The Harvard Crimson Story
AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW WEIL
BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: Dr. Weil, thanks for taking the time from your book tour to contribute to Tim’s Festschrift. What better place to reflect on those days than here, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur? My first question is: Is it fair to say that psychedelic drugs helped to transform you from an overweight, cigar smoking, Harvard overachiever into one of the world’s leading physicians—a bestselling author in the field of medicine?
AW: I was never really a cigar smoker. I used to hold them and didn’t inhale them, still I would get enough smoke in to get acute nicotine poisoning more often than not. I took mescaline for the first time in the fall of 1960, my first year at Harvard, and had no particular reaction. I took it again a few weeks later, had a very profound experience. I didn’t really know what to do with that, and so I think I stuffed it for a lot of my years at Harvard, and didn’t really come back to experimenting with psychedelics until I was doing an internship in San Francisco. And yes, I would say they were very instrumental in my personal transformation, especially around the time I was twenty-eight years old. They started me on a road of experimentation in a lot of areas in my life; that I think got me to where I am today.
RF: Do you think that’s why they are illegal?
AW: I think they are illegal because authorities sense their power to transform people and make them question a lot of the limiting beliefs that are prevalent in our society.
RF: That’s a bigger reason than their biological or psychological dangers?
AW: Their biological dangers are insignificant. Physically, they’re the safest of all the drugs that we know. The psychological dangers I think are real. I’ve certainly met people who are casualties of psychedelic use, and I think that’s a serious concern. But I think the official response to them is all out of proportion to the realities of their risks, so there’s got to be something else involved.
RF: Am I correct you’ve said before that the greatest drug problem in the country, probably in the Western world, is the drugs that are prescribed by the medical profession?
AW: No, I’d actually say that alcohol and tobacco, in terms of health hazards, are the greatest problems we’ve got; also I think there are a lot of drugs prescribed by the medical profession that cause a great deal of harm.
RF: Compared to psychedelic drugs, would you say that harm inflicted on our society from prescription medicines is greater or less than the psychedelic “problem”?
AW: That’s really not a fair comparison. I think it’s more appropriate to look at alcohol and tobacco—which are recreational drugs—than to look at prescription drugs. Of the psychoactive prescription drugs, I think the ones that are most thoughtlessly and widely prescribed are the benzodiazophines—valium and its relatives; they do a great deal of harm. They’re highly addictive, they interfere with memory and intellectual function, and they’re handed out like candy. That’s the most important category of physician-caused drug abuse.
RF: You were there at Harvard, and you had a role in Tim’s dismissal.
AW: I think my role was more instrumental in the case of Dick [Alpert]. Tim resigned on his own. One of the great misconceptions that’s been frozen in history is that Leary was fired from Harvard. He wasn’t. He left voluntarily. Richard Alpert was fired, and the investigative reporting that I did in the undergraduate newspaper certainly helped bring that about. That firing and the publicity about it and Leary was certainly the single factor that brought this whole phenomenon to the attention of American middle class culture. It was front-page news in the New York Times—the first time many Americans ever heard of these drugs. That was a major event in my life and in Alpert and Leary’s lives as well.
RF: What happened?
AW: The undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, printed a story. The university had wanted to get rid of Leary and Alpert, for a lot of reasons, and I think on some level they also really didn’t want to be there under the kinds of rigidity that the university imposed. The university newspaper saw a great opportunity for investigative reporting and made a deal with the administration that if they came up with information that would help them get rid of them, that the university would act on it and give The Crimson the exclusive news rights. That was the basis of what happened.
RF: The university approached you?
AW: No, The Crimson initiated this. We went to the university, and the university said, “Yes, we’d love it.” Because they felt they couldn’t act; they didn’t have grounds on which to dismiss them.
RF: You were the editor of The Crimson?
AW: I was an editor. I was on the editorial board. I wasn’t the editor-in-chief.
RF: You initiated the program to expose them. What did you think you were exposing? What was your feeling about their scene?
AW: I think there was a lot going on around them that was questionable. There was a lot of wild stuff going on in their circle, whether they were directly involved with it or not. And I think the presence of that at the university created a certain amount of tension. They were a group who behaved and acted in ways as if they had something that nobody else did, some kind of secret knowledge. Leary especially kept talking about the academic “game,” and that they were somehow outside of it, and that pressed buttons for a lot of people. So I think it was time for them to get out of the university; it would have happened in one way or another.
