthood, which is funded by all the top foundations.

John Lilly's younger brother, David M. Lilly, graduated from Dartmouth in 1939, briefly worked at the U.S. Treasury in Washington, D.C. served as treasurer and chair of the Minnesota Republican State Finance Committee in the 1960s, and eventually, in the 1976-1978 period, was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the board of governors of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, John Lilly was teaching and participating in seminars at the Esalen Institute. After his Washington appointment, David went back to Saint Paul to serve as dean and vice president for finance and operations of the Minnesota School of Management while also serving on the board of Honeywell, General Mills and other corporations. [131]

As discussed in the book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, to which Lilly contributed, Lilly actually was extremely close to mind control research, although not voluntarily. In 1953 he worked in the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) on pioneering brain implant research, where "he devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert electrodes..." The CIA in particular wanted him to classify his research. Lilly refused and soon found himself shut out of the entire research community, because most had agreed to allow their work to be classified, with the CIA messing around with his security clearance.

Lilly left the field of brain implants in 1954 over ethical concerns and pressure from the CIA, invented the isolation tank, and started working on sensory deprivation. Meanwhile, his next-door colleague, Dr. Maitland Baldwin, quietly "agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen..." Allen was the CIA's main guy in the search for the Manchurian candidate.

It's a strange state of affairs. Lilly didn't want to participate in the mind control programs, but still found himself surrounded by the "liberal CIA" crowd of the Esalen Institute and the like while trying to stay away from CIA. And he came from a rather elite family.

Harvard's Richard Evans Schultes and pioneering research into peyote, ayahuasca, shrooms and Morning Glory seeds in Latin America; partnership with Hofmann and Wasson

At this point we really should discuss Richard Evans Schultes, a very important Harvard ethnobotanist who operated in close proximity to the Leary group. As mentioned earlier, Schultes studied peyote in Mexico as an undergraduate in 1937. It wasn't until 1951 that the earlier-discussed Dr. Humphry Osmond would bring mescaline, the active ingredient in the peyote cactus, to the forefront of psycho-medical research.

Richard Evans Schultes.

In 1938 and 1939 Schultes traveled through the wilderness of Mexico's southern Oaxaca province to help identify magic mushrooms as the Aztec's "Teonanacatl" and Morning Glory seeds as the Aztec's "Ololiuqui". During World War II Schultes was the first westerner to take and study ayahuasca in South America. Only in the 1950s it was the turn of the earlier-discussed William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to get involved with ayahuasca.

Burroughs and Ginsberg, of course, were intimately part of Leary's Harvard network by the early 1960s, both professionally and privately. [132] Schultes, a traditional plant specialist with very conservative views, remained a little on the outside, but nevertheless operated very closely to Leary. Hilariously, Leary described his group's relationship with Schultes as feeling like "novices" and "natives whose drug habits he was observing". They were very interested in Schultes' work, treated him with the utmost respect, but due to his "openly expressed right-wing political views" and "continual government sponsorship of his work" also were not surprised to learn "that his reports were used by the CIA in its brainwashing experiments during the 1950s and 60s." Vice versa, Leary wrote that Schultes "was always cordial to us but distant." [133]

Schultes apparently got along best with the esteemed Swiss scientist and LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and the wealthy Eastern Establishmentarian Gordon Wasson. In 1959 Schultes sent Morning Glory seeds to Hofmann's lab in Switzerland for chemical analysis. That same year Hofmann synthesized psilocybin from Sierra Mazateca psychedelic mushrooms obtained by Wasson, who in turn was following in Schultes' steps by traveling to the region for mushroom research. In the early 1960s, it was through Schultes that Wasson contacted Leary to ask if he could come over for tea. [134] Soon after, Hofmann's Sandoz corporation began to deliver both psilocybin and LSD to the Leary group at Harvard. Almost two decades later, in 1979 and 1980, Albert Hofmann would write books with both Schultes and Wasson. Clearly there was a long-term, but rather low-profile cooperation between these very important researchers. [135]

The 1962 Hofmann-Wasson quest to find Salvia Divinorum

On September 26, 1962, while Leary's team is dosing Harvard students with LSD and becoming ever more controversial, Hofmann and his wife touch down in Mexico City to meet with Gordon Wasson for a new expedition to the exact same area where Wasson, and before him Richard Evans Schultes, got his mushrooms from in the 1953-1956 period. They are joined by Mrs. Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson, a person with an interesting personal and family history.

