The Harvard Psilocybin Project: Leary, Alpert, the Concord prison study and the 1963 dismissals

The Harvard Psilocybin Project was a run of studies in which two Harvard psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, gave psilocybin to volunteers and recorded what happened. Alpert later dated the Harvard-affiliated work from the autumn of 1960 to the end of 1962. It ended in a public dispute and, in May 1963, in Alpert’s dismissal.

This guide keeps two kinds of evidence apart. One is the record made at the time: the Harvard Crimson’s reports, letters the two men published, and the papers they and their students wrote. The other is what people said later, sometimes decades later, which often disagrees with the record. For the wider story, see the history of magic mushrooms.

What was the Harvard Psilocybin Project?

It was research based at Harvard’s Center for Research in Personality, where Leary was a lecturer on clinical psychology and Alpert an assistant professor (Harvard Crimson, March 1962). Leary had been appointed in 1959, according to the Crimson’s 1996 obituary.

In his May 1963 letter to Harvard’s president, Nathan Pusey, Alpert gave the project’s own summary. He wrote that they had worked with over four hundred subjects at the Concord Reformatory, in the local religious community and at the university, studying creativity, religious experience, learning, behavior change, aesthetic experience, relationships and flexible thinking. That is his description, not an audit.

Psilocybin was new to science. Albert Hofmann’s team at Sandoz had reported it only in 1958; see how Hofmann isolated psilocybin. In March 1962 Alpert said the Food and Drug Administration, Harvard’s health service and the synthesizer of psilocybin had approved the experiments.

How it began is mostly told later. A 2012 Crimson feature says Leary first tried psilocybin in Mexico in the summer of 1960, on a family trip, and came back convinced it could shed light on mental illness. We found no contemporary Crimson report of that trip, so we treat it as a retelling, not a documented record.

How the sessions were run

The project’s method put the surroundings and the researchers’ own participation at the center. In March 1962 Leary said it was standard procedure to hold sessions in subjects’ homes with everyone present under the drug’s influence. In 1963 Alpert said it was “absolutely essential” that the experimenter take the drug with the subject, and that expectations and physical surroundings shaped the results.

That second idea became known as set and setting. Leary and Alpert used the phrase in a December 1962 letter to the Crimson, and Leary, George Litwin and Ralph Metzner published a 1963 paper on psilocybin in a supportive environment. The origins and later research are in our guide to set and setting, so we don’t repeat them here.

The early results were self-reports. A 1998 review summarizes the preliminary study: 88% of subjects said they had learned something of value, and 62% said the experience changed their lives for the better. There was no control group behind those figures. Another study under Leary’s sponsorship, Walter Pahnke’s 1962 Good Friday Experiment with divinity students, has its own article.

The Concord Prison Experiment

Leary wanted an outcome harder to argue with than questionnaires: whether released prisoners returned to prison. The study ran from 1961 to 1963 at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, near Cambridge, with volunteers close to their parole dates (Doblin, 1998). Leary and five co-authors reported it in a 1965 paper in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.

According to Doblin’s account of the design, groups of about four prisoners met with two team members over roughly six weeks, with preparation sessions, two psilocybin sessions and discussions afterward. One group leader usually took psilocybin too, as a sign of solidarity. Over two years, 32 prisoners took part. The team tried to support men after release through a small nonprofit, Freedom Inc., but Leary wrote that this phase “was never fully developed.”

The comparison figure came from the team itself. Ralph Metzner and Gunther Weil, graduate students on the project, built a base-rate study of Concord’s parolees, published in 1963. Doblin reports that it reviewed the records of 311 men released in 1959.

What the 1998 re-analysis found

Rick Doblin, then a Harvard public-policy doctoral candidate with funding from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, searched Massachusetts and federal records 34 years later. He found files for 21 of the 32 men and interviewed two former subjects and three researchers, including Leary. His conclusion was blunt: the published claims of a treatment effect were erroneous.

The first problem was timing. Leary’s early figure compared a 32% return rate among his subjects, out an average of ten months, with a 56% base rate measured at about 30 months. When Doblin matched the two at ten months, the base rate was 34.3% against 32%, a gap he called the same as no effect.

The second was counting. By July 1964, Leary’s own figures showed 59% back in prison, no better than expected, but he argued that most returns were for minor parole violations, not new crimes. Doblin found that Leary counted only the reason for the first return. Many men sent back for a parole violation were later convicted of a new crime from the same incident.

At two and a half years, 15 of the 21 men with files had returned, a rate of 71%; for all 32 the possible range was 56% to 88%, against an expected 56%. Doblin also noted that Leary’s later books and the popular histories built on them cited only the early, favorable figure. He did not conclude psilocybin was useless with prisoners; he argued that one or two sessions without real support after release could not be expected to change much.

