Acid Dreams
The Complete Social History of LSD:
The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond
Authors: Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain
2
The Complete Social History of LSD:
The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond
Authors: Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain
2
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 O.S.S 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 O.S.S 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
O.S.S 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.
Osmond's research attracted widespread attention within scientific circles. The CIA, ever intent on knowing the latest facts as early as possible, quickly sent informants
to find out what was happening at Weyburn Hospital. Unbeknownst to Osmond and
his cohorts, throughout the next decade they were contacted on repeated occasions
by Agency personnel. Indeed, it was impossible for an LSD researcher not to rub
shoulders with the espionage establishment, for the CIA was monitoring the entire
scene.*
* Osmond left Canada in 1963 and joined a group of researchers at the Princeton Neuro-psychiatric
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 Ö. 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.
Osmond's reports also caught the eye of Aldous Huxley, the eminent British novelist
who for years had been preoccupied with the specter of drug-induced thought
control. In 1931 Huxley wrote Brave New World, a futuristic vision of a totalitarian
society in which the World Controllers chemically coerced the population into loving
its servitude. While Huxley grappled with the question of human freedom under
pharmacological attack, he also recognized that certain drugs, particularly the
hallucinogens, produced radical changes in consciousness that could have a profound
and beneficial effect. Upon learning of Osmond's work, he decided to offer himself as
a guinea Pig.
Huxley seemed like the perfect subject. A learned man steeped in many disciplines, he was also gifted with a writer's eloquence. Even if the drug confounded him, it
would not tongue-tie him, for he was a glorious talker. But Osmond was still a bit
apprehensive. "I did not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man who
drove Aldous Huxley mad," he explained. His worries proved to be unfounded. In May 1953, less than a month after the CIA initiated Operation MK-ULTRA, Huxley
tried mescaline for the first time at his home in Hollywood Hills, California, under
Osmond's supervision. "It was," according to Huxley, "without question the most
extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision." Moreover, "it
opens up a host of philosophical problems, throws intense light and raises all manner
of questions in the field of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge."
Huxley described his mescaline adventure in his famous essay The Doors of
Perception (which took its title from the works of William Blake, the eighteenth- century British poet and visionary artist). With this book Huxley unabashedly
declared himself a propagandist for hallucinogenic drugs, and for the first time a
large segment of the educated public became aware of the existence of these
substances. Not surprisingly, the treatise created a storm in literary circles. Some
hailed it as a major intellectual statement, others dismissed it as pure quackery. Few
critics realized that the book would have such an enormous impact in years to come.
In The Doors of Perception Huxley elaborated on Henri Bergson's theory that the
brain and the nervous system are not the source of the cognitive process but rather
a screening mechanism or "reducing valve" that transmits but a tiny fraction of "the
Mind-at-Large," yielding only the kind of information necessary for everyday matters
of survival. If this screening mechanism was temporarily suspended, if the doors of
perception were suddenly thrust open by a chemical such as mescaline or LSD, then
the world would appear in an entirely new light. When he looked at a small vase of
flowers, the mescalinized Huxley saw "what Adam had seen on the morning of
creation the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence flowers shining
with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance
with which they were charged . Words like 'grace' and 'transfiguration' came to my
mind."
Huxley obviously was not undergoing an "imitation psychosis." On the contrary, he
contended that the chemical mind-changers, when administered in the right kind of
situation, could lead to a full-blown mystical experience. He went so far as to predict
that a religious revival would "come about as the result of biochemical discoveries
that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical
self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things."
Huxley recognized that the perceptions afforded by hallucinogens bore a striking
similarity to experiences achieved without the use of drugs, either spontaneously or
through various spiritual exercises. His writings reflected more than a passing
interest in non chemical methods of altering consciousness, such as hypnosis, sensory deprivation, prolonged sleeplessness, fasting techniques closely scrutinized
by the CIA as well, but for vastly different reasons. Whereas the CIA sought to
impose an altered state on its victims in order to control them, Huxley's explorations
were self-directed and designed to expand consciousness. He was well aware of the
potential dangers of behavior modification techniques and constantly warned of their
abuse. Thus it is ironic that he unknowingly consorted with a number of scientists
who were engaged in mind control research for the CIA and the US military.*
* 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
While writing Heaven and Hell (the sequel to The Doors of Perception] in 1955, Huxley had his second mescaline experience, this time in the company of Captain Al
Hubbard. They were joined by philosopher Gerald Heard, a close friend of Huxley's. "Your nice Captain tried a new experiment group mescalinization," Huxley wrote to
Osmond. "Since I was in a group, the experience had a human content, which the
earlier, solitary experience, with its Other Worldly quality and its intensification of
aesthetic experience, did not possess . it was a transcendental experience within
this world and with human references."
Later that same year, with the Captain again acting as a guide, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Although he consumed only a tiny amount, the experience was highly significant. "What came through the closed door," he stated, "was the realization not the knowledge, for this wasn't verbal or abstract but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. These words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains ! was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been."
Huxley and his LSD mentor were a most improbable duo. The coarse, uneducated Captain lacked elegance and restraint ("I'm just a born son of a bitch!" he bellowed), while the tall, slender novelist epitomized the genteel qualities of the British intellectual. Yet the two men were evidently quite taken by each other. Huxley spoke admiringly of "the good Captain" whose uranium exploits served "as a passport into the most exalted spheres of government, business, and ecclesiastical polity." In a letter to Osmond he commented, "What Babes in the Wood we literary gents and professional men are! The great World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine; but its full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what extraordinary luck that this representative of both these Higher Powers should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescalin and (b) be such a very nice man."
Despite their markedly different styles Huxley and Hubbard shared a unique appreciation of the revelatory aspect of hallucinogenic drugs. It was Hubbard who originally suggested that an LSD-induced mystical experience might harbor unexplored therapeutic potential. He administered large doses of acid to gravely ill alcoholics with the hope that the ensuing experience would lead to a drastic and permanent change in the way they viewed themselves and the world. (According to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the most important factor in recovery for alcoholics is "a deep and genuine religious experience.") Once the individual's rigid notion of himself had been shattered, "extensive emotional reeducation" was much more likely. At this point the Captain took over. By using religious symbols to trigger psychic responses, he attempted to assist the patient in forming a new and healthier frame of reference that would carry over after the drug wore off. Hubbard found that everyone who went through this process seemed to benefit from it. A number of former alcoholics described their recovery as nothing short of "miraculous." Buoyed by these results, the Captain proceeded to establish LSD treatment centers at three major hospitals in Canada, most notably Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, where he resided.
Dr. Humphry Osmond was also working with alcoholics in Saskatchewan, but initially he approached the problem from a different vantage point. Osmond noted that some alcoholics decided to give up the bottle only after they "hit bottom" and suffered the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens. Could a large dose of LSD or mescaline simulate a controlled attack of the DTs? A "model delirium tremens," so to speak, would be considerably less dangerous than the real thing, which normally occurs after years of heavy drinking and often results in death. Osmond's hypothesis was still rooted in the psychotomimetic tradition. But then Hubbard came along and turned the young psychiatrist on to the religious meaning of his "madness mimicking" drug. The Captain showed Osmond how to harness LSD's transcendent potential. Nearly a thousand hard-core alcoholics received high-dose LSD treatment at Weyburn Hospital, and the rate of recovery was significantly higher than for other forms of therapy an astounding 50%.*
* After thirteen years of utilizing this method, Osmond and his colleagues published their findings: "When psychedelic therapy is given to alcoholics, 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."
Osmond and his coworkers considered LSD the most remarkable drug they had ever come across. They saw no reason to restrict their studies to alcoholics. If LSD changed the way sick people looked at the world, would it not have as powerful an effect on others as well? With this in mind Osmond and Hubbard came up with the idea that LSD could be used to transform the belief systems of world leaders and thereby further the cause of world peace. Although few are willing to disclose the details of these sessions, a close associate of Hubbard's insisted that they "affected the thinking of the political leadership of North America." Those said to have participated in the LSD sessions include a prime minister, assistants to heads of state, UN representatives, and members of the British parliament. "My job," said Hubbard, "was to sit on the couch next to the psychiatrist and put the people through it, which I did."
Hubbard's influence on the above-ground research scene went far beyond the numerous innovations he introduced: high-dose therapy, group sessions, enhancing the drug effect with strobe lights, and ESP experiments while under the influence of LSD. His impressive standing among business and political leaders in the United States and Canada enabled him to command large supplies of the hallucinogen, which he distributed freely to friends and researchers at considerable personal expense. "Cost me a couple of hundred thousand dollars," he boasted. "I had six thousand bottles of it to begin with." When Dr. Ross MacLean, the medical director at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, suggested that they form a partnership and set a price for administering LSD, Hubbard would hear nothing of it. For the Captain had "a mission," as he put it, and making money never entered the picture.
Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing North America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still. "People heard about it, and they wanted to try it," he explained. During the 1950's and early 1960's he turned on thousands of people from all walks of life,policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists. "They all thought it was the most marvelous thing," he stated. "And I never saw a psychosis in any one of these cases."
When certain US medical officials complained that Hubbard was not a licensed physician and therefore should not be permitted to administer drugs, the Captain just laughed and bought a doctor's degree from a diploma mill in Kentucky. "Dr." Hubbard had such remarkable credentials that he received special permission from Rome to administer LSD within the context of the Catholic faith. "He had kind of an incredible way of getting that sort of thing," said a close associate who claimed to have seen the papers from the Vatican.
Hubbard's converts included the Reverend J. E. Brown, a Catholic priest at the Cathedral of the Holy Rosary in Vancouver. After his initiation into the psychedelic mysteries. Reverend Brown recommended the experience to members of his parish. In a letter to the faithful dated December 8, 1957, he wrote, "We humbly ask Our Heavenly Mother the Virgin Mary, help of all who call upon Her to aid us to know and understand the true qualities of these psychedelics, the full capacities of man's noblest faculties and according to God's laws to use them for the benefit of mankind here and in eternity." [I mean who knew lol? DC]
Like a molecule at full boil, the Captain moved about at high speeds in all directions. He traveled around the world in his own plane (he was a registered pilot and master of sea vessels), buying up LSD and stashing it, swapping different drugs, and building an underground supply. "I scattered it as I went along," he recalled. With his leather pouch full of "wampum" he rode the circuit, and those on the receiving end were always grateful. "We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue," said Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist.
Dr. Janiger was part of a small circle of scientists and literary figures in the Los Angeles area who began to use psychedelics at social gatherings in the mid-1950's. In addition to Huxley and Gerald Heard, those who participated in these druginspired intellectual discussions included philosopher Alan Watts, deep-sea diver Perry Bivens, and researchers Sidney Cohen, Keith Ditman, and Arthur Chandler. This informal group was the first to use LSD socially rather than clinically. Captain Al Hubbard, the wandering shaman who visited southern California on a regular basis, supplied the group with various chemicals.
"Something had to be done and I tried to do it," Hubbard explained. He was, in his own words, "a catalytic agent" who had a "special, chosen role." While this is certainly an accurate appraisal, he was also another kind of agent an intelligence agent which raises some intriguing questions about what he was really up to.
After his legendary exploits with the O.S.S, the Captain continued to serve as an undercover operative for various agencies within the US government. He had many contacts with the FBI, for example, and he claimed to be a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover's. "That old bugger was tough, really tough," Hubbard said with admiration. But when he tried to turn on the FBI chief, Hoover stubbornly declined. However, the Captain did manage to give the drug to "some top intelligence men in Washington, always with good results."
During the early 1950's Hubbard was asked to join the CIA, but he refused. "They lied so much, cheated so much. I don't like 'em," he snarled. "They're lousy deceivers, sons of the devils themselves." The Captain's beef with the Agency stemmed in part from his unsuccessful attempt to secure back pay owed to him from his O.S.S days. "They crooked me," he complained bitterly.
Hubbard was unkindly disposed toward the CIA for other reasons as well. Most important, he didn't approve of what the Agency was doing with his beloved LSD. "The CIA work stinks," he said. "They were misusing it. I tried to tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you couldn't tell them a goddamned thing." (Hubbard was certain that Frank Olson was not the only person who died as a result of the ClA's surprise acid tests.)
"I don't know how Al's Washington affairs were done," Dr. Osmond admitted. "He was one of those naturally brilliant wheeler-dealers." Indeed, Hubbard seemed to have a knack for popping up in the most unpredictable places. He worked for the Treasury Department as a young man during the Capone days, busting moonshiners and gangsters who were smuggling liquor into the US from Canada. Apparently he was able to ingratiate himself with both sides during Prohibition, as he subsequently became deputy chief of security for the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. "Those Mafia men were always interesting to talk to," Hubbard remarked, "but they never smiled."
The Captain also engaged in undercover work for a number of other government agencies, including the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the Food and Drug Administration (at a time when both organizations were assisting the C.l.A's drug testing programs). During the mid-1960's he was employed by Teledyne, a major defense subcontractor, as "director of human factors research." In this capacity Hubbard served as adviser and consultant to a combined navy and NASA project that involved testing the effects of psychochemical agents on a newly designed "helicopter avionics system." Teledyne worked closely with various government organizations, including the CIA, to apply these techniques to additional areas of military interest.
While Hubbard was not a CIA operative per se, his particular area of expertise hallucinogenic drugs brought him into close contact with elements of the espionage community. The CIA must have known what he was up to, since Sandoz and the FDA kept the Agency informed whenever anyone received shipments of LSD. The Captain, of course, was one of their best customers, having purchased large amounts of the drug on different occasions.
In a sense "the mysterious Al" embodies the irony and ambiguity of the LSD story as a whole. As one of his friends put it, "Cappy was sort of a double agent. He worked for the government, but in his own way he was a rebel." Some call him a "witch doctor," others describe him as "an incurable scoundrel." A most unlikely combination of mystic and redneck, Hubbard above all remains an enigma.
"Al Hubbard was a very strange man," confided a fellow drug researcher, "but he probably knew more about LSD than anyone else in the world." And while his tale has many gaps and fuzzy edges, this much can be established beyond a shadow of a doubt: his enthusiasm for LSD never waned. "Anyone who'll try to tell me that this has all been a big hallucination has got to be out of their mind. What I've seen with it has been the truth and nothing but the truth."
And as a parting shot he added, "If you don't think it's amazing, all I've got to say is just go ahead and try it."
Originally researchers viewed LSD solely in terms of its ability to create an experimental toxic psychosis. The LSD experience was synonymous with LSD psychosis,"good trips" were no exception. This frame of reference, uniformly shared by scientists at the outset of the 1950s, was typified by the comment of a CIA agent involved in the MK-ULTRA program: "Tripping and psychosis are one and the same. Tripping can be an awful schizoid feeling. Also there are hebephrenicsóhappy schizos. Their experience is similar to a good trip."
Within a few years, however, reports with a different message began to circulate from Canada. After meeting Captain Hubbard, a small circle of researchers based in Saskatchewan broke with the psychotomimetic definition and started exploring new directions. Dr. Osmond noticed a significant discrepancy between the usual description of the drug experience as a close encounter with lunacy and the kinds of experiences reported by his patients when they were given LSD for their alcoholic problems. They often spoke of an LSD session as insightful and rewarding. Many subjects invoked superlatives, calling it an experience of great beauty. As the research at Weyburn Hospital progressed, it became apparent to Osmond and his cohorts that most people who took LSD did not become insane.
The terminology used to describe the LSD experience in the scientific literature did not sit well with Osmond. Words like hallucination and psychosis were loaded; they implied negative states of mind. The psychiatric jargon reflected a pathological orientation, whereas a truly objective science would not impose value judgments on chemicals that produced unusual or altered states of consciousness. Aldous Huxley also felt that the language of pathology was inadequate. He and Osmond agreed that a new word had to be invented to encompass the full range of effects of these drugs.
The two men had been close friends ever since Huxley's initial mescaline experience, and they carried on a lively correspondence. At first Huxley proposed the word phanerothyme, which derived from roots relating to "spirit" or "soul." A letter to Osmond included the following couplet:
To which Osmond responded:
And so it came to pass that the word psychedelic was coined. Osmond introduced it
to the psychiatric establishment in 1957. Addressing a meeting of the New York
Academy of Sciences, he argued that hallucinogenic drugs did "much more" than
mimic psychosis, and therefore an appropriate name must "include concepts of
enriching the mind and enlarging the vision." He suggested a neutral term to replace
psychotomimetic, and his choice was certainly vague enough. Literally translated, psychedelic means "mind-manifesting," implying that drugs of this category do not
produce a predictable sequence of events but bring to the fore whatever is latent
within the unconscious. Accordingly Osmond recognized that LSD could be a valuable
tool for psychotherapy. This notion represented a marked departure from the
military-medical paradigm, which held that every LSD experience was automatically
an experimental psychosis.
Dr. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, thought Osmond's choice appropriate, for it "corresponds better to the effects of these drugs than hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic." The model psychosis concept was further called into question by published reports demonstrating that in many ways the comparison between naturally occurring and LSD-induced psychosis was facile. During the mid- 1950's, researchers John MacDonald and James Galvin pointed out that schizophrenics did not experience the wealth of visual hallucinations common with LSD and mescaline but were prone to auditory aberrations, unlike drug subjects. Oddly enough, true schizophrenics hardly reacted to LSD unless given massive doses.
As the psychotomimetic paradigm began to weaken, the focus shifted toward investigating the therapeutic potential of LSD. Two forms of LSD therapy arose in the 1950S. The "psycholytic" or "mind-loosening" approach utilized low or moderate dosages of LSD as an adjunct to conventional psychoanalysis. Employed in repeated sessions, the drug was said to speed up the process of psychoexploration by reducing the patient's defensiveness and facilitating the recollection of repressed memories and traumatic experiences. Stripped of his censorious attitude, the subject might experience a catharsis in a detached and heightened state of awareness, allowing him to retain his insights after the effects of the chemical subsided. The low-dose technique was practiced primarily in England, where Dr. Ronald Sandison established the first LSD clinic open to the public in 1953. Before long, additional centers specializing in this type of therapy sprang up in Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and several Scandinavian countries.
A different approach caught on more quickly in Canada and the United States. Psychedelic therapy, developed by Captain Al Hubbard and popularized by Dr. Humphry Osmond, was geared toward achieving a mystical or conversion experience. The procedure involved high dosages of LSD, precluding any possibility that the patient's ego defenses could withstand psychic dissolution.
According to this therapeutic model, as the drug starts to take effect there is an unfixing of perceptual constants and the subject's habitual reality ties are suspended. It is as though one were suddenly thrust into a Van Gogh canvas; objects ripple and breathe, an onrush of stimuli bombard and penetrate the body. Sensory functions overlap in a manner that might best be described as polymorphously perverse: one can "hear" colors and "see" sounds. The world is felt to be an extension of the flesh. Existence is no longer a riddle to be solved but a mystery to behold.
