Leary deserves special mention. Of people in the public eye, he had to be the most misunderstood person in the 20th century, but in the next millennium, when the Age of Aquarius is here, his legend will grow and the folk heroes of the 20th century will be the psychedelic "outlaws" like Leary and thousands of others who were way ahead of their time.

Keep in mind that once, it was common knowledge that the Earth was flat. It was so clear and obvious that there wasn't anything to argue about. All one had to do was go to the beach, look out at the water and where the water ends, and that's where the edge was where one could fall off the world. Back then anyone who didn't understand or conform to that was considered nuts. Apparently, in those days, no one thought of taking a boat to try to get just a little closer to where the edge was. They would have found that no matter how far out they went, the edge where one could fall off the Earth was still distantly ahead, that they weren't going to get any closer to it because it was an incorrect assumption the whole time.

The way people incorrectly dismissed the idea of the Earth being round as insanity is the way we now incorrectly dismiss LSD as insanity. People in the future will look back and not see much difference between us and those, centuries earlier, who insisted that the Earth was flat because if one says that LSD is such a terrible, horrible, disastrous, evil thing, then they might as well be saying that the Earth is flat.

Many people have been interested in LSD, but Timothy Leary is the one who got the publicity and for a number of reasons. For one thing, no one could ridicule his impeccable credentials. He was Dr. Leary of the Harvard University faculty, in the psychology department, teaching Ph. d. candidates. There was a lot more to his impressive resume, but there's no need to list it. Harvard says it all.

Another reason Leary got the publicity was his deep belief and commitment to his research. When push came to shove, he showed that, when he decided that LSD is more important than Harvard, that whatever Harvard was supposed to mean is trivial compared to the meaning of LSD. He could have had tenure for life at Harvard if he had been a good little boy, shut up, and did what he was told, but he was courageous enough to chuck all of that in order to do what he knew was right, to continue his research. He also wasn't afraid to speak his mind no matter how much criticism was thrown at him. Timothy was a very inspirational figure to those who were able to understand him. There is no better example of how closed this country is to new ideas. Probably, the only new idea the country would be open to is that the Earth really is flat after all. That is silly, but no more so than how we look at LSD.

Leary had different ideas than the norm. He didn't believe in the typical therapist-patient relationship or the typical teacher-student relationship, each of which involves an authority type figure with power or expertise over another person. These are unequal relationships which Leary thought were ineffective and doesn't work. He saw psychotherapy, in which the patient talks to the therapist as pretty much a game of the therapist imposing his or her will or mind onto the patient. Before ever getting to Harvard, for many years, Leary was the Director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. For 10 years, he studied the success rate of psychotherapy.