LEARY V. US (1969): Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Everything You Thought You Knew About Timothy Leary

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:23 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1179. I'm your not host, Thomas Smith. That's right, the show's been stolen again. If I had a nickel, I'd have two nickels, but it's weird that it happened twice. No, so here's what's going on. Today, the show will be Matt co-hosted by Matt and the amazing Dr. Jenessa Seymour. You should know her from, well, this show and also Serious Inquiries Only. She's fantastic. She got a bachelor's in psychology, a PhD in neuroscience. She teaches psychology classes at the college level and now she works in disability rights in New York and she also has passed the bar and become a real life lawyer. Jenessa is the best. She has a wealth of expertise and brings a whole different, unique, and exciting set of tools to the show. What am I doing? Well, just nothing. Just chilling, really. No, what's going on is I've been really badly needing a mental health break during which to get other work done. It's been 15 months since I won the show back. 15 months. To me, it has gone by like 15 minutes, and I hate that this part of my life, the best part of my life with my three little kids, is going by so quickly. And I know that's always going to happen, but it's been especially bad for probably two and a half years now, I guess. And what happened was, I mentioned it here and there, but that legal fight put me in so much debt that I couldn't afford not to just be working 24 -7 and doing a million podcasts and doing everything I could. And that situation has gotten better so that's good but it's meant that here we are 15 months after the fact of winning the show back two years and seven months or so from when the asshole took the show and in that time I have not gotten to tell my story I've not gotten my crap together enough to tell the story and that's not really the right way of phrasing it I've been there it's impossible it's Impossible to do all the things I'm doing and I have been hoping that I could find some way to relieve workload a little bit. But it's really, really scary when the very reason I can't let up is because of the financial situation I was put into by the asshole. That's scary to try to do anything other than work 800 hours a day and miss my kids growing up. And it's rough, but I'm at a point where it just needs to happen. Time off needs to happen, not the least of which so that I can actually get my story out there. I need to tell it. And a lot of people can't believe that I haven't been able to tell yet. And I honestly, I get it. I totally get it, it's a really difficult thing to do, but it's impossibly difficult when every hour of every day is filled. So I'm attempting to take some time off. I don't know how much time, I really don't now how much, it could be one episode, I really don' t know, we'll see how this goes. But I'm attempt to take time off, I will be reducing to just doing the Wednesday shows. I'm going to just do the Wednesday new live show that we're doing on YouTube. That's going to be my OA. Plus, I'm gonna do these intros because I still want to keep in touch, hear what's going on. But I wanted to find someone to step in for a little bit. And I thought Jenessa is such a good idea because when we were talking about it, the three of us, there's so much of things that we want to cover that actually involve a lot of science and getting the kind of the nexus of like science and law is really cool now it's not changing into like a science law show but there are a lot of topics that naturally have that nexus and there are many times in the law when the lack of understanding of medical science or psychology or anything like that leads to bad outcomes in the long and I think there's so many opportunities so much so that Matt and Jenessa came up with like a million things they want to do and we'll see. We'll see they've got, they've got show ideas for days. And again, I don't know ultimately how long I'm going to try to take a break. I don't know, but however long it is, I think you're in really, really good hands. And I really hope that you will enjoy a little bit of a Jenessa Matt iteration of the show. Starting with, I can't believe this. I'm looking, I've gone for five minutes. Matt does drugs. That's kind of meant, well, I'm here for five months. Matt Does Drugs. I I guess no matter where I am, I feel like Matt does drugs somehow at some point. But anyway, Matt and Jenessa sowed one. We had this idea of talking about Supreme Court cases that are good because we've had just enough. We've had enough of the Supreme Court. Cases that are bad. And I thought that was a great idea. That was kind of it's one I've had before, actually. And then we kind of, you know, revisited it. It's perfect for Monday Deep Dives. And today, Matt Jenessa are going to tell you about Leary v. United States. And yes, that Leary, if you're thinking of the right, Timothy Leary. Did you know that he was one of the most famous people ever to bring a criminal case to the United States Supreme Court? I did not know that. And did you also know that? He was not a great scientist. His research was iffy at best. And Jenessa's got that angle. And while Matt's got the law covered, Jenessa is going to tell us about Timothy Leary as a scientist and about LSD and how it works and drug schedules and all kinds of fun stuff as we look down that way too far gone time of when the Supreme Court used to do good things. And so I'm going to throw it on over to Matt and Jenessa. But before I do, I just want to say also, while I did edit this episode, one of the ways I'm able to try to take time off here is I've hired someone to edit the Matt and Jenessa episodes. And I mention it because that is going to allow me to go back to that Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, the way it's meant to be. I had to adjust that Tuesday, Thursday, Friday thing, that monstrosity, just because, again, pure overwhelm. It's not like that's a particularly natural schedule for a show, but no, we're going back to Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And folks are asking what's happening with T3BE. I will figure it out. Heather is off for two weeks for unrelated reasons. She's job stuff. So she's off for three weeks. She'll be back in a few weeks. Anyway, but I will figured out one way or the other. We will have Heather and T3B. I haven't figured out in what format or where or how, but we will have it. I love T3B, never giving that up. Don't worry. I'll figure it out. And so I'll hand it over to Matt and Jenessa and I'll see you folks on Wednesday on YouTube. And of course on the podcast feed, unless you are one of the unlucky folks who hasn't joined on patreon.com/law, then you're probably going to hear me read some ads. Isn't that funny? You don't want that. No one wants to hear that. Support the show, patreon. Com slash law. Lose the ads. Enough of me. Let's take a quick break and then get on over to Matt and Jenessa talking about Leary v. the United States and also just Timothy Leary and what a weird guy he was.

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0:08:39 Matt: Alright, Jenessa, what's going on?

0:08:41 Jenessa: Nothing much. Good.

0:08:43 Matt: Well, have you dropped any acid today?

0:08:43 Jenessa: Totally not nervous at all. Doing great. Nope.

0:08:51 Matt: That's one of us. So, in honor of today's episode, I have microdosed probably about 10 micrograms of Orange Sunshine, which to be clear is ALD25, not necessarily LSD, but it is exactly the same thing. That was one of Timothy Leary's favorites, and Orange Sunshine is pretty much the, when we're talking about LSD in this episode, it's one of the things we're gonna be talking about. I try to go, you know, true to life, try to do some gonzo journalism on this show. So just thought microdosing, good for insomnia, good for mood, good for kind of seeing colors at the edge of your vision, although I'm not quite up to that. So we're going to be talking About Dr. Timothy Leary today. And I have just spent the last week on vacation reading obsessively about Dr. Timothy Leary. So I'm going to be infodumping. But you're also going to be sharing some fascinating information with me from your own background and research. Since this is kind of the first time we've done something like this, I guess I should set up a little bit about why we're doing it. I really thought it'd be fun to talk about Supreme Court cases that people should know about that are good. I think this is a revolutionary idea here, maybe, but there's already a podcast about why the Supreme Court sucks, and it's great, and you can listen to it elsewhere. But we're here to talk about Supreme Court cases that we like. And I thought it would be especially fun to do some that were influenced by science and had something to do with science, which is where you come in, of course.

0:10:03 Matt: But otherwise, you know, I think it's going to be a lot of fun to talk about some of my favorite cases from my favorite time, of course, the golden age of the Supreme Court, the Warren era. I get to revisit kind of how the Supreme Court can work, what it can do.

0:10:14 Jenessa: I'm really excited about this. I had some vague familiarity with this guy from the past, mostly because I had taught a little bit in class about the history of drug research, research psychoactive drugs, because I teach psychology and neuroscience. And I knew of him just as somebody who was famous in the 60s counterculture and had something to do with LSD. I didn't really know much else. So I'm excited to hear more about it. Did a little bit of research on my own on the, I'm going to put research in quotes that he did in the 60s. So this will be fun to talk about. And the court case, I know nothing about the court case you're telling us today.