During the apotheosis of the acid high, the self-concept may be diminished to the point of depersonalization. As poet Octavio Paz describes in Alternating Current, "The self disappears, but no other self appears to occupy the empty space it has left. No god but rather the divine. No faith but rather the primordial feeling that sustains all faith, all hope. Peace in the crater of the volcano, the reconciliation of man what remains of man with total presence."
This state of consciousness was thought to be conducive to healing deep-rooted psychological wounds. The task of the therapist was to help the patient understand and assimilate the experience in a way that would maximize personal growth. Best results were obtained when the therapist shed his "doctor" status and assumed the role of guide or mentor, intervening only to help the initiate relax and "go with the flow." To succeed, the therapist had to be well acquainted with the psychedelic terrain; this familiarity could only be gained by taking the drug and learning to direct a positive experience. (Osmond's Golden Rule: "You start with yourself.") It was not uncommon for a guide to take a small amount of LSD during the therapy session to increase his rapport with his patient.
Originally tested on alcoholics in Canada with remarkable results, high-dose therapy was subsequently applied to a wide range of diagnostic categories: juvenile delinquency, narcotics addiction, severe character neurosis, and the like. This approach was particularly effective in treating people who were emotionally blocked; they were able to cut through a lot of psychological red tape, so to speak, and get right to the heart of the matter. Oftentimes those who underwent psychedelic therapy reported dramatic personality changes involving not only the relief of neurotic symptoms but a wholesale revamping of value systems, religious and philosophical beliefs, and basic life-style. Numerous patients claimed that a few LSD trips proved more fruitful than years of psychoanalysis at considerably less expense. In some cases spectacular success was achieved with only one dose of the drug.
LSD was the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the late 1950's as
various movie stars were dosed on the psychiatrist's couch. Participants in such
sessions included several of the glamour elite, each capable of generating a flash of
publicity. Cary Grant first took LSD under the guidance of Dr. Mortimer Hartmann
and then with Dr. Oscar Janiger. His therapy was such a success that he became a
zealous missionary for LSD. "All my life," Grant stated, "I've been searching for
peace of mind. I'd explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at
mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment." People from all walks of life echoed Grant's plaudits for the drug, and psychiatrists
who practiced LSD therapy were inundated with inquiries.
Beatific, oceanic, redemptive these words have been used to describe the peak of an LSD trip. But there is another side to it. To be cast about as flotsam in the power draughts of the universe can be a hellish as well as a heavenly ordeal. Both possibilities are rooted in the experience of depersonalization or ego loss. The CIA was not interested in the therapeutic applications of LSD. On the contrary, the men of ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA defined the drug as an anxiety-producing agent, and they realized it would be relatively easy to "break" a person who was exposed to highly stressful stimuli while high on acid. As one CIA document instructed, "[Whatever] reduces integrative capacity may serve to increase the possibility of an individual being overwhelmed by frustrations and conflicts hitherto managed successfully." The powerful ego-shattering effects of LSD were ideally suited for this purpose. CIA and military interrogators proceeded to utilize the drug as an instrument of psychological torture.
That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non- drug factors play an important role in determining the subject's response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature; the enormous range of experiences produced by the chemical stems from differences in (1) the character structure and attitudinal predispositions (or "set") of the subject, and (2) the immediate situation (or "setting"). If LSD is given in a relaxed and supportive environment and the subject is coached beforehand, the experience can be intensely gratifying. As Dr. Janiger put it, "LSD favors the prepared mind."
For the unprepared mind, however, LSD can be a nightmare. When the drug is administered in a sterile laboratory under fluorescent lights by white-coated physicians who attach electrodes and nonchalantly warn the subject that he will go crazy for a while, the odds favor a psychotomimetic reaction, or "bummer."
This became apparent to poet Allen Ginsberg when he took LSD for the first time at
the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, in 1959. Ginsberg was already
familiar with psychedelic substances, having experimented with peyote on a number
of occasions. As yet, however, there was no underground supply of LSD, and it was
virtually impossible for layfolk to procure samples of the drug. Thus he was pleased
when Gregory Bateson,*
the anthropologist, put him in touch with a team of doctors
in Palo Alto. Ginsberg had no way of knowing that one of the researchers associated
with the institute, Dr. Charles Savage, had conducted hallucinogenic drug
experiments for the US Navy in the early 1950's.
* Formerly a member of the Research and Analysis Branch of the O.S.S, 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
The experiment was conducted in a small room full of medical equipment and EEG machines, with no outer windows. Ginsberg was advised that he could listen to whatever music he wanted, so he chose Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and a recording of Gertrude Stein. "For some reason," he recalled, "I thought you were supposed to lie down like in a hospital on a psychiatrist's couch and let something slowly engulf you, which is what happened. I lay down and something slowly engulfed me." As he started getting high, Ginsberg was put through a series of psychological tests word association, Rorschach inkblots, arithmetic problems which struck him as quite absurd at the time. "What difference does it make?" he kept asking the attendants. While they measured his psychological responses, the poet having read Huxley was waiting for God to show up inside his brain.
When it came time for the EEG tests, Ginsberg proposed a rather unusual experiment that had been suggested by his friend William S. Burroughs. He wanted to see what would happen if he looked at a stroboscope blinking in synchronization with his alpha rhythms while he was high on acid. The doctors connected the flicker machine to the EEG apparatus so that the alpha waves emanating from his brain set off the strobe effect. "It was like watching my own inner organism," said Ginsberg. "There was no distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery around me. I began thinking that if I let this go on, something awful would happen. I would be absorbed into the electrical network grid of the entire nation. Then I began feeling a slight crackling along the hemispheres of my skull. I felt my soul being sucked out through the light into the wall socket and going out."
Ginsberg had had enough. He asked the doctors to turn the flicker machine off, but the "high anxiety" lingered. The clinical atmosphere of the laboratory made it hard for him to relax. As the trip wore on, he got deeper and deeper into a tangle: "I had the impression that I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web, and that the spider was slowly coming to get me, and that the spider was God or the Devil I wasn't sure but I was the victim. I thought I was trapped in a giant web or network of forces beyond my control that were perhaps experimenting with me or were perhaps from another planet or were from some super-government or cosmic military or science-fiction Big Brother."
Ginsberg spent the evening at the home of Dr. Joe Adams, the man who supervised the experiment. He retired to his room and tried to describe his first acid trip. While still high, he composed the poem "Lysergic Acid," which begins with the following incantation:
It might appear that such ordeals amounted to a ravaging of the soul rather than its
redemption. But Ginsberg thought otherwise. He and the other poets and artists
associated with the beat generation sampled a veritable pharmacopoeia of different
drugs in various dosages and combinations, and publicly extolled their virtues. They
too viewed psychedelics as "truth drugs," but unlike the CIA they were not
attempting to control someone else's mind. Rather, they used these substances to
assert their creative autonomy. Most of all, the beats wanted to speak the truth
about their lives. While the CIA prowled around in secret and hoarded information, the beats were open and candid about their chemically illumined voyages. Intoxicated states were the keystone of beat literature, and they chronicled their
insights in poetry and prose. Occasionally they tripped together in small groups and
later compared notes on how best to approach a psychedelic session. The beats were
mapping uncharted zones of the human psyche, an effort Ginsberg likened to "being
part of a cosmic conspiracy to resurrect a lost art or a lost knowledge or a lost
consciousness."
The beats' drug shamanism was bound up with romantic excess. In the midst of the spiritual blackout of the Cold War they searched for a "final fix" that would afford the vision of all visions. Their affinity for psychedelics reflected as much a desire to escape from a world they found unbearable as to tap the hidden realms of the psyche. Drugs were instrumental in catalyzing their rebellion against the overwhelming conformity of American culture. The beats had nothing but contempt for the strictures of a society anally fixated on success, cleanliness, and material possession. Whatever the mainstream tried to conceal, denigrate, or otherwise purge from experience, the beats flaunted. Their hunger for new sensations led them to seek transcendence through jazz, marijuana, Buddhist meditation, and the frenetic pace of the hip lifestyle.
It was the beats who railed most forcefully against the ghostly reserve of the 1950's. They understood that the problem was largely social in nature, but it was so extreme that the only sensible response was to become antisocial, to retreat into small groups or cabals of like-minded individuals and pursue radical options outside the cultural norm. The beats were pitchmen for another kind of consciousness. They encouraged the youth of America to take their first groping steps toward a psychological freedom from convention that opened the door to all manner of chemical experimentation. The beats bequeathed an inquisitive attitude, a precocious "set" for approaching the drug experience. As cultural expatriates they linked psychedelics to a tiny groundswell of nonconformity that would grow into a mass rebellion during the next decade.
* 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
While some interesting and highly original works of art have been produced during the acid high, the creative effects of LSD cannot be measured solely in terms of immediate artistic output. Even more important is the enlargement of vision, the acute awareness of vaster potentials that persists long after the drug has worn off. Janiger's subjects frequently commented on the affinity between the drug-induced state and "what they felt might be an essential matrix from which the imaginative process derives." Author William Burroughs, who experimented with hallucinogens on his own, agreed with this assessment: "Under the influence of mescaline I have had the experience of seeing a painting for the first time, and I found later that I could see the painting without using the drug. The same insights into music or the exposure to a powerful consciousness-expanding drug often conveys a permanent increase in the range of experience. Mescaline transports the user to unexplored psychic areas, and he can often find the way back without a chemical guide."
The suggestion that LSD might enhance creativity was vigorously disputed by certain studies purporting to measure the impairment of normal mental functioning during the drugged state. The discrepancy between these studies and the personal testimony of the artists themselves underscored the shortcomings of the scientific modus operand!, which relied primarily on performance and aptitude tests and the like. In the end such tests yielded a morass of nebulous and contradictory data that shed little light on the psychological action of psychedelic agents. Dr. Osmond spoke for a growing number of researchers when he wrote, "Our preoccupation with behavior, because it is measurable, has led us to assume that what can be measured must be valuable and vice versa . An emphasis on the measurable and the reductive has resulted in the limitation of interest by psychiatrists to aspects of experience that fit in with this concept." According to Osmond, the most important features of the LSD experience the overwhelming beauty, the awe and wonder, the existential challenge, the creative and therapeutic insights would inevitably elude the scientist who viewed them merely as "epiphenomena of 'objective' happenings."
The so-called objectivist approach was inherently flawed not only because it sought to quantify creative experience but also because it ignored the input of the observer, which always influenced the results of an LSD experiment. An acid high was a state of heightened suggestibility and acute sensitivity to environmental cues. The subject's response was therefore largely influenced by the expectations of the person administering the drug. If the scientist viewed the LSD experience as essentially "psychotic," he unwittingly contributed to this type of response, both through implicit suggestion and because he was not equipped to assist the subject in interpreting the altered state of consciousness. Under these circumstances a paranoid response with serious long-range repercussions was not uncommon. Such results, in turn, led to overgeneralization, to the point where the drug was defined as a stress-inducing agent.
The notion that LSD could be used to treat psychological problems seemed downright absurd to certain scientists in light of the drug's long-standing identification with the simulation of mental illness. Those who operated within the psychotomimetic framework did not recognize that extra pharmacological variables inadequate preparation, negative expectations, poorly managed sessions were responsible for the adverse effects mistakenly attributed to the specific action of the drug. (According to the model psychosis scenario, there was really nothing to manage; just dose them and take the reaction.) They were appalled to learn that some psychotherapists were actually taking LSD with their patients. This was strictly taboo to the behaviorist, who refused to experiment on himself on the grounds that it would impair his ability to remain completely objective.
The chasm between the two schools of thought was not due to a communications breakdown or a lack of familiarity with the drug. The different methodologies were rooted in conflicting ideological frameworks. Behaviorism was still anchored in the materialist world view formalized by Newton; the "psychedelic" evidence was congruent with the revolutionary implications of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The belief in scientific objectivity had been shaken in 1927 when physicist Wemer Heisenberg enunciated the "uncertainty principle," which held that in subatomic physics the observer inevitably influenced the movement of the particles being observed. LSD research and many other types of studies suggested that an uncertainty principle of sorts was operative in psychology as well, in that the results were conditioned by the investigator's preconceptions. The "pure" observer was an illusion, and those who thought they could conduct an experiment without "contaminating" the results were deceiving themselves.
Aldous Huxley felt that the "scientific" approach was utterly hopeless. "Those idiots want to be Pavlovians," he said, "[but] Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The 'scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics." The practitioners of psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, were cognizant of the complex interaction between set and setting, and they worked to facilitate insight and personal growth.
Of course, even the best set and setting could not always guarantee an easy, pleasant, or uncomplicated experience. The goal of a therapeutic session was not to have a "good trip" per se but to work through emotional, creative or intellectual blockages and further the process of self-discovery an ordeal that could be very painful at times. Certain schools of psychiatry R. D. Laing, for example recognized that "freaking out" might actually herald a positive breakthrough to a new level of awareness if properly integrated by the patient.* The idea that a turbulent acid trip could have therapeutic consequences reflected an ancient understanding of the human psyche and the principles governing the healing process.
* 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
The "perilous passing" through the chaotic realm of the bummer was structured into the drug rituals of primitive societies as part of the sacred "vision-quest." The key figure in the hallucinogenic drama was the shaman, the witch doctor, the medicine man (or woman, as was often the case) who gave song to dreams and provided spiritual access for the entire tribe. A connoisseur of the drug-induced trance state, the shaman derived his or her strength from confronting the terror of ego death the quintessential trial by fire that was seen as a necessary prelude to an ecstatic rebirth, the resurrection of a new personality.
The drug experience informed every aspect of life in traditional cultures. With the aid of hallucinogenic plants the witch doctor cured the sick, communicated with the spirits of the dead, foretold the future, and initiated young people in coming-of-age rites. The use of mind-altering substances within an ethos of combat and aggression was also common in primitive communities. Whatever the specific purpose, the shaman always employed the hallucinogen in a ceremonial context. An elaborate set of rituals governed every step of the process, from gathering the roots and herbs to preparing and administering the brew. The power plants were often poisonous and could be fatal if not prepared properly. Only a ritually clean person who had endured weeks or months of prayer and fasting, often in isolation from the community, was deemed ready to ingest these substances. Because of the shaman's familiarity with states of consciousness induced by hallucinogenic drugs, he or she was considered qualified to pilot others through the experience.
"Primitive man," wrote Huxley in 1931, "explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered." To Huxley, the urge for transcendence and visionary experience was nothing less than a biological imperative. "Always and everywhere," he asserted, "human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in the Wordsworthian phrase, 'far more deeply interfused.' I live, yet not I, but wine or opium or peyote or hashish liveth in me. To go beyond the insulated self is such a liberation that, even when self-transcendence is through nausea into frenzy, through cramps into hallucinations and coma, the drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as intrinsically divine."
The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet (with the possible exception of certain Eskimo and Polynesian communities). For the Aztecs there was peyote and ololiuqui, a small lentil-like seed containing lysergic acid; the Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri, a desert shrub; the natives of the Upper Amazon had yage, the telepathic vine. Those who floated into a sacred space after ingesting these substances often projected ecstatic qualities onto the plants themselves. Certain scholars believe that the fabled Soma of the ancient Vedic religion in northern India was actually the fly agaric mushroom, and there is strong evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived, was the mysterious kykeon used for over two thousand years by the ancient Greeks in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries.*
* In The Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hermann, 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 kykeonóa 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.
When Christianity was adopted as the official creed of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, all other religions, including the Mysteries, were banished. Christian propagandists called for the destruction of the pagan drug cults that had spread throughout Europe after the Roman conquest. Like its shamanistic forebears, paganism was rooted in rapture rather than faith or doctrine; its mode of expression was myth and ritual, and those who carried on the forbidden traditions possessed a vast storehouse of knowledge about herbs and special medicaments. The witches of the Middle Ages concocted brews with various hallucinogenic compounds belladonna, thorn apple, henbane and bufotenine (derived from the sweat gland of the toad Bufo marinus)and when the moon was full they flew off on their imaginary broomsticks to commune with spirits.+
+ 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."
The ruthless suppression of European witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition coincided with attempts to stamp out indigenous drug use among the colonized natives of the New World. The Spanish outlawed peyote and coca leaves in the America's, and the British later tried to banish kava use in Tahiti. Such edicts were part of an imperialist effort to impose a new social order that stigmatized the psychedelic experience as a form of madness or possession by evil spirits. It wasn't until the late eighteenth century that industrial civilization produced its own "devil's advocate," which spoke in a passionate and lyrical voice. The romantic rebellion signified "a return of the repressed" as drugs were embraced by the visionary poets and artists who lived as outcasts in their own society. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, catalyzed the literary talents of Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the best-known French writers, including Baudelaire, de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, gathered at Le Club des Haschischins, a proto-bohemian enclave in Paris founded by Theophile Gautier in 1844.*
* 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
For the visionary poets modem society was the bummer, and they often viewed the drug experience as a tortured means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human. It was with the hope of alleviating his own tortured mental condition that Antonin Artaud made an intercontinental trek in the 1930's to participate in the peyote ritual of the Tarahumara Indians in the Mexican highlands. Artaud did not undertake such a risky journey as a tourist or an anthropologist but as someone who wished to be healed, as a spiritual exile seeking to regain "a Truth which the world of Europe is losing." The desperate Frenchman experienced a monumental bummer "the cataclysm which was my body this dislocated assemblage, this piece of damaged geology." Yet somehow, despite the nightmare visions and the somatic discomfort, he managed to scratch out a perception of the Infinite. "Once one has experienced a visionary state of mind," Artaud wrote in The Peyote Dance, "one can no longer confuse the lie with truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from this reality."
Like Artaud and the romantic poets, some psychiatrists who used LSD in a therapeutic context believed that a disruptive experience could have a curative effect if allowed to proceed to resolution. Many other researchers, however, dismissed transcendental insight as either "happy psychosis" or a lot of nonsense. The kneejerk reaction on the part of the psychotomimetic stalwarts was indicative of a deeply ingrained prejudice against certain varieties of experience. In advanced industrial societies "paranormal" states of consciousness are readily disparaged as "abnormal" or pathological. Such attitudes, cultural as much as professional, played a crucial role in circumscribing the horizon of scientific investigation into hallucinogenic agents.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argues that the scientist's overriding need to make sense of his data compels him to mold it to the prevailing scientific paradigm, which defines "legitimate" problems and methods for a given historical era. There are moments, however, when the orthodox framework cannot bear the weight of irrefutable new evidence. A period of controversy ensues until a new paradigm emerges to encompass and transcend the previous ideology. During this transition period scientists who buck the status quo are often castigated as eccentric, irresponsible, and unscientific. Galileo, for example, was branded a lunatic and a heretic for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. In a similar fashion the psychedelic evidence challenged the entrenched world view of the psychiatric establishment, and proponents of LSD therapy were summarily denounced and ridiculed by those who were fixated on the model psychosis concept.
