A Rhetorical Analysis Of LSD Before Leary

Ask anyone born before 1950 who the father of psychedelic drugs is and the first person to come to mind is most likely psychology professor and countercultural icon Timothy Leary. The association is valid; the man spent much of his life promoting the benefits of turning on with the help of hallucinogenic drugs like psilocybin and LSD. However, Stephen Novak’s article “LSD Before Leary” asserts that discourse on psychedelic drugs in the United States dates back to the late 1940s and was already established in the public consciousness long before Leary and his Harvard psychedelic club got their start in the early 1960s. As early as 1958 newspapers like the LA Times were running stories about the “Fantastic Sensations Gained With New Drug LSD”

Psilocybin was discovered in 1957, well into the LSD years, not by pharmacologists in a lab but as a ritualistically consumed intoxicant of indigenous Mexicans . It was in this context that Leary and Alpert were introduced to the drug in 1960. Psilocybin produces similar hallucinatory effects to LSD, but instead of going through years of physical testing like LSD researchers, the Harvard research team immediately started to investigate the mind-expanding properties of psilocybin. Like Cohen, Leary also worked to determine the potential positive social role of psychedelic drugs. Leary tested if psilocybin could reduce recidivism rates among prison inmates , analogous to Cohen’s study of LSD use reducing relapses for recovering alcoholics. Cohen sought out “men of letters” like Huxley to determine LSD’s ability to generate mystical experiences; to the same end Leary gave psilocybin on a group of seminary students at mass to see if it would trigger religious visions . The thematic arc of psilocybin testing at Harvard from 1960 to 1963 mirrors the later stages of LSD testing some five years prior. This is not coincidental, Leary would have undoubtedly been intimately aware of Cohen’s research. The motives surrounding Leary’s research, however, are entirely different. Cohen was looking for practical mental health applications for the drug

These initial assumptions that underlie Leary’s psilocybin investigations are largely responsible for the linkage of psilocybin and LSD in the public consciousness. Negative connotations, however, also come with the positive. In 1962 LSD became linked with thalidomide as a dangerous investigational drug, the government curtailed its distribution, and LSD lost much of the credibility it had earned with the public . At Harvard, rising administrator discomfort of an “LSD like substance” being tested on and distributed to undergraduate students led to the firing of Richard Alpert and the dissolution of the Harvard psilocybin research team in early 1963 . The government’s reactionary curtailment of LSD distribution was the death knell for any chance psychedelics had in gaining acceptance from mainstream society.
Both of these psychedelic narratives had played out to the ambivalence of most of the public. LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline were still drugs of the medical community and intellectual elite, far removed from the lives of everyday Americans. It is only in the mid 60s when psilocybin and LSD become democratized as street drugs shrooms and acid do people look back for the history of psychedelics. There were two competing creation narratives for psychedelic drugs when they