Timothy Leary, Part 1: The Science of LSD

can really double down on your stuff. And Hey, the three of us would love to meet you. This is the opportunity to do it. Learn more and buy your tickets at New York Comic Con dot com Slash n y c C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. And this week we're talking about Timothy Leary. Now we're not just gonna talk about

Timothy Leary. We're also going to talk about science of LSD, the history of LSD, the use of LSD and psilocybin in various UH research projects. What these substances actually due to the mind to the brain. But we're going to use Timothy Leary as kind of, you know, sort of a guiding principle, I guess for this episode. And if you're if you're out there and you're thinking, well, I

love Timothy Learry, well, then strap in. If you're out there and you're you're thinking yourself, well, I don't know that I like this Timothy Leary guy, well, strap in as well. Yeah, I think we've got something for everybody here. We uh, we're basically sheltered during a hurricane this week, and so Robert and I just binge read about Timothy Leary for four days straight. We've got a lot to

share with you. My eyes are bleeding a little, but I think you're going to be interested in this so much so that we're going to do this as a two parter. Yes, uh, now, just to refresh anybody out there and too, and to inform from anyone who just who doesn't know who Timothy Learry is. Well. Timothy Leary was an American psychologist, author, and a key figure of the nineteen sixties counterculture and psychedelics you know movement in general.

He lived nineteen twenty through nineteen, and he managed to run a foul of pretty much every organization he was a part of. Uh. He was arrested uh enough times that he supposedly saw the inside of thirty six different prisons. He earned the ire of many Americans, even as he was able to submit a reputation as also kind of a you know, a counterculture leader uh his and I think the reason is because he has this message of inner exploration of anti establishment thinking, and this this resonated

with folks and continues to resonate. His writings, his soothing, sage like voice on numerous audio recordings, his his his irresistible celebrity allure. It all made him just impossible to ignore, love him or hate him. Plus he was not the sort of guy to let the limelight go away new and we'll and we'll get into all that he uh yeah, he he clung to it, and people gravitated to him

as well. He was more than willing to rub elbows with scientists like Carl Sagan, artists like hr and Geeger, performers like John Lennon, uh, and you know, such luminaries as Alan Ginsburg, a'l just Huxley, William Burrows, Jack Caro, Whack and kin KESI. He even kept the company of former enemies when it benefited, and such as Watergate Burglar and later conservative radio talk show host G Gordon Liddy. Yeah,

so this guy has been widely influential. He was. I have a derogatory saying that I say sometimes about people like Leary, although I think Leary was doing this before this guy. He was the Cato Kalin of his time. Like he was famous for being famous he was. Yeah, Um, it wasn't because of a very specific thing he did,

and we learned this through the research. But I have to be honest that, like, my experience with him was basically thinking, oh, this was an academic who had done some studies and then sort of became a guru like figure, much like Sasha Shulgin when we talked about him during our two parter on M D M A. Now, Sasha Shulgin was a practicing chemist who is in his laboratory

up until he died. Right, Uh, Leary was not. He did do some interesting studies in the fifties and sixties, and we're gonna get into all of that stuff, but first I think we should probably talk about his influence on music. Yeah, I have to say that before I knew anything about Timothy Leary, I knew the moody blues song legend of the mind is the has the chorus Timothy Learies Dead, you know, yeah, and so forth. Wonderful, wonderful track. I listened to it several times while researching

this episode. Other fan music fans out there might recognize the the the the sampling of his voice in various recordings, probably most notable a live version of Tools Third Eye, where they have the bit to think for yourself, question authority. Um, and then you'll find numerous other musical projects that make use of his soothing voice and in fact, and he

was involved in several of these projects as well. Uh, there's an ambient instrumental like sitar distortion album titled Turn Onto an End Dropout, which was one of his catchphrases. And that's actually like really good listening. I fired up every now and then you just kind of, you know, chill out and and you know, don't think about what's being said too much. But um, the interesting thing is we've alluded to is that there is this kind of surface level pop culture idea of Leary and it doesn't.

It doesn't necessarily hold up when you start going into the details of who he was, the sorts of research projects he was involved in. Um Like I I really wanted him to be more in line with with another counterculture contra virtual character. We've talked about John C. Lily, right, but there's not really a lot to compare the two besides the LSD connection, right, And that's actually kind of what's happening with this episode is we're getting a convergence

of two types of episodes that we normally do. We have a history of doing these two parters on specific psychedelics and looking at their scientific and medical applications. But then we also have a history of doing episodes like the John C. Lily one or the Sasha Shulgin one. We call them our psychedelic Avengers. And we thought, oh, we're gonna emerge Tim Leary and this LSD psilocybin research

