American History Hit - America's Psychedelic '60s: Timothy Leary and LSD

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

In 1963, a Gilded Age estate in Millbrook, New York, became a venue for academic research into therapeutic uses for LSD, led by psychologist Timothy Leary. Over the next few years evolved into the home of the psychedelic movement of 1960s America. Guests were invited to turn on, tune in, drop out. Bemused locals first saw their new neighbours as harmless. But, as Devin Lander tells Don, as their number and notoriety grew, so did a moral panic across America.Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Senior producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We are on the grounds of a massive Gilded Age estate in the Hudson Valley,

just outside Millbrook, New York. It's the early evening of a warm summer day in 1967. Clusters of people wander in and out of a huge white mansion house, its turreted facade, emblazoned with hand-painted imagery. The surrealist Salvador Dalli's eyes and famous mustache loom over all. Guests are invited to turn on, tune in, and drop out. A sign inside the entrance requests all to kindly check your esteemed ego at the door.

Joint surpassed, LSD is dropped. What began as a venue for academic research into the therapeutic uses of hallucinogenic substances, led by none other than Timothy Leary, has evolved into the East Coast Mecca of the psychedelic movement in America. Locals in the village, once bemused, are now suspicious. As a moral panic rises across the nation and in the media, this psychedelic Eden is about to become less than paradise. Hey folks, welcome to the pod.

The 1960s in America were years racked by social unrest, sweeping protest, political activism. It was a new generation of Americans, the baby boomers, coming of age, pushing towards a looser, more liberal society than that of their parents. It was civil rights in the South, Vietnam overseas, free love, rock and roll, feminism, gay rights, and a so-called silent majority, loudly demanding law and order. In this crucible of a deeply conflicted country, another movement took hold. This one's small but mighty, born in the hallways and laboratories of an illustrious university. But then, oddly, moving to the bucolic farmlands of New York's Hudson Valley.

It was a counterculture movement led by a man who would become America's leading proponent of personal rebellion and self-revelation, a man named Timothy Leary. Here to discuss the sobering realities of this hallucinogenic movement, a tale reaching back decades, really, is the New York State historian, Devin Lander. Greetings, Devin. Welcome to American History Hit. Thank you, Don. It's a pleasure to be here. I am myself a proud New Yorker, and Devin and I have worked together on several projects here over the years. But, Devin, today's subject, the story of Timothy Leary and the hallucinogenic

movement here in New York. This is the subject of your doctoral work. Am I right? That is correct. I am doing a dissertation on that topic. It's a story that, I mean, still surprises people here. In the early 60s, Timothy Leary, icon of the counterculture movement in America. The figure Nixon once called the most dangerous man in America located his base of operations right in the Hudson Valley. In a town here called Millbrook, a charming village to this day, hardly a place you would expect controversy.

So first let's get the geography right, the setting. This is a, we're talking about a famous estate. Located what, two hours north of New York? Absolutely, yes. It's in Duchess County, the village of Millbrook, The estate is about 2,500 acres. It's still an intact estate, which is very rare in these days. Most of the large Hudson Valley estates have been broken up over time, but not this one.

So, yeah, it's got a unique location about two hours from New York City. It's also not too far from Boston, which gave the Leary and his group access to two major urban areas and help to position Milbrook as a kind of countercultural destination. I want to stick with Milbrook for a second. All up and down the Hudson Valley, very famously, Rockefeller, Jay Gould. This is the land of the original major estates of these robber barons and so forth. Milbrook, we're calling it Milberg, is an estate of that generation, that Gilded Age picture of the richest possible place in New York.

major mansion, many outbuildings, orchards, meadows, you name it. This place is the last place on earth you would expect a hippie commune to take hold. It really is one of the Gilded Age mansions. It was created by a German-born gas mogul named Charles Dietrich, who had immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century and made a huge fortune in a settling gas manufacturing. It was actually one of the founders of U.S. Union Carbide. So over time, he acquired, again, about 2,500 acres, made up mostly of existing farms and kind of united them together into this grand estate. He contracted with an architect named Addison Mizner to build the main house, which is known as the big house on the estate.

