Everything you love in your life
Your closest friends and family
Special places so familiar
The most intense sentiments
Even that innermost experience
You call yourself
Slip into the past
Never again to be seen or felt

Life feels like a sliding slippery stream
A stream of time that moves
From yesterday until tomorrow
Somehow passing through the present
Carrying it off to somewhere
A place we can never know

Life is a mystery
Its clues remain undecipherable
No matter how hard we try
And cling to life’s many things
We never can hold or grasp
Unto any of them

The feelings I have now
Are gone before these words
A struggle to capture some
Small part of my experience
Fails without any chance

Everything you love in life
Say goodbye to those things
Even memories fade
Leaving nothing in their place

March 6, 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada

Way back inn October of 1988, Omni Magazine editor-at-large Dick Teresi commissioned Peter Stafford and I to write an article about the visit of Dr. Albert Hofmann to Los Angeles for inaugural ceremonies for a foundation established in his name. Peter and I wrote and submitted the following article which we got paid well for. However, Terasi left the magazine shortly after we submitted the piece and it was never published. Here it is, freshly edited.

• A gold plaque with the words “Albert Hofmann Foundation” glistening in the afternoon sun on the patio of the St. James’s Club, in West Hollywood, held by its name bearer. An upscale crowd of psychedelists paid $100 each to launch an ambitious consciousness library project.

• A press conference with Robert Zanger, PhD. President of the foundation, Oscar Janiger, M.D., who gave LSD to artists and Hollywood stars at the end of the ’50s, and Albert Hofmann, discover of LSD and psilocybin, where it was announced that Switzerland had legalized LSD for use in therapy
  

  Albert Hofmann, der Erfinder von LSD. (Bild: Jakob Krattiger; Illustration aus «Das Basler Buch»)

• An afternoon luncheon in the Malibu Hills at the rustic home of John Lilly, M.D. consciousness explorer extraordinaire, with Timothy Leary as well as Hofmann and his wife Anita.

• An evening party at Santa Monica home of Oscar Janiger, where Marline Dobkin de Rios (“Visionary Vine) John Marx (“The Search for the Manchurian Candidate), Andrew Weil (“The Natural Mind), Ronald Seigal (“Hallucinations), artists and psychotherapists watched as Dr. Grant Venerable unveiled a painting for Hofmann, depicting the natural neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain and its resemblance to LSD and psilocybin. (Hofmann leaped to his feet after the presentation and excitedly told the group that this relationship was important because it demonstrated that his discoveries had a direct connection to chemicals of the nervous system and therefore human consciousness. He went on to suggest that the psychedelics would be progenitors of conscious evolution. Many were struck, as was evident through all the events of his visit, by his liveliness and vigor, which made him appear much younger than his 82 years.)

• Twenty-four hundred people filling the Scottish Rite Temple, a huge masonic temple in LA’s Wilshire district, to hear Albert Hofmann’s first public address in a over a decade, where he described his “Transmitter/Receiver” model of consciousness. He was preceded to the podium by Stanley Krippner who described Hofmann’s famous bicycle ride; Andrew Weil who lamented that those present were really only a very tiny minority; John Lilly who recounted his adventures on LSD and ketamine in the isolation tank and the evening’s MC, Terence McKenna, who introduced Hofmann as “a man astride both the synthetic and natural products chemistry of the 20th century like no one else.”

• Another evening at Janiger’s with psychedelic artists, watching slides of works of art fashioned under LSD’s influence, three decades earlier.

• The International Transpersonal Conference in Santa Rosa where 1200 people gathered to watch Hofmann gave two lectures among 100 presentations by other important figures in the consciousness community.

The following is a video of Hofmann’s lecture from YouTube. Its caption begins: “An event that was held at The Scottish Rite Temple in Los Angeles on October 2, 1988 to honor Dr. Albert Hofmann on the 50th anniversary of his discovery of LSD. The MC that night was none other than Terence McKenna, and besides a few words from Terence, we also hear from Stanley Krippner and Andrew Weil, who not only have many kind words for Dr. Hofmann but also add some interesting insights about their own work with LSD”

These were  some of the highlights of the visit by the 82 year old Hofmann to inaugurate a foundation and library which will bring together the world’s most extensive repository of books, papers and artifacts relating to consciousness and its alteration. We were fortunate to be present during these events and here are some of a few more of our observations at the events.

• The greatest understatement from the “L.A. Herald Examiner, about Hofmann: “The Man Who Launched a Thousand Trips.”

• The longest sentence in praise of Dr. Hofmann and his discoveries from the silver tongued Terence McKenna, whom Timothy Leary described at “Another Irishman who kissed the ‘Blarney Stone’”: “LSD is, I think, the greatest medical discovery of the 20th century ameliorating pain, creating caring, promoting unity, healing not so much of the individual psyche although, certainly, its impact in that dimension is tremendous but ultimately as a deconditioning agent allowing us to move beyond the confines of historical society, to see what we could be, what we have been, and what in fact we have the energy to be in the future.”

• Robert Zanger, President of the newly formed Albert Hofmann Foundation, projected requirements of about $1 million to achieve the library’s initial goal; to locate a building for the housing of collections from consciousness enhancement pioneers such as Hofmann, who offered his entire correspondence and library. Laura Huxley is to contribute the Aldous Huxley’s correspondence and papers, and both John Marx and Marty Lee thousands of pages on the CIA/LSD connection. Paintings from Janiger’s LSD art project will be the first exhibit at the foundation’s gallery.

• At the news conference, Janiger had been asked why LA had been selected as the site for the library. Janiger answered that, among other reasons, Huxley had described LA as the “Venice of the Psychedelic Renaissance.”

We found ourselves driving through the sun drenched hills of this mind expanding city, on our way to the Lilly luncheon. Peter had created a “Official Drug Awareness Kit” which asked questions from his forthcoming “Encyclopedia of Psychedelic Substances and asked Bruce the $64 question (he had answered everything correctly up to this point): “As a result of oral ingestion of about 100 mcg. LSD, roughly how many “psyche-changing molecules pass the blood brain barrier?” Bruce tried to do some quick figuring and ventured a wild guess. Two days later, we posed the same question to Hofmann during our interview. He muttered to himself in German and gave us the answer: 10 to the 19th power of molecules. That’s ten times a billion ! Should be enough.

Here is the rest of the interview with Albert Hofmann.

Peter & Bruce: Could you tell us a little about the background of the legalization for medical purposes of LSD in Switzerland?

Albert Hofmann: There has been founded an association of young psychiatrists last year — the Association of Swiss Psychiatrists for Psycholytic Therapy meaning the use of LSD and similar compounds as an adjunct to psychoanalysis & psychotherapy. This association has now got the license to use LSD & similarcompounds in their medical practice.

But only members, & only doctors or psychiatrists. In any
case, members can now use officially, legally, LSD. Since Sandoz stopped distributing LSD, this compound will be prepared in the
chemical department at the University of Berne.

P.& B.: What do you feel is the significance of the setting up of the Albert Hofmann Library?

A.H.: They asked me to give them the name. And I did not know what I could contribute. The name, of course, and my library — I have a collection of publications and correspondences with many people in this field. I shall, of course, will this legacy to them when I die. But then I got this invitation to be present at the inaugaration, and they asked me also to give a lecture which you heard yesterday evening.

I think it is very important that somewhere the whole material is concentrated and available for future research. Documentation for the future is very important. Dr. Janiger, who had the idea for this foundation, has an enormous wealth of documents from this field — from his own research and literature collected from all over the world. He showed me what he has in his files — all the documents from the chemical laboratories of the United States, the Army laboratories. Thousands of volunteers participated in his project of the Army.

So all this material should be concentrated there and made available to students in this field, and maybe also to present to health authorities to show about the use of these substances–and about the dangers, or the impact on the public.

P.& B.: What do you feel is the best use or uses for LSD and the psychedelics? How should they be used if they were to be used in the best possible way?

A.H.: In the medical field, one important use is to help as a pharmacological aid to psychoanalysis, because you can get forgotten, repressed material from the subconscious to make it conscious quicker than normal.

In the normal manner, you may work with a person for years to get out this material, and it has been shown in many studies that under its influence it is possible to bring this to consciousness in one or two sessions. That means that with the help of LSD, psychoanaysis can be shortened to a really important extent.

And also, as a kind of pain-killer in dying persons. Kast and Stan Grof and others have published books about this. People who suffered terrible pain, cancer patients, and they are given opiates to kill pain that did not work; LSD worked. It is not just an anesthetic medicament. It is different.

It seems that under the influence the mind and the body become separated. The body with its pain is left and the consciousness remains out free of pain. It’s a very strange and very important experience also for the normal person that they have the feeling to be out of their body.

I had this same feeling in my first experiment — I had the feeling that my body had died, and had the feeling of being out of the body and looking from outside. That could be one effect which I think could be a very important use for people in their last stage of life, where they have suffered pain — to use as a kind of pain-killer. When people are suffering pain, they are no more able to think, to have contact with their family. They are able again to think about their past life, to communicate, and they have lost the fear of death.

P.& B.: What do you think about Dr. Janiger’s use of psychedelics for creativity enhancement with artists and others?
I have heard, I shall see just this evening his documents. I have seen some of these works. I think it is important to make a difference.

A.H.: There has just been a study in Germany by Hartmann, and he asked I think about 40 or 50 famous painters to do their work just under the influence of LSD. Just then. And there were no good results, because under the influence of LSD you have such an enormous input of impressions and ideas and visions that you have no time to put it down.

A.H.: What Janiger did — they had LSD, and then after they painted what they had seen. There’s quite a big difference. The results of Hartmann in Munchen were negative, and I know from my own experience just under the influence you take in things and you have so deep impressions and deep experiences you are not prepared to formulate them with words, nor to give expression by painting and so on. You are just full of experience.

P. & B.: So you have to pay a lot of attention to timing?

A.H.: For the artist it is important to have seen some new dimensions — that is the first phase. And the second thing is he may be able to give expression in his work with his usual techniques. Janiger’s findings are that what they do after having this experience goes in new and other dimensions then before. They have experienced other dimensions of reality.

What do you think about the possibility of developing new psychedelics that may have more usefulness than LSD?

A.H.: I don’t think that very important new compounds will be found because LSD, mescaline, peyote, all these things, have been discovered — the effects (and LSD is just, as I have explained, a chemical variation of ololiuqui) — these psychedelics have been discovered thousands and thousands of years before.

Man has tested I think the whole range of the plant kingdom. These are natural products, are products of the plants. Although LSD is just a modification, lysergic acid is a plant product. And I don’t think that we as scientists, ethnologists or chemists, we base our work on these earlier discoverers.

I don’t think what has not been discovered in the last 2,000 years that very many new things will come. It would have been discovered in this time, and therefore I don’t think that very new special compounds, natural compounds will come out, and I think it is important to rely on natural compounds.

That means compounds which you find in the plant kingdom. And everything that you find in the plant kingdom has some relation to the chemistry of natural production which is our chemistry. It is the same kind of basic compounds. It is known that these psychedelics have a special relationship to natural hormones in the brain.

Other compounds have relationships with other types of compounds — steroids, etc. It is a close relationship that had already been selected during the evolution of the plant kingdom and animal kingdom together. From the innumerable possibility of compounds which could exist, it is a very, very small selection which we use now in the plant and animal kingdom.

