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00:00This is a gesture of love. I'm open to you. Sock it to me.
00:08He's a seeker and a prophet, a villain and a pariah.
00:12Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD.
00:15One of the most polarizing and controversial figures of the 60s.
00:19His ideas were so powerful in and of themselves that he could spark an entire revolution.
00:24They call me the seeker. I've been searching low and high.
00:31This is the story of a man who pushes the boundaries of psychedelic experience.
00:35The best, most direct, the most natural way to find God is through mind-expanding drugs.
00:42Leary's influence helped shape the music, fashion and politics of a new generation,
00:47becoming the unabashed leader of the psychedelic movement.
00:50He felt that if you could expand your consciousness, you could see through all of the bullshit
00:56that authority figures were shoveling into society.
00:59I'm a seeker. I'm a really desperate man.
01:03But to his enemies, he's an irresponsible scoundrel.
01:08He's considered Pied Piper. That's a threat to American youth.
01:12That poisonous, evil man, Dr. Timothy Leary.
01:16And the authorities will stop at nothing to bring him down.
01:19Nixon called him the most dangerous man in the world.
01:22He was dangerous to Nixon. He was good for America.
01:25Let the kids get high. As a matter of fact, President Nixon, why not we all turn on together?
01:30I won't get to get what I'm after till the day I die.
01:35These are the counterculture icons who changed the world.
01:38In this hour, Timothy Leary, Lords of the Revolution.
02:05Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
02:11In the beginning was the turn on, the acid guru will later write, the electric trip.
02:16But in 1959, after the recent suicide of his wife, Dr. Timothy Leary is looking for a new start.
02:23An up-and-coming professor of psychology, Tim moves to Cambridge with his two children and begins lecturing at Harvard.
02:31Psychology was like the hottest thing going, and he was right in the middle of that.
02:35He's square. He's academic. That's the image Tim had.
02:41I was a graduate student at Harvard University in social psychology, and Timothy was designed to be my advisor.
02:49Ian and I had encounters every weekend about drugs, because I was experimenting with mescaline.
02:55And he'd say, George, you're a fairly intelligent person. Why are you fooling around with drugs?
03:01It's just manipulating behavior. Drugs are just manipulating behavior.
03:07Very little is known about psychedelic substances.
03:09It takes Leary a year of hearing about them before he decides to take the leap.
03:14He was looking for a change, and he was curious.
03:17As I had been trying to explain to him, these drugs do open up another level of consciousness.
03:23So on a summer vacation in Mexico, when a friend raves about his wondrous experience with magic mushrooms,
03:29Leary utters the words that will completely transform his life.
03:35Why don't you see if you can find some?
03:44That first trip in 1960 changed him. He called it the most profound experience of his life that changed him
03:51forever.
03:52I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms that I had in the preceding 15
03:57years of studying, doing research in psychology.
04:00It was a very humiliating experience because I saw how dishonest I had been in my past life,
04:06and how smug and arrogant I had been in thinking that I was so smart, that I was a highly
04:11educated psychologist.
04:13He came back from Mexico and just completely cleaned off his desk of all this interpersonal diagnosis stuff,
04:19and then jumped right into his researching of the mushroom.
04:24Tim discovers that psilocybin, a synthesized form of the magic mushroom,
04:29is easily obtainable from a company in New Jersey and completely legal.
04:33We sat down that very afternoon and wrote a letter to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
04:37They just sent us huge amounts of psilocybin, bottles full.
04:40I thought we would have got forms to fill out.
04:42With these materials, we're in a very strange category we have of drugs that are for research.
04:50Leary assembles a group of about 30 bright academics and embarks on the research that will all but turn the
04:56university upside down.
04:57The Harvard psilocybin project.
04:59All right, sit right down.
05:03Baby, let your hair hang down.
05:06The goal is simple.
05:07Take the drug, see what happens, and record the experiences.
05:13For students and colleagues like doctors Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert,
05:17it's only the beginning of an incredible period of experimentation and metamorphosis.
05:21Nobody knew any more than anybody else, you see, including Tim.
