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White Hand Society
By Peter Conners
Created 11/12/2010 - 08:15
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Ginsberg would give Leary entrée to the influential world of artistic America. Leary
would give Ginsberg an opportunity to expose America to powerful hallucinatory
visions. Allen put it this way, "Really, it was a perfect role for me to play: Ambassador
of Psilocybin."



The following is excerpted from White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of
Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg [1], available from City Lights Publishers.



Leary always appreciated high culture, but under the influence of psychedelics, and
in close association with Allen Ginsberg, he began to see the poet and artist in
himself and in those around him. After their initial meeting and the start of their
partnership, he wrote often to Ginsberg about the ways that psychedelics could turn
convicts and squares into contemplative poets and art aficionados. "Work is booming.
Getting prisoners out of jail, prisoners writing visionary poems. Words as colored
chips. Put words of same color in pail and dip brush in and paint with words. No
writers. Anyone can paint with words."

While at Harvard, he also struggled constantly with the difficulty of communicating
hallucinatory experiences and revelations to straitlaced psychologists who preferred to
keep their patients-and their patients' psychoses-at a distance. In short, the
vocabulary for discussing, and, certainly, for quantifying psychedelic trips had not yet
been invented. But Leary was working in academia and science-realms that
demanded explanation.

Thus, we have Leary presenting a paper on his prison testing to his professional
peers: "After three orientation meetings with the prisoners the drug was given. I was
the first one to take the drug in that bare hospital room behind barred windows.
Three inmates joined me. Two psychologists and two other inmates served as
observers-taking the drug three hours later. This psilocybin session was followed by
three discussions. Then another drug session. Then more discussions. At this point
the inmates have taken the drug an average of four times. There has been not one
moment of friction or tension in some forty hours of ego-less interaction. Pre-post
testing has demonstrated marked changes on both objective and projective
instruments. Dramatic decreases in hostility, cynicism, depression, schizoid ideation.
Definite increases in optimism, planfulness, flexibility, tolerance, sociability."

And we have Leary describing the same prison tests in a letter to Ginsberg: "Big deal
at the prison. Convicts love it. Hoodlums have satori, deciding to devote rest of life to
keep JD's out of jail etc. Administration is puzzled but goes along with Harvard and
the word of this swinging psychiatrist who has joined the team. Tremendous amount
of time, tho. Unforgettable scenes-convicts lying around high, digging jazz records
etc. One con controls the locked door and when the guards knock to announce lunch
he lets them in etc. There's a colored cat in for heroin, a tenor sax man. Imagine his
reaction. Comes these doctors from Harvard and suddenly he is turned on hi her [sic]
than ever in his life understanding Rollins sax chains like never before. He has a
dazed worshipful look in his face everytime [sic] we meet."

Just as psilocybin had given Leary access to artistic realms that he had revered but
never experienced, Ginsberg's hip poetic slang gave Leary a language-aside from the
rigid, confining language of his profession-in which he could discuss his psychedelic
experiences. While at Harvard, Leary was constantly trying to balance the flash and
jive of psychedelic satori with the professional communication and contact that would
ensure his professional validation, and thus continued employment and support for
his testing. But by the time he got around to publishing High Priest in 1968, Leary
had already chosen the hip over the straight world. As a result, we read about his
first mushroom trip in Mexico in an innovative literary mix of parallel narratives,
quotations, prose poetry, and free verse.

Suddenly

I begin

to feel

Strange.

Going under dental gas. Good-bye.

Mildly nauseous. Detached. Moving away

away

away

From the group in bathing suits.

On a terrace

under the bright

Mexican sky.

Leary's choice of "dental gas" as the nearest comparable sensation to slipping under
the spell of psilocybin is also telling. Before meeting Leary, Ginsberg often used the
experience of being anesthetized in the dentist's office as an early touchstone
hallucinatory experience. He spent years working on fragments that eventually came
together in the 1958 poem Laughing Gas.