RF: Was the CIA involved?
AW: Not to my knowledge. When I first read books like Storming Heaven and Acid Dreams, most of that was news to me. I knew some general outlines of it, but I never knew any of the details.
RF: Well it’s clear and on the record that LSD was used by the CIA and at Harvard. The first published LSD research in this country was done at Harvard by Robert Hyde. This work was paid for by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front. How do you feel about the way that all came down?
AW: Fine. I think it was supposed to happen. You know, it was a key thing in my life, too. For one thing, I don’t think I would have gotten permission to do the marijuana studies that I did in my senior year of medical school unless I had done that. I got transcripts of the research committee that was debating whether to approve my research, and it was brought up that I was the person that had—I think the phrase was—“blown the whistle” on Alpert and Leary, and that influenced the committee to vote to allow me to do that. I also found myself a couple years after I left Harvard in a position that seemed to me very parallel to that of Alpert’s, where I became the focus of a lot of institutional paranoia and I saw that my life had gone in a kind of parallel way. At that point I made an effort to get in touch with both of them and discuss what had happened.
RF: You said psychedelics were already a part of the Harvard undergraduate scene. You took mescaline there.
AW: Yes, but not very much, it was minor. At least in my circle, it was pretty novel and unusual to be able to do that. I didn’t know any other people who independently had gotten hold of psychedelics when I was an undergraduate.
RF: So at the time you thought that you were doing everyone a favor by exposing the extracurricular stuff going on?
AW: Yes. One of the lessons I learned was how you advance in that world. A lot of my success at Harvard was due to that.
RF: It’s hard to imagine that the Harvard administration could be so naive to not see that their action would be counterproductive to their concerns. This was the turning point. The beginning of the prohibition. Psychedelic drugs started to become forbidden and available only to outlaws. I wonder if they had been introduced to society some other “legitimate” way what would have happened?
AW: I don’t think the university anticipated that at all. I don’t think they saw it coming.
I’ll tell you one my memories of Tim before I embarked on my venture with The Crimson. I met him first in the fall of 1960. I heard he was doing experiments with psilocybin and went in and told him I was interested. I wanted to take it. He said that they couldn’t use undergraduates in their experiments, but he encouraged me to go out and try to find it on my own. I remember him telling me that this was the greatest thing he had ever come across, and he thought that within a couple of years there would be regular seminars in the university where people would take these drugs once a week and the remaining sessions would be for analyzing what had happened to them. I don’t think he had any conception that this would cause antagonism or resistance. It was a really innocent belief he had, and I think that was the way he operated. He never imagined he would crystallize opposition.
RF: Even when he got arrested in Laredo, he thought he’d be protected under our freedom of religion. Instead he got a twenty-year sentence for less than an ounce of low-grade pot.
AW: Right. You asked about how else they could have been introduced. Well, they could have been introduced through doctors, through psychiatrists, through shamans or shaman equivalents, through academics, through the underground. Those were all possibilities.
RF: For most of the past twelve years I’ve worked in one fashion or another to try to relegitimize the drugs for either medical, psychiatric, or religious studies within the mainstream structures that exist, and that’s proved to be frustrating. As you were saying last night, these groups work on form and structure, and these drugs are destructuring. When I became interested in psychedelics I first thought of Leary’s escapades as a problem that had to be overcome. After being frustrated for several years, I began to appreciate what he did, and to me his exuberance was a tactic that was absolutely necessary to get past the establishment; to propagate the drugs through the artistic, mystical, subversive, outlaw underground.
AW: Right. There are two comments about Leary that I have heard repeatedly from Harvard people over the years; and others, I suppose, but especially from Harvard people. One is that he did a greater disservice to the cause of psychedelic research than anyone in history, and the other one was that the poor man had really fried his brain. Neither of those seems to me to be valid. I have seen Leary over the years and he always looked to me very physically and mentally healthy. It was just amazing to me that these Harvard people could go around saying he’d fried his brain. The other one, in terms of discrediting psychedelic research, I don’t know whether psychedelic research would ever have gotten going at American academic institutions. I think those drugs really push people’s buttons, and it’s too threatening, and I think maybe that’s not the appropriate setting in which to study them.