0:10:57 Matt: Yeah. And the court case is why we're doing this, ostensibly, because it is a Supreme Court case from 1969, Leary v. U.S. I'm going to make the case that it's actually just about the best thing he ever did for drugs in America. It didn't ultimately help a lot, but it did something big at the time. And it's a great case. It's an unqualified W for drug advocates in the Supreme Court, no matter what happened afterward, and no matterwhat else happened with Larry afterward, word, which we'll talk about too. But yeah, let's talk about the man here before we get going on the case, because one of the things I really want to do with this series is talk about the people. I think it's very important that we center the actual people and they get lost so often and they just become names in these things like Miranda and Gideon. Of course, the Brown family will be talking about all those. But Timothy Leary doesn't really need an introduction for people of a certain age, at least, because he was what Nixon called the most dangerous man in America in the late 60s. Nixon actually called him that. Arguably, the person saying that was the most dangerous man in America at the time, but he's just looking in the mirror. And let alone what he was doing in Vietnam and everything that was driving the counterculture. Now, of course, the countercultural movement itself was driven by the CIA. I'm sure you know to some degree how this worked, but the MKUltra project introduced LSD to young people. And Timothy Leary was in the right place, right time for the LSD countercultural revolution. And he came from big money in Massachusetts. At one point, I guess his grandfather was one of the wealthiest people in the state. His father, I think, was Boston's medical examiner. And he had a pretty kind of rough, couldn't really stick it anywhere. He went to Holy Cross and Worcester, got kicked out, was in the army a little bit, made his way around. We'll get to the Harvard years and what he was doing over there and the research, as he said, in quotes he was dealing. But for the most part, he got pretty interested in psychedelics in the 60s, like a lot of people, but he was one of the first people of any kind of prominence. And he had the Harvard name at the time to really get people into it. He was going through some personal stuff. His second wife, so his first wife, actually, they were married for about a year. She wanted to become Uma Thurman's mom. It's just kind of a weird detail. His first wife was Uma Thurman's mother.

0:11:48 Jenessa: Yeah. How close is this to his impeachment? Okay.

0:12:47 Matt: Second wife, unfortunately, took her life on his birthday in 1955. Yeah, it was really sad. That was one thing that really stayed with him. And I think one thing he was working through with his early use of drugs. He had two kids, Susan and Jack. We'll probably end up talking about it later. So he was coming from a very conventional background, like a lot of the people who ended up driving the counterculture. He was not some raving lefty going into this. And he got a lot lot of attention talking about psychedelics. So what do you know about how he was introduced to psychedelics and how he came to this whole thing as a researcher?

0:13:14 Jenessa: Very little. I know a bit of like the timeline of when LSD was invented. It's one of the very few drugs that is totally synthetic in the lab and a little bit of how we discovered the psychedelic properties but I know almost nothing about how he came to be involved in.

0:13:30 Matt: Yeah. And of course, as you mentioned, LSD was synthesized. It was essentially synthesized ergot fungus. It's a fungus that just so people know where we're coming from here. We're not going to be talking, unfortunately, about LSD for the most part today. This is actually a cannabis case that went to the Supreme Court, but I just want to make sure we touched on it because it is the thing that Leary is the most famous for. And Leary was a great marketer. He was actually, he's very charming. And I'm going to make the point overall that Lurie was kind of a dirtbag, unfortunately, like a lot of great people and a lot of advocates and a lot of people who really like talking in public, he was kind of a dirtbag. And I think by the end of this story, everybody will be probably convinced of that, no matter what else you thought of him before. There's still plenty of reasons to like him. I mean, I've been going back and listening to lectures and this amazing interview he did in a conservative talk show in 1966, where he's just so soft-spoken and charming and very gracious, you know, just you can see why he had a real following. He built like an actual cult and people called him the high priest of LSD. That was his sort of working title. Yeah. And he took that very seriously because he started something called the League for Spiritual Discovery, the LSD, where they were going to try to make it a sacrament and have it be administered to people. And yeah, he was asked about this on this talk show. And the guy's like, well, sure, I can just get my LSD certification and I can just go buy LSD and just take it. Right. He's like no, we all know each other. It's actually a ceremony like we're taking it seriously. You'll get kicked out if you just use it irresponsibly. They were trying. Now, at the same time, of course, as you're going to be telling us, he was doing scientific research.

0:14:59 Matt: So not a great look when you're starting a cult, when you're working with something called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which actually is one of the greatest and most successful drug dealing operations in the history of the United States. They made millions of doses of lsd and in one case uh dropped them out of a cargo plane on to a concert not not a great business operation uh but they were very good at distributing LSD. Yeah, Brotherhood of Eternal Love was awesome and they were an actual cult that actually believed that he was the high priest of LSD like they were really into him and they were one of the reasons he was able to do the amazing things we're going to talk about in a bit here but in the meantime um what do you know because I know you've done a little background on this now looking coming at this as a scientist, as someone who's actually done research. What was the science part of Leary's career? Because I don't actually know. I'm really into the social and cultural stuff right now.

0:15:16 Jenessa: What geez Yeah. So there's two main things to talk about one is um what the ethical side and one is the actual like what theories he was putting out there on the ethics side uh you're gonna hear a lot about things he did with, he was taking the drugs himself, giving it to his grad students, arguably coercing his grad student into taking it, just kind of taking it and writing it down. There was not a lot of informed consent going on, writing things down in a systemic way.

0:16:19 Matt: Well, to be clear, though, I'm going to stop here real quick. And I just want to point out, because people really need to understand this. Nobody knew what this stuff was, really. It was invented by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland. He kind of put it on the shelf because Albert Hofmann was kind of a square. He wanted this wild bike ride after he took it for the first time. And he's like, this doesn't really have a lot of value.

0:16:34 Matt: What are we going to do with this? They did actually think it might be able to, they were working on synthesizing it. But the LSD in the world, the entire world's supply was at one point purchased by the CIA. I know how crazy that sounds, but they actually went to Switzerland and bought it all so they could experiment on unknowing Americans. MKUltra, we had an entire episode about it. And the more I talk about MKUultra, the more it sounds like I'm on acid, but it really is true. Yes.

0:16:55 Jenessa: That's episode 1057 of this show if you want to go back and hear more about MKUltra.

0:17:00 Matt: For sure. It was a good one.

0:17:01 Jenessa: MKUltra is often portrayed as being like scientific experiments. Absolutely not. They just like gave people drugs often without their knowledge or consent and just were like, I wonder what happens. So that's not at all systemic. It was initially developed and they thought they were going to use it as a heart medication. And then years later, I don't know how you have this gap. They figured out that it had psychoactive properties. I don't know how you give it to someone and not realize like, well, it's not really helping with their heart and they are tripping. But whatever.

0:17:34 Matt: Opposed to Viagra, which is developed as a heart medication, but I'm sure the side effects were immediately apparent.

0:17:38 Jenessa: Yeah, you would think, right?

0:17:38 Matt: So it's a little different.

0:17:40 Jenessa: I think at some point somebody sent me some of the research on this that one of the key things is, of course, like it usually starts on rats and it'd be a little less obvious that the rat was hallucinating. So at the time when all of this is going on, we did not have institutional review boards. Anybody familiar with human subjects research will be thinking about how when you have a research plan, you give it to an institutional review board, and they're supposed to be independent and not invested in this. And they say, what is the scientific value balanced against the risks and benefits to your participants? And are they giving informed consent? And they can either ask you to modify it or just say flat out, you can't do this. This is, there's no ethical way to do this, that came from the National Research Act of 1974. It was largely in response to the Tuskegee experiments, which I would love to talk about at some point because there's a huge lawsuit that comes out of that. But there were a number of experiments that were happening in the 60s and the 50s. Of course, like a lot of the Nazi science that led people to get more and more concerned with it's the Wild West. We're just doing human subjects experimentation and not regulating this. So it was 1974 when

0:18:59 Jenessa: That act came out and created institutional review boards. So if you're wondering how on earth he got away with this, like, quote unquote, research. Yeah, there were they didn't have rules about this for the most part. I don't know the extent to which other parts were illegal in other ways, but there weren't research laws about this. Yeah. Mm hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:19:17 Matt: That does explain a lot, you know, and you read too about things like Masters and Johnson, right. And other sex researchers where they were doing things that were wildly unethical, like just like blasting the pleasure centers of the brain, just to see what would happen and like messing people up in bad ways. So this does make a little more sense. And of course we had the infamous sort of prison experiment, the shock treatment stuff, all that stuff you'll learn about in a basic one -on -one psychology class. I don't have to tell you about, but all the, basically the reasons you can trot out for explaining why we We just already know that we can't let people just experiment on humans. In case you didn't guess that.

0:19:41 Jenessa: Right. Right. Yeah, it's, yeah. It's really important that we have outside, independent, not interested people going through and reviewing this. I'm not saying unethical research doesn't happen today, but it is really helpful, preventative.

