Timothy Leary was an early proponent of LSD experiments. Leary taught psychology at Harvard and experimented with LSD and other hallucinogens in 1960, first on prison inmates, then on himself and his friends. LSD was not illegal at the time.
In 1960, under Leary’s supervision, Allen Ginsberg took psilocybin mushrooms (under the influence of the drug, he called himself Jack Kerouac and identified himself as God to the operator) and began promoting this new powerful fan Phantom drugs.
In August 1960, Leary traveled with Russo to the Mexican city of Cuernavaca to taste psilocybin for the first time, an experience that changed the course of his life forever. In 1965, Leary commented that “within five hours of ingesting these mushrooms, he knew more about … (his) brain and its functions … (and) psychology than … before … Fifteen more years of study and research in psychology.”
After returning to Harvard that fall, Leary and his collaborators, most notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research initiative called the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The aim was to analyze the effects of psilocybin – found in various hallucinogenic mushrooms – on human subjects (in this case prisoners and later students at Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthetic version of the then-legal drug One of the two active compounds of Psilocybe mexicanus.
The compound is made according to a synthetic method developed by research chemist Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