together and it will be really interesting. It turns out that that he wasn't actually contributing to the research, but I think it does come together in a really interesting way thematically when we get to the whole piece of this, and in that I think he was a barometer for America's acceptance of the idea of researching acid as being a medical tool. Yeah, it's interesting how he was his just will just discuss he was, you know, a spokesperson

for this. He represented that the supposedly a a learned academic who was who was advocating LSD as this this powerful tool, and yet at the same time he also was such um an inflammatory individual as part of the counterculture heat uh. A lot of people point to the harm he did as one of one of the key figures um more so than John C. Lily uh who who vilified the counterculture and vilify the use of psychedelics and one of the reasons that psychedelics were not studied

for for decades. Yeah, there are multiple researchers in the notes here that we'll talk about throughout the course of these two episodes who point to Leary as being the reason why we haven't been able to use LSD in UM medically approved studies for going on thirty plus years now, longer than that, I think even it was. It's in the notes here somewhere, but it was in the mid

sixties when it was banned. So, yeah, strap in because that's the other thing, we're going to get into a real basic primer for you on what LSD is, what's the difference between LSD and psilocybin, and then we'll roll into the Leary experience. Okay, So to go back to the very beginning here, let's just go to the the origins of l s D itself, since that's the main substance that we're gonna be discussing here. So Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman synthesized l s D and a Sandas pharmaceutical

lab on November six uh. Sandas was working on a research project involving a parasitic fungus called ergot that grows on rye. Now you may remember that Joe and I recorded an episode titled The Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism that dealt with the ergot and that that is the same

substance that we're discussing here. And you know, aside from a noteworthy and truly horrifying breakouts of ergod poisoning in Europe, it has been linked to various supernatural rights as well as as well as allegedly individual artist and artistic traditions

throughout history, though I think sometimes those are mere theories, right. Yeah, And so just to be clear here, San DAWs was a pharmaceutical company that started in eighteen eighties six and they began researching for more novel kind of drugs in nineteen seventeen. They were basically looking for therapeutic leads based on natural products. So they turned to ergot Why, well, they had an example that they had already created called ergotamine. That was a drug that they had created for treating

migraine headaches. So Hoffman came along and he started looking at ergat and he saw the lisergic acid in it, and he thought, well, maybe this LSD that I can synthesize out of this will be a good respiratory stimulants. So for instance, make maybe if you have asthma, you take some LSD and it will help you breathe better. Yeah. So he ended up derived being different compounds from lysergic acid, and he developed several medicines, including drugs that lowered blood

pressure and improved brain function in the elderly. And he derived the twenty five in a series of these derivatives. It was lysergic acid dithalamide or LSD twenty five, and he thought that LSD stimulate breathing circulation, but test didn't

show anything special, and Sandaz abandoned further study. But then five years later, Hoffman's thoughts returned to LSD potential and he felt that it hadn't been fully explored, so he took the you know, perhaps unusual step of synthesizing another batch further testing, and during the process he began to feel strange. Um. The rest is history. He discovered the properties of LSD and I've I've heard it described as

his his problem child, like it. Basically the rest of his life he kept coming back to LSD and and trying to figure out, like, you know what what it can be used for and how you know, what are the true properties of this. At this same time, there's this kind of roller coaster of of cultural awareness of it taking place in the background. Yeah. Yeah, And he has that infamous bicycle ride as well, right after he takes it for the first time that has been sort

of mythologized over the years. Yes. Now, l s D, to be clear, is a psychedelic drug, meaning that it alters perceptions of reality, the shape of thoughts, the connections that one forms. I can't stress enough that one should set aside any cinematic uh ideas of what acid trips consists of, because it's it's rare to find a film that truly feels trippy in a way that matches up with the actual experience of ls D. You don't. You

don't see imaginary elves or anything. It's if you watch just films and TV, you just assume that an LSD trip is a dream sequence, and a dream sequence is just an LSD trip, that these are in just interchangeable

altered states of reality, right, Yeah, exactly. I remember, like growing up when kids would start talking about LSD and it being available to us just all the like various like bizarre urban myths that people would tell, you know, like, oh, there's this one guy who took it and uh, he thinks he's an orange now and he doesn't know how stop being an orange, or like another one was like this guy took it and he saw a bunch of everybody looked like giant white guerrillas to him, and he

fought all these guerrillas and it's like these sort of spectacular stories. Well, it does have hallucinogenic properties, there's their mythologized Yeah, I always think back to an episode of Strangers with Candy where there's a story of a girl who try took alice D and tried to force herself through a key hole. You know. Now, that's not to say that that nothing bad can happen while while one is on l S D. We'll have some examples of

that as well as we go on here. But in terms of just like what the experience of the elics D that basically what is the psychedelic experience? Uh? Oddly enough, I'm I want to turn to some the words of Timothy Leary because I thought that that he actually managed to sum it up rather nicely here and uh, and I'm gonna go ahead and read it in my impersonation of Timothy Leary because it's more fun that way for me and hopefully for you. Of course, the drug dose

does not produce transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key. It opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality, structure, and his mood. At the same time setting is physical, the weather, the room's atmosphere, social feelings of persons present toward one another,

and cultural prevailing views as to what is real. It is for this reason that manuals or guide books are necessary. Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as roadmaps for new interior territories which modern science has made accessible.

