Abstract
Beginning with his arrest for possession of marijuana December 24, 1965, Dr. Timothy Leary became embroiled in a very public series of court cases that sought initially to utilize the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to challenge established United States drug laws regarding marijuana. Though Leary’s attempts at using the Free Exercise Clause were unsuccessful, his case was eventually heard by the United States Supreme Court, who, in 1969, found major elements of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Law unconstitutional and overturned Leary’s conviction. This chapter will trace evolution of Leary’s defense argument from one based on religious freedom to one based on due process and the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Leary’s initial freedom of religion defense was based on the success of the Native American Church’s 1964 California State Supreme Court ruling that protected that group’s sacramental use of peyote within its religious ceremonies. This chapter will also describe how the success of Native American Church case led Leary to popularize and speak out in favor of small groups of psychedelic users establishing their own “official” religions. Leary followed his own advice by creating the League for Spiritual Discovery in 1966 and was seen as a religious leader by the founder of the Neo-American Church (another psychedelic quasi-religion) as well. Seeing themselves as a persecuted people under legal attack for their spiritual and experimental practices, both the Neo-American Church and the League for Spiritual Discovery sought to emulate the Native American Church and establish legal protections for the use of illegal substances.
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Notes
- 1.
Timothy Francis Leary, 1920–1996, was a psychologist, author, and lecturer who became one of the most famous advocates for the use of psychedelic substances during the 1960s. An icon of the 1960s counterculture in the United States, Leary waged a very public battle in the courts and in the media against law enforcement representatives and the government whom he believed were suppressing the use of culturally beneficial psychedelic substances, most specifically LSD-25, which Leary believed could change human behavior in positive ways. Arrested several times in the 1960s for possession of marijuana, Leary was eventually sent to prison in California in 1970 for violating parole. With the help of the Weather Underground, Leary escaped from prison and fled the country, living for a time with the Black Panther Party in Algeria, before settling in Switzerland. He was eventually tracked down by U.S. authorities and sent to Federal prison where he cooperated with FBI agents in order to receive a lighter sentence. Released from prison in 1976, Leary spent the rest of the decade as a lecturer and author of several books. In the 1980s, he became one of the earliest advocates for computer “alternative reality” and other technological advances, including the Internet. He died in Beverley Hills, California from cancer in 1996, documenting his demise through constant video upload to his website. In 1997, Leary’s ashes, along with the Star Trek television show creator Gene Roddenberry’s, were placed in a capsule and launched into space where they orbit the planet to this day.
- 2.
Psychedelic, meaning “mind-manifesting,” is currently a contentious term. It was coined by psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond in a letter to author Aldous Huxley in 1956, and has become the most prevalent terminology in popular culture when categorizing the type of natural substances (such as the peyote cactus and certain species of mushrooms) and synthetic substances (such as LSD , synthetic psilocybin, and mescaline) that produce a remarkable array of “consciousness altering” and potently psychoactive effects when ingested. “Psychedelic” as a term has been questioned by those who feel it has become too much entwined with the 1960s “counterculture.” Currently, among the most common alternative terms is “entheogen” (generating the divine within), which has gained favor among advocates of the therapeutic and spiritual use of these substances. However, since this chapter deals with the 1960s, and the term psychedelic is so heavily associated with that time period, I have chosen to use it over alternatives that are equally limited and potentially confusing.
- 3.
A curandero (feminine: curandera) is a traditional folk healer in Latin American aboriginal groups. A curandero is often known as a shaman.
- 4.
Richard Alpert, 1931–, is an author, psychologist, lecturer, and spiritual teacher who is also known as Baba Ram Dass. After receiving his PhD in clinical psychology from Stanford University in 1957, Alpert joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1958 as an associate professor. While at Harvard, Alpert became close friends with Timothy Leary and the two set about designing various experiments with the psychedelic substances psilocybin and LSD-25 under the name of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Alpert was dismissed from Harvard in 1963 for giving psychedelic substances to undergraduate students in a non-clinical setting. Working with Leary closely until 1965, Alpert became an advocate of psychedelic substance use. After a falling out with Leary in 1965, Alpert returned to Stanford where he taught while lecturing throughout the country on the benefits of psychedelics. In 1967, Alpert traveled to India where he met and became a disciple of Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave Alpert the name Baba Ram Dass. Alpert returned to the United States in 1969 and began traveling the country as a New Age spiritual teacher. In 1971 he wrote the bestselling book on his life and philosophy titled Be Here Now. In 1974, Alpert founded the educational Hanuman Foundation and followed in 1978 by founding the Seva Foundation, a health organization. He continues to teach and write despite suffering a stroke on 1997. The award-winning film, Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, about Alpert’s life and work, was released in 2001.
- 5.
The Castalia Foundation was named after Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game (1943) in which a group of elite intellectuals run a boarding school for boys in the fictional European province of Castalia. Besides running the boarding school, the intellectuals play the Glass Bead Game, which is so difficult that it takes a lifetime of knowledge to play.
- 6.
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small cactus with powerful psychedelic properties that has been utilized by native North and Central American tribes as a ceremonial hallucinogen for hundreds of years.
- 7.
The Watergate Plumbers were a group of Republican operatives who were employed by President Richard Nixon and led by G. Gordon Liddy. First established in 1971 by Nixon to investigate leaked internal information from the White House to the press, the Plumbers eventually branched out into illegal activities, including the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC. The subsequent Watergate Scandal led to President Nixon resigning office in 1974.
- 8.
Sherbert v. Verner was a 1963 Supreme Court case in which Sherbert, a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, was fired from her job for refusing to work on Saturday, the day of rest of her church. Unable to find another job, Sherbert applied for unemployment compensation from the state of South Carolina, which denied her claims by finding that she turned down job offers without “good cause.” The Supreme Court ruled in the case that the denial of unemployment benefits by the state infringed upon the plaintiff’s free exercise of religion. In doing so, the Supreme Court established a two-pronged test related to such situations: either it must be found that there is no infringement on the free exercise of religion or that the state must have compelling interest to infringe upon the free exercise thereof. In Sherbert, the Court found that the plaintiff’s free exercise of her religion was infringed upon without the state having compelling interest.
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Lander, D.R. (2014). “Legalize Spiritual Discovery”: The Trials of Dr. Timothy Leary . In: Labate, B., Cavnar, C. (eds) Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40957-8_9
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