Review: 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club'

A review of Don Lattin's new book, 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America'.

Reams have been written about LSD guru Timothy Leary and his sidekick Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) and the role they played in shaping the phenomenon that was the Sixties. But by expanding the circle to include two additional members of what he calls "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," Bay Area journalist and author Don Lattin deepens the context of what actually took place during those wild times and argues successfully for its lasting significance.

Huston Smith, now a genteel nonagenarian living in Berkeley, was an early experimenter with psychotropic substances and a respected scholar whose influence on Americans' understanding of world religions can be compared to that of Julia Child on French cooking. Andrew Weil was a generation behind the other three, an undergraduate whose disappointment in being excluded from the early LSD experiments inspired him to set the wheels in motion that eventually got Leary and Alpert kicked out of Harvard. Weil followed Leary's admonition to "Turn on and Tune in," but not to drop out. Instead, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to become a founder of the alternative medicine and holistic health movements.