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The Benedict Arnold of LSD

Turned On and Turned In by Timothy Leary

Sheet of blotter acid featuring Timothy Leary.

I’ve been wading through more than 500 pages of FBI transcripts and memoranda, showing that Timothy Leary was volunteering to snitch, then snitching to the feds about his knowledge of the Weather Underground and almost anyone else Leary thought the feds might be interested in, including his former wife Rosemary, his attorneys and the wife of one of his attorneys.

This was 1974 when Leary was in Folsom prison in northeastern California, after convictions for a number of marijuana busts plus time for his jailbreak.

It’s not entirely fresh news that the late Timothy Leary was a squealer and a snitch to the FBI. The snitching was well known at the time. The FBI was eager to leak the fact that Leary, high priest of LSD and potentate of the counterculture, was singing about his former associates.

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Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3