Timothy Leary: "The Harvard years" reflection

Timothy Leary in his Harvard years.

       The book Timothy Lear: The Harvard years is the first collection of this psychologist's writings. It's author, James Penner, is a University of Puerto Rico professor who describes many experiments Timothy had using psychedelic drugs on people to see their reactions based on their experiences. In Leary's time, 1960's, LSD and psilocybin were legal drugs and were used actively for research at universities. 

       Here is a link to see James Penner's book.

       

       Many of Timothy's writings have been lost and others where very difficult to find, said the presenter of the conference and author of the book. During the 1960's, Leary was aware of his fame on this type of drug usage, and all of the negative comments but he did not care because he wanted that attention. For Leary, psychedelic drugs were great because they separated the social role and promoted the entire being to experience it's own identity from a deeper perspective.


       James Penner read his prologue and explained some details of it. As an audience member of this conference, I saw how the author was well prepared and very much knew all the details of Leary's life, showing his hard dedication on this book. I was fully surprised when he said that people saw Leary's work as a thread, at a level that he even was fired from Harvard's president at the time. This was a nice conference that I learned about psychedelic drugs and many other curious things about the time.