It's about 40 rooms, give or take. It's a massive structure with a wraparound porch done in really the Queen Anne style that was popular at the time. And they also built, Mizner, the architect and Charles Diedrich, built really grand greenhouses that were the envy of all of their neighbors and really almost tourism destination for people to come and see these huge greenhouses where they grew a variety of exotic fruits and plants that you wouldn't find in the Hudson Valley. And it was also a working dairy farm. They had. had large barns and herds of dairy cows that they milked and sold the milk in New York City as well as butter and cream. So it was an old school, almost European-style working manner home.

Yeah, this is movie land. I mean, this is driving down that huge long road with the line, the alleys of trees and so forth. And there is this magnificent location off there in the distance. To this day, still that kind of place. Of course, like a. all these estates, they traded hands through the 20th century. And by the 1960s, tell me who owns this estate. So by 1963, the property has changed hands, as you said, a few times since Charles Dietrich's death in the 1920s. And it's acquired by the Hitchcock brothers, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, who were heirs to not only the Hitchcock side of the family, which was wealthy, but their mother was a melon. So they were heirs to part of the melon fortunes. So when they reached the age where they were

able to access their trust funds, they were looking for an estate that they could use as a place to raise horses and have really some sort of agricultural space that they could use for their assets and to invest in. So they looked around and eventually came across the estate that Charles Diedrich built. It was up for sale. It was in essentially disrepair at that point. It hadn't been lived in for some time. And so they acquired it. And the spring of 1963, really, is when they closed on the deal. And they still own the estate. It's in private property. It's not open to the public in any way. And the Hitchcock family still owns it. Little did they know what was coming down the pike. In order to understand what happens at Millbrook, I mean, the incredibly unlikely. years ahead that unfold. We need to take a big step backwards. Back to Boston. I mentioned an illustrious institution, by which I mean Harvard University. This is where Timothy Leary is working in the late 1950s, early 1960s, in a completely legit fashion. He is a researcher at Harvard in

the Department of Psychology. Am I right? Yes, he is a psychologist by training and was a lecturer at Harvard University. This is a brilliant man. Just to make me well understand, you know, a brief bio, this guy is an extraordinary mind. He's first trained in Berkeley. He's part of a sort of illustrious generation of new psychologists, really, coming out of World War II and really before, sort of born out of Freud and Jung. This is an area in America and certainly in Europe that is home to the most brilliant minds who are really trying to rethink the way human beings think and how psychology has formed culture, really. He was an expert in personality analysis and interpersonality dynamics between people.

That was what he wrote his dissertation on at Berkeley. He published a book in 1955 that was named the Book of the Year by Psychology Today. So, yes, he was a fast-rising academic research psychologist. He worked at the Kaiser Institute in California for several years, but really by the late 50s, he was undergoing kind of some personal crises, including the suicide of his wife, which happened and really sent him into a depression. He left the Kaiser Institute and was in Europe for a brief bit of time with his two children, trying to kind of plot the course for the future, trying to write another book, trying to decide what he wanted to do with his career. And that's

when he met David McClelland, who was the chair of the Harvard University Department of the of Social Relations, which was part of the psychology department. And after that meeting, he was offered a lectureship at Harvard, and that's how he ended up there in 1959. Well, we really got to think about 1960 as being the beginning of the Timothy Leary that we all know today and that became infamous throughout the 1960s. And that's when he was on summer vacation in Mexico. And that would be the first time that he ever ingested a psychedelic substance, in this case, mushrooms. And really, he came back a completely changed person. Up to that point, he had been very anti-drug and any usage, including in psychology or psychotherapy. He did not believe that drugs were beneficial,

but after experiencing psychedelic mushrooms in Mexico, he came back to Harvard with the idea of creating a research project based on psychedelic substances, specifically starting with psilocybin, which is the synthesized psychedelic compound in mushrooms. And, Learthurins, and theory's belief as a psychologist was that these were substances that were not being fully investigated and that there was real therapeutic potential for psychedelics to aid in a variety of mental illness or personality disorders that he felt otherwise were not being treated in a proper manner. And he also believed that these substances should be used by a variety of people, not just those who are severely mental ill, but those who may have other issues like

depression and even alcoholism and things like that. Many people don't realize today that there is a long history dating back before 1960, for sure, of LSD, hallucinogenics. A big curiosity of this was born in the early 20th century. Of course, this had gone back, you know, into primitive societies for ages. And people were aware of ayahuasca and so forth. being this sort of breakthrough experience that you could see the other side of. But it's really in the 20th century and specifically the late 30s when things take off. Lycergic acid diethelamide.