It's the instant of going

into or coming out of

existence that is

important-to catch on

to the secret of the magic

box.

Stepping outside the universe

by means of Nitrous Oxide

anesthetizing mind-consciousness

the chiliasm was an impersonal dream-

one of many, being mere dreams.



Later in High Priest, Leary also evokes the name of the Ginsberg's early guru, William
Blake, in visionary prose poem form: "Then begins Blake's long red voyage EVERY
TIME LESS THAN A PULSATION OF THE ARTERY down the blood stream IS EQUAL
IN ITS PERIOD AND VALUE TO SIX THOUSAND YEARS floating, bouncing along
labyrinthian tunnels FOR IN THIS MOMENT THE POET'S WORK IS DONE artery,
arteriole and ALL GREAT EVENTS OF TIME START FORTH through every capillary
AND ARE CONCEIVED IN SUCH A PERIOD through pink honey-comb tissue world
with A MOMENT. . . ."

Yes, Dr. Leary had gone on the fantastic voyage. And, as he said of that first trip, "I
learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than in all my years as a
psychologist." Allen Ginsberg would later help him to find the language and
metaphors to explain it.

Fortunately George Litwin was already "initiated." So when Tim ran into him on
campus in September 1960 and started talking to him about his Mexican mushroom
trip, he was able to cut right to it. No jargon or reaching for words necessary. Leary
got it now. As the jazz musicians and Beat poets said, he was hip. And he wanted,
immediately, to get a batch of psilocybin onto campus so that he could start
experimenting with subjects. And on himself. But he had no intention of making
these tests into some big party. This would be a true scientific investigation into the
higher levels of human consciousness, creativity, and, eventually, criminal
rehabilitation. Leary's studies would be professional and psychological. They would
quantify while they explored.

Once Leary knew that he wanted to use psilocybin in his campus experiments, the
problem became -- where to get it? There weren't exactly well-stocked curanderas
wandering around Harvard Square. Fortunately for Leary, Dr. Albert Hofmann-the
same Swiss chemist who first created LSD in 1938-had also developed synthetic
psilocybin pills in the 1950s.

This is where George Litwin's experience came into play. Litwin knew that the
company Hofmann worked for-the Sandoz Company in Switzerland-was providing
psilocybin pills to qualified experimenters. Tim and George sent Sandoz Laboratories
a letter using Harvard stationery, explaining the testing they wanted to undertake
and requesting a supply of psilocybin. A short time later, Litwin recalled, "they just
sent us back a big bottle and said, ‘We appreciate your request and we are
interested in sponsoring work in this area. Here's a starter kit to get going and please
send us a report of the results.'"



r r r



Contrary to [Aldous] Huxley's belief that hallucinogens should be used quietly, by a
select group, Ginsberg-in all his Whitmanic democracy-believed that everyone should
have access to psilocybin. Poets, priests, doctors, students, housewives, workers,
executives, musicians, soldiers, truck drivers . . . everyone should be given the option
of experiencing the state of being "beshroomed." But Ginsberg also knew that
hallucinogens were an inherent threat to the U.S. power establishment, starting with
the government. Hallucinogens are, by nature, non-conformist. In his book
Alternating Currents (1967), Nobel laureate Octavio Paz reflected on his government's
fear of hallucinogens: "We are now in a position to understand the real reason for
the condemnation of hallucinogens and why their use is punished. The authorities do
not behave as though they were trying to stamp out a harmful vice, but behave as
though they were stamping out dissidence. Since this is a form of dissidence that is
becoming more widespread, the prohibition takes on the proportion of a campaign
against a spiritual contagion, against an opinion. What authorities are displaying is
ideological zeal: they are punishing a heresy, not a crime."

Although he was writing about Mexico, Paz's statements were equally true about the
United States. By 1967 the government would go to great lengths to outlaw and
demonize hallucinogens-and anyone who stood up publicly in their favor. In 1960,
Allen Ginsberg, sipping warm milk in Leary's kitchen at Harvard, saw that future
ahead. But he still believed that mushrooms must be made available to everyone.