Cloud forest home of Salvia Divinorum in the Sierra Mazateca in South-West Mexico.

In 1936 Irmgard's father, Robert Weitlaner, at Huautla de Jimenez, became the first westerner to confirm rumors that off the beaten track in the remote Oaxaca province, ancient Aztec mushroom cultism still existed. Specimens he shipped to Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard arrived in such a deteriorated state that they couldn't be identified anymore. Two years later, in July 1938, while Schultes was running his own expeditions in the neighborhood, Robert took his daughter, Irmgard, and her soon-to-be husband, Jean Johnson, back to Huautla de Jimenez to observe a traditional mushroom ritual (they weren't allowed to participate). Johnson documented the experience in a Swedish journal in 1939. He also wrote about a tea made of Salvia leaves that the shamans used in the off-season when mushrooms weren't available. Unfortunately, Johnson was killed during World War II. Irmgard's father, however, remained a prominent researcher, wrote about Salvia in 1952, and worked for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

In other words, the information gathered by the Weitlaner-Johnson family, as well as Richard Evans Schultes, in the late 1930s is what brought Gordon Wasson and his wife to Huautla de Jimenez a first time in 1953. In 1955 they were finally allowed to participate in a mushroom ritual. This time, in September 1962, Wasson and Hofmann are primarily going to try to find specimens of the exact Salvia plant used in Mazatec rituals. They are looking to bring back samples to the West and also to participate in a Salvia ritual. Locals generally refer to the plant as "Hojas de la Pastora". Later the researchers will determine that Salvia most likely was known by the Aztecs as "Pipiltzintzintli".

After two days of travel by jeep they arrive in the region. Their government documents ensure the cooperation of the locals. From the first village, they travel on donkeys deeper into the jungle to a second village. Hofmann describes the tiny village as being located in paradise in terms of its surroundings, but at the same time being a little troubled on the social front. Locals explain about one empty hut that a man murdered his wife there and now is spending life in prison because of it. In another hut a man was murdered by his wife over an affair. The village leader doesn't walk through town without being accompanied by two heavily armed guards for fear of being murdered over the raising of illegal taxes. As with the first village, women do not appear to roam the streets freely. In this village, Hofmann and Wasson are only provided with Salvia samples that have no roots or flowers, so, as already planned beforehand, they meet with a contact and move on to the next village.

In this next village, San Jose Tenango, the duo is provided with plenty of proper Salvia samples to take home, analyze, and hopefully synthesize. The group is really hoping to experience a traditional shamanic ceremony with this plant, but all the "curanderos" they ask come up with excuses. They also can't get any of the curanderos to tell them where exactly this plant is growing naturally or where they are cultivating it. To understand the reason, we only have to look at Marina Sabena, the curandero who introduced Wasson to magic mushrooms in 1955 through her ceremonies: she had her hut burned down after Wasson published her name in his 1957 Seeking the Magic Mushroom article in Life magazine. The locals, or quite possibly jealous shamans, did not appreciate her handing these "secrets" to the "gringos".

Luckily for Hofmann and Wasson, word of their arrival and intentions spreads quickly. At the last moment they are invited to partake in a ceremony, led by a sympathetic curandero. At night, they are led hush-hush style though a secret path in the jungle, accompanied by "strange bird-calls from the darkness", to a secluded hut on a mountainside, just outside the village. You couldn't write it better for a movie. Hofmann later publishes the name of the curandero in question, so let's hope she didn't get her hut burned down too.

Young Salvia plant.

During the Salvia ceremony the curandero and Wasson each drink a tea made of 12 leaves; Hoffman's wife gets 6 leaves. Unfortunately for Hofmann, he is suffering from a severe stomach upset and has to pass. About 20 minutes after drinking, they start to have psychedelic visions. The effects are not nearly as powerful as those of magic mushrooms, explaining why local shamans only use them in the off-season when the mushrooms aren't growing. The shamans only chew rolls of leaves or make tea of different numbers of Salvia leaves to supposedly cure various diseases and afflictions. The highest reported doses involve teas of about 120 leaves total. [136] That may seem like a lot, but inhaling the Salvinorin A content of just one leaf would have produced more intense experiences. Salvinorin A, the active component of Salvia, is one the world's most potent psychedelics.

