LSD: Let’s Save Democracy?
AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP SLATER
BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: This conversation might be something of a prologue to a book on Timothy Leary. Although you never knew him, there are some interesting parallels between your life and his. First of all, you worked on an LSD research project at Harvard seven years before Tim arrived there. Then, after you attained some prominence in the academic world, you dropped out of an academic career at a prestigious university. You’ve written about contemporary culture in a book that helped to define the humanistic movement of the sixties and seventies and that became a bestseller, Pursuit of Loneliness. You’ve also written The Wayward Gate, which discusses humans’ failure to perceive what does not fall within their worldview; you’ve written about Wealth Addiction; and you’ve written about the state of American democracy in A Dream Deferred. You are a living example of the best that the social movement of the sixties offered. First let’s talk about your early work at Harvard with LSD that was sponsored by the CIA.
PS: OK. I had done a little research at the hospital, which is now called Mass Mental Health Center. It was then the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. I heard that they were getting funds from a foundation to study a drug that nobody had heard of at that time. The drug was something that would make you psychotic for a brief period of a day; you would learn what kind of psychotic you would be if you became psychotic. This wasn’t necessarily the official view of the drug, but it was what everybody talked about—everybody who was involved in the project and who later took the drug. It was the scuttlebutt around the hospital. There was a group that met every day up in the occupational therapy department which consisted of the OT director, the recreational director, a nurse, a psychiatrist, an x-ray technician, a social worker, and various other people from time to time. We hung out together and occasionally went out for drinks and so forth. So a lot of those people were interested, as well as a couple of Harvard graduate student researchers like myself. When I heard about this drug it sounded fascinating so I wanted to be on the project. Those who were on the project were going to be the first subjects so we would know what the hell we were dealing with. I was number four in the series. It was a very clinical orientation: two people following you around with clipboards taking down everything you said, making observations about you. We started at eight o’clock in the morning. At eleven you had an intake interview with the admitting psychiatrist of the hospital, who then wrote a diagnosis; later on you had a therapeutic interview. We did various studies as time went on. I did a study, for example, on the differences between people who took it alone and people who took it in groups of three or four, and found, as you might expect, that the people who took it in groups had a lot better time. They were diagnosed either manic or schizoaffective, whereas people who took it alone tended to be diagnosed as depressive or schizoid or something else.
RF: How did you recruit your subjects?
PS: They volunteered. They were all volunteers.
RF: Were they told that they were going to be given something that would induce a temporary psychosis?
PS: Well, my memory is a little bit hazy on that. But they knew it was going to affect them mentally in some way.
RF: One of the popular misconceptions is that Leary was fired from Harvard for giving LSD to undergraduate students and of course that’s not true. Not only did he never do LSD research at Harvard—he worked with psilocybin—but he never involved undergraduates in the study. However, undergraduates were involved in your studies.
PS: Out of 150 subjects that we had, I would say 90 of them were undergraduates. I did a study of people in groups of four as part of my ongoing quantitative research at that time, and I think there were six or eight groups. I’m sure there were at least 32, probably 40. They were all undergraduates.
RF: Did this research instigate any kind of community from having shared this extraordinary experience together?
PS: It varied with everybody. A lot of these people we never saw again. They came, they got their twenty-five bucks or whatever, and went home. I think the people in the hospital who were closer to the project developed a little psychedelic group as it were. And then there were individual people who were very taken with it. One of our subjects was Ralph Blum. I don’t know if you know of him.
RF: Ralph Blum who wrote The Book of Runes?
PS: The Book of Runes, yeah, that’s Ralph. He was one of our more verbal subjects. And I know there was another one who became a psychiatrist later on, but I don’t think he had a good experience. I’m sure there were other people who became interested and were affected by the experience; certainly we were. We did things like take it out on our own, sneak little bits out.
RF: This is 1952—
PS: ’52, ’53.
RF: This was before Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, before Wasson had discovered the sacred mushroom in Mexico.
