After Steve Simon returned to America, he met with Irwin and Edward Luck in Miami. He confessed he was still using drugs, smoking marijuana (hemp) that he rolled into cigarettes. The Luck brothers wrote Baba that they had met with Steve Simon.
In reply, on 11 December 1965, Baba warned Irwin and Edward not to associate with Steve, if he continued to use drugs, also stating in the letter through Eruch: "... Experiences induced through drugs like LSD are nothing short of spiritual hallucinations, and if God could be experienced through drugs and [hemp] cigarettes, God is not worthy of being God!"1
According to Baba's instructions, Robert Dreyfuss returned to America and began the work Baba had given him of dissuading young people from taking drugs. One day he received a long distance phone call from the clinical psychologist Dr. Richard Alpert, Allan Cohen's former professor at Harvard. Dr. Alpert, with Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner, had been experimenting with LSD and other synthesized drugs, and had heard through Cohen that Dreyfuss had recently returned from meeting Baba. Alpert asked what Baba had said about LSD, and Dreyfuss told him word for word in no uncertain terms: "No drugs!"
"Are you sure?" Alpert asked. Dreyfuss said he was. He found out later that Alpert had been on the point of taking some LSD when he phoned, but upon hearing Baba's message of "No drugs!" he had put the tablet aside.
Requesting clarification of what Meher Baba had stated, Richard Alpert then wrote a long letter to Baba as follows:
I am confused and would value your counsel.2 In 1961, as a professor at Harvard, I had the opportunity to inject a chemical derived from the Mexican mushroom, which has been treated as a sacrament by the Mexican Indians through their recorded history. For my colleague, Timothy Leary, and I it [the experience] appeared to pierce the veil of illusion that our limited reality was indeed the only reality and show us, albeit briefly, the possibility of man's true identity. Because we were social scientists interested in helping our fellow man, we set about a systematic exploration of psychedelic chemicals (including LSD).
Our work was very controversial, yet it felt important. For Western man, almost totally inundated by his cultural interpretation of reality, these chemicals, if wisely employed, seemed to provide a key to unlock the door allowing the sunlight of Reality to shine for a moment. For many of these people the experience supplied hope when previously there was cynicism, it helped people to consider their spiritual work seriously rather than to get lost in atheistic intellectualism.
Footnotes
- 1.When Don Stevens returned to America, he did not hear from Steve Simon for a long time, but by chance "picked up his trail" and contacted him a few years later. Some time after this, Don learned that Simon had again become involved with drugs.
- 2.During the 1960s, there were medical experiments with LSD in the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism, as well as for mind control by U. S. and U.S.S.R. government scientists.