Harvard Psilocybin Research Project

Distributes Psilocybin to Researchers, 237 The Harvard Psilocybin Research Project, 239 Use of Psilocybian Mushrooms Increases, 244... 

By late I960, Leary had contacted Sandoz for psilocybin to be used for "creativity studies and had established an eight-member board to oversee the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project. The board included Huxley, psychiatrist John Spiegel (who went on to become president of the American Psychiatric Association), David McClelland (Leary s superior), Frank Barron (an associate who has since written much about creativity), Ralph Metzner (later a close Leary colleague), Leary, and two graduate students who had already started a project with mescaline. 

The opening page of the best presentation on the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project s two-year study with convicts—published in 1968 in Timothy Leary s High Priest (Chapters 9 and 10) and in the Psychedelic Review 10. 

Exactly two years ago the Harvard Psilocybin Project initiated a research program at Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Concord, designed to test the effects of consciousness-expanding drugs on prisoner rehabilitation. 

The Harvard Psilocybin Project was formed to investigate, from a psychological point of view, the astonishing properties of this mushroom chemical. From the start, Tim Leary adopted what he called an existential-transactional approach to this research. He rejected the impersonal clinical atmosphere of the traditional psychiatric experiment. Having taken the substance himself in a sacramental atmosphere, he knew how important it was to have a warm supportive setting if one is to experience the ego-shattering revelations of the mushrooms safely. 

The Harvard academic establishment put more and more restrictions on the conduct of the research, largely because of the mounting sensationalism of media accounts. The legitimate source of psilocybin for the research project dried up. 

The psilocybin project experienced increasing resistance from the Harvard University community. We were criticized that our research... 

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