Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 –
May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, modern pioneer and advocate of psychedelic drug
research and use, and one of the first people whose remains have been sent into space. As a 1960s counterculture icon, he is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual
benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Biography
Early life
Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child[1] of an
Irish American dentist who abandoned the family when Leary was 13. He graduated from
Springfield's Classical High School. Leary attended three different colleges and was disciplined at each.[1] He studied for two years at the
College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He received a bachelor's degree in psychology
at the University of Alabama in 1943. An obituary of Leary in the
New York Times said he was a "discipline problem" there as well, but that he
"finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II,"[1]
when he served as a sergeant in the Medical Corps.
He received a master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of
California, Berkeley in 1950[2]. The title of
Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was, "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process."
He went on to become an Assistant Professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), a director of psychiatric research at the
Kaiser Family Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at
Harvard University (1959-1963). He was officially expelled from the faculty of
Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures; however, his contribution to the spreading popularity of then-legal
psychedelic substances among Harvard students due to his research and other activities played a large part in the move to dismiss
him.
Leary's early work in psychology continued the exploration by such pioneers as Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, Dr. Karen Horney, and others, of the
importance of interpersonal forces to mental health. Dr. Leary specifically focused on how the interpersonal process might be
used to diagnose personality patterns or disorders. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality,
that offered a means by which psychologists could use MMPI
scores to quickly determine a respondent's characteristic interpersonal modes of reaction. It is a credit to the robustness of
his ideas that circumplex models continue to figure prominently in interpersonal research. [3]
In 1955, his first wife, Marianne, committed suicide, leaving him to become a single parent to his son and daughter.[1] Leary later described these years
disparagingly, writing that he had been "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of
commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis . . . like several million
middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."[citation needed]
Psychedelic experiments and experiences
On May 13 1957, Life
Magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented (and
popularized) the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of the
indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico.[3] Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, had recently taken this psychedelic (or entheogenic) Psilocybe mexicana during a trip to Mexico, and related the experience to Leary. In August
1960,[4] Leary traveled to the Mexican city of
Cuernavaca with Russo and tried psilocybin mushrooms for
the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video). In
1965, Leary commented that he "learned more about... (his) brain and its possibilities... (and) more about psychology in the five
hours after taking these mushrooms than... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing [sic] research in
psychology." (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video).
Upon his return to Harvard that fall, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard
Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (in this case, prisoners and later
students of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthesized version of the
then-legal drug—one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms including Psilocybe mexicana. The compound was produced according to a recipe developed by research chemist
Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
Leary argued that psychedelics, used with the right dosage, set and setting, and with the guidance of psychology professionals, could alter behavior in
unprecedented and beneficial ways. The goals of Leary's research included finding better ways to treat alcoholism and to reform convicted criminals. Many of Leary's research
participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim
permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner.
According to Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks, they administered LSD to 300
professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers, and 75% of them reported it as being like a revelation to them and one
of the most educational experiences of their lives.[citation needed] They also gave LSD to 200 clergymen, and 75% reported that they had the
most religious experience of their lives.[citation needed]
In the Concord Prison experiment, they administered psilocybin to prisoners, and after being guided through the trips by Leary
and his associates, 36 prisoners allegedly turned their backs on crime. The normal recidivism rate of prisoners is about 80%, but
of the subjects involved in the project about 80% did not return to prison. However, the results of this experiment have been
largely contested by a follow-up study, citing several problems, including differences in the length of time after release that
the study group versus the control group, and other methodology factors, including the difference between subjects
re-incarcerated for parole violations versus those imprisoned for new crimes. This study concluded that only a statistically
slight improvement could be shown (as opposed to the radical improvement originally reported). In his interview within the study,
Leary expressed that the major lesson of the Concord Prison experiment was that the key to a long-term reduction in overall
recidivism rates might be the combination of the pre-release administration of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy with a
comprehensive post-release follow-up program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous groups to offer support to the released prisoners.
