Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Timothy Leary Project
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE: 10/18/1984
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NATIONALITY: German
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 18, 1984.
EDUCATION:Studied anthropology.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Librarian. Archivist for New York Public Library.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jennifer Ulrich is a special collections librarian who was hired by the New York Public Library to archive the collected documents of Timothy Leary (1920-1996). During the twenty-month project, she researched the documents and wrote the blog called Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers.
From that research, Ulrich published the 2018 The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment, a look at Leary’s life and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Leary was director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University. He believed that humanity was destined to achieve consciousness expansion and his chosen medium was LSD and hallucinogens. He coined the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and led a social and legal reform movement steeped in mysticism and spirituality. Along with Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass), Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960 to study the effects of hallucinogens. Commenting that the Leary revealed in the book is both con man and visionary, a Kirkus Reviews writer reported: “This book won’t change the way you think about Leary, but it does reveal, to the extent that anything can, the person behind the myth.” The writer added that the book includes little new information about Leary that readers don’t already know.
Through the journals, trip reports, correspondence letters, and media clippings collected by Leary and others, Ulrich provides a glimpse into other notable figures of the era, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan. She also explores Leary’s days as an outlaw and his interest in computers. Bart Everts felt in Xpress Reviews that the “most intriguing chapters outline Leary’s early experiments with the psychological uses and impact of hallucinogenic drugs.”
Online at Psychedelic Times, Wesley Thoricatha commented: “What makes this book stand out is its reliance on primary sources rather than opinion, and the fascinating first-hand accounts from Leary and other major players in the 60’s.” In an interview with Thoricatha, Ulrich explained her approach to the Leary archive: “My whole approach was to provide historical context for the materials that I found in the archives, to learn enough to describe them and make them accessible to other researchers. That’s where I came from in regards to my work with the Leary Papers.”
On the PopMatters website, Chadwick Jenkins laments that rather than scintillating correspondence, the collection is mostly letters written to him by others, which are “for the most part, astoundingly uninformative and insipid” containing gossip and requests for drugs. Jenkins added: “I’m sure that in an archive that large there must be more revealing and engaging material than is represented” in the book.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment.
Xpress Reviews, March 2, 2018, review of The Timothy Leary Project.
ONLINE
PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com/ (April 16, 2018), Chadwick Jenkins, review of The Timothy Leary Project.
Psychedelic Times, https://psychedelictimes.com/ (May 1, 2018), Wesley Thoricatha, author interview.
Jennifer Ulrich is an archivist who spent more than a year working with Timothy Leary’s papers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.
The Timothy Leary Project: Interview with Jennifer Ulrich
Posted on May 1, 2018 by Wesley Thoricatha
Few figures in psychedelic history have been as inflammatory and influential as Timothy Leary. As a pioneer in early psychedelic research he was among the first to scientifically validate the transformational power of the psychedelic experience, but as an outspoken “LSD guru” who challenged authority, he manifested a heavy-handed crackdown on psychedelics that persisted for decades. Exploring the extraordinary legacy of Timothy Leary is the subject of a new book by Jennifer Ulrich called The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment. It presents a collection of items from the Timothy Leary papers, a collection held by the New York Public Library that includes journals, trip reports, correspondence letters, and media clippings collected by Leary and others. What makes this book stand out is its reliance on primary sources rather than opinion, and the fascinating first-hand accounts from Leary and other major players in the 60’s. We spoke with Jennifer Ulrich recently about her background, the book, and the surprises that she came across while managing this collection.
Thanks so much for speaking with us, Jennifer- I really enjoyed the book! To start off, can you share a bit about your background and how you came to be in charge of the Timothy Leary collection?
I’ve been working as an archivist and a special collections librarian for many years, and I was hired as a project archivist to process the Timothy Leary papers at the New York Public Library. They wanted someone to focus only on those papers, so I was heading the project, though we did have interns and other people like a digital archivist involved. I was able to complete the project after about 20 months, and part of that was also writing a blog called Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers. The idea was to promote the collection and highlight some of the more interesting aspects of it. It was, I would say, one of the more interesting projects I’ve worked on.
