Today we’re proud to present a recording from the Esalen archives: Timothy Leary, speaking to a rapt audience in June of 1981. Leary rose to national prominence in the early 1960’s, as a clinical psychologist from Harvard who along with Richard Alpert was eventually fired for introducing students to mushrooms and LSD. After his dismissal from the realm of the Ivy League, Leary’s mystique only grew. In 1964, Leary and Alpert visited Esalen for the first time, where they ended up taking LSD with among others, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy. In 1966, Leary attempted unsuccessfully to form a religion based around the idea of LSD as a sacrament, which would have legally protected the use of LSD. His legal troubles had already begun by this point. While at Millbrook he endured raids and arrests, engineered by the local district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy, who would later become famous as one of Nixon’s dirty tricks squad and an engineer of the Watergate break-ins. In January of 1967, he attended the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where he delivered the now famous invitation to tune in, turn on, and drop out. It became kind of a catch phrase for Leary and a shorthand for the psychedelic movement. In 1968 his story began to get truly crazy. He was arrested in Laguna Beach for possession of marijuana, he appealed the conviction, and then somehow in 1970, he received a ten year sentence for the infraction. He went to jail and then in September of the same year the leftist revolutionary group the Weathermen smuggled him out of jail . Leary ended up in Algeria, where he paid Eldrige Cleaver and the Black Panther Party to protect him, but Cleaver ended up putting him under house arrest, due to “exasperation with his socialite lifestyle.” In 1971 Leary and his wife fled to Switzerland, aided, abetted, and ultimately imprisoned by an arms dealer; in 72, Richard Nixon’s AG John Erlichman convinced the Swiss government to imprison him, but ultimately was not able to extradite Leary. He ended up in Afghanistan, where the US government finally seized him. He was transported to Folsom State prison , where he was placed in a cell next to Charles Manson. In order to shorten his prison sentence, he became an FBI informant. In 1974, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Alpert, and Leary’s son denounced him a “cop informant” and a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1976, Governor Jerry Brown released Leary from prison, whereupon he moved to Laurel Canyon, got re-married to filmmaker Barbara Blum, and took on Winona Ryder as his goddaughter. He started touring and lecturing, speaking about his new interests, which included space colonization, life extension, and virtual reality. He even teamed up with G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-convict himself by this point, to debate issues like gay rights, abortion, and welfare. And this is where we find ourselves with Leary, visiting Esalen for the first time in 17 years, in 1981. I think you’ll find this speech entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately very enjoyable. I know I did. He’s the high priest of LSD, speaking to an audience of highly sympathetic hippies and weirdos in the Reagan 80’s.