Every year now in the pharmaceutical industry they produce, I think about a thousand new compounds are prepared and tested and tested. But this is artificial, and I am not convinced that for the long term they will be useful. We should remain within the normal chemistry of our body and of the plants.

Inorganic compounds in living organisms may have dangerous effects in the long term. DDT is an example, which cannot be metabolized by the organism. So after ten years of use, then you had the trouble. Because from the plant kingdom they went ino the nurture of human beings, and finally now you find them deposited in our nerve system.

I don’t know how much, but you now find traces of DDT in every human being. It remains somewhere because the organism doesn’t know how to handle it. That’s the danger of the artificial medicaments.

P. & B.: You’ve come to this country several times, and every time you’ve been here you’ve received a tremendous welcome. How do you fee  l about your reception in the United States?

I am deeply impressed by the warm reception I have received here, and I feel happy and grateful to my friends and to my colleagues.

P.& B.: We asked you earlier about this “peculiar presentiment” you had in 1943 that the LSD-25 molecule was worth reexamining again. Yo u said something about you liked the structure –

A.H.: Yes. I had the feeling that the substance should be tested in a more extended program than before. I liked the structure. If you are not a chemist, you may not know what that means.

It has some beauty in its chemical structure. I liked it — just the structure. And I thought it would be important to do work on this. That isn’t something that you can prove scientifically — what that means, but it is just a feeling that you have. You have some attraction to a painting, to a sculpture, to a human being. Just if you like it, then you work with it.

P.& B.: It was originally tested on what animals?

A.H.: All kinds of animals. In cats, mice, rats and guinea pigs. But without any impression from them. That is very, very important, because it shows that the domain where these psychedelics work is in some domain which doesn’t exist — or exists only to a very low level — in animals. It specifically works on the consciousness, and if you don’t have any or low consciousness, you don’t see any effect. You may see it in higher animals with higher doses than with humans.

In cats — we have films even — we gave large doses. I don’t know how much, but many, many hundred times or a thousand times as you use for humans. You see that the cats have a changed behavior. We have a film where you have a cat in a cage with a mouse, and the cat is frightened by the mouse.

But the really important effects which may be used for many fields that we have spoken about, it happens in the change of the consciousness. And it is the very core of our being human beings that we have consciousness. Üh ÜŒ There has been a lot of European work done with psycholytic therapy.

P.& B.: How safe do you think this is?

There is no danger at all. Thousands of papers have appeared, and it is never spoken of as a danger. Never. The danger is unwise use, in paramedical use. But under the supervision of the medical, I don’t know of any publication.

P.& B.: Do you think other places in Europe will legalize it for use again?

A.H.: We hope in Germany, where we also have an association there who hope to get it in the same way as in Switzerland. I am also a member of this group. About environmental concerns, what are your thoughts and activities in that regard

Oh, I am working in this field. I write articles and have given lectures and am taking part in discussions in this group and with the Green Party. We work to make people conscious. And then we must make conscious the irresponsible person in industry and research. And they do try now to find procedures which produce as small a quantity of by-products that are toxic as possible.

To reduce it and invent procedures which are safe and have no toxic by-products to be eliminated, through recycling and all these things. These things are published, and on the political scene we have our representatives in the political scene. The Green Party is becoming more and more influential in Germany and in Switzerland.

P.& B.: What about your personal use of LSD and psychedelics? Do you still use them?

A.H.: No, no more use them. If I got the message of LSD — I know I opened my eyes and my eyes are opened and I don’t need more. They are open more and more. I can’t really understand what it means to take LSD every week — must be a pleasure, but I think it is not the sort of thing. You must work on — I have a beautiful letter from Aldous Huxley, where he says “What we have taken in by visionary experience, we must give out with love and intelligence.”

LSD often turns its users into “instant messiahs” with an urge to turn on friends, relatives, acquaintances, and perfect strangers. Marijuana, too, is a sort of friendship ambassador from the vegetable kingdom, telling us to declare peace on the world. And during the Forties and Fifties, as acid and grass slowly spread (Tom among an enlightened few to the electrified many, the genealogy of turn-ons began 10 read like a who’s who in the scientific, political, and cultural worlds.

There were artists and writers like Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Salvador Dali, and R. Crumb; actors like Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Gary Grant, Peter Fonda, and David Carradine; scientists like Stanislav Grof, John Lilly, Claudio Naranjo, and Albert Hofmann; media moguls Walt Disney and Henry Luce; top political figures John and Robert Kennedy. All took the magical mystery tour and returned to pick up their friends. It started during World War II. The scene was the New Products Laboratory of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, in a building now dwarfed by the massive Sandoz. tower that dominates the skyline.

On April 16, 1943, the chemist Albert Hofmann, who had concocted a new molecule five years earlier while searching for a uterine constrictor, decided to test it again on birds, who had previously displayed no reaction. By accident, Hofmann absorbed a minute quantity of the chemical through his skin. The agent involved, LSD-25, turned out to be such a potent psychedelic that it had to be weighed out in millionths of a gram. If the substance can be seen with the naked eye, it i.s a very large dose. By comparison, mescaline must be taken in amounts of 3,000 to 4,000 times the weight to produce a turn-on of a similar scope.

Hofmann’s second trip, on April 19 of that year, confirmed that LSD-25 had been the precipitating psychoactive agent three days earlier. Though dramatic, the trip was hardly the first lime that psychedelics had influenced civilization’s collective psyche.

Marijuana use, of course, extends back in to prehistory. It was heartily recommended in the earliest book of Chinese herbal medicine, which had influenced much of the East by the time of our earliest documentations, and, as tradition has it, was carried West by Hasan-i-Sabbah (“the Old Man of the Mountain”) in about 1090 A.D. Its earliest use as a recreational drug coincided with its introduction into Western medicine-since Joseph Moreau de Tours, who acquired it in Algeria and saw its medical possibilities, also brought it to the attention of the poet Theophile Gautier.

Gautier was something of a dandy in France in the 1840s, and he founded Le Club des Haschischins. Members were administered Cannabis indica in the form of a potent greenish jam, and many published extravagant praises of their vision-filled trips. (De Tours first noticed he was affected when he discovered himself fencing with a banana.)’ Recreational usage in the United States, however, didn’t really catch on until the Twenties, when Mexican laborers and blacks brought it up along the Mississippi from Louisiana and into Harlem and other

The prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. spurred pot’s further spread. But for the most part, it remained an activity of the lower-class black and Chicano subcultures, jazz musicians, Bohemian artists, and other assorted members of the creative professions. Meanwhile, an anti-marijuana scare campaign carried on by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics effectively stemmed the pot tide. Weed perforce remained an underground sacrament until the beatniks began to turn on. Pot became as essential to the Beat movement as poetry, Zen Buddhism, espresso coffee houses, and pounding on a bongo.

When it comes to explaining how the Beats caused us to see beyond what Allen Ginsberg called “the clouds of literal consciousness” that shrouded the Fifties, we must again note that many of those most centrally involved-such as Jack Kerouac-themselves “turned on” relatively infrequently. Oh, it is true that Jack smoked a lot of pot, particularly while writing Dr. Sax down in Mexico (much to the annoyance of William Burroughs, who objected that it excessively smoked up the room). But Kerouac and John Clellan Holmes, perhaps the major publicists of this “go” generation of the late Forties and Fifties, personally tried little of the major psychedelics.

When it came to dope, Kerouac and Holmes were largely outsiders with their noses pressed against the window, recording the activities of Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, and Herbert Huneke. These were people who gulped down psychedelics whenever given the chance. Snyder, for example, became the hero of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums after seeing the value of psychedelics while a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. This group’s experiences of fairly continual dope use as recorded, were to entice an entire upcoming generation. But we are getting ahead of our story. After he made his initial studies of the properties of lysergic acid in 1043, Hofmann turned on Werner Stoll, his lab collaborator’s son, and Stoll turned on his patients — sixteen schizophreniacs and twenty “normals.” The results of this experiment were reported in 1947 in the Swiss Journal of Neurology. From here on this psychedelic message quickly spread.

The decade following Stall’s initial report saw LSD enter the heads of psychiatric patients, volunteers and, of course, psychotherapists. In 1949 the molecule came to America via psychologist Max Rinkle. A few years later in Canada, a group of psychologists and related workers headed by Drs. Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer began giving it to alcoholics in the hopes of sobering them through artificial d.t.’s. Instead, many saw the light, and psychedelic was born as a word and perhaps a philosophical concept as well.

Most of the early work with LSD was done with small doses, often only 30 to 50 micrograms and rarely over 100. Hofmann’s opinion is that 250 micrograms is about the maximum dosage, and he felt his initial experience on that amount was an overdose . Large single-shot doses were first suggested by AI Hubbard, a former Canadian uranium salesman, considered a wild man by his associates in alcoholic therapy.

In the late Fifties in Los Angeles, a number of psychologists began to administer LSD to patients for therapeutic purposes. Via this process they managed to turn on such popular figures as TV comedian Steve Allen, the first to announce his turn-on on television. Gary Grant credited LSD with enabling him to become a parent for the first time. One fascinating record from this period is My Self and I, by Constance Newland, the Thelma Moss of recent Kirlian and psychotronic fame. By about 1957, according to the writer Chester Anderson, a substantial LSD leak led [rom the Sandoz plant in Hanover, New Jersey, to Manhattan's East Village, Peyote, pot, and eventually LSD were the main condiments used by the Beats to tum on~and they were also among the most active proselytizers. But word passed quickly of other possibilities for mind expansion. Alan Watts described this type of experience as ~instant sa tori» in his 1959 book This Is It. Ginsberg and Burroughs soon were bringing back additional tales relating to the yage intoxication of South America. Though there was much about their reports and those of others indicating unpleasant effects, a search for mind alteration was clearly pan of the ethos, and many were turned on in the process.

The Chilean psychologist Claudio Naranjo acquired yage after deciding he wanted to go into country where "people ate people." He says he knew he couldn't learn the languages he would encounter, so he brought along a Polaroid camera and some acid, which he dropped onto drawings he had made of stars, moons, and the sun. He would tell the natives that he was a medicine man and that they should meditate upon the heavenly bodies after swallowing the "medicine» appearing on the drawings. Then he paddled away in his canoe as quickly as possible, not knowing what the effects would be. Later, however, the natives indicated they were impressed and grateful-and gave him lots of yage. Naranjo was the first to try MDA after its discoverer, Gordon Alles, and he also gave the first scientific report on ibogaine, after hearing accounts by African natives of their rituals and experiences.

Then in May of 1957, Wall Street banker R. Gordon Wasson published his account of being one of the first two white men tO be "bemushmomed." Life magazine gave Wesson's story a full color spread as pan three of a "Great Adventures" series. This was to lead to Albert Hofmann's synthesis of psilocybin and psilocin, the primary active substances in the Mexican psychedelic fungi. Hundreds would travel to Oaxaca, Mexico, in search of magic mushrooms and/or Maria Sabina, the curandera who had conducted Wasson on his remarkable nighttime journey. Budd Schulberg, author of What Makes Sammy Run? was one of these seekers, as was Jeremy Sandford, who wrote In Search of the Magic Mushroom. By the late Fifties, Sandoz was sending samples of these synthetics out t.o investigators. One of them was Sabina, who responded that "the spirit of the mushroom is in the pill."

