'Captain Al' Hubbard: An Appreciation

The benefits of hallucinogens as healing tools are much in the news these days. Captain Al Hubbard could have told you that 60 years ago. This post was originally published in October 2009.

Alfred "Captain Al" Hubbard led a life that didn't just border on the surreal, it was surreal. 

He was a onetime shyster inventor and brilliant if uneducated scientist.  He was considered a demigod by some and a lunatic by others, and had innumerable brushes with the law. He was virtually unknown in his lifetime and remains so today although he was one of the most influential individuals in determining the course of American culture and innovation in the second half of the 20th century.

This is because it was Hubbard and not author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary who first introduced LSD to America.

The up-and-coming hackers in the computer world of the late 1950s believed that computers had enormous potential beyond processing bank checks and other mundane tasks, but they were divided into two camps.  The mechanists were engineers interested in artificial intelligence; that is, building computers that could mimic the human mind, while the holy grail of the engineers who were humanists was developing small computers that would expand the mind. 

Among Hubbard's adherents were key members of the latter group, and they succeeded in their goal through the sheer force of their personalities, brilliance and ingenuity, as well as the insights they gleaned from using LSD.

In fact, these men, numbering about 30 in all, were to invent virtually all of the key components of the personal computer or laptop on which you are reading this post, from microswitches to microprocessors to multimedia, as well as the mouse you probably are using, and even ARPAnet, the precursor to the World Wide Web that has brought you and I together for these few minutes.

Ironically, the humanists who rode the first wave of the psychedelic movement received much of their funding from the Pentagon and NASA, branches of a federal government that in a few short years would attempt to crush that movement.

It also is ironic that most of the innovations in computing that we take for granted today came not from the then dominant players like IBM, Burroughs, Electronic Data and Texas Instruments, where engineers were discouraged from thinking big about going small, but from start-ups in what would become known as Silicon Valley.  These included Adobe, Cisco, Intel, and of course Apple, fledgling companies where engineers believed that not even the sky was the limit. 

* * * * *

The story of Al Hubbard's life is full of holes, contradictions and cul de sacs, as well as unverifiable claims that he worked with the Manhattan Project as a black-market uranium supplier and in a CIA mind-control program called MK-ULTRA as a psychotherapist.  This short, stocky man with buzz-cut hair, a warm smile and twinkling eyes was known as "Cappy" by his friends and lived much of his life in the shadows by choice.  One would never guess from what is known about his early years that he would become known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.

Hubbard was born in 1901 in Kentucky, but little is known about his childhood. Although he had no scientific training, at age 18 he invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer.  This radioactive battery-powered device could not be explained by the technology of the day.  This is because it was not the perpetual motion machine that he claimed it to be and hadn't actually propelled a ship around Portico Bay in Seattle nonstop for three days, as press accounts claimed.

A Pittsburgh company bought 50 percent rights to the patent for $75,000, but nothing more was heard of the device.

Hubbard's next job was as a taxi driver in Seattle during Prohibition. The pay was lousy, but he made a bundle off of an ingenious sideline -- a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab that he used to steer rum runners past the U.S. and Canadian coast guards.  He was eventually arrested by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.    

What Hubbard did during the 1930s remains a mystery, but during World War II scouts for Allen Dulles, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, were attracted to him because of his knowledge of electronic communications.  As an OSS captain, Hubbard became involved in a scheme to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada for transhipment to England, but when the possibly illegal operation became the subject of a congressional investigation, he moved to Vancouver in British Columbia and became a Canadian citizen to escape indictment.

 

It was there that Hubbard founded a charter boat company, later became scientific director of a uranium mining company and later still owner of several uranium businesses.  By age 50, he had realized his dream of becoming a millionaire, owned a fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht and an island off of Vancouver. But he was miserable. 

"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," according to a friend quoted by Todd Brendan Fahey in an essay on Hubbard.  The friend claimed that an angel appeared to Hubbard during a hike and "told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to. 

"But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for." 

That important something became evident in 1951 when Hubbard stumbled across an article in a scientific quarterly about the behavior of rats who were given LSD.  Hubbard tracked down the person who had done the experiment, obtained some LSD from him and became a true believer after his first trip. 

* * * * * 

It is claimed that Hubbard gave LSD to 6,000 people beginning in the early 1950s until it was outlawed in 1967.

