FACTS ABOUT TIMOTHY LEARY

1. He was born on Oct. 22, 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He claimed he was conceived the day before Prohibition went into effect.  His dentist father left his family when Timothy, Jr. was 14.
2. He went to West Point, but didn’t fit in and had problems with authority. The other cadets gave him the silent treatment.  He was accused of drinking, but was cleared.  However, he did leave the university and transferred to the University of Alabama, where he was expelled for spending a night in a girls’ dorm.
3. He was drafted for WWII, but a chance encounter with an old psychology professor got him assigned to a military hospital in Pennsylvania. He rose to sergeant and got a good conduct medal.
4. He got his doctorate from the University of California in San Francisco and became a professor. He developed a reputation for new theories of psychology. 
5. He was married and had two kids while in California, but the marriage was troubled. He and his spouse drank heavily and he cheated a lot.  When confronted, he responded:  “That’s your problem.”  His wife committed suicide.
6. In 1959, he became a professor at Harvard. A colleague told him about the use of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) in religious rites in Mexico.  Leary made a trip to Mexico to check it out and it changed his life.  He devoted the rest of his life to promoting psychedelics.  He conducted the Concord Prison Experiment where 32 inmates were given doses.  They had a much lower recidivism rate than most released cons.
7. In 1962, he and Richard Alpert founded the International Federation of Internal Freedom (IFIF) to raise awareness of psychedelics. They believed LSD could improve personalities and enhance consciousness. They experimented on and with Harvard students. Some of them were coerced into the study.  After an investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Health found unethical conduct and the pair were fired by Harvard. 
8. The heirs to the Mellon fortune bought him a 64 room mansion for his “research”. For four years, it was party central for like-minded LSD fans.  He developed the use of LSD into a religion where the drug was the sacrament.  The two commandments were “Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man” and “Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness.”  One of the frequenters of the mansion was author Tom Wolfe who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  When he had been at Harvard, he had attracted the attention of Allen Ginsberg and other beat poets like Jack Kerouac.
9. The slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was actually coined by Marshall McLuhan. Leary toured college campuses promoting the slogan.
10. In a Playboy interview, Leary proclaimed that LSD could be used to cure homosexuality. He later retracted that statement.
11. In 1965, coming back from a trip to Mexico, he was arrested for possession of a small amount of marijuana. He avoided a 30 year prison term by successfully defending himself on appeal.  In 1969’s Leary v. United States declared the Marijuana Act of 1937 to be unconstitutional.
12. In 1968, he testified before Congress against making LSD illegal. He argued for keeping it legal, but with regulation.  The law passed.
13. He ran for Governor of California against Reagan in 1970. His campaign song was written by John Lennon. “Come Together” went to #1, but Leary was out of the race when he was convicted of possession of an illegal substance and sentenced to 20 years in prison.  He manipulated the psychological evaluation tests (some of which he had written himself) to get a job in the prison gardens.  He jumped a fence and escaped.  The Weather Underground helped him get out of the country.  He first stayed with the Black Panthers in Algeria, but they had to put him under “house arrest” because of his craving for attention.  He got away and went to Switzerland and then to Afghanistan where he was tricked into boarding a plane that brought him back to America in 1973.  He was put in Folsom Prison in a cell next to Charles Manson.
14. He was released in 1976 and became a celebrity magnet. He was friends with Dan Aykroyd, Johnny Depp, and Susan Sarandon.  He was godfather to Winona Ryder.  He toured the country debating ultra-conservative Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy.
15. His final words were “Why not?” His ashes were launched into space.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-Leary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary

https://www.factinate.com/people/facts-timothy-leary/

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