A significant event of the early Sixties occurred when a seeker named Timothy Leary tripped out poolside in Cuemavaca, near Mexico City. His rational, symbolic mind took a vacation, and he resolved to dedicate the rest of his life to studying this new instrument. Having just been appointed to a lectureship in psychology at Harvard, Leary took it upon himself to initiate research into this with his graduate students. Thus was born the Harvard Psilocybin Project- which rapidly turned on hundreds of creative individuals, religious figures, convicts, psychologists, and graduate students. Leary also turned Allen Ginsberg on to psilocybin, whereupon Ginsberg immediately tried to phone Jack Kennedy, Kerouac, and Nikita Khrushchev (his three favorite Ks) to tell them about it.

In 1960 Dr John Beresford wrote Sandoz from New York and explained that he was interested in investigating LSD-25's possible effects on amoebas. Back by return mail came a gram labeled "pharmaceutically pure" and a bill for $285. Before the year was out, Beresford, jean Houston, and Michael Corner had established an LSD research center, the Agora Scientific Trust. Much of the turning on they performed is described in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

Eventually the gram Beresford bought was split up with an associate, Michael Hollingshead, who conveyed part of it to Harvard, where he turned on dozens of scientists and volunteers. He stayed for a while with Leary at a house that was the site of many psylocybin turn-ons. Despite this, many were afraid of LSD. One of those declaring himself most uninterested was Timothy L. By 1962, jazz musician Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo were obviously having such a good time on it that Hollingshead finally was able to convince Leary to try a spoonful from his LSD-25 mayonnaise jar.

In addition to Leary, Hollingshead turned on Paul Krassner, Richard Alpert, Art Kleps, Ralph Metzner, Donovan Leitch, Keith Richard, the Yardbirds, and others of early English rock scene, from a center he established in London (having been sent there for that purpose by Leary). Though Leary claims to have turned on very few people personally, he and some thirty graduate students, young professors and theologians were , in his words: ... thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard . . . believing it was a time (after the shallow, nostalgic Fifties) for far-out visions .... With . . scientific concepts as suggestive text and with LSD as instrumental sacrament and with prayers for grace, we began to write and to talk publicly about the possibility of a new philosophy, a new individual scientific theology.

Soon Harvard Square became the center of the "psychedelic revolution," with consequences well known. After being forced out of Harvard, Leary, Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass) and their associates decided it was time for the psychedelic movement to go public and established their International Federation for Internal Freedom (lFIF). In 1964 IFIF even opened a pilot LSD training center in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and the following summer offered a week at the reasonable price of $200. They received over 1,500 applications. Acid has appeared in many forms, but one of the strangest was one that Alpert went down to retrieve after he and Leary had been thrown out of their resort hotel in Zihuatanejo to bring it through Customs,

Alpert put it in a shaving lotion bottle. At the airport, his luggage was thrown up on the rack and fell off. He thought that the bottle might have broken , but didn't dare check until speeding from the airport in a taxi. Sure enough, the suit the LSD had been wrapped up in was wet. One idea was to cut the suit up into squares like fabric samples; instead, it was just hung on the wall, where a anyone who wanted to turn on could suck on it. (A seersucker suit, as it were).

After Zihuatanejo, this hearty band of experimenters set out for the British West Indies seeking island sanctuary. Discouraged, they returned to the U.S., and at the invitation of Peggy and William Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon banking fortune, established a longer-lasting psychedelic vortex in Millbrook, New York. From here emanated the Psychedelic Review, early light shows carried to New York City and other messages transmitted via pilgrims who had made the trek to visit the Castalia Foundation and the League for Spiritual Discovery, the slightly altered names for IFIF. The high visibility of such activities dismayed more conservative investigators, but nonetheless drew much media attention leading to the mass turn-ons of the mid-Sixties.

ln the spring of 1963, according to Beresford, Bobby Kennedy was known to be taking LSD or psilocybin and providing psychedelic entertainment for foreign dignitaries in a fashionable New York apartment. JFK reportedly smoked pot in the White House with Judith Campbell Exner. By this time, Eric Loeb ran a store with window displays on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, where he legally sold peyote buds from Arizona, mescaline, harmaline, and ibogaine. And the Englishman Gerald Heard had by now turned on the publisher of Time and Life, Henry Luce, and his wife, the vivacious playwright Clare Booth Luce.

Even more public and outrageous than the psychedelic circuses and celebrations of the Leary clique and upper-class New York society were the antics of Ken Kesey. Kesey, oddly enough, was turned on by the U.S. Army, which along with the CIA had been conducting its own tum-ons from the early Fifties onward. Of course, these tum-ons were given many times without preparation- yet many, such as Kesey, had good trips despite the lack of structure, and this may have inspired Kesey's Merry Pranksters to create their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the namesake of a Tom Wolfe book. The test turned on many who !had little advance knowledge, from the Fillmore ballroom to a Watts church. Wavy Gravy, former nightclub comedian Hugh Romney and one of the Pranksters, denied that he put the acid in the punch on these occasions.

Jerry Garcia could be considered another Army tum-on: The lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead, a notorious peyote-gulper in his early Berkeley coffee house days, Garcia recounts what caused him to gain the moniker "Captain Trips":

(In] ’60, ’61 , ’62, 1 guess, or ’63, the government was running a series of drug tests over at Stanford, and Hunter I the Dead:S lyricist] was one of the participants of these. They gave him mescaline and psilocybin and LSD and a whole bunch of others and put him in a little white room and watched him. And there were other people on the scene who were into that. And as soon as these people had those drugs they were immediately trying to get them, trying to find some way to cop ‘em or anything, but there was no illicit drug market then like there is now.

The acid tests beginning in mid-decade were something entirely new. Instead of the tum-on being spread If rom friend to friend, communal conversions were now the order of the day and a new term was introduced into the language, “freaking freely.” The first real “gathering of the tribes” occurred on October 16, 1966, the day when California became the first state to ban LSD. This was the earliest of what might properly be called the “Human Be-ins,” and was celebrated by thousands on both coasts. A wave of media publicity about the gentleness of this mass turn:on resulted in an even larger gathering in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in January 1967. An estimated 10,000 turned on while listening to Leary, Ginsberg, Lenore Kandel, McClure and many others praise the psychedelic revolution, accompanied by rock bands from San Francisco, such as Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane. Augustus Owsley Stanley Ill, already known by his middle name as a great acid maker, dropped by parachute into the crowd. Longhairs sporting Dowers blew bubbles in the grass. By the time the beautiful, vibrant day, was over, everyone knew that San Francisco would soon celebrate a “Summer of Love.”

The likes of Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Country Joe McDonald and others formed a loose-knit “family” of turned-on rock stars on the West Coast. Chester Anderson has referred to such groups as Sturgeonesque _”homogestalts” in Crawdaddy , the earliest rock magazine. Anderson partially explained why these San Francisco musicians and other acid-rockers such as the Stones, the Beatles, the Mothers, and the Doors, not to mention hundreds of other bands of similar odd fellows, were such an encouragement to the tum-on:

Rock is a legitimate avant-garde art form, with deep roots in the music of the past (especially the baroque and before), great vitality and vast potential for growth and development, adaptation, experiment, etc. Its effects on the younger generation, especially those effects most deplored by type-heads, have all been essentially good and healthy so far.

With rock’s heavy profit orientation today, these principles may sound a bit high-flown, optimistic and idealistic. Yet in the mid-Sixties, millions thought of the Beatles almost as gods (or at least as the four evangelists), and for months after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band became available, people debated endlessly the secret meanings found in the song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

LSD-25 made its debut in rock in 1962 in a single by the Gamblers. By 1965, Eric Burden and the Animals were crooning their love song, “To Sandoz”; the Stones were singing about how “Something Happened To Me Yesterday”; the Byrds were harmonizing about how they were “Eight Miles High,” and the Beatles had long been advising everyone to “Tum off your mind, relax and float downstream. This is not dying . . . ”

Ginsberg says he was turned on to pot by Al Aronowitz, a pop-rock writer for the New York Post who also performed the same service for Bob Dylan. Ginsberg mentions that the Beatles were turned on by Dylan when their planes once crossed at JFK airport. He asked whether they wanted to · turn on, and they were hesitant. Finally, Ringo said he’d try it. They went behind a hangar, and after returning to the others, Ringo was asked what he thought of it. He was smiling so much, the others decided to try it too.

In retrospect, it may seem a strange quirk that the Beatles were turned on to acid by their dentist-the “Dr. Robert” of an early song- who over dinner slipped it into Paul and John’s coffees. “He didn’t know what it was,” one explained later. “We didn’t ask for it, but later we did say ‘thank you.’ • Jimi Hendrix was another first turned on in England. He responded by pulling “Purple Haze” at the top of the charts. In film About Hendrix, we see his acid taster, who followed Jimi wherever he went and checked out his tabs to see how good they were before he tried them. According to many stories, Owsley made a double-strength, special batch of acid for him, and Jimi once ate a handful of these tabs before going on stage. We haven’t said anything about the role played by the Bugs, Steppenwolf, Pearls Before Swine, H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Walker, the Seeds, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Arthur Brown, the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Beach Boys, but these and hundreds of other groups all contributed enormously to the turning-on of the world. Grace Slick likes to tell the story of how she and Abbie Hoffman were invited to a party for Tricia Nixon which Richard Nixon attended. They planned to dose Tricky Dick with some of Owsley’s best, contained beneath her fingernail, before they were stopped at the door by security. Hoffman relates his version of becoming another of the Army’s turn-ons:

Aldous Huxley had told me about LSD back in 1957. And I tried to get it in 1959. I stood in line at a clinic in San Francisco, after Herb Caen had run an announcement in the Chronicle that if anybody wanted to take a new experimental drug called LSD-25, he would be paid $150 for his effort. Jesus, that emptied Berkeley! 1 got up about six in the morning, but I was about 1,500 in line so .. . 1 didn’t get it until 1965. The acid was supplied by the United States Army. My roommate. from college was an Army psychologist …

By the last half of the sixties, the psychedelic message was appearing almost everywhere, even if the lettering was somewhat difficult to read. The first Psychedelic Shop debuted in San Francisco, along with the Oracle, a newspaper that centered on psychedelics, showed up irregularly and ushered in for a short while the use of a split-font color technique that produced almost Day-Glo graphics. Both were quickly imitated by other shops and newspapers sprouting up LO speak LO new psychedelic consumers.

In Manhattan there was the East Village Other, started by Walter Bowart, now publisher of Omen Press, and John Wilcock, a British journalist. the Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, the Astral Projection from New Mexico, the Kaleidoscope from Milwaukee, the Seed from Chicago, the Georgia Straight from Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Nola Express from N~w Orleans, to name only a few. In L.A., the psychedelic message was conveyed by the Free Press, started by An Kunkin at Pandora’s Box on the Sunset Strip.