That is unverifiable, but it is known that among the people who tripped on his acid were Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who experimented with the drug as a way to cure alcoholism, Aldous Huxley, the celebrated writer, parapsychologist and advocate of psychedelics, and actors Cary Grant, James Coburn and Jack Nicholson, novelist Anaïs Nin and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, among other celebrities who were turned on by Beverly Hills psychiatrists supplied by Hubbard.

But it is Hubbard's connection to those Silicon Valley whiz kids that we are focusing on here, and that brings us to Myron Stolaroff.

Stolaroff was an assistant to the president for long-range planning at Ampex Corporation, which was a leading maker of magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders and an incubator for pioneering engineers.  Like Hubbard a few years earlier, Stolaroff felt that there was no spiritual center to his life.

It was through an acquaintance that Stolaroff learned of a new drug called LSD and an unusual man from Canada who was administering the substance to Huxley and others.  Stolaroff was skeptical, but then one day in 1956 he looked up from his desk at Ampex to see Hubbard standing in the doorway.

Several weeks later, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms (a moderately heavy dose) of LSD-25 in Hubbard's Vancouver apartment that had been manufactured by Sandoz, the Swiss firm where Albert Hoffman had stumbled upon the drug's psychoactive properties in 1943.

Stolaroff found his first trip to be a deeply religious event that took him far into his own unconscious mind and he returned to California an LSD zealot. Among the first people he turned on were engineers from Ampex and Hewlitt-Packard, and in the next few years the circle widened to include those 30 or so engineers, who included Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs has been circumspect about his use of LSD.  But John Markoff, author of the fascinating What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, recalls interviewing the notoriously prickly engineer-executive back in 2001 on the day that Apple had introduced its now ubiquitous iTunes media player.

Jobs was in an especially bad mood, Markoff writes, but at the end of the interview he turned to a Mac and brought up onto the screen what is now known as the Classic iTunes view, a visualization feature that conjures up dancing color patterns that pulse in concert with the beats of the music.

"It reminds me of my youth," Jobs said with a slight smile.

* * * * * 

Hubbard left behind his uranium empire and for the next decade traveled the world as a sort of psychedelic missionary.

"Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," recalls Stolaroff.  His first stop was at Sandoz where he purchased a gram (roughly 10,000 doses) of Delysid, the company's brand name for LSD-25, and began shipping it around the world.

In 1957, Captain Hubbard became Doctor Hubbard after he procured a PhD in biopsychology from a diploma mill.  He set up a wing at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia for the study of psychedelic therapy for alcoholics, and obtained the first Investigational New Drug permit from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Hubbard left Hollywood after a dispute with the hospital director but landed on his feet when he was hired by the Stanford Research Institute of Stanford University, where has was assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, and later with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, Stolaroff's project for research into the uses of LSD.

Beginning in 1961, four years or so before LSD would percolate up the peninsula to San Francisco, the foundation supervised about 350 trips.  Among the travelers were Stewart Brand, the author and founder of the influential countercultural Whole Earth Catalog.

Some of Hubbard's ideas were far out, and included the grandiose idea that if he could provide a psychedelic experience to the executives of Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society.  In one such effort, he persuaded a ranking Ampex executive to make his the first psychedelic corporation.

But as Jay Stevens writes in the edifying Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, that things did not go well:

"Although Myron Stolaroff had laid the groundwork perfectly, persuading Ampex's new general manager to overlook Al's flaws and give LSD a chance, the result was disastrous.  The general manager was Jewish.  The last thing he wanted to do was to look at pictures of Jesus Christ, but that's what Hubbard kept waving at him."

Captain Al nevertheless recognized the potential psychic dangers of LSD as well as its benefits and he believed that acid should be administered and monitored by trained professionals.

Despite the amazing story of the Silicon Valley whiz kids, there is some question about whether LSD indeed enhances creativity.  That was the case even before its widespread use and one reason that Hubbard was seen as a charlatan by some of the people he encountered.  Indeed, the debate continues today over whether any chemical substances can do that.

John Markoff writes in What the Dormouse Said that Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the polymerase chain reaction, which he said came to him on one of his numerous LSD trips, is one of the few scientists to have explored the effect of psychedelic drug use.

"Possibly the question is so cloudy because the psychic costs are potentially high," writes Markoff. "Despite intriguing evidence of positive effects in the first years of LSD experimentation, there were also incidents of psychotic outcomes as well."