Dr. Humphry Osmond defended his position by emphasizing that the pathological bias, from a historical perspective, was clearly the exception and not the rule. In many cultures that were less sophisticated technologically but more so ecologically, the drug-induced trance state was revered as an enlargement of reality rather than a deviation from it. Osmond pleaded with his fellow researchers not to dismiss something that struck them as unusual or different simply because "it transcends those fashionable ruts of thinking that we dignify by calling logic and reason." He urged psychiatrists to change their outlook in order to realize the full potential of psychedelics.
While many young doctors rallied to his call, there were others, including certain influential scientists working under CIA and military contract, who refused to budge from the psychotomimetic posture. The debate between the two camps came to a head at the first international conference on LSD therapy in 1959. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (at times a CIA conduit), it was perhaps the most important gathering of LSD researchers to date for it enabled workers in the field to compare notes and analyze their findings as a group. The conference was chaired by Dr. Paul Hoch, a prominent and well-connected scientist who was, in the words of Sanford Unger, "an opinion leader." Hoch was also a longtime CIA consultant and a contract employee of the US Army Chemical Corps. Dr. Harold Abramson, a veteran of the CIAís MK-ULTRA program, served as recording secretary, and a number of other scientists who rented their services to the CIA and the military were featured speakers. Hoch and Abramson did not just stumble into their respective roles at this event. Their status as dominant figures in aboveground LSD research suggests the extent to which covert interests influenced the course of the debate over hallucinogenic substances and their effects.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary Dr. Hoch stubbornly insisted that LSD and mescaline were "essentially anxiety-producing drugs." He asserted that they were "not especially useful" in a therapeutic context because they disorganize the psychic integration of a person. LSD experiments, according to the chairman, could not be compared with "results obtained in patients where tranquilizing drugs were used to reduce, instead of stir up the patient's symptoms."
Dr. Hoch was incredulous when other participants in the Macy conference reported that their patients found the LSD session beneficial and personally rewarding and were usually eager to take the drug again. "In my experience," Hoch announced, "no patient asks for it again." His experience included the following mescaline experiment conducted on a thirty-six-year-old male diagnosed as a "pseudoneurotic schizophrenic."
He had some visual hallucinations. He saw dragons and tigers coming to eat him and reacted to these hallucinations with marked anxiety. He also had some illusionary distortions of the objects in the room. The emotional changes were apprehension and fearóat times mounting to panic, persecutory misinterpretation of the environment, fear of death, intense irritability, suspiciousness, perplexity, and feelings of depersonalization. He verbalized the feelings of depersonalization as "floating out of space," seemed "between this life and the next," and had the feeling of being born. The paranoid content concerned essentially why the doctors were taking notes and fear that he would be attacked by them. He also expressed an ecstatic grandiose trend of having the feeling that he was God in heaven and then, however, had the feeling of being in hell . The mental picture was that of a typical schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted.
As an afterword, Hoch noted, "This patient received transorbital lobotomy and showed temporarily a marked improvement in all his symptoms, losing most of his tension and anxiety. Postoperatively he was again placed under mescaline. Basically the same manifestations were elicited as prior to the operation with the exception that quantitatively the symptoms were not as marked as before."
Dr. Hoch also tried electroshock treatment on patients who had been given mescaline. "It did not influence the clinical symptoms at all," he reported matter-of factly. "The patients continued to behave in the same way as prior to electroshock treatment." On the basis of these tests Hoch concluded that electroshock "has no influence on mescaline-produced mental states." He might have revised his "objective" assessment if he had taken the drug himself and had one of his assistants apply the volts while he tripped the lights fantastic. But those who secretly funded his research required only that he dish it out to mental patients and prisoners.
"An interesting theory can always outrun a set of facts," declared psychologist Audrey Holliday. She found the whole psychotomimetic approach guilty of using "unscientific and intemperate terms." Yet the semantic inaccuracies were still being bandied about even when most researchers had agreed that LSD did not really mimic endogenous schizophrenia.
Despite widespread acknowledgment that the model psychosis concept had outlived its usefulness, the psychiatric orientation articulated by those of Dr. Hoch's persuasion prevailed in the end. When it came time to lay down their hand, the medical establishment and the media both "mimicked" the line that for years had been secretly promoted by the CIA and the military that hallucinogenic drugs were extremely dangerous because they drove people insane, and all this talk about creativity and personal growth was just a lot of hocus pocus. This perception of LSD governed the major policy decisions enacted by the FDA and the drug control apparatus in the years ahead.
Henry Luce, president of Time-Life, was a busy man during the Cold War. As the
preeminent voice of Eisenhower, Dulles, and Pax Americana, he encouraged his
correspondents to collaborate with the CIA, and his publishing empire served as a
longtime propaganda asset for the Agency. But Luce managed to find the time to
experiment with LSD not for medical reasons, but simply to experience the drug
and glean whatever pleasures and insights it might afford. An avid fan of
psychedelics, he turned on a half-dozen times in the late 1950's and early 1960's
under the supervision of Dr. Sidney Cohen. On one occasion the media magnate
claimed he talked to God on the golf course and found that the Old Boy was pretty
much on top of things. During another trip the tone-deaf publisher is said to have
heard music so enchanting that he walked into a cactus garden and began
conducting a phantom orchestra.
Dr. Cohen, attached professionally to UCLA and the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles, also turned on Henry's wife, Clare Boothe Luce, and a number of other influential
Americans. "Oh, sure, we all took acid. It was a creative group my husband and I
and Huxley and (Christopher] Isherwood," recalled Mrs. Luce, who was, by all
accounts, the grande dame of postwar American politics. (More recently she served
as a member of President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which
oversees covert operations conducted by the CIA.) LSD was fine by Mrs. Luce as long
as it remained strictly a drug for the doctors and their friends in the ruling class. But
she didn't like the idea that others might also want to partake of the experience. "We
wouldn't want everyone doing too much of a good thing," she explained.
By this time, however, psychedelic drugs already had a certain notoriety, largely due to favorable reports in Luce's publishing outlets. In May 1957 Life magazine ran a story on the discovery of the "magic mushroom" as part of its Great Adventure series. Written by R. Gordon Wasson, the seventeen-page spread, complete with color photos, was laudatory in every way. Wasson, a vice-president of J. P. Morgan and Company, pursued a lifelong interest in mushrooms as a personal hobby. He and his wife, Valentina, journeyed all over the world, treading a unique path through the back roads of history in an effort to learn about the role of toadstools in primitive societies. Their travels took them to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they met a medicine woman who agreed to serve them teonanacati, or "God's flesh," as the divine mushrooms were called. As he chewed the bitter fungus, Wasson was determined to resist its effects so as to better observe the ensuing events. But as he explained to the readers of Life, his resolve "soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms."
We were never more awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. They evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.
The visions lasted through the night as Wasson lay on the floor of a tiny hut enraptured by God's flesh. "For the first time," he wrote, "the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind."
Wasson's account constituted nothing less than a journalistic breakthrough. A mass audience was introduced to the mysterious world of chemical hallucinogens, and soon hundreds of people started flocking to Mexico to find their own curandero. At the same time Dr. Albert Hofmann conducted a chemical analysis of the divine mushroom at Sandoz Laboratories. He extracted the active ingredients and synthesized a new compound: psilocybin. Upon learning of Hofmann's achievement, the CIA immediately procured samples from Sandoz and forwarded the material to Dr. Harris Isbell at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital, where it was tested on drug addicts.
Among those whose interest was piqued by Wasson's article in Life was a young
professor named Timothy Leary. At the time of Wasson's groundbreaking
explorations, Leary was pursuing a successful career as a clinical psychologist. Between 1954 and 1959 he was director of clinical research and psychology at the
Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. He published extensively in
scientific journals and established himself as a rising star in the field of behavioral
psychology. He wrote a widely acclaimed psychology textbook and devised a
personality test called ""The Leary," which was used by the CIA, among other
organizations, to test prospective employees.
Leary's work culminated in an appointment as a lecturer at Harvard University, where students and professors had for years served as guinea pigs for CIA- and military-funded LSD experiments. His first semester at Harvard was relatively quiet compared to what lay in store; he taught his classes and collaborated on another psychology textbook. While all seemed well outwardly, Leary was beginning to have second thoughts about the career he had charted for himself in the charmed circle of academe. He was mired in a mid-life crisis stemming from two failed marriages; his first wife had committed suicide. The turning point came in the summer of 1960 while Leary, then thirty-nine years old, was vacationing at a sunny villa in Cuernavaca, Mexico. A friend procured a handful of magic mushrooms from an old Indian woman, and after a bit of prodding Leary washed them down with a few slugs of Carta Blanca. At the time Leary had not even smoked marijuana. Like many who experimented with psychedelics, he found that his first trip had a profound impact on his way of viewing the world. "It was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life," he wrote later. "I discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil all lie inside my body, outside my mind." The transcendent implications of that initial journey into inner space convinced him that the normal mind was a "static, repetitive circuit." Leary reevaluated his task as a psychologist; from then on he would dedicate his efforts to exploring substances that hinted at other realities and a new conception of the human psyche.
Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality Assessments section of the O.S.S during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance. Leary had obtained a supply from Sandoz, which distributed the new drug to researchers free of charge.
Among those most impressed by Leary's research project was Richard Alpert, an
assistant professor of education and psychology at Harvard. He and Leary became
partners and together set out to investigate the emotional and creative effects of the
mushroom pill. At first glance they were an unlikely, team, given their contrasting
personalities. Alpert, the son of a wealthy New England lawyer, was ten years
younger and obsessed with "making it" in the academic world. He seemed to be well
on his way, having acquired all the accoutrements of successóthe sports car, the
cashmere sweaters, the cocktail parties, a faculty post at a prestigious university. The last thing Alpert wanted was to rock the boat and jeopardize his career.
Leary, on the other hand, always had a rebellious streak in him. His mother had dreams of his being a priest, and his father wanted him to become a career military officer. Neither wish came true. Leary passed up an opportunity to attend a Catholic seminary and dropped out of West Point after committing a rules infraction that led to the "silent treatment" (a form of ostracism) by the other cadets for nine months. He later enrolled at Alabama University to study psychology, only to be expelled for getting caught in a girls' dormitory. After a brief stint in the service Leary resumed his psychological studies, earning a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. And now he was ready for another tussle with the establishment. In his own words Leary was "handsome, clean-cut, witty, confident, charismatic, and in that inert culture unusually creative."
While drawing up plans for a psilocybin experiment, Leary and Alpert consulted two essays by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. By coincidence Huxley was in the area as a visiting lecturer at MIT. The elderly scholar was brought into the project, first as an adviser and then as a participant in a psilocybin experiment. He and Leary took the drug together, and after the session they spoke about what to do with this "philosopher's stone." Huxley felt the best way to bring about vast changes in society was to offer the experience to the talented, the well-born, the intelligent rich, and others in positions of influence.
When Dr. Humphry Osmond passed through Boston, Huxley took him to meet Leary. It was the night of the Kennedy election. "We rode out to his place," Osmond remembered, "and Timothy was wearing his gray-flannel suit and his crew cut. And we had a very interesting discussion with him. That evening after we left, Huxley said, 'What a nice fellow he is!' And then he remarked how wonderful it was to think that this was where it was going to be done at Harvard. He felt that psychedelics would be good for the Academy. Whereupon I replied, 'I think he's a nice fellow, too. But don't you think he's just a little bit square?' Aldous replied, 'You may well be right. Isn't that, after all, what we want?'"
Leary was a relative latecomer to the psychedelic research scene, but right from the start he and his cohorts made no bones about where they were coming from. "We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness," Leary asserted. "We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia nor the visionary state as model psychosis."
The first formal experiment conducted by Leary's group was a pioneering venture in criminal psychology. Psilocybin was given to thirty-two inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security prison, to determine whether the drug would help prisoners change their ways, thereby lowering the recidivism rate. At least one member of Leary's research team took psilocybin with the prisoners while another observer stayed straight for the entire session. The pilot study proved successful in the short term; only 25% of those who took the drug ended up in jail again, as compared to the normal rate of 80%.
Leary's research methodology was quite different from that of the ClA's Dr. Harris Isbell, who administered various hallucinogens, including psilocybin and LSD, to inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital. Some were kept high for six weeks at a stretch. These studies were not designed to rehabilitate criminals; on the contrary, Isbell and the CIA were interested in drugging people to gather more data on the disruptive potential of mind-altering substances. Leary rejected this manipulative approach, believing that research should be conducted with subjects rather than on them. All of the Concord inmates were briefed beforehand on the effects of the drug, and Leary encouraged his test subjects to provide input and criticism during every phase of the experiment.
Another aspect of Leary's research focused on the relationship between drug-induced and naturally occurring religious experiences. In an unusual experiment he sought to determine whether the transcendent experiences reported during psychedelic sessions were similar to the mystical experiences described in various holy scriptures and reported by saints, prophets, and religious teachers throughout the ages. Although university officials refused to sponsor the experiment, Leary and his assistant, Walter Pahnke, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, proceeded to administer psilocybin to ten theology students and professors in the setting of a Good Friday service, while ten others were given placebos. It was a "double-blind" experiment in that neither Leary nor his subjects knew who was getting the mushroom pill and who was part of the control group. The results of the study were dramatic. Nine out of ten psilocybin recipients reported having an intense religious experience, but only one person from the control group could say the same. In his doctoral dissertation Pahnke concluded that the experiences described by those who had taken the drug were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with" the classical mystical experience.
"The Miracle at Marsh Chapel," as the Good Friday experiment came to be known, generated a highly charged discussion concerning the authenticity of "chemical" or "instant" mysticism. Some religious scholars, such as Walter Houston Clark, professor of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, supported Leary's contention that with the proper set and setting psychedelics could be used to produce mystical states of consciousness almost at will. These drugs were said to offer not only a means for enhancing spiritual sensitivity; they also opened up the possibility of bringing the religious experience into the laboratory, where it could be scrutinized and perhaps even explained in scientific terms.
This prospect was not greeted with hosannas by orthodox religious teachers, who denigrated the drug experience as a less genuine form of revelation. Psychedelic advocates countered that the apparent ease with which the mystical experience could be triggered by drugs did not negate its spiritual validity. On the contrary, they believed that the high incidence of drug-related religious phenomena, even in cases where an exceptional set and setting were lacking, stemmed from the fact that on a fundamental level the human mind is connected with the Infinite; psychedelics simply made manifest this basic truth. According to Leary, the personal background of the subject did not matter. "You can be a convict or a college professor," he declared. "You'll still have a mystical, transcendental experience that may change your life."
In December 1960 Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky arrived at Leary's house in
Newton. Although Ginsberg was a veteran of psychedelic trips, he had never tried
psilocybin, so when the opportunity presented itself he and Orlovsky jumped at it. The environment provided by Leary was much more congenial than the research
institute in Palo Alto where Ginsberg had taken LSD the previous year. After
swallowing the mushroom pills, Ginsberg became slightly nauseous, but his initial
queasiness subsided as the drug took command of his being. He and Orlovsky were
completely overwhelmed. They took off their clothes and padded around the house, a supernatural gleam in their eyes. Ginsberg was inundated by a rush of messianic
feelings. "We're going to teach people to stop hating . Start a peace and love
movement," he triumphantly proclaimed. There he stood in Leary's living room, a
squinting prophet (he had removed his spectacles) ready to march through the
streets stark naked and preach the coming of a new age.
Leary was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of one of his test subjects
wandering around in public without any clothes in the middle of the winter. He
convinced Ginsberg this was not the best tactic. But the beat poet was still full of
fire. He wanted to get Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Mao Tse-tung on the phone in a
cosmic rap session that would rid them of their petty hangups about warfare. This
being impractical, he decided to call Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, the bible
of the beat generation. Kerouac was then living with his mother in Northport, Massachusetts. When the operator came on the line, Ginsberg identified himself as
God wanting to talk to Kerouac. He repeated his name, spelling it out: G-O-D. When
he realized he didn't have Kerouac's number, he shuffled through his address book
and tried again. This time he reached Kerouac and insisted that he take the
mushroom pills. "I can't leave my mother," Kerouac replied. Ginsberg urged him to
bring his mother. Kerouac said he'd take a rain check.
As Ginsberg and Orlovsky were coming down from the six-hour psilocybin high, they put on robes and sat around the kitchen table sipping steamed milk and talking with Leary about the pills. Ginsberg had some forthright ideas about what to do with the synthetic mushroom. As far as he was concerned, psilocybin had vast implications far beyond the world of medicine; psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind and ushering in a new millennium and therefore no one had the right to keep them from the average citizen.
Whereas Huxley had suggested turning on opinion leaders, Ginsberg, the quintessential egalitarian, wanted everyone to have the opportunity to take mind- expanding drugs. His plan was to tell everything, to disseminate as much information as possible. The time was ripe to launch a psychedelic crusade and what better place to start than Harvard University, the alma mater of president-elect John F. Kennedy? Leary seemed ideally suited to lead such a campaign. A respected academic, he had short hair, wore button-down shirts, and took his role as a scientist quite seriously. How ironic, Ginsberg noted, "that the very technology stereotyping our consciousness and desensitizing our perceptions should throw up its own antidote . Given such historic Comedy, who should emerge from Harvard University but the one and only Dr. Leary, a respectable human being, a worldly man faced with the task of a Messiah."
Ginsberg's vision of a historic movement that would transform human consciousness struck a responsive chord in Leary. "We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard," the LSD doctor recalled, "believing that it was time (after the shallow and nostalgic fifties) for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed; knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, and that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum." Leary felt that the limited vision of reality prevailing in modem society was partly attributable to the dominant drugs, alcohol and coffee. Change the drugs, and a change of heart would naturally follow: "Politics, religion, economics, social structure, are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical."
The task that lay before them was formidable. Ginsberg pulled out his little black address book and began reeling off the names of people they could turn on: painters, poets, publishers, musicians, and so on. In addition to being one of the most important poets of his time, Ginsberg was a cultural ambassador of sorts. He traveled in various circles, and his contacts were international in scope. He would carry the message to everyone he knew.
Ginsberg was off and running. He returned to New York armed with a stash of
psilocybin. At the Five Spot in Greenwich Village he gave the mushroom pills to
Theolonius Monk, the great jazz pianist. A few days later Ginsberg dropped by
Monk's apartment to check on the results. Monk peered out from behind a crack in
the door, smiled, and asked if he had anything stronger. Ginsberg also turned on
Dizzy Gillespie, who was evidently quite pleased by the gesture. "Oh yeah," he
laughed, "anything that gets you high."
In a sense it was Ginsberg's way of returning a historical favor; the jazz musicians had given marijuana to the beats, and now the beats were turning the jazz cats on to psychedelics. Word of the new drugs spread quickly through the jazz scene, and numerous musicians, including many of the preeminent players in the field, experimented with psychedelics in the early 1960s. John Coltrane, the acknowledged master of the tenor saxophone, took LSD and reported upon returning from his inner voyage that he "perceived the interrelationship of all life forms."