So to give you an idea of what LSD is like outside of the experience, outside of getting turned on, as Leary would not right, It starts without about an hour of when you first take it, and it can last up to twelve hours. Uh, there's a peak about halfway through that experience. And the effects very widely, but biologically they include dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, high body temperature, dizziness, sweat,

blurred vision, and tingly hands and feet. The primary effects, though, are visual, which is more what Leary is describing there. You get stronger colors, brighter lights, trails, halos, and patterns. Overall, people say it provides a sense of happiness and euphoria. That's very emotional. However, though, as we said, this can also lead to impulsive behavior. And poor judgment. When you're under the effects of this euphoria. Yeah, you you feel

you're body as if it's something new, something different. You smell and taste the world in a different way, visual stimulized, processed, and with new areas of focus, new details, and and the same can be said for cognition. Uh. And the same can be said for the basic processing of time. And so indeed, that is the that is the essential

psychedelic experience, uh, in a nutshell. And there's one thing I'd like to point out before we go further here, which is that we don't actually know how it affects the brain entirely. And why don't we know that because there's never been any scientific research on how it affects the brain because it has been banned largely in the United States and some other countries for for the last couple of decades, as we mentioned, So this is kind of a problem. We've got this thing on our hands.

Everybody knows about it, we have a general understanding of it, but we haven't done the research. Yeah, and we've touched on this. So when we've talked about marijuana, so a cybin as well as m d M A you have these substances that just became banned. Research into their properties right, was at the very least professionally taboo for so long. So yeah, despite the fact that they clearly have powerful properties,

we don't necessarily understand them all that much. It's believed that LSD works similar to serotonin, a neurotransmitters responsible for regulating moods, appetite, muscle control, sexuality, sleep, and sensory perception. And ls D seems to interfere with the way the brain serotonin receptors work, so it may inhibit neurotransmission, stimulated or both. It also affects the way that the retinas

process information and conduct that information to the brain. So you might be listening to this and saying, well, hold on, I've never taken any of this stuff before, and you're just kind of throwing these terms around. What's the difference between LSD and psilocybin. While psilocybin is a fun guy, and that's classified by botanists and my cologists people to

study mushrooms. While they were used by the Aztecs in religious rituals, the American public didn't really find out about psilocybin until nineteen fifty seven, and this was when an article in Life magazine recounted the adventures of a New York banker in Mexico where he tried it. H Yeah, LSD totally different. It is colorless, odorless, and tasteless and ingesting. Just twenty five micrograms is enough to feel effects. Now, to give you an idea of what twenty five micrograms is,

that's less than the weight of two salt grains. It is very quickly metabolized by the human body. Now, as previously established, LSD is a chemical that synthesized in a laboratory setting, whereas psilocybin is a fun guy that's grown in nage. One is natural one is created in a lap. Several chemicals that could go into l s D are currently sales restricted here in America or are monitored by the Drug Enforcement Agency. And there's all kinds of different

recipes on how to make it. Some start with lysergic acid that's derived from morning glory seeds. Others use that ergot fungus that we talked about earlier and how it was discovered. They culture that and they extract ergot alkaloids from it. This fungus and LSD itself can break down when exposed to light, and that's important to note as well. In this ergot recipe, the solvents and reagents involved are also very dangerous. They're poisonous, carcinogenic, and explosive. So it's fun.

I would imagine marking on this stuff, like if you've got your little laboratory, you've got to be really careful. You know. This is like uh um, some Jesse and Walter White stuff where you've got to be really careful about what kind of stuff you're concocting and what you're breathing in and whether you're not you blow up your trailer. Yeah, this is straight up chemistry. And that's the other different psilocybin is uh is ultimately uh, it's it's about I

guess scavenging or or growing naturally occurring organism. Uh. This is chemistry. So the way you do it is you synthesize the ergot alkaloid into a life surgic acid compound, and you do this by adding chemicals and applying heat. After word, you isomerize the compounds so that the atoms in its molecules rearrange. This involves some cooling, mixing, it with an acid, an actual acid, not the term acid,

also a base, and then evaporating it. The remnants are iOS lysergic dithalamide, which is then isomerized again and that produces what's called active LSD. So finally you purify it, you crystallize it. Afterward, LSD can be made into tablets, or it's dissolved into liquid or made into gelatine squares. Most often it's dissolved into ethanol, and then that ethanol is added to sheets of blotting paper that are then dried, cut up into little pieces, and people get tabs. It

