I would like to know what peoples opinions are regarding Tim Leary. Basicaly he turned alot of people on to psychedelics however this caught the attention of the authroriites and severly impeded much needed scientiific research with these compounds. Huxley warned Leary about this approach and said it was better to turn on the intellectuals of society and let the effects it had infleuce society through them via art, writing, music etc. In some ways many of us may owe our introduciton to hallucinognes to leary however the research into these fascinating compounds is still recovering over learys strategy. Any opinions?

idealistic
perhaps as naive as Aldous Huxley (maybe more), though it's been said huxley didn't think LSD should have been readily available to the general public

regarding huxley,
i liken huxley to plato, who didn't think the common man was capable of governing himself
still, he came off as quite naive in "doors of perception/heaven and hell"

I think he made some mistakes that yes did mess up legit research which is a shame. I think like benzyme said that he was idealistic about the whole issue which to me was a mistake. But also I think things did turn out quite well because the impact that lsd had and still has on people is major. For example the anti war movement and the environmental movements I think were in part a result of people taking lsd and other psychedelics. I don't think that kind of cultural revolution would have happened without the spread of these substances into the general population of which Leary played a major role.

Slowly research is being allowed again with these substances and I think as time goes on and more serious scientists get involved it will continue. This is a good thing. But I do think it is also a good thing that so many regular average people got to experience these substances.

Leary's impact was both good and bad.

Good: he alone caused many millions of people to partake in the LSD consciousness expanding movement. He made LSD seem like a wonder drug. Without his amazing and honest enthusiasm for LSD, many people would have never tried LSD, included SWIM. He also did some important work on psilocybin and LSD. And at the beginning he was a very positive figure.

Bad: he became reckless, got kicked out of Harvard for testing LSD on students, he later encouraged people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”. That was the worst possible phrase he could ever have made popular. It sounded like he was encouraging people to become jobless drug addicts with no future! Of course that’s not the intension of the phrase, but that’s how most people interpreted it. The other thing that he did that was not good was to make it seem as though all drugs were good and that mind expanding drugs were the way of the future. He thought everyone should take mind expanding drugs. He ended up trying all sorts of harmful drugs. He became a drug addict. At the time he died of cancer he was hooked on pot, tobacco, and cocaine.

Leary was no Hofmann that’s for sure. Albert Hofmann lived a long healthy life. He never became a drug addict. He used LSD often though, but never in a habitual way. He was always respectable and never became reckless. Because of that, the positive messages that came from Albert Hofmann about how LSD can benefit a person, were never tainted. A professional could take Hofmann’s words seriously after many years. No so with Leary. After getting kicked out of Harvard and telling everyone to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” and dying of cancer, it’s hard to believe anything he said was ever valid. Its a shame. Leary did have good things to say at the beginning, but as soon as the drug addicts started hanging around Leary (they just wanted his LSD) he started to change, and lost all of my respect.

So there’s a bit of good and bad. Regardless of how reckless Leary became, he managed to get millions of people to use LSD and for that I’m eternally grateful. It was in fact his early books on LSD that got SWIM interesting in LSD in the first place. Without Leary’s early books, SWIM would never have tried LSD. NEVER. So Leary changed SWIM’s life for the better. It’s sad that drug addicts started flocking to him for a thrill. He ended up just being another drug addict.

Had he stuck to his own teachings of LSD and not gone down the path of self destructive drug abuse, likely leading to cancer, I think LSD would be seen in a much better light today. But because he did, now people can say, “LSD is a bad drug. It will mess you up. Look what LSD did to Leary. He was kicked out of Harvard, got addicted to drugs, later put into prison, and then died of cancer. Do you want that?”

I completely agree with 69ron here. The same reason i don't like this forum to get too much of a "spice is good for you like vitamin C, take as much as possible" tone.
It's not for everyone and it's not a cheap thrill. Moderacy is a good thing not only to apply in our daily lives, but also to advocate.

definitely

swim prefers to have a psychedelic experience once, maybe twice a year.

Leary definelty turn alot of people on. However I do not think that these compounds are for everyone and I wish leary had realized and expressed this as well. It seemed it all happened to fast, what leary thought would happened did not. This isn't to say he did not contribute in some positives ways as well however the community is still recovering from his strategy. I think a slower more scientiifc-intellectual approach/introduction would have allowed much more understanding and respect for these amazing tools and allowed society to find the appopriate uses for them. The reason I brought this up is I just read Storming-Heaven by Jay Stevens. It is a greally good look at LSD and its influence on society as well as why the 60's occured 9his view of course). Has anyone else read this?

