Psychedelic Experience, The

From Timothy Leary's first trip (on psilocybin) in Mexico in 1960, his life's work became exploring and preaching the benefits - social, aesthetic and spiritual - that psychedelic drugs had to offer. Leary, with fellow psychologists Metzner and Alpert, began experimenting with LSD on themselves and others at Harvard, and from this came The Psychedelic Experience and, with it, the future of the counterculture. Both a manual to ease the reader through drug-induced enlightenment and a reinterpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead by way of chemical mind-expansion, 'The Psychedelic' Experience is a controversial step-by- step guide to how we should all, as Leary (called by Nixon 'the most dangerous man in America') would later put it, 'turn on, tune in and drop out'.