looks just like the candy that you can buy. I'm not really sure on the history of that. Can you know the one where it basically looks like blot Yeah? Like which came first. It's a good question this is this like candy cigarettes or is it just a happy coincidence that this terrible candy looks like acid? Yeah? That is curious. If any listeners know, please let us in on the secret. There A lot of you have probably

also heard about bad trips. We mentioned them earlier. Well, it's not really clear what causes these bad trips, but they result in fear and paranoia, and treatment usually requires basically going to a quiet space so that the user can just come down, but sometimes you have to administer anti anxiety medication or tranquilizers, so that that's important to

remember as well. Yeah, this makes me think of a lot of the research involving psilocybin um that really ultimately kind of backs up some of what Leary said in that that bit that I read in that a lot of it comes down to priming, preparing the individual for what the trip is going to consist of, and then of course personal medical and personal psychiatric history is going

to play into that scenario. Yeah. Absolutely. Now you've also probably heard of flashbacks, right, this is the other thing like when when I was in high school, like all the legends, it was like, Oh, he's gonna see those White Guerrillas every year for the rest of his life,

right like something like that. Oh yeah, it's this is something that is that pops up in films and TV from time to time, and it's either just completely ridiculous, like the White Guerrillas, or even when it is a lot cooler and more believable, say with the first season of True Detective, there's still a lot a lot of doubts from some individuals to to what extent this is a thing or or a realistic depiction of it if

it is. Yeah, here's the deal with flashbacks. There's no evidence to support the idea that LSD remains in your body forever in amounts inside your brain or spinal fluid. People say that, but we don't have any evidence on it. Why because we really haven't been able to study it. Right. Uh. Some people think though, that this is what causes flashbacks.

The majority of users the report never having had flashbacks, and of those who have reported it, many are mentally ill, and some doctors believe that what they're perceiving is actually a form of psychosis that emerged due to the LSD use. There's actually a medically recognized disorder called hallucinogen persisting perceptive disorder, and this is for people who constantly experience visual hallucinations after they take LSD. This is a little different than

the idea of flashbacks, right. I mean, it's also worth noting that the visual hallucinations can occur for a number of reasons. Um, So it's it's entirely possible that one could could could take LSD and then what a year later, they experienced some sort of visual hallucination and one of the main ways they can describe it is the narrative of acid flashbacks and then they're going and then that becomes encoded in memory. So one last thing I want to make clear about ls D before we we cap

off this summary here. LSD is not an addictive drug. So if somebody tells you you know you're gonna take that, you're gonna get hooked on it or something like that, that's just patently untrue. Uh. The real basic way that it works is that if you take it a lot, your body is going to get used to it, and subsequently the effects are going to lessen over time. So that's the opposite of something that you become addicted to. It doesn't work in the same way as something like heroin.

Right though then some people may point out there's the whole idea that like, the first time you take heroin is the best, and then you're always chasing that dragon. Uh. But still, the LSD, psilocybin, d m T, any of these psychedelic substances that we've discussed on the program before, they are they are not addictive in the the very literal way that stuff like heroin is. Alright, we're gonna

take a quick break and we come back. We're going to continue to talk about the psychedelics, and in particular, we're gonna talk about psychedelics in medicine. Alright, we're back. So, according to Timothy Leary's archivist, a guy named Michael Horowitz, before Leary, the research being done on psychedelics was mostly done by the CIA and the Army. Uh makes us think of d and stranger things. Yeah, but they were

looking to weaponize it, dosing subjects without their knowledge. Now, what he's actually talking about is the CIS attempts with stuff like Project Bluebird and Project mk Ultra to develop mind control techniques. We actually have an episode about Stranger Things coming up in the next couple of weeks where we're going to talk more about this stuff. The basic idea here that I'm gonna boil it down quickly is that they were inspired by Nazi research experiments in the

Dakow concentration camp. Subsequently, they tested on helpless populations like prisoners, drug addicts, and mental patients, and at one point the government reportedly ordered over a hundred million doses of LSD from sand DAWs, that company that discovered it, so that they could experiment with contaminating a water supply. So they wanted to weaponize this and basically see like, can we put a whole bunch of LSD in one of our

enemies water supplies? You know this really sad thing about this, uh portion of the story is the it underlies, uh you know, a fact about military first research. You know that essentially mility military researchers come in and say, okay, can we use it to kill people? Better? Can we use it to enable our our our our warfare in some way, shape or form, And if not, well then

we're done with it. We see this time and time again on the show, and whenever we dig deep into topics, whether it be uh the weaponization of animals we've done an episode on, or a lot of our space based stuff is usually related to weaponizing space at some point. Uh. So, Actually, the government Sandas wouldn't supply them that much, so they

