The Silver Snuffbox

If one man can be singled out as the father of the current epidemic of psychotic illness resulting from misuse of hallucinatory drugs, that man is Dr. Timothy Leary, 45. In 1961, then a clinical psychologist at Harvard, Leary began a program of experimentation with "consciousness-expanding" chemicals. Harvard got rid of him two years later, after 400 subjects had received 3,500 doses of psilocybin. But that was just the beginning of a wave of irresponsible experimentation and just plain playing around with the more potent LSD that is fast becoming a major problem not only among oddball cultists and kick-seeking college students, but among high school and prep school students as well (TIME, March 11). Last week, in the U.S.-Mexico border town of Laredo, Texas, Leary finally got his comeuppance.

The road to Laredo has been lined with weird detours. After leaving Harvard, Leary tried to continue his experiments near Acapulco, Mexico, where he opened a sort of Hallucination Hilton in an old resort hotel. He offered to expand consciousnesses at the rate of $200 a month and $6 per expansion; the Mexican government expelled him after two months. He tried unsuccessfully to reopen in the Caribbean, finally established something called the Castalia Foundation on a 3,000-acre estate in Millbrook, N.Y., near Vassar and Bennett colleges. Along the way, he had become very much a religious mystic; the four-story foundation headquarters was filled with religious statues, yoga exercisers and Leary followers seeking spiritual enlightenment by smoking marijuana cigarettes and chewing morning-glory seeds.

Bound for Mexico last December with family and friends, Leary was stopped and searched by U.S. Customs agents. Leary was clean, but when a woman agent stripped and searched 18-year-old Susan Leary, she found a silver snuffbox containing three ounces, "more or less," of marijuana. Leary said the stuff was his. Last week, in federal court, Daughter Susan was convicted of failing to pay taxes on the marijuana and ordered to a federal reformatory for a term to be determined after psychiatric tests. The doctor was found guilty of transporting marijuana as well as failing to pay taxes on it, was fined $40,000 and tentatively given the maximum sentence of 30 years in jail. Only by imposing a maximum sentence, the judge explained, was he able to order a psychiatric examination of Leary, after which he may adjust the sentence.

Another drug experimenter entangled with the law was Dr. Stevan Durovic, 61, father of Krebiozen. Last month Durovic was declared innocent of charges ranging from mail fraud to submitting false statements to the Government about his so-called anticancer drug. But last week a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted him on charges of evading $904,907 in taxes on an income of $1,076,939 during 1960-62. Durovic, said his lawyer, was in Paris having his kidney treated.

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