I got it. LSD was mistakenly invented, I suppose, or developed at a lab in Switzerland. Tell me how that event happened and how that triggered on a new kind of study. Albert Hoffman was a research chemist in Basel, Switzerland, and he was working on trying to develop the medicinal properties of the ergo fungus, and he was doing this to aid in birth and other applications for these types of medicines. So as he was going through his process of investigating and creating compounds, he created LSD 25, and he quickly determined that it wasn't something that he thought would be valuable in his research. So he set it aside really for five years until 1943. And for reasons that even he later didn't know, he decided at one point to bring it back

to his laboratory table and take a look at that compound again. There was something about it that stuck in his mind that he thought maybe he hadn't investigated it thoroughly. So in doing so, he spilled a little bit of it on his hand. And actually, because of that, he had a slight psychedelic episode. So immediately he realized that there was something to this compound. And so he set up an experiment on himself to take an amount, which he thought was a small amount at the time, which ended up being quite large dose because LSD is so powerful. So he took a small amount of LSD at his laboratory and immediately had the first acid trip, so to speak. He had to go home. He was worried that he was going to go mad and not come back from this experience, but he did.

And in doing so, he realized that it was a powerful compound that somehow altered consciousness and should be investigated. So that was really not only the invention of LSD, but also the first experimentation. And other scientists in countries around the world really took psychedelics and started to investigate uses for them throughout the 1940s and 1950s. So by the time Leary got interested in 1960 and 61, there were other important scientific investigations taking place on psychedelics of various types, including mescaline and psilocybin and LSD. One of the real publicists of this movement is Aldous Huxley,

famous author of Brave New World, appropriately, I guess, and a real thinker on the future of the world. And he begins to experiment with, I guess, at first, it's mushrooms. And this is all out in Hollywood at the time because all these Europeans have landed in that world. And he writes a book called The Doors of Perception, which interestingly later becomes the source of the name The Doors for the rock group The Doors. And this is a widely read account of his experimentation with hallucingenics. And we have to add very positive. You know, all of the reason that LSD and the word about hallucinogenics in this time spread was that nobody was dying from it.

There was no addiction that came from it. There was a generally positive view of this tool, this new drug that could be a breakthrough drug into the subconscious, a way of seeing into human experience in a whole different way and perhaps curing problems. And Lerie meets Huxley later on. Huxley happened to be at MIT when Timothy Lerry, essentially. established what was known as the Harvard psilocybin project, his research project on psychedelics. And one of the first people he met with was Aldous Huxley because he was aware of the doors of perception and the follow-up book called Heaven and Hell, which Huxley had written about his own experimentation with mescaline at that time.

In a way that was, you mentioned that it was a positive account, and it really was. And the interesting thing that Huxley was talking about was not only the potential therapeutic benefits, but also the spiritual benefits, that these substances, as have been used for thousands of years in a spiritual and religious way, had that ability to access mystical states that were otherwise almost impossible to access for your average person. So Leary really was interested in that,

as much as the potential for psychological therapy that these substances have. he became very interested in the application for mystical states. And Huxley was really the one that helped move him in that direction, specifically towards Eastern philosophy and Eastern religion, which became a hallmark of Leary's research at Harvard and at Mexico and at Milbrook. There was a definite turn to the east. And that was one of the results of conversations with all this Huxley and others,

who just happened by chance. to be at Harvard, including the Zen philosopher Alan Watts, who was a visiting professor at Harvard during this era. During this time, let's remind people, we're talking about 1960, 61, 62. A lot is happening in this period of time. And it's all happening on the campus of Harvard, sanctioned by Harvard University. He's doing legitimate research. He's working with someone named Richard Alpert, who becomes a very important figure in American society later, and we'll get to that in a bit. But these are experiments and types of research that Harvard knows all about. Nonetheless, it is controversial. Tell me about the conflict that's going on between him and the faculty.