PS: You know, it’s interesting, because The Doors of Perception was published in ’54 but people knew about it then. Hyde knew about it, because I know he quoted it. Robert Hyde was the head of the project. Hyde, as you know, was the first person to take LSD in the United States, and he was my teacher. I initially became involved through taking a graduate course at the hospital with him. It was a fascinating course in psychopathology. He was a great teacher and had a brilliant, really free-ranging mind that could go all over from psychology to cultural-historical things. I learned more from him than from anybody else at Harvard. He just could make connections.
RF: Is he still alive?
PS: I would be very surprised if he was still alive. He was probably in his fifties then, forty years ago. So he’d be very, very old. He’s been retired for—the last time I asked anybody about him, he’d been retired already for five or ten years, so he may even be older than I remember. But he liked to try different things. I remember one time we were celebrating something or other. We had a little party up at this bar around the corner, and we spiked the punch with LSD and people realized afterward that they had had enormous quantities of LSD and an enormous quantity of alcohol. We realized then that there was kind of a negative relationship between the two, that they tended to cancel each other out.
RF: It is remarkable that there you were in the early 1950s giving LSD to Harvard undergraduates and nothing resulted from that in terms of social movement, controversy, or visionary breakthroughs. Tim Leary comes along a few years later and there’s an uproar and a movement beginning to take form. You were still there at Harvard. Was there a difference in Harvard between 1952 and 1958 or ’59?
PS: I think he created the culture. Not single-handedly, but he was caught up in it in a different way. Our little group went way beyond the psychotomimetic definition of the drug, and we had a lot of different experiences with it, and were bonded by it very much. People who had it felt closer to each other because of it. But I don’t think we gave it any real spiritual significance.
RF: Was “spiritual significance” even remotely in the vocabulary in the early 1950s in Cambridge?
PS: No, not really. Because everything was taking place in this completely clinical setting. I spent a couple of hours of my first trip on the disturbed ward, which sounds weird and it was, but I hung out there all the time anyway. I was doing research there and so on. I felt very comfortable, and I knew all the patients and everything. But that’s the kind of environment we were in. It was very clinical.
RF: What about sexuality? Did that change in your subjects?
PS: I don’t think so. There was always sexual content in people’s verbalizations, but . . .
RF: I’m surprised news of this “study” didn’t spread throughout the campus.
PS: This one course was the only real connection to Harvard, other than the med school and so forth. There wasn’t that big a connection between Harvard and the hospital at that time. So it wasn’t that surprising. In Leary’s department, a few years later, it was different, he was in a completely different part of the university. But you know how colleges and universities are. People can be working three doors down from each other on the same problem and not know it, because everybody is on their own little ego trip. It’s just the nature of the beast.
RF: You were allowed to take the LSD out of the clinic?
PS: Well, we managed—it was a little bit loose. The stuff was locked in a safe. I don’t remember how or under what circumstances I got hold of what I did get hold of. I know we did a tolerance test once, so I was taking a little bit every day and then a little bit more and a little bit more and then stopping and then taking a full hit and then waiting and taking another hit to see if you’d develop a tolerance to it. So I had access to some. I don’t know whether I got extra or what I did. I think that was the only time that I actually had some to carry around, but I know Hyde did. He was suspected of tripping more than once, but then he was a pretty out-there guy anyway.
RF: Did you know at the time that this work was funded by the CIA?
PS: We didn’t know. We did two studies. The first one was sponsored by the Geschickter Foundation—that should have been a tip-off—and the second was funded by the Society for the Study of Human Ecology. I never met any of the Geschickter Foundation people, but I remember meeting some of the Human Ecology people. They were a very strange group.
RF: Was Herbert Kelman involved with you guys?
PS: No, not at that time I don’t think. He was around, but I don’t think he was involved in LSD at all. Why?
RF: Because he reportedly had something to do with Leary’s firing and he was involved with the Human Ecology Fund.
PS: Really. Could be. Huh, that’s interesting. That was probably later. You know, I got my Ph.D. in ’55, so I wasn’t involved in any of that then. I was involved in another project in another hospital.
RF: Did your LSD experiences in any sense affect the perspective you then developed in your career as writer and teacher?
