Leary’s ‘Philosophy’ Leaves Lawman Cold

Neil Purcell was a rookie cop on the beat. Timothy Leary was a celebrated guru of the counterculture.

Their paths crossed once, 19 years ago in Laguna Beach, and changed both of their lives forever.

It was your basic bust. Cop stops driver, smells marijuana, arrests driver. Leary, the driver, had been arrested 13 times before. Purcell made it stick, though, for the first time.

He can still remember that fateful meeting, as if it happened yesterday. But he was clearly in no mood to catch Leary’s “stand-up philosophy” act at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano for old times’ sake Tuesday night.

“In my opinion, he’s a phony and a hypocrite,” said Purcell, who has been the Laguna Beach police chief for the last eight years. “I wouldn’t go to see him if his show were taking place in our own council chambers. The guy is a blowhard.”

Purcell recalls that on the night of Dec. 26, 1968, just four months after he had joined the Laguna Beach police force, he saw a station wagon sitting in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.

“I stopped my patrol car to investigate,” he said Tuesday. “Leary was driving. His wife was with him, and his son was on all fours climbing over the seat. I asked the driver to roll down the window, which he did. I could smell the odor of marijuana.”

Purcell arrested Leary for possession of marijuana, LSD and hashish. Leary went to trial in 1970, was convicted and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The rest is a sort of history of great escapes.

Not long after Leary began serving his sentence at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, he climbed over a fence and fled, with the help of the radical underground Weathermen, to Algeria, where Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, himself a fugitive at the time, promptly “arrested” him as a counter-revolutionary.

Leary escaped again, made it to Switzerland and eventually traveled to Afghanistan, where he was arrested again and extradited to the United States. He ultimately served 44 months in prison.

Purcell still has no sympathy for the former Harvard psychologist, especially when he is quoted as declaring that he is “1,000% in agreement with Nancy Reagan about saying no (to drugs) for kids.”

“This is a free country, and he has a right to make a living and (to) say what he wants,” said Purcell, now 48. “But I don’t have to believe him. Where was he in the ‘60s when he was advocating ‘turn on, tune in, drop out?’ I hold him responsible as one of the key persons for the spread of drugs to this day.”

Ironically, making the Leary arrest-that-stuck helped make Purcell’s police career.

“It sprang my name out there, that’s for sure,” he said. “It became nationwide news. I don’t know if it had that much impact in the department, but shortly after that arrest, I did become an aggressive narcotics officer (partly) because of the notoriety.”