[neonate]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2516424/ is an interesting documentary about the complicated, ambivalent relationship between Alpert and Leary, made when Leary was dying. Leary, characteristically, turned his death into a spectacle, but I find Alpert the more interesting of the two.

[alexilliamson]

I highly recommend How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. He convincingly illustrates how detrimental to serious research were Leary and his penchant for the spectacular.

[fmihaila]

I wholeheartedly second the recommendation. I also want to point out that Pollan's treatment of Leary's influence is certainly more nuanced than that. Here's a key quote:

> When I asked Rick Doblin if he worries about another backlash, he pointed out that our culture has come a long way from the 1960s and has shown a remarkable ability to digest a great many of the cultural novelties first cooked up during that era.

“That was a very different time. People wouldn’t even talk about cancer or death then. Women were tranquilized to give birth; men weren’t allowed in the delivery room! Yoga and meditation were totally weird. Now mindfulness is mainstream and everyone does yoga, and there are birthing centers and hospices all over. We’ve integrated all these things into our culture. And now I think we’re ready to integrate psychedelics.”

Doblin points out that many of the people now in charge of our institutions are of a generation well acquainted with these molecules. This, he suggests, is the true legacy of Timothy Leary. It’s all well and good for today’s researchers to disdain his “antics” and blame him for derailing the first wave of research, and yet, as Doblin points out with a smile, “there would be no second wave if Leary hadn’t turned on a whole generation.” Indeed. Consider the case of Paul Summergrad, who has spoken publicly of his own youthful use of psychedelics. In a videotaped interview with Ram Dass that was shown at the 2015 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, he told his colleagues that an acid trip he took in college had been formative in his intellectual development. (Jeffrey Lieberman, another past president of the American Psychiatric Association, has also written of the insights gleaned from his youthful experiments with LSD.)

[neonate]

Well, but Leary also turned into a convenient scapegoat a long time ago, and I'm not sure how fair that is. It was a wild time. He didn't create that.

Pollan's book comes at the fulcrum of the movement where a lot of people have been carefully, and strategically, working on rehabilitating psychedelics without spooking the state again. Leary as scapegoat fits into that perfectly. Maybe too perfectly?

Leary was brilliant and complex, more interesting than the caricatures, which he admittedly drew a lot of himself. And I would say tragic. I felt from the documentary that prison broke him. His daughter killed herself (also in jail) and his son publicly denounced him and refused to speak to him. The film didn't mention those things.

[marzell]

Pollan also gave credit to the fact that Leary did bring psychedelics into pop culture in a major way, which has had some detrimental effects on serious study, but near the end of the book also acknowledged that on the flipside, all that exposure means currently a lot more people may be interested in serious study than there might be otherwise. I do appreciate Pollan's earnest attempts at considering many sides of an issue.

edit: pronoun clarifications

[bsenftner]

That turning his death into a spectacle was something to witness. I remember going to various underground night clubs in the Los Angeles area around the time of his death, and he would be in the club, literally in a hospital bed. People would be doing a meet and greet type of procession line, where he'd share any drugs offered and was generally one of those "I can't believe it" head shaking moments, but repeated for months.