Hubbard refused the temptation to become a psychedelic philosopher king like Timothy Leary, who along with the possibly LSD-related suicide of Diane Linkletter, the daughter of media celebrity Art Linkletter, probably did more to prompt the feds to outlaw LSD than anyone else.

A Drug Control Amendment signed by President Johnson in 1967 declared LSD a Schedule I substance and even possession was a felony punishable by 15 years in prison.

The FDA ordered the confiscation of all psychedelic stocks at laboratories and institutions, including Stolaroff's foundation, and legend has it that Hubbard buried most of his own stash in Death Valley, California.  Only five researchers eventually were permitted to continue their research, none of them associated with Hubbard and none using human subjects.

In 1968, his finances in ruin, Hubbard was forced to sell his island for a pittance and in 1974 the Stanford Research Institute canceled his contract. 

Hubbard's later efforts to get another Investigational New Drug Contract from the FDA failed although he had two decades of clinical documentation.  His own health failing because of an enlarged heart, he went into semiretirement.

"He knew his work was done," said a friend. 

On August 31, 1982, Al Hubbard took his last trip, departing this mortal coil from the trailer park where he lived in Casa Grande, Arizona.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top to bottom): Ken Kesey; Timothy Leary; Early personal computer; ARPANet laboratory; Bill Wilson; Aldous Huxley; Stewart Brand; Myron Stolaroff; Steve Jobs; Diane Linkletter; Death Valley; Hubbard at home of Silicon Valley friend.

'Captain Al' Hubbard: An Appreciation

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

-- ALDOUS HUXLEY

Alfred "Captain Al" Hubbard led a life that didn't just border on the surreal, it was surreal. He was a onetime shyster inventor and brilliant if uneducated scientist. He was considered a demigod by some and a lunatic by others, and had innumerable brushes with the law. He was virtually unknown in his lifetime and remains so today although he was one of the most influential individuals in determining the course of American culture and innovation in the second half of the 20th century.

This is because it was Hubbard and not author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary who first introduced LSD to America.

The up-and-coming hackers in the computer world of the late 1950s believed that computers had enormous potential beyond processing bank checks and other mundane tasks, but they were divided into two camps. The mechanists were engineers interested in artificial intelligence; that is, building computers that could mimic the human mind, while the holy grail of the engineers who were humanists was developing small computers that would expand the mind. Among Hubbard's adherents were key members of the latter group, and they succeeded in their goal through the sheer force of their personalities, brilliance and ingenuity, as well as the insights they gleaned from using LSD.

In fact, these men, numbering about 30 in all, were to invent virtually all of the key components of the personal computer or laptop on which you are reading this post, from microswitches to microprocessors to multimedia, as well as the mouse you probably are using, and even ARPAnet, the precursor to the World Wide Web that has brought you and I together for these few minutes.

Ironically, the humanists who rode the first wave of the psychedelic movement received much of their funding from the Pentagon and NASA, branches of a federal government that in a few short years would attempt to crush that movement.

It also is ironic that most of the innovations in computing that we take for granted today came not from the then dominant players like IBM, Burroughs, Electronic Data and Texas Instruments, where engineers were discouraged from thinking big about going small, but from start-ups in what would become known as Silicon Valley. These included Adobe, Cisco, Intel, and of course Apple, fledgling companies where engineers believed that not even the sky was the limit.

* * * * *

The story of Al Hubbard's life is full of holes, contradictions and cul de sacs, as well as unverifiable claims that he worked with the Manhattan Project as a black-market uranium supplier and in a CIA mind-control program called MK-ULTRA as a psychotherapist. This short, stocky man with buzz-cut hair, a warm smile and twinkling eyes was known as "Cappy" by his friends and lived much of his life in the shadows by choice. One would never guess from what is known about his early years that he would become known as the "Johnny Appleseed of LSD."

Hubbard was born in 1901 in Kentucky, but little is known about his childhood. Although he had no scientific training, at age 18 he invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer. This radioactive battery-powered device could not be explained by the technology of the day. This is because it was not the perpetual motion machine that he claimed it to be and hadn't actually propelled a ship around Portico Bay in Seattle nonstop for three days, as press accounts claimed.

A Pittsburgh company bought 50 percent rights to the patent for $75,000, but nothing more was heard of the device.

Hubbard's next job was as a taxi driver in Seattle during Prohibition. The pay was lousy, but he made a bundle off of an ingenious sideline -- a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab that he used to steer rum runners past the U.S. and Canadian coast guards. He was eventually arrested by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.

