page_title: Timothy Leary
section_title: Dissension over studies
hierarchical_section_title: Timothy Leary / Psychedelic experiments and experiences / Mexico and Harvard research (1957–1963) / Dissension over studies
caption_attribution_description: English: Timothy Leary, family and band on a lecture tour; State University of New York at Buffalo (1969) (Buffalo, New York). NOTE: If redistributing my work, please credit my work with my name, Dr. Dennis Bogdan, since I am the original author, and please be consistent with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License agreements. Note: Image featured in University of New England (2015) article. (Drbogdan (talk) 20:37, 28 March 2017 (UTC))
context_page_description: Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was "a hero of American consciousness," according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut." But to Louis Menand, it was a put-on: "The only things Leary was serious about were pleasure and renown." Leary was not a seeker of truth, according to Menand: "He liked women, he liked being the center of attention, and he liked to get high."
  As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960–62, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. The scientific legitimacy and ethics of his research were questioned by other Harvard faculty because he took psychedelics along with research subjects and pressured students to join in. Leary and his colleague, Richard Alpert, were fired from Harvard University in May 1963. Most people first heard of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal.
  Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry.
context_section_description: The Concord conclusions were contested in a follow-up study on the basis of time differences monitoring the study group vs. the control group, and differences between subjects re-incarcerated for parole violations and those imprisoned for new crimes. The researchers concluded that statistically only a slight improvement could be attributed to psilocybin in contrast to the significant improvement reported by Leary and his colleagues. Rick Doblin suggested that Leary had fallen prey to the Halo Effect, skewing the results and clinical conclusions. Doblin further accused Leary of lacking "a higher standard" or "highest ethical standards in order to regain the trust of regulators". Ralph Metzner rebuked Doblin for these assertions: "In my opinion, the existing accepted standards of honesty and truthfulness are perfectly adequate. We have those standards, not to curry favor with regulators, but because it is the agreement within the scientific community that observations should be reported accurately and completely. There is no proof in any of this re-analysis that Leary unethically manipulated his data."
  Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to carry out studies in the religious use of psychedelic drugs. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a friend of Leary. The Harvard Crimson described her as a "disciple" who ran a Psychedelic Information Center out of her home and published a national LSD newspaper. That publication was actually Leary and Alpert's journal Psychedelic Review, and Bieberman (a graduate of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, who had volunteered for Leary as a student) was its circulation manager. Leary and Alpert's research attracted so much public attention that many who wanted to participate in the experiments had to be turned away due to the high demand. To satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics sprang up near the Harvard campus.
caption: Timothy Leary, family, and band at the State University of New York at Buffalo during Leary's 1969 lecture tour.
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