turned to another company. They wanted the company to break sandas is patent and produce the chemical, but the whole thing never came to pass, and the government essentially deemed LSD too unpredictable for their general use. Now, Leary pioneered research into how psychedelics could reveal the nature of human consciousness and possibly help people with depression and anxiety, but he also precipitated a backlash against psychedelics that criminalized them

and made it impossible for others to do research on them. Uh. Leary supporters argue, that's not Leary's fault. This would have happened anyways, you know, And I can see, you know, I can see both sides of that. But he was undoubtedly m a key figure and in a in a very um, you know, ultimately a very like hateable figure. Like part of his his charisma and his charm, it just worked like poison against the people who already had,

you know, a conservative bent. Yeah, it's true, and we're going to see time and time again people turn against him, and not the kind of people that you would expect. Right, So let's back up for a second here, what about before Leary? How we're scientists and researchers looking at it before that. Well, in the nineteen fifties, some researchers began investigating whether psychedelics could treat mental health disorders or addiction.

The federal government funded a hundred and sixteen of these studies. But between nineteen fifty three and nineteen seventy three, again I turned to our episode on M D, M A and Sasha and Shulgin. They're perfect example of this. Along those lines is kind of what was going on with psychiatrists and various researchers working with LSD and patients to see how it could work. Sandaz was essentially selling it as a psychiatric product, right and these and these were

reputable research operations. We had not yet gotten to the point where Leary comes along or or John C. Lily comes along and you know, starts giving it to dolphins, yeah, exactly, or or giving it to himself while he's hanging out with dolphins. Uh. Now, the sam Does Company patented it, but they sold it as Della sid beginning in nineteen forty seven, and they sold it in twenty five microgram

tablets that were designed for analytical psychotherapy. They suggested that the psychiatrists themselves take it so that they could better understand their patients experiences. Now, when they stopped making it, they said, this is about the fact that there's a lack of regulation and that there's inaccurate information being perpetuated

about this drug. But between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty five, forty thousand patients were given Delhi sid tablets basically legal LSD, and Dr Max Wrinkle was the first to bring LSD to the United States and then test it on a population of a hundred volunteers. He and his colleague Dr Paul Hope noted that LSD produced effects that quote mimic

schizophrenic psychosis. So this is you can see what there's some as Another theme that we come back to over and over again on the show is early psychological theory seems to be very uh generalized and biased, right, and this is another example of that. They're like, oh, there's this thing. It just seems to make you schizophrenic, you know,

and there just wasn't enough research behind it. But recreational drug use increased dramatically in the sixt s, such that as many as two million people had dropped acid by the nineteen seventies. So by nineteen sixty five there were very few researchers who were allowed to possess LSD. Only

six projects were conducted in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen seventy, the US Congress added psychedelics into the government War on Drugs, and the federal government declared these drugs had no medical use. The chairman for New Jersey's Narcotic Drug Study Commission called LSD the greatest threat facing the country today, more dangerous than the Vietnam War. It seems like a little hyperbot. By nineteen seventy four, the National Institutes for Mental Health

declared that LSD had quote no real therapeutic value. So there was a strong establishment bent against this drug, which Timothy Leary unfortunately did not help with his antics. UH. Today, though l s D is a Schedule one drug in the United States, it's under the Controlled subs sens Is Act. This basically means the government believes that it has high abuse potential, which we've already established that's not addictive. UH, it has a lack of accepted safe uses when taken

under medical supervision. We'll talk a little bit about how there actually are some of those, and that it basically has no current medical use in their minds. Again, there's evidence that it does. Now. I want to remind everybody that by placing it as a Schedule one, they're placing it in the same category as marijuana and uh, and they're placing it in a stricter category than category two, which includes cocaine. Yep. So since then, only a small

number of studies have been conducted. You've got small sample sizes, so there's not a lot of research that we can rely on. The early results are broad. They suggest that when used by people without a family history or risk of psychological problems, psychedelics can actually make us kinder, calmer, and better at our jobs. They also help us solve

problems more creatively and make us more open minded and generous. Yeah, it's it's interesting when you look at the research here about these potential uses for psychedelics that one is insolute reminded of meditation, because both both meditation and psilocybin have been shown to shut down the default fault mode network, that constant stream of worry chat about past and future in your brain um, and that the brain activity is similar even if the experience you know, obviously isn't going

to always be the same though there there is often a certain amount of crossover UM and we'll have to get into that more when we do a focus on meditation in the future. Yeah, I mean, what Robert's referring to is the default mode and network. This is a group of structures in the brain. They're found in the

frontal and prefrontal cortex. That's what's responsible for our ego and our sense of self, and it's why we as humans have very rigid habitual thinking that let's face it, we can obsess over right on psychedelics that slows down and the boundaries betwe in the self in the world dissolve, allowing for therapy sessions that can be more effective. Yeah. Yeah,

