My Meetings with Timothy Leary

ALBERT HOFMANN

It was on the day of the Warsaw Uprising, the first resistance against the Nazi forces, that Albert Hofmann, in the context of chemical research, came upon the substance LSD. But it was not until five years later, on Friday, April 16, 1943 (a day known by some as “Better Friday”) that he accidently absorbed this substance into his body and experienced “a not unpleasant reaction.” The following Monday, April 19, Dr. Hofmann took what he thought to be a very small dose of LSD (250 millionths of a gram), took his famous bicycle ride, and began the modern psychedelic era.

For twenty years LSD spread through the international neuropsychiatric research community, prompting thousands of studies. By 1963 its use began to escalate in artistic, mystic, and countercultural movements, much to the chagrin of the Swiss establishment. Dr. Hofmann is the retired director of research for the Department of Natural Products at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland. He has been a fellow of the World Academy of Science, and a member of the Nobel Prize Committee, the International Society of Plant Research, and the American Society of Pharmacognosy. He is the author of several books: The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens and Plants of the Gods with Richard Schultes, The Road to Eleusis with R. Gordon Wasson, Carl Ruck, and Danny Staples, LSD My Problem Child, and Insight/Outlook.

Timothy Leary, after he managed to escape from the California prison in San Luis Obispo in September 1970, came to Switzerland and petitioned for political asylum. He lived with his wife Rosemary in the resort town of Villars-sur-Ollon in western Switzerland.

Through the intermediary of Dr. Leary’s lawyer, Dr. Mastronardi, contact was established between us. On September 3, 1971, I met Dr. Leary in the railway station snack bar in Lausanne. The greeting was cordial, a symbol of our fateful relationship through LSD. Leary was medium-sized, slender, resiliently active, with bright, laughing eyes and a brown face surrounded by slightly curly hair mixed with gray. This gave him the look of a tennis champion rather than of a former Harvard lecturer. We traveled by automobile to Buchillons, where in the arbor of the restaurant A la Grande Foret, over a meal of fish and a glass of white wine, the dialogue between the father and the apostle of LSD finally began.

I voiced my regret that the investigations with LSD and psilocybin, which had begun promisingly, had degenerated to such an extent that their continuance in an academic milieu became impossible. My most serious remonstrance to Leary, however, concerned the propagation of LSD use among juveniles. Leary did not attempt to refute my opinions about the particulate dangers of LSD for youth. He maintained, however, that I was unjustified in reproaching him for the seduction of immature persons to drug consumption, because teenagers in the United States, with regard to information and life experience, were comparable to adult Europeans. Maturity, with satiation and intellectual stagnation, would be reached very early in the United States. For that reason he deemed the LSD experience significant, useful, and enriching, even for people still very young in years.

In this conversation I further objected to the great publicity that Leary sought for his LSD and psilocybin investigations, since he had invited reporters from daily newspapers and magazines to his experiments and had mobilized radio and television. Emphasis was thereby placed on publicity rather than on objective information. Leary defended his publicity program because he felt it had been his fateful historic role to make LSD known worldwide. The overwhelmingly positive effects of such dissemination, above all among America’s younger generation, would make any trifling injuries or regrettable accidents as a result of improper use of LSD unimportant in comparison, a small price to pay.

Timothy Leary and Albert Hofmann

During this conversation I ascertained that one did Leary an injustice by indiscriminately describing him as a drug apostle. He made a sharp distinction between psychedelic drugs—LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, hashish—of whose salutary effects he was persuaded, and the addicting narcotics morphine, heroin, etc., against whose use he repeatedly cautioned.

My impression of Dr. Leary in this personal meeting was that of a charming personage, convinced of his mission, who defended his opinions with humor yet uncompromisingly; a man who truly soared high in the clouds pervaded by beliefs in the wondrous effects of psychedelic drugs and the optimism resulting therefrom, and thus a man who tended to underrate or completely overlook practical difficulties, unpleasant facts, and dangers. Leary also showed carelessness regarding charges and dangers that concerned his own person, as his further path in life emphatically showed.

During his Swiss sojourn, I met Leary by chance once more, in February 1972 in Basel, on the occasion of a visit by Michael Horowitz, curator of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, a library specializing in drug literature. We traveled to my house in the county near Burg where we resumed our conversation of the previous September. Leary appeared fidgety and detached, probably owing to a momentary indisposition, so that our discussions were less productive this time. He left Switzerland at the end of the year, having separated from his wife, Rosemary, and now accompanied by his new friend Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

Sixteen years later we saw each other again. It was in the fall of 1988 during a lecture tour in California that I did in connection with the founding of the Albert Hofmann Foundation. We met at a party at John Lilly’s house in Malibu on October 1 and saw each other again the next day at a reception for the Foundation at the elegant St. John’s Club in Los Angeles. Our reunion was again very cordial. We agreed that the history of this psycho-pharmacopoeia par excellence has only begun, and that its essential meaning for the evolution of human consciousness will appear in the spiritual Age of Aquarius.

Our next and final meeting took place in Hamburg, Germany, when Tim and I were invited to appear on a talk show in connection with the fifty-year anniversary of the discovery of LSD. It was broadcast on July 16, 1993, as part of a series called “Premiere.” We were interviewed for forty minutes by a young woman, sometimes separately and sometimes together. The questions were for the most part the usual ones. What was unusual was the remarkably strong interest of the young lady in a statement Tim made long ago in Playboy that LSD is the most potent aphrodisiac humanity has ever discovered—a woman could have more than a hundred orgasms in a single LSD love session. She wanted to know if it was true, if Tim had witnessed it himself. She asked me about it too. Tim skillfully dodged the question and said that he was obviously expected to talk about sex and LSD in a Playboy interview. This he had done and exaggerated his statement for the fun of it. He often talked nonsense in his life for the fun of it and would continue to do so, he explained to the visibly disappointed interviewer. It was the sovereign, self-mocking Tim who spoke these words.

In the evening of that day, we were invited to a party at the home of mutual friends in Hamburg. Tim was the center of the merry company. He was lively and in high spirits and made everybody laugh with the stories he told. It was past midnight when we embraced and said good-bye. That was my last meeting with Tim.

(translated by Nina Graboi and Jonathan Ott)