The study concluded that whether a new program of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy and post-release programs would
significantly reduce recidivism rates is an empirical question that deserves to be addressed within the context of a new
experiment.[5]
Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around this time, their Harvard colleagues grew
uneasy about their research, and about the rumors and complaints (some by parents of students) that had reached the university
administration about Leary and Alpert's alleged distribution of hallucinogens to their students.[citation needed] To further complicate matters, their
research attracted a great deal of public attention. As a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments, but were
unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for
psychedelics developed near the Harvard University Campus (Weil, 1963).
According to biographer Robert Greenfield, in May 1963, Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard after college authorities
alleged that undergraduates had shared in the researchers' drugs.[6] According to Andrew Weil, Leary was fired for not
showing up to his lecture classes (while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin to
an undergraduate in an off campus apartment) (Weil, 1963). This version is supported by the words of Harvard President Nathan M.
Pusey, who, regarding Leary's termination, released the following statement on May 27, 1963: "On May 6, 1963, the Harvard
Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and
has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as
of April 30, 1963" (New York Times, 03/12/1966, p. 25).
Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an
estate in the town of Millbrook (near Poughkeepsie, New York), where they continued their experiments.[6] Leary later wrote: "We saw ourselves as
anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space
colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art."[citation needed]
Later, the Millbrook estate was described as "the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period
filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and
numerous raids and arrests, many of them led by the local assistant district attorney, G.
Gordon Liddy."[6][citation needed] Others contest this characterization
of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in his book, The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, Thomas Wolfe portrays Leary as only interested in research, and not
using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the residence, the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was engaged in
a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters acid.
In 1964, Leary co-authored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called The
Psychedelic Experience, based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it, they wrote:
| “ |
A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and
content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time
dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory
deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have
become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the
transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key—it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns
and structures. |
” |
Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by
G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told author and Prankster Paul
Krassner: "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never
owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."
On September 19 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part
as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and
other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, based on a "freedom of religion" argument. (Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual
leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF.) On October 6 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and
recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well.
During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multi-media performance called "The Death of the
Mind," which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its
membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He
published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion, to encourage people to do so (see below under
"writings").
On January 14, 1967, Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered his
famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." The phrase came to him in the
shower one day after Marshall McLuhan suggested to Leary that he should come up with
"something snappy" to promote the benefits of LSD.[1]
At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California. He made a number of friends in Hollywood. "When he married his
third wife, Rosemary Woodruff in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of
'Bonanza.' All the guests were on acid."[1]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary (in collaboration with the writer Brian Barritt) formulated his circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system
consisted of seven circuits which, when activated, produce seven levels of consciousness (this model was first published as the
short essay, 'The Seven Tongues of God'). The system soon expanded to include an eighth circuit; this version was first unveiled
to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet Neurologic (written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison), but was not
exhaustively formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology (by Leary) and in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed significantly to the
model after befriending Leary in the early 70s, and has used it as a framework for further exposition in his book
Prometheus Rising, among other works.
Leary believed that the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") are naturally accessed
by most people in their lifetimes, triggered at natural transition points in life, such as puberty. The second four circuits
("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four that
would be triggered at transition points that we will have when we evolve further, and would equip us to encompass life in space,
as well as the expansion of consciousness that would be necessary to make further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested
that some people may "shift to the latter four gears" (i.e. trigger these circuits artificially) by utilizing
consciousness-altering techniques such as meditation and spiritual endeavors such as
yoga, or by taking psychedelic drugs specific to each
circuit. An example of the information Leary cited as evidence for the purpose of the "higher" four circuits was the feeling of
floating and uninhibited motion experienced by users of marijuana. In the
eight circuit model of consciousness, a primary theoretical function of
the fifth circuit (the first of the four developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a
zero or low gravity environment.
Trouble with the law
DEA agents Don Strange (r.) and
Howard Safir (l.) arrest Leary in 1972
Leary's first run in with the law came on December 20 1965.
