Source: The Harvard Psychedelic Club. Don Lattin (2010)
Conclusion: Healer, Teacher, Trickster, Seeker
Fourteen years before Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were kicked out of Harvard, another pair of Boston drug researchers conducted their own experiments on a group of undergraduate students. History has all but forgotten Dr. Max Rinkel and Dr. Robert Hyde. But their story is worth telling, if only because it provides a larger context to understand the events of this book.
Rinkel and Hyde were using a new drug called LSD-25, which was many times stronger than the magic mushroom pills later employed by the Harvard Psilocybin Project. But the most important difference between these two research projects was the motivation behind the experiments. Both projects were playing with the minds of young Harvard students, but they came at their work with very different expectations. Leary and Alpert hoped to show that their subjects could experience joyous moments of mystical insight. Rinkel and Hyde were trying to discover how LSD could drive their subjects crazy, how it could provoke a “transitory psychotic disturbance.”
Is this simply two ways of describing the same thing? Perhaps. But the intent of the researcher is important. And that is especially true for psychedelic researchers, whose expectations and intent almost certainly influence the outcome of their experiments.
Historians of the psychedelic era tell us that the first LSD trip in North America was most likely the initial trip taken by Dr. Robert Hyde. It happened sometime in early 1949, just six years after the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the powerful effects triggered by LSD. Rinkel and Hyde conducted their experiments on about a hundred students at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a mental-health clinic affiliated with Harvard University. They reported their findings at the May 1950 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Yes, they concluded, LSD could easily be used to provoke temporary psychosis.
One would think that would have been the end of their research. After all, who would want to intentionally drive research subjects crazy? What’s the social benefit behind such a twisted research agenda?
It would be decades before we would learn the answer to those questions. The explanation would come only when it was revealed that Rinkel and Hyde’s research was secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Their experiments were part of a vast government program in the 1950s to see if LSD could be used for military purposes as a chemical warfare agent. Perhaps it could be sprayed on enemy troops—a powerful weapon of mass distraction. Maybe it could be employed as a truth serum for interrogating prisoners of war. Then there was the idea that enemy soldiers could be drugged, hypnotized, and programmed to go back behind enemy lines and sabotage their comrades in arms.
Philip Slater, one of the Harvard graduate students who administered LSD under the supervision of Dr. Hyde, had no idea that two CIA front groups were funding their research. Slater was twenty-five years old when he signed on to assist Robert Hyde, but he didn’t find out about the CIA connections until sometime in the 1980s, when Slater was in his sixties. Slater worked on the project from 1952 to 1954. He estimates that about half of the subjects were undergraduates. He doesn’t recall exactly what the students were told they would be given, but he believes they knew it would somehow affect their mental processes. At the time, the word psychedelic had not been coined, and the Cambridge researchers classified LSD as a “psychotomimetic” drug, meaning that it mimicked psychosis. Their job was to find out exactly what kind of psychosis the drug induced. Student volunteers were dosed individually and in groups. About three hours after they took the drug, when they were at the peak of their experience, they would be sent down to the hospital’s admitting psychiatrist for diagnosis. Such categories as schizophrenic, paranoid, and manic-depressive were used to describe their condition.
Not surprisingly, some of the subjects were deeply disturbed by all this. “We lost a couple,” Slater recalled. “One had to be hospitalized. Another went out in the street to see if cars were real. That really scared us.”
Hardly anyone had heard of LSD in the early 1950s. Aldous Huxley had yet to take his first mescaline trip and write The Doors of Perception. R. Gordon Wasson had not yet returned from Mexico to sing the praises of magic mushrooms in the pages of Life magazine. If Slater, Rinkel, and Hyde had any preconceptions about LSD—ideas that would affect the actual experience of taking the drug—their expectations were that their subjects would go through a period of temporary psychosis.
Slater initially saw LSD as a test of his sanity, so when he resisted the experience, he found that it produced relatively mild effects. There were no hallucinations. But then he and other friends started sneaking doses out of the hospital. They began taking the drug in less formal settings. They began to see something else. “All you had to do was walk off and look at a plant and you’d start having all these visual changes,” he said. “It definitely felt like we were expanding our consciousness. From that moment, we saw the world differently than people who had not had the experience.”
Like Timothy Leary, Slater couldn’t take the academic world all that seriously after his psychedelic experience. He taught sociology at Harvard and Brandeis. He played the game for fifteen years. He went out to the West Coast for a teaching job at the newly established University of California at Santa Cruz, but he knew that his taking the post was just an excuse to get away and change his life. Slater taught at Santa Cruz for only a couple of years. Like Leary, he’d seen the absurdity of academic pretension. Then, in 1971, his book The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point became a surprise bestseller.
Decades later, I made an appointment to meet Phil Slater at a coffee house in Santa Cruz. I was sitting outside when a guy pulled up on a bicycle. Could that be him?
Slater had to be well into his eighties. This trim man with a full head of gray hair looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. It was Slater. At the time, I was still interviewing people for this book, and just starting to figure out what it all might mean. Something told me this psychedelic pioneer, this rebel sociologist, could point me in the right direction.
“What Leary did more than anything else was activate conservative anxiety in America,” Slater said. “The way he phrased the rejection of the status quo fit the hippies and the political left, and he did it in a way that scared people hugely. While all the hippies and feminists and the radicals and the civil rights people argued about which was the most important way to go, the only people who really understood that it was all one thing was the right wing.”