The following day Wasson and Hofmann travel to Huautla de Jimenez. Here they meet with Wasson's old friend, the curandero Marina Sabina. They offer her their psilocybin pills. Sabina's whole family partakes in the psilocybin ceremony, with Hofmann now finally being able to drink a Salvia tea for himself. It is made of 10 leaves and prepared by a 10-year-old virgin, supposedly because this makes the potion "especially active". Sabina confirms the effects of the psilocybin pills are exactly the same as when using unsynthesized psychedelics mushrooms and is thrilled to now be able to run mushroom ceremonies year round. [137]

Similar to ayahuasca and Ibogaine for the longest time, Salvia has always been among the most obscure psychedelics. Timothy Leary never mentioned Salvia in his 1968 biography High Priest or his 1983 one Flashbacks, but did mention the interest of some of his friends in ayahuasca. In the 1970s and 1980s a researcher named Jose Diaz conducted research on Salvia with Sierra Mazateca shamans, but his work remains obscure to this day. Since the 1990s the main promoter has probably been Daniel Siebert, also not a particularly visible psychedelic researcher. Siebert set up a website called the Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center, which anno 2017 has the same layout that it had back when it was founded in 1995. In December Siebert attended MAPS' "3rd World Conference on Salvia Divinorum" alongside Ralph Metzner. Despite his vague expertise, obscurity and medieval-looking website, in the early 2000s Siebert continually appeared as a spokesman in major media outlets, including the New York Times [138], Los Angeles Times [139] and CNN. [140] I always wonder about that, because none of these outlets have ever expressed the tiniest interest in picking this ISGP admin as a spokesman for "the conspiracy theorists".

In any case, from Siebert we learn that rooted Salvia cuttings were sold at one place in California for $100 a piece back in the early 1970s. The price went down to $25 in the early 1980s. Eventually Siebert was able to obtain a cutting from a visitor of a Terence McKenna lecture in the early 1980s, who had specifically brought along this plant to share cuttings with anyone interested. From Siebert we also learn that while there were reports going back to the 1970s that students of the National University of Mexico City were smoking dried Salvia leaves, that this practice was completely unknown in the West until the mid 1980s when a poet named Dale Pendall tried it and got an effect. From then on it became more and more common to smoke Salvia, but for the longest time this method was seen as not generating a particularly powerful experience.

By the late 2000s, with the emergence of broadband internet, Salvia was sold more and more on the internet. Soon the potency of the natural product was vastly increased by repeatedly extracting leaves between 5 and 40 times and then dripping the extract back on to a little bit of original dried leaf. That's why these days one sees "5x", "10x", etc. with Salvia products being sold. From that point on Salvia slowly started to get the name of being one of the most powerful psychedelics in existence.

The 1963 booting of Leary, Alpert and Metzner from Harvard

At Harvard in late 1962, in the same period that Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann are stomping around in the Sierra Mazateca in search of Salvia plants, Timothy Leary and allies Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner are running into ever more bureaucratic resistance from traditional psychologists at Harvard over their not-particularly well-controlled LSD research among Harvard students. Apart from the break with traditional methods of therapy and doing research, at the personal level these traditionalists see the amount of student volunteers for their own therapeutic programs dwindle. Leary and Alpert, on the other hand, have more volunteers for their programs than they can handle. Leary later describes the situation as follows:

"Graduate students, not yet committed to a system, were lining up at our office doors for neurological fieldwork. Following our contract with [Harvard] University we excluded undergraduates, who were the most interested group of all. Drugs were becoming ultra-trendy. Every weekend the Harvard resident houses were transformed into spaceships floating miles above the Yard. At this point the opposition made its first move." [141]

This opposition doesn't just involve regular, traditional researchers. Quite a few of them are linked to CIA MKULTRA mind control research. This may or may not be a coincidence, but at the very least it means that these professors are connected. Dr. Robert Heath, Tulane University's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology chairman from 1949 to 1980, becomes one of Leary's better known critics. [142] Back in the 1950s, Heath was involved in LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and brain implant tests on monkeys and mental patients on behalf of the CIA and Army. [143] Dr. Max Rinkel at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and the first person to import and experiment with LSD, emerges as an important critic of the Leary group. So does Harvard's Dr. Henry Beecher. Both Rinkel and Beecher maintain CIA MKULTRA ties. [144]