What Hubbard did during the 1930s remains a mystery, but during World War II scouts for Allen Dulles, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, were attracted to him because of his knowledge of electronic communications. As an OSS captain, Hubbard became involved in a scheme to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada for transhipment to England, but when the possibly illegal operation became the subject of a Congressional investigation, he moved to Vancouver in British Columbia and became a Canadian citizen to escape indictment.

It was there that Hubbard founded a charter boat company, later became scientific director of a uranium mining company and later still owner of several uranium businesses. By age 50, he had realized his dream of becoming a millionaire, owned a fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht and an island off of Vancouver. But he was miserable.

"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," according to a friend quoted by Todd Brendan Fahey in an essay on Hubbard. The friend claimed that an angel appeared to Hubbard during a hike and "told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to.

"But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."

That important something became evident in 1951 when Hubbard stumbled across an article in a scientific quarterly about the behavior of rats who were given LSD. Hubbard tracked down the person who had done the experiment, obtained some LSD from him and became a true believer after his first trip.

* * * * *

It is claimed that Hubbard gave LSD to 6,000 people beginning in the early 1950s until it was outlawed in 1967.

That is unverifiable, but it is known that among the people who tripped on his acid were Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who experimented with the drug as a way to cure alcoholism, Aldous Huxley, the celebrated writer, parapsychologist and advocate of psychedelics, and actors Cary Grant, James Coburn and Jack Nicholson, novelist Anaïs Nin and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, among other celebrities who were turned on by Beverly Hills psychiatrists supplied by Hubbard.

But it is Hubbard's connection to those Silicon Valley whiz kids that we are focusing on here, and that brings us to Myron Stolaroff.

Stolaroff was an assistant to the president for long-range planning at Ampex Corporation, which was a leading maker of magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders and an incubator for pioneering engineers. Like Hubbard a few years earlier, Stolaroff felt that there was no spiritual center to his life.

It was through an acquaintance that Stolaroff learned of a new drug called LSD and an unusual man from Canada who was administering the substance to Huxley and others. Stolaroff was skeptical, but then one day in 1956 he looked up from his desk at Ampex to see Hubbard standing in the doorway.

Several weeks later, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms (a moderately heavy dose) of LSD-25 in Hubbard's Vancouver apartment that had been manufactured by Sandoz, the Swiss firm where Albert Hoffman had stumbled upon the drug's psychoactive properties in 1943.

Stolaroff found his first trip to be a deeply religious event that took him far into his own unconscious mind and he returned to California an LSD zealot. Among the first people he turned on were engineers from Ampex and Hewlitt-Packard, and in the next few years the circle widened to include those 30 or so engineers, who included Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs has been circumspect about his use of LSD. But John Markoff, author of the fascinating What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, recalls interviewing the notoriously prickly engineer-executive back in 2001 on the day that Apple had introduced its now ubiquitous iTunes media player.

Jobs was in an especially bad mood, Markoff writes, but at the end of the interview he turned to a Mac and brought up onto the screen what is now known as the Classic iTunes view, a visualization feature that conjures up dancing color patterns that pulse in concert with the beats of the music.

"It reminds me of my youth," Jobs said with a slight smile.

* * * * *

Hubbard left behind his uranium empire and for the next decade traveled the world as a sort of psychedelic missionary.

"Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," recalls Stolaroff. His first stop was at Sandoz where he purchased a gram (roughly 10,000 doses) of Delysid, the company's brand name for LSD-25, and began shipping it around the world.

In 1957, Captain Hubbard became Doctor Hubbard after he procured a PhD in biopsychology from a diploma mill. He set up a wing at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia for the study of psychedelic therapy for alcoholics, and obtained the first Investigational New Drug permit from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Hubbard left Hollywood after a dispute with the hospital director but landed on his feet when he was hired by the Stanford Research Institute of Stanford University, where has was assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, and later with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, Stolaroff's project for research into the uses of LSD.

Beginning in 1961, four years or so before LSD would percolate up the peninsula to San Francisco, the foundation supervised about 350 trips. Among the travelers were Stewart Brand, the author and founder of the influential countercultural Whole Earth Catalog.

Some of Hubbard's ideas were far out, and included the grandiose idea that if he could provide a psychedelic experience to the executives of Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society. In one such effort, he persuaded a ranking Ampex executive to make his the first psychedelic corporation.

