American professor, guru of the 1960’s drug culture who coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Well ahead of his time, he was fired from Harvard for his controlled experiments with psychedelic drugs. Arrested 29 times, he was imprisoned in 1970 for two years and was eventually paroled in 1976. President Richard Nixon once called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
In 1940 Leary left his first collegiate venue, Jesuit-run Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA after just a year. The son of a U.S. Army captain, he decided to follow the family tradition by enrolling at West Point. In 1941, after 18 months, he left due to various infractions of the rules. In 1950 he earned a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkley. Leary questioned the accepted theories of personality and believed that what people called abnormal was really just an exaggeration of normal personality. He continued there as an assistant professor and served as director of psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland.
After a year in Spain he returned to the U.S. to become a lecturer at Harvard and began experimenting with psylocybin, mescaline and LSD. Although the experiments were controlled and scholarly papers on the experiments were published in prestigious journals, he and fellow Harvard researcher Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) were fired. A patron set them up in a Millbrook, NY estate where they could continue their research. Instead, it became a kind of Bohemian salon where Leary dropped acid with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Thelonius Monk. In 1965 he was sentenced to 30 years and $30,000 for smuggling a small amount of marijuana into the U.S. from Mexico. In 1966 the estate mansion was raided and he was again arrested on drug charges. After appeals and more arrests he was sent to the state prison in San Luis Obispo in 1970 to face up to 20 years for two possession convictions. In September 1970 Leary escaped prison with the help of the radical Weathermen underground movement and was smuggled out of the country. In 1973 he was detained while trying to enter Afghanistan, sent back to the U.S. and was retuned to Folsom prison where he at one point had a cell across from Charles Manson. He was released on parole in 1976.
Leary’s life was marked by tragedy and broken relationships. In 1955 his first of five wives, Marianne, committed suicide. In 1990, daughter Susan, 42, was found mentally unfit to stand trial for shooting her sleeping boyfriend. Later that year she used shoelaces to hang herself from the bars of her cell. His son Jack felt his father had deserted him at a critical time in his life and was not close to him.
In January 1995 Leary called his closest friends to tell them he had prostate cancer. He considered suicide and cryonics as well as the more traditional burial and cremation. He wanted to meet death on his own terms and planned to commit suicide and have it broadcast worldwide on the Internet. He turned his death into a cyber-happening by chronicling his illness on a personal Web site. Two days before he died, Leary’s request to have his ashes launched into space was approved. With videotape rolling, he died 5/31/1996, 00:44 AM at his home in Beverly Hills, CA, whispering his last word, “beautiful.”
Link to Wikipedia biography