A Canadian parallel: LSD in Saskatchewan and Ontario prisons

Concord was not the only prison study. Andrew Jones, a historian at the University of Toronto, describes a late-1950s pilot in which the Saskatchewan psychologists Duncan Blewett and Nicholas Chwelos gave LSD to roughly 30 young repeat offenders at the prison in Regina. About 75% had what the team called a psychedelic reaction, but Blewett judged that the method “offers less to prisoners” and blamed the prison environment and a lack of staff and time.

Jones also describes LSD given to inmates at the Kingston Prison for Women in Ontario in the early 1960s, which led decades later to a complaint, a federal investigation and a lawsuit settled out of court. That work used LSD, not psilocybin. The Saskatchewan background is in our article on Humphry Osmond.

Colleagues, students and the university

The first open clash came in March 1962 at a 90-minute meeting of the Center for Research in Personality, chaired by its head, David McClelland. Opponents said the project was run irresponsibly and that possible harm to participants had been underestimated. The psychologist Herbert Kelman said the work “violates the values of the academic community” and that graduate students who had taken the drug formed an “insider” group.

Regulators and the university then set limits. After a 11 April meeting, Massachusetts officials let the research continue but required a physician to be present to give the drug; the university health service took possession of most of the pills, and a faculty committee was to oversee any resumption. Harvard also ruled that no undergraduates could take part.

The dispute returned in late 1962. On 26 November 1962, Dean Monro and the health service director, Dana Farnsworth, warned undergraduates that the drugs were “a serious hazard to the mental health and stability even of apparently normal persons”. Leary and Alpert replied that this view was “reckless and inaccurate from the scientific” point of view, and added that their group had never needed or wanted undergraduate subjects. In December the federal Food and Drug Administration confirmed it was looking into possible illegal sales of psilocybin, LSD and mescaline in Cambridge.

By then the two men had moved their work off campus. They founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, or IFIF, in October 1962. In a March 1963 radio interview, Leary said consciousness-expanding drugs should be available to anyone seriously wanting to study them, under IFIF’s supervision, and cited over 66% positive change among more than 400 people. These were his claims on air, not published results.

The 1963 dismissals

On 27 May 1963 President Pusey announced that the Harvard Corporation had terminated Alpert’s appointment as assistant professor of clinical psychology and of education for giving hallucinogenic drugs to an undergraduate in violation of an agreement with the university. The Crimson called it the first dismissal in Pusey’s ten years. Leary, it reported, had been relieved of his teaching duties and his salary suspended for being absent without permission.

A university official told the Crimson that Alpert had admitted breaking the rule, had been given a chance to answer and had not asked for a formal hearing. Faculty members interviewed saw no academic-freedom case, though a law professor worried that proper procedures may not have been followed. Alpert released his 15 May letter to Pusey, asking the university to review its public position on this research.

Student support was small. At the one protest meeting, fewer than a dozen students signed a letter calling the decision timid; some at the meeting thought Alpert had seemed to invite it. The Crimson’s own editorial backed the university and spoke of “flagrant dishonesty”. Pusey said Harvard was not against research with the drugs, only against breaking its rule.

Record versus legend

“Harvard fired Leary.” Leary said so for years. The 1963 record says he was relieved of teaching and lost his salary for absence (Crimson, 1963). In 1996 a psychology professor told the Crimson Leary was given leave without pay and his contract was due to expire that spring. Later Crimson features place his exit in 1962 instead (2012; 2016), which conflicts with the 1963 reports that still call him a lecturer.

“The prison study proved psilocybin cut crime.” Doblin found that popular histories called it an astonishing success because they relied on Leary’s early figure. The record, including Leary’s own 1965 numbers, does not support that.

“The scandal caused the ban.” Wark and Galliher, in a 2010 paper, argue, using Harvard Archives documents, that US federal prohibition of psilocybin in 1968 was largely a product of the Harvard drug scandal and the two men’s later fame. That is an interpretation, not a settled fact. Canada’s own path to prohibition is told in how magic mushrooms became illegal in Canada.

Today, Health Canada says the production, sale and possession of magic mushrooms are illegal in Canada, that no psilocybin therapy product is approved, and that clinical trials are the most appropriate way to advance research. Modern trials use controls, screening and ethics review that the Harvard project lacked.

What we could not confirm

• Harvard’s own text of Pusey’s 27 May 1963 statement. We have it only as the Crimson reported it.
• The full texts of Leary’s 1965 Concord paper, the 1963 supportive-environment paper and the base-rate study. We checked their bibliographic records and rely on Doblin’s account of their figures.
• Leary’s first psilocybin experience in Mexico in 1960, which we found only in later retellings.
• Whether Leary’s contract ended, was not renewed or was cut short. The Crimson’s accounts differ.
• Exactly how many undergraduates took part, and when. The 1963 reports speak of one undergraduate in the dismissal and of some undergraduates in Mexico in 1962.

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