But as Jay Stevens writes in the edifying Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, that things did not go well:

"Although Myron Stolaroff had laid the groundwork perfectly, persuading Ampex's new general manager to overlook Al's flaws and give LSD a chance, the result was disastrous. The general manager was Jewish. The last thing he wanted to do was to look at pictures of Jesus Christ, but that's what Hubbard kept waving at him."

Captain Al nevertheless recognized the potential psychic dangers of LSD as well as its benefits and he believed that acid should be administered and monitored by trained professionals.

Despite the amazing story of the Silicon Valley whiz kids, there is some question about whether LSD indeed enhances creativity. That was the case even before its widespread use and one reason that Hubbard was seen as a charlatan by some of the people he encountered. Indeed, the debate continues today over whether any chemical substances can do that.

John Markoff writes in What the Dormouse Said that Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the polymerase chain reaction, which he said came to him on one of his numerous LSD trips, is one of the few scientists to have explored the effect of psychedelic drug use.

"Possibly the question is so cloudy because the psychic costs are potentially high," writes Markoff. "Despite intriguing evidence of positive effects in the first years of LSD experimentation, there were also incidents of psychotic outcomes as well."

Hubbard refused the temptation to become a psychedelic philosopher king like Timothy Leary, who along with the possibly LSD-related suicide of Diane Linkletter, the daughter of media celebrity Art Linkletter, probably did more to prompt the feds to outlaw LSD than anyone else.

A Drug Control Amendment signed by President Johnson in 1967 declared LSD a Schedule I substance and even possession was a felony punishable by 15 years in prison.

The FDA ordered the confiscation of all psychedelic stocks at laboratories and institutions, including Stolaroff's foundation, and legend has it that Hubbard buried most of his own stash in Death Valley, California. Only five researchers eventually were permitted to continue their research, none of them associated with Hubbard and none using human subjects.

In 1968, his finances in ruin, Hubbard was forced to sell his island for a pittance and in 1974 the Stanford Research Institute canceled his contract.

Hubbard's later efforts to get another Investigational New Drug Contract from the FDA failed although he had two decades of clinical documentation. His own health failing because of an enlarged heart, he went into semiretirement.

"He knew his work was done," said a friend.

On August 31, 1982, Al Hubbard took his last trip, departing this mortal coil from the trailer park where he lived in Casa Grande, Arizona.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top to bottom): Ken Kesey; Timothy Leary; Early personal computer; ARPANet laboratory; Bill Wilson; Aldous Huxley; Stewart Brand; Myron Stolaroff; Steve Jobs; Diane Linkletter; Death Valley; Hubbard at home of Silicon Valley friend.

What A Bummer, Man! The Psychedelic Revolution Wasn't Gonna Be Televised

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 2009)

Aldous Huxley's creative powers were at their peak in 1960, some three years before his death. The public lectures given by the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception were filled to overflowing and never had a parapsychologist been so acclaimed and had a larger following.

But Huxley was perplexed. As had so many other great minds before and after him, becoming immersed in taking and studying the effects of psychedelic drugs had produced an embarrassing consequence: The more he tripped, the more he traveled to the so-called Other World and the more that he mused over the profundities of these voyages and how they could improve mankind's lot, the less insight he had to offer.

As Huxley confided to a friend: "To have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find that at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.' "

What Huxley was intimating is that while LSD, psilocybin mushrooms or peyote buttons could make individual homo sapiens better people, the psychedelic revolution would not make terra firma a better place.

It wasn't that people didn't try.

Albert "Captain Al" Hubbard, who is said to have given LSD to 6,000 people beginning in the early 1950s until it was outlawed in 1966, believed that if he could provide a psychedelic experience to the executives of Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had tripped on psychotropic plants in South America and later took psilocybin and LSD, declared that the psychedelic movement was an opportunity "to seize power in the Universe . . . not merely over Russia or America -- seize power over the moon -- take the sun over."

But as big thinking went, it was hard to top Timothy Leary, a psychologist and psychedelic avatar whose increasingly manic quest to get people to "turn on, tune in, drop out" more or less led to the federal prohibition against not just the possession of LSD, but a halt to virtually all research into promising uses of the drug in treating chronic alcoholism, psychoses and other illnesses.

