An LSD guru’s onetime crash pad
What a trip. In the San Jacinto Mountains, a desert ranch where the LSD advocate Timothy Leary and his Hippie Mafia once congregated has found a new owner: YouTube personality and amateur boxer Logan Paul.
Paul, who last week lost a boxing match against British YouTuber KSI at Staples Center, paid a dollar over $1 million for the 80acre property in Mountain Center.
Billed as the only private property in Duchess Canyon, the compound has enough structures to house a small community — and it once did. About 30 members of the Hippie Mafia, a.k.a. the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, led by Leary, occupied the property in the 1960s, using it to take and manufacture LSD, as well as worship nature in the rugged landscape.
Leary and his wife, Rosemary, lived in the two-bedroom main house while the rest occupied outbuildings and tepees scattered across the grounds. One of the group’s members died of an overdose in 1969, and three years later, narcotics agents raided the compound and made seven arrests, ending the drug-fueled stay.
The ranch house remains the largest home on the property, and other structures include a guesthouse, bunkhouse and workshop. There’s also a barn, two-car garage and two solar panel systems for power. A pair of springs feeds a 70,000-gallon water tank.
Timothy McTavish of Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty held the listing.
Leary, who died in 1996 at 75, was a clinical psychologist at Harvard University when he oversaw the controversial Concord Prison Experiment and Marsh Chapel Experiment, which tested the effects of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug, on prisoners and theology students in the early 1960s. He became a strong proponent of using mind-altering drugs to treat behavioral disorders.
Paul, 24, gained a following on the video-sharing app Vine before creating a YouTube channel shortly after in 2013.