PS: It’s hard to say, because there was a lot going on in my life, and that was a fairly circumscribed event. I was married and had three kids, and then shortly thereafter I was divorced and paying alimony and I was working three jobs. I was too busy surviving to have time to really process my life or think about anything. It was really a very hard period for me, for six years after I got my degree. And of course I also was writing my dissertation during part of that too. The LSD experiences were all pushed aside. I think the impact it had was latent. I mean there were always certain kinds of music that evoked the experience, and especially Debussy and Ravel, which I’m still very attached to. And I remember one time there was a group of us, all of whom had had LSD at one time or another, and we were sitting around my living room listening to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé suite, and we all started having recollections and visions or memories of visions. But I think what happened was that after my life calmed down a little bit in the early sixties, I began to get interested again, and also I think personally, psychologically, I began to explore more.
RF: Using psychedelics?
PS: No, not at that time. It meant going to groups, encounter groups and things like that; exploring inner space a lot more. Then in the later sixties I got into doing a lot of pot and so forth, and became interested in the whole thing again. So it definitely had an influence, but a delayed reaction.
RF: Did you ever interact with Tim at Harvard?
PS: I was aware of him. The irony is that there were several of us who were very interested in his earlier quantitative research on interpersonal dynamics, which of course he was totally uninterested in after psychedelics. But we were doing a lot of quantitative stuff with computers, all this factor analysis and everything. We were very interested and very excited that he was coming. Then of course he came and immediately got into the psychedelic stuff, and no longer cared about it. I knew Dick Alpert better. Our fathers were both involved with the New Haven Railroad. His father was president and my father was chairman of the board. With Leary and I there was a definite wave pattern that wherever one was, the other wasn’t. We were completely out of phase. When I was interested he wasn’t and when he was interested I wasn’t, and when I was interested again he wasn’t again.
RF: What was your reaction when you saw this psychedelic movement start to congeal out of Harvard in the early sixties?
PS: Well, I could understand it. It made sense to me. I could see it happening. I also knew that he was headed for trouble. That was clear. Rumors flying around.
RF: What do you mean “trouble”? There’s so many ways to look at the trouble Tim got in. Trouble with the administration because he was challenging authoritarian systems? Trouble with some of his colleagues who felt he was profaning a sacred substance? What trouble do you mean?
PS: I meant it in the more mundane sense of trouble with the administration and even more with fellow faculty I think.
RF: There was a lot of jealousy because he was such a popular professor and had this really exciting line of research going and all the graduate students were flocking toward him. . . .
PS: I went through that at Brandeis toward the end. When I was department chair at Brandeis in the Sociology Department, I was always having to protect somebody for doing something like that. Whether they were teaching a course in yoga or Zen or they were doing a course in gender, they were doing things that were radical and were breaking academic traditions in one way or another. It was always clear to me what upset academics the most. One was popularity—being popular. They always said to us either we were seducing the students—not literally but emotionally—or being seduced by them. If we’re popular we must be lowering academic standards, because learning isn’t supposed to be fun. The other thing is, anything emotional or anything below the brain, anything that might involve touching, anything that involved feeling, anything that involved spiritual things, was very, very frightening to academics. Of course Leary was doing all of it. And that was the fifties. We were doing it in the late sixties and people were still getting all in a tizzy over it. So it wasn’t hard to imagine, looking back, how intense the reaction was to Leary in the very early sixties.
RF: Do you think he was careless or irresponsible in the way he conducted himself? Or do you think that was an important and courageous, daring move on his part, the way he pushed the limits?
PS: It’s hard to say, because I wasn’t intimately involved in it, but at the time I thought, he’s not protecting himself at all. I could see he was going to get clobbered. You can get away with rubbing academics’ noses in emotion and spirituality and your popularity and everything else, but you don’t want to give them an opening. You can get away with it if you can play by their rules at least on the surface and he didn’t appear to do that. I’m not saying that that necessarily was a bad thing for him. I’m just saying that I could see that event coming.
RF: So now we have this drug war and other evidences of twenty, thirty years of extreme reactionary repression to what was ignited there. Do you think if Tim were more circumspect, more careful, that we could have avoided this?
