1966: LSD was made illegal, thus instigating a massive underground market of global extent, as Tim Leary had predicted, Cassandra-like, when he testified before a Senate subcommitee. In the Nixon administration, Leary was to be made the scapegoat for the psychedelically driven countercultural movement he predicted, and so some degree, inspired ("Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out"). Later, when under arrest and under threat of lifetime imprisonment, he turned state and federal witness, his accomplice Joanna Harcourt-Smith was made out to be the scapegoat's scapegoat: people around Leary blamed her for Leary's dirty deed of informing on the Brotherhood of Love, a hash-smuggling ring, and the Weatherman, a domestic terrorist group.

As John Higgs shows brilliantly in I Have America Surrounded, and as others have likewise contended, the Leary-turns-informant scenario is precarious at best. The truth was, the world's most notorious "idelological trafficker" had precious little information to offer to the Feds. Joanna Harcourt-Smith— who originally titled her book on her time with Leary Scapegoat, intended as a double entendre for both Leary and herself—says that TL was simply a terminally desperate man bargaining for his life and freedom, not to mention his dignity and sanity. Even though he really had nothing to bargain with, Joanna encouraged him to do whatever it took to manipulate the authorities and get out of the prison system. She did not force or persuade him to become an informer, but she went along with that choice once he made it. At the same time, she toured campuses around the USA with a film interview of Leary, and campaigned tirelessly for his release. The breakthrough finally came after she had a cocaine-charged talk with then California governer Jerry Brown in his limo.

After Leary's release, Joanna was targeted in the counterculture as the femme fatale who had made TL become "Charlie Thrush" (a songbird or informant) for the Feds. An article in the September 1975 issue of Playboy, Graig Vetter claimed that Joanna was a CIA agent provocateur who had been sent to find Leary in Switzerland when he was an international refugee. (Despite any shred of evidence whatsoever, this notion continues to fly with prominent members of the psychedelic community such as Bruce Eisner.) A contract was put out for her murder. Joanna fled to the Carribean where she lived on a boat for seven years, in mortal fear for her life. More ahead...

January 18, 1967 4:15 PM John Lash met Jan Michele Kerouac at 144 Avenue B off Tompkins Square Park, New York City. This was a month before her 15th birthday on February 16. John was twenty-one. They remained lifelong friends until Jan's death in June 1996, the same week as Timothy Leary. Jan died at forty-four from kidney failure compounded by an obscure blood disease probably inherited from her father, Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac.

1968 Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past by Erich von Däniken proposed that many ancient civilizations' technologies and religion were given to them by space travelers who were welcomed as gods.

Spring 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.

See Carlos Casanova, parts one and two.

1979 Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallee .

September 1975 "How Timoth Leary Turned Informant" by Craig Vetter spread the false story that Joanna Harcourt-Smith was a US government agent who persuaded Timothy Leary to become an informer.