It was through Ginsberg that the existence of Leary's research project came to the attention of the beat network. When Neal Cassady heard about the mushroom pills he bolted up to Cambridge for a session with the professor. "It's philosophical!" Cassady exclaimed. "This is the Rolls Royce of dope, the ultimate high." Kerouac arranged to sample the mushroom extract without leaving his mother. A "Dear Coach" letter from Kerouac to Leary described his experience tripping at her house on the day President Kennedy was inaugurated.
Mainly I felt like a floating Khan on a magic carpet with my interesting lieutenants and gods . We were at the extremist point goofing on clouds watching the movie of existence . Everybody seemed innocent. It was a definite Satori. Full of psychic clairvoyance (but you must remember that this is not half as good as the peaceful ecstasy of simple Samadhi trance as I described it in Dharma Bums) . The faculty of remembering names and what one has learned is heightened so fantastically that we could develop the greatest scholars and scientists in the world with this stuff.
The letter was signed, "Well, okay. Touch football sometime?"
Another writer Ginsberg brought into Leary's circle was the poet Charles Olson, formerly rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. A man of overpowering intellect, Olson was fifty years old at the time of his psychedelic initiation. He stood a towering six feet seven inches, had unruly strands of white hair, and spoke in a deep resonant voice. Olson remembered the first time he tried psilocybin: "I was so high on bourbon that I took it as though it was a bunch of peanuts. I kept throwing the peanuts and the mushrooms into my mouth." He described the experience as "a love feast, a truth pill it makes you exactly what you are."
Olson had a strong affinity for the mushroom. He thought it a "wretched shame that we don't have it in the common drugstore as a kind of beer, because it's so obviously an attractive and useful, normal food." But he also sensed immediately that psychedelics were a profound threat to the status quo. After the drug wore off, his first words to Leary were, "When they come after you, you can hide at my house." Leary, being an apolitical creature, shrugged off the remark without much thought. Little did he know that the CIA was already keeping an eye on his escapades at Harvard.
Olson admired Leary for his chutzpah, but he also considered the good professor a bit foolhardy in thinking that happiness would descend in one fell swoop if the world was suddenly be mushroomed. "Leary used to argue that this was the decade of the mushroom," Olson commented, "and if we didn't get peace from turning everybody on, the race would be destroyed . I myself think that was rather thin politics to begin with."
In retrospect Ginsberg admitted, "We were probably too proselytizing." It may have been his messianic enthusiasm that rankled Robert Lowell, the New England poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, who was turned on to psilocybin by Ginsberg. Lowell did not report favorably at the end of the session in his apartment. As Ginsberg was leaving, he tried to reassure Lowell by telling him, "Love conquers all." To which the distinguished poet replied, "Don't be too sure." Writer Arthur Koestler was also critical of the mushroom experience. "This is wonderful, no doubt," he told Leary the day after he tripped. "But it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism . There's no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was." [lol I can relate to that, I used to call it sensory overload DC]
But the sternest rebuke to the high-flying optimism of the Harvard group was yet to come. Leary was eager for William Burroughs to take the mushroom pills. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, was something of a mentor to the beat generation. In the summer of 1961 Leary traveled to Tangiers, where Burroughs was living at the time. He was working on a new novel, The Soft Machine, smoking a considerable amount of Moroccan kit, and experimenting with a flicker machine developed by his friend Byron Gysin that caused hallucinations similar to mescaline or LSD. The poets Alan Ansen and Gregory Corso were there for the session along with Leary and Ginsberg. Things got off to a swimming start as they sauntered in the warm moonlight high on psilocybin. But the mood quickly changed once it became apparent that the mushroom was not to Burroughs's liking. "No good, no bueno," he kept shaking his head. He split from the others and waited out the "high" in seclusion.
Burroughs was never into drugs simply for a good time. Despite his psilocybin bummer he agreed to go to Cambridge to participate in further experiments in consciousness alteration. Burroughs looked forward to working with sensory deprivation and submersion tanks, stroboscopes, machines to measure brain waves, and all the technical wonders that a prestigious university could supply. But his hopes were dashed as soon as he arrived at Harvard. All he found was a semipermanent cocktail party with a bunch of starry-eyed intellectuals talking some half-assed jive about brotherly love. Leary kept touting psilocybin as an enlightenment pill, a cure-all for a sick society. To Burroughs, this view was far too simplistic. While agreeing that hallucinogenic drugs could open the doors of perception, he recognized that only the deliberate cultivation of new habits of consciousness could endow such visions with enduring significance. "Remember, anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways," he insisted. "You don't need drugs to get high, but drugs do serve as a useful shortcut at certain stages of training." Burroughs had already tried drugs as a means of self-realization and was attempting to move on. After a short stint in Cambridge he dropped out of the psychedelic clan for good.
Burroughs was acutely aware of the darker side of American politics, and he had some ominous premonitions about the impending psychedelic revolution. Despite rampant enthusiasm for hallucinogens among his peers, he suspected that sinister forces were also interested in these drugs and that Leary and his sidekicks might be playing right into their hands. Burroughs feared that psychedelics could be used to control rather than liberate the vision-starved masses. He understood that the seeker of enlightenment was especially vulnerable to manipulation from without, and he sounded an urgent warning to this effect in the opening passages of Nova Express, published in 1964.
At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction and history is fiction I must say this:
Bring together state of news Inquire onward from state to doer Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Time Life and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Listen: Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer . Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit . Stay out of the Garden of Delights . Throw back their ersatz Immortality . Flush their drug kicks down the drain They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs learn to make it without any chemical corn.
Shortly after Burroughs left Cambridge another figure arrived on the scene who was
destined to up the ante considerably. His name was Michael Hollingshead, and he
had a profound impact on Leary and his cohorts. An artful Englishman with a keen
sense of humor, Hollingshead had once worked for the British Cultural Exchange. While living in New York City, he acquired a full gram of LSD-25 (enough for ten
thousand doses), which he divided with his associate Dr. John Beresford. They mixed
the LSD with powdered sugar and distilled water, tasting the divine confection as
they spooned it into a mayonnaise jar. Hollingshead had smoked grass and hashish
before, but this was another matter entirely. The doors of perception not only swung
wide open, they flew off the jambs: "What I had experienced was the equivalent of
death's absolution of the body. I had literally stepped forth from the shell of my body
into some other strange land of unlikeness which can only be grasped in terms of
astonishment and mystery, an ecstatic nirvana."
When he came down from his initial psychedelic voyage, he called Aldous Huxley to ask his advice about what to do with the magic gram of acid. At that point Hollingshead was unsure whether LSD was more confusing than illuminating. The drug had disrupted his sense of self: "The reality on which I had consciously based my personality had dissolved into maya, a hallucinatory facade. Stripped of one kind of reality, and unwilling or unable to benefit from the possibilities of another one, I was acutely aware of my helplessness, my utter transience, my suspension between two worlds, one outside and the other wholly within." Moreover, he was financially destitute and his marriage was falling apart. Huxley was sympathetic. He suggested that Hollingshead go to Harvard and meet Timothy Leary. If there was any single investigator in the United States worth seeing, Huxley assured him, it was Dr. Leary.
Hollingshead took off for Cambridge with his mayonnaise jar. Leary went out of his way to help his visitor. He offered Hollingshead a free room in his attic, loaned him some money, and invited him to join the psilocybin research team. Naturally Leary gave his guest a mushroom session, and though Hollingshead had a good trip, the drug was not as strong as LSD. Hollingshead obliged by offering his host some acid, but Leary was not eager to take it. He was apparently of the opinion that if you had tried one psychedelic you had tried them all.
One night Hollingshead was driving around outside Leary's house with Maynard Ferguson, the trumpet player, and his wife, Flo. They were smoking a joint in the car because illegal drugs were not allowed inside. Hollingshead told them about LSD, and they became very curious. Eventually he fetched his mayonnaise jar, and they all took a hit. Within an hour the drug had started to come on. Flo thought it was fantastic, and Maynard had to agree; it definitely got you there. When Leary noticed that Ferguson's face was glowing like an electric toaster, he decided to join them. He took a heaping spoonful, and soon he was flying.
It came sudden and irresistible. An endless deep swamp marsh of some other planet teeming and steaming with energy and life, and in the swamp an enormous tree whose branches were foliated out miles high and miles wide. And then this tree, like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, went ssssuuuck, and every cell in my body was swept into the root, twigs, branches, and leaves of this tree. Tumbling and spinning, down the soft fibrous avenues to some central point which was just light. Just light, but not just light. It was the center of Life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the hard eye of God. Merged with this pulsing flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama.
Leary was stunned by the power of the drug. In the wake of his first acid trip he wandered about dazed and confused. What to do, he asked himself, now that the mundane routines of life seemed so futile and artificial? Not knowing quite where to turn, he latched onto Hollingshead as his guru. Leary followed him around for days on end, treating the Englishman with awe. He was convinced that this pot-bellied, chain-smoking prankster whose face was pink-veined from alcohol was a messenger from the Good Lord Himself. Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, two of Leary's closest associates, were vexed to see him in such a helpless state. They thought he had really blown his mind, and they blamed Hollingshead. But it was only a matter of time before they too sampled the contents of the mayonnaise jar. Hollingshead gave the drug to all the members of the psilocybin project, and from then on LSD was part of their research repertoire.
Those early days at Harvard were charged with a special mystery and excitement. "Turning on" had not yet become identified with a particular lifestyle or set of values, and there were no maps or guideposts to chart the way. To those who embarked upon these shattering inner journeys, anything and everything seemed possible. It was as if all the fetters were suddenly removed. "LSD involved risk," Hollingshead said. "It was anarchistic; it upset our apple carts, torpedoed our cherished illusions, sabotaged our beliefs . Yet there were some of my circle who, with Rimbaud, could say, 'I dreamed of crusades, senseless voyages of discovery, republics without a history, moral revolution, displacement of races and continents. I believed in all the magics.'"
Not everyone was enchanted by the renegade psychedelic scene at Harvard. A confidential memorandum issued by the CIA's Office of Security, which had utilized LSD for interrogation purposes since the early 1950's, suggested that certain C.l.A- connected personnel might be involved with Leary's group. This prospect was disconcerting to Security officials, who considered hallucinogenic drugs "extremely dangerous." "Uncontrolled experimentation has in the past resulted in tragic circumstances and for this reason every effort is made to control any involvement with these drugs," a CIA agent reported. The document concluded with a specific directive: "Information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately . In addition, any information of Agency personnel involved with Dr's. ALPERT or LEARY, or with any other group engaged in this type of activity should also be reported."
It is known that during this period Leary gave LSD to Mary Pinchot, a painter and a
prominent Washington socialite who was married to Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA
official. (Meyer oversaw the ClA's infiltration of the US National Student Association
and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe, which provided financial support to
numerous Cold War liberal intellectuals and writers.) Leary and Pinchot struck up a
cordial friendship during her occasional visits to Cambridge in the early 1960's. She
asked him to teach her how to guide an LSD session so she could introduce the drug
to her circles in Washington. "I have this friend who's a very important man," she
confided to Leary. "He's very impressed with what I've told him about my own LSD
experience and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself." Leary
was intrigued, but Pinchot wouldn't tell him who she intended to turn on. Nor did she
inform her LSD mentor of her marriage to a CIA bigwig.
Leary explained the basic rules about set and setting, emphasizing the importance of a comfortable, sensuous environment for an LSD trip. From time to time Pinchot reported back to him. "I can't give you all the details," she said, "but top people in Washington are turning on. You'd be amazed at the sophistication of some of our leaders. We're getting a little group together " Leary had no way of knowing that Mary Pinchot was one of President Kennedy's girlfriends and that she and JFK smoked pot together in the White House. Pinchot was murdered less than a year after Kennedy was assassinated, and her diary disappeared from her home.
When Leary learned of Pinchot's death, he recalled their conversations about LSD. At various times she had hinted that the CIA was monitoring his activities. Since drug research is of vital importance to American intelligence, Pinchot told him that he'd be allowed to conduct his experiments as long as it didn't get out of hand.
But Leary ignored her advice. In the spring of 1962 he published an article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists warning that the Russians might try to subvert the United States by dumping a few pounds of LSD into the water supply of major cities. The only way to prepare for such an attack, Leary maintained, was to dose our own reservoirs first as a civil defense measure so that people would know what to expect. Not surprisingly, this suggestion didn't go over well in the scientific community. A number of CIA- and military-sponsored researchers launched vociferous attacks on Leary and Alpert. Dr. Henry Beecher, an esteemed member of the Harvard Medical School faculty who conducted drug experiments for the CIA, ridiculed Leary's research methodology, stating that it reminded him "of De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater rather than a present-day scientific study of subjective responses to drugs." Dr. Max Rinkel, a veteran of the ClA's MK-ULTRA program, denounced Leary in the Harvard Alumni Review, as did Dr. Robert Heath, a longtime CIA and army contract employee. As Heath saw it, the whole notion of consciousness expansion was a meaningless abstraction, and impairing the human nervous system with dangerous chemicals could only result in pathological states that might have long-term negative repercussions.
As word of Leary's acid escapades spread around Harvard, university officials began to get edgy. Tensions reached a boiling point during a faculty meeting in March 1962. Leary's opponents charged that he conducted his drug studies in a nonchalant and irresponsible fashion. Specifically they cited the fact that trained physicians were rarely present; moreover, Leary himself got high with his test subjects. While admitting that he was operating outside the medical framework, Leary stuck to his guns and emphasized that taking LSD with a patient was common practice among many psychiatrists. Besides, since psychedelics were educational as well as medical tools, they should be made available outside the medical profession for investigatory purposes. Just because someone was a physician did not mean he was qualified to administer LSD, Leary argued, especially if he had never tried the drug himself.
Although Leary's volunteers rarely suffered untoward effects, a number of faculty members still had grave misgivings about the psilocybin project. As Dr. Herbert Kelman, recipient of a small grant from the ClA-connected Human Ecology Fund, put it at the meeting, "I question whether this project is being pursued as an intellectual endeavor or whether it is being pursued as a new kind of experience to offer an answer to man's ills."
The following day a sensationalized account of the faculty tussle appeared in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper. The story was immediately picked up by the Boston press, prompting an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration, which assisted the ClA's drug testing efforts, A month later Leary was notified that he could not continue his research unless a medical doctor was present when the drugs were administered. LSD, the FDA maintained, was too powerful and unpredictable to be left in the hands of irresponsible individuals, especially when they advocated using it not for scientific or medical purposes but to conjure up so- called religious experiences.
In effect the government had sided with the medical establishment, thereby legitimizing it as the sole authority on these matters. Leary and Alpert were ordered to surrender their supply of psilocybin to the university health service, and a special faculty committee was formed to advise and oversee future experiments. By the end of the year the psilocybin project had been officially terminated. "These drugs apparently cause panic and temporary insanity in many officials who have not taken them," Leary quipped as he grudgingly forked over his stash. The rebellious professor felt that the doctors had a vested interest in keeping psychedelics out of the hands of laymen. He accused the government and the medical establishment of conspiring to suppress valuable methods of research.
Leary's rambunctious style infuriated members of the academic community. Even some of his would-be allies suggested that he tone it down a bit. They feared that his antics might jeopardize other psychedelic researchers. This was also the opinion of Captain Al Hubbard, the incorrigible superspy who visited Leary at Harvard. "I liked Tim when we first met," Hubbard recalled, "but I warned him a dozen times." In no uncertain terms the Captain told Leary to keep his research respectable, to play ball with the system. Hubbard was keenly aware of the potency of Harvard's name and tried to lend a hand by supplying drugs to the young professor. But eventually the two LSD pioneers had a falling-out. "I gave stuff to Leary," said the Captain, "and he turned out to be completely no good . He seemed like a well-intentioned person, but then he went overboard."
The dispute over Leary's research methodology quickly became tangled up with reports that sugar cubes laced with LSD were circulating on the Harvard campus. Unconfirmed stories about wild LSD parties and undergraduates pushing trips on the black market were rife. Leary did little to placate his superiors. "LSD is so powerful," he observed wryly, "that one administered dose can start a thousand rumors." While Leary was never directly accused of dealing drugs, his reputation as a freewheeling and euphoric type led many to assume that he was connected with the underground supply. It was a case of guilt by alleged association, and it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
In May 1963 Richard Alpert was summarily dismissed from his teaching post for violating an agreement not to give LSD to undergraduate students. It was the first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the twentieth century. "Some day it will be quite humorous," he told a reporter, "that a professor was fired for supplying a student with 'the most profound educational experience in my life.' That's what he told the Dean it was." A few days later the academic axe fell on Leary as well, after he failed to attend an honors program committee meeting a rather paltry excuse, but by this time the university higher-ups were glad to get rid of him on any pretext.
Leary was unruffled by the turn of events. LSD, he stated tersely, was "more important than Harvard." He and Alpert fired off a declaration to the Harvard Review blasting the university as "the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness contractors," an "intellectual ministry of defense." The Harvard scandal was hot news. In the coming months most of the major US magazines featured stories on LSD and its foremost proponent. Leary was suddenly "Mr. LSD," and he welcomed the publicity. The extensive media coverage doubtless spurred the growth of the psychedelic underground.
Rebuffed by the academic and medical authorities, Leary decided to take his case directly to the people in particular, young people. He was convinced that the revelation and revolution were at hand. The hope for the future rested on a simple equation: the more who turned on, the better. It would be a twentieth-century remake of the Children's Crusade, with legions of stoned youth marching ever onward to the Promised Land. Leary would assume the role of High Priest, urging his brethren to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." With the help of the media his gospel would ring throughout the land. "From this time on," he said, "we saw ourselves as unwitting agents of a social process that was far too powerful for us to control or to more than dimly understand."
* The CIA used terminal cancer patients as guinea pigs for testing knockout drugs and psychochemical weapons under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA.
The rate of recovery or significant improvement was often higher with LSD therapy than with traditional methods. Furthermore, its risks were slim compared to the dangers of other commonly used and officially sanctioned procedures such as electroshock, lobotomy, and the so-called anti-psychotic drugs. Dr. Sidney Cohen, the man who turned on Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, attested to the virtues of LSD after conducting an in-depth survey of US and Canadian psychiatrists who had used it as a therapeutic tool. Forty-four doctors replied to Cohen's questionnaire, providing data on five thousand patients who had taken a total of more than twenty-five thousand doses of either LSD or mescaline. The most frequent complaint voiced by psychedelic therapists was "unmanageability." Only eight instances of "psychotic reaction lasting more than forty-eight hours" were reported in the twenty-five thousand cases surveyed. Not a single case of addiction was indicated, nor any deaths from toxic effects. On the basis of these findings Cohen maintained that "with the proper precautions psychedelics are safe when given to a selected healthy group."