I can imagine! Leary was nothing if not interesting.
Yeah, and I guess I should point out, as I do in the book, that I’m not necessarily a leading counterculture or Leary expert. As an archivist, your job is to arrange and describe material to make it available for research, so my approach to the project was without an agenda. I think that gave me a unique perspective in describing the Leary Papers, because, as you know, a lot of people have been invested in this story for so many years. My whole approach was to provide historical context for the materials that I found in the archives, to learn enough to describe them and make them accessible to other researchers. That’s where I came from in regards to my work with the Leary Papers.
I think the “no agenda” approach of your book is powerful, because it’s hard not to have an opinion or agenda when it comes to a figure as polarizing as Leary. It really came across in the book that you weren’t arguing a point; it was simply an explanation of the content you found. Which is great, since it allows the reader to form their own judgements about all of it. I’m curious: prior to this project, did you have any interest or familiarity with the world of psychedelics or the counterculture movement or anything like that?
My knowledge of Leary before this project was that he was “the LSD guy” and a counterculture figure who encouraged people to use LSD. I became aware of LSD and psychedelic drugs as a teenager, as most teenagers do. When I was an undergrad student I studied anthropology so I was familiar with the traditional, ritualistic use of psychedelics by indigenous populations. I was then naturally interested in different belief systems and cosmology, and other figures of the time, like Carlos Castaneda. I was also interested in the counterculture, Burroughs and the Beat writers, along with the black power and women’s liberation movements. I remember reading Sisterhood is Powerful and Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and what an impact it had on me. I’m a librarian, so I know what a large influence Aldous Huxley and Hermann Hesse had on that generation. I read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when I was young, so the details surrounding Kesey and Leary was something that I was aware of, but I wouldn’t say that it is or was my specialty. Maybe it is now (laughs)
Indeed. A line in the book that I really loved was when you said that going through the Leary Papers granted “unique insight into a period in history that has become obscured by its own myth-making.” What did you find when comparing the mythology of Leary with the reality, his papers and tangible artifacts?
A lot of people’s knowledge of Leary is through the press, and he was really demonized by the mainstream press. When you look at someone’s personal papers, you get a perspective on their whole life, and I saw that he was just one player in the larger psychedelic research movement. When he was an academic and working at Harvard, he was corresponding with other psychologists and psychiatrists and others who were working at MIT and Harvard, and it’s clear he was interested in doing serious research. That’s a different perspective than reading just what journalists are writing about him. He was collaborating with people like Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert and many others. Even though he’s seen as a figurehead and the “LSD guru,” he wasn’t the one person responsible for all of this- I guess that’s sort of the takeaway.
Doing my research and looking into the subject more, the government was really responsible for the introduction of psychedelics into the United States through the MKUltra project, and was probably supporting research- Leary was possibly handpicked; I don’t know. You see that he was on a path in his academic career and it’s not that he was trying intentionally to derail American culture or to cause chaos.
I think another myth is that people think he was just trying to turn everyone on, and maybe that’s partially true, but in his research, he first wanted to invite people who already had experience with psychedelics like Ginsberg and Burroughs and other artists who had experience with drugs, as well as people who had training in religious studies. So he saw this research as serious.
It was incredible to read about how deeply Leary was tied in with the artists, poets, writers, and musicians of his time, largely through the help of Allen Ginsberg. Before he “turned on” the youth of the world, he was turning on the creative elite, supplying them with LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and gathering their trip reports. How vast of an impact do you think Leary had on arts and culture in his day?