RF: What do you think is the appropriate setting? Who do you think is best suited to use the drugs?
AW: Well, I think that we really need equivalents to shamans in our society. I’d love it if there were medical doctors who were qualified as shamans who could supervise and oversee that.
RF: What is a shaman in your language?
AW: Someone who has mastered out-of-the-body experiences, who knows how to mediate between the visible and invisible world, who’s undertaken fairly rigorous training, on an individual level and with other people who are proficient at those things. But we don’t have any normal mechanism of producing those people.
RF: Last night you described what you thought would be the next revolutionary breakthrough in Western medicine as having to do with the discovery and mapping of the energetic body—kundalini and things like that. I wonder if you think this is one such application of the psychedelics in Western medicine?
AW: Yes. I also think psychedelics can be healing tools. I’ve seen a lot of healing, not just of mental problems but of physical problems, from psychedelic experiences; they’ve got great potential in that regard. They’re so nontoxic and safe if used in appropriate settings by people who are knowledgeable about them; it’s a shame they are not available.
RF: For the healing of physical problems, not mental problems? Yet the healing is through a mental agency.
AW: Yes. I’m saying this because the research interest has mostly been from psychiatrists, but my interest has been at looking at the mind-body aspects, and seeing how a change at the level of consciousness initiated by psychedelics can produce dramatic changes in the physical body. But most people talk about psychedelic therapy, always looking at issues like addiction and alcoholism and depression, and you don’t hear people talking about the other. It’s just part of the whole mind-body separation problem that we perpetuate.
RF: I heard that some years ago Paula Hawkins, while running for office in Florida, tried to have you removed from your faculty position because of scientific statements you made about drugs.
AW: That’s not quite accurate. When Chocolate to Morphine was first published in ’83 there was a midterm election. It was right after Len Bias had died and the war on drugs got into high gear. I was on The Donahue Show by myself. Donahue was incredibly supportive of the book, and it was a great show. The questions were remarkable. Television stations really liked it. The show was shown again and again. In response to that, an organized effort againt the book was started by the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, which Nancy Reagan and Paula Hawkins were the honorary chairpersons of. Paula Hawkins was running for reelection to the Senate and she made one of her main campaign themes getting the book banned from schools and libraries. She stood up on the floor of the Senate Judiciary Committee and waved the book around, passed copies out to members, and said that the worst thing about this book was that it was neutral, which I thought was interesting. It didn’t say “no.” She also waved the book around CBS Nightly News and actually got more publicity for it than the publisher did. Then the National Federation mounted an organized campaign to try to keep me from speaking publicly. There were several places where I had been asked to give lectures where the organizers were approached by representatives of this group who tried to intimidate them. One event was in Tucson, a statewide conference of drug abuse educators. I had been asked to be the keynote speaker. Right before the conference the organizer said that the National Federation had come to them in the person of a woman in Arizona (a politically powerful woman who had the ear of the governor) and said that I should be dropped as keynote speaker because I promoted drug use. They had a meeting and said no, they wanted me to remain as keynote speaker. She then brought in a woman who was her counterpart in California, and she said that she would use her clout with the governor’s office to cut off funding to these state agencies unless they dropped me. They had another meeting and again said no, they would keep me as speaker. And then—and this especially bothered me—they called the White House, and within twenty-four hours the White House Drug Office FedExed a dossier on me that was about two inches thick, purporting to say that I was a proponent of drug use. That was the first I had heard of this thing. Then I found out this same document was being circulated to libraries and schools in an effort to get them to remove Chocolate to Morphine. I was working at that time as a health counselor at a popular spa, and they went to them. The owners of the spa told me that I couldn’t work there anymore because I was politically undesirable. Then I went to my boss at the University of Arizona and said, “Look, this is happening and you should know that there’s a possibility that these people are going to come around.” They did not go to the university. Then Paula Hawkins lost the election. That was when something like 95 percent of Americans said that drug abuse was the greatest threat facing the nation, you know, and then a year later something like 1 percent said that it was. In fact it was totally manipulated by the media. At any rate, I have not—since she lost her bid for election—run into that kind of campaign anymore.