Probably the most important opponent is Dr. Herbert Kelman, positioned in the same Center for Personality Research as McClelland, Leary and Alpert. He's been worried about the cultic approach Leary, Alpert and Barron have been taking since observing them all together at a May 1961 conference in Copenhagen. [145] Besides having received a small grant from the infamous CIA front the Human Ecology Fund [146], he later has an esteemed career at Harvard's elite Weatherhead Center for International Affairs [147], founded by CIA officer Robert Bowie and Henry Kissinger in 1958, with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington being among the elites involved over the years. [148] Curiously, in 1984 Kelman will write an article for the New York Times in which he argues against scholars working with or for the CIA. [149] Controlled opposition under all circumstances and in all situations appears to be the name of the game, as Leary and others already were on to him more than 20 years before:.

"Professor Herbert Kelman stormed into the office of director McClelland, voicing serious complaints about our project. McClelland decided to convene a staff meeting to air the grievances. Graduate students were to be invited — most unusual. The reason for Kelman's annoyance was apparent. Fewer students were coming to his office to assist on this tame questionnaire projects.



"Kelman was a formidable rival. He had undeniable clout in Washington, as demonstrated by an uncanny facility for obtaining annual grants, fellowships, and visiting professorships in foreign countries. Actually no one could explain why he was in the Center for Personality Research since his field was social and political psychology. Richard and I knew that Kelman was preparing an ambush." [150]

Kelman largely leads the charge that eventually gets Leary, Alpert and their associates removed from Harvard. The media joins the effort, including Time magazine of LSD pioneer Henry Luce. Time warns that "hallucinogens" are "taken for kicks by beatniks and hipsters" and are "mimicking the psychoses, the most crippling of mental illnesses". A dose of LSD, so small as to be almost invisible", can "destroy a man's mental equilibrium" and "throw an emotionally wobbly individual into a mental hospital." Maybe not entirely untrue, but at the same time this message of the media is extremely biased and a serious exaggeration. [151]

Apart from just personal grievances, it appears that national security interests are worried that Leary and allies are trying to introduce the masses to LSD, instead of sticking to a small network of elites or a few isolated psychiatric patients. So much is clear from a May 1962 article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists in which Leary, Alpert, Hollingshead and Gunther Weil, almost in the same trolling fashion the media is using to ban psychedelics, are suggesting to add LSD to the water supply of major cities in an effort to "prepare" the American people for potential Soviet attack involving the use of psychedelic agents. [152] Yeah, they wish! It is largely in this period that pressure on the Leary group strongly increases. According to Kennedy mistress and top-level CIA wife Mary Pinchot Meyer, this pressure largely comes from the top of the CIA: men like Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, James Angleton and Frank Wisner. Leary later recounts Mary Meyer's words to him:

"Oh, you reckless Irishman. You got yourself in trouble again [with your article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists]. It's magnificent, these headlong cavalry charges of yours. Mais ce n'est pas la guerre." ... Publicity [is what you did wrong]. I told you they'd let you do anything you want as long as you kept it quiet. ...



"You poor innocent thing. You have no idea what you've gotten into. ... It's time you learned more. The guys who run things - I mean the guys who really run things in Washington - are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control. ... Until very recently control of American consciousness was a simple matter for the guys in charge. The schools instilled docility. The radio and TV networks poured out conformity. ...



"You may not know that dissident organizations in academia are also controlled. The CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents. ... [Your] IFIF plan [to set up international psychedelic training centers] was ingenious [but] they would have infiltrated every chapter [and] not [have] let CBS film you drugging people on a lovely Mexican beach. You could destroy both capitalism and socialism in one month with that sort of thing." [153]

Leary's appointment at Harvard will run out on June 30, 1963, so the leadership of Harvard is not too bothered with trying to fire him. In early April, however, he decides to go "on leave" to Los Angeles without mentioning anything in advance. [154] As a result the university terminates his position and salary per April 30. [155]

With the help of a snitch named Andrew Weil, Harvard is able to fire Alpert on May 27 for having provided psilocybin to an undergraduate student. It appears the Harvard leadership is taking this highly unusual measure after learning that although Alpert's appointment at the Center for Personality Research expires on June 30, he has been able to obtain a position at Harvard's School of Education into the next year. Alpert is fired from both positions. [156]

Meanwhile, Ralph Metzner, who has just finished his Ph.D. at Harvard, leaves of his own free will at this point. Various professors and associates urge him to distance himself from Leary and Alpert, but he has taken too many psychedelics to have an interest in doing that.

