> This is the first of what I hope will be many excerpts I hope to type up
> from Flashbacks, one of Timothy Leary’s autobiographical accounts (the
> most complete one).
>
> One of Leary’s projects was to see if the psychedelic experience could
> help rehabilitate criminals. Here is his account of it.
>
> Word count: 2,453 words. Reading time: 12 minutes
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> Word count: 2,453 words. Reading time: 12 minutes
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> -----
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> March 1961 Concord State Prison
>
> I walked through the first tall cellblock, across the prison yard to the
> hospital. Bell, peephole, metal hinges creaking. Entered the hospital.
> Knocked on the door of the prison psychiatrist. It opened and facing me
> was good news. The prison psychiatrist was black and definitely
> avant-garde. Hurray! Philosopher Thomas Kuhn said that when you wish to
> introduce change-technology to a culture, you’ll find your best allies
> among the outsiders, those whose alienation from the establishment makes
> them more open to change.
> Aside from being a black psychiatrist, Dr. Jefferson Monroe stood
> out in the primitive period of 1961 as another kind of rarity---a
> sophisticated psychiatrist. Impeccable, graceful, hip. He had a twinkle
> in his eye and a wise, cool way of looking at you. He was definitely
> ready for something new.
> A few days later Dr. Monroe paid a return call at the Faculty Club
> and then came to a staff meeting at the Center. We put him on the
> Harvard payroll as a consultant. The following Sunday he brought his
> wife over for cocktails.
> “Your plan to teach prisoners to brainwash themselves is simply
> delicious. There’s even a slight chance you can pull it off. Do you know
> what that might mean?”
> “A great boon to society,” I suggested.
> Dr. Monroe crossed his legs gracefully and laughed. “My dear, you
> don’t really understand what you’re getting into, do you? Sooner or
> later you’re going to discover that law enforcement people and prison
> administrators have no desire to cut crime. They want more crime and
> more money to fight it. I’ll cover you from the medical and psychiatric
> end, but sooner or later, if your methods work they’ll start coming down
> on you. Reporters, bureaucrats, officials. ‘Harvard Gives Drugs to
> Prisoners!’ And you’re going to have to do the impossible. Cure
> prisoners with your left hand while you try to hold off the entire
> bureaucracy with your right.”
> “So what? If it works.”
> “Being human, sooner or later you’ll make a teeny mistake. One of
> your subjects will revert. ‘Harvard Drug Parolee Robs Bank.’ ”
> “As long as we do everything out front, no secrets,” I said, “we
> can make a few honest mistakes.”
> “Maybe,” said Monroe. “Look, here’s the deal. I’ll back you
> all-out, until you goof. When they start coming down on you, exactly at
> that point I’ll have to protect my own pretty black ass. ‘Cause, I’m not
> you. I’m not the new Freud. So, I’ll win with you, but I can’t afford to
> lose with you.”
> On that basis we agreed on a plan: Monroe would line up volunteers
> in the prison population for the drug project and I’d line up Harvard
> graduate students willing to put their nervous systems on the line
> taking drugs with maximum security prisoners.
>
> A few days later I was visited by a graduate student named Ralph
> Metzner. Metzner had a reputation for being one of the most rigorously
> experimental students in the department. He wanted to work on the prison
> project.
> My first reaction was that Metzner was too academic, too
> dainty-British, too ivory tower to walk into a prison and take drugs
> with hoodlums. But Metzner said he wanted to learn how. So I guided a
> training session for Metzner, his girlfriend, Dr. Monroe and his wife,
> and graduate student Gunther Weil and his wife. This was the
> fifty-second time I had taken psilocybin.
> My study was the site of this experiment. Since this was an
> exploratory training session, I told the participants to relax, have a
> good time, and learn what they could. After a few hors of silent
> serenity, Jefferson took over spontaneously as guide. His joking and
> warm earthiness created a benign atmosphere. Ralph turned out to be a
> natural inner explorer.
> A few days later Ralph, Gunther, and I, feeling a sense of
> camaraderie as a result of the session, drove out to the Concord prison
> to meet the six candidates Jefferson has selected from the pool of
> volunteers. Two murderers. Two armed robbers. One embezzler. One black
> heroin pusher.
> In a dreary hospital room---gray walls, black asphalt floor, barred
> windows---we told the six suspicious men about an experience that could
> change their lives. We brought books for them to read, reports by other
> subjects, articles that described the ecstasies as well as the possible
> terrors. We spent most of the time describing our own experiences and
> answering questions. We made it clear to the prisoners that this was
> nothing *we* were doing to them. We were doing nothing to them that we
> weren’t doing happily to ourselves.