Los Angeles also had its own Oracle, trying to reach the standards already set in San Francisco. Beyond this, a variety of “Communication Company” memos were issued sporadically in New York by Jimmy Fouratt and in San Francisco by Chester Anderson, the author of The Butterfly Kid. All of these updating communiques were members of the rapidly growing Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). They freely allowed the reprinting of psychedelic-encouraging material, such as this widely quoted statement from Ginsberg:

Abruptly then, I will make a first proposal — on one level symbolic, but to be taken as literally as possible, it may shock some and delight others-that everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once, every man, woman and child American in good health over the age of 14-that, if necessary, we have a mass emotional nervous breakdown in these states once and for all, that we see bankers laughing in their revolving doors with strange staring eyes .. . I propose, then, that everybody including the president and his and our vast hordes of generals, executives, judges and legislators of these states go to nature, find a kindly teacher or Indian peyote chief or guru guide and assay their consciousness with LSD …

The surprising thing in the situation at this time was that so few; in the wider perspective, were very curious~ A dean at Columbia spoke of this once when he suggested at a faculty meeting that the university not graduate any senior who hadn’t at least smoked some grass. Students who hadn’t toked up by the late sixties, he said, showed such little interest in the real world that they could never be a credit to the institution. Hollywood also was on the psychedelic bandwagon, using the turn-on as a central theme in wide-screen technicolor production. Peter Fonda was featured in The Trip, a Hollywood version of the psychedelic experience. he was reported at the time that Fonda would smoke grass on the patio of his Hollywood Hills home while police helicopters buzzed by periodically. The namesake for I Love You, Alice B. Toklas as was Gertrude Stein’s lover, who had a notorious recipe for hash brownies. We can only speculate

whether the films star, Peter Sellers, partook. But Lew Gottlieb, the psychedelic guru in the movie, definitely did. Gottlieb started Morning Star, a communal farm in Sonoma County, California, and he was also one of the Limeliters. Other psychedelic films included The Presidents Analyst, starring a dapper and possibly turned-on James Coburn; and that tour de force of psychedelic animation, Yellow Submarine, which blended turn-on movement with the Beatles’ music.

By the time the Beatles had gotten themselves decked out in Sgt. Pepper costumes, however, the country was also being turned on by a new kind of film, which Gene Youngblood would call the “expanded cinema.” This genre was typified by Jordan Belson’s Re-Entry, Samadhi and Momentum.

Other film makers, inducting Jean Malay and Francis Lee, tried to convey an impression of their own psychedelic experiences. Psychedelic cinema was being projected on the walls and screens of light-show emporiums such as The Electric Circus in New York’s Lower East Side, the Avalon, Fillmore and Family Dog in San Francisco, the Kaleidoscope and Shrine Auditorium in L.A. and in dozens of rock venues across the land. The ultimate rock-acid rush was Woodstock and the hundreds of festivals it began.

Until 1960, according to Hofmann, the world supplies of ergot, the necessary precursor to the manufacture of LSD-25, were extremely limited. Peyote was available, but not to any great extent. Yage, DMT, psilocybin, MDA, STP, MMDA, and ibogaine were all but unknown. But then, as Humphrey Osmond put it, somebody discovered how ergot could be grown in churns. Now the ball really had begun to roll. The discovery of how to mass cultivate ergot on Claviceps paspali was made in the Farmitalia labs in Milan, Italy. Before long, Fam1italia was offering LSD-25 at $10,000 a kilo, enough for eight million 250 microgram experiences. Then Spofa Pharmaceuticals in Czechoslovakia began manufacture, providing a high-quality product which became available to anyone in Prague who wished 10 try the experience under medical supervision.

Communist parry leader Alexander Dubcek and most of the city’s artistic community took advantage of the offer, which many claim led to the”Prague Spring” of 1968 that ended in a Soviet invasion. Spofa, however, continued to supply the drug until just very recently.

In the early sixties, nearly all the LSD ingested came from these pharmaceutical sources. When Sandoz recalled LSD after the heavy scare campaign of 1966, most users became dependent upon underground supply. This had remained fairly amateurish and small until the advent of Augustus Owsley Stanley Ill, grandson of a Kentucky senator.

Owsley came to the making of acid in 1961 after collaborating with one of the earliest manufacturers. Soon he was in business for himself in a makeshift laboratory behind a vacant store in Berkeley, California. His acid varied from early white capsules to what became known as “Owsley tabs,” blue at first, but later- when c heap imitations hit the market-in other colors. Some were stamped with the figure of Batman or Robin, bearing such names as “Midnight Hour,” “White Lightning,” or “Monterey Purple.”

Owsley got into the game due to his inability to procure pharmaceutical LSD-25, and within five years it had made him a millionaire. But he was put out of business following his bust in December 1967 at his Orinda tabbing center. His apprentice, Tim Scully, carried on in association with Nicholas Sand, prolific Brooklyn alchemist. Together they put out most of the fabled “Sunshine” acid.

Sunshine was the second acid to gain a large distribution-world-wide, as a matter of fact. The main source of these orange, crumbly tablets was Laguna Beach, a beautiful art colony on the coast of California. A “clean” scene developed there in the mid-Sixties, with many taking Sandoz on the picturesque sands. Here was where Timothy Leary stayed after touring communes throughout the southwestern United States, the sites of many religious turn-ons.

By 1969, five years after this town·s first head shop was established, large amounts of Sunshine began to be pumped to an acid-hungry population by a group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Actually, the Brotherhood had started several years ·earlier as a religious group. But as dealing became big business, new faces emerged. Brotherhood members made large fortunes from the import of Afghanistan hash, selling it from a center on small street called Woodland Drive. The Brotherhood house burned down after a hookah filled with the best “prima” tipped over. Brotherhood members and Afghani royalty escaped the flames.

ln the Sunshine field, Nick Sand and Timothy Scully were the original suppliers, claiming to have produced the “improved ” acid homologue ALD-52.

By the of the decade, some 35 million doses of LSD-brown from oxidation and decomposition-had come via that European lab of Ronald Stark, presently a fugitive. The largest amount of this appeared on the West Coast late in 1970 (hence the designation “Christmas acid”).

With more people having bad trips as the result of this new impure LSD Leary, at this point, remarked, “The challenge to the dealer is not only must his product be pure and spiritual but he himself must reflect the human light he represents. Therefore, never buy dope, never purchase sacrament from a person that hasn’t got the qualities that you aspire for.”

Here is the poem which I hope you enjoy reading as I did reading it for the second time 24 year later.

It is the summer of new beginnings
It is the summer of never endings
It is the summer of always being
It is the summer that I became part of you

All my life there was a hole in me
Now I am completed
Simple words that say much
Simple words for the unheard
Simple words of many feelings
Simple words weave varied tapestries
All my life I searched for you
Through rooms and fields of loneliness

It was the winter of my dark night
It was the winter of my burden
It was the winter that my heart cried out
It was the winter without an answer

Then there was that glimpse of certainty
Then at last the sky began to clear
The winds welcomed warm weather
And the ease of simple living

It is the summer of changing seasons
It is the summer of spiritual movement
It is the summer of only once
It is the summer of new love

Bruce Eisner, August 1987, Santa Cruz, Californa

Twenty two years ago,  I published Ecstasy The MDMA Story. It was the first comprehensive overview of a drug which had been legal until 1985. I was able to use the drug and to observe its effects on different groups of people.

I wrote the book in 1987 and 1988 and it was published in 1989. A second edition was published in 1993. It has sold almost 100,000 copies since then

You can buy a copy at Amazon here.

Prose Poem Love_Lights@Leary-Eisner.Com My car pulled up to the large ranch house on a cul-de-sac in the Beverly Hills neighborhood. It was a house that I have visited scores of times in the past 12 years — continue reading here.

I am adding to my poetry online poetry collection. They will be published as posts rather than in PDF format to make them more accessible.

These are the original poems I presented here.

Here are some poems sampled from various parts of my life. They are presented in PDF form as to preserve their formatting.

Remember the Connection Santa Cruz, CA Fall 1984

Haiku, Los Angeles, 1968

Hornsby Desolate Sunny Cliffs in August Hornsby Island, Vancouver Canada 1998

Hungry Santa Cruz, CA 1984

Water and Fire and I Topanga Canyon, 1971

Time Already Passed Me By

Time has already swept me into oblivion
As I write these words there is no one to write them
The person who I think I am has been fabricated
From shards of dreams and the froth of chaos

Although it would be great if I was special
I know that would be delusion
I long to know some answers
About this life and universe I find myself

Early memories of separation
Reels and episodes spin in my mind’s eye
Imprints upon celluloid or the stuff that matter is made of
Even the thoughts from which these words come

All I am left with are my own conclusions
Always subject to revision
The archetype strains to twist the play
To the requirements of its form

Time flows in and out
An insane river meandering through life without mercy
Leaving me yearning for a succession of realities
Each without fruition

If I had known that my youth would be so epoch
I would have given it more attention
Its almost as if someone was watching it all
Reveling in my innocence

Though I write this within the bounds of time
My words know that I am already gone
The guy who dreamed of a better world
Must acknowledge inevitable limitations

Sometimes along the riverbank
I was able to pause make camp and revel
But now those pleasures too are past
So I can’t give you any answers

Bruce Eisner

Note: Images from Chaos@UMD

A Call For A Psychedelic Sanctuary — Updated
by Bruce Eisner

Wooden ships on the water very free and easy
Easy you know the way it’s supposed to be
Silver people on the shoreline leave us be
Very free and easy
Sail away where the morning sun goes high
Sail away where the wind blows sweet and young birds fly
Take a sister THEN by her hand
Lead her far from this barren land
Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cry and
Stare as all you human feelings die
We are leaving
You don’t need us

DAVID CROSBY — CROSBY, STILLS AND NASH

Play the Song Windows Media

MANIFESTO

Four decades have passed since fresh winds of change blew our nation and around the world. In Wooden Ships, David Crosby and his friends wanted to catch some those favorable breezes and ”keep the party going.”

The winds turned icy cold as the decade ended and nobody got out alive.

The 1960s were an extraordinary period – a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some kind of pill which seemed to magically transform. The cultural icon of the man in the thin gray flannel suit with a drink in his hand gave way to the image of a different kind of cocktail party – the kind they had on the popular TV show “Laugh In.”

They were having  drinks laced with a different kind of rum. It was not the rum that young John Kennedy’s elders had run in from Cuba in the Thirties that made the Sixties parties swing.  The decade of Old Ike with its stolid and stuffy attitude had given way to a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the kind of reaction that it would bring forth.

The sixties were a kid of American Glasnot. Roles and ways of doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into town and threatened to overturn “Jim Crow” discriminatory laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the earth began using the word “ecology” (heretofore reserved for those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often symbolized by the “Whole Earth” as seen by the first humans to orbit the earth. And of course, with the advent of birth control pills, there was the sexual revolution-before the tragedy of AIDS.

It was a period marked by so much cultural change that the highly respected historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this period in American history: “I have been visiting the United States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty.”

Of course, it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few physical side effects, was discovered in Basil, Switzerland during the dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic bomb.

Just as Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press in the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed by the monks, so now the same mass production machines that had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were turning out insight pills a kind of mass-produced Holy Grail handed to somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and 1970). The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley’s well-described “doors of perception,” stepping out of Plato’s cave to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any generation before it. The mystical experience, from being something reserved for saints, became available on sugar cubes.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their unconscious-a kind of virtual Disneyland. But for a few, it took on a significance that they called “mystical” or “religious.” It was these profound experiences which led a large segment of the Boomer generation to a commitment to altruism and idealistic pursuits that were to become the passion during what is often referred to as the “Psychedelic Sixties.” In many, that commitment to change has never really faded.

