TIMOTHY LEARY - HOW TO OPERATE YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS PART 2 OF 4
On May 13, 1957, Life Magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented (and popularized) the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, had recently taken the psychedelic (entheogen) Psilocybe mexicana during a trip to Mexico and shared the experience with Leary. In the summer of 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico with Russo and after drinking several shots of Tequila tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video). In 1965 Leary commented that he "learned more about (his) brain and its possibilities. . . (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing (sic) research in psychology" (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video).
Upon his return to Harvard that fall, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects using a synthesized version of the drug--one of two active compounds in the so-called Mexican mushroom--that was produced according to a recipe concocted by Albert Hofmann, a research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. The experiment later involved giving LSD to graduate students.
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