As Allen saw it, the solution was sitting right across the table from him: Dr. Timothy
Leary. Or, more important, everything that Timothy Leary represented. Leary was an
ivy-league academic, a certified Ph.D., a well-respected psychologist, a clean-cut
unknown with-and here was the kicker-access to mass quantities of psilocybin. On
the other hand, Ginsberg was a known Beatnik poet with a history of drug use and
mental illness. He wasn't just famous, he was infamous. American culture had
already punched his ticket. As Ginsberg put it, "I'm too easy to put down."

No, what they needed to give hallucinogens a shot at safe passage into mainstream
America was a respectable front. "Big serious scientist professors from Harvard." But
the key would be to build up a base of supporters for the drug first. If they could
combine Leary's scientific credentials with a roster of influential supporters, it would
be much harder for the government to suppress the drug. That was their logic,
anyway. Once again, this logic was based on democratic principles, the belief that
the government would honor the will of the people. In 1960, this was an ideal that
still had legs.

For Leary's part, he saw a key ally in Ginsberg, who had arrived at just the right time
to boost the Harvard Psilocybin Project to the next level. As he wrote in High Priest,
"And so Allen spun out the cosmic campaign. He was to line up influentials and each
weekend I would come down to New York and we'd run mushroom sessions. This fit
our Harvard research plans perfectly. Our aim there was to learn how people
reacted, to test the limits of the drug, to get creative and thoughtful people to take
them and tell us what they saw and what we should do with the mushrooms. Allen's
political plan was appealing, too. I had seen enough and read enough in Spanish of
the anti-vision crowd, the power-holders with guns, and the bigger and better men
we got on our team the stronger our position. And then too, the big-name bit was
intriguing. Meeting and sharing visions with the famous."

Allen Ginsberg may have been a media-scarred icon, but he was a well-connected
one. He ran up Leary's stairs and came back into the kitchen with his address book.
And then, as Leary says in High Priest, "we started planning the psychedelic
revolution." Robert Lowell, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac, William
Burroughs, Charles Olson, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barney Rosset, Muriel
Rukyser, LeRoi Jones . . . Allen Ginsberg's address book was a who's who of New
York City, and U.S., artistic leaders. As famous as he would become, it must be
remembered that at this time Timothy Leary was completely unknown beyond the
small, academic psychology community. Although he loved the idea of running tests
on gifted and accomplished artists, to this crowd, he would have been just some
square Harvard professor. His access would have been severely limited. But with an
introduction from Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary would become a player. He would
have the blessings of the King Bohemian.

The partnership would be thus: Allen Ginsberg would give Timothy Leary entrée to
the influential world of artistic America. Timothy Leary would give Allen Ginsberg an
opportunity to expose America to powerful hallucinatory visions. Ginsberg put it this
way, "The idea was to give it to respectable and notable people first, who could really
articulate the experience, all the while keeping it under the august auspices of
Harvard. I could act as the go-between, keeping as much of a low profile as possible
considering my visibility as America's most conspicuous beatnik. Really, it was a
perfect role for me to play: Ambassador of Psilocybin."

In High Priest, Leary said, "From this moment on my days as a respectable
establishment scientist were numbered. . . . [My] energies were offered to the
ancient underground society of alchemists, artists, mystics, alienated visionaries,
drop-outs and the disenchanted young, the sons arising. . . . Allen Ginsberg came to
Harvard and shook us loose from our academic fears and strengthened our courage
and faith in the process."



Copyright Peter Conners. Drug Abuse & Addiction, Detoxification, Treatment, Opiate Withdrawal. Substance Abuse: Heroin, Cocaine, Marijuana, Crystal meth, Vicodin, OxyContin, Amphetamines, Percocet and others.
All Rights Reserved.

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