THE POLITICS OF ECSTACY

Hard cover, 299 pages. Pages slightly age-toned, else a very good copy of the scarce MacGibbon & Kee edition.

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", and writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America". During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times. -wikikpedia.org

From the sleave: "Messiah, martyr, and high priest of the psychedelic - Dr Timothy Leary speaks out from the turned-on ecstacy world of LSD in this extraordinary testament of the psychedelic way of life.

Dr Leary was first plunged into the mind-expanding visionary maelstrom one sunny afternoon in Cuernavaca, when he ate a handful of odd-looking mushrooms he had bought from the witch doctor of a nearby village. These were the legendary 'sacred mushrooms' now recognised as one of the psychedelic chemicals, like LSD.

Dr Leary was dismissed in 1963 from the faculty of Harvard University where he was a lecturer in clinical psychology, when it was learned that he had been experimenting on himself, his associates and hundreds of volunteer subjects with measured doses of psilocybin, the chemical derivative of the sacred mushrooms.

This startlingly candid collection of essays in defence of ecstacy are the documents of his own spiritual search and the fantastic entrance to the runed-in psychedelic world".