Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (9 page)

Another scientist who rented his services to the CIA as well as the military was Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University. Heath and his colleagues administered LSD to people and then subjected them to electronic brain stimulation via electrode implant. One test subject became hysterical, lapsed into a trancelike state, and later claimed that the doctors were trying to manipulate her body. She was “obviously having paranoid ideas,” commented an army employee.

In addition to sponsoring research at various universities and civilian hospitals, the army conducted extensive in-house studies with LSD. During the late 1950s a series of tests was initiated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Their purpose was to determine how well soldiers would fare in the execution of war games while high on acid. Small military units were given EA-1729, the army’s secret code number for LSD, and asked to perform various operational exercises, including command-post maneuvers, squad drills, tank
driving, radarscope reading, antiaircraft tracking, meteorological and engineering surveys, and so on. The results showed performance ranging “from total incapacity to marked decrease in proficiency.” Unbeknownst to the stoned servicemen, some of these exercises were filmed by the army and were later shown to members of Congress to demonstrate the disruptive influence of psychochemicals.

Concerned that LSD might one day be used covertly against an American military unit, certain officials suggested that every Chemical Corps officer should be familiar with the effects of the drug, if only as a precautionary measure. Accordingly nearly two hundred officers assigned to the Chemical Corps school at Fort McClellan, Alabama, were given acid as a supplement to their regular training program. Some staff members even tried to teach classes while tripping.

Additional tests were carried out at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Dug-way Proving Ground, Utah; and in various European and Pacific stations. Soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were given LSD and confined to sensory deprivation chambers; then they were subjected to hostile questioning by intelligence officers. An army report concludes that an “interrogator of limited experience could compel a subject to compromise himself and to sign documents which could place him in jeopardy.” With a stronger dose “a state of fear and anxiety could be induced where the subject could be compelled to trade his cooperation for a guarantee of return to normalcy.”

Shortly thereafter the military began using LSD as an interrogation weapon on an operational basis, just as the CIA had been doing for years. An army memo dated September 6, 1961, discussed the interrogation procedure: “Stressing techniques employed included silent treatment before or after EA 1729 administration, sustained conventional interrogation prior to EA 1729 interrogation, deprivation of food, drink, sleep or bodily evacuation, sustained isolation prior to EA 1729 administration, hot-cold switches in approach, duress ‘pitches,’ verbal degradation and bodily discomfort, or dramatized threats to subject’s life or mental health.”

Documents pertaining to Operation DERBY HAT indicate that an army Special Purpose Team trained in LSD interrogations initiated a series of field tests in the Far East beginning in August 1962. Seven individuals were questioned; all were foreign nationals who had been implicated in drug smuggling or espionage activities, and in each
case the EA-1729 technique produced information that had not been obtained through other means. One subject vomited three times and stated that he “wanted to die” after the Special Purpose Team gave him LSD; his reaction was characterized as “moderate.” Another went into shock and remained semiconscious for nearly an hour after receiving triple the dosage normally used in these sessions. When he came to, the Special Purpose Team propped him up in a chair and tried to question him, but the subject kept collapsing and hitting his head on the table, oblivious to the pain. A few hours later he started to talk. “The subject often voiced an anti-communist line,” an army report noted, “and begged to be spared the torture he was receiving. In this confused state he even asked to be killed in order to alleviate his suffering.”
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By the mid-1960s nearly fifteen hundred military personnel had served as guinea pigs in LSD experiments conducted by the US Army Chemical Corps. Some later claimed they were coerced into “volunteering” for these experiments by their superior officers. A number of GI veterans complained they suffered from severe depression and emotional disturbances after the LSD trials. Ironically, there were also reports that soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were stealing LSD from the laboratories and using it for recreational purposes. Some of these men had taken their first “trip” (the word originally coined by army scientists to describe an LSD session) when acid was given to unsuspecting GIs at mess parties.

Army policy restricted LSD tests to individual volunteers or small groups of military personnel. That was not enough for the leaders of the Chemical Corps. Major General Creasy bemoaned the fact that large-scale testing of psychochemical weapons in the United States was prohibited. “I was attempting to put on, with a good cover story,” he grumbled, “to test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud was laid down on a city. It was denied on reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me.”

As it happened, however, LSD was much more effective by ingestion than by inhalation, and the Chemical Corps was unable to figure out an appropriate means for delivering the drug. This precluded any possibility of using LSD as a large-scale battle weapon. Undaunted, the military surrealists and their industrial counterparts forged ahead in search of a drug and a delivery system that could do the job. During the early 1960s Edgewood Arsenal received an average of four hundred chemical “rejects” every month from the major American pharmaceutical firms. Rejects were drugs found to be commercially useless because of their undesirable side effects. Of course, undesirable side effects were precisely what the army was looking for.

It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual patterns. The effects generally last about three days, although symptoms—headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior—have been known to persist for as long as six weeks. “During the period of acute effects,” noted an army doctor, “the person is completely out of touch with his environment.”

