A Psychedelic Trip to Timothy Leary’s Catalina Resort in Mexico

Their Mexican neighbors had been bemused. The Zihuatanejo historian Rodrigo Campus Aburto, a younger teen within the Nineteen Sixties, remembers that the group thought the largely American trippers had been lunatics. He additionally remembers older teenagers typically attended fiestas that IFIF hosted on the seashore. “Moon, fireplace and beer,” is how he describes the events. Some smoked marijuana (Guerrero state was then, and nonetheless is, a significant marijuana producing space), however “the sacrament,” because the IFIF folks referred to as their LSD, was not shared with the locals.

It was many years earlier than the rise of the narco-trafficking that has wreaked murderous violence and havoc on Mexico. The one rule of IFIF was that folks on LSD had been to not depart the compound, and by all obtainable accounts, that appears to have been adopted.

One or two people did wind up in Mexico Metropolis hospitals with breakdowns, in accordance with a Saturday Night Put up article printed within the fall of 1963, titled “Thoughts-Distorting Medication: The Bizarre Saga of LSD.”

On June 13, 1963, the Mexican authorities formally gave the group 20 days to depart the nation. It’s unclear precisely what prompted the expulsion. “They had been breaking the legislation,” Mr. Aburto mentioned. The Saturday Night Put up reported Leary received the group deported after he learn a paper on LSD on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico’s Institute of Biomedical Analysis, as it’s now recognized. The scandalized director deemed his discuss “absurd, confused, worthless,” and protested to the Mexican authorities.

In addition to the Mexican federales, the group confronted a extra primeval problem. The group was 60 p.c male, and Dr. Downing, the California psychiatrist and ever the empirical observer, dryly famous that “marital instability characterised many.”

Mr. Weil, the psychologist, introduced his spouse to the group and was among the many few members whose marriage survived. “I do bear in mind a type of loosening of sexual bounds,” he mentioned. “It was like a love fest.”

Did the Zihuatanejo Venture obtain its targets? Mr. Weil isn’t certain. “The intent, as I replicate now, was to kind a extra concentrated community, a extra concentrated group who may keep it up the work. How naïve we had been by way of our perception that we may change the world in a single day!”