0:20:03 Matt: So by the standards of the time, are you saying, though, that this was normal? He was a regular researcher?

0:20:08 Jenessa: Okay, define normal. Psychology was kind of a disaster at the time. You had this war between the behaviorists who were trying to at least make it scientific and standardized. And the, you know, old school Freudian people and some of these counterculture people who were just doing a lot of loosey goosey stuff. But nobody was really worried about ethics. I mean, it's not like the behaviorists were doing a great job caring about their participants either. So yeah, I guess it was normal insofar as it was common to not care too much about the long term impacts on the people you were studying. I obviously that doesn't mean it's okay, but it was happening a lot. So yeah, putting him in the larger context, you will be able to tell us more about what exactly he was up to with some of this that I think I guess everybody is going to have to judge for themselves on the scale of it's all there's a lot of not great stuff How bad exactly compared to other terrible stuff, too. It's rough back then. So yeah, the ethics are weird, but that explains why it was able to happen without just instantly the institutions coming down on him happening in public, essentially. Right.

0:21:27 Matt: Right. Well, and I should point out this, of course, just to be very clear, I think we said this out loud. He's a researcher and lecturer at Harvard at this point. So top of the game. And he's from Massachusetts. Jesus. And he is working with Richard Alpert, who would become Ram Dass, a big figure in the hippie movement. And they were close friends for quite a while. The reason they fell out later, we'll talk about. But they were part of something called the Harvard Psilocybin Project. And this is kind of the turning point for him. In 59, he's hired essentially just as a regular researcher, clinical lecturer, right? And then he comes on and he goes to Mexico, takes psilocybin, completely changes his life. And it says that he learns more just from taking psilocytin in Mexico than he learned from all the time he'd spent working in psychology and doing research. And you can imagine, I mean, again, I'm going to make some excuses for Larry in the course of this. You can imagine how, as a regular psychologist in the 50s, taking the substance, he had no idea existed. This is just side by side, but this is even before he's getting introduced to LSD. But of course, he opens up to other kinds of psychedelics during this process. But you can see how that would blow your mind to the literal kind of extent that you're like, okay, anything's possible now. Let's just, let's get into this. Let'S try it. I've been thinking about this a lot in the past week, as I've bee doing my reading, about how we are very much operating interpreting under our parents' and grandparents' generations' ideas of LSD, right? And I didn't have these kinds of parents, but certain kinds of people had parents that told

0:22:43 Matt: Them how great it was their entire lives, right, what a great experience it was. But if you didn't know what it was, and somebody just handed you this tab at a Jefferson Airplane concert in 1968, let alone if you were dosed by MKUltra in the punch at the Christmas party, as did happen at one federal Christmas party. And you just walked down the street, and it was literally from a federal agent, you just walk down the Street and start seeing demons coming out of cars and, you know, ends up going and robs a bar, you know, this is freaky stuff. This is, it's just, I think it's, I really have to emphasize how new it was and how nobody knew what this was or what it could do. And of course there's all kinds of misunderstandings as well, but he was at Harvard for about a couple of years and he was working in the Silas Seidman project. As you said, he was consensually or otherwise getting grad students to do stuff with him in ways that weren't necessarily ethical, not necessarily writing it down in ways you might if you're doing research, but did anything come up that time? Cause he was fired eventually.

0:23:27 Jenessa: So he was fired. The school claims it's because he was not showing up to class.

0:23:33 Matt: Oh, well that's possible too.

0:23:33 Jenessa: He swears that was not true. I would imagine that if you were frequently high, I would, I don't know, I am not really a drug person. So I've never encountered this issue but I would imagine it's difficult to get to class on a regular basis if you're doing a lot of drugs so who knows what's going on there supposedly you know it was not again I mean this research was not technically illegal so at least in the beginning so that wasn't a basis to fire him he's obviously alleging that it's because this was so controversial And it's not because of the teaching and whatever. The research itself is pretty wild. Granted, everybody back then, we do not have good systematic research of like, what is this drug and how does it work? We're starting to get that now because research on hallucinogens has become legal internationally and within the US relatively recently around like 2010 ish. I think it was like 2009 internationally 2015 in the US. So we're starting to get modern, like informed consent, placebo controlled. The placebo controls never work because the people getting like saline know that they're not on LSD. But in general, we're started to do this kind of systemic research. Back then, it was almost exclusively like people just took a drug and wrote about it. You know, you'll have case studies where, a case study normally in psych, people say, oh,

0:25:10 Jenessa: Participant A-M, and that's their initials because you want to keep them anonymous. But then it would be like the author was like Adam Maroney, and you're like, oh I think that's just you. And like people were given it, there was one where a guy gave it to his dog, like what was that for? Or there was one where they gave it to dolphins and they were like, they seemed really distressed. But the dolphins were out of water. So I have an alternative. Yeah, I have alternative hypothesis about what might have been going on there. You know, as you talked about, like MKUltra, that was definitely not systemic research. So it's all kind of a mess. And then it gets banned. So we don't know much about how these drugs work at all um we talked a lot about this in some episodes of serious inquiries only it's a 455 and 456 if you want to hear me and thomas get into what we do know about the neuroscience and psychology of this but really yeah I think a lot of this kind of wooey nonsense research is happening people get really nervous he was getting into stuff that I think even for the time was really out there. He had this thing called like the eight circuit model of consciousness. Oh boy. Yeah. Okay. So this might sound like less wild today with like the 2025 understanding of the brain where like if you go learn about psych and neuroscience, you'll hear about circuits. And it's like a literal circuit diagram, electrical engineering of

0:25:40 Matt: If you held me underwater and gave me LSD, I'd be distressed too.

0:26:30 Matt: Wow. I saw this referenced quite a lot. I thought I'd leave it to you because it sounded so ridiculous and I figured I wasn't high enough anyway. Sure.

0:26:58 Jenessa: How a neuron fires. Or we talk about networks on the macro level, as opposed to microscopic, of different brain areas that communicate. He did not mean that when he said circuits. It was like a metaphor where computer circuits analogize to the brain. And we did not have the kind of neuroimaging technology back then to be looking at brains in this way like it was just totally coming from nowhere and he didn't have data on this so we don't have at the time contemporary scientists like arguing with him he was just putting this in books this was not peer -reviewed scientific journal articles where people would argue back and forth he just wrote books that he called psychology philosophy abbreviated to sci -fi um so I think you can see he's already like jokey playing with it yeah

0:27:53 Matt: One thing I've learned about Timothy Lurie is you can't really trust things he writes about himself in books or generally probably in books. So I wouldn't be surprised, but this eight circuit consciousness theory. He called himself an existential psychologist, which I think just means like, hey, let's see what it's like to live in the world. What's that like? I think that was basically his idea. So this is not any kind of... I'm not even going to say peer -reviewed. Obviously, it's not peer - reviewed. This is not really anything you'd expect a Harvard scientist to be putting out from what I understand.

0:28:09 Jenessa: No no no and a lot of people criticize that there's no even prior to the LSD research his dissertation prior to the invention of LSD his dissertation was about some personality tests and he was criticized for it that there was really no data backing that up either. And it was just kind of like, oh, just test it by giving it to people and seeing what you think. And he's like, well, that's not how that works. So he already had this habit. And instead of using data on like, well, the reason I think this circuit exists is because, oh look, I collected this data and people behave like this. He just used all these metaphors and there was like, Oh, it like turns your brain onto a higher voltage and like I don't even know how I could criticize that as a scientist because I don'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEANT

0:29:08 Matt: It's in the category of not even wrong, right? That's the scientific expression. You're not even wron.

0:29:10 Jenessa: Yeah yeah like you ever see that that video of that guy like david wolf it went it got really famous because he was like ranting about health stuff and he was like chocolate is an octave of the sun and it was like I DON'T KNOW what that could mean so I don' don't I don't know how to tell you whether that's right or wrong. Like what? What? It's that?

0:29:29 Matt: Sure, man. An octave of this. That's so good. Good. Those are words.

0:29:37 Jenessa: Yeah, exactly. It's That kind of vibe. It'S It's not a scientific theory, because it's not explaining data. ItS Not predicting new data. Its Not creating a testable falsifiable hypothesis. I don't knoW what experiment I would do in order to tell yOu whether or not there's an anal emotional emotional territorial circuit in your brain. Like, what would that be?

0:30:00 Matt: Time -binding semantic circuit. I'm just looking at those. Holistic neurosomatic. The metaprogramming. Okay. This is very 60s, isn't it?

