Time to Mutate

"I know lots of languages," the lanky, boyish-looking speaker assured an enraptured audience in New York's Town Hall last week. "I can talk to trees. And I do pretty well talking Holyman. You must be able to speak first to an amoeba, your father, a madman, Buddha, your lover."

Psychologist Timothy Leary, 45, is less successful when it comes to com- municating with cops. The high priest of hallucination, who is most often held accountable for popularizing the mind-bending drug LSD, was arrested in Texas in December and last month received the maximum sentence--30 years in jail and a $40,000 fine--for illegally transporting marijuana. Last week police raided the rambling, 64-room house rented by Leary's Castalia Foundation in Millbrook, N.Y., and Leary, free on bail, once again was arrested--this time on charges of "possessing" narcotics, which were found in an upstairs bedroom.

A Better Race? Though most of the country is not yet "turned on," Leary told the faithful in a lecture titled "The Politics and Ethics of Ecstasy," the "psychedelic battle" is over and won, and some 1,000,000 Americans have already had "psychedelic experiences." LSD may even be creating a new, unquestionably better race of mutants. "It is perhaps indicative," Leary said, "that LSD was invented in the same decade as the atomic bomb. Maybe the deepest and most basic chords of all human life, the DNA codes deep within each cell of all living organisms, saw that man now had the capacity to destroy all life, and decided that it was time to mutate."

That, at least, is what Leary's cells told him. "I look around us," he continued, "and I see metal--all living things and all my cells hate metal--and I see the pollution of the air and the poisoning of the rivers and the concrete over the earth, and I have to say 'Baby, it's time to mutate.' "

A Better Way? In New York, where an average of two frightened LSD experimenters wind up in Bellevue Hospital every week, authorities are not so sure the time has yet arrived. Though no one knows where it is coming from or how many people are using it, almost anyone can take a "flight" on LSD for $5. Even so, there is no LSD crisis, averred Dr. Donald Louria, head of the State Advisory Council on Drug Addiction, who condemned the raid on Leary's estate as "reprehensible" and "politically motivated."

Leary, a convert to Hinduism who was fired from the Harvard faculty in 1963 for giving hallucinogenic drugs to students, betrays boyish pride in the stir he has created ("They used to call people like me alchemists or medicine men"). However, he now agrees that LSD can be a danger. He has promised to forgo his own weekly LSD seances for a year, and recommends a similar moratorium for his disciples. Perfectly good hallucinations, he insists, can be had from yoga, movies or music. To prove it, he plans to run a do-it-yourself hallucination school at Millbrook this summer--if he is still around.

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