there are a number of excellent studies here. At two thousand and eleven study at John Hopkins University gave high doses of psilocybin to fifty one test subjects and according to ABC News, a thirty of these individuals experienced measurable personality changes that lasted more than a year. So as of twenty six, a year ago, about five hundred people have participated informal psilocybin experience. That's not LSD. It's worth remembering though, that these volunteers are self selected and are

carefully screened and then are guided by therapists. So psychedelics used outside of control settings, yes, they can cause problems, including bad trips where the users feel extremely anxious and depressed. This doesn't account for the occasional flashbacks that we talked about earlier, whether that's a real thing or not. Right, the possible future of research is very promising. Patients are recommend ended for treatment by a doctor, for instance, This

might be what we we look at in a few years. Right, you get recommended for LSD R psilocybin treatment by your doctor. They get you screened for mental illness, They look at your heart to see if you have any heart conditions. Then they're prepping you about what to expect. You're monitored by a medical professional while you're under the effects. This is someone that they have, you know, established a trusting relationship with you. Is not just some scary orderly who

stands there the whole time. They have to work with you for at least six to eight hours ahead of time. Then the experience you have is contained, so it's something you can build a life around, right, you can you can figure out how to solve the problems that you're going in for around this. Across the board, though, like you, we're looking at at openness is one of the key positive results of psaulocybin use other hallucinations that have been

explored in these various research programs. Yeah, and so you look at what are the possibilities here. If we can get the FDA to reschedule it, what can we do with it? Well, there, I've already been studies that have looked at how psilocybin or LSD can be used to help terminal patients deal with the end of life anxiety. You can potentially help people who have addictive problems. There's been studies that have been done on smoking cessation and

alcoholism related to it. Uh. And then also psychedelics can potentially help mental wellness. There's been a number of studies that have been done basically looking at how it can prolong positive changes in attitude and mood. Um. When I think about LSD or psilocybin for myself, I've never taken either, But when I hear these very controlled laboratory conditions described as somebody who's never taken it, that's actually more appealing to me. The idea of it being done in a

controlled setting like that. Well, you know, the crazy part about it is that like the idea of of say people or young people taking LSD, solocybin or whatever and not really knowing what they're doing and having, you know, maybe a positive experience, maybe a negative like that's that's not in keeping a with the clinical use of it. But but all but be with the with the traditional use of some of these substances, where you would have not a scientist but a shaman to administer these things.

There were rituals, there were there was a process. It was communal. Yeah, it was a communal experience with lots of priming. Yeah. Now, so just from my perspective, because I know I have a history of depression and anxiety, and my family has a history of depression and anxiety, I've always worried, well, I don't want to take this because I might have a bad reaction, right, Remember what they said some of the setup was because they needed

to screen you for certain things. I'm also curious though they say things like it's going to increase your interest in fantasy and imagination, and I want to know how much more interested in fantasy and imagination I can get, because I'm already pretty well down that rabbit hole. One of the things that these researchers say is that when

they take a look at it. It can help change your personality if you're having personality problems, right that the general idea is that personality is fixed after the age of thirty, but with the help of psychedelics, you may be able to overcome some you know, boundaries that you're facing in that respect. And I just think that's interesting. I've always just kind of anecdotally thought about it about

ten years later than that. Like pretty much everybody I know, by the time they're forty, they are who they are and they're going to be that way. I have not seen anybody make any drastic changes, but it seems like if they have really difficult emotional problems in life that they're trying to get over, it seems like there's a possibility here that if we were only able to study

this further, it might be an option for people like that. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's one of those things where you know, we we like, we may think of ourselves a set in stone after a certain point, but but we're not. We're not really. I mean, we know that the mind is in memory is more malleable than that. Uh So, psychedelics come in as a as a possible

means to loosen things up so that they can be reset. Uh. And of course that being said, drugs are not the only thing that I think that they can allow a person to do that. I mean, sometimes something is simple, is say travel, uh, new experiences, um, reading a book you wouldn't have otherwise read this sort of thing. Generally, having a creative curiosity about life uh can can change who you are. I think one of the interesting things some of these studies of is that it makes you wonder, like,

is the person that has administered the substance. Are they this the kind of person that is not a novelty seeker? They're not. They don't seek out new experiences otherwise. Like maybe that's the kind of individual for whom some potential future treatment would be best used. Like somebody who's who

really can't shake some thing negative in their life. Uh. And they have a pretty established routine if how things are, But at the same time they recognize that there's something about that routine that is dysfunctional for them or for the world around. Yeah, there's some sort of cycle that needs to be broken. Uh, there's something that needs to be you know, just pulled apart so it can be put back together. In a slightly different form. Yeah, yeah,

