Psychology professor Robert Rosenthal, who arrived immediately after Leary’s departure from the University in 1963, said that Leary was the source of the majority of the experimentation.

“He more or less made it a requirement to do psilocybin,” Rosenthal said. “We regarded it as kind of shocking that he got away with as much as he got away with.”

When Kelman discovered that Leary and Dass were distributing hallucinogenic drugs to their students, he raised the issue with McClelland. As the research became more publicized, Kelman said that other students began speaking up.

“One was telling me about a very bad trip she had,” Kelman said. “After taking it, she was almost at the point of jumping out of the window.”

ENDING THE TRIP

After listening to Kelman, McClelland scheduled a faculty meeting to discuss the issue. At the packed meeting, both McClelland and Kelman spoke against the practice, initially trying only “to remove the aura of legitimacy” from the research, Kelman said. McClelland told students that the research could hurt them later in their career, both as students and as teachers.

After the meeting, Leary stopped showing up to his classes. His contract was not renewed for the following year. Dass, who Kelman said was on track for a tenure appointment before the drug incidents, was fired in 1963 after it was revealed that he had broken University policy by giving drugs to an undergraduate.

RETURN TO NORMALCY

Although Leary left Harvard, hallucinogenic experimentation on campus continued. Lisa Bieberman ’63 was found guilty of mailing sugar cubes with trace amounts of the substance.  In the fall of 1962, the Food and Drug Administration began an investigation specifically targeted at psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline, the latter two of which provided similar hallucinogenic experiences to those of psilocybin.

However, while students may have continued to explore hallucinogenic substances outside the classroom, formal experimentation with hallucinogenics ceased after Leary and Dass’s departures.

Rosenthal said that Leary’s research was treated with disdain by the students he taught in the department’s clinical program.

“For three or four or five years later, people would still make references to his work,” Rosenthal said. “Nobody took his experiments as serious science.”

Rosenthal took over teaching the introductory and psychotherapy courses for graduate students. He said that little changed from Leary’s original course syllabus, but he made sure to remove the psilocybin.

“I taught the same course that he taught, and this was a course that had nothing to do with drugs,” Rosenthal said. “It was really far-fetched for Leary to bring that into what he was teaching but when he left we didn’t change anything.”

In fact, Rosenthal said that the Psychology department was affected very little by Leary’s departure.

“Harvard was a hands-off enough place,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone’s research was affected.”

Furthermore, Rosenthal said that Dass and Leary’s experiments with psilocybin were an entirely isolated incident.

“I didn’t see anything that was even remotely questionable [in others’ research],” Rosenthal said. “I think what was upsetting to people was that he made it a part of his teaching.”

-Staff writer John P. Finnegan can be reached at johnfinnegan@college.harvard.edu. Follow him @finneganspake.

-Staff writer David P. Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him @CrimsonDPFreed.