By the early 1960's it appeared that LSD was destined to find a niche on the pharmacologist's shelf. But then the fickle winds of medical policy began to shift. Spokesmen for the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Food and Drug Administration started to denounce the drug, and psychedelic therapy quickly fell into public and professional disrepute. Granted, a certain amount of intransigence arises whenever a new form of treatment threatens to steal the thunder from more conventional methods, but this alone cannot account for the sudden reversal of a promising trend that was ten years in the making.
One reason the medical establishment had such a difficult time coping with the psychedelic evidence was that LSD could not be evaluated like most other drugs. LSD was not a medication in the usual sense; it wasn't guaranteed to relieve a specific symptom such as a cold or headache. In this respect psychedelics were out of kilter with the basic assumptions of Western medicine. The FDA's relationship with this class of chemicals became even more problematic in light of claims that LSD could help the healthy. Most doctors automatically dismissed the notion that drugs might benefit someone who was not obviously ailing.
In 1962 Congress enacted regulations that required the safety and efficacy of a new drug to be proven with respect to the condition for which it was to be marketed commercially. LSD, according to the FDA, did not satisfy these criteria. From then on, authorized distribution of the drug was tightly controlled. Anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to receive special permission from the FDA. The restrictive measures were supposedly designed to weed out "the bad apples," as one report put it, and thereby insure against the misuse of regulated substances. The FDA maintained that it did not want to inhibit legitimate researchers who were "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities."
By designating LSD an "experimental drug," the FDA had in effect ruled that it could only be used for research purposes and never as part of general psychiatric practice. Consequently it became nearly impossible for psychiatrists to obtain psychedelics legally. Some of the most distinguished and experienced investigators were forced to abandon their work, and the conditions that might have demonstrated LSD's therapeutic potential virtually ceased to exist. "It was a very intense period," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "The drug experience brought together many people of diverse interests. We built up a sizable amount of data and then the whole thing just fell in on us. Many who formerly were regarded as groundbreakers making an important contribution suddenly found themselves disenfranchised. "
Certain officials suggested that those who practiced psychedelic therapy were themselves to blame for the crackdown on LSD research. In a thinly veiled reference to Leary, Drs. Jonathan Cole and Robert Katz of the National Institutes for Mental Health expressed concern that some investigators "may have been subject to the deleterious and seductive effects of these agents." AMA president Roy Grinkler harped on the same theme, proclaiming, "At one time it was impossible to find an investigator willing to work with LSD-25 who was not himself an 'addict.'"
As far as Grinkler was concerned, the elimination of psychedelic studies was necessary to insure the health and safety of the American public. In a widely circulated editorial that echoed the psychosis-producing view of hallucinogens, the AMA president stated, "Latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology. Psychic addiction is being developed." He issued an urgent warning to the psychiatric profession that "greater morbidity, and even mortality, is in store for patients unless controls are developed against the unwise use of LSD-25."
Many LSD researchers were quick to point an accusing finger at Leary for bringing the government's wrath down on everybody. But is it plausible that one wayward individual was single-handedly responsible for provoking a 180-degree shift in official government policy with respect to psychedelic research? Was the FDA simply overreacting to Leary's flamboyant style, or were there other forces at work?
Up until the early 1960's LSD studies had flourished without government restrictions and the CIA had sponsored numerous research projects to enhance its mind control capabilities. In 1962, however, the Technical Services Staff, which ran the MK-ULTRA program, began to orient its behavioral activities exclusively toward operations and away from peripheral long-range studies. This new strategy resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers. Extensive LSD testing was no longer a top priority for the MK-ULTRA crew, which had already learned enough about the drug to understand how it could best be applied in selected covert operations. They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe." While acid was still an important part of the cloak-and-dagger arsenal, by this time the CIA and the army had developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon.
The CIA and the military were not inhibited by the new drug laws enacted during the early 1960's. A special clause in the regulatory policy allowed the FDA to issue "selective exemptions," which meant that favored researchers would not be subject to restrictive measures. With this convenient loophole the FDA never attempted to oversee in-house pharmacological research conducted by the CIA and the military services. Secret arrangements were made whereby these organizations did not even have to file a formal "Claim for Exemption," or IND request. The FDA simply ignored all studies that were classified for reasons of national security, and CIA and military investigators were given free reign to conduct their covert experimentation. Apparently, in the eyes of the FDA, those seeking to develop hallucinogens as weapons were somehow more "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities" than independent researchers dedicated to exploring the therapeutic potential of LSD.
In 1965 Congress passed the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, which resulted in even tighter restrictions on psychedelic research. The illicit manufacture and sale of LSD was declared a misdemeanor (oddly enough, possession was not yet outlawed). All investigators without IND exemptions were required to turn in their remaining supplies to the FDA, which retained legal jurisdiction over psychedelics. Adverse publicity forced Sandoz to stop marketing LSD entirely in April 1966, and the number of research projects fell to a mere handful.
The decision to curtail LSD experimentation was the subject of a congressional probe into the organization and coordination of federal drug research and regulatory programs. The inquiry in the spring of 1966 was led by Senator Robert Kennedy (D- N.Y), whose wife, Ethel, reportedly underwent LSD therapy with Dr. Ross MacLean (a close associate of Captain Hubbard's) at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver. Senator Kennedy asked officials of the FDA and the NIMH to explain why so many LSD projects were suddenly canned. When they evaded the issue, Kennedy became annoyed. "Why if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren't they worthwhile now?" he demanded repeatedly. The dialogue seesawed back and forth, but no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. "Why didn't you just let them continue?" asked the senator. "We keep going around and around . If I could get a flat answer about that I would be happy. Is there a misunderstanding about my question?"
Kennedy insinuated that the regulatory agencies were attempting to thwart potentially valuable research. He stressed the importance of a balanced outlook with respect to LSD: "I think we have given too much emphasis and so much attention to the fact that it can be dangerous and that it can hurt an individual who uses it that perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly."
Kennedy's plea fell on deaf ears. The FDA steadfastly refused to alter the course it had chosen. In 1967 a Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee (a joint FDA/NIMH venture) was established to process all research applications. Members of this committee included Dr. Harris Isbell and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, two longtime CIA contract employees. Shortly thereafter the NIMH terminated its last in-house LSD project involving human subjects. In 1968 the Drug Abuse Control Amendments were modified to make possession of LSD a misdemeanor and sale a felony. Responsibility for enforcing the law was shifted from the FDA to the newly formed Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Two years later psychedelic drugs were placed in the Schedule I categoryóa classification reserved for drugs of abuse that have no medical value.
While above ground research was being phased out, the CIA and the military continued to experiment with an ever more potent variety of hallucinogens.* In effect the policies of the regulatory agencies were themselves "regulated" by the unique requirements of these secret programs. As an official of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (of which the FDA was part) explained, "We are abdicating our statutory responsibilities in this area out of a desire to be courteous to the Department of Defense rather than out of legal inability to handle classified materials." The same courtesy was proffered to the CIA. The FDA collaborated with the Agency in other ways as well. FDA personnel with special security clearances served as consultants for chemical warfare projects. Information concerning new developments in the field of psychopharmacology was exchanged through confidential channels. The FDA also provided laboratory facilities and samples of new drugs that might prove useful to the CIA.
* 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/CHICK-WIT 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-3i67 produced "prolonged psychotic effects in laboratory personnel."
In light of the FDA's relationship with the intelligence community, it is highly unlikely that a major policy decision regarding LSD would have been made against the wishes of the CIA. If the Agency had wanted aboveground LSD studies to proliferate, they would have. But this type of research was no longer essential as far as the CIA was concerned. The spymasters viewed LSD as a strategic substance, as well as a threat to national security, by virtue of its psychotomimetic properties, which had been fully explored during the 1950's. Creative or therapeutic considerations were not part of the covert game plan. When push came to shove, the medical establishment implemented a policy based on the psychosis-producing view that is to say, the C.l.A's view of hallucinogens, even though this perspective was vigorously contested by many scientists.
By the early 1960's, when the new regulatory policy was enacted, a large number of people had already heard about LSD. Some were eager to try the drug, but they no longer had access to psychedelic therapists, who were the original "gatekeepers," so to speak. "The whole thing was just moving geometrically," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "Obviously those people who couldn't get it from us would be seeking to get it elsewhere." A certain momentum had been generated thanks in no small part to the CIA and it quickly reached a point where the government could no longer contain it. Black market acid began to turn up on the street to meet the growing demand. This remarkable social phenomenon continued to gather strength despite the repeated admonitions of educators, doctors and politicians. Soon the "laboratory" would stretch across the entire continent as millions of young investigators undertook their own experiments with this consciousness-quaking chemical.
to be continued...next....
4 Preaching LSD
Later that same year, with the Captain again acting as a guide, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Although he consumed only a tiny amount, the experience was highly significant. "What came through the closed door," he stated, "was the realization not the knowledge, for this wasn't verbal or abstract but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. These words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains ! was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been."
Huxley and his LSD mentor were a most improbable duo. The coarse, uneducated Captain lacked elegance and restraint ("I'm just a born son of a bitch!" he bellowed), while the tall, slender novelist epitomized the genteel qualities of the British intellectual. Yet the two men were evidently quite taken by each other. Huxley spoke admiringly of "the good Captain" whose uranium exploits served "as a passport into the most exalted spheres of government, business, and ecclesiastical polity." In a letter to Osmond he commented, "What Babes in the Wood we literary gents and professional men are! The great World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine; but its full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what extraordinary luck that this representative of both these Higher Powers should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescalin and (b) be such a very nice man."
Despite their markedly different styles Huxley and Hubbard shared a unique appreciation of the revelatory aspect of hallucinogenic drugs. It was Hubbard who originally suggested that an LSD-induced mystical experience might harbor unexplored therapeutic potential. He administered large doses of acid to gravely ill alcoholics with the hope that the ensuing experience would lead to a drastic and permanent change in the way they viewed themselves and the world. (According to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the most important factor in recovery for alcoholics is "a deep and genuine religious experience.") Once the individual's rigid notion of himself had been shattered, "extensive emotional reeducation" was much more likely. At this point the Captain took over. By using religious symbols to trigger psychic responses, he attempted to assist the patient in forming a new and healthier frame of reference that would carry over after the drug wore off. Hubbard found that everyone who went through this process seemed to benefit from it. A number of former alcoholics described their recovery as nothing short of "miraculous." Buoyed by these results, the Captain proceeded to establish LSD treatment centers at three major hospitals in Canada, most notably Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, where he resided.
Dr. Humphry Osmond was also working with alcoholics in Saskatchewan, but initially he approached the problem from a different vantage point. Osmond noted that some alcoholics decided to give up the bottle only after they "hit bottom" and suffered the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens. Could a large dose of LSD or mescaline simulate a controlled attack of the DTs? A "model delirium tremens," so to speak, would be considerably less dangerous than the real thing, which normally occurs after years of heavy drinking and often results in death. Osmond's hypothesis was still rooted in the psychotomimetic tradition. But then Hubbard came along and turned the young psychiatrist on to the religious meaning of his "madness mimicking" drug. The Captain showed Osmond how to harness LSD's transcendent potential. Nearly a thousand hard-core alcoholics received high-dose LSD treatment at Weyburn Hospital, and the rate of recovery was significantly higher than for other forms of therapy an astounding 50%.*
* After thirteen years of utilizing this method, Osmond and his colleagues published their findings: "When psychedelic therapy is given to alcoholics, 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."
Osmond and his coworkers considered LSD the most remarkable drug they had ever come across. They saw no reason to restrict their studies to alcoholics. If LSD changed the way sick people looked at the world, would it not have as powerful an effect on others as well? With this in mind Osmond and Hubbard came up with the idea that LSD could be used to transform the belief systems of world leaders and thereby further the cause of world peace. Although few are willing to disclose the details of these sessions, a close associate of Hubbard's insisted that they "affected the thinking of the political leadership of North America." Those said to have participated in the LSD sessions include a prime minister, assistants to heads of state, UN representatives, and members of the British parliament. "My job," said Hubbard, "was to sit on the couch next to the psychiatrist and put the people through it, which I did."
Hubbard's influence on the above-ground research scene went far beyond the numerous innovations he introduced: high-dose therapy, group sessions, enhancing the drug effect with strobe lights, and ESP experiments while under the influence of LSD. His impressive standing among business and political leaders in the United States and Canada enabled him to command large supplies of the hallucinogen, which he distributed freely to friends and researchers at considerable personal expense. "Cost me a couple of hundred thousand dollars," he boasted. "I had six thousand bottles of it to begin with." When Dr. Ross MacLean, the medical director at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, suggested that they form a partnership and set a price for administering LSD, Hubbard would hear nothing of it. For the Captain had "a mission," as he put it, and making money never entered the picture.
Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing North America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still. "People heard about it, and they wanted to try it," he explained. During the 1950's and early 1960's he turned on thousands of people from all walks of life,policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists. "They all thought it was the most marvelous thing," he stated. "And I never saw a psychosis in any one of these cases."
When certain US medical officials complained that Hubbard was not a licensed physician and therefore should not be permitted to administer drugs, the Captain just laughed and bought a doctor's degree from a diploma mill in Kentucky. "Dr." Hubbard had such remarkable credentials that he received special permission from Rome to administer LSD within the context of the Catholic faith. "He had kind of an incredible way of getting that sort of thing," said a close associate who claimed to have seen the papers from the Vatican.
Hubbard's converts included the Reverend J. E. Brown, a Catholic priest at the Cathedral of the Holy Rosary in Vancouver. After his initiation into the psychedelic mysteries. Reverend Brown recommended the experience to members of his parish. In a letter to the faithful dated December 8, 1957, he wrote, "We humbly ask Our Heavenly Mother the Virgin Mary, help of all who call upon Her to aid us to know and understand the true qualities of these psychedelics, the full capacities of man's noblest faculties and according to God's laws to use them for the benefit of mankind here and in eternity." [I mean who knew lol? DC]
Like a molecule at full boil, the Captain moved about at high speeds in all directions. He traveled around the world in his own plane (he was a registered pilot and master of sea vessels), buying up LSD and stashing it, swapping different drugs, and building an underground supply. "I scattered it as I went along," he recalled. With his leather pouch full of "wampum" he rode the circuit, and those on the receiving end were always grateful. "We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue," said Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist.
Dr. Janiger was part of a small circle of scientists and literary figures in the Los Angeles area who began to use psychedelics at social gatherings in the mid-1950's. In addition to Huxley and Gerald Heard, those who participated in these druginspired intellectual discussions included philosopher Alan Watts, deep-sea diver Perry Bivens, and researchers Sidney Cohen, Keith Ditman, and Arthur Chandler. This informal group was the first to use LSD socially rather than clinically. Captain Al Hubbard, the wandering shaman who visited southern California on a regular basis, supplied the group with various chemicals.
"Something had to be done and I tried to do it," Hubbard explained. He was, in his own words, "a catalytic agent" who had a "special, chosen role." While this is certainly an accurate appraisal, he was also another kind of agent an intelligence agent which raises some intriguing questions about what he was really up to.
After his legendary exploits with the O.S.S, the Captain continued to serve as an undercover operative for various agencies within the US government. He had many contacts with the FBI, for example, and he claimed to be a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover's. "That old bugger was tough, really tough," Hubbard said with admiration. But when he tried to turn on the FBI chief, Hoover stubbornly declined. However, the Captain did manage to give the drug to "some top intelligence men in Washington, always with good results."
During the early 1950's Hubbard was asked to join the CIA, but he refused. "They lied so much, cheated so much. I don't like 'em," he snarled. "They're lousy deceivers, sons of the devils themselves." The Captain's beef with the Agency stemmed in part from his unsuccessful attempt to secure back pay owed to him from his O.S.S days. "They crooked me," he complained bitterly.
Hubbard was unkindly disposed toward the CIA for other reasons as well. Most important, he didn't approve of what the Agency was doing with his beloved LSD. "The CIA work stinks," he said. "They were misusing it. I tried to tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you couldn't tell them a goddamned thing." (Hubbard was certain that Frank Olson was not the only person who died as a result of the ClA's surprise acid tests.)
"I don't know how Al's Washington affairs were done," Dr. Osmond admitted. "He was one of those naturally brilliant wheeler-dealers." Indeed, Hubbard seemed to have a knack for popping up in the most unpredictable places. He worked for the Treasury Department as a young man during the Capone days, busting moonshiners and gangsters who were smuggling liquor into the US from Canada. Apparently he was able to ingratiate himself with both sides during Prohibition, as he subsequently became deputy chief of security for the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. "Those Mafia men were always interesting to talk to," Hubbard remarked, "but they never smiled."
The Captain also engaged in undercover work for a number of other government agencies, including the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the Food and Drug Administration (at a time when both organizations were assisting the C.l.A's drug testing programs). During the mid-1960's he was employed by Teledyne, a major defense subcontractor, as "director of human factors research." In this capacity Hubbard served as adviser and consultant to a combined navy and NASA project that involved testing the effects of psychochemical agents on a newly designed "helicopter avionics system." Teledyne worked closely with various government organizations, including the CIA, to apply these techniques to additional areas of military interest.
While Hubbard was not a CIA operative per se, his particular area of expertise hallucinogenic drugs brought him into close contact with elements of the espionage community. The CIA must have known what he was up to, since Sandoz and the FDA kept the Agency informed whenever anyone received shipments of LSD. The Captain, of course, was one of their best customers, having purchased large amounts of the drug on different occasions.
In a sense "the mysterious Al" embodies the irony and ambiguity of the LSD story as a whole. As one of his friends put it, "Cappy was sort of a double agent. He worked for the government, but in his own way he was a rebel." Some call him a "witch doctor," others describe him as "an incurable scoundrel." A most unlikely combination of mystic and redneck, Hubbard above all remains an enigma.
"Al Hubbard was a very strange man," confided a fellow drug researcher, "but he probably knew more about LSD than anyone else in the world." And while his tale has many gaps and fuzzy edges, this much can be established beyond a shadow of a doubt: his enthusiasm for LSD never waned. "Anyone who'll try to tell me that this has all been a big hallucination has got to be out of their mind. What I've seen with it has been the truth and nothing but the truth."
And as a parting shot he added, "If you don't think it's amazing, all I've got to say is just go ahead and try it."
Healing Acid
By the late 1950's, according to Robert Bernstein, former assistant surgeon general
of the American army, "perhaps by coincidence, LSD was almost simultaneously
recognized by the army as a military threat and by certain segments of our US
population as a means for self-fulfillment." What puzzling characteristics does LSD
possess that give rise to such disparate and seemingly contradictory points of view?
