LSD and counter-culture guru Timothy Leary has long been a fascination of mine. While he was instrumental in kick-starting all kinds of social changes, there is also hard evidence linking him to the FBI, if not the CIA as well. Needless to say, his actions and motives are both complicated and highly suspect when viewed in such a light.

Over the weekend though, I had an interesting shift of perspective on at least one part of Leary’s early career. From what I understand about the man’s history, he started out at Harvard experimenting with psilocybin therapy (from magic mushrooms) on prisoners at a local correctional facility. His goal was to reduce recidivism, which means to get fewer people to return to prison after being released.

Three Psilocybin projects were set up in line with Leary and Alpert’s specialty, the psychology of ‘game-playing.’ In early 1961, after initial psilocybin investigations, the Leary group began working in nearby Concord with convicts in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison for young offenders. It was hoped that psilocybin could help prisoners ’see through’ the self-defeating ‘cops-and-robbers game’ and become less destructive citizens …

The six volunteers grew in number to thirty-five over the next two years. Each underwent two psilocybin experiences during six weeks of bi-weekly meetings. Although the subjects were not very well educated, they were able to detach themselves from their everyday roles and ‘confront themselves,’ recognizing constructive alternatives to their formerly violent and self-destructive behavior patterns. The question was what would happen to these prisoners upon release. Would the insights gained from two fairly heavy doses of psilocybin help them to lead useful and rewarding lives? Or would they soon be headed back to prison?

Though I can’t seem to find the exact official numbers online at the moment, it looks like expected rate of prisoners returning to jail after six months would be around 64%, but among Leary’s group, the actual figure was something like 25%. Certainly to gain any scientific data from such a study, we’d have to see it tested with much larger groups of people and tracked over a longer period of time.

But in any event, this forms the backdrop for my newest theory about Tim Leary that I am trying out. I have nothing to back it up beyond pure speculation, but it goes like this. Suppose Leary did find a way to keep prisoners from coming back to jail multiple times. Suppose he was very successful. There’s a good chance he’d seek to expand that success, and approach the problem in new ways. What if instead of stopping prisoners from coming back again and again, he figured out a way to stop them from ever coming in the first place? That is, what if he adapted his therapy and applied it to regular people so that they would break free from destructive patterns altogether and never become ensnared in the justic system?

Chance are, if he did follow that course of action, there would be some blow-back. While governments wouldn’t want prisoners to come back again and again and tax the resources of the state, is it likely that any government would be truly on board with eliminating prisons altogether? As sociologist Emile Durkheim explained, deviance is essential to society:

According to Durkheim, deviance serves four important functions. The first of these four functions is the enhancement of conformity. This function is premised upon the paradoxical notion that otherwise abstract concepts of criminal law can only be illustrated by their violation. Durkheim contends that, by committing crimes, the deviant tangibly enacts principles that are antithetical to the law. In so doing, the deviant supposedly makes the law “real.” Once incarcerated and properly punished, the deviant is sacrificed on the altar of conformity for the education of the public. Because the letter of the law must be consistently reiterated for the common citizen, society requires an inexhaustible supply of deviants to act as examples.

The second function served by the deviant is the reinforcement of solidarity among “law-abiding” individuals (157). The deviant “promotes social cohesion”. The “collective outrage” generated by criminals unifies the citizenry and facilitates the stability of society. Thus, deviance, in the words of Durkheim, constitutes “a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies”. In other words, society requires an enemy. The so-called “solidarity” induced by deviance is a solidarity of fear and paranoia, not of common dissent.

The third function of deviance is the provision of a “safety valve”. Crime is a necessary cathartic exercise, allowing people to avenge themselves against the dominant social order. Fragmented deviance is a viable alternative to civil unrest.

From the perspective of the power elite, individual criminal acts are far more desirable than movements unified by common dissent. Although deviance does induce a certain degree of so-called “solidarity,” the resulting unity is one born of fear and paranoia. This unity should not be confused with genuine grass roots mobilization, which is born of legitimate social and/or political dissension. Criminality effectively atomizes society, stultifying grass roots opposition to the oligarchs. The rationale underpinning this third function inverts the classic mantra, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Division becomes central to societal stability. Deviance, which fractures the social body by promulgating fear and paranoia among its members, becomes an agent of stability.

Whether or not Leary knew anything about Durkheim is debatable, but the text above paints a very curious picture which could easily be applied to the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies which Leary was so influential within. Maybe he was simply an agent for some medley of government organizations. Maybe he railed against them. Perhaps he was involved in a delicate push and pull around this issues. We can’t ever know for sure, but we can look at how these ideas of personal freedom, crime and deviance play out in our society and in our pop culture nowadays. With the cop fetish crawling all over our culture (and even moreso inside our heads) now more than ever, these to me seem to be very important questions. Questions which few people seem to be asking, perhaps for fear of being themselves perceived as deviant.