Contrasting strangely with this avowed commitment to research and to the communication of results to the scientific family are published statements of Leary. Leary conceives all learned patterns of human behavior as games, involving roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values. While he, or at least his associates, claim to be playing the "game" of science, one which certainly uses the mind, he says: "The mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-box complex. It is the game-playing fragment--a useful and entertaining tool but quite irrelevant to survival... We over-value the mind--that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections; the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we eschew the non-mind, non-game intuitive insight-outlook which is the key to the religious experience, to the love experience." (T. Leary, "How to change behavior," in G.S. Nielsen (Ed.) Clinical psychology: proceedings of the 14th international congress of applied psychology, vol. 4; Copenhagen, 1962.) Whatever its truth, in some sense or other. Leary's estimate of the mind is inconsistent with the science game, with the professor game, and with the university game. A university is built of men's minds; he who attacks the corner-stone can well expect to get hit by falling walls.

Leary's attitude toward mind disqualifies him from membership in a university, and perhaps he has shown that he realizes this by removing to Mexico.

So much for the three charges directed to the official drug researches of the Center for Research in Personality. In addition there have been many rumors and clandestine reports of illicit uses of psilocybin. The sources of these rumors are curiously elusive; the people who bear them swear to their truth, but fail to present the least evidence to support them. Until such evidence is found, we will ignore the rumors.

Drugs Remain

Even with Leary gone to Mexico, student interest in drugs will remain, and with it the University must yet treat.

The University has started poorly. The letter from Dana L. Farnsworth, chief of the University Health Service, and Dean Watson, declared that students should not take "mind-distorting drugs" because they are bad. Granted, such a move puts the University in the safe position of having warned its students, and provides Boston with banner headlines for a day; still it probably did not prevent a single undergraduate so determined from taking drugs, while it may have aroused the curiosity of those who had been indifferent. If the University is to guide its students, it must do so by providing information about the dangers, on the same rational bases that it expects its faculty to operate. The dangers of mescaline and LSD are real; those of psilocybin even greater because unknown, and the University is absolutely correct in condemning irresponsible and unguided playing. But a more informative warning is needed.

Assuming the University deals properly with its undergraduates and graduates, what about the remaining experimenters? Using drugs for social rehabilitation is important, and likely to become more so; the University, on the forefront in so many other areas, would be negligent if it ignored this one. But perhaps it or the department in control can cultivate, through selection, investigators not less imaginative but more circumspect; investigators not less far-reaching in thought, but more willing properly to carry the responsibilities of informing and explaining.