Reminiscences of Leary and Alpert

A freelance writer recently shared his reminiscences of meeting Tim Leary and Richard Alpert at a psychologists conference in 1963. Even from this briefly painted picture, set well before the full mayhem of the counterculture emeged, the cavalier quality that catapulted them to prominence is already plain to see:

Over room-service breakfast, Leary defended the work he and Alpert did at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality. The two had been ''expelled'' from their teaching posts because, as Dr. Dana Farnsworth, the psychiatrist in charge of the university's health service, declared, ''Patients suffering the consequences of the hallucinogens demonstrates that these drugs have the power to damage the individual psyche, indeed to cripple it for life.''

Leary's response: ''At Harvard they have 15 to 20 psychiatrists who work part-time. There are a lot of students in psychotherapy. The psychiatric center is a hotbed of gossip. Apparently some of the patients at the clinic took drugs on their own and then gave lurid reports to their psychiatrists. I assume that's where Dr. Farnsworth gets his information.''

''Dana's statements are too general,'' Alpert told me. ''How can he know the drugs can cripple for life when the only persons he has worked with are students?''

When confronted with the notion that LSD might have ill effects, Leary manages to boil it all down to a pithy slogan - one which happens to ring somewhat true, of course, but still, it's pretty slick:

Leary and Alpert had seen LSD's malignant face. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Park Avenue penthouse, Alpert told me, ''Once on LSD, I went into a trance for four hours and saw a red cloud coming over me with everything of my past life. This was my most-frightening experience.'' Leary insists that the uppers of psychedelic tripping outweigh the downers. ''Just because you get airsick sometimes, that's no reason to stop flying.''