05:25We're all just, you know, babes in the woods.
05:27Everything falls apart.
05:29Any all-learned structures, all thought patterns, all beliefs, opinions, emotional convictions, positive or negative,
05:39they all fall apart.
05:44I met my inner being that I had never known before.
05:51I came up out of the ocean and I was just getting rid of my gills and I was climbing
05:55up and I was experiencing the whole evolution of species.
05:58And during that time, I also was seeing art pieces I'd seen in the Museum of Modern Art.
06:05And I was in an airplane above the clouds.
06:07This was all happening just image after image, thousands of images a second.
06:13For the next two years, Tim conducts several controversial experiments, including testing the effects of psilocybin on hardened criminals and
06:20divinity students.
06:23He also gives the pills to people in the hip underground, like jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, writer Jack Kerouac, and
06:29beat poet Alan Ginsberg.
06:35Gillespie had a very intense trip, a messianic trip, where he came and walked into Leary's living room naked.
06:45Ellen Ginsberg, totally naked, on the phone, saying,
06:49yes, I want the White House, Washington, D.C., and then after you get them on the line, I want
06:54the Kremlin, U.S.S.R.
06:56He was trying to set up a conference call to settle all this. It wasn't needed, all this Cold War
07:01stuff.
07:01Gillespie had a really strong sense of the need to change society.
07:09And when these two forces collided, this set off a spark in Leary, and the rest is history.
07:19Harvard has let Leary pursue his research without any interference.
07:23But as rumors of naked beatnik poets circulate around campus, and with Leary's popularity growing, storm clouds gather.
07:31All the graduate students only came to us because they heard you could get psychedelics from Halpert and Leary.
07:4328 of the 29 graduate students timed up to work with one of the two of them, and all these
07:49other people had no graduate students.
07:51And they stood up in a public meeting of the faculty and said, something's wrong.
07:54He said, this could not be normal. This is not normal. He's giving drugs to these people and brainwashing them.
08:01We're labeled in the public's mind, perhaps, as drug professors. We're not concerned with the drugs. We're mainly concerned with
08:07man's head.
08:09The media now discovers an irresistible story. Harvard eats the holy mushroom. Students and teachers taking wild, mind-altering drugs.
08:18With controversy mounting, Harvard quickly puts the psilocybin supply under lock and key.
08:23But Tim is undaunted. By now, he's discovered LSD.
08:29LSD is the most powerful of all the psychedelic, mind-opening chemicals.
08:38The man who introduces this new substance into the group is Michael Hollingshead.
08:44A divine rascal, as Leary calls him, who shows up at Harvard with a mayonnaise jar filled with a paste
08:49that contains some 5,000 doses of LSD.
08:56My dad said to Tim, you've got to try this. It's not like psilocybin. The acid is just so much
09:02stronger.
09:03It's so much more potent. And we believe that you see God.
09:06People were very worried the first time he took LSD. In fact, I think Richard Alpert said, we've lost Timothy.
09:13Tim didn't say a word for about five days. And I, being the second in command, said everybody, don't take
09:24this, because look what's happened to Tim.
09:27Then Tim said, it's wonderful. And we were all on the bandwagon.
09:34To me, it was a complete religious revelatory experience. It was as though God had taken me by the hand
09:42into his workshop and had let me look just for a few minutes at the design of five billion years
09:48of energy that had been developing and evolving on this planet.
09:51He said, the Catholic Church could be reborn all over again if they just discovered the new sacrament. It's not
09:58the little wafer. It's the psychedelic drop.
10:05Leary's epiphany is that LSD is a tool that blows away all the artificial conventions of modern society by allowing
10:12people to see the truth of who they really are.
10:14Everything else is a mere game. And Tim is tired of playing the game of Harvard.
10:19We gotta get out of this place. Here it's the last thing we ever do.
10:26Harvard is a place where the intellect rules. And psychedelics are putting the intellect in a box. And they didn't
10:37like it because it wasn't intellectual. It was mystical.
10:43We gotta get out of this place.
10:45In the spring of 1963, Harvard terminates the project. But Tim is already long gone.