It does become almost immediately controversial. And that's because of the methodology that Leary and Elpert develop around the psilocybin project. They were firm believers in removing the barriers between the researcher and the subject. So instead of having a doctor in a white coat with a clipboard, writing things down, while somebody is undergoing a psychedelic experience in a laboratory setting, Leary and Elpert believed in setting up aesthetically pleasing, comfortable settings with music, and really programming the session in that way. And they did it outside of laboratories. So they were doing it at their shared home in Newton Center.

They were giving psychedelics in a very loose way, comparatively, to what the established scientists believed should be done. And they also, to break down, again, that barrier between the researcher and the subject, believed that the researchers should be taking these substances at the same time. And that really caused a problem. So, again, almost immediately from the formation of the Harvard psilocybin project, their colleagues start questioning their methodology and how and why they're doing this, whether or not this is dangerous, whether or not the scientific method is not being followed in some cases.

So they pushed back and tried to initially tone things down, and they promised they would only use subjects that were, you know, graduate students and that they would be more scientifically inclined. That didn't last long. So the next step that they took was to create a foundation that they could conduct their research outside of the auspices of Harvard. Now, we have to remember, these substances are totally legal at this time as well. Exactly. So they created the International Federation for Internal Freedom, known as if-if. Again, with the intent on being able to conduct experiments the way they wanted to do it outside of the boundaries of what Harvard was imposing on them. So that didn't mollify things very well either.

And over time, really by the spring of 1963, Leary had completely determined that he was moving beyond Harvard. and he actually stopped attending classes that he was assigned to teach. So that is why he was terminated. I'll be back shortly with more from Devin Lander. Let's talk about the prison experiment that they did. I mean, this was typical of hopes for LSD, applying hallucinogens to prisoners in order to let them see another way of life, another way of thinking. Yeah, it's really an interesting project,

and it's somewhat surprising that they were allowed to do it because of the controversy. that they were creating at Harvard. But the Concord Prison Experiment was really an attempt to allow hardened criminals, in some cases, the ability to undergo a programmed therapeutic session with psychedelics in order to break out of their personality that had led them to a life of crime in some cases. So Leary and his group actually entered the prison and would distribute psychedelics into prisoners in confined setting and take them them. with them, again, to break down that boundary. So initial findings from the project showed that

the recidivism rate drastically declined with those who undertook this experiment. That was their intent to, again, break prisoners out of their past personality that led to crime and allow them to leave prison and, you know, have a life of prosperity and not be immediately back in prison. And so initially the findings were very positive. Now, later studies that happened decades later and people looked at the data and determined that that may have been, you know, not exactly accurate that many of the prisoners who didn't go back to prison were helped in other ways by Leary, including he let people stay at his house until they found their footing and things like that. So there were some question about whether or not this experiment was actually as beneficial. But that does show you that Leary was really smitten, so to speak, by psychedelics, and he saw them as a panacea for a variety of problems, personality issues, and even societal issues. And that, in the end of the day, is really what got him in trouble.

Yeah, this really becomes about Timothy Leary, as much as it's about LSD. I mean, the story, Timothy Leary was blurring the lines that were previously respected and drawn carefully and certainly in the academia. But this is a result. He had a big personality as a nice way of putting it. Others would call him an egotist. Yeah, he's certainly an interesting character, an iconoclastic character, really, had been thrown out of many institutions, including West Point, the University of Alabama, Harvard eventually. So he was really a person who pushed back. He had a rebellious streak throughout his entire life, very intelligent, but also very complex. You mentioned egomaniac is an accurate depiction. Part of his problem was when first Harvard and eventually law enforcement and the U.S. government started to constrict on what he wanted to do in his research. His reaction was not to just kind of quiet down and try to play along.

His reaction was to become even more flamboyant and more out there as far as his proclamations and things he was saying. He loved the media. He loved the spotlight. And it really caused problems throughout his rest of his life. So this becomes his cause. And he starts to think in terms of society, as so many people were in those days. You know, this was a ticket to the big time in many ways for him. But maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad.

I don't know. But whatever it was, he begins to think big and how to find a bigger stage. And he meets Peggy Hitchcock, who is the sister of one of these Hitchcock brothers, who owned the estate we're talking about. and this becomes the solution, the temporary solution to their problems. Let's move down south, away from all of this academia, around from the stodginess of Harvard, etc., and find this new promised land, which is in Duchess County, New York.