I think that's a good way to approach it. So why don't we take another break, and then when we get back, we're gonna officially dive into the Leary stuff, and we're gonna start right at the beginning. Thank thank Alright, we're back. Okay, So we're gonna talk about Timothy Leary for the rest of this episode and then into the next episode as well. Uh, you know, we're gonna start at the beginning because I think a lot of the stuff that happens on early on in his life is

going to be key. And it's interesting when we talk about this in terms of like, at what point is someone's personality set? At what point is somebody's destiny kind of set? Well, according to Robert Greenfield, who wrote to Timothy Learry a biography, yeah you can. You can sort of see a lot of that in Leary's early life. So he was born October ninety and Springfield, Massachusetts to an Irish Catholic family. His father with a stroll as a struggling dentist, and his mother was a working mother.

That's my neck of the woods, Stoffield, Massachusetts. Yeah, my uncle works there. It's just my whole family is from the western part of that state. So I have a very clear picture in my head now of what his

his young upbringing was like. So, according to Greenfield's biography, you can really attribute a lot of learies rebel rebellious spirit to his relationship with his father Tote, an alcoholic who brought imbalance to the home and depended on charity from family loans to prop up his struggling dental practice.

And now the young Tim Larry you know, occasionally stood up to his father, but was also forced to hide from him on the roof on some occasions, and then total left the family when Tim was on fourteen UH, leaving him to find solace in books about mythic heroes and UH legends, and he was determined to become something better, greater than his father, and his mother obsessed as well over her her child's future, like how can I engineer

uh somebody for success? And so Greenfield argues that we see the seeds of Leary's relationships with authority figures throughout his life, you know, pinpointed in his early life as well as his relationships with women. He would go through periods of finding structure within an within an institution, but would ultimately rebel against its order, and in times of distress he'd seek out women and for positive father figures. He turned to UH, not to his own father, of course,

but to a flamboyant and sometimes dramatic family members. And he depended on the emotional and financial support UH first of all of his mother and UH and in Greenfield identifies a pattern of his leaving most of them along the way. Yeah. I mean, I think like one of the off whole themes that we're going to notice by the time we get to the end of this two parter is that he left a a wake behind him of either abused people or dead people. I mean, well,

we're gonna get into it. Yeah. There are a number of self destructive tendencies in Timothy Learry's life, al right. So in terms of his his school and his essentially pre psychedelics career, UH Learry attended classical high school alongside American author, a biographer and historian William Manchester. Somebody might be a familiar with him from a world lit only by fire The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, which is an excellent book. And he also went to the same

school as a Theodore Geisel or Dr Seuss. He went to the College of Holy Cross and Worcester, uh is a strict Catholic school that of course inspired rebellion from Larry. He made money gambling on sports. He frequently hopped the wall with other adventure seekers in or Or to go out drinking in town and chase girls. My father from Worcester.

So also, like this is like connecting the dots. So to give you an idea here if if you're not familiar with messages at all, Springfields in the western part of the state, Worcester sort of in the middle, but between Springfield and Boston. So it's not I mean, it's like forty five minutes probably from where he grew up. All right, Well, the next place we're going on the map here for Leary is west Point, and this is where he initially just goes all in on the culture

of West Point. He wrote, according to the Greenfield, he's writing back to his mom with just the maximum amount of west Point lingo you can possibly use. And this is telling to like he'll start off really into a culture and then he rebels, and indeed he does. He returns to his old ways, even faces a court martial for drunken behavior. He's acquitted, but then he ends up facing what's known as the silence, or was known as

the silence. This was a policy that Australized cadets who broke the honor code, and this was discontinued in seventy three. And Uh. He ultimately ends up resigning and is honorably discharged by the army. Then he applies to colleges across America. The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa accepted in first, so that's where he went. He met Dr Donald Angus Ramsdell, a Harvard psychology PhD, a man who Leary would later refer to as Dr d which I found that interesting

given our episodes on the real Doctor John Dyah. And Uh. He soon immersed himself in the study of psychology and in biology, and now having lost his draft de term deferment, he enrolled in r OTC to avoid a draft. And then he also ran a foul of the school here due to womanizing so much though the dean even accused him of sullying quote the honor of Southern womanhood, and

he was expelled. Man like just from my point perspective from you know, being from up in New England and in the tooth thousands moving to the South into a progressive southern city. I had a lot of culture shock. I'm trying to imagine what it was like for this guy, you know, all these years ago, Uh, just transitioning and jumping around and getting into trouble and just really shaking

things up everywhere he went. Well, it's interesting. One of the sort of side things in in Greenfield's biography that he points out is that apparently at the time the university in Tuscaloosa, you had these various liberal academics and in many cases, um homosexual academics who had found sort of a safe environment in which to thrive. So in a in a sense like if Timothy Leary was going to go to anywhere in the American South at that point,

