Sante on Greenberg on Leary

After last week's debacle review on psychedelic culture, it was a nice surprise to find High Priest Timothy Leary on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

I'm not sure I'm up for carting a 700 page book cross-country with me in August. But Sante's comments on Professor Leary's fondness for quenching his thirst do remind me of the "prologue" to his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks:

"I was conceived on a military reservation, West Point, New York, on the night of January 17, 1920. On the preceding day alcohol had become an illegal drug."

It's certainly worth wondering about the human pursuit of intoxication and the state's interest in regulating intoxication on behalf of the control of labor, land, and other such resources. Recently, law enforcement personnel have started to organize against the misuse of the public interest in the name of a "war on drugs."

Not everything that some people use to party with is about recreation -- so much more is about the unmediated contact with mystic, Earth wisdom. I like Huxley's writings in MOKSHA on the liberation of consciousness. But for an online example, check out Leary's own description of his entheogenic mushroom revelations, in "The Religous Experience: Its Production and Interpretation" from Psychedelic Review 1:3 (1964), pp. 324-246.