Yeah, really, they had attempted to establish what they called the Psychedelic Research Institute in Mexico, initially after Harvard. That didn't last. The Mexican government was not happy with that. They threw them out after about a month. They quickly tried the Caribbean as well. lasted even less time, about two weeks. They were thrown out of Dominica, and so they were back in Massachusetts with no place to go. And they being Leary, Richard Elpert, had been dismissed by that time,

a bevy of their graduate students who were very interested in this type of research, including Ralph Metzner and Gunther Weil and others. So it was a decent-sized group about, you know, 10 to 15 adults, as well as Leary's children and so on. So they were looking for a place to create a research institute that they, again, as you noted, was away from Harvard, away from academia, they could decide how the methodology would work in, as well as living communally, which is something that they had begun doing in Massachusetts when they were at Harvard. They had all kind of moved in together in various levels. And so they were really interested in this kind of communal family setting.

And so they were looking for someplace to do that. And you mentioned Peggy Hitchcock, who had become involved with them at Harvard. She had spent time in Mexico. And after being thrown out of the Caribbean, she mentioned that her twin brothers, Tommy and Billy, had acquired the estate in Millbrook, and suggested that they go and see it. So Richard Alpert, who was a pilot, had his own plane, flew from Massachusetts down to Duchess County with Peggy Hitchcock, took a look at the estate and obviously fell in love and found it to be perfect for exact. what they were looking for. And the brothers agreed. They were all in on this thing. Yes, the brothers agreed. They were interested in the research that Leary and Elpert were doing. Peggy Hitchcock had, as they said, been involved with that at Harvard. So she, you know, was able to tell them who these

people were and introduce them. And Richard Elper and Timothy Leary were nothing, if not charismatic, and very gregarious and easy to deal with and talk with. So the brothers allowed them to move in for next to no rent and live in the big house and have access to the rest of the estate. Didn't hurt that they were two hours north of New York City. You know, this was a chance to bring a lot more people into the fold to get media attention as well. They were trying to spread the word. Tell me about the Research Institute. So this becomes a formalized world of study. I'm thinking about, you know, places that exist these days like this, the Esselin Institute and so forth. This is kind of the precursor to all of that. Yeah, well, it's really contemporary.

the Esselin Institute, and they both traveled in the same universe, so to speak. Aldous Huxley was involved in both groups, so was Alan Watts. But yeah, initially, Milbrook was a setting that was not open to the public. So they were doing their research among themselves. And writing and publishing, they had an academic journal that they were publishing called the Psychedelic Review. They wrote a book called The Psychedelic Experience. So they were really not open to the public like Esselin was at the time.

They later transitioned to having weekend seminars and kind of opening their doors. And that's when they became, this would have been 1964, 65. That's when they kind of became something similar to what Esselin was doing for a brief amount of time, at least. Again, people could pay a fee and come and stay for the weekend and experience psychedelic lectures and information without taking the drugs. They weren't giving drugs out at the time. but they were also doing things like yoga and Eastern meditation and things like that. So it really was kind of like an early New Age Institute. And that's the direction they were moving in.

But at the same time, again, they came into conflict this time with local police authorities and the district attorney of Duchess County. Not yoga. Oh, my God. This had to have been quite a scandal in Millbrook. many people don't know. I'm not speaking specifically of Milbrook, but New York is a more conservative place than people think of New York City. And certainly in these days, the early 60s, for this group to move in to really one of the pride and joy of the town, this great estate, has to be raising the hackles in a lot of people. Yeah, well, it's interesting, Don. It starts out actually a little bit differently. And now when they did arrive in the summer of 1963 in early fall and started to set up shop in the estate, the New York Times did an article because they were notorious at this point. There was a lot of press around them being dismissed at Harvard. There was a lot of press about what happened in Mexico. So these were known people. And the Times did an article where they went around town and asked the villagers, you know, what is your impression? And it did vary. Some were concerned and, you know, worried about the negative attention that would come with Leary and Elk moving there. But others were very bemused, maybe, but not concerned.

