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Retrospective By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal ===================== "My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."Timothy Leary (1920 - 1996), U.S. psychologist. Lecture, 1966 (published in The Politics of Ecstasy, ch. 21, 1968). ===================== Although Timothy Leary, PhD has been dead some five years, for an hour last Sunday, he once more seemed like the liveliest trouble-maker around, dead or not. How did this happen? Courtesy of the Big Eye. I got lucky and while aimlessly flipping through the channels, accidentally came across a one-hour biographical sketch of the unsinkable, unstoppable, indefinable, incorrigible, Irish iconoclast, and the "different drummer" being referred to when people used to say they were "marching to that different drummer". Fans of life and living on the edge of things will never forget that it was Doctor Tim Leary who set the tone for an entire generation when he told us that Valhalla came in a bottle and was most beneficially combined with a sugar cube and ingested like the original manna from heaven. This procedure was guaranteed to lend the hopeful ‘consciousness travelers’ the chemical keys to the boundless wonders within our own skulls. Just waiting for exploration The magic potion was Lysergenic Acid (LSD), and Timothy Leary was the Tour Director for a generation of "Inner Space Travelers." His message was simple, direct and unvarying: "Turn on, tune in and drop out". While his principal celebrity (or notoriety) grew out of his enthusiasm for LSD, his tastes in brain-twisting substances didn’t stop there. In addition to ‘acid’ tripping, he had warm comments to make about virtually the entire menu of mind-bending medicinals, herbal products and mere inebriants. In addition to serving as the self-anointed high priest of lysergenic acid (LSD), Tim wrote the recipe book for such exotic items as Mexico’s highly-touted 'magic mushrooms', marijuana and many other hallucinogens that could be eaten, smoked, shot up, injected or rubbed on reachable mucous membranes. Tim turned his 'country seat', "Millbrook", (borrowed from a well-loaded and liberally inclined scion of the moneyed Mellon tribe) into the mother-house for an assortment of Ivy League acid-heads, goof-balls, space-cadets and other assembled chemical cases, most of whom were truants from such august institutions as Harvard, Yale, Boston College, etc. In other words, 'poor little rich kids', in the satiric label of the time. Leary's central theme was that, via drug helpers, he (and everybody) could link up with the pre-historic vestigial components of original intelligence, when all of what we ‘knew’ was really an assortment of accumulated instincts, rather than what we now call "information" and must be artificially acquired via study. This is knowledge that can be selectively summoned up and applied to discrete problems. (Call it discretionary problem solving.) It’s a relatively new ‘trick’. Our prehistoric ancestor were not very good at this kind of directed rational reasoning. The ability has to be painstakingly acquired and enhanced through lots of practice. Leary was kicked out of Harvard, and a number of lesser institutions, that failed to warm up to his "victimless crime" thesis, when applied to drugs. Most of these dissertations were germinated while he was in durance vile for a variety of gross departures from acceptable socio-legal conduct. As soon as he managed to get released - or arrange a break-out from his most recent incarceration, he would invariably appear back on the lecture circuit, recruiting disciples, attracting widespread attention, and reminding John Law that he was a dispenser of dangerous, anti-social, extra-legal ideas. "Doctor Tim" accepted institutional terminations, imprisonment and fines, etc., with admirable equanimity, on the basis that his tormenters just 'didn't understand the territory' he was mapping out for the good of humanity. He steadfastly adhered to the idea that sooner or later the cops and courts - and everybody else - would, in due course, come to recognize the ignorant error of their "Square John" ways. Regardless of whatever else we might say about him, Timothy Leary was an engaging, intelligent, brilliantly introspective clinical observer. Whether his case for psychedelic self-analysis holds up or not, he broke some brand new psychological ground. Nobody can take that away from him. The point at which at which your reporter had to break with the Leary position was when he began defending drug use as a 'victimless crime'. This simply - and obviously - was not and is not true. It doesn't hold up at all. Not even on even the most superficial examination. It always seemed surprising that anybody as intelligent as Timothy Leary couldn’t see through the glaring fallacy of his own case. Begin with the fact that drugs - from acetyl-salicylic-acid, to LSD, to hypnotics, opiates, nicotinic acid and alcohol, regularly lead to dependencies and/or habituation. Some of the so-called 'social drugs", notoriously so. The fall-out from those dependency or addictive results impact with varying effects on the "hooked" individual, his family, his employability, his company, community and society at large. Anyone who fails to understand this, or who chooses to ignore the realities, needs his/her awareness upgraded. Drug usage is not a 'victimless crime'. Drug usage creates innumerable victims,in the full circle of functions in which the user, him- or herself, is engaged. Anyone who has lived in and observed full-fledged drug-cultures function, can tell you that narcotics of all kinds extract a greater or lesser toll on everyone, users and non-users alike. The penalties are both direct and indirect, and come in the form of economic, social and institutional hardships against both the guilty and innocents. The only difference is in degree and the prices to be paid. The economic drug ‘loading’ may involve reducing discretionary spending: Buying a 'fix', instead of buying groceries for the family; spending a day 'spaced out' in a "smoke house' or an opium cellar, instead of going to work; job impairment, ranging from faulty judgement, to operational mistakes, and from spoiled work to machinery breakage through misuse, and physical accidents that regularly involve insurance claims and result in crippled - or dead - bodies. The point being made here is that drugs never make the user smarter, more efficient, more perceptive or more cooperative. Quite the opposite. And slice it any way you choose, the bottom line is that its costs are both visible and hidden - in terms of productivity, profitability, job security, personal inconvenience, health and total work output. Add these economic deductions to those levied against the family, in terms of ruined interpersonal and personal relationships, dysfunctionality, poverty and broken homes, and we begin to see the huge cumulative costs accruing from these allegedly 'victimless crimes'. So let’s not delude ourselves. There are as many reason for using drugs as there are users. There are also as many exculpatory cop-outs as imaginative people can invent to ease their own consciences and salve the fears of others, who may or may not be in the primary or secondary 'circles of impact' set forth above. But the excuse that drug-use is a personal issue, and therefore should be left up to the individual user to chart his own course, since it doesn't "hurt" anybody else, is totally phony. Pure self-serving lies! Every ‘druggie’ with half a brain knows better. He can see what his ‘habit’ is doing to him - and everyone close to him. Anybody who has ever tried to conduct a sensible conversation with someonewho is 'blown away', stoned, riding the bubble, in the smoke cloud, up there, steamed, or out of his head, knows better. So, at the very least, let's stop trying to delude ourselves and others about what drugs cost. The cost is incalculable! If nowhere else, the cost of drugs is calculated in terms of cumulative human intelligence. Like somebody has said, "a brain is a terrible thing to waste". Try putting a price on that organ. And remember: Only one to a customer! ========== E N D =========== Lorenzo Dee Belveal Copyright © 2000 Lorenzo Dee Belveal
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