A lesser known fact about Leary is that he provided a venue and an outlet for artists. Through his organizations, the International Federation for Internal Freedom and also the Castalia Foundation, he would sponsor performances and workshops. He would invite artists to collaborate with him and put on these psychedelic explorations and performances. Leary would lecture while artists would conduct what we could call psychedelic light-shows. So he had relationships like that where there was collaboration with artists. He also invited artists to live at his Millbrook commune, the commune where Leary and Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were based. Obviously he was influential in that respect, and he was a prolific writer and had relationships with authors. He was friends with Ken Kesey and in the 70’s edited an issue from one of his journals called Spit in the Ocean, and he had a working relationship with members of the underground press. Without giving a direct example and saying “this person’s art was influenced by Leary” I think he created an environment and created opportunities for artists to produce work.
Leary’s life seemed to be a litany of juxtapositions. He was both a “square” scientist and a psychedelic prophet. He helped to pioneer scientific research into psychedelics, but his zeal for popularizing them caused a backlash that hampered psychedelic research for decades. He taught peace and love, but became an escaped fugitive and was temporarily embedded with militant Black Panthers. The list goes on and on. Through all of these contradictions, what threads of consistency did you find in Leary in terms of his choices, his sense of self, and his impact?
Looking at his papers, it seems that he was always ambitious, an intellectual, and a little rebellious too. Leary was editor of his high school paper, he got kicked out of West Point, he wrote, lectured, and published throughout his life. I think that he saw himself as an educator, even after he left academia. He was very charismatic too, which was a big part of his appeal. Some people might call him a narcissist or egomaniac, but I’m not going to say that because I’m not a trained psychologist (laughs).
It’s almost impossible to imagine how the world of psychedelic research would have evolved without Leary because of his vast influence, both positive and negative. After reading through his library of papers, do you have any sense of whether his work did more to advance psychedelic awareness, adoption and acceptance, or more to harm it? Was he perhaps just the figurehead of an unavoidably messy and controversial reintroduction of psychedelics to the materialist Western mind? Or did he wantonly thumb his nose at the system and conflagrate the issue more than needed?
That’s a good question. It kind of goes back to your first question with the myths. Something that I skipped over is that a lot of people blame him for “ruining everything.” They think this because his court case went to the Supreme Court and overturned the Marijuana Tax Act (and that lead the way for the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 where we got all these schedules of drugs that we currently have.) We have Leary to thank for that, Leary vs. The United States was his court case. He gets blamed for sensationalizing everything when he should have kept quiet so that serious research could be conducted without causing all this media uproar. But like I said, he was just one player. Granted, he liked the limelight and he was extroverted and was talking to the press, but he wasn’t the one responsible for producing all the LSD in the United States. There was a whole West Coast scene going on too, and The Merry Pranksters and the U.S. government had introduced the drugs and created that scene in California.
I just think that there’s a lot to take into consideration with everything that was going on at the time, and all the different people involved. Things played out the way they played out. If you agree that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” then he definitely created awareness of psychedelics in the mainstream press for those who did not already know about them. So really I can’t say that he intentionally thumbed his nose at the system.
Overall, my interest is in presenting these documents and putting them in historical context and letting people come to their own conclusions. As a librarian and archivist, I’m always wanting to encourage further research. It’s been approximately 50 years since a lot of this happened- it has become part of history- and people will be able to study it now that this material is available for research.
Lastly, was there anything that stood out to you or touched you, or surprised you in going through his documents?
There was a lot that surprised me- his relationships with the Beat poets, his prison escape- it’s all so sensational. When you’re working with someone’s personal papers, there’s a lot of material that’s fascinating and rich, such as correspondence and artwork from people who were influenced by Leary and wrote to him and Castalia and the League for Spiritual Discovery (L.S.D.) That part was really fascinating because it’s a window into what other people were thinking and what they were experiencing.
We are very grateful to Jennifer for taking the time to speak with us. To explore this subject more deeply, check out The Timothy Leary Project book, the Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers blog, and the collection of information at the New York Public Library archives.