The Psychedelic Movement, as it came to be known by some, grew from a small intellectual elite-composed mainly of writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London-into a mass movement which involved the “best minds of [their] generation,” including college students and open-minded people of all ages. This movement provided a catalyst for many changes that occurred in our culture. The long-haired, bearded hippie with his or her open, loving ways was born as an American archetype as a result of the experiences and unique consciousness that resulted from the use of LSD on a grand scale.

Because these changes were sudden and profound, they were quickly viewed as a fundamental threat by powerful forces in our society which make up the economic, political, and other social strata we call The Establishment. In a rather successful effort to keep the genie in the bottle, they made possession and use of LSD and several other related psychedelic drugs serious crimes.

In making LSD illegal, which was formerly legal and available in powerful and pure forms, the Establishment was able to effectively freeze the fluid changes of the sixties. The Psychedelic Movement lost its ability to pass on to new generations the opportunity to have the powerful experiences that LSD had given them access to, leaving those that came after them to try new synthetic and botanical substitutes which are only a shadow of the real thing.

Despite the repressive actions of the powers that be, young people continued to be fascinated by the lifestyle and values represented by the Psychedelic Movement. Many sought out and some found psychedelic compounds-mainly the psilocybin mushroom and various synthetic compounds-and, although it was harder to find them, they remained determined and persisted. The followers of the Grateful Dead kept the hippie image by following their esteemed band “on tour” each year with the look and feel of the hippies.

Since the Dead’s demise, other bands attract this “rainbow hippie” following. The members of this youth movement used what compounds they could get and were able to gain an inkling of what the million-plus members of the Psychedelic Movement of the sixties had experienced. New generations maintained a faith and trust in the Psychedelic Movement — -treating psychedelic compounds as religious sacraments for all the years that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling that psychedelic compounds could not be protected under the rights given by the First Amendment. And those of us who had those powerful experiences three decades ago continue to value them and to be guided by them.

We million-plus who participated in the Movement gained an understanding of the transparency of the superficial TV show reality most people live their lives. For some these memories endure the p
assage of time. Many of us wondered what a world might be like in which psychedelics were as integral a part of society as traditional intoxicants like alcohol, coffee and tobacco. Some of us still wonder.

The influence of psychedelics permeated many aspects of our everyday life and permanently changed the way we live, love, work, and play. The impact that the Psychedelic Movement made on our culture appears everywhere, from the television commercials for Coors or Porsche that look like underground films from the sixties (complete with their computer-generated effects-impossible back then), to casual clothes in the workplace. Our language is less formal, and filled with the grooving vernacular of those heady times.

Our rock-n-roll society has adopted and made commonplace the rebellious symbols of the youth culture of the sixties. In addition, the tremendous technological advances in many areas give a science fiction veneer to our lives-making them somehow resemble the fast-paced mind acceleration characteristic of tripping. The connection between the cyberspace of computers and the shamanic space of vision quests is one example. The energies and mechanisms of new devices and gadgets we use today almost seem magical, just as our LSD trips once felt.

But while widespread adoption of sixties styles and the external advances in modern technology remain, the metamorphosis of a new culture which sometimes led LSD users in the sixties to think of themselves as a mutant species (“acid freaks”) fast evolving toward a dramatically different and vastly more humanistic society has long faded away.

Certainly there are social youth movements and alternative cultures and a small group of “entheogen enthusiasts” who collect autographed reproductions of seventies style blotter acid the way that some people collect postage stamps 

But few among these groups has a feeling  as many did in the sixties that a new culture is just around the next corner.

It was in the sixties that the laws against LSD and other psychedelics were first enacted. Laws against marijuana had been on the books for years but LSD was a much more powerful experience and played a central role in creating a large group with world views different from any that had come before it. (see “History of the Psychedelic Rediscovery” by various authors in the web’s Psychedelic Library.

For some who took it, LSD had such an impact that they believed it might provide insights of a similar magnitude in anyone who took it. There is the story told in High Priest by Timothy Leary of poet Alan Ginsberg’s taking psilocybin (an extract of the “magic mushroom” synthesized by LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and used in early experiments at Harvard with psychedelic compounds). Ginsberg became convinced that if he could get John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to take LSD, it would end the Cold War; after not being able to get the telephone operators to connect him to either man, he slowly returned to the realities of 1962.

In a way, this kind of thinking colored many of even the most conservative leaders of the Psychedelic Movement. Although known to believe that LSD should be kept for the intellectual elite, even Huxley, in a speech delivered in Copenhagen, Denmark, speculated on a “mass experiment” of social LSD- taking as a remedy to the disturbing directions our society was taking.

However, whether an experiment of mass LSD use would have turned out differently if the Vietnam War had not been part of the scenario will never be known. Those opposed to the war advocated LSD use for everyone as a “weapon” against the US government. If LSD had instead been used as a personal development tool, the urgency to spread LSD use might have been mitigated with the result being a smoother integration into society (fewer “freak outs,” etc).

But LSD was politicized and its image with the public deeply scarred by its association with the anti-war movement. The same kind of social transparency that people felt toward some of the mundane and even violent games people play was magnified when people examined from an altered consciousness the terrible costs incurred by the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. This in turn made the Establishment, already threatened by the challenge to their traditional values by LSD, even harsher in their counterattack on the Psychedelic Revolution. After all, many of those in power felt; these people (the anti-Vietnam policy hippies) were akin to traitors.

There was a split back then in the ranks of the Psychedelic Movement between those who were committed political activists and those who saw LSD more as part of an apolitical spiritual path. There were the famous Hippies vs. Yippies debates and efforts to reconcile them such as the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco. Those not specifically political in their participation in the youth culture imagined that when the war was over and society has progressed, LSD and marijuana would join alcohol as socially sanctioned drugs, and that some of the new ways of relating which they had learned using LSD would be assimilated into our society as a whole.

However, as one of those who looked forward with idealism and an expectation of rapid change, I don’t think in my wildest dreams I could have imagined the “War on Drugs.” In the thirty-three years since I first puffed a joint, there has been a trend toward marijuana decriminalization (it certainly is by no means accepted). On the other hand, LSD has been put in the same category as powerfully addictive drugs-heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines, and new drugs such as MDMA-as a threat to the health and safety of our citizens.

As the sixties ended and the seventies began, when Nixon left office and Jimmy Carter became president, there was a sense that there might be some change in the attitudes of government toward drugs. But as soon as Ronald Reagan took office, that hope was quickly dashed. Reagan and his wife Nancy had always been firmly opposed to drugs, and Nancy actively joined the War on Drugs; her “Just Say No” campaign was her personal contribution to the administration.

There were many elements at play here. Reagan was an old Cold Warrior and as the threat from Communists both at home and in the Soviet Union ended, he felt we needed a new enemy to turn our attention to. A new internal enemy to fight was the drug dealer and the drug user became that enemy. While their rhetoric was targeted toward all the major drugs we mentioned above, it is probably no coincidence that the purity and price of cocaine and heroin has decreased by a factor of ten since the War on Drugs scaled up while the availability and purity of LSD and other psychedelics has plummeted. During the years when the Grateful Dead scene threatened to keep the spirit of the Psychedelic Revolution alive, the DEA even started an Operation Deadhead to make sure that there would be no resurgence of the “craziness” of the sixties.

Because of it was used by many more people than Huxley, Leary, or Hofmann ever could have imagined or approved of, LSD gained a public image as a “crazy-making” drug, an image that has been engraved so deeply and is reinforced by the media so frequently that it is almost impossible that it can be rehabilitated in the public mind anytime soon.

As the Berlin Wall fell (perhaps partially the result of the Psychedelic Movement and its effects upon tolerance among the younger generation), the drug user has replaced the Communist as the identified threat to our society and our youth. So we must hide away to use our sacraments, and read underground magazines, and fight the propaganda war fueled by government billions-with their prime time TV commercials and school DA
RE programs -with a few Web sites and small circulation newsletters like Island Views.

The government is waging a war on us. According to the I-Ching (hexagram 33) sometimes the best strategy for later victory is to retreat. It is my belief that we need to go elsewhere and establish a place where a culture can be formed that allows for the use of psychedelic compounds as part of its social contract. So this is a call to found a psychedelic sanctuary somewhere in the world-perhaps somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, far from U.S. politics-in which those of us in the Psychedelic Movement can feel at home and make a homeland.

Island Foundation and its previous incarnation, the Psychedelic Education Center (founded in 1977), was the earliest organization aimed at furthering the cause of the Psychedelic Revolution. So it is fitting that Island Foundation makes the founding of a psychedelic sanctuary our primary mission.

In the years since our founding, many other organizations have been formed; each with a specific set of agendas which, they believe, will help put the Psychedelic Movement back on track. These include MAPS and the Heftner Foundation which both hope to get psychedelic research going again (there were over 4000 studies with LSD before it was made illegal in 1966); the Albert Hofmann Foundation which hopes to build a psychedelic library; and the Council for Spiritual Practices which aims at making a legitimate religion of the use of LSD and other “entheogens” as they call psychedelic compounds.

None of these groups have been particularly effective in changing the extremely negative climate in which psychedelics continue to find themselves. Yet each of them would benefit enormously through the establishment of a psychedelic sanctuary somewhere in the world. Such a sanctuary could have research parks for both MAPS and the Heftner Foundation, permit the Council for Spiritual Practices to practice their religion, and allow for the creation of a library and museum in the name of the great Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann.

Since we put on the “LSD-A Generation Later” Conference in 1977 and the Future of Consciousness Conference in 1980, there have been an increasing number of annual events in which members of the Psychedelic Revolution, many now in their forties and fifties, assemble to hear speakers talk about various aspects of psychedelics and entheogenic plants. These conferences also would find our new sanctuary outfitted with facilities enabling people such as Jonathan Ott and Rob Montgomery to hold meetings with a new degree of safety.

Looking at the larger picture, organizations aiming for the decriminalization of all drugs, including the powerful Drug Policy Alliance have attempted
to promote a harm-reduction strategy-popular in Europe and much of the rest of the civilized world-here in the U.S. They have had some limited success but with the recent victory of George W. Bush, I don’t think that we can look for drug decriminalization as a national strategy any time soon. There will be progress but unless something unforeseen occurs, these changes will progress at a glacial speed.

In the early days of the Psychedelic Movement, many of the leaders attempted to found sanctuaries in other places-including Mexico and the Caribbean. They had limited success, I believe, because they chose to stick so close to the United States with its powerful control mechanisms. Later, the group leased a large estate at Millbrook, New York, and so was born the first of the efforts to build a community around visions emanating from the Psychedelic Revolution. As the revolution expanded, these communes and co-operative experiments proliferated.

Two years after the founding of Millbrook, the residents found themselves under siege by G. Gordon Liddy. Later in that decade, most of the rest of the hundreds of efforts at building a representative psychedelic culture dissolved due either to their own internal problems or negative forces aimed at them from the larger community. Several books, including The Modern Utopian (edited by Richard Fairfield), describe many of these fascinating, diverse efforts at creating something new right here in the good old USA.

A few of these efforts remain, most noteworthy the Farm in Tennessee, but also a handful of others. There is also an organization dedicated to intentional communities that publishes an annual guide to literally hundreds of communal efforts. What is different, however, is that psychedelics are rarely a part of this new generation of experimental communities. Even the Farm-famous for its excellent weed-has an official rule against smoking marijuana. We will discuss more about the quest for a utopian community in part two of this essay.