> We also made a transactional research contract with the prisoners.
> We said something like this: “We want to find out how and how much you
> change during this experience. For this reason we want you to take a
> battery of psychological tests.
> The prison project extended our research into a number of new
> areas. We were dealing with a very different population from the
> professionals and high-status subjects in the early research. Second, we
> were switching from questionnaires and subjective reports to objective
> measurements of personality change. And third, we had to move from
> naturalistic settings to the most controlled and least inspirational
> environment imaginable---the hospital of a maximum security prison.
>
>
> Six prisoners and three Harvard psychologists met for the first drug
> session. During the morning I was to turn on with three convicts. The
> three other prisoners and two graduate students would act as observers.
> Then in the afternoon Gunther and Ralph and the three observing
> prisoners would take the drug, and the first group would act as guides.
> We brought a record player, tape recorder, and several books of
> classical art with us. Otherwise the room was bleak: four beds, a table,
> and a few chairs. The bowl of pills was placed in the center of the
> table. To establish trust I was the first to ingest. Then the bowl was
> passed among the three prisoners, who each took twenty milligrams
> [psilocybin]. After a humming pressure in my head, the sharp, brilliant,
> and then brutal intensification of the senses.
> I felt terrible.
> What a place to be---locked in a penitentiary, out of light, out of
> mind. I turned my brain to the man next to me, a Polish bank robber from
> Worcester. I could see him much too clearly, every pore in his face,
> every blemish, the hairs in his nose, the horrid green-yellow enamel of
> his decaying teeth, the glistening of his frightened eyes, every hair on
> his head looking big as a tree-branch. What am I doing here?
> “How ya doing, John?” I asked with a weak grin.
> “I feel fine ,” he answered, but I didn’t believe him.
> “How *you* doing, Doc?”
> I was about to reply in a reassuring professional tone, but I
> couldn’t. It’s hard to lie when you’re in the power of mushrooms. “I
> feel lousy.”
> John drew back his purple-pink lips. “What’s the matter, Doc?”
> Inside his eyes I could see a yellow spider-web of retinal fibers,
> optical veins shiny and pulsing. “I’m afraid of you,” I said.
> John’s eyes enlarged, and then he began to laugh. I could see in
> his mouth, swollen red tissues, gums, tongue, throat. I was ready to be
> swallowed.
> “Well that’s funny, Doc, ‘cause I’m afraid of you.”
> We were both smiling at this point, leaning forward.
> “’Why are you afraid of me?”
> “Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?”
> “I’m afraid of you because you’re a fucking mad scientist.”
> Then our eyes locked and we both laughed.
> Voila. There it was. We had made a connection. The sun came out in
> the room. For a while.
> One of the prisoners, the heroin pusher, moaned and tossed on his
> cot.
> “Are you all right, Willy?” I asked, apprehensive about a potential
> threat to our newfound sense of security. Everyone in the room watched,
> anxiously wondering if the prison setting was just irretrievably wrong,
> if this was going to be one of those dreaded “bad trips.”
> Willy lifted his head and gave a big grin. “Man, am I all right?
> I’m in heaven looking down on this funny planet and I’m a million years
> old and there’s a million things to enjoy---and it’s all happening in
> prison. And you ask me, man, am I all right?”
> When Willy laughed we were all high and happy.
> Jefferson checked in every now and then, walked around the room
> like a dainty, graceful cat not saying much but taking it all in.
> At six o’clock, as the afternoon session was winding down, there
> was a bang on the door, and the guards came in. “Time is up, men. Back
> to the ward.” Ralph, Gunther, and I walked out of the hospital, across
> the dark prison yard, rang the bell, and waited until the iron doors
> opened into the guardroom. We went through two metal doors, down metal
> stairs, past the clanking steaming radiators, and outside the prison.
> We laughed in triumph. All of us, Harvardites and convicts, had
> passed a crucial test. We had put our faith in human nature and the drug
> experience on the line. A bit of pagan magic occurred, and none of us
> would ever forget that brief day of grace. It was a heroic moment in our
> lives.
>
> The morning after the session, driving back to the prison was like
> returning to some comfortable place in my skull. Strong bonds of empathy
> had developed. We had been through the adventure together. We had gone
> beyond the roles of Harvard psychologist and convict, faced fear
> together, had trusted and laughed.