Ulrich, Jennifer: THE TIMOTHY LEARY PROJECT
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ulrich, Jennifer THE TIMOTHY LEARY PROJECT Abrams (Adult Nonfiction) $27.50 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-4197-2646-0
A look at the life of Timothy Leary (1920-1996) through the documents preserved in his archive.
Depending on your point of view, Leary was either a guru or a charlatan. Actually, he was a little bit of both. With Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass), he initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960 to research the effect of hallucinogens. A few years later, when he was dismissed from the university, he moved to Millbrook, New York, and helped jump-start the psychedelic movement. As this collection of documents from the archive reminds us, Leary's story is complex. Indeed, the writings here--including Leary's notes and commentary as well as correspondence from Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Eldridge Cleaver, and other significant figures--highlight Leary's belief in consciousness expansion, which he saw as the evolutionary purpose of humanity. Arranged and annotated by Ulrich, who cataloged this material for the New York Public Library, the collection is a mixed bag, and there is little new for readers who already know Leary's life and work. At the same time, it can be revealing, if also more than a little hagiographic, to see it through primary sources. "Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle," Leary once said. "Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected." The advice is unexpectedly pragmatic and, in some ways, speaks to the intentions of the volume, which seeks to operate as a controlled cacophony. "The letters and papers offered in this book," Ulrich writes in the introduction, "...serve as a unique insight into a period in history that has been obscured by its own myth-making." The Leary we find here is a version of the one we know already, both con man and visionary. Given the subject, how could it be otherwise?
This book won't change the way you think about Leary, but it does reveal, to the extent that anything can, the person behind the myth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ulrich, Jennifer: THE TIMOTHY LEARY PROJECT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959730/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c5c97b70. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959730
Ulrich, Jennifer. The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment
Bart Everts
Xpress Reviews. (Mar. 2, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Ulrich, Jennifer. The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment. Abrams. Apr. 2018. 272p. ISBN 97814197264 60. $27.50; ebk. ISBN 9781683351672. SOC SCI
Ulrich (archivist, New York P.L.) brings the processed archive of Timothy Leary (192096) to the public, documenting the evolution of the rebel psychiatrist from a conventional academic to one of the most iconic figures of the Sixties counterculture. Beginning with the premise that "Leary's life is the history of the counterculture," Ulrich guides readers through his subject's correspondence with well-known figures (e.g., Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon, Yoko Ono); the most intriguing chapters outline Leary's early experiments with the psychological uses and impact of hallucinogenic drugs. One sees a variety of subjects self-reporting their widely divergent experiences with Psilcybin. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg envisions monsters and cartoon figures on his trip, while Harvard divinity student Paul Lee felt he was one in mind and emotion with his housemates. Later chapters follow Leary's journey from cultural figurehead to outlaw and his interest in computers.
Verdict Ulrich provides a fascinating look into Leary's world and a counterculture that firmly believed in better living through the use of mind-altering chemicals.--Bart Everts, Paul Robeson Lib., Rutgers Univ., Camden
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Everts, Bart. "Ulrich, Jennifer. The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment." Xpress Reviews, 2 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532075565/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6b803d5. Accessed 29 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532075565
Books
The Doldrums of the Drug Experience: Jennifer Ulrich's 'The Timothy Leary Project'
Chadwick Jenkins 16 Apr 2018
The initial role Ulrich took on as the archivist of the Timothy Leary archive was to publish excerpts from it on a public blog. That seems more suitable than this rather stolid book.
The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment
Jennifer Ulrich
Abrams
Apr 2018
Other
No historical account of the '60s would be adequate, much less complete, without a careful assessment of the personality and career of Timothy Leary. Indeed, it's safe to say that the order of personality and then career is apt. It's true, of course, that Leary was trained in psychiatry, had served as director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, published a book in the field (The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality in 1957), and worked for a few years as a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University where he was affiliated with the Harvard Center for Research in Personality. But as the '60s unfolded and moved into the '70s, and as he became increasingly identified with the use of psychotropic drugs to expand consciousness, Leary quickly moved to occupy a strange but (for a while) prominent position in US society. He became the psychedelic guru of the counterculture, the promulgator of such slogans as "turn on, tune in, drop out" (although the phrase seems to have been coined by Marshall McLuhan) and "question authority", and was even dubbed by President Nixon as "the most dangerous man in America."