I find Leary totally readable. The powers of darkness had nasty plans for LSD and other things we like; Leary let the cat out of the bag and totally ruined those plans, came close to bringing the whole shithouse down His later, personal, escapades are problematic to me; did he rat to save his own skin? opinions are out and divided on that one... Certainly the suggestion of such a thing took the shine off his halo for me. Regardless of later, possible, character deterioration, the initial 'Leary thing' stands as one of the most important acts of the 20th century to me.

i agree with leary's idea that psychedelics such as psylocibin, mescaline, lsd, and other entheogens should be legal for spiritual and religious uses. however, i disagree with his plan of action to get them that way. he obviously failed miserably.

Ya I think hes totally readable as well..69 ron..did you read exo-psychology?? I first read politics of ecstacy, than exo-psychology, but it was exo-psychology that really got me into leary..first time I had heard of meta-programming and the 8 calibur brain model etc..

I also read his biography and yeah..his life was quite fucked up..but he definatily stands alone..no other like him.I kinda wish he had gone more the way of metzner later on though..Metzner's still out there writing books and being present within the entheogenic culture..same with Richard Ablert(ram dass-now dead), but I like metzner more.

i look at it this way..there was Leary...and then there was Terrence. Noone else had that level of charisma and attractable sophistication that they seemed to have...it was like they had this impossible ability to box the unboxabe, and place it infront of you to open and understand.. Hoffman, metzner, ginsberg, shulgen, siebert, pinchbeck..all of them have their place and have made their contributions..but noone of them have really taken the place as the "new Leary or Mckenna" of this generation, as I have seen stated other places.

BTW, leary was always a drunk..Seems like he drank alot from reading his bio.. I have a friend in seattle, hes an older guy who tripped lots back in the late 60's and 70's, he was an artist and ended up somehow spending a weekend or something with Tim leary and Alan Watts. He said that Tim was already really hammered when they met, and it was backstage at some event, and Tim immediatly suggested they both drop acid. Then Tim proceeded to keep drinking, while frantically talking at high speed about all kinds of weird things and enthusiastically waving his hands back and forth.. when the acid hit, he said it was like BOOM, and he was done..it was like there was him, and there was tim, and they had gone over a dimension or something and it was just the 2 of them and tim kept babbling on and on and my friend was way to fucking high to take any of it in!!! He said that Tim and Allen drank like that the whole time he was there..He said he had never had LSD like that before though!

Unlike Ralph Metzner, I don't think that Ram Dass has really been involved in the entheogenic culture for quite some time... he's more of a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Yoga (in the broadest sense of the word)... and he is still alive, though he did have a "near fatal stroke" in 1997...


http://www.ramdass.org/B...y/tabid/331/Default.aspx


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass

Leary's heart was in the right place, he just made some tactical mistakes. He thought he had the numbers, he thought the counterculture was bigger and more powerful than it was. I don't think he foresaw what would happen, and how the forces of repression would descend on them and seek to destroy them totally. But it was a complicated time, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, a lot of street violence and the law and order crowd won. And they're still winning today. So, the message is, keep it on the down low. Get in through the back door, through the brave doctors and psychoanalysts givng psychedelics to their patients, seeing that it works, and publishing about it.

If you like Storming Heaven check out Acid Dreams too, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love for a look at the supply side.

i've only really read 'the psychedelic experience', but i've read it many times. it's a great book and i have found, through personal experience, his ideas are quite valid.

i think if he should of focused more on eliminating the negative effects on psychedelics before trying to take it so mainstream

As observed by Mr. Hoffman in his book, the problems with LSD were made manifest when it was taken mainstream. In his experiments, when there was control, it was fine. But when millions of kids started dropping acid to see what the buzz was all about, no control, no sitter, no safety, people started getting hurt and some complete mental breakdowns were reported.

imo tim leary and huxley were not doing the right thing - mckenna was tho

good or bad... eh well... he did what he did and now we all have to deal with the repercussions...

wow so there is actually proof?

i guessed with proper guidance alot of the bad reactions could be eliminated but i didnt think it had been confirmed. is this in LSD: My Problem Child?

Yeah, It's in LSD: My Problem Child.

I'll take Alpert and Huxley's way of thinking over Leary's.