How could the same drug be hailed as an unparalleled avenue to transcendental or
visionary experiences and denounced as an agent of psychotic interludes? Originally researchers viewed LSD solely in terms of its ability to create an experimental toxic psychosis. The LSD experience was synonymous with LSD psychosis,"good trips" were no exception. This frame of reference, uniformly shared by scientists at the outset of the 1950s, was typified by the comment of a CIA agent involved in the MK-ULTRA program: "Tripping and psychosis are one and the same. Tripping can be an awful schizoid feeling. Also there are hebephrenicsóhappy schizos. Their experience is similar to a good trip."
Within a few years, however, reports with a different message began to circulate from Canada. After meeting Captain Hubbard, a small circle of researchers based in Saskatchewan broke with the psychotomimetic definition and started exploring new directions. Dr. Osmond noticed a significant discrepancy between the usual description of the drug experience as a close encounter with lunacy and the kinds of experiences reported by his patients when they were given LSD for their alcoholic problems. They often spoke of an LSD session as insightful and rewarding. Many subjects invoked superlatives, calling it an experience of great beauty. As the research at Weyburn Hospital progressed, it became apparent to Osmond and his cohorts that most people who took LSD did not become insane.
The terminology used to describe the LSD experience in the scientific literature did not sit well with Osmond. Words like hallucination and psychosis were loaded; they implied negative states of mind. The psychiatric jargon reflected a pathological orientation, whereas a truly objective science would not impose value judgments on chemicals that produced unusual or altered states of consciousness. Aldous Huxley also felt that the language of pathology was inadequate. He and Osmond agreed that a new word had to be invented to encompass the full range of effects of these drugs.
The two men had been close friends ever since Huxley's initial mescaline experience, and they carried on a lively correspondence. At first Huxley proposed the word phanerothyme, which derived from roots relating to "spirit" or "soul." A letter to Osmond included the following couplet:
To make this trivial world sublime,
Take half a Gram of phanerothyme.
To which Osmond responded:
To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
Dr. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, thought Osmond's choice appropriate, for it "corresponds better to the effects of these drugs than hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic." The model psychosis concept was further called into question by published reports demonstrating that in many ways the comparison between naturally occurring and LSD-induced psychosis was facile. During the mid- 1950's, researchers John MacDonald and James Galvin pointed out that schizophrenics did not experience the wealth of visual hallucinations common with LSD and mescaline but were prone to auditory aberrations, unlike drug subjects. Oddly enough, true schizophrenics hardly reacted to LSD unless given massive doses.
As the psychotomimetic paradigm began to weaken, the focus shifted toward investigating the therapeutic potential of LSD. Two forms of LSD therapy arose in the 1950S. The "psycholytic" or "mind-loosening" approach utilized low or moderate dosages of LSD as an adjunct to conventional psychoanalysis. Employed in repeated sessions, the drug was said to speed up the process of psychoexploration by reducing the patient's defensiveness and facilitating the recollection of repressed memories and traumatic experiences. Stripped of his censorious attitude, the subject might experience a catharsis in a detached and heightened state of awareness, allowing him to retain his insights after the effects of the chemical subsided. The low-dose technique was practiced primarily in England, where Dr. Ronald Sandison established the first LSD clinic open to the public in 1953. Before long, additional centers specializing in this type of therapy sprang up in Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and several Scandinavian countries.
A different approach caught on more quickly in Canada and the United States. Psychedelic therapy, developed by Captain Al Hubbard and popularized by Dr. Humphry Osmond, was geared toward achieving a mystical or conversion experience. The procedure involved high dosages of LSD, precluding any possibility that the patient's ego defenses could withstand psychic dissolution.
According to this therapeutic model, as the drug starts to take effect there is an unfixing of perceptual constants and the subject's habitual reality ties are suspended. It is as though one were suddenly thrust into a Van Gogh canvas; objects ripple and breathe, an onrush of stimuli bombard and penetrate the body. Sensory functions overlap in a manner that might best be described as polymorphously perverse: one can "hear" colors and "see" sounds. The world is felt to be an extension of the flesh. Existence is no longer a riddle to be solved but a mystery to behold.
During the apotheosis of the acid high, the self-concept may be diminished to the point of depersonalization. As poet Octavio Paz describes in Alternating Current, "The self disappears, but no other self appears to occupy the empty space it has left. No god but rather the divine. No faith but rather the primordial feeling that sustains all faith, all hope. Peace in the crater of the volcano, the reconciliation of man what remains of man with total presence."
This state of consciousness was thought to be conducive to healing deep-rooted psychological wounds. The task of the therapist was to help the patient understand and assimilate the experience in a way that would maximize personal growth. Best results were obtained when the therapist shed his "doctor" status and assumed the role of guide or mentor, intervening only to help the initiate relax and "go with the flow." To succeed, the therapist had to be well acquainted with the psychedelic terrain; this familiarity could only be gained by taking the drug and learning to direct a positive experience. (Osmond's Golden Rule: "You start with yourself.") It was not uncommon for a guide to take a small amount of LSD during the therapy session to increase his rapport with his patient.
Originally tested on alcoholics in Canada with remarkable results, high-dose therapy was subsequently applied to a wide range of diagnostic categories: juvenile delinquency, narcotics addiction, severe character neurosis, and the like. This approach was particularly effective in treating people who were emotionally blocked; they were able to cut through a lot of psychological red tape, so to speak, and get right to the heart of the matter. Oftentimes those who underwent psychedelic therapy reported dramatic personality changes involving not only the relief of neurotic symptoms but a wholesale revamping of value systems, religious and philosophical beliefs, and basic life-style. Numerous patients claimed that a few LSD trips proved more fruitful than years of psychoanalysis at considerably less expense. In some cases spectacular success was achieved with only one dose of the drug.
Beatific, oceanic, redemptive these words have been used to describe the peak of an LSD trip. But there is another side to it. To be cast about as flotsam in the power draughts of the universe can be a hellish as well as a heavenly ordeal. Both possibilities are rooted in the experience of depersonalization or ego loss. The CIA was not interested in the therapeutic applications of LSD. On the contrary, the men of ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA defined the drug as an anxiety-producing agent, and they realized it would be relatively easy to "break" a person who was exposed to highly stressful stimuli while high on acid. As one CIA document instructed, "[Whatever] reduces integrative capacity may serve to increase the possibility of an individual being overwhelmed by frustrations and conflicts hitherto managed successfully." The powerful ego-shattering effects of LSD were ideally suited for this purpose. CIA and military interrogators proceeded to utilize the drug as an instrument of psychological torture.
That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non- drug factors play an important role in determining the subject's response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature; the enormous range of experiences produced by the chemical stems from differences in (1) the character structure and attitudinal predispositions (or "set") of the subject, and (2) the immediate situation (or "setting"). If LSD is given in a relaxed and supportive environment and the subject is coached beforehand, the experience can be intensely gratifying. As Dr. Janiger put it, "LSD favors the prepared mind."
For the unprepared mind, however, LSD can be a nightmare. When the drug is administered in a sterile laboratory under fluorescent lights by white-coated physicians who attach electrodes and nonchalantly warn the subject that he will go crazy for a while, the odds favor a psychotomimetic reaction, or "bummer."
* Formerly a member of the Research and Analysis Branch of the O.S.S, 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
The experiment was conducted in a small room full of medical equipment and EEG machines, with no outer windows. Ginsberg was advised that he could listen to whatever music he wanted, so he chose Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and a recording of Gertrude Stein. "For some reason," he recalled, "I thought you were supposed to lie down like in a hospital on a psychiatrist's couch and let something slowly engulf you, which is what happened. I lay down and something slowly engulfed me." As he started getting high, Ginsberg was put through a series of psychological tests word association, Rorschach inkblots, arithmetic problems which struck him as quite absurd at the time. "What difference does it make?" he kept asking the attendants. While they measured his psychological responses, the poet having read Huxley was waiting for God to show up inside his brain.
When it came time for the EEG tests, Ginsberg proposed a rather unusual experiment that had been suggested by his friend William S. Burroughs. He wanted to see what would happen if he looked at a stroboscope blinking in synchronization with his alpha rhythms while he was high on acid. The doctors connected the flicker machine to the EEG apparatus so that the alpha waves emanating from his brain set off the strobe effect. "It was like watching my own inner organism," said Ginsberg. "There was no distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery around me. I began thinking that if I let this go on, something awful would happen. I would be absorbed into the electrical network grid of the entire nation. Then I began feeling a slight crackling along the hemispheres of my skull. I felt my soul being sucked out through the light into the wall socket and going out."
Ginsberg had had enough. He asked the doctors to turn the flicker machine off, but the "high anxiety" lingered. The clinical atmosphere of the laboratory made it hard for him to relax. As the trip wore on, he got deeper and deeper into a tangle: "I had the impression that I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web, and that the spider was slowly coming to get me, and that the spider was God or the Devil I wasn't sure but I was the victim. I thought I was trapped in a giant web or network of forces beyond my control that were perhaps experimenting with me or were perhaps from another planet or were from some super-government or cosmic military or science-fiction Big Brother."
Ginsberg spent the evening at the home of Dr. Joe Adams, the man who supervised the experiment. He retired to his room and tried to describe his first acid trip. While still high, he composed the poem "Lysergic Acid," which begins with the following incantation:
It is a multiple million eyed monster
it is hidden in all its elephants and selves
it hummeth in the electric typewriter
it is electricity connected to itself, if it hath wires
it is a vast Spiderweb
and I am on the last millionth infinite tentacle of the spiderweb, a
worrier
lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self
I Allen Ginsberg a separate consciousness
I who want to be God
The beats' drug shamanism was bound up with romantic excess. In the midst of the spiritual blackout of the Cold War they searched for a "final fix" that would afford the vision of all visions. Their affinity for psychedelics reflected as much a desire to escape from a world they found unbearable as to tap the hidden realms of the psyche. Drugs were instrumental in catalyzing their rebellion against the overwhelming conformity of American culture. The beats had nothing but contempt for the strictures of a society anally fixated on success, cleanliness, and material possession. Whatever the mainstream tried to conceal, denigrate, or otherwise purge from experience, the beats flaunted. Their hunger for new sensations led them to seek transcendence through jazz, marijuana, Buddhist meditation, and the frenetic pace of the hip lifestyle.
It was the beats who railed most forcefully against the ghostly reserve of the 1950's. They understood that the problem was largely social in nature, but it was so extreme that the only sensible response was to become antisocial, to retreat into small groups or cabals of like-minded individuals and pursue radical options outside the cultural norm. The beats were pitchmen for another kind of consciousness. They encouraged the youth of America to take their first groping steps toward a psychological freedom from convention that opened the door to all manner of chemical experimentation. The beats bequeathed an inquisitive attitude, a precocious "set" for approaching the drug experience. As cultural expatriates they linked psychedelics to a tiny groundswell of nonconformity that would grow into a mass rebellion during the next decade.
Psychosis or Gnosis?
Therapeutic studies in the 1950's opened up new areas of investigation for a growing
number of young psychiatrists. A particularly promising avenue of inquiry involved
using LSD as a tool to explore the creative attributes of the mind. Dr. Oscar Janiger
(the first person in the US to conduct a clinical investigation of DMT, or
dimethyltryptamine, an extremely powerful short-acting psychedelic) noted that
many of his patients reported vivid aesthetic perceptions frequently leading to a
greater appreciation of the arts. One of his subjects claimed that a single acid trip
was equal to "four years in art school" and urged Janiger to give the drug to other
artists. This led to an experiment in which one hundred painters drew pictures
before, during, and after an LSD experience. Everyone who participated considered
their post-LSD creations personally more meaningful. Impressed by these results, Janiger proceeded to administer the psychedelic to various writers, actors, musicians, and filmmakers, including such notables as Anais Nin, Andre Previn, Jack
Nicholson, James Coburn, Ivan Tors, and the great stand-up comedian Lord
Buckley.* * 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
While some interesting and highly original works of art have been produced during the acid high, the creative effects of LSD cannot be measured solely in terms of immediate artistic output. Even more important is the enlargement of vision, the acute awareness of vaster potentials that persists long after the drug has worn off. Janiger's subjects frequently commented on the affinity between the drug-induced state and "what they felt might be an essential matrix from which the imaginative process derives." Author William Burroughs, who experimented with hallucinogens on his own, agreed with this assessment: "Under the influence of mescaline I have had the experience of seeing a painting for the first time, and I found later that I could see the painting without using the drug. The same insights into music or the exposure to a powerful consciousness-expanding drug often conveys a permanent increase in the range of experience. Mescaline transports the user to unexplored psychic areas, and he can often find the way back without a chemical guide."
The suggestion that LSD might enhance creativity was vigorously disputed by certain studies purporting to measure the impairment of normal mental functioning during the drugged state. The discrepancy between these studies and the personal testimony of the artists themselves underscored the shortcomings of the scientific modus operand!, which relied primarily on performance and aptitude tests and the like. In the end such tests yielded a morass of nebulous and contradictory data that shed little light on the psychological action of psychedelic agents. Dr. Osmond spoke for a growing number of researchers when he wrote, "Our preoccupation with behavior, because it is measurable, has led us to assume that what can be measured must be valuable and vice versa . An emphasis on the measurable and the reductive has resulted in the limitation of interest by psychiatrists to aspects of experience that fit in with this concept." According to Osmond, the most important features of the LSD experience the overwhelming beauty, the awe and wonder, the existential challenge, the creative and therapeutic insights would inevitably elude the scientist who viewed them merely as "epiphenomena of 'objective' happenings."
The so-called objectivist approach was inherently flawed not only because it sought to quantify creative experience but also because it ignored the input of the observer, which always influenced the results of an LSD experiment. An acid high was a state of heightened suggestibility and acute sensitivity to environmental cues. The subject's response was therefore largely influenced by the expectations of the person administering the drug. If the scientist viewed the LSD experience as essentially "psychotic," he unwittingly contributed to this type of response, both through implicit suggestion and because he was not equipped to assist the subject in interpreting the altered state of consciousness. Under these circumstances a paranoid response with serious long-range repercussions was not uncommon. Such results, in turn, led to overgeneralization, to the point where the drug was defined as a stress-inducing agent.
The notion that LSD could be used to treat psychological problems seemed downright absurd to certain scientists in light of the drug's long-standing identification with the simulation of mental illness. Those who operated within the psychotomimetic framework did not recognize that extra pharmacological variables inadequate preparation, negative expectations, poorly managed sessions were responsible for the adverse effects mistakenly attributed to the specific action of the drug. (According to the model psychosis scenario, there was really nothing to manage; just dose them and take the reaction.) They were appalled to learn that some psychotherapists were actually taking LSD with their patients. This was strictly taboo to the behaviorist, who refused to experiment on himself on the grounds that it would impair his ability to remain completely objective.
The chasm between the two schools of thought was not due to a communications breakdown or a lack of familiarity with the drug. The different methodologies were rooted in conflicting ideological frameworks. Behaviorism was still anchored in the materialist world view formalized by Newton; the "psychedelic" evidence was congruent with the revolutionary implications of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The belief in scientific objectivity had been shaken in 1927 when physicist Wemer Heisenberg enunciated the "uncertainty principle," which held that in subatomic physics the observer inevitably influenced the movement of the particles being observed. LSD research and many other types of studies suggested that an uncertainty principle of sorts was operative in psychology as well, in that the results were conditioned by the investigator's preconceptions. The "pure" observer was an illusion, and those who thought they could conduct an experiment without "contaminating" the results were deceiving themselves.
Aldous Huxley felt that the "scientific" approach was utterly hopeless. "Those idiots want to be Pavlovians," he said, "[but] Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The 'scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics." The practitioners of psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, were cognizant of the complex interaction between set and setting, and they worked to facilitate insight and personal growth.
Of course, even the best set and setting could not always guarantee an easy, pleasant, or uncomplicated experience. The goal of a therapeutic session was not to have a "good trip" per se but to work through emotional, creative or intellectual blockages and further the process of self-discovery an ordeal that could be very painful at times. Certain schools of psychiatry R. D. Laing, for example recognized that "freaking out" might actually herald a positive breakthrough to a new level of awareness if properly integrated by the patient.* The idea that a turbulent acid trip could have therapeutic consequences reflected an ancient understanding of the human psyche and the principles governing the healing process.
* 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
The "perilous passing" through the chaotic realm of the bummer was structured into the drug rituals of primitive societies as part of the sacred "vision-quest." The key figure in the hallucinogenic drama was the shaman, the witch doctor, the medicine man (or woman, as was often the case) who gave song to dreams and provided spiritual access for the entire tribe. A connoisseur of the drug-induced trance state, the shaman derived his or her strength from confronting the terror of ego death the quintessential trial by fire that was seen as a necessary prelude to an ecstatic rebirth, the resurrection of a new personality.
The drug experience informed every aspect of life in traditional cultures. With the aid of hallucinogenic plants the witch doctor cured the sick, communicated with the spirits of the dead, foretold the future, and initiated young people in coming-of-age rites. The use of mind-altering substances within an ethos of combat and aggression was also common in primitive communities. Whatever the specific purpose, the shaman always employed the hallucinogen in a ceremonial context. An elaborate set of rituals governed every step of the process, from gathering the roots and herbs to preparing and administering the brew. The power plants were often poisonous and could be fatal if not prepared properly. Only a ritually clean person who had endured weeks or months of prayer and fasting, often in isolation from the community, was deemed ready to ingest these substances. Because of the shaman's familiarity with states of consciousness induced by hallucinogenic drugs, he or she was considered qualified to pilot others through the experience.
"Primitive man," wrote Huxley in 1931, "explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered." To Huxley, the urge for transcendence and visionary experience was nothing less than a biological imperative. "Always and everywhere," he asserted, "human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in the Wordsworthian phrase, 'far more deeply interfused.' I live, yet not I, but wine or opium or peyote or hashish liveth in me. To go beyond the insulated self is such a liberation that, even when self-transcendence is through nausea into frenzy, through cramps into hallucinations and coma, the drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as intrinsically divine."
The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet (with the possible exception of certain Eskimo and Polynesian communities). For the Aztecs there was peyote and ololiuqui, a small lentil-like seed containing lysergic acid; the Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri, a desert shrub; the natives of the Upper Amazon had yage, the telepathic vine. Those who floated into a sacred space after ingesting these substances often projected ecstatic qualities onto the plants themselves. Certain scholars believe that the fabled Soma of the ancient Vedic religion in northern India was actually the fly agaric mushroom, and there is strong evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived, was the mysterious kykeon used for over two thousand years by the ancient Greeks in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries.*
* In The Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hermann, 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 kykeonóa 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.
When Christianity was adopted as the official creed of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, all other religions, including the Mysteries, were banished. Christian propagandists called for the destruction of the pagan drug cults that had spread throughout Europe after the Roman conquest. Like its shamanistic forebears, paganism was rooted in rapture rather than faith or doctrine; its mode of expression was myth and ritual, and those who carried on the forbidden traditions possessed a vast storehouse of knowledge about herbs and special medicaments. The witches of the Middle Ages concocted brews with various hallucinogenic compounds belladonna, thorn apple, henbane and bufotenine (derived from the sweat gland of the toad Bufo marinus)and when the moon was full they flew off on their imaginary broomsticks to commune with spirits.+
+ 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."