0:30:07 Jenessa: It is. It is. It's very, it feels more like 60s counterculture and just vibes. It's all vibes. And we don't have to, in order to defend his right to exist, or, you know, I think a lot of modern day, like liberal people and a growing number of conservative people feel really strongly that like you should not go to jail for using drugs or like for having a substance use disorder like our prison system is not curing drug addiction we can be on board for that and see him as part of that movement without feeling like we have to embrace his philosophy on how it's gonna open your brain to a higher voltage like this we can let that part go this is not this is nothing

0:30:17 Matt: Amazing. Sure. Yeah. Vibes, I think, is actually a really good way to describe his entire career. He was a VibES guy. And I mean, anybody who did that said that often and that much. I found a great video of him. He died in 96 of incurable prostate cancer. He actually documented him at his death very carefully. He had a lot of interesting stuff going on sort of artistically more than scientifically, but he was asked about his greatest regrets. And he said, one of his greatest regards was that he didn't do enough acid. And I thought that was perfect because he'd done it. He did it so many times, so many things like by in that radio interview, I was talking about 1966, he's already saying he's done at least 310 times. And in the period of time we're about to talk about, he did it every day, sometimes twice a day, which is unimaginable, unimaginble to me because yeah, it's a 12 hour commitment.

0:31:10 Jenessa: What could he do oh yeah it's it's also worth mentioning yeah so first of all as compared to so many other drugs of any type including hallucinogens specifically this drug stays in your system a super long time and that's a lot and also because of the fact that research on this has been banned for such a long time we don't know the side effects of this on your body like the the presumption that it is necessarily a hundred percent good for you is no less silly than the like dare class oh if you take this you'll get pregnant and die like it's we yeah

0:31:55 Matt: It sure does. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, you won't get pregnant and die. Nobody's actually ever died of an LSD overdose. Technically speaking, it is one of the safer substances like overall, I'm going to defend acid very quickly because I'm a fan, but it does take a long time. It's a real commitment. I think one ofthe reasons it's not popular so much anymore is because you're in for 10 or 12 hours. And one ofthethings that literally popularizes the idea of set and setting that you want to make sure you'rein the right mindset, that you'reIn the right place. And generally speaking, you can guarantee you're going to have a good trip if you control your set and setting. But one of the reasons he wanted to sacramentalize it and take it out of science is because he did see it as such a deeply religious and spiritual experience, which I think is completely fair. As anybody who's done acid properly, at least and had a good drip, will know that. Maybe if even if I've never had a bad trip, but if you've had a bed trip, maybe you know that too. I don't know. Maybe that's also a religious experience of its own kind. But I should talk about Larry's vibes and how they translate into the rest of his life very quickly here because his life story needs to be a movie it needs to be three movies like there's so much good stuff in this I mean really like some of the story you could not write if you were on acid like it's so good I was not aware of the many and I will say I'm drawing largely from a book that I read last week called The Most Dangerous Man in America and it's great it's got two co -authors it's written in a very cinematic sort of narrative way I think he's taking some Woodward and Bernstein type liberties with like giving us some dialogue trying to piece things together and tell you how it happened. But it's great. So Leary was arrested about 36 times in his life around the world, in many different countries, actually. He was one of the luckier people to come in contact with the criminal punishment system. And back then, it was a lot harder to go to prison for things. But I will say his first major arrest in 65 becomes the case we're going to talk about today, the Supreme Court case that went up and actually had a real consequential effect for everybody else. Now, Leary, on top of LSD, he was really into cannabis cannabis and believed especially two substances together could do a lot for people.

0:32:29 Jenessa: Together that seems like so much

0:34:11 Matt: And I should say back then that I realized from this book, they were into not just cannabis, but hash. So that's the whole plan. You're getting like 90 % THC versus the 13 or 14 % you're going to get from smoking weed.

0:34:22 Jenessa: Oh I know nothing about any of this so this is all revelation to

0:34:25 Matt: So yeah, man, I've not dabbled in hash. It's harder to find. So he's coming back from Mexico on a trip with his kids and his girlfriend, Rosemary, who'd become his wife. And Rosemary actually realized that she still had some weed on her. And she's starting to freak in the way that you do as you're going over the Mexican border coming back in the United States. So she tries to toss some of it out, but she realizes everybody's going to see her. She can't do it. So she puts some stuff in her clothes and customs finds a snuff box and they find some residual stuff. And so Leary takes full, but honestly, this is very noble. He takes full accountability for the marijuana, is charged, and he's facing 30 years for violations of laws that are not necessarily laws you would think of when you're thinking about marijuana possession. So I'm going to get to the legal stuff in a minute, but I just want to tell you what sort of happened, the catalyst of this set off of his first major arrest. So he's facing this thing. He's taking on the constitutionality of his conviction and the underlying statutes. But he's also meanwhile arrested in 1968 in Laguna Beach. And this is, there's some dispute about what he actually had on him in his book, which again, his autobiography flashbacks is not necessarily trustworthy. Trustworthy. But he started the sort of stoner legend that there were two roaches on him and like two smoked cigarettes that were mostly gone, and that he was facing up to 10 years for that. The cop who arrested him insisted there was much more on him, but you can't necessarily trust the police report or what's going on there. He was a known countercultural figure at this point. Right after the conclusion of the case we're about to talk about, he announced that he Was running for governor against Ronald Reagan. And so, yeah, no, Timothy Leary, California,

0:35:29 Jenessa: Me wait

0:35:57 Matt: Yeah. He had such an interesting life. He really did so many different things. And his campaign slogan, this is true, inspired John Lennon to write Come Together. Come Together was written as a campaign song for Timothy Leary. How cool is that? It's so cool.

0:35:55 Jenessa: What's is this california okay okay all right what the

0:36:13 Matt: I love that. Yeah. The Moody Blues also wrote a song about Timothy Leery, and it sucks, but he loved it. He loved it so much because it got him so much attention. It was called The Legend of a Mind. And I will say, for a soft -spoken researcher, PhD kind of guy. He had a huge, what am I saying? PhDs have huge egos. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive concepts, but he had a big ego. He loves an audience and he gets plenty of audiences, you know, through his different endeavors here. But the really wild part of the story starts when he is sentenced to 10 years in a California prison for this thing that he alleges was the two roaches. And this is after he's had this big victory they were about to talk about. And I just wanted to put this all in context to understand how important this plaintiff is. Ultimately, this is petitioner. So his lawyer, Michael Kennedy, was a well -known radical lawyer who represented the Weather Underground and Black Panthers and other radicals. And he conspired with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Weather Underground. The BEL paid the Weather underground $25 ,000 to bust Leary out.

0:36:33 Jenessa: Sure might have encountered some of these in my career oh

0:37:15 Matt: And Leary practiced in his mind over and over and ever again, using meditative techniques, how he was going to bust out. And he found it was a minimum security prison. He had actually, as a psychologist, answered All of the questions exactly in the way that he knew would get him sent to a minimum security prison. This is part of his story. So he finds like this convenient thing where he can like climb up a tree, jump onto a roof, hide, go down using his racquetball gloves. He can like slide down like a zip line. It's so cool. And he goes off and runs into the woods. It was like a wire, like an electric wire. And he uses like a zipline. Yeah. No, it's so cool. This has to be a movie. And he's not, you know, he's not the most fit guy, but he's having a great time. He goes out of the woods, the weather underground coming. Pick him up. And it's all prearranged. And nobody had really thought that far ahead. The Weather Underground at this point is led by Bernadine Dorn, actually the adopted mother of last week's guest, Shaisa Boudin, just a weird coincidence. So they take him to safe houses. They sort of let the cops know that he's going south and make it look like he's gonna go to Mexico. They take him into safe houses going up to Seattle, but they need a plan to get him out of the country because he's just broken out of prison on, you know, again, a minor marijuana possession offense. And one of the great ironies of the Timothy Leary story is that it's just honestly, when they make this movie, it's going to have to be at least in part of comedy because there's so many funny details. But he ends up to get out of this minor marijuana possession offense, for which he's serving an obscene amount of time, obviously. He ends up hooking up with three different terrorist groups, actual terrorist groups. So the Weather Underground, of course, was bombing federal buildings all over the place during this time, like constantly. There were just constant bombings. They were trying not to hurt anybody. They were just trying to make it a property thing, but people did get hurt in the process. Us. So they send an ambassador to Algiers because the Black Panthers are the only recognized American embassy in Algiers, which is so

0:37:27 Jenessa: Okay pipeline okay wait

0:38:58 Matt: Cool at the time. Yes.