The desire for new vistas for the “heads” of our time became in the 1970s even- shall we say-”further out.” At various times Tim Leary advocated building a starship to carry the hippie masses to a new star and even had the Jefferson Airplane-turned Jefferson Starship-singing the anthem. Later, after his release from jail, Leary decided that putting the heads in high orbiting space habitats might be a more immediate possibility. As we can see by the state of our current space efforts, he was perhaps forty or more year ahead of his time. The feeble attempts at a space station in the year 2000 hardly look like fit housing for psychedelic refugees.

Along with the strong bonds of group identity that the psychedelic community felt in the sixties, there was a strain of thought that perhaps the only way to live the way we want was to go somewhere else. In the sixties, Crosby Stills, and Nash made famous the song “Wooden Ships” which suggests we set sail and find a “distant” land. “We are leaving; you don’t need us” was their refrain. Indeed, we still aren’t wanted and that distant land still beckons. The mutant genes that carried our forefathers from England need new soil.

We who were the youth generation that comprised the Psychedelic Revolution are now middle-aged. We are an important segment of the huge Baby Boom generation- the population explosion that followed World War II. We went to Woodstock, we dropped in and had careers, and many raised families. Many have not forgotten their idealistic past, and our income supports many projects which we all hope in some way may improve the current situation.

I propose in this manifesto for a sanctuary, that Island Foundation set up a separate account to raise capital to purchase the land and build the facilities for a psychedelic sanctuary. Before the account is set up, there would be a committee formed to look into two important issues:

The legalities of such a sanctuary with regard to international law. The United Nations and its related World Health Organization attempt to enforce drug laws internationally. Considerations such as this must be taken into account as they relate to the feasibility of the project as well as to the decisions regarding the acquisition of the sanctuary.

. The availability of an island or island property with the proper requirements for the creation of the psychedelic sanctuary must be investigated. A German broker, Dr. Farhad Vladi, has sold over 700 islands over the past ten years and there are currently 3000 on the market.

Once these two items have been clearly understood, the committee would project a budget
, and a separate “lock-box” account administered by two Island members would be formed, in which all tax-free donations would be kept and not used for any purpose until a fixed amount of money was raised. The committee would determine the amount needed to fund the project used for any purpose and no money would be withdrawn until the committee determined there would be sufficient funds to purchase the land and build the facilities for the island. Of course, all contributions would be tax-deductible and could be placed in an interest-bearing account, which would leverage our contributions.

A study committee would be formed to decide the exact requirements for being allowed to go to the island, and also to define some of the parameters-economic, political, social, and ethical – by which the island’s psychedelic sanctuary should function. In fact, there might be two portions of the island, a welcoming area that would be the place where outsiders would first visit, and one or more experimental community areas where the actual Huxley experiment, detailed in his novel Island, would take place.

UTOPIA

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. Oscar Wilde

In the preceding Manifesto portion of this article, I call on those of us who are part of the psychedelic/etheogenic/alternative culture community to get behind a real-world project of creating a sanctuary far from US shores “where we can laugh again”, as Crosby, Stills and Nash would have put it.
In my initial vision for the project, I see the project having multiple sub-projects and roles, including being a site for conferences, a research park, a 21st Century Esalan, a library and museum and several others.

However, one portion of the Island would be dedicated to what I call the Huxley project. That is — the creation of an experimental community — along the lines that Huxley envisioned in Island. Not necessarily Utopia but a good safe place to live and raise your children. So now, let’s turn to the question of what that kind of place might be like.

In an interview which I conducted with Laura Huxley in 1994 (Island Views No. 3 and also http://www.island.org/ive/3), we discussed briefly some of the ideas around the founding of a psychedelic community based on Aldous Huxley’s Island. I have liberally excerpted from the interview:

Laura Huxley (L.H.) Aldous spoke about this revolution sixty-two years ago, when he wrote Brave New World. He showed us the danger of a mechanized society without ethics and without vision. Many people thought then that Brave New World was incredible or grotesque; we know now that some of its prophecy (for instance overpopulation and over-organization) is true now much, much sooner than Aldous thought. In the last years of his life, he wrote Island, the description of a society whose citizens are given all the possibilities to develop their creative potentialities. Bruce Eisner (B.E.): There was an anthropologist that had studied some tribe on an island and they had discovered-I remember this from Aldous’s audio tapes- where they raised the children without inflicting any fear on them.

L.H.: Oh, that’s right. Education through fear is less effective than education through recognition of good behavior. Moreover, much of psychotherapy is the attempt to lessen the damaging and sometimes tragic and anti-social consequences of fear and punishment. In Island’s education there was recognition of the fact that there are many kinds of different energies within us-Aldous said that we are “multiple amphibians.” The children were made aware with theater games and dances that they could use and transfer their negative energy in a positive, even a creative, way.

B. E.: In your book, This Timeless Moment, you say that the book Island was misunderstood-that it was not a science fiction story, but a guide for living based on the way you lived . . .

L.H.: Well, I didn’t say exactly that. Yes, we used some of the principles. Like Brave New World was used to describe methods to induce unawareness and passive obedience, in Island methods and recipes were used by a population thinking and acting interdependently-with awareness, choice, and responsibility for their actions. Many of these recipes were not invented. They had already been tried in different times and by different cultures and were found effective and beneficial.

B. E.: We were talking before about how Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World back in the 1930s, and then, of course, thirty years later, wrote Island. Which of these two novels do you think this last three decades has validated more?

L.H.: Unfortunately it has validated Brave New World more than Island, but I understand-although I am not in contact with-I understand that there are some small communes that try to incorporate Island in their lives. I think that for one person that has read Island; probably there are a hundred that have read Brave New World. Brave New World is in the schools-you have to read it. .

B.E.: Right, and then there is Brave New World Revisited (a collection of essays published by Huxley as a follow up on the trends described in Brave New World), where he touched on all the different things that have come true.

L.H.: That’s right. Already, in ’58 or ’59-those years.

B. E.: What would you like to see from a group named after the novel Island? Would you imagine an Island Group would be a safe place where people could explore a wider range of relationships?

L.H.: Oh, absolutely, yes! An Island Group could adopt the methods described in Island. It can be done in a village. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child, and it is true. In a small village, a child can go out alone and visit small and adult friends. A child alone in the streets of Los Angeles is in danger both from adults and other children. You know about children being killed in the streets by other children.

They have handguns and machine guns. When they are little they are given for Christmas these war toys-a lovely way to celebrate the birth of a savior. So very soon they want to have a real gun, and when they have it they use it. People make money by selling guns to children and very young people.

Then we are surprised that they use them. But in a village where a few families have read and agreed with the method of education described in Island, a child could go out and even leave his family for a few days. Do you remember the mutual adoption club? Each family has two or three adoptive families where the child can go and take a vacation from his own family, who might also need a vacation from him.

There is so much which can be done with a small group who wants to grow its children in a safe place. This group must really have something basic in common to start a village of this kind. And now with the technological advances, it might be possible to make a living without going into the city. In Island the children have not only a loving family but also a sane environment in which to grow.

A village, a small and open group, and a sane environment-these are some of the essential elements required for the gestation of an Island community. Huxley’s novel, published in 1961, was his attempt to describe a “utopian” society that allows for the integration of the principles and ideas he had discovered during his life’s studies including the use of psychedelic or “Moksha medicine” as he calls it in Island. .

The communes of the sixties were not the first experiments in creating a different w
ay of living, just as Island is not the first attempt at creating a plan for a better society. Ever since the birth of human consciousness and culture, there have been those who have imagined and even planned better ways that we could live together on this planet from the beginnings of history. The pursuit of these dreams; speculations, proposals, fictions, texts, and ideas has sometimes been called “utopian” after the sixteenth-century novel by Sir Thomas Moore. Utopia is a composite of two Greek words: Eutopia (meaning “good place”) and Outopia (meaning “no place”) — which was meant to evoke the irony of the very concept that we very imperfect creatures inhabiting a planet in constant flux and change could ever aspire to live in a perfect world.

But utopian thinking or planned social change does not have to assume that what we are attempting to create is a perfect society. Certainly we would be satisfied to find ourselves in a society in which each of us can realize more of our complete potential and live a happier, more fulfilled life.
Indeed, the great documents that led to the founding of the United States-the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution-were politically-focused attempts at creating a better society, and most will agree on their better days that we have achieved some of these goals.

During the nineteenth century, the social thinkers reacting to the excesses of industrial capitalism that dominated that time conjectured about people living together communally. When the economic theories of socialism first found strong interest, there were attempts to form communes and collectives organized according to these precepts. None of the experiments have lasted but these attempts demonstrated that there are some individuals who are willing to take great risks, including changing their entire way of living, in the hopes that we can find a better way of living together.

While some social experiments just don’t make it and quietly fade away, others fail more with a bang than a whimper. The former Soviet Union was an example of an enormous experiment based on some of the same principles, which had motivated the smaller communal efforts of the previous century, but which instead of producing the Utopia conceived by Marx and later by Lenin produced an opposite-a dystopia on a massive scale. Although it used socialist principles, it relied on the top-down hierarchy, the totalitarian power which was inherited from Russia’s czarist tradition.

But it was also in the twentieth century that a new collective vision of the planet and its culture was born. Marilyn Ferguson gave this movement the name the Aquarian Conspiracy while Theodore Roszak wrote about The Making of the Counter Culture. And, noting the changes to our relationship to our planet, Charles A. Reich wrote The Greening of America.

Some of the ideas of Ferguson, Reich, and Roszak have been around for many centuries. Countercultures such the Bohemians and Beats have popped up throughout the last century and were preceded by smaller and more localized movements throughout recorded history. Similarly, attempts at developing movements based on whole systems thinking and organic models have been with us for a long time too, but found great impetus in the composite visions of several million individuals who used LSD from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. As we described above, the search for Utopia took the form of hundreds of community and communal efforts.

Visionary experiences like those which LSD provided have been with humans since our species first gained the ability to be conscious, and it was perhaps the psychedelic plants that led to human consciousness in the first place.

As we pointed out earlier, what was new about the Psychedelic Movement was that for the first time large numbers of people had access to experiences which previously had come either through gratuitous grace or chewing on bitter Peyote buttons.

It was Osmond and Huxley who encouraged Timothy Leary and his colleagues at Harvard University to conduct experiments with psychedelics there. Leary and his fellows began to believe that a wider use of LSD might help keep the world safe from the dangers posed by the Cold War with its nuclear arms race. Leary decided to go public with psychedelics and is said to have broken with Huxley on this point, although it is clear from many of his writings that Huxley, too, shared the belief that psychedelics might be necessary if humans would continue to advance as a species.

The diversity of ideas gave way to the enormous social forces of the Sixties which we have described above. From a small group of ivory tower psychedelic cognoscenti in 1962, their number increased to 1% of the American population by 1964 who had tried LSD and, of course, unleashed some of the powerful forces we have described above.