10:50He was finished with his classes. You know, his contract ran out. They didn't want him there.
10:54And he didn't want to be there anymore after a while.
10:57Dr. Timothy Leary is now on a mission to change the world.
11:01The people that use LSD are not drug addicts. We're not dope fiends. We're not criminal types.
11:08We're people who have found a new way to make meaning in our lives. And we're not going to be
11:13stopped.
11:13Our day will come.
11:18Free from the restrictions of Harvard, Tim Leary sets out to create a utopian, psychedelic community.
11:24We'll share the joy. Falling in love can bring...
11:32Having become, you know, the wild and risky and dangerous Harvard professor who was fired, you know, I think he
11:40saw it as his moral obligation to go off and start his own movement.
11:45In the fall of 63, fortune smiles on Leary when a friend, Peggy Hitchcock, finds Tim and his group a
11:52home in the quiet town of Millbrook, just 90 miles north of Manhattan.
11:56My brothers had bought this large estate up in upstate New York in Dutchess County. They said there was a
12:03big house on it that they weren't going to be using. So I remember asking if they could rent it
12:08and they were delighted.
12:09They loved the idea of having these cool neighbors in the house. So I think the arrangement was they rented
12:15it for a dollar a year or something like that.
12:18Timothy Leary's rented estate is almost as fantastic by day as it is by night.
12:24Three thousand acres complete with man-made lakes in the rolling woodlands of upstate New York.
12:33Millbrook is perfect. A completely private setting shielded from all prying or interference.
12:38It's a place where Tim can continue his research in an atmosphere of total freedom.
12:44Dr. Leary, what are you up to here?
12:48We teach the science and art of ecstasy. We teach people how to turn on or how to go out
12:57of their minds.
12:57A group of about 15 or 20 individuals, Mary Alpert, myself, my wife, various children and various people. We all
13:05lived there.
13:06It wasn't an academic setting. We were doing the research we wanted to do.
13:10When you take LSD and your conscience expanded, the number of possibilities and the number of perspectives dramatically multiplied.
13:19The idea is you don't just take it to have a trip. You go on a trip for a purpose.
13:25You always go for a purpose.
13:26That's why we always have urged people, don't take LSD unless you're very well prepared.
13:32Unless you're specifically prepared to go out of your mind.
13:36Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it.
13:43What happens in Millbrook profoundly shapes the whole psychedelic counterculture to come.
13:49In 1964, Leary, Alpert and Metzner published the book, The Psychedelic Experience.
13:57They discovered that their own experiences on LSD are remarkably similar to the states between death and reincarnation, as described
14:04in the ancient text, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
14:07Tim's book is intended as a flight manual to guide the mind through an acid trip.
14:12I took the acid around 2 in the morning and started reading this book.
14:16And there are sections in it that give instructions to a person and they tell him to do certain things,
14:25just allowing the experience to happen to you naturally.
14:27And in the course of that, I got very confused as to whether I was alive or whether I was
14:32dead.
14:33Everybody was using that book. You can't go wrong with that book.
14:36I still get to this day maybe letters once a month saying, telling me how much impact that book had.
14:45As news of Millbrook grows, so does Leary's reputation. Tim begins running sessions and seminars for the intellectual and cultural
14:53elite.
14:54In his natural habitat, the prophet preaches. Timothy Leary in a Saturday morning session of words and silences.
15:03The session tonight we're going to use as the model, a voyage into your own body.
15:12I remember the acid was put on sugar cubes in the front room and everyone would just take a sugar
15:18cube and then maybe put on some funky music or Indian music, light the incense, smoke a cigarette, have a
15:26joint and then the trip would begin.
15:31Tim's mind was always going 150,000 miles a minute.
15:36And so he was always cooking up things for the community. He really liked upending us.
15:41I'm going to keep shifting everything we do this weekend. So you're never going to be sure exactly who's who
15:48and who's supposed to do what.
15:53In addition to the research, Millbrook becomes an adventure. Everything is new, uncharted, and the possibilities of insight and transcendence
16:02exist side by side with the weird and eccentric.