PS: I don’t think so. Yes, he did bring a lot of that about but I think if he hadn’t done it somebody else would have. The fifties were so repressive in every way, and it was such an awful, stupid, dishonest period in history, where everyone was pretending a kind of normality which didn’t exist, and there was just a lid on everything, and a tremendous lid on sexuality particularly, and really on any kind of experience that was other than to make money and support your family; and for women, to be domestic and support your husband. And to suddenly open all that up and show we’ve got a new world opening up here—I don’t think there’s anything Leary could have done differently that would have made a difference. There was just too much pressure behind the opening.
RF: That pressure wasn’t built up enough when you were doing your early experiments?
PS: Well it had, but Leary provided meaning. We were still operating in a kind of academic, scientific, psychological framework. It was a private thing and we didn’t translate it into anything else. Of course the sixties came along and there was a general shift in attitude, which was huge. A lot of other things opened up as well. I think, when you consider all the other things that were going on then, you certainly can’t either blame or credit Leary for all of the sixties. I just feel a kind of inevitability about what happened, that all of that had to happen. He was the guy that comes along with a pretty big ego, puts himself at the center of it, and noises it about. There’s always somebody like that, and if it hadn’t been Tim it would have been somebody else.
RF: When I was in fifth grade, in ’67, my teacher told me that LSD stood for Let’s Save Democracy. Of course that went right over my eleven-year-old head, but in the last few years I finally got it. If we look at the political spectrum from authoritarianism to democracy, authoritarianism preys on an unaware populous and democracy requires a self-aware, self-determined populous. Here’s LSD, which can activate the awareness of the divinity within—anathema to authoritarianism. Tim realized this and hit the streets with his findings.
PS: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I would add that to what I said, that it was facilitating the democratic process for him to do that, even though it cost him dearly and generated a lot of reaction and backlash. But it always does. You would expect it, no matter who did it or how they did it or what happened. And you can say, “Oh well, he made it worse than it would have been.” I don’t know. I’ve always said that authoritarianism works within the personality too, and when the ego is authoritarian, it prevents a lot of stuff from getting to the brain. It’s like the ego is a repressive dictator often, and acts just like a despot. First of all there’s no distinction between the despot and the nation, there’s no distinction between the ego and the personality. What’s good for me is good for the country. What’s good for the ego is good for the organism. Of course it isn’t true, and messages coming from the periphery are ignored, the messenger is shot. All these things are very much equivalent. So LSD was a very strong force in the democratization of the organism, let’s say, and that reflects itself outside as well, because you can’t really separate them. You’ve got one, you’ve got the other.
RF: Do you think the authorities were aware of that, and that was the reason that they immediately repressed it? I’ve had a hunch, I don’t know if it’s true or this is my own paranoid conspiracy theory, that the government, through the CIA’s research of LSD, became aware of its effects on personality very early on, and maybe I’m attributing too much intelligence to the powers that be—
PS: I think so.
RF: But they could have become aware that a high dose of LSD in the right circumstance brings you into contact not only with your deep self but with other dimensions of reality that are beyond the scope of the ruling paradigm—extraterrestrial intelligences, a collective mind, intelligent unity of life, living God, things like that they don’t understand and can’t control and don’t want free and available. Attempted repression backfired. While Harvard thought they were getting rid of Leary, they actually gave his career the best boost it could have gotten.
PS: Yeah, well that’s usually the case. But I don’t think they thought that deeply about it. I think they thought only that this is interfering with the channeling of youth into the proper tracks, and they’re all going out and doing something different from what they’re supposed to be doing. That fear doesn’t need an intellectual content. It’s the same with academics when somebody’s really popular. You know, there’s something going on here that’s threatening. I don’t like it. And I can think up twenty different reasons why it’s bad, because I’m an academic and that’s what I do is think up reasons. And I think with the government it was the same kind of thing. It was just a fear. It’s drugs and it’s bad and it’s corrupting youth. And I don’t think they thought beyond that into anything as sophisticated as what you’re saying.
RF: Do you think that the sixties worked? I mean there was a movement, a humanitarian and environmental movement away from consumerism, away from militarism, a reawakening of cosmic and ecological concerns that are necessary for our survival. Do you think it worked to help humanity evolve?
