Timothy Leary

Leary, Timothy Francis - 1920–96, American psychologist and educator, b. Springfield, Mass., Ph.D., Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1950. He was dismissed as a professor of psychology at Harvard, where he taught from 1959 to 1963, for encouraging students to experiment with the hallucinogen LSD. He became an outspoken advocate of hallucinogenic drug use; his exhortation "turn on, tune in, drop out" became a catchword of the 1960s. After LSD was classified as illegal (1965) he was frequently arrested. In 1970 he escaped from prison and fled to Algeria; in 1973 he was extradited and returned to prison. After his release (1976) he continued writing and lecturing. During the 1980s and 90s the charismatic Leary styled himself as a postmodern guru, and celebrated computer technology as a utopian, boundary-demolishing force. He took leave of life in the style in which he had lived it, detailing his illness and drug-taking on the World Wide Web. In 1997 a Spanish satellite carried his ashes into space.

See his autobiographical Flashbacks (with W. S. Burroughs, 1983), Design for Dying (with R. U. Sirius, 1997), and Politics of Ecstasy (with R. U. Sirius, 1998).

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