"Look at that, Timmy." he said proudly. It was an architect's color drawing of a super-prison. "Look. Two football fields. This wing is for admitting and orientation. Two more cell blocks. Mess halls double in size. We'll have capacity for twice as many inmates and we can double the staff all the way down the line." His face was glowing. This was his fantasy coming true. A huge prison and an organizational table twice as big to go with it! Bureaucrat Heaven.

"That's wonderful, Bill," I said. "But have you forgotten? You're not going to need a larger prison."

His face registered surprise. "Why not?"

"Because we're cutting your return-rate from 70 percent to 10 percent. If you let us continue our project, you won't need half the cells you have right now."

The warden laughed, in spite of himself. "I can't argue with you, Timmy. You have kept these men straight, although I'll be damned if I know how you did it."

This warden, obviously, couldn't care less if Leary had rehabilitated every inmate in the prison. All this guy knew was that he has this dream of running the biggest prison empire possible. He thinks that the bigger the prison he runs, the more of a big shot he is, a silly ego game. Do you think that this warden wants less crime in society and fewer criminals? Of course not because if that's the case, then how can he become king of all prison wardens? This is the kind of mentality and absurdity that Leary was constantly up against, everywhere, not just with the warden.

Timothy Leary was also involved in another fascinating experiment while at Harvard. The religious community in the area expressed an interest in psilocybin as a way of having a genuine religious experience. Walter Pahnke was a D. D. candidate in the Harvard Divinity School. Pahnke had a ministrial degree and an M. D. He had no experience with psychedelic drugs but still was convinced that they could bring on a religious experience. Pahnke wanted to write his doctoral thesis on psychedelic experience. He came to Leary with an idea of having a supervised experiment involving divinity students taking psilocybin. The goal was to find out if psilocybin can trigger a religious experience and to do this according to accepted scientific standards. So, what they did was give the psilocybin to some divinity students and give placebos that do nothing to others, but no one would know in advance who was getting what. The results were just what they expected in that the divinity students who got the psilocybin had religious experiences and those who got the placebos did not.

So, here Timothy Leary was showing scientifically that criminals can be helped by psilocybin and also that it can produce religious experiences. This was incredible. He was succeeding and figured that everyone would appreciate it. Instead, he found out that everyone is like the warden. For example, psychiatrists and psychologists are not going to accept that what they are doing is ineffective and that some chemical can do what they can't do. They don't want to change themselves or what they are doing. They want to keep the same game going which makes them feel important and respected, when they know precisely nothing. Everyone wants to keep their own racket going, whether it's prisons, psychotherapy, politicians, big corporations, etc. Anything that threatens anyone's racket will be resisted by those who benefit from that racket no matter how much good it would do the world if things changed.

A case can be made for saying that Leary shouldn't have been doing his LSD research at a university, not because it was inappropriate, but because of complicated political situations involved within a university. Leary encouraged graduate students, even those who were not his students, to try psilocybin and then LSD once he found about LSD. Those graduate students came running into Leary's program, eager and excited that a professor actually knows something. Some other professors were not so excited about it because they like to use their graduate students as slave labor to do tedious things that the teacher doesn't want to do. These professors were losing their graduate students in this way and didn't like it. Parents of the graduate students complained, wondering what all this LSD nonsense has to do with Harvard, even though people involved with Leary didn't have bad trips because he knew what he was doing.