[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.)