Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (67 page)

While parapsychology has long been ridiculed by the scientific establishment, the CIA seriously entertained the notion that such phenomena might be highly significant for the spy trade. The Agency hypothesized that if a number of people in the US were found to have a high ESP capacity, their talent could be assigned to specific intelligence problems. In 1952 the CIA initiated an extensive program involving “the search for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP performance.” The Office of Security, which ran the ARTICHOKE project, was urged to follow “all leads on individuals reported to have true clairvoyant powers” so as to be able to subject their claims to “rigorous scientific investigation.”

Along this line the CIA began infiltrating séances and occult gatherings. A memo dated April 9, 1953, refers to a domestic—and therefore illegal—operation that required the “planting of a very specialized observer” at a séance in order to obtain “a broad surveillance of all individuals attending the meetings.”

The CIA also sought to develop techniques whereby the ESP powers of a group of psychics could be used “to produce factual information that could not be obtained in any other way.” If it were possible “to identify the thought of another person several hundred miles away,” a CIA scientist explained, “the adaptation to the practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not give serious difficulty.” Moreover, “everything that adds anything to our understanding of what is taking place in ESP is likely to give us advantage in the problem of use and control.”

In a rather bizarre twist, during the late 1960s the CIA experimented with mediums in an effort to contact (and debrief?) dead agents. These attempts, according to Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official, were part of a larger effort to harness psychic powers for various intelligence-related missions that included utilizing clairvoyants to divine the intentions of the Kremlin leadership. Secret ESP research is still being conducted, although CIA spokesmen refuse to comment on the nature of these experiments.

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While the miracle cure never panned out, it is worth noting that Thorazine was found to mollify an LSD reaction and subsequently became a standard drug for controlling patients in mental asylums and prisons.

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Upon completion of their mission in November 1962, the Special Purpose Team was told to remain in Japan and wait for further instructions. Arrangements were made to extend their stay in the Pacific Theater for an additional sixty days so that they could travel to Saigon. According to the army inspector general, a letter hand-delivered to the team “allegedly announced the Secretary of Defense’s decision to use LSD on Viet Cong POW’s.”

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Pentagon spokespeople insist that the potential hazards of such experimentation were “supposed” to be fully explained to all volunteers. But as Dr. Snyder noted, nobody “can tell you for sure BZ won’t have a long-lasting effect. With an initial effect of eighty hours compared to eight for LSD you would have to worry more about its long-lasting or recurrent effects.”

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Osmond left Canada in 1963 and joined a group of researchers at the Princeton Neuropsychiatrie Institute. There he worked closely with Dr. Bernard Aaronson, whose studies in hypnosis and altered states of consciousness were funded by the CIA through the Society for the Study of Human Ecology. Osmond and Aaronson later coauthored a popular anthology called
Psychedelics
. Unlike Aaronson, who was unaware of the CIA’s interest in his work, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, another Princeton researcher, had close ties with the CIA. As one of Pfeiffer’s associates put it, “Princeton was crawling with agents. They came courting everyone. It was obvious. They would give us whatever we wanted. . . . We realized we were being recruited, but at that time we were flattered that such a prestigious government agency was interested in us.” A little too interested, perhaps; a number of scientists soon discovered that their mail was being opened and read by government agents.

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In his letters Huxley mentioned “my friend Dr. J. West,” a reference to Jolly West, who conducted LSD studies for the CIA. At one point, while West was engaged in MK-ULTRA research, Huxley suggested that he hypnotize his subjects prior to administering LSD in order to give them “post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction.” Needless to say, the CIA was intrigued by this idea. Huxley also lectured on parapsychology at Duke University, where J. B. Rhine (with whom Huxley communicated) was engaged in ESP studies for the CIA and the army.

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After thirteen years of utilizing this method, Osmond and his colleagues published their findings: “When psychedelic therapy is given to alcholics, about one-third will remain sober after the therapy is completed and another one-third will be benefited. . . . Our conclusion is that, properly used, LSD therapy can turn a large number of alcoholics into sober members of society. Even more important, this can be done very quickly and therefore very economically.”

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Formerly a member of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, Bateson was the husband and co-worker of anthropologist Margaret Mead. An exceptional intellect, he was turned on to acid by Dr. Harold Abramson, one of the CIA’s chief LSD specialists.

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In the mid-1940s Lord Buckley founded a mescaline club called The Church of the Living Swing. A practitioner of yoga who often appeared in public wearing a tuxedo with tennis sneakers, a big white moustache, and a safari hat, Buckley rented a yacht and threw mescaline parties in the San Francisco Bay with live jazz by Ben Webster and Johnny Puleo and the Harmonicats.

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Whereas most psychedelic therapists were prepared to assist their patients should difficulties arise, Dr. Salvador Roquet, a maverick Mexican psychiatrist, consciously sought to induce a bummer as part of his “treatment.” Roquet utilized various hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, datura, and ketamine. Known as “a master of bad trips” and “a pusher of death,” Roquet subjected people to adverse stimuli while they were drugged; Jewish subjects, for example, were given acid and then forced to listen to a recording of Hitler’s speeches.

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In
The Road to Eleusis
authors Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson, and Carl Ruck present convincing evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries, the oldest religion in the West, centered around a mass tripping ritual. For two millennia pilgrims journeyed from all over the world to take part in the Mysteries and drink of the sacred
kykeon
—a holy brew laced with ergot. The setting for the Mysteries was carefully devised to maximize the transcendental aura. After drinking the spiritual potion, the initiates would listen to ceremonial music and ponder the texts of Demeter, goddess of grain (symbolizing renewal, spring, fecundity, and possibly the ergot fungus, which grows on barley, from which the
kykeon
was made). At the climax of the initiation a beam of sunlight would flood the chamber. This vision was said to be the culminating experience of a lifetime, man’s redemption from death. As the poet Pindar wrote, “Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and its god-sent beginning.” Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles were among those who participated in this secret ritual.

†While the passing of time and the destruction of documentary evidence by the church has concealed the full scope of the ritual use of hallucinogens in Europe, scattered references suggest that a widespread psychedelic underground existed during the Middle Ages. Walter Map, a twelfth-century ecclesiastic, told of certain heretical sects that offered innocent people a “heavenly food” proclaiming, “Often you will see . . . angelic visions, in which sustained by their consolation, you can visit whatsoever place you wish without delay or difficulties.”

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Gautier was turned on to hashish by J. J. Moreau de Tours, a French doctor who attempted to correlate the effects of cannabis with the manifestations of mental illness. Moreau, the first person to put forward the notion of a drug-induced “model psychosis,” supplied hashish to the literary giants who frequented Gautier’s club.

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The CIA used terminal cancer patients as guinea pigs for testing knockout drugs and psychochemical weapons under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA.

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During this period the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA’s Office of Research and Development initiated a project to create new compounds “that could be used offensively.” A major portion of the OFTEN/CHICKWIT Program, as the joint effort was called, was geared toward incapacitants. A CIA memo dated March 8, 1971, indicates that a backlog of more than twenty-six thousand drugs had been acquired “for future screening.” Information gathered from this screening process was catalogued and data-banked in a “large, closely held” computer system that monitored worldwide developments in pharmacology. Under the auspices of OFTEN/CHICKWIT at least seven hallucinogens similar to BZ were tested; inmates at Holmsburg prison in Pennsylvania were used as test subjects for some of the drugs. Very little is known about these experiments, although CIA documents mention “several laboratory accidents” in which a drug designated EA-3167 produced “prolonged psychotic effects in laboratory personnel.”

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In 1965 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the radical youth wing of the civil rights movement, expelled white activists from its ranks and introduced black power as a counterpoint to integration.

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The first member of the Grateful Dead to turn on to LSD was Robert Hunter, the Dead lyricist, who participated in a government-sponsored drug study at Stanford University during the early 1960s. Hunter later recommended the experience to the other band members.

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LSD-25 made its debut in the pop world on the flip side of a 1962 single by the Gamblers.

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Strychnine, a poison that is lethal in sufficient quantities, was listed in an inventory of biochemical agents stockpiled by the CIA. Other drugs in the CIA’s medicine chest included tachnn (a vomit-inducing agent), 2,4 pyrolo (“causes temporary amnesia”), M-246 (“produces paralysis”), neurokinin (“produces severe pain”), digitoxin (for inducing a heart attack), and seven BZ homologues.

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West was head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma during the 1950s and early 1960s, when he conducted research into LSD, hypnosis and “the psychobiology of dissociated states” for the CIA. (It was West who administered a massive dose of LSD to an elephant as part of an ill-fated drug experiment.) In 1964 he was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. After visiting Ruby in his jail cell, West concluded that he had sunk into a “paranoid state manifested by delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations and suicidal impulses.” Ruby was not faking these symptoms, West asserted, since he had vigorously rejected the doctor’s repeated suggestions that he was mentally ill. “The true malingerer usually grasps eagerly at such an explanation,” said West. Since Ruby would not admit he was crazy, West concluded he was nuts. Catch-22.

Ruby’s “delusions” included the belief that an ultra-right-wing conspiracy was behind the death of the president. On the basis of Dr. West’s diagnosis, Ruby became a candidate for treatment of mental disorders. Another doctor soon put him on “happy pills,” although these drugs did not seem to cheer Ruby up. Two years later he died of cancer while still in prison.

West, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles, where he served as director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatrie Institute, a position he still holds. In the early 1970s he became embroiled in a heated controversy over plans for a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. Originally proposed by Governor Ronald Reagan, the violence center would have exceeded even Jack Ruby’s worst paranoid nightmares had it not been scuttled by the California State legislature after information about it was leaked to the press.

West, who helped formulate plans for the center, described the program as an attempt “to predict the probability of occurrences” of violent behavior among specific population groups. “The major known correlates of violence,” according to West, “are sex (male), age (youthful), ethnicity (black), and urbanicity.”

The violence center was to have been housed in a former military base located in a remote area of California. The medical facility at Vacaville prison, the site of a major CIA drug testing program during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was listed among the facilities that would have been used to develop treatment models and implement pilot and demonstration programs for the violence center.

Treatments discussed by West included chemical castration, psychosurgery, and the testing of experimental drugs on involuntarily incarcerated individuals. Furthermore, the activities of the Center were to have been coordinated with a California law enforcement program that maintained computer files on “pre-delinquent” children so that they could be treated
before
they made a negative mark on society.