NEWS FEATURE: Timothy Leary may be planning public suicide on the Internet

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-Timothy Leary may be about to kill himself-live on the Internet-and his old friend Ken Kesey, for one, says he’s planning to watch. “It will be stimulating,” says Kesey, the author whose association with Leary goes back 30 years to his days as leader of the footloose Merry Pranksters. “It […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Timothy Leary may be about to kill himself-live on the Internet-and his old friend Ken Kesey, for one, says he’s planning to watch.

“It will be stimulating,” says Kesey, the author whose association with Leary goes back 30 years to his days as leader of the footloose Merry Pranksters. “It will be about something. So much of this Internet stuff is kids playing with paper cups and string.”


A former Harvard professor who advised ’60s students to “turn on, tune in and drop out” with the help of LSD, Leary appears close to dying of prostate cancer. Recently, he’s been saying he plans to go out in typically controversial style, committing suicide on camera for the benefit of a global audience of computer nerds.

Whether he’ll go through with the plan isn’t clear. Today (April 18) he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying he was”actively exploring”committing suicide while logged onto the Internet.”I’m very involved in the high tech of dying,”he told the AP.”There are dozens of ways of dying. I have not made any decisions yet.” But Kesey says the Internet stunt is “all he talks about.

“I told him, `Tim, this is your best act so far.’ He said, `Yeah, but what do I do for an encore?”’

Kesey attended Leary’s 75th-birthday party recently in Los Angeles, where Leary lives, and also played host to a recent visit from the psychedelic relic at Kesey’s farm near Eugene, Ore.

A repeat spectacle by anyone isn’t what assisted-suicide activists are looking for.

Oregonians led the world in 1994 by passing an initiative, now mired in appeals courts, making doctor-assisted suicide legal.

News of Leary’s potential public death drew strong reactions from ethicists who study the suicide issue.

“Personally, I’m appalled,” says T. Patrick Hill, research scholar at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics in Chicago. “It seems like voyeurism of the worst kind and equally narcissistic.”


Mark Hanson, associate for religious ethics at the Hastings Center, a think tank in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., says Leary would be catering to Americans’ curiosity about death.

“Clearly, that’s something that I think we have both a curiosity as well as a revulsion to,” says Hanson, whose center deals with ethical issues in medicine and technology. “I think it is ethically questionable to broadcast one’s suicide.”

Whether he goes through with it or not, Leary’s desire to cybercast his demise has the Internet e-mail all abuzz.

Steve Silberman, editor at large of the on-line magazine HotWired (http://www.hotwired.com) and author of “Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads,” says it all makes sense. Part of the ’60s dream, he says, was about cutting through governmental party lines in search of a “global transformation of consciousness.”

“I doubt he’s trying to set an example of suicide,” Silberman says. “I think he’s trying to set an example of conscious dying.”

Leary himself has called it the first “visible, interactive suicide.”

His live personal computer audience would not be large. Fewer than 10 million Americans are using the Internet. Many of them are getting to the World Wide Web through on-line services that do not have the tools for live video.


Meanwhile, Leary has been promoting “hi-tech designer dying” via his home page on the Web (http://www.leary.com), which is readily available to those with Web access.

“Mademoiselle Cancer has moved in to share `my’ body,” states a health summary he entered April 9. “So far she is taking Room & Board in `my’ prostate and `my’ back bones. I feel minimal pain.”

Leary’s home page lists his daily pain regimen for the first week of April. It includes 44 cigarettes, three cups of coffee, two glasses of wine, one beer, one marijuana joint, three “Leary biscuits” (baked marijuana-and-cheese canapes) and 12 balloons of nitrous oxide, a pain reliever.

Specific details of the manner of Leary’s possible Internet death are not available. But even if he receives assistance in the form of lethal drugs, two recent appellate court rulings favoring assisted suicide would make prosecution unlikely.

“What the 9th Circuit said is he has the right to determine the time and manner of his death,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, a chief petitioner for Oregon’s Measure 16 assisted-suicide law.

But Lee and other assisted-suicide supporters say Leary’s sensational scheme bears no resemblance to “death with dignity” as they see it.


“Public activity is not what we anticipate,” Lee says. “Our expectation is that not more than 1 or 2 percent will take advantage of the option, and those we expect will exercise the choice in the privacy of their homes, surrounded by loved ones.”

Derek Humphry, an activist who founded and later left the Hemlock Society, says what Leary is doing “is in pretty poor taste, but then you would expect that from a flamboyant character like Timothy Leary. … He’s not doing anything for our cause.”

“This troubles me, to think that people will grandstand death in this way,” says Jim Hoefler of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, author of the book “Deathright: Culture, Medicine, Politics and the Right to Die.”

“This is not really any different from standing on the Golden Gate Bridge and calling people out to watch you jump,” he says. “It’s kind of a desperate act of somebody who wants to go out in a blaze of glory.”

Kesey says he doesn’t see Leary’s possible plan as suicide.

“These people (the terminally ill) want to stop hurting. They will die on their own if you give them enough opiates,” he says. “If it takes so much painkillers, and you die in the course of that, it’s different from suicide.”

But Herb Gold, a San Francisco novelist, suspects that Leary’s scheme reflects not just the desire for a painless death but an unsatisfied longing. “He is already mythic, and he wants to be even more.”


END BATES-TURNQUIST

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!