Word: alpert
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...Crimson, he fell into an unlikely assignment: poke around the psychology department and investigate rumors that students and professors there were openly experimenting with illegal drugs. The substance of choice was the so far little-known hallucinogen LSD. The professors providing it were the so far little-known Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary...
Weil recognized a scoop when he was handed one, and he struck a deal with the university administration: if the Crimson provided Harvard officials with enough information to help them get rid of Leary and Alpert, Harvard officials would keep the scandal quiet until Weil published his exclusive story. Harvard agreed, Weil went to work, and when he proved the rumors true, his subsequent Crimson articles caused such a stir that Look magazine commissioned him to write a similar piece for national publication. To the surprise of no one at Harvard, Leary and Alpert were soon forced...
...officials in Washington, requesting a small amount of the marijuana the government kept for research of its own. Not surprisingly, he received repeated refusals. Ultimately, Harvard had to intervene, endorsing the study on the strength of the impeccable antidrug credentials Weil had earned as a result of the Leary-Alpert affair. Not long after, federal officials relented. "One day," says Woodward Wickham, Weil's Harvard roommate and now a vice president at the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, "this box of government marijuana just arrived in the mail...
Weil's pot studies, like his Leary-Alpert expose, quickly made national news, owing in no small part to the kindly conclusions he reached about the contraband plant. "Marijuana did appear to raise heart rate," Weil says, "but it didn't seem to affect pupil size or blood sugar. More important, it didn't really impair performance, at least in people who had some experience with it. It seemed to be a rather mild intoxicant...
...performance sent out a message to the rest of the country that we should have been ranked higher," Alpert said...