0:38:59 Jenessa: The black panthers have an embassy

0:39:02 Matt: Because the socialist government of Algiers will not recognize the United States and they will only talk to the Black Panthers. That was our representatives. And of course, Nixon didn't recognize them either. So, they're just hanging out in this French colonial house smoking weed all day and being the embassy.

0:39:14 Jenessa: I didn't know that could be a thing I guess a country can decide the embassy just is whatever you want it okay

0:39:22 Matt: So yeah, I mean, Iran, if you want me to be the ambassador, I guess, let's hook it up. The whole story of everything that happens to Leary was on the run, because he ends up going out with Rosemary and his wife at the time on the run into a bunch of different countries, a bunch of madcap hijinks ensue, and he ends up showing up a couple of days after the envoy that the Weather Underground sent to Algeria to try to get them to convince them to take Leary as an asylee. And now Eldridge Cleaver at the time is running the Black Panthers embassy and not a great guy for reasons that come out pretty strongly in the book. And Cleaver's really skeptical about this because we're in a Muslim country at this point, Algeria, and he's going to, he doesn't want to have to try to convince them that this well -known drug advocate is the first person they should be taking in from America, right? But he's eventually convinced. Leary himself shows up. This wasn't coordinated very well. Leery shows up a couple of days after the Weather Underground advocate shows up, they didn't really talk to each other about this. Leiry is carrying as a going away present from the Weather underground, he is carrying an aftershave bottle full of LSD that he brought to Algeria because their big plan was to turn on the Panthers. They thought that they could get them all going on LSD and raise their consciousness too. Didn't work.

0:40:32 Jenessa: Oh so not turn on as in turn against

0:40:35 Matt: Oh, no. Yeah. No, no. 60s, man. You got to turn it on.

0:40:38 Jenessa: Oh my all right Jesus.

0:40:40 Matt: Remember, this is the guy who gave us turn on, tune in, drop out, Timothy Leary.

0:40:43 Jenessa: Okay. I didn't know what that, I've heard that phrase and I'm like, is that like a koan? Like it means nothing to me.

0:40:51 Matt: And just as sidebar, he didn't actually give that to us. He actually, Marshall McLuhan, the communications guy who give us the medium as the message, was at lunch with Leary one day and he was doing this Pepsi jingle along to himself. And he's like, turn on tune in drop out and Leary just totally stole it and used it for the rest of his career so they get to algeria I just have to tell you this because this is just too good they're trying to establish algera the panthers are as like a haven for people who are escaping nixon and draft dodgers and radicals right and it's a good idea you've got a place that doesn't extradite it's reasonably good to live it's cheap and it'S ON THE BEACH AND THEY'RE HAVING A GOOD TIME so eldridge cleaver is convinced that he's going to petition on behalf of of the panther's to give give Timothy Leary asylum. So he goes to Algeria and does not mention, hilariously, does not mention that Timothy Lear is white, just to start with, which is an important detail. They just assumed anybody the Panthers were advocating for would not be white. And does not mentioned that he's a drug advocate. He just says he's an opponent of Nixon. He's opposed to Vietnam, which is all true, but not the most important thing about Timothy Learing. There was millions of other people that felt that way too.

0:41:42 Jenessa: Fair. Okay, I guess we didn't have the internet yet, so.

0:41:55 Matt: Exactly. Now this is so funny to me because they couldn't Google him. They couldn't even get a picture of him. And so they publish an official asylum asylum announcement in their local publication in Algeria that says that prominent Afro-American scientist Timothy Leary has been given... So egg was really on their face when it turns out that he's a white guy who's really into drugs. And so the Algerian government was furious when they found this out, that they had just given asylum to this guy. Because obviously the US government was very happy to let them know. They sent him a bunch of clippings. Anyway, there's so many other great stories from this whole time, but I thought that was just about the funniest part. But it It doesn't go so funny after that, because the Panthers end up sort of taking him hostage a little bit under arms, and they make him basically cough up 10 ,000 to leave the country. He goes on to Switzerland. It's a whole story about why he has to end up staying in Switzerland. He ends up staying with this sort of James Bond villain who's an arms trafficker to the PLO. Oh, I forgot to mention he also got involved with the PLL and the Black Panthers. So he ended up advocating for both of them in the course of all of this, along with the underground, the

0:42:35 Jenessa: Wait, what's the PLO again?

0:42:53 Matt: Palestinian Liberation Organization, which at the time was hijacking airliners. That was their big thing. Panthers actually to allow him to keep the asylum they'd already given him, they sent him on a mission to go talk to the PLO because they were really into Palestine at the time. And they were like, this will make up for it, basically, if you can come out as a strong advocate for Palestine, which he was happy to do. So to his credit. So there's all that. But the point is, this Supreme Court case, he would have been doing 30 years if the Supreme Court had not found in his favor in what we're about to talk about.

0:43:25 Jenessa: Wait is is this 30 years before just related to the marijuana or is this then related to escaping?

0:43:34 Matt: No, so this is before all that, I should make the point that in the alternate history version of this, the original arrest I told you about the Mexican border, this is the second one was the California arrest, but the federal arrest where he's charged with these things we're about to talk about. If he'd been doing those 30 years, we never would have heard from him again, probably. I mean, he would have done a lot of work from prison, but he wouldn't have had this crazy life. So anyway, the very long version is, excuse me, the Very Short Version.

0:43:57 Matt: I really want to tell you the Very Long Version because it's so good. But the Very Short Version is he ends up in Switzerland for a while. He sells off the book rights to this arms dealer so he can continue to receive protection. The Swiss government finds they can't extradite him because it's such a dinky little charge that he's facing at this point in California. But Nixon is determined to get him and forces the Swiss. So he ends up being forced to go to Afghanistan, which is kind of the end of the hippie highway at the time. Yeah, of course, Afghanistan. Turns out the nephew of the king of Afghanistan.

0:44:21 Jenessa: Wait, why? Of course. What?

0:44:22 Matt: Oh, yeah, because that's where the good drugs were at the times. El Dehashish. Yeah.

0:44:27 Jenessa: Yeah, apparently.

0:44:29 Matt: No, this is a different time. The nephew of the King of Afghanistan was super into LSD. That was like his deal. So, he knew he'd be getting protection there. And Afghanistan didn't extradite. So he was really counting on that. But the CIA actually kidnapped him and brought him back anyway. So yeah. So before I tell you about what happened after he got back, let's just talk about the actual Supreme Court case.

0:44:49 Matt: So we'll take a break here and we'll come back on that, all

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0:46:28 Matt: Right. So Leary v. U .S., the reason that we're actually here 40 minutes in. It's fascinating because I didn't know anything about this case before I started reading about Leary. And it's something I feel like I should know as a cannabis advocate. Leary, after, of course, he's charged in 1965 with federal cannabis violations, becomes really interested in undoing them. He calls them a bizarre monstrosity from the bureaucratic standpoint and unconstitutional from the legal standpoint. And he was correct on both counts. The main thing he was challenging was the marijuana, I should say the marijuana because it was put that H in there, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Now, we talked about this a bit in opening arguments before. One of my favorite episodes, in OA 1150, we talking about the fact that in the Farm Bill of 2017, Congress sort of accidentally legalized a lot of THC products.

