The Ivy League Roots of Getting High

“If you remember the ’60s,” as the saying goes, “you weren’t there.”

That’s only one of the cherished myths that Don Lattin debunks in “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” (HarperOne: $24.99).  It’s a fast, funny, and savvy book that dishes about some of the most celebrated figures in the American counterculture.

Lattin, who spent two decades as the religion writer at the San Francisco Chronicle and has authored several books on religion in American life (including “Jesus Freaks” and “Following Our Bliss”), shows us exactly what happened when three distinguished Ivy League professors first experimented with various psychedelic substances, blowing not only their own minds but also the minds of a whole generation.

“They set the stage for the social, spiritual, sexual, and psychological revolution of the 1960s,” Lattin explains. “They came together, then drifted apart, but the cultural changes they wrought are still very much with us today.”

What makes “The Harvard Psychedelic Club” so delicious, however, is Lattin’s insistence on telling the real story of the psychedelic revolution, which included not only the proverbial excesses of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but also a good measure of old-fashioned “backstabbing, jealousy, and outright betrayal.”

Ram Dass, then still known by his given name of Richard Alpert, was the privileged son of a railroad mogul who was trying to convince him to give up his job at Harvard and join the family business. Huston Smith, an ordained Methodist minister, was a philosophy instructor at MIT who appeared on television to talk about the religions of the world.  And Timothy Leary, a West Point graduate and a former Kaiser Hospital psychologist, was considered to be “a rising star in mainstream psychology.” Nothing in their curriculum vitae predicted the changes they were about to make in themselves and the world around them.

Leary took the fateful first step on a trip to Mexico in 1960. He sampled “magic mushrooms” that contained psilocybin — “the deepest religious experience of my life,” he later said — and when he returned to Harvard, Leary was “more interested in metaphysics than clinical psychology.”  Over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club with Huston Smith, he offered to guide his prim and proper colleague “into these mysterious realms of higher consciousness,” and so “the two professors pulled out their date books and tried to find a completely open day they could devote to the experience.” 

A few months later, it was Richard Alpert’s turn.  By then, Leary had already assembled “an eclectic squadron of test pilots,” as Lattin puts it, including Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, avant-garde novelist William Burroughs, and Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest who had reinvented himself as a charismatic teacher of Asian religious philosophies.  Instead of mushrooms, Leary was now offering a synthetic form of psilocybin that had been devised by the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratory in Switzerland.

“Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy,” Alpert (now known by his adopted name of Ram Dass) told Lattin as he recalled his first trip nearly 50 years later.  “What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be?  That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.”

The fourth figure in the story that Lattin tells is Andrew Weil, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman majoring in botany. He wanted to participate in the clinical experiments that Alpert was conducting, but Harvard had extracted a promise from Alpert not to use undergraduates.  So Weil — “a calculating, ambitious young man,” according to Lattin — filched some Harvard stationery in order to obtain a supply of psychedelics and conduct his own experiments. But Weil was unimpressed with the experience of getting high, if only because “[h]e could see that having any more of these insights might convince him that Harvard was a complete waste of time.”

What happened next is so unsettling that I will leave it to the reader to find out in the book itself.  Suffice it to say that the willful young Weil was “determined to bring down the Harvard Psilocybin Project,” according to Lattin, “and he would take on the assignment with the zeal of a jilted lover.”  The man who is today revered as a guru of natural health is shown in an entirely different and far less benign light in the pages of “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.”

Of course, there is much more to Lattin’s book than tales told out of school.  The cast of characters in his account features some of the most notable figures of the mid-20th century, including novelist Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard and theologian Paul Tillich.  But it’s also true that he follows Leary and Alpert from Harvard to the wilder reaches of the counterculture, where Leary crashed and burned and Alpert reinvented himself yet again as Baba Ram Dass. By then, Huston had dropped out of the psychedelic revolution and Weil had begun his own ascent to iconic status with his first book, “The Natural Mind.”

Like every good journalist, Lattin is a truth-teller, and he refuses to idealize any of the famous men and women who populate “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.”  Yet he concludes that the four principal figures in his book “did nothing less than inspire a generation of Americans to redefine the nature of reality.”  And he allows us to see that we all live in a brave new world that they helped to make.

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, clearly remembers the 60s even though he spent last three years of the decade at U.C. Santa Cruz.