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Timothy Leary (1920 - 1995)
Early Life
Born on October 22, 1920 in Springfield Massachusetts Timothy Leary was to become the embodiment of the psychedelic drug culture. He was born an affluent New England family. He studied at the Holy Cross in Worcester but reacted to the scholastic approach religion taught by the Jesuits there. He went from there to West Point. However, eighteen months later he found himself in the University of Alabama where he studied psychology.
Adulthood
During WWII he worked as a psychologist at the U.S. Army hospital in Pennsylvania. He was hired there full time as an assistant professor of psychology having obtained his doctorate at the University of California. By the 1950s he had a respectable reputation in academia. He had written several works in his field and became director of psychological research at a hospital in Oakland, California. This all augured for a successful career in his chosen area however all was not well with Doctor Leary. He was not a happy man and became disaffected with the drudgery of 9 to 5 lives.
Revelation
On his 35th birthday he left home after a drunken fight with his wife, Marianne. He returned the next day to find her dead. She had committed suicide. To escape he took to travelling and eventually settled in Spain with his two children. He stayed there until 1959 when he returned to the states where he joined the faculty at Harvard University Centre for Personality Research. In August of the next year he tried his first psychedelic drug while in Cuernavaca, Mexico. As he quoted later on his first experience of "dropping acid" "I ate seven of the sacred mushrooms of Mexico and discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, god, the devil-all lie inside my mind"
Notoriety
Harvard saw him continue his habit of taking LSD and made it a regular part of his curriculum at the research centre. His fellow users included famous literary figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac and Arther Koestler apart from his colleagues and students. Even though his experiments of using psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes on schizophrenics, imprisoned criminals and alcoholics were proven to be valid, Harvard was not impressed with his growing image and notoriety as a drug guru. Harvard dismissed him from his position in 1963.
Millbrook - Church of 'jolly' people
After a millionaire friend of Leary's gave him free use of his sixty-four room in Millbrook, New York, he founded his League for Spiritual Discovery and made it into a centre to house 60 of his disciples. He saw it as his mission to overthrow "original sin, the book of Genesis and the whole Judeo-Christian bad trip". Life at Millbrook was like "living in a church with jolly people", as described by Leary's daughter Susan.
Jailbird
The law didn't see Leary's liturgy as benignly as others did, however, and he complained of the rising police harassment. An example of how this was manifested was when Leary and his wife were arrested at an immigration point in Laredo, Texas when some marijuana was found in his possession in December 1965. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison but the Supreme Court later overturned this conviction. Leary's trouble with the police was far from over, however. Once more he was arrested on marijuana charges in California, his then place of residence and he was sentenced to ten years in a minimum-security prison in Obispo prison. Added to his other 10-year sentence in Laredo he faced some possible 20 years behind bars.
Escape
An interesting twist of fate, which wasn't wholly unengineered by Leary, changed all this however when he, considered a model prisoner, scaled the prison's 12-foot fence and escaped. After he escaped he fled to Algiers on a false passport with his wife Rosemary Woodruff and joined up with an exiled Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver. While he was in exile he became more aware of politics and wrote a letter to the media saying that he would keep his commitment to "stay high and wage the revolutionary war". Because of proclamations such as this, Richard Nixon called Leary the most dangerous man on earth. The revolution though came to an end for Leary when CIA agents recaptured him in January 1973. After another 2 years in prison he was put on parole and faded into obscurity.
Career Change
In the 1970s Leary discovered another new mind expanding experience that was legal and very profitable: Computers. As he said in 1986, "People need some way to activate, boot up and change the discs in their minds." "LSD may not be necessary now". He wrote 6 programs and became a consultant to many software companies. One of these programs, Mind Mirror sold more than 30,000 copies and in the 1990s Leary became one the most active advocates of the virtual reality cause, a technological development that the Wall Street Journal referred to as electronic LSD.
Later life and death
Leary led a good second life as a media star living in Los Angeles's Benedict Canyon. He has appeared in ads for jeans, on MTV in music videos and had a film company option his fifth biography, "Flashback". However Leary's criminal days were not over and he was caught smoking a tobacco cigarette in a non-smoking airport. Sadly, the man who brought us LSD (or at least made it more famous) died in 1996 due to cancer.
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