1979 reunion of first-wave U.S. psychedelic researchers

In February 1979, leading figures from the first wave of American psychedelic research gathered at Oscar Janiger’s home in Los Angeles for a reunion that became an unusually candid reckoning with their shared history. A rough videotape preserves the encounter: an aging, divided group trying to make sense of work that had been driven underground, while arguing over the difference between disruptive exploration and legitimate research. Its central question was not simply whether they had succeeded, but whether the damage and the achievement could be separated from one another.

Setting and Participants

The reunion brought together virtually all the important figures in the first wave of American psychedelic research. In Janiger’s living room were Humphry Osmond, Sidney Cohen, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Timothy Leary. Al Hubbard sat beside Leary on the couch, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He had traveled from Casa Grande, Arizona, where he lived in a trailer park; at seventy-seven or seventy-eight, he still wore his paramilitary outfit. The narrator, watching the poor-quality video, could not tell whether Hubbard was carrying a sidearm. That uncertainty belongs to the scene’s record of appearances, not to a confirmed detail about what he brought.

The surviving recording offers both a roomful of recognizable names and a less polished encounter than a formal commemoration. Most of the conversation is audible, but the old researchers begin stiffly, and hard feelings remain in the air. They are not assembled as a triumphant institution: their great project, to which they had devoted their lives, is described as lying in ruins. Yet their presence together suggests that the work still demanded an account. As the conversation proceeds, the reunion becomes less a celebration of a finished movement than a negotiation over what its participants had done, and how their actions should be remembered.

Meaning and Mistakes

Sidney Cohen, dressed in a jacket and tie, voices the question hanging over the gathering: “What does it all mean?” He answers that the work stirred people up and cracked their frame of reference by the thousands, perhaps millions, concluding that anything capable of doing that was worthwhile. His response does not claim that the research survived institutionally or that every consequence was intended. Instead, it measures the project by the disruption it set in motion, a form of influence that could persist even when the organized work had collapsed.

Then Leary asks, “Does anyone here feel that mistakes were made?” The question gives the reunion its sharpest turn: the group is invited to judge not only the project’s historical effects but its own conduct. Osmond, unfailingly polite even as the recording shows his teeth in full revolt, refuses the word mistake. He says that other ways of doing things could have been seen. An unidentified person makes a different, joking intervention: “There was a mistake made: nobody gave it to Nixon!” The quip briefly turns retrospective judgment into political comedy, but it does not resolve the more serious disagreement in the room.

Stolaroff makes that disagreement explicit. Turning to Leary, he says that the group had been disturbed by some of Leary’s actions because they made it more difficult to continue legitimate research. The complaint names a practical consequence, not merely a difference in temperament: the conduct associated with Leary had, in Stolaroff’s view, obstructed the work that others were trying to sustain. Leary answers that he had told them he had a different role to play. His argument is that the far-out explorers gave researchers at Spring Grove a contrast against which they could appear responsible. The exchange reframes their conflict as a division of labor, though the fact that Leary has to explain the arrangement indicates that the division had not erased the strain it caused.

Different Roles, Shared Work

Leary widens his response beyond the dispute with Stolaroff. He hopes the group can understand that they had all been playing assigned parts, and that there was no simple division into good guys and bad guys, credit and blame. Cohen accepts this account genially. In his view, people like Leary and Hubbard had to go far beyond the acceptable, perhaps too far, to move the larger enterprise; people like Osmond were also needed to reflect and study. The metaphor of a ship being turned makes the researchers’ different approaches complementary without pretending they were interchangeable. One kind of work unsettled settled expectations; another gave the field a more measured way to examine what had been unsettled.

That argument resonates with the earlier fracture between medical and spiritual approaches to psychedelic research. Hubbard had established the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination in 1955, an organization whose aspirations extended beyond medicine’s focus on the ill. Although the commission’s practical substance was unclear, its existence signaled a widening divide over whether psychedelic work should remain psychotherapy or reach toward cultural transformation. Hubbard himself had said that his regard for science as an end in itself was diminishing, because what he wanted lay beyond empirical manipulation. By the reunion, the people who had inhabited these different positions were trying to interpret their divergence as part of a larger undertaking, while still leaving the original friction visible.

Hubbard listens intently but says comparatively little. When he does speak, he urges the work to continue despite drug laws: “just keep on doing it. Wake people up! Let them see for themselves what they are.” He even imagines that Carter, the defense secretary Harold Brown, and CIA director Stansfield Turner could use a dose. His appeal carries the same expansive, confrontational impulse that marked his public identity, but it does not make him reconciled to Leary. The narrator observes that Hubbard seems less willing than the others to let bygones be bygones or to let Leary off the hook, even while Leary is solicitous toward him.

An Unsettled Reconciliation

Leary addresses Hubbard with conspicuous warmth: “Oh, Al! I owe everything to you,” he says, adding that the galactic center had sent Hubbard down at just the right moment. Hubbard does not smile. A few minutes later, he offers a restrained acknowledgment: “You sure as heck contributed your part.” The exchange holds affection, gratitude, and lingering resentment together without allowing any one of them to settle the meaning of their relationship. Leary’s expansive praise does not produce an equally expansive response; Hubbard’s brief recognition, in turn, stops short of forgiveness.

The reunion therefore ends not with agreement over the past but with a more complicated account of responsibility. Its participants can regard the larger project as ruined and still believe that something important was accomplished. Cohen’s defense of the group’s different roles gives that belief a shape, while Hubbard’s refusal to soften his response to Leary preserves the cost of those roles. The videotape’s lasting significance lies in that unresolved combination: an effort to defend the cultural disturbance the researchers had caused, an acknowledgment that some actions hindered legitimate research, and a roomful of former collaborators who could imagine their work as necessary without agreeing on who had made it harder.