Word: alpert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...would be unfortunate if the firing of Richard Alpert led to the suppression of legitimate research into the effects of hallucinogenic compounds. Such drugs as mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD may be of real value in scientific studies of the mind and in the treatment of mental disorders. But it would have been equally unfortunate if Dr. Alpert had been allowed to continue his activities under the aegis of a University that he has misinformed about his purposes...
...highly informal settings. They have been lax about screening potential recipients of the drugs; indeed, they have urged many who have expressed a casual interest in the drugs to try them for themselves. Far from exercising the caution that characterizes the public statements of most scientists, Leary and Alpert, in their papers and speeches, have been given to making the kind of pronouncement about their work that one associates with quacks...
...true believers the most evangelical are Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, two Harvard psychologists who have received national attention for their espousal of the psychedelics. Their article on the "Politics of Consciousness Expansion" is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that surely owes its incoherence to the influence of psilocybin. Their thesis, if one may use so conventional a word, is that hallucinogens have brought us to the brink of a psychic revolution, the leaders of which (Leary and Alpert) are comparable to Socrates, Bacon, Columbus, and Galileo. Their message, if they are indeed prophets, is that drugs...
Other contributors to the issue give testimonials supporting the Leary-Alpert claims. Arthur Hoener, a local artist, supplies before and after paintings to show how psilocybin transformed him. Whereas he was a methodical and mediocre artist before the drug, he was changed into a spontaneously mediocre artist after. Richard Jones, a Harvard junior, exhausts his vocabulary trying to describe an ecstatic state in which he saw worlds of beauty in such things as the red border of a Time magazine cover. It all made...
Norman Zinberg, an M.D., provides invaluable historical background for an evaluation of public debate on drugs. His brief history of "Narcotics in the U.S." trims the extravagant claims of both Leary and Alpert and their enemies. The result is a balanced and thoroughly reasonable article...