In August 1960—while vacationing in Cuernacava, Mexico with his colleague Anthony Russo—Leary consumed psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Returning to Harvard, he and another colleague, Richard Alpert (now better known as Ram Dass), initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project. They contacted the Swiss company Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where Albert Hofmann had developed a method of synthesizing Psilocybe Mexicana. Having secured a supply, Leary and Alpert designed a series of "experiments" intended to "determine the conditions under which psilocybin can be used to broaden and deepen human experience." The scare quotes around the word "experiments" are rather hard to resist. The people conducting the study (Leary and Alpert) took the drugs alongside the subjects of the study, there was rarely any attempt to establish a control group (and when such a group was established, it was generally mishandled), and many of the studies (such as the "Concord Prison Experiment", which theorized that psilocybin use might reduce recidivism among parolees) provided no reliable method for assessing whether the beneficial results were the product of the drug consumption or other factors.
Moreover, Leary almost immediately began to court the attention and cooperation of several notable artists such as Aldous Huxley, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg; the latter became a frequent correspondent. Indeed, people of all stripes flocked to Harvard hoping to participate in these studies and a black market for psychedelics quickly emerged and flourished. Soon, the university grew wary of the possible dangers surrounding Leary's work. In February of 1962, David McClelland (an early supporter of Leary's who was partially responsible for bringing Leary to Harvard) wrote a fairly eviscerating assessment of Leary's approach to research, which McClelland felt was overly concerned with "samples of people's vocabulary (use of neologism like "groovy", "love engineer", etc.)" and the "slow decrease in ability to talk about anything without bringing drugs into the conversation." That last charge, of course, fit Leary himself quite well by 1962. Soon both Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard.
This was only the beginning for Leary; his dismissal opened the way for his emergence as a cult of personality. Soon the heirs to the Mellon fortune helped him acquire a 64-room mansion at Millbrook, New York. Here Leary held court over a communal group of like-minded people. Leary married a model and continued to surround himself with celebrity. He himself was now becoming a celebrity in his own right, touring the country for lectures, and releasing a spoken-word album through Folkways in which he reads from the book he co-authored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience (1964). It was in the mid-'60s that his legal troubles began, getting arrested several times for marijuana possession. On 19 May 1969, he had a conviction overturned by the Supreme Court and that same day he announced he was running against Ronald Reagan for governor of California (The Beatles' "Come Together" was written as his campaign song). In 1970 he began a ten-year sentence and almost immediately escaped.
Whether you regard him as a man of his time or ahead of it, a prophet for raising consciousness or a huckster obsessed with notoriety, a scientist or a charlatan, it is undeniable that Leary's life reads like some kind of drugged out adventure novel. Why then, is the new book by archivist Jennifer Ulrich, The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment, so brutally dull, so unenlightening, so forgettable? The New York Public Library houses a huge archive of materials that Leary collected over the course of his life and that material serves as the basis for this book. The book is neither a biography nor is it simply a selected correspondence. Rather, it provides an underwhelming overview of Leary's life alongside selections from the correspondence and Ulrich's explanations regarding the various letters—mostly informing readers of who the correspondent was, the context of the letter or, in some unfortunate cases, simply paraphrasing the contents of the letter itself. In his Foreword to the book, Leary's son Zach Leary claims that Ulrich "is neither pro-Leary nor anti-Leary and with this slant, she has spent countless hours over the last few years pouring over [sic] every piece of paper that makes up the six hundred-plus boxes that are the archive" (11). That neutrality (which can hardly be described as a "slant") makes precious little impact here. There is no disinterested evaluation of Leary's work and life, just a rather dry presentation of the letters.
