Ram Dass dead: Psychedelic drug pioneer dies at home in Hawaii aged 88

Ram Dass died at home aged 88
www.ramdass.org/
Bronwen Weatherby23 December 2019

Ram Dass, a pioneer of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, has died aged 88.

Dass, born Richard Alpert, promoted the taking of the so-called mind-expanding drugs as a path to inner enlightenment.

He joined the likes of Timothy Leary, an American psychologist, who advocated the therapeutic potential of certain drugs under controlled conditions.

According to a post on his official Instagram account on Sunday, Dass "died peacefully at home in Maui on December 22, 2019 surrounded by loved ones".

“He was a guide for thousands seeking to discover or reclaim their spiritual identity beyond or within institutional religion," the post continued.

Dass was a key figure in the New Age movement and played a leading role in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West.

He is reported to have grown up in a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts.

He considered himself an atheist, and after graduating from Tufts University and earning a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was an up-and-coming psychology professor and researcher at Harvard University in the early ‘60s.

Ram Dass would later describe himself at the time as a driven “anxiety-neurotic” who had an abundance of knowledge but lacked wisdom. Things began to change when Leary joined the Harvard faculty and the two became close friends.

He had been introduced to marijuana in 1955 by his first patient while working as a health services counsellor at Stanford University but Leary took him farther with psilocybin, the compound that gives certain mushrooms hallucinogenic qualities.

In his first psychedelic experience, “the rug crawled and the picture smiled, all of which delighted me,” Ram Dass wrote in “Be Here Now.”

Together, Dass and Leary conducted experiments including giving the drug to “jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists.” Afterward, they had them fill out questionnaires about their experiences.

They were eventually fired from Harvard in 1963, who were upset they were using students as subjects.

They moved their experiments to a mansion in New York which has been made available to them by heirs of industrialist Andrew Mellon.

They were central to the counterculture phenomenon as the hippie movement grew and Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out" mantra gained popularity with poets and musicians alike.

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