HARVARD SQUARES

In the early 1960s, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began experimenting with psilocybin at Harvard, convinced that altered consciousness deserved serious scientific investigation. It did not stay inside the laboratory for long. Students, writers, artists and seekers entered their orbit; Harvard grew increasingly alarmed; and by 1963 both men were gone.

Alpert would eventually become Ram Dass. Leary would become the most notorious evangelist of the psychedelic age. But before LSD became shorthand for Haight-Ashbury, one of the doors to the counterculture had already been kicked open in Cambridge. Boston Babylon follows the trip from Harvard Square into the coming psychedelic underground.