Word: psilocybin
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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...
Mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, the synthetic hallucinogens now on the market, are nowhere more hungrily consumed than in Harvard Square; nowhere are the philosophical and legal issues surrounding their use more hotly debated. Three major approaches to the debate are all represented in the current Harvard Review. We have the true believers, the scientists and the armchair commentators--and they give us a timely, lively and thorough discussion...
...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 are good...
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...
...true believers contend that anyone who hasn't tried the drugs cannot judge them; anyone who has, will, they claim, be converted to them. The attitude is expressed by R. Gordon Wasson, a man whose pioneering researches on psilocybin-containing mushrooms would lead one to hope for better: "We are all divided," he says, "into classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by our subjective experience and those who have not taken the mushroom and are disqualified by their total ignorance of the subject...