RF: How much of this backlash against drugs and drug abuse generally do you think is inspired by the fear of the transformative potential of LSD we saw in the sixties?
AW: I think that’s there, but I think it’s unconscious on the part of people doing it. I think it’s a deep, unconscious motivation. LSD and its relatives are regarded in the same manner as heroin by the majority of Americans and treated that way under regulatory schemes. This is so irrational that the only way you can explain it is that it is deeply threatening on some unconscious level.
RF: A more effective drug policy would distinguish psychedelics from other recreational drugs. Psychedelics have been extremely beneficial to society in ways that aren’t well known. Ralph Abraham for example suggests they were influential in the development of chaos theory in math and physics, and in the computer revolution. What about in your field? How have psychedelics impacted the growth of alternative, or, as you like to say, “integrative” medicine?
AW: A lot of the people I know in this movement have a history of using psychedelics in the past, whether or not they use them today. Those experiences were probably, as for me, important in their process of transformation that helped them come around to these points of view. I think that’s simply true of many people in my generation. Many of those people may not use psychedelics anymore, and may not have for a long time; nonetheless, they were important.
RF: Was it Aldous Huxley who said if the twentieth century is to remembered at all it will be remembered for the reemergence of psychedelic drugs?
AW: I think they are very powerful transformative forces and that the separation—however you want to call it, expulsion, separation—of Leary and Alpert from Harvard was the central event that disseminated them throughout the American culture.
RF: How do you think Tim will be remembered years from now?
AW: Certainly as a key figure of the 1960s and that whole movement. I think in any look at the countercultural picture, he’s very central. I always give Leary and Alpert credit in my talks and writings for their insistence on the importance of set and setting. Although they didn’t invent those concepts, they are certainly the ones that popularized them and insisted on their importance; and that has been a major theme of my work on drugs, and Norman Zinberg’s. The terms “set” and “setting” go back a ways in psychology, but I don’t know whether they were applied specifically to drug experiences before Leary.
One other thing I would say is today, when my main work is in the area of medicine, health, healing, I talk to very diverse audiences. I’m sure there are some people out there who are embarrassed by my previous history, my writings on drugs, and wish that wasn’t in my past. I always point out that my current view of healing is just an expansion of the ideas that I developed working with drugs. The whole point of The Natural Mind is that drug highs originate within the nervous system and that the drugs act as triggers or releases if set and setting are conducive. My current view, that treatments activate or release innate healing responses if set and setting are conducive, is an expansion of that insight.
RF: They activate our capacity for the miraculous.
AW: Another memory I have of Leary is that the first time I met him, I liked him. He was a charming person and I remember him as being very twinkly and sort of leprechaun-like. He’s an archetype of the Irish storyteller-enchanter, and there’s something playful and mischievous about that. I think that’s both been his asset and his problem. Very different personality than that of Dick Alpert.
RF: You weren’t ever a student of Tim’s; you just heard about him?
AW: Yes, I went over, met him, got to know people in that group. Then I experimented on my own independently.
RF: When did you have the idea to expose them?
AW: That came later. I met him in the fall of 1960. I took mescaline about a dozen times in 1960 and 1961. The newspaper campaign didn’t start until late in 1962.
RF: Those are historic articles.
AW: There’s a lot; there’s also the magazine that I edited, called the Harvard Review. It was a new political magazine which I became editor-in-chief of for a year, and I devoted an issue to psychedelics. It had a manifesto by Alpert and Leary in it, and articles by Ralph Metzner and other key figures.
RF: I’m getting a different picture now. On the one hand, you initiated investigative reporting to expose them and have them removed from the university because you were unhappy with their activities, on the other you were enthusiastic enough about their manifesto to publicize it in your magazine.
AW: I think that reflects a split in me, personally more than anything else. I was the only person on The Crimson that had taken any of these drugs, so I think that reflected my own ambivalence, which I don’t think was resolved until maybe ten years later.
RF: The rest of the staff at The Crimson was pretty much unaware of what was going on?
AW: Generally.
RF: But they were opposed to it?
AW: Yes. I don’t think they were people who would have tried substances.
RF: Do you have any regrets about playing that role?