§

If Leary hadn't led the way to LSD being outlawed, someone else's antics certainly would have. After all, how could the government not ban the use of a non-addictive substance that could do such wonderful things, let alone have astonishing curative powers?

Leary's initial foray into psychedelics was innocent enough -- the Harvard Psilocybin Project -- which during its 15-month existence in 1960-61 showed convincingly that the comparatively mild psychedelic was a positive agent for behavioral changes even in prison convicts.

Writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream:

"Imagine the Humphrey Bogart of Angels With Dirty Faces suddenly transported into Alice in Wonderland and you will have some idea of what transpired. One of the newcomers [to the psilocybin sessions] became paranoid and decided the whole thing was a fiendish police trick to get him to all the crimes he had never been caught for. . . . But then his paranoia vanished, he forgot about revenge, forgot about his standing in one of Boston's Irish Mafia families; he started thinking about love, about how everyone was really the same, no difference between him and this Harvard boy, really."

The study did have a drawback. The prisoners were indeed changing, but they were changing in ways that made science uncomfortable. As Stevens puts it, "They were getting religion. And if psilocybin could do that to hard-core cons, imagine what it was doing to members of the psilocybin project."

Indeed, the cautious optimism among Leary's professorial peers that the drug could be an extraordinary addition to the psychiatric tool kit turned to anxiety as Leary and many of his graduate students began binging on psilocybin and immersing themselves in mystical texts. What controls their experiments had went out the window and raw data was no longer being collated and written up.

The project's death blow came when the Harvard Crimson ran a story on a drug orgy at Leary's house with students that was picked up by the Boston papers and then the wire services. After confiscation threats from the feds, the Harvard administration put Leary's psilocybin stash under lock and key and promised that when the drug was dolled out in the future there would be close supervision. The scandal had been contained, but it was obvious to all that Leary's contract would not be renewed.Leary rolled with that punch and soon he and colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were deeply involved with LSD, a substantially more powerful psychedelic that for them was less about love than death and rebirth.

Some LSD therapists were showing remarkable results. Hubbard's work with chronic alcoholics at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia showed an 80 percent success rate, while a research program at the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, California showed promising results for psychotic vets. That also is where Ken Kesey, future leader of the Merry Pranksters, tripped while writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

§ 

These results notwithstanding, therapists struggled to figure out why LSD could do what it did.

Stevens presents this analogy in Storming Heaven:

"Imagine the self as an oxbow lake, which is formed when a meander is cut off from the main body of a shallow, slow-moving river. Over time, unless fresh sources of water are found, the oxbow begins to stagnate, becoming first a marsh, then a swamp, as vegetation (thickets of received ideas, neuroses, etc.) starts to compete for oxygen. Psycholytic therapy, you might say, contented itself with removing the vegetation; psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, operated by dynamiting the obstruction and restoring the oxbow to what, in fact, it had always been: a lazy curve in a broad, flowing river." Most of these therapists used small doses of LSD on their patients in charting a path to consciousness before any deep exploration began, but from the outset Leary administered massive doses to both patients and himself.

Perhaps inevitably a man with the brightest of futures in psychiatry began to think of himself as a prophet. By the spring of 1962 he was deeply into Tantric Buddhism and was referring to his acclaimed pre-psychedelic work as "antediluvian stuff."

Stevens:

"To hell with Harvard and psychology, Leary wanted to shout, to hell with boring old bourgeois science. To hell with boring old bourgeois religion. Mind-expanding drugs were going to be the religion of the twenty-first century . . . and he was going to be the chief avatar."

As Stevens notes, Leary's escapades, including the creation of a psychedelic circus known as the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), highlighted what by 1963 was a turf war over who would control traffic to the Other World.Medical doctors believed that mere psychologists like Leary and Al Hubbard, let alone an engineer like Myron Stolaroff, did not have the competencies to examine the extremes of consciousness.The rap on Stolaroff was misplaced. He was an assistant to the president for long-range planning at Ampex Corporation, which was a leading maker of magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders and an incubator for pioneering engineers.

Stolaroff was making big bucks but felt that his life was empty. It was through an acquaintance that he learned of a new drug called LSD and an unusual man from Canada who was administering the substance to Aldous Huxley and others. Stolaroff was skeptical, but then one day in 1956 he looked up from his desk at Ampex to see Hubbard standing in the doorway.