0:47:15 Matt: And that got into a whole interesting history, which I can just recap very quickly about how industrial hemp was actually eventually criminalized. Marijuana possession was not criminalized, what they did is they did the same thing that they had done to high capacity firearms, where they criminalized transferring, possessing, importing, distributing these things without having paid your tax. It used to be a special, and in the case of the gun, it was very high tax, but the Marijuana Tax Act created pretty serious, strict taxes. You had to get a stamp, a special marijuana stamp, when you paid your taxes on your marijuana. Now, there were people that were authorized to have it for different scientific and medical purposes. And I should say, of course, in case people aren't aware, marijuana was completely legal until 1937, essentially. And many of the states had criminalized it by that point, but the federal government hadn't. There was getting to be more and more concern about it, but it was well -known to have medicinal uses, and industrial hemp was doing fine at the time. But Harry Anslinger, who was a big prohibitionist who led the early version of the DEA, was kind of the original reefer madness guy, really into the idea of making sure everybody knew that this was killer, this was what they call loco weed, which I really wish that had stuck around, but we don't call it that anymore. So Anslinger is instrumental in getting the 1937 Tax Act passed. And the main thing that Leary is challenging when this goes up to the Supreme Court, remember, again, he's facing 30 years for two different federal offenses. And one of them is 21 U .S .C. 176A at the time, which is about importation. And we'll get to that in a minute. I think that's a super interesting question because he was bringing it in again from Mexico at the time, but also there's an issue about knowing where it's from. And he was indicted also though, of course, under the Marijuana Tax Act. His main argument, which wasn't something, okay, this is kind of funny. Essentially in order to defend himself in the smuggling charge, he actually pretty much had to testify. So I guess we should talk about the smuggling charge first. Now, generally not a good idea to testify in your own criminal case but the section 2h of the narcotic drugs and import and export act just read this here notwithstanding other provision whoever knowingly with intent to defraud the united states imports or brings into the united states marijuana contrary to law or smuggles and clandestinely introduces marijuana which should have been invoiced or receives conceals buys sells or in any manner facilitates transportation concealment or sale here's the important part knowing the same to have been imported or brought into the United States contrary to the law so there's a knowledge a center requirement built into this statute statute, which requires the person to, and it says, basically, if you take this to trial, there's actually a section in the law that says, if You take this a trial, you have the opportunity to explain where it came from, if, you know, and Timothy Leary took the stand and testified that he knew that it came From New York, and that he was pretty sure and they and the Supreme Court had a chance to look at a bunch of evidence about where marijuana was being grown. And obviously, they said, by default, we don't really know because this is a clandestine trade. But it's generally could be assumed that most consumers don't necessarily need to assume that it's being imported, that you could believe that a lot of this is coming in.

0:50:04 Jenessa: So this is he had it when he was in Mexico, and he was crossing back into the US. But what mattered was not him taking it to the US. What mattered was like where it grew out of the ground.

0:50:16 Matt: Where it came from and what he knew about where it came from in the United States. Yeah. So they presented evidence about domestic marijuana production and how it was reasonable for many users to believe that it came From the US.

0:50:26 Jenessa: Is this still based on because I'm like calling back to first year of law school? Is this under a theory that like the Fed can't just ban it like states rights kind of thing? They think they have to commerce clause this. Like, why are they not just saying it's illegal? Because I feel like they kind of just do that now.

0:50:49 Matt: So there's another thing with the the Boggs Act, I was trying to figure this out, too, because there was it later on. So the Tax Act was kind of their way of regulating it and their sneaky way. Now I should point out just to get the history, legislative history of the tax act, which we're about to talk about. This was a sneaky job because at the time hemp was a pretty booming industry and this isn't necessarily something we're looking to criminalize. And nobody knew, really knew what marijuana was. So they introduced this thing because Anslinger really wants to criminalise it. And the only opponents to this otherwise pretty banal 1937 tax thing, and most Americans aren't going to care if marijuana is tax if they even know what it is because it's illegal or they think it is in most states the only opponents were the american medical association who actually wrote a pretty impassioned letter saying this has all kinds of medicinal value it's not addictive and there's no reason we'll look to this letter it's actually pretty striking and they said basically if you want to regulate it there's already a narcotics act you can do that under so let's just keep this simple and keep the existing regime there's no reason to pass this special tax it's going to burden doctors the mayor of new york actually if you're a la guardia the guy the name airport is named after also was the only other major opponent to this bill but there's reason to believe and and this is kind of stoner lore, but it is also pretty much true, one of those things, that William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Company were also very much involved in getting this going because Hearst saw hemp as a competitor to the timber interest that he had that were producing the paper for his newspaper. And the DuPont Corporation had different synthetics that they were concerned would be in danger if hemp were more available. So just an interesting little thing, blip of history, that we have this tax act that is essentially the only way that they're able to charge him. And he's able to challenge the constitutionality because, and this is interesting to me, because he's already testified in the case, right? He's already testified and said, yes, I was in possession. This is where I bought it. I don't know where it was grown, but I know where I brought it. But he's making the argument on appeal. And the governor did correctly point out, and I listened to some of the oral arguments, that you're raising this kind of the first time saying this is self -incrimination, but it is. And as his lawyer said in oral arguments. You'd have to be a madman to follow this law, to go down to the IRS and say, here's all the marijuana that I imported this year. Here's everything that I bought and sold, because you're outside the use, right? You're outside any of the license uses. And the government was basically saying that Congress created this knowing that they were essentially criminalizing the possession. They didn't exactly do it that way, but they knew that they were creating a regime in which it was going to be a crime to possess it other than for the specified uses. But Justice Harlan correctly, I think found in this case that it was self incrimination for you to have to pay the tax because you'd be admitting to a crime in almost every state at this point, you

0:53:17 Matt: Just on default, including Texas, where he was arrested for the importation defense in 1965 that is on appeal here. So what you're looking at is every time you're just a regular person who's in possession or transferring or otherwise dealing with marijuana, you're supposed to go down and get your special stamp. And they're saying you're automatically incriminating yourself in that state to begin with, and possibly the federal government. And it's a very straightforward case. It makes a lot of sense. It's very long. It is a lot longer than it needs to be. There's a lot stuff about how they presented the jury instructions for what the jury was looking at to decide his state of mind about what he knew about the importation aspect of it. But at the end of the day, this ended up finding that the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was unconstitutional and that the importation thing, that the center requirement was also illegal. So he got very lucky. They just set him up for everything else. This name, Leary v. U .S., there was also a companion case called Covington, but they picked Leary as the the main thing here because he had the cachet. You have to remember he was extremely famous in

0:54:19 Matt: The late sixties. This would have been a household name at this point by the time that his case was in front of the Supreme court. So this, an unequivocal good, this struck down the tax act and this sort of ridiculous regime. And the United States had an opportunity at this point to do something very cool. But of course we know they didn't because Richard Nixon was president and you know how Nixon felt about marijuana.

0:54:40 Matt: So we passed the controlled substances Substances Act instead in 1970, just a little bit later. And there was sort of an emergency finding at the time in the Controlled Substances Acts that they were going to schedule marijuana, but they didn't make a final decision. He put it over to this panel called the Schaefer Commission. You know about the Schaffer Commission?

0:54:56 Jenessa: No, I don't think so.

0:54:58 Matt: Nixon hated this because it was led by a Republican governor and it had a bunch of very famous people in it. And I'm not exaggerating. This is not stoner lore. We can link to the Schafer Commission .You can see it for yourself. But they recommended that marijuana not be scheduled at all. They said that it doesn't appear to meet the definition of any of the federal schedules that we have just set up. And Nixon said, no, that's ridiculous. Of course, we're going to schedule it. But he had extensive findings saying otherwise.

0:55:12 Jenessa: Mm -hm. Yeah, it's worth talking briefly about scheduling. I think we could do a whole episode on it.

0:55:26 Matt: Oh, I want to, yeah.

0:55:27 Jenessa: But just so people are aware, the supposed scientific reasoning is that Schedule 1 would be no medical value, high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 would be high potential for abuse and severe dependency, but, you know, the idea that there would be some slight potential medical value. And as we go down the schedule, there's lower likelihood likelihood of dependence, and a higher likelihood of medical value. So we're kind of balancing these things. In reality, when you look at which drugs get which schedule, it's nonsense. I mean, you have a schedule one, as some examples, you have LSD, heroin, marijuana, and ecstasy. In schedule Schedule 2, we have cocaine and meth. So, like, it's, there's no scientific logic to this. There's even an issue where for a long time, heroin, Schedule 1, fentanyl, Schedule 2. Fentanyl does have real medical use in some extreme, in cases, yes, exactly. You have, it is a really good pain reliever.

0:56:38 Matt: But it's so dangerous.

0:56:43 Jenessa: It's extremely addictive and extremely dangerous in terms of the dose it takes to get pain relief is very close to the dose. It takes to kill you. So, right. This is a really important concept when you create any drug, the effective dose and the lethal dose. And it's ED50, LD50, meaning the 50 percent of the population, because obviously the dose is going to be slightly different for different people. Of course, we don't test the lethal dose in humans, but estimating

0:56:55 Matt: Yeah? As opposed to the dose of marijuana that it takes to kill you.

