The mind-expanding 'Harvard Psychedelic Club'

The mind-expanding 'Harvard Psychedelic Club':

"The following excerpt is taken from Don Lattin's new book, 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.' It's the story of what happened when three university professors and one ambitious freshman crossed paths in the fall of 1960 at Harvard, where Leary had just begun putting together a controversial psychedelic drug research project. This scene is from a chapter in the middle of the book titled 'If you come to San Francisco.' It's January 1967, and the center of the psychedelic scene has shifted from Boston to Baghdad by the Bay.

Timothy Leary could not be stopped. He was determined to secure his position as the 'high priest' of the LSD movement. He knew he needed the news media to spread the psychedelic gospel, and journalists knew they needed Leary to figure out what was going on in the early years of the counterculture. Leary's concern for public relations was on display the night following the Human Be-In extravaganza in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the event where the former Harvard psychology professor - dressed in white with beads around his neck and a yellow flower tucked behind his ear - first uttered his infamous slogan, 'Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.' Leary had just run out to get an early edition of the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner. He rushed the newspaper over to an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury where Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and others were in the midst of a post-celebration party." Sphere: Related Content