Timothy Leary, Lsd Guru, Dies At 75 Of Cancer

LOS ANGELES - Timothy Leary, Harvard professor turned guru of LSD who gained fame and infamy for encouraging the '60s generation to "turn on, tune in, drop out," died today of cancer, a friend said. He was 75.

Mr. Leary, who had turned his battle with terminal cancer into a public event, died at his hilltop Beverly Hills home, said Carol Rosin, a friend for 25 years.

Fans could follow his deteriorating health through his site on the World Wide Web. Last month, he said he was exploring the idea of allowing users of the computer communications network to watch as he committed suicide.

In the end, though, he died in his sleep surrounded with family and friends, Rosin said. His home page announced the death with a simple "Timothy has passed."

It also said his last words were, "Why not" and, "Yeah."

"He had been alert for the last few days - he'd been traveling with one foot in this world and one foot in the other world," Rosin said. "Until yesterday, he was moving around in an electric wheelchair, but he was getting weaker."

His life seldom failed to polarize two generations: the parents and flower children of the 1960s.

They called him psychologist, LSD guru, author, lecturer, jailbird, heretic and leader. To some of the most gifted members of America's counterculture, he was host, confidant and drug supplier.

The popular '70s British band The Moody Blues even put him in their song "Legend of a Mind," singing, "Timothy Leary's dead. Oh, no no no. . . ." After he fell ill, they retooled the lyric, "Timothy Leary lives" and sang it to him over the phone. He said it moved him to tears.

But for all his popularity with some baby boomers, Mr. Leary's activities cost him his Harvard University job and landed him in prison for a time.

In 1959, Mr. Leary joined the Harvard faculty. There, he met Professor Richard Alpert, who later changed his name to Baba Ram Dass, and began a series of controlled experiments with psychedelic drugs.

Four years later, Mr. Leary was fired. The school, which had been investigating his experiments, said he was fired because he was absent from class without permission.

The pair retired to Millbrook Estate, a 63-room mansion in upstate New York once owned by the Mellon family. People like William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg came and went, all united by a desire to experience better living through chemistry.

But ingesting mass quantities of LSD and bragging about it did not endear Mr. Leary to members of the Establishment, especially the ones with badges.

And for the next 20 years, he had run-ins with the law.

In 1970, he escaped from the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for marijuana possession. His bust-out was aided by the Weather Underground and his third wife, Rosemary.

Mr. Leary and his wife bounced from country to country. In Algeria, they took up residence-in-exile with Eldridge Cleaver, who ultimately kidnapped his guests after a political disagreement.

The Learys escaped, fleeing to Switzerland. U.S. agents eventually caught up with Mr. Leary in 1973 in Afghanistan, and he was imprisoned in California.

After his release in 1976, Mr. Leary's life became a journey of lecture tours, experiments with stand-up comedy, book writing, an obsession with cyberspace and dabbling in the Hollywood party scene.

Born in Springfield, Mass., in 1920 to a teacher-mother and dentist-father, Mr. Leary attended West Point, joined the Army, and earned an undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Alabama.

After earning a master's degree from Washington State University and a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, he went to work at Harvard.

"I wanted to be a philosopher. Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire and all these guys who were out there in nirvana," he said. "I discovered as I grew up that I was different. Life was to have adventures and quests and Huckleberry Finn and the notion of being . . . of living a life of exploration and adventure."

Mr. Leary married five times. His first wife committed suicide in 1959. The couple had two children. The son, who felt abandoned by his father's ribald lifestyle, was estranged from Mr. Leary. The daughter, accused as an adult of shooting her boyfriend, hanged herself at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in 1990.

Those incidents, Mr. Leary said, were the only regrets of his life.

After he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 1995, he focused on dying.

"I was really thrilled, because I knew that this was the beginning of the most fascinating part of my life," he said.

Afraid of pain and of being helpless, he turned on right up to the end "for medicinal purposes," his friends said.

"Some guy at a party came up to me and said, `Good luck on your death.' And that's one of the most powerful things that anyone has ever said to me," Mr. Leary said. "It implies `Have a good life. Have a good death.' "