The Andrew Weil angle on the Leary-Alpert firing

Harvard student Andrew Weil got Dr. Richard Alpert fired from Harvard in 1963.

The firing of Leary and Alpert from Harvard is often portrayed as having been the result of an article in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper by Andrew Weil, a student at Harvard at the time who later became one of Harvard's psychedelic researchers. Early 2010 articles in the New York Times about Don Lattin's book The Harvard Psychedelic Club are a prime example of this. [157] Fact is, that the May 28, 1963 article of Andrew Weil [158] had nothing to do with the firing of Leary and Alpert. Leary was already gone and Alpert was cleaning out his office while this article was published. As the previous section makes clear, both men had been drawing the ire of various influential Harvard professors since at least May 1961.

What is true, however, is that Weil was the snitch that made it possible for Harvard to fire Alpert. As for the story here, Leary and Alpert had refused to take Weil and his dorm mate Ronnie Winston up in the psilocybin project, because they were undergraduates. Undergraduates were banned from these tests, so the hands of Leary and Alpert were tied. By Leary in particular, the students were given the recommendation to try and find their own source of psychedelics, but that was it. Subsequently, Weil in particular really did his best to obtain psilocybin. He even wrote to Aldous Huxley for advice. These efforts failed, but eventually he and Winston were able to obtain mescaline and started their own research circle at their dorm.

Things changed after Winston met Alpert again at a party and the two struck up a homosexual relationship, whether this involved sex or not. Alpert, who wouldn't openly admit to his homosexuality for another three decades, would invite Winston to lunch, fly him around in his private jet and... hand him psilocybin pills. Apparently Alpert, and possibly Winston, kept Weil away from these pills, so the "jilted lover" squealed to the leadership of Harvard university about the affair. The affair itself was not made public, but the fact that Alpert had provided Winston with psilocybin came to serve as the excuse to get rid of Alpert. A May 27, 1963 press release by Harvard president Nathan Pusay announced that Alpert was fired because he had "violated an agreement which he had entered into in November, 1961, not to involve undergraduates in his work with drugs." The next day, Weil wrote his devastating article about Leary and Alpert in the Harvard Crimson - once again without mentioning the homosexual affair between his dorm buddy and Alpert.

Arguably Alpert deserved to be fired. Some might say that his love affair with a student violated Harvard's ethical principles. Another argument might be that Alpert deserved to be fired, because he simply didn't do things very smart. By starting an affair with one of his undergraduate students and then giving this one student, against regulations, a drug his entire dorm is begging for, is just asking for problems. He wouldn't be the first person to do stupid things for love - or the first guy to do stupid things for sex - but when you roll the dice, you have to pay the price.

There's more though. In November 1963 Weil published a lengthy article in Look magazine about the situation at Harvard during the years Leary and Alpert were running their experiments with psychedelics here. It leaves one with the strong impression that the removal of Leary and Alpert from Harvard wasn't just about CIA mind controllers getting jealous, nor was it simply a case of a squealing "jilted lover". Points made in the article include:

Mescaline and LSD sugar cubes were clandestinely traded at an ever increasing rate on the Harvard campus, to the point that the FDA started to take notice of the black market and preparing to do searches.

Already in 1961 two Harvard undergraduates temporarily ended up in a mental hospital after either taking mescaline or psilocybin.

Dr. Herbert Kelman complained about a growing "insider sect" of participants in the psilocybin projects who considered nonparticipants "square".

Maybe for obvious reasons, Leary and Alpert refused to give up their personal stash of psilocybin pills to the University Health Services in order to make sure that the pills were only used during controlled experiments.

