While the U.S. has been seized by both a pandemic and an epic undermining of its democratic processes, psychedelics are undergoing their own revolution. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that drugs associated with existential awakening should accompany movements like Black Lives Matter, which oppose systemic inequity. It’s in this moment that filmmaker Errol Morris has decided to fix his camera lens on Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the onetime girlfriend of psychedelics evangelist Timothy Leary, called “the most dangerous man in America” by President Richard Nixon. Timothy Leary was a Harvard lecturer and psychology researcher who, alongside assistant professor Richard Albert, created the Harvard Psilocybin Project between 1960 and 1962. The project sought to understand how the human mind interacted with hallucinatory drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, which were both legal at the time. Leary was later dismissed from Harvard for proselytizing the virtues of using LSD and for his lax if not unscientific approach to experimentation. After leaving Harvard, Leary was propelled into pop culture fame. His numerous run-ins with the law and the loud condemnation from Nixon helped seal his status as an icon of the counterculture revolution. The film, called My Psychedelic Love Story , follows the five year relationship of Harcourt-Smith and Leary as they tripped from country to country evading U.S. law enforcement and meeting new friends. Premiering on Showtime on November 29, the film is a high drama story that is rendered absurd in the light of 2020 drug legislation. Joanna Harcourt-Smith in My Psycehdelic Love Story . [Photo: Nafis Azad/Courtesy of SHOWTIME] “It’s certainly ironic that this whole thing was propelled forward by drugs laws that we now see as insane,” says Morris. “But the war on drugs has always been nonsense.” When Harcourt-Smith and Leary met, he was on the run from U.S
See the rest here:
As psychedelics enter a new era, Errol Morris’s new doc explores their original evangelist