During a border crossing from Mexico into the United States, his daughter was caught with
marijuana. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on 11 March 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, given a $30,000 fine and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon
after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the Marijuana Tax Act was, in fact, unconstitutional, as it required a degree of
self-incrimination. Leary claimed this was in stark violation of the Fifth Amendment.
On December 26 1968, Leary was arrested again, this time
for the possession of two roaches of marijuana, which Leary claimed were planted by
the arresting officer. He was later convicted of this offense.
On 19 May 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary. The Marijuana Tax Act was declared
unconstitutional, and his 1965 conviction was quashed. The case was known as Leary v.
United States.
On the day his conviction was overturned, Leary announced his candidacy for Governor
of California, running against Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come
together, join the party." On 1 June 1969, Leary joined
John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song
called "Come Together."
On 21 January 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for
his 1968 offense. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate
work details. Having designed many of the tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them
in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and
gardening.[4]
As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. Leary
claimed his non-violent escape was a humorous prank and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone.
For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff
Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. He sought the patronage of
Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the separatist USA Black Panther party’s
"government in exile," and started cheerleading for violent revolution in the USA. After staying with them for a short time,
Leary claimed that Cleaver attempted to hold him and his wife hostage; but the Learys were somehow able to extricate themselves
from the Panthers' lair.
In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively
imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect
philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind."(Luc Sante,
New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2006)
In 1972, President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss
refused to extradite him back to the US.
In that same year, Leary and Rosemary separated. After a brief spell with heroin addiction,[citation needed] Leary became involved with
French-born socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith in a pseudo-occult ceremony[citation needed] at a hotel two weeks after they were
first introduced; she would use his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul,
Afghanistan, in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but
this stricture did not apply to American airliners," Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary. That interpretation of
the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."[6]
At a layover in the United Kingdom, as Leary was being flown back to the United
States, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, but to no avail. He
was then held on five million dollars bail ($21 mil. in 2006), the highest in U.S. history to that point;[citation needed] President Nixon had earlier labeled
him "the most dangerous man in America."[1]
The judge at his remand hearing remarked, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his
ideas."[citation needed] Facing a total of 95 years in
prison, Leary was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California, where
at one point he was in a cell immediately adjacent to Charles Manson.[7]
Leary made somewhat of a pretense of cooperating with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, by giving them information they wanted that he knew they
already had or would have very little consequence. In a perceived attempt at character assassination, the FBI allegedly spread
disinformation about Leary having become an "informant," implicating friends and helpers
in exchange for a reduced sentence.[citation needed] Leary would later claim, and members of the Weathermen would later support,
that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI (as noted in an Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy
Leary:
| “ |
The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was
not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the
escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that
he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was "we understand." |
” |
Many of his oldest friends, including Ken Kesey, Paul
Krassner, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin and
Ram Dass, were openly contemptuous of Harcourt-Smith and felt that, in the words of Krassner,
she had "led him by his dick."[citation needed] These sentiments were echoed at a rally against the "new" Leary organized
by Kesey at Stanford University.[citation needed]
While the imprisoned Leary remained a productive writer, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the
StarSeed Series. In Starseed (1973), neurologic (1973), & Terra II: A Way Out (1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy
and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual
transcendence as his principal frame of reference. Neurologic also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available
to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. Terra II is his first detailed proposal for
space colonization. Leary’s muse peaked with Exo – Psychology, Neuropolitics, and
The Intelligence Agents.
Hollywood
Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976, by Governor
Jerry Brown. After briefly relocating to San
Diego, Leary established residence in Laurel Canyon and
continued to write books and appear as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand up philosopher." In 1978, Leary married
filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Roberts.
Leary adopted Blum's son and raised him as his own. Leary and Blum divorced in 1992.
Leary cultivated a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy, the notorious
Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture
circuit in 1982 as ex-cons (Liddy having been imprisoned after high-level involvement in the Watergate scandal) debating about
the soul of America. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both figures. Along with the personal
appearances, a successful documentary that chronicled the tour and the concurrent release of the [citation needed] autobiography, Flashbacks helped to
return Leary to the spotlight.
