Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary (1920 to 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for strongly advocating psychedelic drugs. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he worked as a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, where after a 1960 experience with magic mushrooms in Mexico he founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project and tested psilocybin in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Harvard faculty questioned the legitimacy and ethics of his research because he took psychedelics himself with his subjects, and Harvard fired him and his colleague Richard Alpert in May 1963. He became a figure of the 1960s counterculture, popularized phrases such as turn on, tune in, drop out, developed an eight-circuit model of consciousness in Exo-Psychology in 1977 and was arrested 36 times. Evaluations of him remain polarized.