Tune in, turn on, drop out

Ann Marlowe reviews Robert Greenfield's biography of Timothy Leary and B. H. Friedman's Tripping: A Memoir at the New York Observer and finds the first "a powerful argument against the inchoate belief shared by many who have used psychedelics—and I was one—that tripping almost automatically makes you a better, more enlightened person. Though Mr. Greenfield maintains an evenhanded tone, the effect of his accumulation of detail is to show that Timothy Leary was a scumbag—a charming, energetic and inventive scumbag—despite decades of taking LSD."