0:57:19 Jenessa: That, testing it in animals, yikes, sorry, everybody. And a drug is considered safer when the effective dose is further from the lethal dos, similarly to having the effective dos further away from severe side effects. So that way, you have a bigger leeway of somebody accidentally takes a little higher of the effective does, they don't instantly hit a severe side effect or like die. So if we actually did scheduling with that in mind like I'm not saying I agree with the criminalizing but you could at least see the logic behind how they control it in reality we're gonna see marijuana and lsd at the top and like fentanyl bounces between schedule one and schedule two depending on the administration which is nonsense

0:58:03 Matt: Right right yeah no no this is I mean and again this is all being dictated by people who have never tried any of these substances nixon of course was a big fan of alcohol which if it just showed up today I think alcohol would have to be scheduled like it does have some medicinal value but it would haveと be scheduled I mean it's just an obviously controlled substance and even in that 1966 radio interview I was telling you about this very conservative talk show host is doing the typical conservative talk shows gish gallop right the just like trying to inundate him with his his opinions and facts and whatever. It's all bunk. And he's like, yeah, I mean, of course, I like my martinis. And somebody in the audience yells out, how many martinis have you had in your life? Because he's just going on and on about how many times Leary's done it, how it can't be not addictive, right? And he said, well, that's different, obviously. And Nixon really believed that marijuana made you less motivated, that it made you stupid, that you couldn't be a productive member of society. Whereas he said specifically, he thought alcohol made people more productive.

0:58:52 Jenessa: So, what God?

0:58:52 Matt: That was just Nixon's scientific opinion. Yeah, no, he really believed that because Nixon liked like to drink. So yeah. And he also associated, I mean, marijuana was also responsible for Nixon's legendary infamous tapes quote of, what the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? He was asking about marijuana specifically. It's like, why are they so into marijuana? And he was basically saying, because they were promoting, like there were a lot of Jewish advocates for cannabis. Yeah.

0:59:11 Jenessa: Is that a stereotype I didn't even heard that one really okay this

0:59:20 Matt: Again, who were able to get out of bed apparently and go and write letters and and publish things. It kind of obviates his point. But yeah, no, it's just the typical kind of societal prejudice of people that just never tried LSD and marijuana, trying to get their arms around it and see if they can control it because they're scared of it.

0:59:38 Jenessa: Is really important too for thinking about like people making smart choices around this that like when you demonize something that way and make these outrageous claims it creates a huge problem where if you're you're hearing this is terrible. It will ruin your life if you even try it once. And then you meet somebody who's done it once and their life is not ruined. Now you're not going to trust a single thing that any authority figure says about it, which to be fair at the time was probably a smart thing to do.

1:00:07 Matt: Maybe you shouldn't.

1:00:07 Jenessa: But the problem is like, yeah, it's not good to like smoke things. That's bad for your lungs. And now you have like young kids making bad decisions because they can't get good information from anybody like this is not helping anyone when you demonize something on no scientific basis whatsoever they're going to instantly see through the fact that there is no evidence for what you're saying and there's counter evidence for what you'RE saying this is useless

1:00:36 Matt: Then that was, I mean, just ironically, of course, that taking these kinds of substances makes you question everything, right? Including why have I been told that these things are bad for me? This feels great. I'm getting a lot of interesting thinking done right now. So that was of course why Nixon was terrified of all of this. He really thought that every Every day that Lurie was out free from prison was a day that they were losing the drug war in the worst possible way. And, you know, because he was this sort of living symbol of this resistance and this counterculture. And remember at the time, too, just to situate this a little better, you've got so many of your friends and neighbors are being sent off for no reason to die in Vietnam at the same time that you're discovering that you can open your mind and live in these different ways. You know, all kinds of criticisms to be had of what's going on with the countercultur and the people who are driving it. But just a fascinating time in American history. Learn about their resistance and the way they did things, and a lot we can learn not to do. But I should say, speaking of things not to doing, Lurie

1:01:24 Matt: Gets brought back. So again, he's had this big one at the Supreme Court, but he has to go on the run because he's just been sentenced in 1970. He escapes in late 1970.

1:01:31 Jenessa: So that the supreme court case says the federal law violates the fifth amendment but it doesn't necessarily invalidate state laws against it. So that's how he gets convicted a second time for an unrelated offense in California.

1:01:46 Matt: That't right. Yep. Which wasn't brought under that, just regular California law. And as I said, the day that the Supreme Court announced that he had just won his case, he announces he's running for governor of California, which is perfect. It's just absolutely perfect. And he could have just taken the W, but Timothy Timothy Leary just always kept going. And the whole time he's on the run, I should point out, he's doing psychedelics because I think partly because he just knows he's probably going back to prison. He was right. But also because he really believes in it. I think he's making more and more decisions sort of based on the fact that he's taking LSD every day, which I'm not going to recommend anybody do, no matter the sudden setting, not a great way to live.

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1:03:49 Matt: So he's returned by the federal government illegally from Afghanistan in 1973, and FBI is waiting and they want to talk to him. And he immediately snitches on everybody he's ever known, which is the main reason I'm going to tell you that timothy leary was a dirtbag and the fbi knew a lot of this stuff already they just really wanted to be able to say that he had told them that because obviously yes

1:04:06 Jenessa: Oh, because I mean, I would imagine that's very discrediting of

1:04:10 Matt: And they were looking to just destroy what's left of the counterculture and the hippie movement and what better way right than to bring down the high priest of lsd and it gets to the point I mean he at this point he had real enemies in the panthers because of what they did to him in algeria I think that's legit but he also snitched on his own lawyer he snitched in the weather underground people that busted him out yeah it's pretty bad and you can also see this through his entire history that that he was happy to give statements backing radical causes he may or may not have completely believed in as a matter of convenience to move things along. So he was just as happy to snitch as well. But the day this came out, his old friend, Alan Ginsberg, the poet, obviously, and his son, Jack Cleary, both stood up to denounce him in a press conference, say what a snitch he was. And it took years for Ginsberg to reconcile with him. His son never really reconciled with him for other reasons. He did give his children a lot of LSD growing up. I will point that out. Not great. It was not good for either of them.

1:05:00 Matt: And yeah, I wouldn't even, it's a tragic story actually what happened to his daughter but so he went on to become a cyber guy he got really interested in computers and consciousness he briefly attempted to get the expression turn on boot up jack in going uh it didn't ever take off yeah I mean again he was big into neuromancer I think they thought jacking in was going to be a thing we're actually going to be doing oh the sci -fi book william gibson classic yeah oh man yeah but that's sort of the the inspiration for The Matrix, right? The idea of plugging into the back of your brain and going into some other place. So he continued to be a countercultural figure. He documented his death, as I told you, in a very unusual way. Got really into sort of preparing for death and talking about death. But really interesting, complicated guy who was more than anything a promoter and a self -promoter. But as we've discussed, not really a scientist, not necessarily a true radical, but a radical in a lot of ways. Someone who absolutely did believe in LSD, I have no doubt about that, but was kind of flexible in a Lot of the other stuff he believed. But honestly, Honestly, I've had the best time reading about him, thinking

1:05:23 Jenessa: What's Neuromancer? Oh, okay, okay, yeah, I don't know this. Yeah,

1:06:01 Matt: About him. This is a fun one to talk about. And it's an unequivocally great outcome from the Supreme Court because they go through this. I mean, this is a detailed case. We didn't go through the actual legal breakdown of this as much because I think it speaks for itself. I think anybody can understand that having to pay a tax on something that is illegal is self -incriminating and that the requirement for the importation was a little too much. But this is very well -reasoned case. And Potter Stewart is the closest thing to a dissent where he's just like, I actually only think that self - incrimination was supposed to be when you're on the stand. End. But our entire case law at this point leads to this conclusion. I have to agree with it. It is concurrence.

1:06:34 Jenessa: I was going to say, I think your average person probably thinks of the Fifth Amendment and they think of someone on the stand saying, I plead the Fifth or refusing to testify. And they would not imagine all these other contexts that it does, of course, apply to.

1:06:47 Matt: No, I mean, something like a blood draw, right? Like, should you be required when you've been drinking, right, to get a blood drawn?

1:06:54 Jenessa: Yeah.