Meanwhile, from October 1962 on Leary and Alpert were setting up their International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), with chapters in Mexico, Los Angeles and Boston. The chapters involved the creation of "multifamilial ... transcendental communities" where whole families were supposed to live in one large compound, seeking and experiencing the divine.

where whole families were supposed to live in one large compound, seeking and experiencing the divine. There was criticism that the experiments of Leary and Alpert largely came down to "cocktail parties" where both subjects and observers were under the influence of psychedelics, with data being gathered in a highly unscientific manner. Leary and Alpert creatively countered with the claim that "no one was qualified to observe people under the influence of psilocybin unless he was in the same state." [159]

It's kind of hilarious to read this criticism and the responses of Leary and Alpert, because all of it is so recognizable. People who take too many psychedelics will become thoroughly irrational to outsiders, unless they ignore the messages coming through. Obviously, a situation like this could not persist at Harvard. If you are the president of Harvard, what are you going to tell the parents of a student who is run over by a car while high on LSD? Or if some other kind of accident happens? Or if the student decides to "drop out" after using psychedelics? Even Weil said that he backed off of mescaline use, because he was worried that "any more of these insights might convince [me] that Harvard was a complete waste of time." [160]

To summarize, it was probably inevitable that Leary, Alpert and Metzner left Harvard. It was a clash between the ultimate in rational thinking versus the ultimate in irrational thinking. Either Harvard was going to control psychedelics or psychedelics were going to take over Harvard and probably, in the end, stop it from being a university altogether.

It's important to note that there's something very odd about "Weil the Squeal" that makes one wonder to what extent the Harvard controversy was scripted. This will be discussed in a later chapter.

PART III: THE POST-HARVARD YEARS

From Harvard to "Mellon country" - Millbrook

Millbrook, mid 1960s: Ralph Metzner with Leary and Leary's girlfriend from 1965 to 1971, Rosemary Woodruff.

As mentioned, by the time they are fired from Harvard in April and May 1963, Leary and Alpert, with the aid of Ralph Metzner, already are in the process of setting up the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) [161], a scheme to develop a network of national and international psychedelic training and retreat centers. Alan Watts is the symbolic head of IFIF. [162] Harvard professors Dr. George Litwin, with whom Leary took LSD for the first time, and Dr. Gunther Weil are other founding directors of IFIF, as is Dr. Huston Smith, the long-time chairman of MIT's philosophy department and a participant in the Harvard Psychedelic Project. [163] Their first project is in beautiful Zihuatanejo in southern Mexico, close to the Oaxaca mountains where Gordon Wasson found his magic mushrooms. No less than than 2,000 people apply for a spot. Leary, Alpert and Metzner select a first group of 35 participants who will pay $200 per month to live at the retreat and take LSD daily. The center will only be in operation for six weeks, from May 1 to June 16, 1963. Pressure of the FBI and CIA on the Mexican government results in a crackdown. Subsequently Leary & Co. try to restart the project in Dominica and Antigua, but this also fails, with the CIA warning Dominica that Leary's group is trying to establish "an alleged happiness hotel". [164]

Luckily for the Leary group, establishment help comes just in time. In mid 1963 Richard Mellon "Billy" Hitchcock, a heir to the earlier-mentioned Mellon family [165] that played such an important role in keeping Leary friends as Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts afloat, offers them to live and continue their research at the giant 64-room Millbrook estate, just north of New York City. [166] Like Paul Mellon and the Rockefellers, the Hitchcock family belongs to the Pilgrims Society. [167] It also has similar ties to the OSS and CIA. [168]

Leary with Billy Mellon Hitchcock at Millbrook.

In Acid Dreams, Billy Mellon Hitchcock is described as the "black sheep" of the Mellon family. [169] That may have been so, but the book, considered an authority, doesn't mention the Bollingen Foundation of Paul Mellon that played such a crucial role in the life of Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, alongside Laurance Rockefeller. That alone make one wonder if Paul Mellon didn't delegate or approve the Millbrook project to his much younger relative, who undoubtedly would have a much better time getting involved. As we'll see in the next section, Billy Mellon Hitchcock also did much more than just provide a home for the Leary gang.

