The Harvard Psilocybin Project 1960-1962
Summer, 1960
Timothy Leary takes visionary mushrooms, known to the Aztecs as Teonandcatl, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He returns to Harvard University and together with fellow faculty members Frank Barron and Richard Alpert and several graduate students, initiates research projects with psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient of the mushroom, supplied by Sandoz Phar- maceuticals.
Fall, 1960
Aldous Huxley then visiting lecturer at MIT, and Huston Smith, professor of religion at MIT, become involved with the project as consultants and advisors. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky visit, take psilocybin and become allies and supporters of the project. They take Leary to turn on Beatnik novelist Jack Kerouac and adventurer Neal Cassady Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon and other books, visits Leary and takes psilocybin. He later dismisses the experience as “ersatz mysticism.”
Spring, 1961
Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner each have their first experiences with psilocybin. Studies are conducted giving psilocybin to artists and writers, as well as graduate students and “normal” people (not undergraduates); collecting written accounts and questionnaire responses. First published formulation of the “set and setting” hypothesis, according to which the content of a psychedelic experience is a function of the internal set or intention and the external context or environment.
Leary initiates a research project at Concord State Prison, designed to bring about insight and behavior change in convicts, using psilocybin. Graduate students participating and assisting with this project include Ralph Metzner, Gunther Weil and Ralph Schwitzgebel. Madison Presnell, MD, prison psychiatrist, provides medical supervision.
Fall, 1961
William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and other books, visits Leary and takes psilocybin. He and Leary present on a panel at the American Psychiatric Association convention in Boston. Burroughs is cynically dismissive of the project’s aim.
Walter Houston Clark, Professor of the Psychology of Religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary joins the project as an enthusiastic sup- porter and advisor.
Professor David McClelland, Director of the Center for Research in per- sonality where the psilocybin project is housed (and Leary and Alpert’s boss) circulates a memo questioning the scientific value of the research, and the societal impact of psychedelic drugs in places like India. Michael Hollingshead, English freelance researcher and writer, arrives at Tim’s house on Grant Avenue. He provides Leary his first LSD session.
November, 1961
Important turning point session at Alpert’s house in Cambridge, around themes of good and evil, ethics and spiritual leadership. Participants include, besides Leary and Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Michael Kahn, George Litwin and his wife, and Gunther Weil; also, musician Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo.
Spring, 1962
Frederick Swain, American Vedantist monk, arrives to visit the Harvard group; introduces group to his Indian guru Gayatri Devi, of the Bengali lineage of Ramakrishna, who headed Vedanta ashrams on the East and West coasts. Gayatri Devi and Rabbi Zalman Schachter experience psilo- cybin and become supportive advisors to the project.
At a faculty meeting at the Center for Personality Research, the psilocy- bin project, and Leary and Alpert personally are vigorously criticized on both scientific and ethical grounds. Social Psychology professor Herbert Kelman is one of the chief critics, as is experimental psychologist Brendan Maher.
Birth of a Psychedelic Culture
Control of the supply of psilocybin is removed from Tim Leary and put in hands of psychiatrist Dr. Dana Farnsworth, head of the Harvard University Counseling Center. Leary and Alpert are forbidden to give psilocybin to undergraduate students. The Concord Prison Project is completed; other work with psilocybin comes to an end. The results of that and other studies are written up and published in the psychological and psychiatric journals.
Professor David McClelland, Chair of the Center for Personality Research, tells graduate students on the project, including Metzner, Litwin and Weil, that they will not be able to do their PhD thesis on research with psilo- cybin. Metzner chooses to work under supervision of Walter Mischel on a study in child development, asking what are the factors influencing the capacity of a child to learn to delay gratification. He obtains his PhD in the spring of 1962.
April, 1962 – The last Harvard-sponsored psilocybin study known as the “Good Friday” study in “experimental mysticism,” takes place during an Easter service conducted by renowned preacher Howard Thurman, in Marsh chapel in Boston. Designed and conducted by Walter Pahnke, doctor of medicine and divinity the study is a double blind placebo controlled examination of psilocybin in the induction of mystical expe- riences in divinity students.