Many histories of psychedelic research and its diffusion into popular consciousness are affixed to the work of Tim Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard and their subsequent para-academic organizations, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and the League for Spiritual Discovery. This story often leaves one character out, Lisa Bieberman, and her foundational role to the operation of IFIF in Cambridge as Leary and Alpert pursued pursued other goals elsewhere. This elision also paints a rather flat portrait of psychedelic interest in Cambridge quickly coming to an end when Leary and Alpert were fired.
Radcliffe College alumna Lisa Bieberman penned an unpublished memoir in the 1970s, To Mark A Spot: A Psychedelic Pilgrimage, which describes a psychedelic culture emerging in Cambridge and Harvard in 1963, precisely after the departure of Leary and Alpert.
In Bieberman’s telling, as a student at Radcliffe College in 1962, she read an article in Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson, about Leary’s psilocybin research. At the advice of one of Leary’s graduate students, she “hung around” the office of the Department of Social Relations, hoping to enter the psychedelic research community and get her hands on some psilocybin.
She discovered that psychedelics were not to be found through Harvard-sanctioned research but through the IFIF, Leary and Alpert’s burgeoning para-academic organization. The two professors founded the IFIF to disseminate research on psychedelics and to open training programs, chemical production plants, and retreat centers—all dedicated to psychedelic research. The IFIF was the solution to Leary and Alpert’s grand ambitions that were hindered by their institutional duties, and Lisa was ready to provide her labor to serve those goals with her whole being.
Leary and Alpert were fired in May of 1963. Upon her graduation that same year, Bieberman ran the IFIF office and became the circulation manager of the Psychedelic Review, the IFIF’s research publication. She worked the phone day and night, answering diverse queries about psychedelics—where to get them, what was illegal, and how to use them safely and productively—and speaking to callers about their most recent psychedelic sessions. She processed IFIF membership requests and orders for the Psychedelic Review. She responded to all IFIF mail, circulating contact information for cactus farms and chemical labs and providing updates about local drug laws.
Bieberman recounts Leary and Alpert’s disinterest in her work. While the term “male chauvinism” was not readily known in 1964, she states that it certainly would apply to her relationship with Leary, Alpert, and the company they kept.
The IFIF collapsed in the spring of 1964, but Bieberman continued her work from her apartment, founding the Psychedelic Information Center (PIC) and its bulletin. Published from 1965 until the end of the decade, The PIC Bulletin was one of the most consistent publications on psychedelics, connecting enthusiasts and advising readers about shifting legal landscapes, events of interest, and new organizations. It also presented her musings on psychedelics and the newfound culture around them. These musings include an essay that present her philosophy of psychedelic religion in the West, “Phanerothyme: A Western Approach to the Religious Use of Psychochemicals.” In this essay, she presents psychedelics as offering a profound experience of radically simple truths, and that Westerners do not need to “turn to the East” to adequately contextualize this profound experience. Further, in her memoir, she illuminates the plans she had for a communal retreat center where this philosophy could be put into practice.
Bieberman called her apartment the Psychedelic Information Center, but she was the Center. Bieberman connected people to information, and she connected them to one another, forming the very community she hoped psychedelics could offer. She collected mailing addresses of those interested, kept records of correspondences, and even maintained a “missing persons” file of mail that was returned to sender or correspondence left without a reply.
Bieberman was committed to democratizing access to psychedelic substances and educating about how to take them safely. She insisted that psychedelics should transform one into better a better person, which she called the “moral challenge” of psychedelics. For her, psychedelic phenomenology was important because an experience might illuminate about how to live better in community. You might have a profound or illuminating experience, but you must enlist that experience in transforming your life, loving the world, and caring for others. Hers is a remarkably simple vision, but it resists the psychedelic over-enthusiasm and profit-chasing she witnessed elsewhere.
Bieberman’s commitment to building community ultimately led her out of the psychedelic scene and into devotional life as a Quaker. She came to believe that the culture emerging from psychedelics was divorced from the community-enriching potential of those substances. In her words, psychedelics were for “having an experience that will reawaken a person to the basic truths he understood as a child and point the way to becoming a better man or woman.” Her vision of this psychedelic possibility is one that contemporary enthusiasts would do well to heed.
American psychedelic users have often taken a turn toward religious life to situate and make sense of their profound experiences. In the 20th century and into the 21st, this turn towards religion also meant a “turn to the East,” invoking either Hindu or Buddhist traditions and cosmologies to make meaning of an extraordinary experience. These patterns suggest that psychedelics entail something altogether new to elucidate their true meaning. Yet early in this period of popular psychedelic experimentation in the late 1960s, Lisa Bieberman—a veteran of Harvard’s psychedelic research and head of the influential Psychedelic Information Center in Cambridge, MA— presented an alternative philosophy of psychedelic religion, rooted in Quaker practice and a radically simply gnosis that resulted from a psychedelic experience. Drawing from her essays and unpublished memoir, this paper will outline her view of psychedelic religion for “the West” and present its implications for contemporary psychedelic religious life.