16:05What did you do there? I got fire.
16:08You know, some of the things were a little weird that we did, but you know, like paint the butter
16:13greens.
16:14Wouldn't just see everything the way you usually see it.
16:17It's all too beautiful.
16:20Timothy Leary used to give LSD to different animals. I think he had like a monkey and then there was
16:26an iguana and then maybe a pig and a rabbit. And he just thought if they all took LSD, maybe
16:33they'd all get along. I think one of them ate the other. You know, maybe they were having a bad
16:38trip. I really don't know.
16:42The weekend parties get very famous very fast. And as more people find their way to Millbrook, the scene becomes
16:48harder to control.
16:49People invited themselves. We were like deluged by people. People would go to New York, let's go up to Millbrook,
16:54take drugs and have sex. That was not the idea.
16:57But what were we supposed to do? Were there supposed to be cops and say, no, go away, you know?
17:00We used to flee to the woods on the weekends because so many people would come up. And here we
17:07were, you know, kind of in a somewhat delicate state from taking LSD a lot that it was just overwhelming.
17:19Along with the new freedom comes new dangers, especially for the children who live on the estate, like six year
17:25old Vanessa Hollingshead, whose father, Michael, was the man who turned Leary onto acid.
17:32It felt like there was drugs and sex. It was very, very awkward for me. I remember I spent a
17:38lot of time near the stair, just hidden and watching, just just watching everything around me and just feeling very
17:46small.
17:50I just used to wander around Millbrook Mansion by myself. One morning, I happened to take the acid. I don't
17:58know how much I took. And the next thing I saw was like millions of fluorescent worms everywhere.
18:03And I said, Dad, look at the pictures ripping on the walls. Look at my nails. They're getting smaller. The
18:08next thing, my dad and I were in a car and my dad said, you were going to get your
18:12shot of Thorazine to make you go to sleep just so you weren't tripping.
18:15He said, I was actually panicked at that point because I didn't know the effects of it on kids.
18:24As things get crazier, Tim sends everyone packing. By December of 65, it's just Leary, his two children, Jack and
18:31Susan, and the new love of his life, Rosemary Woodruff.
18:38From the time they got together, they took LSD, they fell in love, and they became extremely close.
18:44Rosemary didn't want all this public social action. She actually wanted to be a professor's wife and live in a
18:52house with a white picket fence.
18:54And, you know, Tim, let's just drop out of this for a while and we'll go to Mexico and write
18:59a book and just kind of settle down.
19:00And that's what they were going to do. But they were busted for, you know, a little bit of pot.
19:07Dr. Leary, could you tell us exactly what happened from your standpoint in Texas?
19:12I left New York to drive to Mexico in December with my two children.
19:18We were stopped on the border and not allowed to enter Mexico.
19:22Our baggage was searched and less than a half an ounce of marijuana was found in our possession.
19:29Actually, a friend of mine had given Susan a joint to take with her.
19:33She got busted. Of course, Tim took the rap for her.
19:36He said it was his, which, of course, it wasn't.
19:38He didn't even, I don't think he even knew she had it.
19:40And then they threw the book at him, and that was just the excuse.
19:43I think the government's waiting for an excuse, you know, to really get him.
19:52Free on bail, Tim is shocked to learn that in Texas, possession of marijuana is punishable by a possible sentence
19:58of life in prison.
20:00By pleading guilty, as his lawyer recommends, the charges could be reduced to a misdemeanor.
20:05Timothy Leary, however, is not about to back down.
20:10I'm fighting for my individual civil rights.
20:13I use chemicals such as LSD and marijuana in my spiritual practices because I want to find out more about
20:21what life is about.
20:22And I use these sacramental aids. I use them in my pursuit of knowledge.
20:27I feel I have a right to do this as long as I'm not causing any danger to society.
20:31He chose to fight it because that was the more flamboyant and that was going to attract more attention.
20:37That was really his spirit.
20:40We're going to appeal this case to the federal court and eventually to the Supreme Court.
20:45His fateful decision to fight back sets up one of the epic confrontations of the age.