What also shouldn't be overlooked is that Christopher Mellon, another great-grandson of William Lamar Mellon, Sr. besides Billy Mellon Hitchcock, in 2017 joined the board of Tom DeLonge's top-level but super-disinformative UFO disclosure group, the To The Stars Academy, literally launched two weeks before this article was finished. Similar to every other board member of the TTSA, Chris Mellon has deep intelligence connections. Looking at this information, as well as the Mellon family's similar involvement in the "alt right" movement through Richard Mellon Scaife, what are the chances that Billy Mellon Hitchcock solely supported the Leary group from the kindness of his heart? Maybe not too great. In fact, one of Tim Leary's later-life best friends would become UFO disclosure disinformer Carol Rosin, who also happens to have become involved with DeLonge. It's a small world after all.

Moving back to Millbrook, as soon as Michael Hollingshead hears about the new living quarters of the Leary clique at Millbrook, he abandons his Agora Scientific Trust in New York City, where he moved to early in 1963 when it became obvious that Leary, Alpert and Metzner wouldn't be able to continue their LSD work here.

At Millbrook the activities are incorporated under the Castalia Foundation, with Leary as president. The foundation, in effect, is useless, because it never receives tax-exempt status.

Birth of the hippie movement: LSD and rock music

With Millbrook as their new base of operations, the connections between all these early psychedelic researchers coalescing around Timothy Leary only intensify. It is in 1964, at Millbrook, that Leary, Alpert and Metzner write their classic book The Psychedelic Experience, which largely comes to serve as the bible for the hippie movement and other psychedelic enthusiasts in years to come. [170] An excerpt of the book reads:

"Experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, religious or aesthetic ecstaties, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc." [ 171 ]

The book solidifies Leary's status in particular as the godfather of psychedelics and the emerging hippie movement.

In September 1965 the somewhat troublesome Hollingshead is send to London by Leary and Alpert with 5,000 doses of LSD and 300 copies of the Millbrook-produced book The Psychedelic Experience. In London he sets up his World Psychedelics Centre, paid for by "a generous friend". Individuals visiting lectures and LSD-laced parties include Victor Lowes, the number 2 man in Hugh Heffner's Playboy empire who also backed his Agora Scientific Trust in New York City; Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, children of Pilgrims Society president and U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Lord David Ormsby-Gore; filmmaker Roman Polanski; the Dutchman Bart Hughes, "the high priest of the trepanation movement"; William Burroughs, Beatles member Paul McCartney, and many others we today have never heard of. "American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist" Norman Mailer is also involved with Hollingshead's group in London. [172]

So is Countess Amanda Feilding, the then girlfriend and later wife of Joey Mellen, a law graduate from Oxford who serves as the founding vice president of the World Psychedelics Centre. [173] Both are followers of the earlier-mentioned Bart Hughes - who made it to national Dutch television in 1965 - and similarly decide to drill holes in their brain (trepanning) in order to experience a permanently heightened state of well-being. [174] Feilding is well-known today in the psychedelics movement as the founder of the Beckley Foundation, which has its pro-psychedelics letters signed by elites as George Soros, George Shultz, Frank Carlucci and others, as well as Noam Chomsky.

Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and John Lennon (pictured with Timothy Leary), all fans of Timothy Leary and vice versa.

The success of the World Psychedelics Centre is short-lived though and Leary's ideal of having the Centre organize a Beatles or Rolling Stones concert at the Royal Albert Hall laced with LSD never materializes. [175]

This ideal had not at all been unrealistic. Certainly in the 1964-1967 period, while based at Millbrook, the Leary group is good friends with many of a new generation of world famous musicians. Examples are Jim Morrison of The Doors [176], John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles [177]; the far less famous Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey [178], the Rolling Stones [179], Jimi Hendrix [180], Joan Baez [181], and especially The Grateful Dead. [182] Billy Mellon Hitchcock is actually financing the illegal LSD labs of Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully. During concerts this LSD is sold or freely distributed to the crowd [183], with Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts sometimes appearing on stage to deliver spiritual messages and protest the Vietnam War. [184] Another drug popular among members of The Grateful Dead that has not been mentioned yet is STP, which they prefer over the short-lasting and foul-smelling DMT. [185]

January 14, 1967: Tim Leary on stage with The Grateful Dead in San Francisco. He appears to have had only a minor impact on the audience here.

Leary's psychedelic messages come to serve as an inspiration to The Moody Blues [186] and, in a different way maybe, The Who. [187] All of them, except The Who, are supporters of Leary. Around the time Hendrix is