Was It Leary's Fault?

“Stevens is careful about assigning blame. Leary was not the only cause of the 1968 collapse. He was the most visible accelerant.”

Jay Stevens does not write Timothy Leary as a villain in Storming Heaven. He writes him as a man of considerable intelligence who made a series of decisions that destroyed, in the short term, something more valuable than what he was building.

The chain of causation is more complex than 'Leary's fault.' The CIA's coercive research had already given prohibition its evidence. The counterculture's enthusiastic adoption of LSD had already created the political conditions for suppression. Anslinger's framework was already in place.

Leary did not create the conditions for the 1968 crackdown. He accelerated them.

What he did: he moved LSD from a clinical tool being carefully developed into a public symbol of rebellion against the social order. He made the connection between LSD and anti-war, anti-establishment politics explicit and theatrical. He gave the Nixon administration exactly the association they needed to make scheduling politically viable.

Huxley saw this coming. His letters to Osmond in the early 1960s include the warning that public advocacy would provoke a crackdown. He recognized the impulse as genuine. He was criticizing the strategy.

Stevens's judgment: the impulse was genuine and the strategy was catastrophic. What we cannot know is whether the crackdown would have come anyway, because the political conditions that made it possible were already present.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)