And there's quotes saying, you know, that they're very nice. They're obviously very intelligent. These are academic types. And there's a photograph in this newspaper article that is really interesting of Leary and Elper and Leary's daughter on the main street in Milbrook. and they look very conservative, short hair, suit and tie, long coats, you know, they look like academics. They don't look like Timothy Leary and Richard Elpert looked by 1968. So it does change and it does become a problem for the local villagers and for law enforcement. Milbrook is a conservative place.

Still is, I would say. It's still Dutchess County is a heavily Republican county. So, you know, there was pushback by 1965. but that really is a result of Timothy Leary again being in the headlines this time for being arrested trying to travel into Mexico to spend the Christmas break with Billy Hitchcock and he is arrested at the border for possession of marijuana and this makes large headlines over the Christmas holidays including in the New York Times. He has to come back to Millbrook and by the spring of 1966 the estate is raided by

Sheriff Larry Quinlan and the district attorney and the assistant district attorney of Duchess County at the time a man named G. Gordon Liddy, who we all know. So they drew the heat. They got the fuzz. G. Gordon Liddy becomes very famous later as a member of the plumbers who are famous in the Watergate robbery and so forth. He becomes a very notorious figure on his own. But in these days, so does he arrest Leary?

They shut him down? Well, it really begins a series of raids. And the initial raid in the spring of 1966, there were a couple arrests made for possession of, again, marijuana. They never actually found psychedelics when they conducted any of these raids, which is interesting. I think they didn't necessarily know what they were looking for, and the group was good at hiding it because there certainly were psychedelics present. One of the ways they hit it was to pour liquid LSD into a decanter of cognac. So unless you're taking the cognac and having it analyzed, you're not going to find the psychedelics. But what they did end up taking was Timothy Leary's son's chemistry set. They also took some potted plants that were not drugs and were certainly not marijuana. So there was an almost comical sense of law enforcement wasn't really sure what they were looking for. But it really did start a pattern of Leary reacting to these rations. by going to the media and saying his civil rights were being trampled upon in Millbrook,

and then, you know, that would cause even more law enforcement reaction. And so it really was a beginning of a series of raids that lasted throughout 66, 67, and then 268. Hiding it in the cognac bottle, the oldest trick of the book. Come on, guys. This was an insanely active place. I mean, and a magnet for celebrities, for, you know, countercultural figures. I'm talking about Ken Keezy and the Murray Pranksters riding through in their bus. I mean, the Grateful Dead played there, all kinds of people.

You mentioned the location and how close it is to New York City. Well, that made it easy for the kind of counterculture leadership to make pilgrimages to Milbrook, as well as just kids would show up randomly and want to take part. But people like Allen Ginsberg spent a lot of time there. And through Ginsburg, who had actually experimented with Sillow. Lisbon at Harvard with Leary. He was introduced to really the who's who of the beats and the counterculture writers and artists. So yeah, it becomes a hive of psychedelic experimentation, but also experimentation in art and music, which is really something that I've discovered is not really

been reported on, is how influential Milbrook was to what would become known as psychedelic art and psychedelic, you know, visualizing the psychedelic experience. They conducted a series of what they called psychedelic theater events in New York City with an artist collective called Usko, which was based in Rockland County, another collective. They lived in an old church. And they collaborated on these immersive multimedia experiences that included sound and visuals and lights and music and Leary lecturing and really played to standing room only crowds and really established the concept of, what visualizing the psychedelic experience and listening and hearing and how disjointed the experience could be, really portrayed that to audiences in New York City. And then Leary eventually took that program on the road and did a series of them without Oskillow at this point, but with other

artists and light artists across the country in 1966, playing in most major cities, Chicago and Pittsburgh and places like that, Washington, D.C. And so that's one of the real underreported parts of this is it wasn't necessarily just people sitting around taking drugs and staring at the wall. They were producing artwork. They even did some films there. Jonas Mekis recorded a film there. Leary took part in a film that was shot there.