PS: Oh, absolutely. There are tremendous changes that took place in the sixties. In the first place, the sexual revolution; that was a tremendous change. In the fifties, if you weren’t in New York City or some equivalent environment, you couldn’t even rent an apartment and live with somebody unless you faked it in some way, really, until the sixties. And now the percentage of people living together, I think it’s higher than the percentage of people who are married up to a certain age, or in a certain age group. And of course what could be shown in the movies or on TV and what can be said, even in the newspapers. The general idea was communicated in the fifties that women weren’t interested in sex, and that’s of course the old authoritarian tradition, the repression of female sexuality, because nobody ever represses male sexuality very much. That’s pretty much over. So that is, I think, one of the most important changes that happened in the last several thousand years. And along with it go a lot of other things. The attitude toward war changed completely. There’s a totally different attitude toward war now. People used to think of war as like a tornado, like an act of God almost, and now people think it shouldn’t happen. If somebody’s fighting somewhere, we should do something to stop it. That’s a totally new idea. It didn’t exist before.
RF: At the same time we have bigger defense budgets than ever before.
PS: Yeah, sure, but there’s always a huge lag in these things.
RF: Materialism?
PS: It’s the sort of thing that I’m writing about in this book. There’s really two things happening at once. The old systems, when they decay, become more extreme, always. They become exaggerated. They become more monolithic. And that undoes them eventually, because it’s like fascism was the purist form of authoritarianism. The dictator has no obligation to anybody, that is, obligation that everybody understands. It’s not like the king who has certain obligations to nobles, certain obligations to the populace, and is bound around with traditions of various kinds. A dictator has none of that. It’s pure authoritarianism. And it’s the beginning of the end. It’s like they’re falling like flies, because the only places that they can exist are really backward places. Internationalism has grown enormously. I think it’s very hard, if you weren’t there, to recall how unbelievably naive, insular, conventional, and accepting of authority the fifties were. If the government said it, it had to be true. Nobody thinks that now.
Even television: if you watch what everybody watches, you’ll see a tremendous change. Compare Seinfeld with Father Knows Best, for example. That’s like night and day, what’s dealt with, what’s talked about, what’s understood. It’s understood that Elaine wants to get laid, and it’s understood that people fart and masturbate, and all this stuff is talked about openly. That’s a tremendous change.
RF: But at the same time we’ve seen growth of the one world, new world order, throughout the world, even well into China. We’ve lost ground since the sixties in the environmental movement.
PS: No, no, no. We have not lost ground. I mean you have to distinguish in all these things—it’s like people who think crime has gotten worse or there’s more child molesting than there used to be. You have to distinguish between what’s happening and what’s being made known. People are incredibly environmentally aware now, and they’re aware of what’s happening. Corporations are not getting away with nearly what they used to get away with. Of course there are more ways of polluting everything and so on than there used to be, but there’s more battles over it. Even with all the control of the media that corporations have, they can’t ignore that issue, because they know that a huge majority of the population is environmentally concerned, ecologically concerned, and that’s a huge change. The sixties was like a handful of people making a row. But there’s another 90 percent of the population that doesn’t buy it. I was in Paris in 1968 during the riots, and I remember I had this feeling that everybody’s out there in the streets, that it was just this tremendous movement. Then, one Sunday, there was a march by the right and what an eye-opener all of a sudden. There were five times as many people in the streets, all dressed in suits and stuff. It made me realize that the left was not the majority. The sixties was really, if you looked at polls and things like that, a very small number of people.
RF: Nixon’s silent majority.
PS: Well, it existed then. Today it’s different. It’s quite different. I mean there’s many, many more people, there’s a hundred times as many people who are antiwar, who are ecologically concerned, who are into spiritual pursuits, who are antimaterial. But it’s not news anymore. Another major change is organic food. Can you imagine, in the sixties, if they’d made that attempt to redefine the meaning of organic? Nobody would have opposed that. They wouldn’t have gotten a flutter. Ten people would have complained and they would have ignored it. And alternative medicine; it’s huge now. It’s a huge thing. All these things come out of the sixties, and they’re permanent. Nobody’s going back. But I will predict that magazines and TV will come out within the next two years with something saying the move is back to traditional medicine. I mean they just do that regularly. It’s back to the tradition. Because the media themselves are very conservative, and also, they want this kind of novelty pendulum thing going all the time. So they have to go back and forth, they have to have movement without threat is what the media—that’s what advertisers want: movement without threat. Novelty without change. Every two years feminism is dead. Every two years. Its as regular as clockwork. Because they’re thinking of feminism as bra burning or some other little superficial thing that symbolized it for them, whereas with the real issues, like battered women’s shelters and day-care centers, there are huge gains over ten, twenty years ago. So that’s the way things tend to get defined. And the media also is into cynicism, because it makes them look intelligent.