20:50Dr. Timothy Leary against the full legal machinery of a government determined to lock him away in prison for decades.
21:03In 1966, the country is changing. The Vietnam War is escalating. The Beatles are wearing their hair longer.
21:09And LSD experimentation is growing rapidly.
21:16In the middle of it all is Timothy Leary, whose notoriety only grows when he receives a shocking 30-year
21:22sentence for his pot bust.
21:23He was, well, this is becoming a serious problem. The government is really after me. It's not a joke. They
21:28really are after me.
21:29You know, I'm being victimized terribly in my own country.
21:3530 years and a $30,000 fine seems severe for the possession of less than a half an ounce of
21:42marijuana.
21:43That would be about $3 worth of marijuana.
21:45I'm told it's probably the most severe sentence that's ever been given.
21:50Now free on appeal, Tim knows that he has only a short time to spread the word about LSD.
21:55And he realizes that his best weapon is his personality.
21:58He was extremely charismatic.
22:00He really had that twinkle in his eye and he had the ability to capture and to connect.
22:05He just figured that people were going to finally catch on and agree with him.
22:10Tim reopens Millbrook and the mayhem is back. Only this time, the authorities are keeping a close watch.
22:17I'm going up to country wherever you want to go.
22:23I was the assistant district attorney of Dutchess County, New York.
22:26And all our drug informants were telling us that it was drug nirvana out there.
22:31They had marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide 25 LSD.
22:40And the word was that people were running around naked out there.
22:45That the panties were dropping as fast as the acid.
22:49The axe falls on April 16th, 1966 when G Gordon Liddy comes bursting through the house on a midnight ray.
22:56I was in my bedroom with my wife and I was talking to my son and the door banged open
23:01and in came G Gordon Liddy
23:03with 24 armed and booted sheriffs.
23:07I remember the sheriff looked over in the corner, he said, look Liddy, they got a dead dog in here.
23:15And he went over, there was a dog just lying there, you know, his eyes up and his tongue out.
23:20And the sheriff nudged what he thought was the corpse of the dog and the dog got up and staggered
23:25to its feet.
23:25It was on a contact eye. Poor beast.
23:29They find what they think is a small amount of marijuana.
23:32And for the second time in less than six months, Leary is arrested.
23:37Again, national headlines, but the charges don't stick and Tim is released.
23:42They found no marijuana. The warrant was thrown out. They did confiscate a little plant we had on peat moss,
23:47which was a geranium.
23:49By now, LSD is widespread on every college campus.
23:57I took LSD for a kick.
24:02Man, LSD is like a vitamin for the brain.
24:05LSD is a really groovy way to find out more about the things around you.
24:10And so it will go, as the hysteria about LSD mounts until it's like a 60s version of reefer madness.
24:17Well, by 65, 66, we began to see a lot of reports in the newspapers, you know, like a man
24:23eats baby on LSD.
24:25They made stuff up, frankly.
24:26I will make a psychotic reaction.
24:31Oh! God, no! No, no, no!
24:37Every time anybody freaked out, Timothy Leary was pretty much the scapegoat.
24:45In May of 66, Tim appears before a Senate subcommittee looking into the matter of the LSD crisis.
24:52The use of psychedelic drugs such as marijuana and masculine LSD is out of control in the United States today.
24:58Now, I am not alarmed by this situation per se.
25:01When he went to Congress, he told them thousands of people are going to be taking LSD.
25:06And he said they're going to need support.
25:10And, of course, Congress just laughed that one off.
25:13But he was really right about that.
25:15He said it should be regulated.
25:16Of course, you just don't hand it out.
25:18It should be regulated just like your driving license or your pilot license.
25:21Don't let somebody drive a car or drive a plane without being trained and prepared and have knowledge.
25:26The challenge of the psychedelic chemicals is not just how to control them, but how to use them.
25:35As the federal government moves closer to clamping down on psychedelics,
25:40Tim fans the flames even higher in a Playboy interview that links psychedelics to the sexual revolution.
25:45He said that if a couple had sex on LSD, there'd be like a thousand orgasms, knowing that that would
25:52appeal to that particular demographic.