The ruthless suppression of European witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition coincided with attempts to stamp out indigenous drug use among the colonized natives of the New World. The Spanish outlawed peyote and coca leaves in the America's, and the British later tried to banish kava use in Tahiti. Such edicts were part of an imperialist effort to impose a new social order that stigmatized the psychedelic experience as a form of madness or possession by evil spirits. It wasn't until the late eighteenth century that industrial civilization produced its own "devil's advocate," which spoke in a passionate and lyrical voice. The romantic rebellion signified "a return of the repressed" as drugs were embraced by the visionary poets and artists who lived as outcasts in their own society. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, catalyzed the literary talents of Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the best-known French writers, including Baudelaire, de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, gathered at Le Club des Haschischins, a proto-bohemian enclave in Paris founded by Theophile Gautier in 1844.*
* 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
For the visionary poets modem society was the bummer, and they often viewed the drug experience as a tortured means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human. It was with the hope of alleviating his own tortured mental condition that Antonin Artaud made an intercontinental trek in the 1930's to participate in the peyote ritual of the Tarahumara Indians in the Mexican highlands. Artaud did not undertake such a risky journey as a tourist or an anthropologist but as someone who wished to be healed, as a spiritual exile seeking to regain "a Truth which the world of Europe is losing." The desperate Frenchman experienced a monumental bummer "the cataclysm which was my body this dislocated assemblage, this piece of damaged geology." Yet somehow, despite the nightmare visions and the somatic discomfort, he managed to scratch out a perception of the Infinite. "Once one has experienced a visionary state of mind," Artaud wrote in The Peyote Dance, "one can no longer confuse the lie with truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from this reality."
Like Artaud and the romantic poets, some psychiatrists who used LSD in a therapeutic context believed that a disruptive experience could have a curative effect if allowed to proceed to resolution. Many other researchers, however, dismissed transcendental insight as either "happy psychosis" or a lot of nonsense. The kneejerk reaction on the part of the psychotomimetic stalwarts was indicative of a deeply ingrained prejudice against certain varieties of experience. In advanced industrial societies "paranormal" states of consciousness are readily disparaged as "abnormal" or pathological. Such attitudes, cultural as much as professional, played a crucial role in circumscribing the horizon of scientific investigation into hallucinogenic agents.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argues that the scientist's overriding need to make sense of his data compels him to mold it to the prevailing scientific paradigm, which defines "legitimate" problems and methods for a given historical era. There are moments, however, when the orthodox framework cannot bear the weight of irrefutable new evidence. A period of controversy ensues until a new paradigm emerges to encompass and transcend the previous ideology. During this transition period scientists who buck the status quo are often castigated as eccentric, irresponsible, and unscientific. Galileo, for example, was branded a lunatic and a heretic for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. In a similar fashion the psychedelic evidence challenged the entrenched world view of the psychiatric establishment, and proponents of LSD therapy were summarily denounced and ridiculed by those who were fixated on the model psychosis concept.
Dr. Humphry Osmond defended his position by emphasizing that the pathological bias, from a historical perspective, was clearly the exception and not the rule. In many cultures that were less sophisticated technologically but more so ecologically, the drug-induced trance state was revered as an enlargement of reality rather than a deviation from it. Osmond pleaded with his fellow researchers not to dismiss something that struck them as unusual or different simply because "it transcends those fashionable ruts of thinking that we dignify by calling logic and reason." He urged psychiatrists to change their outlook in order to realize the full potential of psychedelics.
While many young doctors rallied to his call, there were others, including certain influential scientists working under CIA and military contract, who refused to budge from the psychotomimetic posture. The debate between the two camps came to a head at the first international conference on LSD therapy in 1959. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (at times a CIA conduit), it was perhaps the most important gathering of LSD researchers to date for it enabled workers in the field to compare notes and analyze their findings as a group. The conference was chaired by Dr. Paul Hoch, a prominent and well-connected scientist who was, in the words of Sanford Unger, "an opinion leader." Hoch was also a longtime CIA consultant and a contract employee of the US Army Chemical Corps. Dr. Harold Abramson, a veteran of the CIAís MK-ULTRA program, served as recording secretary, and a number of other scientists who rented their services to the CIA and the military were featured speakers. Hoch and Abramson did not just stumble into their respective roles at this event. Their status as dominant figures in aboveground LSD research suggests the extent to which covert interests influenced the course of the debate over hallucinogenic substances and their effects.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary Dr. Hoch stubbornly insisted that LSD and mescaline were "essentially anxiety-producing drugs." He asserted that they were "not especially useful" in a therapeutic context because they disorganize the psychic integration of a person. LSD experiments, according to the chairman, could not be compared with "results obtained in patients where tranquilizing drugs were used to reduce, instead of stir up the patient's symptoms."
Dr. Hoch was incredulous when other participants in the Macy conference reported that their patients found the LSD session beneficial and personally rewarding and were usually eager to take the drug again. "In my experience," Hoch announced, "no patient asks for it again." His experience included the following mescaline experiment conducted on a thirty-six-year-old male diagnosed as a "pseudoneurotic schizophrenic."
He had some visual hallucinations. He saw dragons and tigers coming to eat him and reacted to these hallucinations with marked anxiety. He also had some illusionary distortions of the objects in the room. The emotional changes were apprehension and fearóat times mounting to panic, persecutory misinterpretation of the environment, fear of death, intense irritability, suspiciousness, perplexity, and feelings of depersonalization. He verbalized the feelings of depersonalization as "floating out of space," seemed "between this life and the next," and had the feeling of being born. The paranoid content concerned essentially why the doctors were taking notes and fear that he would be attacked by them. He also expressed an ecstatic grandiose trend of having the feeling that he was God in heaven and then, however, had the feeling of being in hell . The mental picture was that of a typical schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted.
As an afterword, Hoch noted, "This patient received transorbital lobotomy and showed temporarily a marked improvement in all his symptoms, losing most of his tension and anxiety. Postoperatively he was again placed under mescaline. Basically the same manifestations were elicited as prior to the operation with the exception that quantitatively the symptoms were not as marked as before."
Dr. Hoch also tried electroshock treatment on patients who had been given mescaline. "It did not influence the clinical symptoms at all," he reported matter-of factly. "The patients continued to behave in the same way as prior to electroshock treatment." On the basis of these tests Hoch concluded that electroshock "has no influence on mescaline-produced mental states." He might have revised his "objective" assessment if he had taken the drug himself and had one of his assistants apply the volts while he tripped the lights fantastic. But those who secretly funded his research required only that he dish it out to mental patients and prisoners.
"An interesting theory can always outrun a set of facts," declared psychologist Audrey Holliday. She found the whole psychotomimetic approach guilty of using "unscientific and intemperate terms." Yet the semantic inaccuracies were still being bandied about even when most researchers had agreed that LSD did not really mimic endogenous schizophrenia.
Despite widespread acknowledgment that the model psychosis concept had outlived its usefulness, the psychiatric orientation articulated by those of Dr. Hoch's persuasion prevailed in the end. When it came time to lay down their hand, the medical establishment and the media both "mimicked" the line that for years had been secretly promoted by the CIA and the military that hallucinogenic drugs were extremely dangerous because they drove people insane, and all this talk about creativity and personal growth was just a lot of hocus pocus. This perception of LSD governed the major policy decisions enacted by the FDA and the drug control apparatus in the years ahead.
Chapter 3
Under The Mushroom,
Over The Rainbow
Manna From Harvard
By this time, however, psychedelic drugs already had a certain notoriety, largely due to favorable reports in Luce's publishing outlets. In May 1957 Life magazine ran a story on the discovery of the "magic mushroom" as part of its Great Adventure series. Written by R. Gordon Wasson, the seventeen-page spread, complete with color photos, was laudatory in every way. Wasson, a vice-president of J. P. Morgan and Company, pursued a lifelong interest in mushrooms as a personal hobby. He and his wife, Valentina, journeyed all over the world, treading a unique path through the back roads of history in an effort to learn about the role of toadstools in primitive societies. Their travels took them to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they met a medicine woman who agreed to serve them teonanacati, or "God's flesh," as the divine mushrooms were called. As he chewed the bitter fungus, Wasson was determined to resist its effects so as to better observe the ensuing events. But as he explained to the readers of Life, his resolve "soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms."
We were never more awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. They evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.
The visions lasted through the night as Wasson lay on the floor of a tiny hut enraptured by God's flesh. "For the first time," he wrote, "the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind."
Wasson's account constituted nothing less than a journalistic breakthrough. A mass audience was introduced to the mysterious world of chemical hallucinogens, and soon hundreds of people started flocking to Mexico to find their own curandero. At the same time Dr. Albert Hofmann conducted a chemical analysis of the divine mushroom at Sandoz Laboratories. He extracted the active ingredients and synthesized a new compound: psilocybin. Upon learning of Hofmann's achievement, the CIA immediately procured samples from Sandoz and forwarded the material to Dr. Harris Isbell at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital, where it was tested on drug addicts.
Leary's work culminated in an appointment as a lecturer at Harvard University, where students and professors had for years served as guinea pigs for CIA- and military-funded LSD experiments. His first semester at Harvard was relatively quiet compared to what lay in store; he taught his classes and collaborated on another psychology textbook. While all seemed well outwardly, Leary was beginning to have second thoughts about the career he had charted for himself in the charmed circle of academe. He was mired in a mid-life crisis stemming from two failed marriages; his first wife had committed suicide. The turning point came in the summer of 1960 while Leary, then thirty-nine years old, was vacationing at a sunny villa in Cuernavaca, Mexico. A friend procured a handful of magic mushrooms from an old Indian woman, and after a bit of prodding Leary washed them down with a few slugs of Carta Blanca. At the time Leary had not even smoked marijuana. Like many who experimented with psychedelics, he found that his first trip had a profound impact on his way of viewing the world. "It was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life," he wrote later. "I discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil all lie inside my body, outside my mind." The transcendent implications of that initial journey into inner space convinced him that the normal mind was a "static, repetitive circuit." Leary reevaluated his task as a psychologist; from then on he would dedicate his efforts to exploring substances that hinted at other realities and a new conception of the human psyche.
Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality Assessments section of the O.S.S during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance. Leary had obtained a supply from Sandoz, which distributed the new drug to researchers free of charge.
Leary, on the other hand, always had a rebellious streak in him. His mother had dreams of his being a priest, and his father wanted him to become a career military officer. Neither wish came true. Leary passed up an opportunity to attend a Catholic seminary and dropped out of West Point after committing a rules infraction that led to the "silent treatment" (a form of ostracism) by the other cadets for nine months. He later enrolled at Alabama University to study psychology, only to be expelled for getting caught in a girls' dormitory. After a brief stint in the service Leary resumed his psychological studies, earning a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. And now he was ready for another tussle with the establishment. In his own words Leary was "handsome, clean-cut, witty, confident, charismatic, and in that inert culture unusually creative."
While drawing up plans for a psilocybin experiment, Leary and Alpert consulted two essays by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. By coincidence Huxley was in the area as a visiting lecturer at MIT. The elderly scholar was brought into the project, first as an adviser and then as a participant in a psilocybin experiment. He and Leary took the drug together, and after the session they spoke about what to do with this "philosopher's stone." Huxley felt the best way to bring about vast changes in society was to offer the experience to the talented, the well-born, the intelligent rich, and others in positions of influence.
When Dr. Humphry Osmond passed through Boston, Huxley took him to meet Leary. It was the night of the Kennedy election. "We rode out to his place," Osmond remembered, "and Timothy was wearing his gray-flannel suit and his crew cut. And we had a very interesting discussion with him. That evening after we left, Huxley said, 'What a nice fellow he is!' And then he remarked how wonderful it was to think that this was where it was going to be done at Harvard. He felt that psychedelics would be good for the Academy. Whereupon I replied, 'I think he's a nice fellow, too. But don't you think he's just a little bit square?' Aldous replied, 'You may well be right. Isn't that, after all, what we want?'"
Leary was a relative latecomer to the psychedelic research scene, but right from the start he and his cohorts made no bones about where they were coming from. "We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness," Leary asserted. "We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia nor the visionary state as model psychosis."
The first formal experiment conducted by Leary's group was a pioneering venture in criminal psychology. Psilocybin was given to thirty-two inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security prison, to determine whether the drug would help prisoners change their ways, thereby lowering the recidivism rate. At least one member of Leary's research team took psilocybin with the prisoners while another observer stayed straight for the entire session. The pilot study proved successful in the short term; only 25% of those who took the drug ended up in jail again, as compared to the normal rate of 80%.
Leary's research methodology was quite different from that of the ClA's Dr. Harris Isbell, who administered various hallucinogens, including psilocybin and LSD, to inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital. Some were kept high for six weeks at a stretch. These studies were not designed to rehabilitate criminals; on the contrary, Isbell and the CIA were interested in drugging people to gather more data on the disruptive potential of mind-altering substances. Leary rejected this manipulative approach, believing that research should be conducted with subjects rather than on them. All of the Concord inmates were briefed beforehand on the effects of the drug, and Leary encouraged his test subjects to provide input and criticism during every phase of the experiment.
Another aspect of Leary's research focused on the relationship between drug-induced and naturally occurring religious experiences. In an unusual experiment he sought to determine whether the transcendent experiences reported during psychedelic sessions were similar to the mystical experiences described in various holy scriptures and reported by saints, prophets, and religious teachers throughout the ages. Although university officials refused to sponsor the experiment, Leary and his assistant, Walter Pahnke, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, proceeded to administer psilocybin to ten theology students and professors in the setting of a Good Friday service, while ten others were given placebos. It was a "double-blind" experiment in that neither Leary nor his subjects knew who was getting the mushroom pill and who was part of the control group. The results of the study were dramatic. Nine out of ten psilocybin recipients reported having an intense religious experience, but only one person from the control group could say the same. In his doctoral dissertation Pahnke concluded that the experiences described by those who had taken the drug were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with" the classical mystical experience.
"The Miracle at Marsh Chapel," as the Good Friday experiment came to be known, generated a highly charged discussion concerning the authenticity of "chemical" or "instant" mysticism. Some religious scholars, such as Walter Houston Clark, professor of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, supported Leary's contention that with the proper set and setting psychedelics could be used to produce mystical states of consciousness almost at will. These drugs were said to offer not only a means for enhancing spiritual sensitivity; they also opened up the possibility of bringing the religious experience into the laboratory, where it could be scrutinized and perhaps even explained in scientific terms.
This prospect was not greeted with hosannas by orthodox religious teachers, who denigrated the drug experience as a less genuine form of revelation. Psychedelic advocates countered that the apparent ease with which the mystical experience could be triggered by drugs did not negate its spiritual validity. On the contrary, they believed that the high incidence of drug-related religious phenomena, even in cases where an exceptional set and setting were lacking, stemmed from the fact that on a fundamental level the human mind is connected with the Infinite; psychedelics simply made manifest this basic truth. According to Leary, the personal background of the subject did not matter. "You can be a convict or a college professor," he declared. "You'll still have a mystical, transcendental experience that may change your life."
Chemical Crusaders
In addition to a series of formal studies, Leary's group also held psychedelic sessions
on their own outside the university. A clinical setting was rejected in favor of the
comfortable surroundings of a private apartment where subjects could relax and
listen to music by candlelight. Graduate students and selected individuals from the
arts were invited to participate in these off-campus experiments, and the vast
majority reported positive experiences. "Anyone who wanted to take the voyage was
welcome to come along," Leary said.As Ginsberg and Orlovsky were coming down from the six-hour psilocybin high, they put on robes and sat around the kitchen table sipping steamed milk and talking with Leary about the pills. Ginsberg had some forthright ideas about what to do with the synthetic mushroom. As far as he was concerned, psilocybin had vast implications far beyond the world of medicine; psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind and ushering in a new millennium and therefore no one had the right to keep them from the average citizen.
Whereas Huxley had suggested turning on opinion leaders, Ginsberg, the quintessential egalitarian, wanted everyone to have the opportunity to take mind- expanding drugs. His plan was to tell everything, to disseminate as much information as possible. The time was ripe to launch a psychedelic crusade and what better place to start than Harvard University, the alma mater of president-elect John F. Kennedy? Leary seemed ideally suited to lead such a campaign. A respected academic, he had short hair, wore button-down shirts, and took his role as a scientist quite seriously. How ironic, Ginsberg noted, "that the very technology stereotyping our consciousness and desensitizing our perceptions should throw up its own antidote . Given such historic Comedy, who should emerge from Harvard University but the one and only Dr. Leary, a respectable human being, a worldly man faced with the task of a Messiah."
Ginsberg's vision of a historic movement that would transform human consciousness struck a responsive chord in Leary. "We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard," the LSD doctor recalled, "believing that it was time (after the shallow and nostalgic fifties) for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed; knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, and that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum." Leary felt that the limited vision of reality prevailing in modem society was partly attributable to the dominant drugs, alcohol and coffee. Change the drugs, and a change of heart would naturally follow: "Politics, religion, economics, social structure, are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical."
The task that lay before them was formidable. Ginsberg pulled out his little black address book and began reeling off the names of people they could turn on: painters, poets, publishers, musicians, and so on. In addition to being one of the most important poets of his time, Ginsberg was a cultural ambassador of sorts. He traveled in various circles, and his contacts were international in scope. He would carry the message to everyone he knew.
In a sense it was Ginsberg's way of returning a historical favor; the jazz musicians had given marijuana to the beats, and now the beats were turning the jazz cats on to psychedelics. Word of the new drugs spread quickly through the jazz scene, and numerous musicians, including many of the preeminent players in the field, experimented with psychedelics in the early 1960s. John Coltrane, the acknowledged master of the tenor saxophone, took LSD and reported upon returning from his inner voyage that he "perceived the interrelationship of all life forms."
It was through Ginsberg that the existence of Leary's research project came to the attention of the beat network. When Neal Cassady heard about the mushroom pills he bolted up to Cambridge for a session with the professor. "It's philosophical!" Cassady exclaimed. "This is the Rolls Royce of dope, the ultimate high." Kerouac arranged to sample the mushroom extract without leaving his mother. A "Dear Coach" letter from Kerouac to Leary described his experience tripping at her house on the day President Kennedy was inaugurated.
Mainly I felt like a floating Khan on a magic carpet with my interesting lieutenants and gods . We were at the extremist point goofing on clouds watching the movie of existence . Everybody seemed innocent. It was a definite Satori. Full of psychic clairvoyance (but you must remember that this is not half as good as the peaceful ecstasy of simple Samadhi trance as I described it in Dharma Bums) . The faculty of remembering names and what one has learned is heightened so fantastically that we could develop the greatest scholars and scientists in the world with this stuff.
