Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychologist who swapped test tubes for acid tabs and declared that LSD could rewire the mind like software. In the 1960s he became the pied piper of psychedelia, urging America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” To some, he was a prophet of consciousness; to others, he was Public Enemy #1.
Leary’s experiments with psilocybin and LSD in controlled settings began academically, but soon turned into countercultural crusades. The establishment cracked down hard, forcing him out of Harvard and into a global game of cat-and-mouse with governments. He escaped prison once with help from the Weather Underground, bounced through Algeria, Afghanistan, and Switzerland, always trailing both admirers and FBI agents.
In hindsight, Leary blurred the line between visionary and chaos merchant. He seeded the idea of consciousness as hackable code — a meme that still resonates in today’s psychedelic therapy and even AI discourse. Love him or loathe him, Leary was the face of a generation that tried to jailbreak reality itself.