25:56LSD? Say, you won't start going ape on me, will you daddy?
26:01No. Just make me appreciate you that much more.
26:07It's like a trickster, what people would call a trickster, provoking in order to get people to think.
26:15The government is hearing none of it. On October 6, 1966, LSD is made illegal.
26:21A lot of people blame him quite a bit for taking what was this great small underground movement and blowing
26:28it up into this big political drama.
26:30But I think the fact is that Dr. Leary has gone around the country into various cities and has promoted
26:37the use of LSD
26:38and talked about the fact that everybody who took LSD was going to take a marvelous voyage.
26:44And I always felt reading them that it was going to be a marvelous voyage. It was just a question
26:49of whether they'd ever come back.
26:53By now, the psychedelic revolution has too much momentum to be held back.
26:57When the Beatles released Revolver, an album drenched in the influence of LSD, Tim realizes that he will have powerful
27:04allies in his struggle.
27:06You know, John Lennon wrote Tomorrow Never Knows after reading the psychedelic experience. You know, that speaks for itself.
27:13You know, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. John Lennon basically took it from that book.
27:18Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
27:24That was really a sign of things to come. You know, look how, you know, this research and this work
27:30is affecting art.
27:31As a result, LSD will catalyze some of the greatest cultural and political upheavals of the time,
27:36making Timothy Leary more famous and infamous than ever.
27:40I think that it's healthy that society resists my ideas because my ideas are very revolutionary.
27:55On January 14th, 1967, just three months after LSD is declared illegal, the first human being is held in San
28:03Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
28:0630,000 souls twirling like enraptured angels in the glorious sunshine, all of them taking LSD in direct defiance of
28:13the law.
28:29The psychedelics became part of rebelling against the establishment.
28:33Now it became an outlaw culture and what can be hipper than an outlaw culture,
28:38particularly at this time when it was very cool to be a rebel.
28:41This became a thing to do.
28:50The rally is headlined by some of the most prominent figures of the counterculture,
28:54like the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.
28:58Shall we go?
29:02You act high while we can.
29:06With flowers in his hair, Leary cuts an image that shows how far he's traveled from his days as a
29:11Tweety Harvard professor,
29:13and seizes the moment to proclaim his slogan, the six fateful words that will now become one of the most
29:19familiar and provocative catchphrases of the age.
29:22Turn on, tune in, drop out.
29:26His message was that it was a good thing to, like, kind of break out of the nine-to-five
29:33game, the rat race, the game of conformity, and to find yourself.
29:38Turn on means to go beyond your mind, your secular, tribal, 20th century mind.
29:43Tune in means to harness up the new revelation and energy in your life.
29:49Drop out means to detach yourself harmoniously, tenderly, and beautifully from the tribal game to which you are addicted.
29:59Question authority. Think for yourself. You know, that's the underlying message here.
30:07To the establishment, Leary's message seems like nothing less than a proclamation for the end of the world as they
30:13know it.
30:14Drop out.
30:14You've got to drop out.
30:16I think everyone over the age of 40 should drop out.
30:18The younger generation, in particular, have got to drop out.
30:22No one over the age of 50 years old should be allowed to vote for whole power over the same
30:26territory.
30:28Should they? Should they?
30:29Mainstream America didn't know what to make of it.
30:32It represented a lack of respect for societies, a lack of respect for the principles and philosophies of the time.
30:40Smoke pot with your kids, and then you'll understand why the kids are happier.
30:44From our perspective, I mean, he was a law violator, and that's the way we viewed him.
30:51The druggies viewed him as a hero.
30:53At 47 years of age, Timothy Leary remains one of the few people over 30 that the flower children really
31:00trust.
31:00I think that the current younger generation is the wisest, the most sophisticated, and the holiest generation in human history.
31:07They realize that the aim of life is not to have things, but to have fun.
31:12With billions cropping up across America and psychedelic rock dominating the airwaves, Timothy Leary is the superstar of the new
31:20age.
31:21Everywhere he went, you know, he was the man in the room.
31:23You know how they say that about, you know, a great rock star today.
