The New York Public Library has acquired a huge archive of files from Harvard psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary that could shed light on some of the studies he performed with psychedelic drugs, according to the Associated Press.
"[The archive] is the missing link in every attempt to piece together an account of research in to Timothy Leary and the emergence of scientific research into psychedelic drugs and popular drug counterculture," Denis Berry, a trustee for the Leary estate, told the Associated Press.
Leary, who passed away in 1996, was either revered or reviled for his famous studies into LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. Richard Nixon once referred to Leary as the most dangerous man in America while many of the beat writers hailed him as a hero, according to the New York Times.
One of the items in the collection that spans 335 boxes is a "session record" of the time Leary and famous beat poet Allen Ginsberg took psilocybin, according to the Times.
"The first time I look psilocybin - 10 pills - was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge," Ginsberg wrote in the detailed account of his experience. "Professor Leary came in to my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man."
The archives contain hundreds of letters from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy, Cary Grant and others, according to the Times.
"How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills," Kerouac wrote to Leary. (SM pills are psilocybin.) "Allen said I could know off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month."
The archive also includes a letter that Leary wrote to Kesey, author and noted advocate of psychedelic drugs, from prison, according to the Associated Press.
"I think the time has come for me to go public about what I've been doing and learning," Leary said in the letter.
