Bibliofreakblog

The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin

I had a few problems with what was otherwise and interesting, edifying read.  

Problem #1: The title and subtitle.  If you can’t see from the picture, it reads, “How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.”  For the most part, this book focuses on Tim Leary and a bit on Ram Dass.  If you want to get pedantic, Huston Smith was teaching at MIT.  Beyond taking some psilocybin pills (psilocybin being the active ingredients in “magic mushrooms”), and helping interpret what people hallucinated in terms of religion, which was his field.  But it seemed to be he was barely a player.

And Andrew Weil!  As an undergrad, he got Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, then Richard Alpert, professor’s in Harvard’s Social Psychology department kicked out.  He went on to advocate alternative medicine and he took plenty of hallucinogens himself, but part of the original “club”?  Hardly.

Also, it seemed to me that Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey both did as much or more to promote the use of psychedelics (even if they might not have been calling them that, as the term was coined by Alpert) as Timothy Leary.  Sure, they flitted in and out of the book, but I wish Lattin had delved into that more.

Problem #2: While I appreciated the fact that Don Lattin’s voice was neutral throughout the book, I felt that he didn’t really address the reasons why LSD might be bad.  He seemed to say that the only reason that it was banned was because it freaked out the conservatives and was a hallmark of counterculture.  Now, for one, Lattin provides no statistics on how many people took LSD in the ’60’s.  But the other thing, and here I am probably a product of my generation, having undergone D.A.R.E. and all, but I’m all like, Acid? That shit stays in your spine for 30 years.  

He does note on more than one occasion what utter shambles Tim Leary’s life seems to be in.  After spending years and years dropping acid at least once a week, when he goes to jail the withdrawal has terrible effects on his state of mind, as he becomes, among other things, increasingly paranoid.

But don’t let these hang ups of mine fool you.  I found this to be a fascinating tale.  Leary and Alpert really wanted to help people through the use of psychedelic drugs.  They worked in the psych department, remember.  They tested hallucinogens not only on graduate students, but alcoholics and convicts as well, hoping that the experience really would “expand their minds” and bring them closure.  They had massive parties, after leaving Harvard, yes, but then they would all sit around (and by all I mean Leary, Alpert, and various other people), and discuss their trips for the rest of the week.  

They believed it was possible to have an actual religious experience through the use of psychedelics.  Of course, how could you ever prove that?

Yo FTC!  I got this ARC as part of TLC book tours.  For more info, check out their Harvard Psychedelic Club page.

Buy The Harvard Psychedelic Club on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Spiritual but Not Religious by Robert C Fuller
After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s by Robert Wuthnow
The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature by William James
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemical by Huston Smith
Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography by Huston Smith
The Natural Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to the Drug Problem By Andrew Weil
Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties by Ram Dass
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, Karma-Glin-Pa Bar Do Thos Grol, and Timothy Leary
Flashbacks by Timothy Leary
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History b Terence McKenna
This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim
Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead by Peter Conners

Other works by Don Lattin:

Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today
Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge