X-Message-Number: 7043 Date: Mon, 14 Oct 96 20:27:43 From: Dave Pizer <> Subject: Leary Report To Cryonet from Dave Pizer I would like to compliment Charles Platt for the great writing style in his article "The Strange Case of Timothy Leary" In "CryoCare Report." There is one correction I would like to add to this story. This is where Charles says "Like Alcor before us, we were willing to freeze Leary at a significant discount because he was the most famous person who had ever signed publicly with a cryonics organization." It may be partly true that some Alcor directors approved Alcor's original agreement, I don't know what was in the minds of each one at the time. But in my opinion, Leary's agreement was approved because Keith Henson promised the Alcor Board that he would raise money in donations from Leary's friends at Alcor to make up the difference between Mr. Leary's insurance proceeds and the full amount required at the time. Keith and Arel were very close to Tim and Keith can be a *very* persistent person at times. It was through Keith's hard work to get pledges from our members that the board was convinced that we would get most or all of the money for Tim's suspension. With all due respect, I think it was this assurance that caused most of the directors to approve the Leary agreement and the good publicity we would have received was secondary. Another minor correction is that Charles says that charges were dropped in the Dora Kent matter "..but only after a hideously expensive legal battle." Actually after the initial damage, Alcor made the best of this situation in several ways. We received international publicity that showed our dedication to our members. I filed a suit with 5 other persons who were taken into custody and received a total settlement from them of $90,000 for us. Keith Henson got us another $30,000 on some little known E- mail violation they made in the raid. So even though allowing Ms. Kent to deanimate in our facility initially was bad for us, the end results were turned around and we made some of our largest membership gains ever from this. The situation Charles describes seems so terrible that the question comes up as to why they did not call the authorities and have those bums thrown out or have Mr. Leary transferred to a place where he would have received better medical treatment. I'd like to know more about this. Charles says that the situation was so bad that their nurse, Carlotta Pengelly "... has also quit, because she would have to report to authorities the poor standard of patient care if she witnessed it first hand." It seems to me that it would have been good for the situation if Ms. Pengelly would have witnessed it and reported it. I am glad that Charles has written this detailed report. It may be helpful to all the cryonics groups in the future when dealing with strong willed patients who, from a cryonics point of view, appear to be making the wrong choices. Thanks. Dave Pizer Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7043