Conclusion: Healer, Teacher, Trickster, Seeker
Fourteen years before Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were kicked out of Harvard, another pair of Boston drug researchers conducted their own experiments on a group of undergraduate students. History has all but forgotten Dr. Max Rinkel and Dr. Robert Hyde. But their story is worth telling, if only because it provides a larger context to understand the events of this book.
Rinkel and Hyde were using a new drug called LSD-25, which was many times stronger than the magic mushroom pills later employed by the Harvard Psilocybin Project. But the most important difference between these two research projects was the motivation behind the experiments. Both projects were playing with the minds of young Harvard students, but they came at their work with very different expectations. Leary and Alpert hoped to show that their subjects could experience joyous moments of mystical insight. Rinkel and Hyde were trying to discover how LSD could drive their subjects crazy, how it could provoke a “transitory psychotic disturbance.”
Is this simply two ways of describing the same thing? Perhaps. But the intent of the researcher is important. And that is especially true for psychedelic researchers, whose expectations and intent almost certainly influence the outcome of their experiments.
Historians of the psychedelic era tell us that the first LSD trip in North America was most likely the initial trip taken by Dr. Robert Hyde. It happened sometime in early 1949, just six years after the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the powerful effects triggered by LSD. Rinkel and Hyde conducted their experiments on about a hundred students at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a mental-health clinic affiliated with Harvard University. They reported their findings at the May 1950 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Yes, they concluded, LSD could easily be used to provoke temporary psychosis.
One would think that would have been the end of their research. After all, who would want to intentionally drive research subjects crazy? What’s the social benefit behind such a twisted research agenda?
It would be decades before we would learn the answer to those questions. The explanation would come only when it was revealed that Rinkel and Hyde’s research was secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Their experiments were part of a vast government program in the 1950s to see if LSD could be used for military purposes as a chemical warfare agent. Perhaps it could be sprayed on enemy troops—a powerful weapon of mass distraction. Maybe it could be employed as a truth serum for interrogating prisoners of war. Then there was the idea that enemy soldiers could be drugged, hypnotized, and programmed to go back behind enemy lines and sabotage their comrades in arms.
Philip Slater, one of the Harvard graduate students who administered LSD under the supervision of Dr. Hyde, had no idea that two CIA front groups were funding their research. Slater was twenty-five years old when he signed on to assist Robert Hyde, but he didn’t find out about the CIA connections until sometime in the 1980s, when Slater was in his sixties. Slater worked on the project from 1952 to 1954. He estimates that about half of the subjects were undergraduates. He doesn’t recall exactly what the students were told they would be given, but he believes they knew it would somehow affect their mental processes. At the time, the word psychedelic had not been coined, and the Cambridge researchers classified LSD as a “psychotomimetic” drug, meaning that it mimicked psychosis. Their job was to find out exactly what kind of psychosis the drug induced. Student volunteers were dosed individually and in groups. About three hours after they took the drug, when they were at the peak of their experience, they would be sent down to the hospital’s admitting psychiatrist for diagnosis. Such categories as schizophrenic, paranoid, and manic-depressive were used to describe their condition.
Not surprisingly, some of the subjects were deeply disturbed by all this. “We lost a couple,” Slater recalled. “One had to be hospitalized. Another went out in the street to see if cars were real. That really scared us.”
Hardly anyone had heard of LSD in the early 1950s. Aldous Huxley had yet to take his first mescaline trip and write The Doors of Perception. R. Gordon Wasson had not yet returned from Mexico to sing the praises of magic mushrooms in the pages of Life magazine. If Slater, Rinkel, and Hyde had any preconceptions about LSD—ideas that would affect the actual experience of taking the drug—their expectations were that their subjects would go through a period of temporary psychosis.
Slater initially saw LSD as a test of his sanity, so when he resisted the experience, he found that it produced relatively mild effects. There were no hallucinations. But then he and other friends started sneaking doses out of the hospital. They began taking the drug in less formal settings. They began to see something else. “All you had to do was walk off and look at a plant and you’d start having all these visual changes,” he said. “It definitely felt like we were expanding our consciousness. From that moment, we saw the world differently than people who had not had the experience.”
Like Timothy Leary, Slater couldn’t take the academic world all that seriously after his psychedelic experience. He taught sociology at Harvard and Brandeis. He played the game for fifteen years. He went out to the West Coast for a teaching job at the newly established University of California at Santa Cruz, but he knew that his taking the post was just an excuse to get away and change his life. Slater taught at Santa Cruz for only a couple of years. Like Leary, he’d seen the absurdity of academic pretension. Then, in 1971, his book The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point became a surprise bestseller.
Decades later, I made an appointment to meet Phil Slater at a coffee house in Santa Cruz. I was sitting outside when a guy pulled up on a bicycle. Could that be him?
Slater had to be well into his eighties. This trim man with a full head of gray hair looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. It was Slater. At the time, I was still interviewing people for this book, and just starting to figure out what it all might mean. Something told me this psychedelic pioneer, this rebel sociologist, could point me in the right direction.
“What Leary did more than anything else was activate conservative anxiety in America,” Slater said. “The way he phrased the rejection of the status quo fit the hippies and the political left, and he did it in a way that scared people hugely. While all the hippies and feminists and the radicals and the civil rights people argued about which was the most important way to go, the only people who really understood that it was all one thing was the right wing.”