Psychedelic men: did LSD kill the '50s?

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Lysergic acid diethylamide

ARGUABLY THE second most memorable Good Friday in history took place in the basement of Boston University's Marsh Chapel on April 20, 1962, when a graduate student under the academic direction of Timothy Leary dosed 10 subjects with the hallucinogen psilocybin and another 10 with a placebo containing niacin. Among those receiving psychoactive drugs was the generally sober and eminently respectable MIT religion professor Huston Smith, whose understanding of divinity was forever changed.

Smith, author of The Religions of Man, was no slouch when it came to grokking theology in all its manifestations. Yet his "encounter that Good Friday," writes religion journalist Don Lattin in his thoroughly engaging (if sometimes overblown) book The Harvard Psychedelic Club (Harper-One), "was the most powerful experience he would ever have of God's personal nature.... From that moment on, he knew that life is a miracle, every moment of it, and that the only appropriate way to respond and be mindful of that gift was to share it with the rest of the world."

Packing his book with many strange, wonderful scenes worthy of a book on psychedelics, Lattin argues that America was radically transformed by an unlikely quartet that did a little time--and lots of drugs--at Harvard in the early 1960s. Along with Leary and Smith, the "psychedelic club" included the psychologist Richard Alpert, who would go on to co-author a hugely popular version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead with Leary and recreate himself as the countercultural mystic Baba Ram Dass, and Andrew Weil, the alternative medicine guru whose undergraduate exposes of Leary and Alpert's unorthodox methods ultimately led to their flight from the university. In characteristically over-the-top prose, Lattin enthuses that this strange quartet "changed the way we see the very nature of reality."

By kickstarting the drug-drenched 1960s, he writes, the club didn't just tune in, turn on, and drop out of normal society. It "changed nothing less than the way we look at mind, body and spirit." Lattin credits his phantasmagoric foursome with pushing America from "mechanistic thinking to mysticism" and "from the scientific to the shamanic." New ages, it turns out, don't just happen on their own. They often benefit from transformational Viagra.

All four of the club members went on to differing levels of renown, infamy, and enlightenment. Leafy became the godfather of the counterculture, an irrepressible trickster figure who...