AW: No, not at all. I think that was the way it was supposed to be, and that was part of my growth and transformation, and you know, as I said, there was a point in my life when I really saw that I had gotten myself in a position that was very parallel to Alpert’s at that time, and was quite amazed. I’m grateful for his example because I feel like he has—in a strange way—been a teacher of mine. We haven’t had a lot of direct contact, but it’s by his example.
RF: I see—Alpert’s been a conduit for Eastern mysticism into Western psychology, and you’ve been for integrating Western medicine with discoveries from your cross-cultural travels.
AW: Right. Another thing was, during all those years, I was Richard Schultes’s student. That’s when I was studying botany, from ’60 to ’64—my undergraduate work. He’s very down on Alpert and Leary.
RF: Well, he’s very conservative generally about everything. He told me he thought the American Revolution was a mistake.
AW: Right. And yet has tried everything himself.
RF: He’s tried everything but he’s interested in them strictly for what he calls the “scientific” value, not the transformative aspects. Wasson was the same way, his interest was mainly in the historical, scholarly world, though he admitted, near the end of his life, this may have been a mistake; that had he approached them in a different way, “it could have been the source of a revolution on Wall Street.”
AW: Of the three of them, I think Albert Hofmann is the most open and the most personally committed to the experience.
RF: Yes, but he insists that the best strategy is to propagate the drugs through the psychiatric profession.
AW: I think that would be disastrous. Psychiatry is the most authoritarian branch of the medical profession. You know, institutional psychiatrists are really the consciousness police, in a way. I found myself, when I was doing psychiatry rotations in my medical training, at incredible odds with those people over the issue of whether there were multiple realities. I mean that was simply not admissible. They say there is one reality and if you deviate from that, something’s wrong with you and you have to come back.
I also remember Albert saying that the best news he’d seen coming out of America was a story in the New York Times that said LSD use was up among the American youth.
RF: It was either Oscar Janiger or Timothy who told me that in their early studies the highest incidence of “bad” trips was among psychiatrists. Second most was theologians.
AW: That wouldn’t surprise me. Too bad, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
RF: Religion and medicine are both exceedingly plagued by authoritarianism. This is the disease that psychedelic drugs can help to dispel, so there’s bound to be resistance.
AW: I must also say even in the hippie communities that I visited, there was one part of me that always wanted to be part of that lifestyle, but the more I looked at it, the more it looked rigid to me. I saw a lot of sexism for example. The taking of a lot of these drugs does not necessarily equate with the breaking down of social roles and freedom.
RF: Taking the drugs generally induces a liminal state. What happens when you reenter is another thing. You can reimprint on another dysfunctional structure. Of course Tim first clarified this for everyone.
AW: Right. In The Marriage of the Sun and Moon I tried to show that anything destructuring brings the same kind of societal response—see the chapter I wrote on eclipses of the sun and why there’s all this medical paranoia about them.
Here’s a question I’m interested in. What’s your take on MDMA? How threatening is it to the established order and why is the LSD camp so down on MDMA? For instance, Terence thinks MDMA is awful and that nobody should take it and I’m curious about that, as to why that is. To me it seems MDMA is at least as threatening . . .
RF: A lot of people have been profoundly affected by MDMA over the years, proving its transformative potential. There’s sort of a battle between LSD and the MDMA camps as you say because people form attachments to their drugs. Terence’s perspective revolves around tryptamines and he sometimes irrationally rejects other esteemed entheogens. In Food of the Gods, for example, he summarily rejects Wasson’s Amanita theory because he hasn’t gotten off on it in the five times he’s tried.
As for MDMA, the establishment reacted irrationally exactly as they did when LSD became popular. In the case of LSD, as is well known, the government actively perpetrated a hoax in the name of science that it caused chromosome damage. With MDMA it is brain damage. I was there at the very first news conference at the University of Chicago when they announced the emergency scheduling of MDMA based on research of Charles Schuster. Schuster had never even seen MDMA at that point but he was the authority that provided the “reason” for the ban. The next year he was named head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. He told me he did the things the government asked because they funded the U of C Drug Abuse Research Unit.
As for the experience, if you think about it in terms of character, LSD will completely disintegrate your character for the time being. With MDMA you will know that you have your character on line, you’ll feel a little more comfortable in it and you’ll know its not really you. It’s more gradual, not as shocking and radical as what I think Wasson called the “superior entheogens.”