Timothy Leary/ Jail Notes (introduction by Allen Ginsburg)

New York: A Douglas Book / Distributed by the World Publishing Company [1970], 1970. First edition.softcover, condition: basically as new.

One of the most famous figures in American counterculture, Timothy Leary was a strong advocate for the use of LSD and psilocybin to expand the mind and consciousness. He believed enlightenment could be achieved by expanding the mind through psychodelic drug usage. Leary was a Harvard psychologist, who pursued research on psychoactive drugs with controlled experiments involving graduate students, fellow counterculture figures such as William S. Burroughs, and even some undergraduate students. After being expelled from the Harvard faculty, he was arrested and sent to jail for the possession of marijuana. This book is his record of seven months spent in jail: Leary notes the treatment of prisoners, the abuse certain prisoners faced, his cellmates, and the culture he encountered in prison. He escaped his first prison, but was later extradited to the United States from Afghanistan. Leary spent a few years total in jail, but never backed down from his embrace of psychodelic drugs and his iconoclastic lifestyle.