While his stated ambition was to eventually cross over as a mainstream Hollywood personality, reluctant studios and sponsors
insured that that never occurred. Nonetheless, constant touring ensured that he was able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle
by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout
the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd, which included John Frusciante
(Leary appeared in Johnny Depp's and Gibby Haynes'
1994 film Stuff which showed the squalid conditions that Frusciante was living in at
the time); Robert Anton Wilson; David
Byrne; science fiction wunderkind
William Gibson; and Norman Spinrad amongst its
ranks.
While he continued to frequently use drugs on a private basis, rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of
psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuing
extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness in
complex, interesting books such as Info-Psychology, among several others. He adopted the acronym "SMI²LE" as a
succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE
(Life extension).
Leary's colonization plan varied greatly throughout the years. Because he believed that he would soon migrate into space,
Leary was opposed to the ecology movement. He dismissed many of Earth’s problems and labeled the entire field of ecology “a
seductive dinosaur science.” He ridiculed groups like Greenpeace, and individuals sympathetic to environmentalism. Leary stated
that only the “larval,” intellectually and philosophically backward humans, would choose to remain in “the fouled nest.”
According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on
a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was inspired by the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album Blows Against The Empire, which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came
to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic
and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like High Orbital Mini-Earths (documented
in the Robert Anton Wilson lecture H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange) using existing
technology and raw materials from the Moon, orbital rock and obsolete satellites.
By the early 1990s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and
virtual reality into his aegis of thought. Leary established one of the earliest sites
on the World Wide Web, and was often quoted describing the Internet as "the LSD of the 1990s." [citation needed] He became a promoter of virtual
reality systems,[8] and sometimes demonstrated a prototype
of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in
From Psychedelics to Cybernetics). Around this time he cultivated friendships with a number of notable people in the
field, including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and
human-computer interaction.
In 1989, Leary's eldest daughter, Susan, committed suicide after years of mental instability. After separating from Barbara
Leary in 1992, Leary began to associate with a much younger, artistic and tech-savy crowd that included people as diverse as
actors Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon and
Dan Aykroyd, and his granddaughters, Dieadra Martino and Sara Brown; grandson, Ashley
Martino; stepson, Zach Chase; author Douglas Rushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughters: actress Winona Ryder and
artist/music-photographer Hilary Hulteen. He was frequently spotted at raves and alternative rock concerts, including a memorable mosh pit experience at
an early Smashing Pumpkins concert.[citation needed] In spite of his declining health, Leary maintained a regular schedule of
public appearances through 1994.
Death
etoy agents with mortal remains of Timothy Leary 2007
In early 1995, Leary discovered that he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate
cancer. He did not reveal the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.
Leary authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of
death and dying. "The most important thing
you do in your life is to die," he claimed happily, welcoming death with the same energetic excitement he had welcomed most other
challenges in his life. Leary's de facto "family"--his staff of technophilic Gen
Xers--updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake
of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a predilection for nitrous oxide,
cigarettes, his trademark "Leary biscuits" (see below), and eventually heroin and
morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved
in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months, thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him
in his California home. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of
embracing death.
For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. He did not believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the
importance of cryonic possibilities. He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped
publicize the process. Privately he dismissed cryonics as "a joke" and did not seem to regard the process with much seriousness.
Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE. A cryonic tank was
delivered to Leary's house in the months before his death. However, Leary subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which
it was, and distributed among his friends and family.
Leary's death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. This video has never been publicly seen
but will be included in a documentary currently in production.[citation needed] At one point in his final delirium, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary.
He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations, and died soon after. His last word, according to Zachary Leary, was
"beautiful." With the movie Timothy Leary's Dead, filmmakers capitalized on his initial desire for cryogenic preservation
by creating a fake decapitation sequence.
Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of