Dr. Van Sim, who served as chief of the Clinical Research Division at Edgewood, made it a practice to try all new chemicals himself before testing them on volunteers. Sim said he sampled LSD “on several occasions.” Did he enjoy getting high, or were his acid trips simply a patriotic duty? “It’s not a matter of compulsiveness or wanting to be the first to try a material,” Sim stated. “With my experience I am often able to change the design of future experiments. . . . This allows more comprehensive tests to be conducted later, with maximum effective usefulness of inexperienced volunteers. I’m trying to defeat the compound, and if I can, we don’t have to drag out the tests at the expense of a lot of time and money.”

With BZ Dr. Sim seems to have met his match. “It zonked me for three days. I kept falling down and the people at the lab assigned someone to follow me around with a mattress. I woke up from it after three days without a bruise.” For his efforts Sim received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service and was cited for exposing
himself to dangerous drugs “at the risk of grave personal injury.”

According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, “The army’s testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ.” Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975. During this period an estimated twenty-eight hundred soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ. Robert Bowen, a former air force enlisted man, felt disoriented for several weeks after his exposure. Bowen said the drug produced a temporary feeling of insanity but that he reacted less severely than other test subjects. One paratrooper lost all muscle control for a time and later seemed totally divorced from reality. “The last time I saw him,” said Bowen, “he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar.”
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After extensive clinical testing at Edgewood Arsenal, the army concluded that BZ was better suited than LSD as a chemical warfare agent for a number of reasons. While acid could knock a person “off his rocker,” to use Chemical Corps jargon, BZ would also put him “on the floor” (render him physically immobile). This unique combination—both “off the rocker” and “on the floor”—was exactly what the army sought from an incapacitant. Moreover, BZ was cheaper to produce, more reliable, and packed a stronger punch than LSD. Most important, BZ could be dispersed as an aerosol mist that would float with the wind across city or battlefield. Some advantage was also found in the fact that: test subjects lapsed into a state of “semi-quiet delirium” and had no memory of their BZ experience.

This was not to belittle lysergic acid. Although LSD never found a place in the army’s arsenal, the drug undoubtedly left its mark on the military mind. Once again LSD seems to have acted primarily as a catalyst. Before acid touched the fancy of army strategists, Creasy’s vision of a new kind of warfare was merely a pipe dream. With LSD it suddenly became a real possibility.

During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army’s standard incapacitating agent. By this time the superhallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large-scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was reportedly employed by American troops as a counterinsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, “We will use these things as we very well see fit, when we think it is in the best interest of the US and their allies.”

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Psychedelic Pioneers

THE ORIGINAL CAPTAIN TRIPS

The stout crew-cut figure riding in the Rolls-Royce was a mystery to those who knew him. A spy by profession, he lived a life of intrigue and adventure befitting his chosen career. Born dirt poor in Kentucky, he served with the OSS during the Second World War and went on to make a fortune as a uranium entrepreneur. His prestigious government and business connections read like a Who’s Who of the power elite in North America. His name was Captain Alfred M. Hubbard. His friends called him “Cappy,” and he was known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”

The blustery, rum-drinking Hubbard is widely credited with being the first person to emphasize LSD’s potential as a visionary or transcendental drug. His faith in the LSD revelation was such that he made it his life’s mission to turn on as many men and women as possible. “Most people are walking in their sleep,” he said. “Turn them around, start them in the opposite direction and they wouldn’t even know the difference.” But there was a quick way to remedy that—give them a good dose of LSD and “let them see themselves for what they are.”

That Hubbard, of all people, should have emerged as the first genuine LSD apostle is all the more curious in light of his longstanding affiliation with the cloak-and-dagger trade. Indeed, he was no run-of-the-mill spook. As a high-level OSS officer, the Captain directed an extremely sensitive covert operation that involved smuggling weapons and war material to Great Britain prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In pitch darkness he sailed ships without lights up the coast to Vancouver, where they were refitted and used as destroyers by the British navy. He also flew planes to the border, took them apart, towed the pieces into Canada, and sent them to England. These activities began with the quiet approval of President Roosevelt
nearly a year and a half before the US officially entered the war. To get around the neutrality snag, Hubbard became a Canadian citizen in a mock procedure. While based in Vancouver (where he later settled), he personally handled several million dollars filtered by the OSS through the American consulate to finance a multitude of covert operations in Europe. All this, of course, was highly illegal, and President Truman later issued a special pardon with kudos to the Captain and his men.

Not long after receiving this presidential commendation, Hubbard was introduced to LSD by Dr. Ronald Sandison of Great Britain. During his first acid trip in 1951, he claimed to have witnessed his own conception. “It was the deepest mystical thing I’ve ever seen,” the Captain recounted. “I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse. It was all clear.”

Hubbard, then forty-nine years old, eagerly sought out others familiar with hallucinogenic drugs. He contacted Dr. Humphry Osmond, a young British psychiatrist who was working with LSD and mescaline at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada. Like most other researchers in the field, Osmond was primarily interested in psychosis and mental illness. In 1952 he shocked the medical world by drawing attention to the structural similarity between the mescaline and adrenaline molecules, implying that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by the body mistakenly producing its own hallucinogenic compounds. Osmond noted that mescaline enabled a normal person to see the world through the eyes of a schizophrenic, and he suggested that the drug be used as a tool for training doctors, nurses, and other hospital personnel to understand their patients from a more intimate perspective.