The Specter of Timothy Leary: Telling Stories and Performing Credibility in Contemporary Psychedelic Science

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Biomedicine and Health II

Abstract

From the late 1940s to early 1960s, many scientists viewed psychedelic drugs as promising tools for understanding and treating mental illness—that is, until the federal classification of psychedelics as Schedule I substances in 1970 blocked their research. Since the 1990s, however, psychedelic research on human subjects has been slowly resuming. The history of psychedelic drugs and psychedelic research, however, has created credibility struggles for contemporary psychedelic scientists. Based on archival documents, field observations, and semi-structured interviews, I find that a key means through which these researchers attempt to reestablish themselves and their field as credible is through an explicit and repeated distancing from the specter of Timothy Leary—a Harvard psychologist who went from being a prominent psychedelic scientist to countercultural psychedelic evangelical, and who is frequently held responsible for the decades-long interruption on psychedelic research. I argue that stories told within this scientific community about Timothy Leary function to regulate the actions of contemporary psychedelic researchers. Therefore, this paper brings together sociological literature on storytelling with science and technology studies literature on boundary work and credibility to understand how stories shape the performance of the credible scientific self and community.

Author

• Danielle Giffort, University of Illinois-Chicago