Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was a writer, psychologist, futurist, advocate of psychedelic drug research, and one of the first people whose remains have been sent into space. An icon of 1960s counterculture, he is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic, spiritual and emotional benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish American dentist who abandoned the family when Leary was thirteen. He graduated from Springfield's Classical High School and spent two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, but received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Alabama in 1943. He received his master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. He became an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950–1955), director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (1955–1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959–1963). He was fired from Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures, but the decision to dismiss him may have been influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and sympathetic faculty members.
His first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. During a border crossing with his wife and two children from Mexico into the United States, marijuana was found in a bag in his car. He was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, given a $30,000 fine and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the Marihuana Tax Act was, in fact, unconstitutional, as it required a degree of self-incrimination. He claimed this was in stark violation of the Fifth Amendment. On December 26, 1968, he was arrested again, in Laguna Beach, California, this time for the possession of two roaches of marijuana, which Leary claimed were planted by the arresting officer. He was later convicted of this offense. On May 19, 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States. The Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, and his 1965 conviction was quashed.
On the day his conviction was overturned, he announced his candidacy for Governor of California, running against Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, he joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song called "Come Together."
On January 21, 1970, he received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively for less than a half ounce of marijuana. When he arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As a result, he was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. He claimed his non-violent escape was a humorous prank, and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the separatist USA Black Panther party’s "government in exile." After staying with them for a short time, Leary claimed that Cleaver attempted to hold him and his wife hostage.
In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind." In 1972, President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison him, which it did for a month, but the Swiss refused to extradite him back to the U.S. In that same year, he and Rosemary separated. Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch. He "married" Harcourt-Smith at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she used his surname until their breakup in early 1977.
They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1973 where U.S. authorities captured him. At a layover in the United Kingdom, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, but to no avail. He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21.5 mil. in 2006). President Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America." Facing a total of 95 years in prison, he hired criminal defense attorney Bruce Margolin and was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California, where at one point he was in a cell immediately adjacent to Charles Manson. He made somewhat of a pretense of cooperating with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, by giving them information that they already had or that was of little consequence. He would later claim that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI.
Leary conduct speaking engagements until his death due to cancer in in 1996. In his will he requested that his ashes be shattered in outer space and along with Leonard Nimoy, their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, on a satellite that remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere. Find out more at:
http://www.timothyleary.us/
