LSD / Timothy Leary

Psychedelic Review, No. 1

The founding issue of The Psychedelic Review, published in June 1963 by Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner's International Federation for Internal Freedom. Hosted here are the issue's unsigned Editorial and Statement of Purpose, which set out the journal's program and explain its choice of the word 'psychedelic.' The issue's bylined articles, by Gerald Heard, R. Gordon Wasson, and Alan Watts, are described in the front matter but not reproduced.

The Psychedelic Experience

A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Leary, Metzner and Alpert recast the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a manual for LSD, psilocybin and mescaline sessions. Hosted here is a fair-use excerpt: the book's opening definition of 'set and setting,' and the full 'Preparation' and 'The Setting' sections, which give that idea its practical, session-by-session form.

Leary Senate Testimony on LSD (1966)

Timothy Leary (1920–1996), then president of the Castalia Foundation at Millbrook, New York, testified on May 13, 1966, before the special Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Thomas J. Dodd (1907–1971) that was holding hearings on narcotic addict rehabilitation and on LSD use on college campuses. Leary proposed licensing adults to use psychedelics and offering supervised university courses, and he sparred at length with Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1932–2009) over control, possession, and danger. The record hosts the full printed exchange, pp. 238–258, from Dodd's introduction to the recess.

LSD: Lettvin vs Leary

NET Journal debate with transcript from Innisfree's LSD: The Great Debate

A televised debate between Timothy Leary and MIT professor Jerome Lettvin over LSD, religion, danger, judgment, and social control, staged at MIT's Kresge Auditorium and later broadcast by NET Journal.

Houseboat Summit

A conversation among Leary, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Watts, taped aboard Watts's houseboat and published in San Francisco Oracle no. 7 (February 1967). Hosted here is the opening run of the conversation, in which the four debate dropping out of mainstream society versus working within it, and trace the psychedelic movement's lineage back through earlier utopian and religious dissent. The full conversation continues on to LSD, utopian withdrawal, and post-drop-out economics.

No. 34

Lisa Bieberman's February 1971 bulletin responds to news that the Black Panthers in Algeria had put the escaped Timothy Leary under house arrest. It prints a memo from Humphry Osmond recalling how he and Aldous Huxley met Leary in 1960 and later came to distrust his missionary zeal, followed by Bieberman's own memories of Leary at Harvard and a critique of press claims that LSD had ruined his mind.

FBI File: Leary's Escape Network

An FBI FD-302 interview (July 1974) in which recaptured Timothy Leary decodes the coded correspondence from his September 1970 prison escape. Leary identifies the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as the Laguna Beach LSD collective 'Group', Michael Randall as 'M', attorney Michael Kennedy, fellow inmate William Bellinger, and the Weathermen as 'Consultants' who staged the escape.