Several weeks later, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms (a moderately heavy dose) of LSD-25 in Hubbard's Vancouver apartment that had been manufactured by Sandoz, the Swiss firm where biochemist Albert Hoffman had stumbled upon the drug's psychoactive properties in 1943.

Stolaroff found his first trip to be a deeply religious event that took him far into his own unconscious mind and he returned to California an LSD zealot. He soon founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study and over the next several years led several hundred people, including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and 30 or so other young engineers in what came to be known as Silicon Valley, on trips closely supervised by experienced therapists.

The engineer was well aware of the dangers of LSD and was horrified when Leary founded IFIF. "It will wreak havoc on all of us doing LSD work all over the nation," Stolaroff correctly predicted in a letter to Leary. "The medical profession in this country has had these materials available for years. Yet outside of the Canadian groups, and a very few individuals in this country, no one has really learned how to use these materials and get the benefits from them in spite of years of trying. Tim, I am convinced you are heading for very serious trouble if your plan goes ahead as you have described it to me."

"In 1961," Leary's wrote of his master plan in High Priest, one of his two autobiographies, "we estimated that 25,000 Americans had turned on to the strong psychedelics . . . at that rate of cellular growth we expected by 1967 a million Americans would be using LSD. We calculated that the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969."

§

After Leary and his IFIF cadre were kicked out of Mexico and two Caribbean nations they landed at Millbrook, a huge estate in Dutchess County in upstate New York.

Millbrook was many things, but to consider it an ashram as many IFIF adherents did is misleading insofar that the leader of a typical ashram doesn't ride around on a horse painted blue on one side and pink on the other and brag about screwing every woman who comes through the door, including his future second wife. Then there were the gold painted ceilings, mandala filled walls and antique furniture with the legs cut off so the residents could live on the floor.

The IFIF spun its wheels, beginning many experiments and programs but finishing none, before succumbing a year later. Out of its ashes rose Leary's next ego trip, an organization called Castalia that was to set up shop on a tropical island a la Huxley's Island, a utopian counterpoint to Brave New World where a drug he called soma was used for enlightenment.

The name Castalia came from Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. The IFIF crowd was convinced that the German author was a psychedelic adept from an earlier age who had succeeded where Huxley had failed in that his books were accounts of the internal drama of the psyche.The Millbrook era ended with a bang in April 1966 with a raid by a law enforcement team led by former FBI agent and future Nixon White House Plumbers unit operative G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate scandal fame, whom in but one of many bizarre plot twists in Leary's life was to become a friend who 15 years later would go on a national speaking tour with him.Undeterred, of course, in September 1966 Leary segued to his next ego trip and created the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as a holy sacrament. The league also was, in part, an attempt to maintain legal status for the use of the drug, which was outlawed the following month.

Leary was arrested nine more times over the next two years, and while his craving for attention would not diminish until he drew his last breath in 1996 at age 75, he spent much of his last three decades dodging the law and doing prison time.It is hard to tell whether Timothy Leary ever understood his role in outlawing a drug that he tirelessly advocated and ingested, but he carried some sense of irony into his dotage, so he probably did, although the Sixties certainly ended with a whimper and not a day glo bang.

Writes Stevens: "And so the psychedelic movement ground to a close. The drugs were still available, more so than ever, but it was a rare person who took them to push the envelope. For the kids, a trip to the Other World was like a trip to Disneyland, lots of scary rides and laughs, but no wisdom.

"Kesey, Owsley, IFIF, the Acid Tests, Castalia, the Trips Festival, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, the Be-In -- it had receded into memory so fast it was almost as if it had happened to an older brother, or an uncle, or maybe they'd read about it in some book or magazine -- it didn't seem real. Had they really thought they could transform Uncle Sam into the Buddha? The fact was, the good times were too painful to talk about because they always led to the bad times, to all the people who had been left behind, either burned out or in prison or on the run or irrevocably lost. . . "

PHOTOGRAPHS (FROM TOP) TIMOTHY LEARY (LEFT) WITH NEIL CASSADY AT MILBROOK (1964); ALDOUS HUXLEY; ALLEN GINSBERG; LEARY (ca. 1962); RICHARD ALPERT; RALPH METZNER; LEARY (ca. 1966); AL HUBBARD; KEN KESEY; MARTIN SOLAROFF' HERMAN HESSE; LEARY ESCORTED BY DRUG AGENTS AFTER 1966 MILLBROOK RAID; LEARY AND FOURTH WIFE ROSEMARY.