31:27You know, he had that quality to him.
31:29Timothy Leary is dead.
31:33No yellow is outside looking near.
31:39When the Moody Blues release Legend of a Mind,
31:41Timothy Leary.
31:43Tim has his very own theme song.
31:45Timothy Leary.
31:51But as the Summer of Love plays out in San Francisco, Leary isn't even there.
31:56He's back at Millbrook, living in a teepee with Rosemary.
31:59Dr. Leary, how many people have you got living behind the house and in the woods?
32:04There are about 30 people living out in the woods.
32:07We're turned on, and we're tuned in, and we're very dropped out.
32:13The only intrusion is the police surveillance flights overhead.
32:16And when G. Gordon Liddy raids the estate again, he busts Tim on drug possession.
32:20Only this time, the charges will stick.
32:26After a long trial, both sides come to an agreement.
32:29And by the fall of 1967, after four years of psychedelic exploration,
32:34the doors of Leary's Millbrook Utopia finally close.
32:39Ah, you gotta miss me, baby.
32:41Ah, you gotta miss me, child.
32:44We reached a deal.
32:45We would drop the charges if he would agree to leave Dutchess County.
32:49And he did.
32:50Then he went to California, for which the people of California have never forgiven me.
32:56As Timothy Leary relocates out west, the psychedelic optimism of 67 now gives way to the polarization of 1968.
33:04Oh, no, must be the season of the rich.
33:11America elects Richard Nixon, a man bitterly opposed to everything Leary stands for.
33:17Must be the season of the rich.
33:20Nixon ran in 1968 as the law and order candidate, cracking down on the new left radicals and the hippies.
33:28Tim's defiant words now take on greater significance.
33:31I urge all of you to go back to your campuses and start some type of dropout move.
33:36That's the only way we're going to bring this country of menopausal, whiskey-drinking, congressmen, senators, and so forth, to
33:45their senses.
33:45And when I mean their senses, I mean their senses.
33:51But Nixon is the least of Tim's worries.
33:53On the day after Christmas 1968, he's busted again.
33:58One evening, I was in a parked car, and a policeman came up to the car and opened the door
34:02against my wishes,
34:03made a pass at the ashtray, and said, you're under arrest for what?
34:08He said, for marijuana.
34:09I said, what marijuana?
34:10He reached in his pocket.
34:12He pulled out two joints that I'd never seen before, half joints, and said, you're under arrest.
34:23Tim is released on bail.
34:25In the spring of 69, he finally receives some good news.
34:29The appeal from his 1965 drug bust in Texas finally reaches the Supreme Court,
34:34and the justices, citing a loophole in the marijuana law, throw the case out.
34:38On a prayer rug in front of his teepee, his wife beside him, Leary, talked about the court decision.
34:44Well, we're thanking God and thanking all our friends.
34:47This is a new beginning.
34:49What's next for you?
34:50What do you plan to do in relation to drugs?
34:54Well, we plan to continue to get high and to feel good and try to make other people feel good.
35:00But specifically, what we're doing, I'm going to run for the governorship of the state of California.
35:11I think that we need a new party.
35:14And by party, I mean party.
35:16Come to the sunshine.
35:22He was high on his victory, and in a spontaneous moment with all the media attention on him, he announced
35:29that he would run against Ronald Reagan.
35:31Tim was always like pushing the envelope.
35:33Tim didn't expect to win, but he had some ideas.
35:36For instance, legalize marijuana and tax it.
35:39It was newsworthy.
35:41The press would report it, and that was what he was looking for.
35:47During his campaign, Tim joins John Lennon and Yoko Ono for their bed-in for world peace, singing along on
35:54Lennon's now-famous song, Give Peace a Chance.
36:08When Lennon asks how he can help Leary in his run for governor, Tim asks for a song that captures
36:13his campaign theme, Come Together, Join the Party.
36:16He sketched a few words, and John Lennon turned that into the song, Come Together, and this was going to
36:23be his gubernatorial campaign song in California.
36:26One thing I can tell you is you've got to be free. Come Together, Right Now, Over Me.