1:06:54 Matt: And that's generally considered to be self -incriminating. In Massachusetts, we have extremely good law on all of this that you even like, you can refuse a breath test with no consequences because it's self - incriminating,

1:07:03 Jenessa: One of my favorites is this has been applied to cell phones in the circuits with contradictory results and not yet decided at the Supreme Court. But But the analogy where it all started was with wall safes that it has been held. You can be required to give cops a key if they have a warrant to your wall safe because they have a right to get in there physically via the warrant. But even with a warrant, if it's one of those keypads with a digit, you can't be requiredto give them the number because that would would be testifying against yourself, that you are saying the contents of your own brain. So even with the warrant, now granted, they could probably still pry it open, I'd imagine, but it feels silly until you think about it. But yeah, and

1:07:43 Matt: It's evidence. Yeah, sure. No. This is, yeah, this is the difference between making sure just easy free legal advice here. I don't mind giving this one. The difference between having face recognition on your phone and having thumbprint recognition, because the cops can take your phone, and hold it up to your face, and make it activate, but they can't force you to put your thumb on it, or put your numbers in. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah nothing you can can do sure but that yeah of course yeah

1:08:14 Jenessa: This is the one, it's always important to clarify that's with a warrant. Without a warrant, they can't just be like, la la la, oh, I'm getting into your phone. But that's the one that's, yeah, it's bouncing around the circuits of like, so definitely they can't make you give the digits because that's the analogy to the wall safe. But like the biometrics of like a face and a thumbprint, like are you testifying against yourself if you put your thumb on the phone? Probably. If you just sit there and they look at your face, probably not. The Supreme Court hasn't said yet. At the border, all bets are off. Do whatever you want. It's it's wild out there. But yeah, the Fifth Amendment is way more than just literal testifying in court about yourself. It goes all over the place.

1:08:59 Matt: Sometimes it's paying your taxes yeah

1:09:01 Jenessa: So yeah, well, and I was gonna ask you about this. So now we have a lot of states where it's the exact reverse. We have states where It's legal, and you run a business and sell it and it's taxed, but it's still technically illegal at the Fed. So now is this case been tested on that? Or?

1:09:09 Matt: That's a great point yeah no I mean this is because again the federal government hasn't been and who knows the trump administration by the end of all this they might start imposing but generally since the states have been legalizing they haven't been enforcing any of this against the states and it's just so yeah it's untested but it really could be though that uh this this could be a direct precedent for that kind of

1:09:35 Jenessa: Yeah, I mean, between the tax and like filing a business license and all that stuff, like you've been forced to admit that you run this technically federally illegal business.

1:09:45 Matt: Thing yeah oh my clients are still considered to be drug drug traffickers, if they're on the payroll of a legal dispensary. They still are treated as federal drug traffickers. Yeah, it's terrible. But we should close up here. And I just wanted to ask you sort of the legacy of Leary here, because we are going to talk about psychedelics again. There is just so much great stuff to talk About. I can't wait to talk to you about drug regulation and scheduling. I think we should do a separate issue on MDMA and talk about LSD, talk about cannabis some more. Always happy to talk ABOUT these things. But Leary himself as a figure, I've been wondering about this a lot, about what would have happened if instead of of having the high priest of LSD who came out and did this as a spiritual thing, if we had like a totally boring, normal guy named Timothy Leary, who was a Harvard psychologist who didn't lose his job for doing drugs with students and not showing up to class, and to come out and just said, hey, here's the substance. I'm not telling you to use it. It exists. Here's the safe way to use it, and here's peer -reviewed research that we've put out

1:10:38 Jenessa: Yeah.

1:10:38 Matt: That shows that it can have incredible incredible psychological benefits for some people used under certain care. I mean, how much different would our world be, right?

1:10:47 Jenessa: You know, it's a really good question. Because on the one hand, that's what's starting to happen now. And And it is changing. You know, we now have this disease model of addiction where we're starting to understand this is not just a willpower problem and that addiction and chemical dependency are not the same thing, that people need help, that there are lots of methods for people to address addiction like harm reduction, as opposed to just abstinence only, which of course I would love to talk about. We just got an executive order saying actually harm reduction encourages drug use, which is demonstrably false. We know this is not true. Harm reduction has been a wonderful thing for the field of substance use treatment.

1:11:22 Matt: Yeah. So bad. Sure.

1:11:32 Jenessa: So on the one hand, we are seeing the reality of when you would just have a boring research, it does slowly change things. On the other hand, so much of that history is more than just a reaction. It is a racist, intentional movement to make these things illegal and to target minority populations in order to incarcerate them.

1:12:01 Matt: Including the Marijuana Tax Act, I meant to mention, not only the scary use of the Mexican word that everybody's scared of, right, but also the idea that Mexicans smoke marijuana, whereas we nice white people, we take it in tinctures. But the smoking is very bad. That's what's going to make you nuts, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole other thing.

1:12:13 Jenessa: Right, right. And this idea that it's not just, you know, as opposed to talking about real costs and benefits of like smoking things is not good for you. And like, you know, there are for a certain small percentage of people, certain serotonergic drugs like hallucinogens, like marijuana, that can result in that bad trip that can result in psychosis. It's not most people, but that happens to some people. That's not great. We could have a real conversation about this. And instead, we were saying things like, it's gonna make you crazy, it's going to make you terrible stereotypes about how it was going to like make black men super strong and violent, and they were going to commit crime. And like, that's the reefer madness stuff that was obviously, I hope I don't have to say completely false and based in racist stereotype, but it was also intentional, making up that stereotype in order to incarcerate people. So it's hard to say if people were doing better research back then, how much could it have helped the public combat this very intentional campaign to convince them that they were not safe, and that this had to be banned to keep them safe from those scary other people.

1:13:30 Matt: That's a great point because Nixon hated LSD already so much, just to switch over to that, what Leary was doing. And it was generally seen as such a threat because, and again, the federal government was well aware, they knew more about LSD than anybody else in the world at this point after the MKUltra experiments. So I think that once it sort of made its way to the counterculture, again, through CIA's inadvertent efforts, I think they realized they'd really unleashed something. So I think that no matter, even if a very respectable Harvard psychologist had come out in a very very respectable, non-sacramental way and not tried to be a media celebrity about all of this, I think they probably still would have found a way to say this guy is a nut or to find scientists disagreed with them and keep LSD out of the hands of people as much as they could. It's an interesting point. I was wondering though, because maybe we could have moved LSD research up a couple of decades if Leary hadn't done this. I don't know. I mean, as I said, kind of a dirtbag a little bit, but doing what he was doing, trying to figure out a thing that had just landed in everybody's laps, basically. So I will say in closing that he met with Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD when he was in Switzerland a couple of times. And Hoffman's first question for him is, why are you telling people to do LSD? It's like, I've been watching your career and you're telling teenagers to do LSD.

1:14:39 Jenessa: Yeah, your little developing brain. I always told my students, I was like, just wait, like when you're 80, whatever, do heroin, like you're dying anyway. But like, you're 20, you have so much life in front of you and your brain is not done developing, like, oh, I would protect that thing. I'm a goody-two-shoes, like I'm not doing that stuff anyway, so it's easy for me to say, but like, yeah,

1:15:03 Matt: I will counterpoint. I will say that some of my favorite people did a lot of it. I said in high school and are just wonderful people now, and you would never know. So, you know, it's, but don't do it kids. Sorry. To be clear, it's the official perspective of this program that no one should do illicit drugs under 21. So yeah, this is such a fascinating topic. This has been a lot of fun. I love your perspective on this coming from a scientific point of view, because we don't get enough of that here.

1:15:26 Jenessa: For sure. Glad we're getting to talk about this and this was a lot of fun.

1:15:30 Matt: This is also a great start to the idea of the Supreme Court sometimes does things correctly. And I'd love to revisit that.

1:15:36 Jenessa: Yeah, and I hope we can think through why do they sometimes do really well and how this court could be structured to make those good outcomes more likely. I want to believe it's savable.

1:15:49 Matt: There's a reason we're going to be drawing from the Warren Court, which was just ending actually in 69. But the Warren Court, of course, the golden era of liberal Supreme Court jurisprudence, and we're going to talk a lot more about some of their best work. But time's up, so we'll get to it next time.

1:16:03 Jenessa: Good talking to you.

1:16:05 Matt: Turn on Tune in and let's drop off. Yeah, okay. One of those things.

1:16:07 Jenessa: Turn off and

1:16:32 Matt: I'm going to defend acid very quickly because I'm a fan. The Moody Blues also wrote a song about Timothy Leary, and it sucks. We want nice white people, we take it in tinctures.

1:16:38 Jenessa: Cocaine and meth, whatever, do heroin.