So there was just all kinds of stuff happening pretty much all the time from 1963 until the end and 68. G. Gordon Liddy made it his duty to take down Timothy Leary. He was ambitious in his own way politically and was seeking to run for Congress, and he wanted to make an even larger name for himself by being the one to really get Leary on the run out of Duchess County. This was a result of the negative headlines. As psychedelics became more popular with the youth and also became more popular with the press in 1966, especially, start. and throughout 1967, really a moral panic erupts around these substances, and they're in the headlines all the time in negative ways. There is a change from the early 60s and the 1950s. And it really plays out in a microcosm in Milbrook and causes there to be a lot of concern from residents, seeing their village name associated with Timothy Leary and with LSD and with psychedelics. They really become a mirror of America at this time. I was killed.

at the time. I remember those stories, and it was constantly in the news what a danger LSD was. It would drive you to become a madman. You'd fly out of the window. You'd think you could fly. You'd have flashbacks. It was all suddenly a strong propaganda against the drug. Some of it true. I mean, it was a dangerous drug, obviously, but it became a poster child narcotic for everything that was wrong with America because of drugs. It becomes, the end is near around 65, 66, am I right? And because Leary really sees a promised land out west. Really what happened by 1967 is there were three separate groups living on the estate, all with similar goals in mind.

There was a Hindu ashram that believed in using psychedelics as part of their spiritual journey, who had been invited to move there by Leary. There was another small group called the Neo-American Church, led by a very interesting character named Art Kleps, who had also been invited to live there. So the ranks of the group at Milbrook had really swelled. And there was also fractures. There was a lot of police pressure.

Again, the raids were continuing. And the amount of people that sometimes swelled to up to 50 people living there at a time, which was not cheap. So there was a lot of financial pressure. The group was always broke. Liru was trying to support them with lectures and publications. But it was difficult because the Hitchcock allowed them to live there, but they didn't necessarily give them money or finance them in any way. So they were kind of left to their own. So there was a lot of pressure in Milbrook, in Duchess County, and a variety of ways.

There were some disagreements taking place among Leary and the ashram and the Neo-American Church about, you know, how things should be divided, who should be living where. So some of it became very petty. And as you would kind of think about with, you know, these communal groups. So, yeah, Leary became more and more interested in the West Coast and returning to the, the area where he got his Ph.D. So he started spending more time out there. And really, it was the final raid in the winter of 1967 in which Billy Hitchcock was actually arrested because he was the owner of a property that was allowing drug use. So at that point, the Hitchcock family said, okay, enough's enough. This is bad for the family. It's bad for us. You need to all get off of the

estate. And so by February, 1968, Leary had moved completely to California. The rest of the of the groups disband and or follow him in some cases, and everything switches to the West Coast. How much of a success story do you think this is? I mean, is that why you're interested in covering this? Well, it's hard to say it's a success story. I think one of the things we do need to emphasize is that Leary was completely irresponsible in his belief that anyone and everyone should be taking psychedelics, including children, by the way. So there's a lot of darkness to this story, and there's certainly a downside to the story. I think what's interesting is that we're moving into a time now

where psychedelics are being rediscovered, so to speak, or they're being used in scientific research again for the first time in 40, 50 years. And they're being seen as having the potential, at least therapeutically, that Leary thought they had. And so I think that really makes the story interesting to me because many scientists and observers and historians blame Timothy Leary for being the person who caused LSD and psychedelics to be a Schedule 1 narcotic,

and all research to be shut down by 1970, essentially, with very few exceptions. And it wasn't until 2008 when Johns Hopkins gets FDA approval to once again experiment with psilocybin, that, you know, the doors kind of open again. And the story of Milbrook is interesting because of the setting. This gilded age estate, you have extreme wealth, you have those who have been thrown out of academia, you have interesting characters like Timothy Leary and Richard Elper, who we should note went on to become Rom Doss, probably the most famous Western guru in the 1970s and 80s and 90s and up till his death recently. So you have a swirling mixture of art and counterculture and Eastern philosophy issues.

about personal freedom, consciousness expansion, and the backlash to all of this. Not unlike the entirety of the 60s, the good and the bad, an incredible time of creative expression, really good music, and indeed a freeing of social moors that has benefited many, by my opinion, and many others. Some would feel differently. It all happened there in Milbrook, right here in New York State. Thank you, Devin Lander, New York State historian. You would never think it was there, but it really happened. And that estate, fortunately, and that family fortunately is still thriving. And life goes on.

Thanks a lot, Devin. Thank you, Don. It was great. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.