Tuscaloose was probably one of the places to go. And he did find people who who valued him and embraced him, you know initially, but he wasn't quite able to to finish his his academic duties. Oh of course not now. On the advice of Dr d he goes on to a role in the univer of Illinois he lines up work in the psychology department, and he eventually completes his education at Tuscaloosa remotely. But uh yeah, it's one of these situations where, um, you just see this pattern over

and over again. As Greenfield writes, a clear pattern in his life had already emerged whenever Tim Leary began accepting the kind of success for which he had been programmed since birth by his mother, he would stop the process by indulging, just as his father had done before him, in self destructive behavior. So Leary then goes on to

get his master's degree at the University of Washington. We're talking about Washington State now, So he's already jumped from New England to Alabama, to Illinois, and now up to Washington State. He received his doctorate in psychology in nineteen fifty from the University of California at Berkeley. So then he jumps down to California. Here he decided that conventional psychotherapy was useless and he began experimenting with group therapy

and transactional analysis. So this gives you an idea of like where he was that sort of academically disciplined wise before he was introduced to psychedelics. His first wife, Mary Anne, committed suicide during this time. This was in nineteen fifty five. This left him to raise their two children alone. We have more on this obviously. Yeah, this was just a real sad situation for a number of reasons. But basically, uh he he and Mary Anne had a very open relationship.

Well yeah, but also just a chaotic relationship, but just a lot of according to to Greenfield's account in the biography, just a lot of negative vibes in this uh, in

this relationship, a lot was not working. Leary was apparently looking to end the relationship in the very near future anyway, and then she committed suicide and it was It's not like Leary wasn't an unfeeling person like this had a huge effect on him, like he would write about it, just essentially a pit that he wasn't able to emerge from emotionally, for you, for for decades even, and then you know, to to say nothing then of the children as well. Now, the urban legend of this goes this

is what you know. I can't imagine how many articles and books Robert and I read for this, but it probably popped up in every single one of them. Is that the night before they were having an argument about their open relationship and about that he was in a relationship with a woman that he loved more than Mary and his wife, and that she was upset about this and she wanted him to break it off, and he went into the bedroom and said, it's your problem, not mine,

and closed the door. When he woke up in the morning, she was dead. She had suffocated herself in the garage inside the family car. Yeah. In Greenfield's account, he he kind of points to the different versions of the story, so like there's the there's like a slightly different version that he that he tells the authorities and then he writes about later, and you know, you can sort of try to find the truth between all of these. Uh uh.

And yeah, it's just a really ugly situation with an ugly ending it is, but it's also, unfortunately, I think, an important sign of things to come with this guy and and sort of where his priorities were, right. Uh. And I don't want to end this this episode because we're about to wrap up our first part here, but

I don't want to end it on such a super downer. Uh. He went on afterwards to teach at Berkeley and he actually was the director of psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, from nineteen fifty five until nineteen fifty eight. Now, during this period, uh, after his wife's suicide, Uh, he he also ends up going to uh to Europe a few times. He goes to Spain, he goes to Italy, and uh, this is kind of key.

There was this, um, there was this period of time when he was when he was in Spain and he suddenly experienced this some sort of mysterious illness, so swelling pain. Uh. He was attended to buy a Danish doctor and he ends up passing this night in misery, ends up sending the kids to stay with another couple of of of Americans were staying close by, and he says, he said that he felt like he died during this time, that he that he let go and they put the past

behind him. But you know, in a very interesting way, it was kind of his first psychedelic experience, like a taste of this altered state as a you know, not to be confused with all the times he'd gotten just blindly drunk in the past, because he had previously and for a lot of his life, had a severe alcohol problem. But it's it's shortly after that too, that Frank Baron, who was who was a colleague from Berkeley. Uh. He he visited Leary during an unproductive stay in Florence, Italy.

He was always going on these trips to try and you know, to to write various things. And at this point Barren told him that during his research into creativity he had interviewed a psychiatrist who had used matt Aig mushrooms to produce visions and trances, and that Baron had tried them as well, resulting in a mystical transcendental insight. Now, interestingly enough, Leary warned him that he might lose his scientific credibility to be babbled on about this sort of thing. Um,

And that, my friends, is what we call foreshadowing. Yes, so in the next episode we will get into the psychedelic experience of of Leary, basically one continuous psychedelic experience that lasted his entire life and uh basically dragged American culture with Yeah, please make sure that you tune into that second part. It's got a lot more of the juicy details of Timothy Leary's life and the science and

research that he did into LSD and psilocybin. If you want to reach out to us about this episode and any of the stuff we brought up today regarding LSD research or possibly Timothy Leary's history, you can always get us on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. And if you want to get into was the old fashioned way, just shoot us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and

thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com