The Psychology of Deception: The Lingering Consequences of MK-ULTRA
“Nothing good can happen with LSD if it’s used crudely, or for power or manipulative purposes.” Dr. Timothy Leary, 1966
“It’s all Timothy Leary’s fault.”
“Timothy Leary ruined it for everybody.”
I will invariably hear one of these remarks whenever I engage in a discussion about psychedelic research and therapy. But the fact is that in the Who’s Who of players responsible for the catastrophic reality that the true potentials of psychedelic drugs still remain unrecognized and unaccepted by mainstream society more than eighty years after LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary’s name barely merits honorable mention.
From members of the counterculture to those who adhere to the culture of the masses, the story of Dr. Timothy Leary and LSD has been well circulated over the years. The short version is that his personal relationship with psychedelics began in 1960, after he had been working as a psychologist for fifteen years. Believing that psychology “wasn’t doing much to solve the emotional or mental problems of the human race,” he insisted he “learned more about psychology, about the human mind, about the human situation” in a matter of hours after taking psilocybin than he had learned in his entire career studying, performing research…