> This time I felt at home in the prison. It always works this way
> after a good trip. Your old reality fades a bit, and you incorporate a
> new reality. This identification is not metaphorical. It is
> neurological. In scientific papers we called it re-imprinting.
>
> This first session changed our status in the prison. As word went
> out through the grapevine, prisoners approached us in the yard to ask if
> they could sign up for the project. Guards and parole officers stopped
> us to request that a favorite prisoner be admitted to the group.
> We spent the next two weeks discussing the prisoners’ reactions.
> Then we ran a second session for the group. This time the prisoners were
> more sophisticated. There was no sitting around on chairs in nervous
> anticipation. As soon as the energy began to radiate through their
> bodies, they headed for the cots and closed their eyes. For the next two
> or three hours they lay engulfed in the visions, occasionally sitting up
> to smile or make some quiet comment.
> After the third session the convicts repeated the personality tests
> to measure changes. We brought the test results into the hospital room
> and handed them to the inmates. No secrets. We explained what the tests
> measured and what the results meant.
> They had changed on the objective indices so dear to the heart of
> the psychologist. They showed less depression, hostility, anti-social
> tendencies; more energy, responsibility, cooperation. Their personality
> scores had swung dramatically and significantly in the direction of
> improved mental health.
> By handing over and explaining their test results we were training
> the prisoners in psychodiagnostics. The prisoners were becoming their
> own psychologists. They loved it. There were fierce discussions about
> personality characteristics as the cons played the psychiatric game.
>
> We planned the next phase of the research. The convicts were to
> select new recruits for the group. They would learn how to administer
> the psychological tests. They would give the orientation lectures. They
> would take over the project.
> The prison became a training center. New graduate students were
> assigned to experienced inmates for orientation and guidance. In session
> after session the inmates guided the Harvards, and the Harvards guided
> the convicts.
> The energy generated by the sessions was felt beyond the prison
> walls. The penitentiary session room became a showplace. Whenever
> visitors came to Cambridge inquiring about psychedelic drugs, we took
> them out to the prison. The convicts spoke about their mystical
> experiences to Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, and William Burroughs, Aldous
> Huxley, and the ex-king of Sarawak, as well as to coveys of visiting
> psychiatrists. Our strategy here was to do everything possible to
> enhance their pride and sense of accomplishment. Every power we could
> turn over to the convicts became a fiber in the body of self-esteem.
> By fall 1962 we had over thirty-five convicts and fifteen Harvards
> in the group. The men started being paroled at the rate of two and three
> a month, so we started Project CONTACT. The ex-cons and the Harvards
> were paired up in buddy-system teams, with the Harvards visiting the
> ex-cons in their homes. There was a twenty-four-hour telephone to rush
> help in cases of emergencies.
> We sobered them up, praised them to the parole officers, cooled out
> angry bosses. In short, we did what a family does for its confused
> members. We kept them out of jail.
> Soon our circus had grown into a three-ring extravaganza. There was
> the in prison group. There was the outside CONTACT project. And there
> was the equally important task of keeping the state administration and
> officials happy. We sent out a steady flow of memoranda and progress
> reports to the myriad departments that had jealous interest in the work
> of rehabilitating criminals. Following Jefferson’s sage advice we never
> let a week go by without contacting the bureaucrats, making them a part
> of the action.
> One morning in the second year of the project I came into Warden
> Grenman’s office to report the most recent statistics. We had kept
> ninety percent of our convicts out of jail.
> He listened politely but kept glancing behind me. When I finished,
> he clapped me on the back and led me to the corner. “Look. Two football
> fields. This wing is for admitting and orientation. Two more cell
> blocks. Mess halls double the size. We’ll have capacity for twice as
> many inmates, and we can double the staff all the way down the line.”
> His face was glowing. This was his fantasy come true. A huge prison
> and an organizational table twice as big to go with it! Bureaucratic
> Heaven.
> “That’s wonderful, Bill,” I said. “Burt have you forgotten? You’re
> not going to need a larger prison.”
> His face registered surprise.
> “Why not?”
> “Because we’re cutting your return-rate from seventy percent to ten
> percent. If you let us continue our project, you won’t need half the
> cells you have right now.”
> The warden laughed, in spite of himself. “I can’t argue with you,
> Timmy. You have kept these men straight, although I’ll be damned if I
> know how you did it.”