Timothy Francis Leary

Timothy Leary married several times. His first wife Marianne committed suicide while many of his other marriages ended in divorce. His daughter Susan also died by committing suicide.

He was a heavy user of psychedelic drugs like marijuana, LSD, heroin and morphine.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995 and died a year later in 1996.

Timothy Leary was born to a dentist father and his wife in Massachusetts. He father abandoned his family when Timothy was 13.

He graduated from Classical High School. He enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross in 1938 and studied there till 1940.

Under his father’s pressure he joined as cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. During his brief stint at the Academy, he got into serious trouble due to his rebellious nature. He resigned and was honorably discharged by the Army.

He joined the University of Alabama in the fall of 1941. However, a year later, he was expelled from the university after he was caught spending a night in the female dormitory.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 during the Second World War and was discharged in 1946 following the resolution of War. By this time he had risen to the rank of a sergeant and had won many awards.

He was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine in 1950 and held this post till 1955.

He also began working simultaneously as the Director of the Kaiser Family Foundation Psychological Research Division in Oakland from 1952 to 1958.

He developed a complex model of interpersonal circumplex which was published in ‘The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality’ while he was at the Kaiser Foundation.

He joined the faculty at Harvard University as a lecturer in 1959 where he taught clinical psychology. He was also associated with the Harvard Center for Research in Personality and was in charge of the Harvard Psilocybin Project and concomitant experiments along with assistant professor Richard Alpert.

He went to Mexico in 1960 where he consumed psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, which produces psychedelic effects; this kindled his interest in psychedelic drugs. On his return to Harvard, he started conducting experiments with psychedelic drugs on human beings.

He is primarily known for his experiments on human beings involving psychedelic drugs and for being an open advocate for the use of LSD and other drugs for therapeutic purposes.