Now, this wouldn't matter in the least if the letters themselves were of interest. After all, living such a colorful life and surrounded by so many fascinating historical figures (all while discussing consciousness expansion and drug use), Leary really ought to have produced some of the most scintillating correspondence known to modern letters. If that's so, it's not apparent in this selection. The blurbs on the back of the dust jacket imply that the book reveals something "intimate" about Leary through these letters but surprisingly few of them are by Leary. Most are letters written to him and they are, for the most part, astoundingly uninformative and insipid. There's a gossipy letter by Alpert from Millbrook while Leary was on honeymoon, detailing things going on in the lives of people to whom we are not introduced (and whatever pertinent information we might glean from it is better summarized by Ulrich's introduction to it). There are a series of letters from Ginsburg that demonstrate that his interest in Leary involved the latter's ability to supply him with intriguing drugs more than his research. There s an entire chapter of "trip reports" (reports by various individuals, including Kerouac, on their drug experiences) that somehow manage to be extraordinarily tedious.
I'm sure that in an archive that large there must be more revealing and engaging material than is represented within the pages of The Timothy Leary Project. The initial role Ulrich took on as the archivist of this material was to publish excerpts from it on a public blog and that somehow seems more suitable to the material than this rather stolid book. When Leary, Kerouac, and Ginsberg (the latter two being among the finest writers of their generation) fail to stimulate, something is going horribly wrong.
Related Articles Around the Web
Timothy Leary - Wikipedia ›
Timothy Leary | Department of Psychology ›
AMAZING TIMOTHY LEARY INTERVIEW - YouTube ›
Timothy Leary | Biography, Books, & Facts | Britannica.com ›
The Timothy Leary Project (Hardcover) | ABRAMS ›
concord prison experiment richard nixon psychedelic drugs biography drug culture epistolary timothy leary
February 19, 2018 · 13:06
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Book Review — The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment
Leary’s influence in art, culture, and politics throughout the 1960s was
wide-ranging. While President Nixon accused him of being out to corrupt
the nation’s youth into drug taking, many within the counterculture saw
him as a visionary, who presented an alternative path to human fulfillment
and harmony through consciousness expansion and the rejection
of game-playing. However, for Leary himself the close of the decade
was to see the limits of his vision decidedly challenged by the system.
The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment is a biography put together by the phycologist’s notes, letters, and other documents. Jennifer Ulrich is the curator of the documents as well as editor and author of this book. Leary’s son, Zach, provides the forward.
Leary was ultimately known for the use of psychedelic drugs to increase human consciousness and experience. This work shows the transformation of a middle-class phycologist into the counterculture guru. Early correspondence is with Allen Ginsberg but is not limited to the Beat culture although it did offer a starting point for experiments and documentation. Leary conversed with others too like Carl Sagan.
Documents include “trip reports” from various volunteers. Leary turned to Albert Hofman, the first person to synthesize LSD and take it. Hofmann is also known for writing his experience of riding a bicycle while on LSD. Aldous Huxley is also a source of letters and information until his death in 1963.
Some space is given to Leary as a fugitive. His 1965 Laredo arrest under the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 lead to a conviction and a thirty-year sentence. The Marijuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Although Leary was free, it did lead to the creation the DEA and federal controlled substance laws under Nixon. Leary was arrested again in California in 1970 and sent to a low-security prison. He promptly escaped and moved to Algiers, then Switzerland. Returning back to Switzerland from Afghanistan he was taken into custody by US agents. Governor Brown would later pardon him in 1976. In an interesting change of events, Leary took to personal computers as his new savior. In fact, one of Leary’s last acts was posting a recipe for an edible marijuana bud on a Ritz cracker.
An interesting look at Leary through his personal documents. It’s not quite a biography in a traditional sense but an examination of personal papers. A book for the reader with knowledge of Leary’s life and work but wants to see more of the original documents.