Was Timothy Leary Right?

published on Thursday, 19 April, 2007
By JOHN CLOUD
Time

Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time?

The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the '50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the '70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.

Psychedelics chemically alter the way your brain takes in information and may cause you to lose control of typical thought patterns. The theory motivating the recent research is that if your thoughts are depressed or obsessive, the drugs may reveal a path through them. For Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31 psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room.
A half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after ordinary treatment.

Antidrug warriors may argue that the research will lend the drugs an aura of respectability, prompting a new round of recreational use. That's possible, but today we have no priestly Leary figure spewing vertiginous pro-drug proclamations. Instead we have a Leary for a less naive age: Richard Doblin. Also a Harvard guy--his Ph.D. is in public policy--Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986 to help scientists get funding and approval to study the drugs. (Doblin, 53, says he was too shy for the '60s, but he was inspired by the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof, who authored a 1975 book about promising LSD research--research that ended with antidrug crackdowns.) Doblin has painstakingly worked with intensely skeptical federal authorities to win necessary permissions. MAPS helped launch all four of the current Ecstasy studies, a process that took two decades. It's the antithesis of Leary's approach.

All drugs have benefits and risks, but in psychedelics we have been tempted to see only one or the other. Not anymore.

Grateful Dead fan is security chief

Source: Guardian Unlimited

A Whitehall high flyer chosen by Gordon Brown to oversee the security and intelligence agencies is a cycling fan with a passion for the Grateful Dead.

Alex Allen, 56, was yesterday made chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, responsible for assessing reports from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

But his private interests are available for all to view on his personal website, with photos of him windsurfing to work up the Thames, in a bowler hat and pinstripe suit, during a transport strike in the 1980s. The site shows Allen sporting a skin-tight cycling outfit, playing guitar, and celebrating his 50th birthday with family and friends.

Extolling his favourite band, he says: "I first saw the Dead in the mud at Bickershawe in 1972 and was so knocked out ... I have been a Deadhead ever since." Beside listing computers and bridge as among his interests, the site reveals his west London address as well as home and mobile phone numbers.

Allen, currently the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, was the principal private secretary to John Major and Tony Blair (he says, "It's the same job as Bernard in Yes Prime Minister for those who watched that!") before becoming British high commissioner for Australia.

The JIC became notorious in the controversy over the Iraq weapons dossier published in the build-up to the Iraq war. The resulting Butler inquiry said the JIC chairman should be "someone with experience of dealing with ministers in a very senior role and who is demonstrably beyond influence and thus probably in his last post".


Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: November 16, 2007

Of Krassner,Kerouac,and Leary as Pranksters?

Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932) was the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. With the radical humor of his publication shattering taboos and breaking barriers, Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Paul Krassner is indeed a writer/activist. Jack Kerouac never got on the bus, but one of his inspirations Neal Cassaday a.k.a. Dean Moriarity in On the Road, was one of the original core member/prankster for sure. The famous bus trip took place in 1964, (I was all of 10 and had not the slightest clue this was going on in my hometown) with New York Worlds Fair was the original destination so Kesey had a few years on the Beatles. Kesey's second novel Sometimes a Great Notion demanded his presence in New York, so Kesey bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus that he and the Merry Pranksters painted in day-glo colors, and outfitted it for a cross-country trip. With Neal Cassady at the wheel, they left La Honda in June 1964 and began their now legendary journey across the country, smoking marijuana, and dropping acid along the way. The top of the bus was made into a musical stage and when it detoured through some cities, the Pranksters blasted a combination of crude homemade music and running commentary to all the astonished onlookers. They arrived in New York in July after an arduous journey, whereupon Neal Cassady introduced them to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg embraced the new legends immediately and arranged for them to drive to Millbrook to meet the other psychedelic pioneer, Timothy Leary. Jack Kerouac was not impressed and had little to say to either Kesey or the Merry Pranksters. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were not pranksters and Millbrook was a another astral plane ( or airliner ) all together albeit definitely pioneers treading different pathways on the same trail.
I think we need to look beyond and into the humor...psychedelics have been fun much more than religious in my experiences and I like that aspect the most.