How LSD Helped Launch a Radical Libertarian Counterculture

Today's guest is Susannah Cahalan, whose new book is The Acid Queen, a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary—muse, fugitive, and heavily indicted co-conspirator of Timothy Leary's psychedelic revolution.

She talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about hippie communes, outlaw drug smuggling, the war on drugs--and how the '60s counterculture in its best moments ran experiments in radical individualism, where personal freedoms were used to build voluntary communities founded on altered consciousness and aesthetic liberation. The Acid Queen helps explain how the personal became the political, why libertarians should care about the messy legacy of the counterculture, and what comes next in drug policy, especially regarding psychedelics.

0:00 – Introduction
1:15 – Who is Rosemary Woodruff Leary?
7:02 – How did Rosemary meet Timothy Leary?
9:57 – Why America was ready to experiment with psychedelics
15:12 – Rosemary's connection to John Lennon and Yoko Ono
16:11 – How Rosemary and Timothy Leary became outlaws
21:07 – The jailbreak of Timothy Leary
28:45 – The political speech of Timothy Leary
31:45 – Why Rosemary and Timothy split up
35:31 – The final years of Rosemary Woodruff Leary
40:08 – The reconciliation of Rosemary and Timothy Leary
42:54 – The common thread between Cahalan's books
46:18 – Labeling in mental health
48:34 – Cahalan's experience with psychedelics

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Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
Illustration: Eddie Marshall