The fact that LSD was so powerful and that a huge number of doses could be manufactured from a single gram of the substance allowed for it to be spread much more widely than, say, mescaline, the active ingredient of peyote (which had been first manufactured in 1897 but which did not serve as the catalyst for any sort of large movement). The technology of chemistry had evolved to the point that it could mass manufacture the Philosopher’s Stone and modern media including television, music, and motion pictures allowed for the myths of this new revolution of the mind to be spread quickly around the globe. By the time these turned-on youth reached Woodstock, they were more than a half a million strong and they seemed like they would take over the world.

Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, an excellent history of the Psychedelic Movement, ends in 1970. In fact, if the author were to do a revision, there would not be that much more to write. Thirty years have passed since those heady days. While the rave and trance youth movements have attempted carry on the spirit of the hippies, their temporary autonomous zones last only a night.

Aldous Huxley believed that LSD and the psychedelics allowed us to reach a transcendental state during our actual lives often ascribed by religions to an afterlife. So after completing his essays in Brave New World Revisited, warning of a totalitarian future, he spent the next few years thinking and writing about how people might live together “sensibly.” As Laura above points out, the novel Island that resulted from this literary thought experiment might serve as a good starting point for experiments that we would conduct on a portion of our psychedelic sanctuary.

In 1994 when I founded Island Web, I soon ran into a young computer science student named Mike Markowski. Mike had done a web site based on Island and I liked it so much I made it a major feature of the Island Web. You can find it by going to Island Web and clicking on Huxley’s Vision.

While Island is a work of fiction, it is the vehicle Huxley used to communicate his ideas about how people in a good society would interact with each other and their environment. These Web pages do not offer a literary critique of the novel, analyzing symbolism, or even summarizing the novel. The plot is a wonderful story in its own right, and it’s best to read the book, not a synopsis, to fully enjoy it. The goal here is to simply present Huxley’s underlying ideas and philosophies upon which the novel is built.

Just as many science-oriented movies start off with a child being taught something, or a news program or some educational device really for the benefit of the viewer, Huxley has his own “news reel” in Island so that the setting and
events in the story are understood in context. The people of Pala (which is the island the title refers to) live their lives based on ideas representing the best that Eastern and Western philosophies have to offer. Neither philosophy is quite enough on its own, or maybe is too much to live a full, balanced life. And it so happens that Pala’s philosophies result from the hard work and combined ideas of two founding fathers, one a Buddhist and the other an analytical medical doctor. Together they developed principles which the then-leader, (the Rajah) of Pala wrote down and entitled: “Notes on What’s What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What’s What.” This is the tool Huxley provides so that we, the readers, can be educated in the principles underlying society on Pala (Mike pulls the notes together into a formal text, which can be found in this section of the Web site).

A friend, Will Penna recently introduced me to a fascinating book, A Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. The authors describe a great number of fictional and mythological villages, cities, countries, lost continents, and such. In about two and a half pages of small double column type, the author gives a concise and lucid description of Huxley’s Pala. I will be asking the author for permission to publish it on our Web site but here are a few excerpts, pulled from a much longer text, which gives a flavor of the various aspects of Pala that can serve as a foundation and starting place for our psychedelic sanctuary’s traditions:

The Palanese are pacifists and have never had an army. There are no prisons on Pala. The island is traditionally a constitutional monarchy. Politically, Pala is a federation of decentralized self-governing units. There is no press monopoly. A panel of editors represents various groups and interests-each is given set space for arguments and comments-and the reader is left to draw his own conclusions. The economic system is a cooperative one based on mutual aid with a credit system modeled on nineteenth- century credit unions. As the population is relatively small, there is sufficient surplus. Enough gold is produced to back the currency and supplement exports. Expensive equipment is paid for in cash. There is silver, gold, and copper currency for internal use.

The Palanese religion is Buddhism, which arrived from Bengal and Tibet in the seventh century AD. It has Tantric elements and also has been influenced by Shivism. Palanese Buddhism does not lead to renunciation of the world or to a search for nirvana; it leads to an acceptance of the world. Everything seen, tasted, heard, or touched becomes an aid to the liberation of the self.

At the age of four or five all children undergo intensive physical and psychological testing. Potential criminals or problem children are identified and given appropriate treatment. According to Palanese medicine, criminality is the result of endocrine imbalance and is to be treated as such. Potential bullies for instance are encouraged to divert their wish for power into socially useful activities such as cutting wood, mining, or sailing.

Moksha, a powerful hallucinatory drug derived from mushrooms, lends its name to one of Pala’s most important ceremonies. The drug is known as the “reality revealer.” It produces a state similar to that reached by deep meditation, allowing a heightened perception of reality. Moksha also affects areas of the brain which are normally “inactive,” allowing immediate access to the subconscious and providing the equivalent of a mystical experience. The use of Moksha, the Palanese say, can take the user to heaven, hell, or beyond, allowing visions of what some forms of Buddhism term “the clear light of the void.” The Moksha ceremony is an initiation ceremony and takes place in the temple (described in great detail). During the service, young men and women offer a rock-climbing accomplishment to Shiva and then through the use of the drug, experience liberation from themselves.

******* *******
The island has a very low rate of neurosis and cardiovascular troubles, thanks largely to the use of preventive medicine on all fronts from psychological help to controlled diet.

******* *******
The family organization of Pala is unusual. Everyone belongs to a mutual adoption club consisting of fifteen to twenty five couples of all ages who adopt each other in the form of an extended family. When a child finds his natural family becoming restrictive or unpleasant, he or she migrates to another home within the extended family.

******* ******
Education in Pala is based on helping children to understand the logic and structure of the subject before moving on to its general applications. Ecology is seen as important subject and is seen as the basis of ethics; man can only live on the earth if he treats it with compassion. Elementary ecology leads rapidly to elementary Buddhism. Children are introduced to the concepts of “suchness” and Buddhism in preparation for the Moksha initiation.

******* ******

We are now at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In four decades, some two generations have been born and grown up since the days of hula-hoops, John F. Kennedy, screaming teens outside of Beatles concerts, and young Professor Leary at Harvard. Certainly the sixties had its phony parts, and its excesses are part of what destroyed its momentum.

But those of us who grew up back then and have been involved in the Psychedelic Movement know that underneath all of that “fluff” is a set of important truths, ethics, and principles. As the world’s population soars from the three billion people who inhabited the earth when I was born to the over six billion alive now to the projected twelve billion which will be here by 2040 according to the current predictions, it is possible that we may see civilization as we know it fade. It is possible that with so many people, technology will not be able to keep up with our overall growth and we may experience a new Dark Ages.

Large numbers of people will be subjected to more control and regimentation with the goal of making them better consumers rather than more enlightened people.

This essay and Island Foundation, like the novel Island it got its name from, are not just about taking psychedelics. Psychedelics happen to be a powerful tool which opens people up to new ideas and ancient wisdom. Island Foundation’s goal, like Huxley’s in writing Island, is to synthesize these ideas and form something new and better.

We must take steps now to keep our torch burning in the potential darkness and to re-ignite the spirit that brought so many changes four decades ago. So in this manifesto, I call on the members of Island Foundation, the psychedelic/entheogen community, and all of those of you who find some sense in these words to get involved.

Note: We humbly apologize for not crediting David Banton for his transcription of Ram Dass' “Brave World or Island?” published in the last Island Views. We thank David for the transcript that follows.

My car pulled up to the large ranch house on a cul-de-sac in the Beverly Hills neighborhood — a house that I have visited scores of times in the past 12 years — since Timothy Leary had moved there from Laurel Canyon in 1984. In the past year, Leary has put up a web site offering a tour of this house.

As you walk in, you are struck by the amounts of striking art pieces hung on the walls — gifts Tim has received from psychedelically-inspired artists grateful for his role in their work's evolution.

Leary: Bruce, first of all, I wanted to express all the love that my friends in Santa Cruz sent with me. Everybody has a great amount of gratitude for all of the things you've said and done all these years. I just want to say that at the beginning.

In the past year, Leary has put up a web site (http://www.leary.com) which uses the house's layout as a metaphor for navigating this web site’s features: the video room for How to Operate Your Brain, Tim's great multimedia essay on the global village future, for example.

In previous visits to Timothy's home, we often sat out on the patio, which has a majestic, panoramic view of Hollywood. On his web site, you can run a video which will give you a chance to share this experience.

In the livingroom, you see some of Leary's art collection — or can visit the Art Room, a constantly-changing gallery of art by Timothy's friends, plus a life-spanning set of photos of Leary . . . covering stages of his life from childhood, to Harvard, to the 'Sixties, all the way up to current photos from the past couple for years.

Also in the livingroom, you can chat on a variety of topics with people sharing the site. Or read the Global Village Voice, edited by Zach Leary, and get the latest on developments with Tim, including his current health status.

Tim's current health is what makes made this visit so much different than all the other visits. In late 1994, Tim announced that he had prostate cancer, a cancer that had spread throughout his body. Although we have been friends for twenty years, I never asked Tim for an interview before. I decided to interview him, to get some of his last thoughts on topics of special interest to me — areas which our readers share, and not covered by the many mainstream media interviews that have been conducted since his announcement.

Zach Leary greeted me at the door. While we waited for Tim to wake up, we sat by a familiar yellow and green Mexican table and chatted for about a half an hour. Zach told me that it was a good time to interview Timothy, because there was nobody in the house except for us — which he told me was rare.

I had been given an old but "broadcast quality" tape recorder by a friend in Santa Cruz who produces a local interview show — with the hope she could air the interview. I asked Tim if it was OK to interview him. He agreed and I set up the recorder and tested it. It didn't work! Nothing I could do would make it work, and I soon found myself tangled in a mass of wires from the mike and power supply.

Determined to move forward, I set off into Hollywood and returned with an inexpensive Sony recorder with built-in microphone. However, when I returned, my notes and other equipment had been scattered about — and a cryonics freezing tank had been set up where the table had been.

There were a dozen new people in the house — including Trudy Truelove, Tim's secretary, Deane, his aide and nurse, David Prince, coauthor on a new book, Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip, Vicki Marshal, a novelist friend of Timothy's, and three people from the cryonics company. Zach wheeled Tim out to the displaced Mexican table. Without my notes, with cryonics people pounding on hammers and installing the cryonics tank, and with half a dozen people coming in and out of the vicinity talking, joking and sporadically checking in with Tim, I turned on the tape recorder:

Leary: And I'd like to say at the beginning that I think we all know that Santa Cruz is a very special, special city on this planet. There's a higher ratio of enlightened cybernetic and psychedelic people in that area per capita than any place in the world by far, so I consider myself an honorary member of the community. I'm with you!

B: In Exo-Psychology and several other books you wrote in the late '70s to early '80s you talked a great deal about your eight-circuit theory of the brain. More recently you've been talking about the effects of computers on the culture, and the media on the culture and so forth.

How do you feel about your eight-circuit theory of the brain and how would it apply to 1996?

L: Well, number one, anytime you set up a classification system it has to be open to change. By definition, we have to revise it.

B: Yeah, you started with seven levels, and then you got to eight circuits.

L: Yeah, and I hope we get to 12! There's nothing sacred. Now, what is the eighth circuit?

B: The eighth is the neurological fusion with the . . .

L: Is it? My memory was that the fifth had to do with the sensual, right, and the sixth was –

B: Neuroelectric . . .

L: Yeah, that's cybernetic.

B: So we're moving from that . . .

L: And the seventh is genetics, where you're getting into genes, implanting, and changing there and see, it moved away from electricity and into the real situation which is genes . . . and after that we talked about all the systems of the Orientals, Asians, and Western, like the Harvard salons of William James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reich was very big there.