36:41Leary is riding higher than ever, hovering, it seems, above the law, provoking the government at every turn.
36:47I ask you, President Nixon, let's end the generation war. Let's smoke the peace pipe.
36:54He loved it. He absolutely loved it. He thought they were the clowns, and he was the professor, and this
37:01was an opportunity to show them what they were thinking.
37:04I'm asking Mr. President Nixon this question. Are you going to try to pass stricter and harsher legislation to infringe
37:14on personal rights and the way people have fun?
37:16Mr. Nixon, you can't do that.
37:21By now, Nixon is seen and heard enough. He declares an all-out war on drugs.
37:27It hits the young as well as the old and is indeed a national problem.
37:33As the White House begins to crack down, President Nixon finds a well-known ally in his campaign to bring
37:39down Leary.
37:39I want to talk about why the children of this generation are risking their lives in this risky business of
37:47ingesting chemicals.
37:49Beloved TV personality Art Linkletter, an icon of American family values, has just lost his 20-year-old daughter to
37:56suicide.
37:57Linkletter claims that his own daughter had taken LSD the day before she jumped out a window, and he goes
38:03on the attack, calling her death murder.
38:06Art Linkletter blamed psychedelics and specifically blamed Timothy Leary and went on a campaign of outright hate.
38:14She was the victim, the unwitting, innocent victim, of that poisonous, evil man, Dr. Timothy Leary.
38:25To parents across the nation, Linkletter's loss echoes their own fears about kids and drugs, and Leary becomes, in Nixon's
38:33words, the most dangerous man in America.
38:36He was threatened to the government because he was an icon for, as they say, experimentation.
38:41Psychedelic drugs, they're a very serious problem for the authoritarian personality, and Nixon knew that.
38:46That's why he called him the most dangerous man in the world. He was dangerous to Nixon.
38:50Let the kids get high. As a matter of fact, President Nixon, why don't we all turn on together?
38:56Such is the mood of the establishment as Tim, back in court for his 1968 drug arrest, is found guilty.
39:05On March 2nd, 1970, Tim is sentenced to 10 years in prison.
39:10The judge, instead of giving me bail, as I was entitled to for appeal, held up a book that I
39:17had been writing,
39:18and said, uh, your ideas are dangerous, and we're not gonna give you bail, and, uh, we're gonna put you
39:23in prison to keep you quiet.
39:24He really was a battler for, um, for what he believed in. And ultimately, he, you know, he paid a
39:31heavy price.
39:34After nearly a decade of chasing Leary, the government finally has the great psychedelic icon right where it wants him.
39:40When he was handcuffed, and he's got all the government guys around him, the smile on his face is one
39:46of the great Timothy Leary images.
39:48It's just so evocative of everything that he was about, you know, that he was still gonna be himself.
39:54He was still gonna smile, and he was still gonna persevere through this kind of persecution.
39:58I think my future is very intimately connected with the future of this country. You just can't keep, uh, your
40:04philosophers in prison.
40:05On September 12th, 1970, after just seven months in jail, Timothy Leary boldly escapes,
40:12shimmying across a 40-foot wire cable to freedom, setting off one of the greatest manhunts in American history.
40:18All he leaves behind is a note. The future belongs to the black and the brown and the young and
40:23the wild and the free.
40:24He watches my feet, thought of brain, shines unfrightly, quite insane.
40:35Timothy had the guts to make the psychedelics useful to the society at large.
40:43There aren't too many people who can inspire so much love and debate and controversy and provoke such an emotional
40:51response, you know, through the work.
40:53You need these people that experiment and say that, you know, it's all right to dare and it's all right
41:01to question.
41:02It's all right to go into the field of almost insanity to make discoveries about yourself.
41:10To his critics and enemies, Timothy Leary will always represent everything dangerous and misguided about drugs in the 60s.
41:17But to untold millions, he remains a seeker, willing to surf the outer edges of psychedelic experience and human potential,
41:24always remaining perfectly true to his vision and to himself.
41:28Be young, be foolish, but be...
41:34...
41:34...
41:34...
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