There’s an interesting book by a guy named Alfie Kohn called The Brighter Side of Human Nature, where he talks about this: about the confusion of cynicism with intelligence and how that works. For example, the idea that psychological differences between men and women are biological, and/or that men are inherently biologically aggressive and violent and so on, all this stuff. There are studies and magazine articles about stuff like this all the time, and scientists are in total disagreement. The only stuff that ever gets in the magazines, as Kohn points out, is the dark stuff, the negative stuff, the “it’s all biological, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just a given.” You know, “men are natural-born killers,” and blah, blah, blah. So it’s not optimism. It’s just looking at the real data as opposed to the media data, which is so skewed.
RF: I agree the media distracts people from deeper issues; for example today attention is on Monica Lewinsky’s dress instead of on the U.S. reaction to international pressure on them to lower fossil fuel consumption.
PS: Yeah. Or the U.S. opposition to the World Court. I love that one. It’s so funny. They were the ones that pushed for it in the first place and then all of a sudden they’re like, “God, they might use it on us!”
RF: I don’t mean to harp on what might seem to be a cynical attitude compared to yours, but we just lived through the decade of the 1980s, twelve years of Reagan and Bush in one of the most corrupt decades of American history. I haven’t read Kohn yet but I see that Americans are unwilling or unable to see just how corrupt and dark the American political scene is. I, for one, believe the findings that the military-industrial complex has been involved in the narcotics trade since early in the Vietnam War, as reported by Alfred McCoy in his Yale dissertation that became The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. It’s been reported in many other places too. I’m convinced that military intelligence was involved in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Most people suspect a conspiracy in these murders. The CIA’s beginning is clearly traced to Nazi intelligence joining with the U.S. military just after World War Two, as Martin Lee describes in his fine expose, The Beast Reawakens. The Iran Contra hearings of the 1980s did little to motivate the American people to clean up the obvious and profound corruption of the democratic process. The United States has been in wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Iran, Panama, and other places. There is some public outcry, but these senseless wars continue. Saddam Hussein was put in power by the United States military; so was Noriega. And the most recent “monster,” Bin Laden, was a U.S. hero when Russia invaded Afghanistan. You told me the United States built those terrorist camps that it just bombed. People are aware of all this stuff but it goes on. Global warming is something everyone is concerned with, but doing anything about it lags far behind the GNP in importance. The drug war rages—half a million people in jail just for pot. It is utterly futile, gives jobs mainly to dope dealers, the police force, and the prison industry, while doing nothing to reduce drug abuse, which is a relatively minor health problem—unless you include alcohol and cigarettes, which are foisted upon the American people in slick ad campaigns—but your career in national politics is over if you challenge the sense of the drug war and appear “soft on drugs.” There are so many absurdities in firm place in American politics it’s hard to see any progress at all.
PS: I think what you are reacting to is the fact that the world is in a major cultural transition—the kind of paradigm shift that takes place over decades, even centuries. And at those times things seem to be moving in opposite directions at the same time, and at accelerating speed. (I’m working on a book now that deals with this.) So, those who cling to the status quo feel the world is going to hell, and those who want fundamental change also feel the world is going to hell (i.e., backwards). It’s chaotic, but chaos is necessary for creation.
RF: Yes, and this brings us back to Tim, who titled his last book Chaos and Cyberculture. In it he explains that his efforts in the sixties were to induce chaos in an excessively ordered culture. Here again is a fundamental difference between an authoritarian culture (or personality) and a democratic one. The democratic society tolerates some apparent chaos in the world, having trust in a natural order, while the authoritarian seeks control.