So, it's been taken around the ultimate point of, sort of flash light illumination, and now we can do that, because we have the technological equipment and we can do that. I have a painting here in this house which was done with a flashlight, which is a first eighth-circuit expression, work of art. The guy's using a flashlight and going around pointing it around and taking pictures of where his flashlight lands, where his light lands.

B: In one of your most recent books, Chaos and Cyberculture, you characterize the last millennium as the Christian millennium.

L: Starting when?

B: Starting 1,000 years ago — perhaps it might be more like 2,000 years ago when it started?

L: The idea of feudalism started somewhere about 500 BC. Basically they say that feudalism went until Gutenberg, the 15th Century, and that's where the feudal is: basically hand mediate, lift that bale, lift that pyramid stone, and all that. It moved into the mechanical, and then every kid could have a book, and every kid has the power to read and write, and it was the invention of that technology that made that possible. So the new era started with Gutenburg and the industrial, and it goes up to the 20th century when you got radio, television. Now it's digital and . . .

B: You called the next millennium the “millennium of the new paganism.”

L: Well, that's a bumpersticker.

B: A bumpersticker — just a catch-all?

L: I have to preface this interaction with the statement that don't believe anything I say, I'm throwing ideas out there to look at. The last thing I want is someone taking notes while I lecture. I long for an interaction back and forth. That goes way back, basically to the psychology of Harry Stack Sullivan in the '50s and '60s, interpersonal. And that goes back to quantum physics where they say it's all a field and no electron can live by hirself, it has to have another electron to send and receive, so it's always being back and forth.

 We were applying this at Harvard, in the interpersonal stuff at Kaiser, the principles of quantum physics, field stuff, getting interactions from everybody, everybody's rating everybody else, that's how psychologists interpret things.

B: Before that everybody just looking at the individual . . .

L: You had the doctors who were looking, and the rest of us were listening. I'm exaggerating too, that's part of the profession.

B: Let's move 100 ahead, to 2096. How do you think that people are going to be living differently, how is all of this going to impact ordinary lives?

L: I think it’s futile to make such a long range prediction, so much is going to happen. It's the next 10 years that are going to be clearly important, I think.

B: Just the next ten?

L: What is developing right now, is it all goes back to McLuhan, I'm rolling out a big banner now which says “Viva McLuhan.” He predicted it all, he talked about the global village, meaning the kid in Kyoto would be on-line with the kids in Paris and Mississippi.

I want to tell you a little story. Last night, in my bedroom studio, for six hours we had a television screen showing, uh, beamed in from Tokyo. I was watching this studio of my friends in Tokyo, and our partner Chris [editors note: Christopher Gray, of the video production company Retinalogic, and Tim's webmaster] is there, (Chris waves at us)

We fooled around for awhile and then we'd go away. It was going for six hours, and it's no big deal. Tokyo is on my screen live, and every now and then somebody'd come over and I'd take my flashlight and point it at him and make myself disappear, and then I would talk back and forth. Now that's the future.

B: CU-C-ME? Is that what it was?

L: Yeah. And you'll explain to your wise readers what that is.

B: I certainly will. (note: I explained it in a sidebar in the original publication)

L: They even have a picture of how it looks. Now that's thrilling. I mean, it's one of the first times that a private citizen is allowed to have a 60 minute — an hour — open-line video phone.

B: Well, the World Wide Web is beginning to really open things up, empowering people to broadcast their own versions of what is, rather than having to rely on the networks and mainstream media.

L: Everything that we do — we have a whole list of priorities and we're working in many media. We have eight basic media that we work through. ut the goal and the aim of everything is the Web. We have what's called leary.com" on the Web, and I'm pouring all my thoughts into the Web right now. All of my books, one by one, we're putting up there, and you can play the book.

The first screen of my book, say Flashbacks, comes on-line, and on the same page there's another copy of it, and I edit that. So if it's, "In the beginning was the word," I could say on the other side, "In the beginning was the bird," or "the turd." And that comes in color, so you can see in a glance how I've changed my original.

The performer out there can do the same thing. SHe can build up hir own library of living books and sHe can have hir diary there, and people can help edit and re-edit, so it's the concept of the living book.

B: On my Web site we have a Web-chat area when people can keep posting words and images . . . .
You've been called a Cheerleader for Change, and during your life you've espoused a number of different new ideas: the sacramental use of psychedelics, life extension and cryonics, space migration, computers, virtual reality, a whole variety of new ideas. Which one had the most passion for you?

L: You're trying to make invidious comparisons, They're all stages I go through. I love being a teenager, but then it's time to move on. I can always go back.

B: Currently you're working on a number of new projects — the CD-ROM, and a film?

L: No, there's been a lot of talk about a film being made, and it’s been bantering around the top studios, and top crooks of Hollywood are talking about it. I expect there will be one made, but I have no lust. The ultimate masturbation in Hollywood — who's gonna play me?

My answer to that is Grace Jones. Grace Jones is a Harvard professor in drag, and she dresses up like a guy, and she seduces all those graduate students to turn on and tune in the world. Me and Grace!

B: Tell me a little bit about the CD-ROM. That one's solid, right?

L: What do you mean by solid?

B: I mean it's gonna be Timothy Leary's house . . . or?

L: Yeah, we have that down. I've already got pages and pages of it.

B: I've seen that on the Web. Is that going to be a CD-ROM as well?

L: No, see, you click into my house, and you click around the house, you can click into my art room, my library room, you can click into my music room, my video room, my cyber room. In each of these rooms for the Web, there's a featured artist of the month, of the week. We save everything that goes on the Web, and it's stored on the CD-ROM. You continually replay, and store, the CD-ROM is a storage library that you can get stuff and access, and then use it for anything you want.

We're not selling the product like a CD-ROM game, although you can play it like a game, clicking around the house. You can click and see what kind of drugs I've done all day, or yesterday. What I had to eat, and who these great guys who come by are, like Mr. Rand here (referring to Leary's novelist friend who was sitting with us).

B: If you were to have your life to live all over again, is there anything you would do differently, or would you do it all the same?

L: How could I do it all the same? How could I?

B: I mean, knowing what you know now, if you had it all stored in memory and you could live your life again, what would you do differently?

L: I say I couldn't, because what I know now is what's happening right now and tomorrow, so I'm involved in that.

B: So it's all perfect?

L: I didn't say that. And, by the way, I did nothing — I just surfed the wave. I didn't start the interest in drugs. If anything, it was hot in the '50s, it was the beatniks that beat that drum. Kerouc and Ginsburg, and Burroughs, the great father of us all. So, I didn't start this, it was there. I'm a very skillful communicator and I'm a very enthusiastic person. I like to be involved and engaged. It's been just perfect for me.

But I didn't lead, I didn't want followers. I was moving along with it. I've always, well, more and more I've hung out with people who are younger than me. The people I work with are always between the ages of 25 and 35, always! And they keep changing.

Just last week we had a reunion of five Harvard graduate students who worked with me then. I want to tell you that they are five of the most good-looking, sophisticated, intelligent psychologists. Not one of them became a faculty chairman. They learned to apply what they learned to, uh . . . Gunther Weil is the Dean of the East-West Foundation. It's a wonderful thing, but its not what a psychologist used to do, and right down the line they had something special, and they were good-looking men of dignity and fun. It was a really proud moment for all of us.

B: And Metzner was another one?

L: Metzner, oh yeah. Ralph was a very, very brilliant, brilliant British experimentalist, objective right down the line, and he's beautiful because he managed to maintain his integrity as an academician, and at the same time, taking LSD on the flat of his back in a maximum security prison with the most dangerous prisoners in Massachusetts. Now, that's a jump for a sedate Englishman. But he did it, with courage. And they all have a nice little twinkle in their eye, which I love.

They taught me. They knew about drugs before I did. Metzer and others would come and tell me about drugs, and I didn't like drugs, because in those days, in the '50s , the psychiatrists were drugging everybody with Valium and all that stuff, and the libertarian view then was, don't get involved in those doctors’ drugs, because they are going to tranquilize you into loving Eisenhower.

B: I remember I was on a panel with you once, actually I had put it together, and . . .

L: Where?

B: It was at Stanford, at the Bridge Conference. We ended up having about four or five doctors on the panel with you, and I think you expressed the sentiment that you would rather not see the psychedelics with the medical profession with all this experimentation, that you thought it was out in the world doing it, you know, with your lover or with . . .

L: That sounds pretty babbling, but, yes, I agree!

B: Maybe you could tell us a little about this cryonics process. As I'm sitting here, I'm watching them set all of this up, and uh . . .

L: As I approach my dying, which includes the possibility of self, uh, suicide, I've got all charts and diagrams and rating scales so when it gets to a point where when I'm immobile and can't talk, and all these ratings go below what I'd like, then my executors are commanded to help me hit a button so that I will be through the transition. This is classic stuff, it's been others uh . . .

B: Do you have any last things you'd like to say to our readers? This is going into our first magazine issue of Island Views, and you know that Island is an organization that's looking to create a new culture based on new ideas. We're trying to take new ideas from Huxley and bring them into the 21st century, the idea of transforming our culture through all the new ideas . . .

L: Well, number one, Aldous Huxley was one of the most magical people I ever met in my life. He came to Harvard while we were there, and he coached us
and guided us, and he was way ahead. He'd written a classic book, Doors of
Perception. Heaven and Hell was about, actually, suicide, remember, and the book Island . . .

B: Well, Island was about transitions.

L: Yeah, anyway it turns out that after all these years, Laura Huxley
lives almost in the same canyon, she's my closest neighbor, and she comes
down often. She was there when Aldous passed on, and she was the one who
handed Aldous the pills that he used — or it was actually Dr. Sidney Cohen
who did it — and it gives me a great, great honor that she is now kind of
guiding me, and I'm just the luckiest guy.

The point there is we always had a team, there was always a group of us working together. In this house, there is a team of us. Everybody who works now at this house withme, last night I even burst out into tears thinking about it, Bruce. Their lives are going to be changed forever, when you think about it, going through this experience, and that's not something you do lightly, you know.

It's a new social organization in a way, with total honesty and openness, and it's thrilling, and I'm glad that you're a part of it, and I would invite you to communicate to and fro with our friends in Santa Cruz area, the Holy Cross, the Cross of Light.

OK, stay in tune!

Postscript: My role as interviewer ended. I spent the rest of the day with Timothy. I sat at his bedside as he bantered with an official from the cryonics group that was contracted to freeze his brain after his death — along with a doctor and a nurse. Their relationship was strained and at one point, Timothy remarked to the official: "If I have to wake up in 50 years with you standing over me with a clipboard, I don't want to wake up!"

In early May, Lear issued the following announcement:
“Due to recent events and personal decisions, Dr. Leary has decided to terminate all relationships and contracts with Cyrocare, Inc. and all other cryonic organizations. Dr. Leary is now energetically exploring all other options regarding his ‘designer’ dying and all other post-mortum details including conventional plans such as cremation and burial.

Because of the recent media attention regarding his planned suicide on the World Wide Web, Dr. Leary also wants to make it very clear that no date has been set for any suicide whatsoever. Dr. Leary's updates regarding his medical condition and dying can be obtained on a regular basis at http://leary.com.”