Dr. Timothy Leary and the Millbrook Estate

LSD was first introduced to the public on a national scale in the early 1960’s. This is often attributed to the efforts of Dr.’s Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Upon their dismissal from Harvard University in 1963, for carrying out experiments involving LSD, Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom, IFIF. After a brief, yet successful stint of psychedelic experiments in Mexico in the summer of 1963 Leary and Alpert brought the organization back to the United States. Shortly after, Leary met a young stockbroker and LSD enthusiast, William Hitchcock. Hitchcock, the recipient of a sizeable family inheritance, made numerous donations to Leary and his fellow LSD aficionados. In 1963 Hitchcock leased out his families four hundred thousand acre estate to Tim Leary and his crew for only five hundred dollars a month. This marked the beginning of the days at the Millbrook Estate.
The men and women living at the Millbrook Estate throughout the 1960’s shared similar views in regards to LSD. Their goal was to ‘use Millbrook as a setting to explore the realities of [his or her] own nervous systems in a creative way’. Dr. Leary was convinced that LSD held the key to a new life understanding. He and his colleagues took great pride in their work, and felt it was their job to encourage everyone to, “Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out.” When asked about his time at Millbrook Michael Hollingshead, a prominent British Doctor, and close friend of Tim’s stated, ”We lived out a myth which had not yet been integrated into our personalities. Millbrook was itself the work of art… Like Kafka’s Castle, it gave out messages into the aether in the form of one high resonant sound, which vibrated on the ears of the world, as if it were trying to penetrate beyond the barrier separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. We felt satisfied that our goal was Every Man’s, a project of Every Man’s ambition. We sought that for unitary state of divine harmony, an existence in which only the sense of wonder remains, and all fear is gone.”
Experiments at Millbrook continued until the spring of 1967, when the government’s frequent narcotic search and seizures forced an end to Leary’s time at the estate.
Although it began and ended in just four years, the Millbrook estate era had an everlasting affect on people’s perceptions of LSD. Unlike the research done by scientists and government officials in the 1950’s, Dr. Leary and the growing youth counterculture received unprecedented amounts of publicity from the media throughout the 60’s. During the early part of the decade Leary’s proselytizing words could be heard everywhere, however the medias over involvement in Leary’s life would prove to have a permanently damaging effect on his reputation. It surfaced that Leary admitted to still feeling a ‘psychic displacement’ years after his first LSD trip. When speaking about the trip he said, “I have never recovered from that shattering ontological confrontation. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, and the social world around me seriously.” Leary’s growing confusion led him to publish his own, ‘updated’, version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he declared the ultimate psychedelic manual (A guide/set of instructions used by someone during an LSD trip that supposedly helps the person confront their acid trip with minimal fear and anxiety. Interestingly enough, many LSD users reported having worse experiences uses Leary’s manual). The manual went against the traditional idea that every person should have their own unique experience; therefore sparking disagreements among various acid veterans in the mid 1960’s. Leary caught heavy criticism within the psychedelic community after publishing his manual. Even Dr. Hollingshead, changed his stance on LSD after he saw what Leary had gone through. “Let’s face it-LSD is not the key to a new metaphysics of being or a politics of ecstasy. The ‘pure light’ of an acid session is not this-it may even be the apotheosis of distractions, the ultimate and most dangerous temptation. But it does allow one to live at least for a time in the light of the knowledge that every moment of time is a window into eternity, that the absolute is manifest in every appearance and relationship. ”Despite strong dissenting opinions Leary kept some of his core followers, and persisted that if a particular spiritual state could be produced regularly the psychedelic movement would skyrocket.
I believe that Tim Leary had varying effects on LSD’s role in American culture. He acted as a spokesperson for LSD until the day he passed away. For numerous years he was the driving force behind the entire psychedelic and LSD movement. However, I feel that if he had produced more definitive scientific studies while at the Millbrook estate, the scientific community, and more importantly the government would have been inclined to listen to his opinions.