LSD entered the public picture in the mid 1960s and, as the saying goes, “the world would never be the same.” Leary and Alpert got thrown out of Harvard for a variety of reasons, including animosity among many faculty members and a damning exposé about drug use written by Andrew Weil, a young Harvard student rejected from the psychedelic “club” who would go on to earn his MD, experiment on his own with illegal substances, and eventually secure a future as an alternative health and spiritual guru success story. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert set up shop in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and began more robust research with LSD that brought new spiritual breakthroughs to the community of people living with the two on the beach. Within a short time, the press learned about the experimentation in living taking place on this exotic beach in Mexico, increasing Leary’s notoriety especially, but also leading to his and Alpert’s removal from the country. From here the two eventually end up in Milbrook, New York, in 1963 and, with the patronage of some very wealthy fans, set up a new lab—really an enormous Gothic mansion with multiple buildings and beautiful, sprawling grounds—to conduct their research, which meant ingesting and sharing unimaginable amounts of acid.
The high life at Millbrook likewise began to crumble before long, with Alpert breaking from Leary and leaving in 1965, and Leary himself getting entangled in numerous legal difficulties, including an arrest and conviction for possession of pot in 1965, and two subsequent raids at the mansion that contributed to Leary’s departure and ultimately the end of the Millbrook experiment in 1967. Indeed, by this time not only Leary but also LSD had become increasingly dangerous to American cultural, political, and social authorities who only a few years earlier were either unaware of its appearance on the scene, indifferent to the drug, or open to its potential psychiatric value, but who very quickly perceived a serious threat to social stability. Leary’s catchy motto, “Tune in, turn on, drop out” signaled apathy, anarchy, and atheism to the culture warriors reacting to the emergence of youth culture, drug culture, and musical culture overtaking the American marketplace.
The center of gravity in this very brief though consequential history of acid in the mid 1960s—illustrious to some, infamous to others—shifts from upstate New York to the Bay Area, thanks to the connections and popularity of Alpert and Leary’s lectures/performances in the area; the improbable allure of Ken Kesey’s “Acid Tests” orchestrated with the Merry Pranksters and including strobe lights, dancing, music, often featuring future lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, and lots and lots of acid; and such gala LSD fueled events like the three-day Trips Festival, the Love Pageant Rally, and the Human Be-In.
The San Francisco neighborhood known as Haight Ashbury became ground zero for the west coast cultural explosion associated with LSD, a “small psychedelic city state” that spawned not only hippie culture as America came to understand it, but also more religiously ritualistic uses of acid for cosmic and personal spiritual awakening and transformation as described, for example in the local publication know as The Oracle. Yet despite the optimism associated with the strange brew of political activism, self-exploration, communal experimentation, mystical transportation, and social liberation, the cold, hard realities of the conflicted era—which included police enforcement to uphold laws, human degradation and exploitation, and serious political contestations—abruptly contained the boundaries of hippie culture and dampened the heat from the Summer of Love in 1967. LSD was declared illegal in 1966, congressional hearings emphasized the dangers of drugs, Leary was soon in jail and, after escaping from prison, in exile by the early 1970s, and Richard Nixon called for a war on drugs.
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