The letter was signed, "Well, okay. Touch football sometime?"
Another writer Ginsberg brought into Leary's circle was the poet Charles Olson, formerly rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. A man of overpowering intellect, Olson was fifty years old at the time of his psychedelic initiation. He stood a towering six feet seven inches, had unruly strands of white hair, and spoke in a deep resonant voice. Olson remembered the first time he tried psilocybin: "I was so high on bourbon that I took it as though it was a bunch of peanuts. I kept throwing the peanuts and the mushrooms into my mouth." He described the experience as "a love feast, a truth pill it makes you exactly what you are."
Olson had a strong affinity for the mushroom. He thought it a "wretched shame that we don't have it in the common drugstore as a kind of beer, because it's so obviously an attractive and useful, normal food." But he also sensed immediately that psychedelics were a profound threat to the status quo. After the drug wore off, his first words to Leary were, "When they come after you, you can hide at my house." Leary, being an apolitical creature, shrugged off the remark without much thought. Little did he know that the CIA was already keeping an eye on his escapades at Harvard.
Olson admired Leary for his chutzpah, but he also considered the good professor a bit foolhardy in thinking that happiness would descend in one fell swoop if the world was suddenly be mushroomed. "Leary used to argue that this was the decade of the mushroom," Olson commented, "and if we didn't get peace from turning everybody on, the race would be destroyed . I myself think that was rather thin politics to begin with."
In retrospect Ginsberg admitted, "We were probably too proselytizing." It may have been his messianic enthusiasm that rankled Robert Lowell, the New England poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, who was turned on to psilocybin by Ginsberg. Lowell did not report favorably at the end of the session in his apartment. As Ginsberg was leaving, he tried to reassure Lowell by telling him, "Love conquers all." To which the distinguished poet replied, "Don't be too sure." Writer Arthur Koestler was also critical of the mushroom experience. "This is wonderful, no doubt," he told Leary the day after he tripped. "But it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism . There's no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was." [lol I can relate to that, I used to call it sensory overload DC]
But the sternest rebuke to the high-flying optimism of the Harvard group was yet to come. Leary was eager for William Burroughs to take the mushroom pills. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, was something of a mentor to the beat generation. In the summer of 1961 Leary traveled to Tangiers, where Burroughs was living at the time. He was working on a new novel, The Soft Machine, smoking a considerable amount of Moroccan kit, and experimenting with a flicker machine developed by his friend Byron Gysin that caused hallucinations similar to mescaline or LSD. The poets Alan Ansen and Gregory Corso were there for the session along with Leary and Ginsberg. Things got off to a swimming start as they sauntered in the warm moonlight high on psilocybin. But the mood quickly changed once it became apparent that the mushroom was not to Burroughs's liking. "No good, no bueno," he kept shaking his head. He split from the others and waited out the "high" in seclusion.
Burroughs was never into drugs simply for a good time. Despite his psilocybin bummer he agreed to go to Cambridge to participate in further experiments in consciousness alteration. Burroughs looked forward to working with sensory deprivation and submersion tanks, stroboscopes, machines to measure brain waves, and all the technical wonders that a prestigious university could supply. But his hopes were dashed as soon as he arrived at Harvard. All he found was a semipermanent cocktail party with a bunch of starry-eyed intellectuals talking some half-assed jive about brotherly love. Leary kept touting psilocybin as an enlightenment pill, a cure-all for a sick society. To Burroughs, this view was far too simplistic. While agreeing that hallucinogenic drugs could open the doors of perception, he recognized that only the deliberate cultivation of new habits of consciousness could endow such visions with enduring significance. "Remember, anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways," he insisted. "You don't need drugs to get high, but drugs do serve as a useful shortcut at certain stages of training." Burroughs had already tried drugs as a means of self-realization and was attempting to move on. After a short stint in Cambridge he dropped out of the psychedelic clan for good.
Burroughs was acutely aware of the darker side of American politics, and he had some ominous premonitions about the impending psychedelic revolution. Despite rampant enthusiasm for hallucinogens among his peers, he suspected that sinister forces were also interested in these drugs and that Leary and his sidekicks might be playing right into their hands. Burroughs feared that psychedelics could be used to control rather than liberate the vision-starved masses. He understood that the seeker of enlightenment was especially vulnerable to manipulation from without, and he sounded an urgent warning to this effect in the opening passages of Nova Express, published in 1964.
At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction and history is fiction I must say this:
Bring together state of news Inquire onward from state to doer Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Time Life and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Listen: Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer . Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit . Stay out of the Garden of Delights . Throw back their ersatz Immortality . Flush their drug kicks down the drain They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs learn to make it without any chemical corn.
When he came down from his initial psychedelic voyage, he called Aldous Huxley to ask his advice about what to do with the magic gram of acid. At that point Hollingshead was unsure whether LSD was more confusing than illuminating. The drug had disrupted his sense of self: "The reality on which I had consciously based my personality had dissolved into maya, a hallucinatory facade. Stripped of one kind of reality, and unwilling or unable to benefit from the possibilities of another one, I was acutely aware of my helplessness, my utter transience, my suspension between two worlds, one outside and the other wholly within." Moreover, he was financially destitute and his marriage was falling apart. Huxley was sympathetic. He suggested that Hollingshead go to Harvard and meet Timothy Leary. If there was any single investigator in the United States worth seeing, Huxley assured him, it was Dr. Leary.
Hollingshead took off for Cambridge with his mayonnaise jar. Leary went out of his way to help his visitor. He offered Hollingshead a free room in his attic, loaned him some money, and invited him to join the psilocybin research team. Naturally Leary gave his guest a mushroom session, and though Hollingshead had a good trip, the drug was not as strong as LSD. Hollingshead obliged by offering his host some acid, but Leary was not eager to take it. He was apparently of the opinion that if you had tried one psychedelic you had tried them all.
One night Hollingshead was driving around outside Leary's house with Maynard Ferguson, the trumpet player, and his wife, Flo. They were smoking a joint in the car because illegal drugs were not allowed inside. Hollingshead told them about LSD, and they became very curious. Eventually he fetched his mayonnaise jar, and they all took a hit. Within an hour the drug had started to come on. Flo thought it was fantastic, and Maynard had to agree; it definitely got you there. When Leary noticed that Ferguson's face was glowing like an electric toaster, he decided to join them. He took a heaping spoonful, and soon he was flying.
It came sudden and irresistible. An endless deep swamp marsh of some other planet teeming and steaming with energy and life, and in the swamp an enormous tree whose branches were foliated out miles high and miles wide. And then this tree, like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, went ssssuuuck, and every cell in my body was swept into the root, twigs, branches, and leaves of this tree. Tumbling and spinning, down the soft fibrous avenues to some central point which was just light. Just light, but not just light. It was the center of Life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the hard eye of God. Merged with this pulsing flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama.
Leary was stunned by the power of the drug. In the wake of his first acid trip he wandered about dazed and confused. What to do, he asked himself, now that the mundane routines of life seemed so futile and artificial? Not knowing quite where to turn, he latched onto Hollingshead as his guru. Leary followed him around for days on end, treating the Englishman with awe. He was convinced that this pot-bellied, chain-smoking prankster whose face was pink-veined from alcohol was a messenger from the Good Lord Himself. Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, two of Leary's closest associates, were vexed to see him in such a helpless state. They thought he had really blown his mind, and they blamed Hollingshead. But it was only a matter of time before they too sampled the contents of the mayonnaise jar. Hollingshead gave the drug to all the members of the psilocybin project, and from then on LSD was part of their research repertoire.
Those early days at Harvard were charged with a special mystery and excitement. "Turning on" had not yet become identified with a particular lifestyle or set of values, and there were no maps or guideposts to chart the way. To those who embarked upon these shattering inner journeys, anything and everything seemed possible. It was as if all the fetters were suddenly removed. "LSD involved risk," Hollingshead said. "It was anarchistic; it upset our apple carts, torpedoed our cherished illusions, sabotaged our beliefs . Yet there were some of my circle who, with Rimbaud, could say, 'I dreamed of crusades, senseless voyages of discovery, republics without a history, moral revolution, displacement of races and continents. I believed in all the magics.'"
Not everyone was enchanted by the renegade psychedelic scene at Harvard. A confidential memorandum issued by the CIA's Office of Security, which had utilized LSD for interrogation purposes since the early 1950's, suggested that certain C.l.A- connected personnel might be involved with Leary's group. This prospect was disconcerting to Security officials, who considered hallucinogenic drugs "extremely dangerous." "Uncontrolled experimentation has in the past resulted in tragic circumstances and for this reason every effort is made to control any involvement with these drugs," a CIA agent reported. The document concluded with a specific directive: "Information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately . In addition, any information of Agency personnel involved with Dr's. ALPERT or LEARY, or with any other group engaged in this type of activity should also be reported."
Leary explained the basic rules about set and setting, emphasizing the importance of a comfortable, sensuous environment for an LSD trip. From time to time Pinchot reported back to him. "I can't give you all the details," she said, "but top people in Washington are turning on. You'd be amazed at the sophistication of some of our leaders. We're getting a little group together " Leary had no way of knowing that Mary Pinchot was one of President Kennedy's girlfriends and that she and JFK smoked pot together in the White House. Pinchot was murdered less than a year after Kennedy was assassinated, and her diary disappeared from her home.
When Leary learned of Pinchot's death, he recalled their conversations about LSD. At various times she had hinted that the CIA was monitoring his activities. Since drug research is of vital importance to American intelligence, Pinchot told him that he'd be allowed to conduct his experiments as long as it didn't get out of hand.
But Leary ignored her advice. In the spring of 1962 he published an article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists warning that the Russians might try to subvert the United States by dumping a few pounds of LSD into the water supply of major cities. The only way to prepare for such an attack, Leary maintained, was to dose our own reservoirs first as a civil defense measure so that people would know what to expect. Not surprisingly, this suggestion didn't go over well in the scientific community. A number of CIA- and military-sponsored researchers launched vociferous attacks on Leary and Alpert. Dr. Henry Beecher, an esteemed member of the Harvard Medical School faculty who conducted drug experiments for the CIA, ridiculed Leary's research methodology, stating that it reminded him "of De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater rather than a present-day scientific study of subjective responses to drugs." Dr. Max Rinkel, a veteran of the ClA's MK-ULTRA program, denounced Leary in the Harvard Alumni Review, as did Dr. Robert Heath, a longtime CIA and army contract employee. As Heath saw it, the whole notion of consciousness expansion was a meaningless abstraction, and impairing the human nervous system with dangerous chemicals could only result in pathological states that might have long-term negative repercussions.
As word of Leary's acid escapades spread around Harvard, university officials began to get edgy. Tensions reached a boiling point during a faculty meeting in March 1962. Leary's opponents charged that he conducted his drug studies in a nonchalant and irresponsible fashion. Specifically they cited the fact that trained physicians were rarely present; moreover, Leary himself got high with his test subjects. While admitting that he was operating outside the medical framework, Leary stuck to his guns and emphasized that taking LSD with a patient was common practice among many psychiatrists. Besides, since psychedelics were educational as well as medical tools, they should be made available outside the medical profession for investigatory purposes. Just because someone was a physician did not mean he was qualified to administer LSD, Leary argued, especially if he had never tried the drug himself.
Although Leary's volunteers rarely suffered untoward effects, a number of faculty members still had grave misgivings about the psilocybin project. As Dr. Herbert Kelman, recipient of a small grant from the ClA-connected Human Ecology Fund, put it at the meeting, "I question whether this project is being pursued as an intellectual endeavor or whether it is being pursued as a new kind of experience to offer an answer to man's ills."
The following day a sensationalized account of the faculty tussle appeared in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper. The story was immediately picked up by the Boston press, prompting an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration, which assisted the ClA's drug testing efforts, A month later Leary was notified that he could not continue his research unless a medical doctor was present when the drugs were administered. LSD, the FDA maintained, was too powerful and unpredictable to be left in the hands of irresponsible individuals, especially when they advocated using it not for scientific or medical purposes but to conjure up so- called religious experiences.
In effect the government had sided with the medical establishment, thereby legitimizing it as the sole authority on these matters. Leary and Alpert were ordered to surrender their supply of psilocybin to the university health service, and a special faculty committee was formed to advise and oversee future experiments. By the end of the year the psilocybin project had been officially terminated. "These drugs apparently cause panic and temporary insanity in many officials who have not taken them," Leary quipped as he grudgingly forked over his stash. The rebellious professor felt that the doctors had a vested interest in keeping psychedelics out of the hands of laymen. He accused the government and the medical establishment of conspiring to suppress valuable methods of research.
Leary's rambunctious style infuriated members of the academic community. Even some of his would-be allies suggested that he tone it down a bit. They feared that his antics might jeopardize other psychedelic researchers. This was also the opinion of Captain Al Hubbard, the incorrigible superspy who visited Leary at Harvard. "I liked Tim when we first met," Hubbard recalled, "but I warned him a dozen times." In no uncertain terms the Captain told Leary to keep his research respectable, to play ball with the system. Hubbard was keenly aware of the potency of Harvard's name and tried to lend a hand by supplying drugs to the young professor. But eventually the two LSD pioneers had a falling-out. "I gave stuff to Leary," said the Captain, "and he turned out to be completely no good . He seemed like a well-intentioned person, but then he went overboard."
The dispute over Leary's research methodology quickly became tangled up with reports that sugar cubes laced with LSD were circulating on the Harvard campus. Unconfirmed stories about wild LSD parties and undergraduates pushing trips on the black market were rife. Leary did little to placate his superiors. "LSD is so powerful," he observed wryly, "that one administered dose can start a thousand rumors." While Leary was never directly accused of dealing drugs, his reputation as a freewheeling and euphoric type led many to assume that he was connected with the underground supply. It was a case of guilt by alleged association, and it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
In May 1963 Richard Alpert was summarily dismissed from his teaching post for violating an agreement not to give LSD to undergraduate students. It was the first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the twentieth century. "Some day it will be quite humorous," he told a reporter, "that a professor was fired for supplying a student with 'the most profound educational experience in my life.' That's what he told the Dean it was." A few days later the academic axe fell on Leary as well, after he failed to attend an honors program committee meeting a rather paltry excuse, but by this time the university higher-ups were glad to get rid of him on any pretext.
Leary was unruffled by the turn of events. LSD, he stated tersely, was "more important than Harvard." He and Alpert fired off a declaration to the Harvard Review blasting the university as "the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness contractors," an "intellectual ministry of defense." The Harvard scandal was hot news. In the coming months most of the major US magazines featured stories on LSD and its foremost proponent. Leary was suddenly "Mr. LSD," and he welcomed the publicity. The extensive media coverage doubtless spurred the growth of the psychedelic underground.
Rebuffed by the academic and medical authorities, Leary decided to take his case directly to the people in particular, young people. He was convinced that the revelation and revolution were at hand. The hope for the future rested on a simple equation: the more who turned on, the better. It would be a twentieth-century remake of the Children's Crusade, with legions of stoned youth marching ever onward to the Promised Land. Leary would assume the role of High Priest, urging his brethren to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." With the help of the media his gospel would ring throughout the land. "From this time on," he said, "we saw ourselves as unwitting agents of a social process that was far too powerful for us to control or to more than dimly understand."
The Crackdown
When LSD was first introduced to the United States in 1949, it was well received by
the scientific community. Within less than a decade the drug had risen to a position
of high standing among psychiatrists. LSD therapy was by no means a fad or a fly- by-night venture. More than one thousand clinical papers were written on the
subject, discussing some forty thousand patients. Favorable results were reported
when LSD was used to treat severely resistant psychiatric conditions, such as
frigidity and other sexual aberrations. A dramatic decrease in autistic symptoms was
observed in severely withdrawn children following the administration of LSD. The
drug was also found to ease the physical and psychological distress of terminal
cancer patients, helping them come to terms with the anguish and mystery of
death.* And chronic alcoholics continued to benefit from psychedelic therapy. One
enthusiastic researcher went so far as to suggest that with LSD it might be possible
to clean out skid row in Los Angeles. * The CIA used terminal cancer patients as guinea pigs for testing knockout drugs and psychochemical weapons under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA.
The rate of recovery or significant improvement was often higher with LSD therapy than with traditional methods. Furthermore, its risks were slim compared to the dangers of other commonly used and officially sanctioned procedures such as electroshock, lobotomy, and the so-called anti-psychotic drugs. Dr. Sidney Cohen, the man who turned on Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, attested to the virtues of LSD after conducting an in-depth survey of US and Canadian psychiatrists who had used it as a therapeutic tool. Forty-four doctors replied to Cohen's questionnaire, providing data on five thousand patients who had taken a total of more than twenty-five thousand doses of either LSD or mescaline. The most frequent complaint voiced by psychedelic therapists was "unmanageability." Only eight instances of "psychotic reaction lasting more than forty-eight hours" were reported in the twenty-five thousand cases surveyed. Not a single case of addiction was indicated, nor any deaths from toxic effects. On the basis of these findings Cohen maintained that "with the proper precautions psychedelics are safe when given to a selected healthy group."
By the early 1960's it appeared that LSD was destined to find a niche on the pharmacologist's shelf. But then the fickle winds of medical policy began to shift. Spokesmen for the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Food and Drug Administration started to denounce the drug, and psychedelic therapy quickly fell into public and professional disrepute. Granted, a certain amount of intransigence arises whenever a new form of treatment threatens to steal the thunder from more conventional methods, but this alone cannot account for the sudden reversal of a promising trend that was ten years in the making.
One reason the medical establishment had such a difficult time coping with the psychedelic evidence was that LSD could not be evaluated like most other drugs. LSD was not a medication in the usual sense; it wasn't guaranteed to relieve a specific symptom such as a cold or headache. In this respect psychedelics were out of kilter with the basic assumptions of Western medicine. The FDA's relationship with this class of chemicals became even more problematic in light of claims that LSD could help the healthy. Most doctors automatically dismissed the notion that drugs might benefit someone who was not obviously ailing.
In 1962 Congress enacted regulations that required the safety and efficacy of a new drug to be proven with respect to the condition for which it was to be marketed commercially. LSD, according to the FDA, did not satisfy these criteria. From then on, authorized distribution of the drug was tightly controlled. Anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to receive special permission from the FDA. The restrictive measures were supposedly designed to weed out "the bad apples," as one report put it, and thereby insure against the misuse of regulated substances. The FDA maintained that it did not want to inhibit legitimate researchers who were "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities."
By designating LSD an "experimental drug," the FDA had in effect ruled that it could only be used for research purposes and never as part of general psychiatric practice. Consequently it became nearly impossible for psychiatrists to obtain psychedelics legally. Some of the most distinguished and experienced investigators were forced to abandon their work, and the conditions that might have demonstrated LSD's therapeutic potential virtually ceased to exist. "It was a very intense period," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "The drug experience brought together many people of diverse interests. We built up a sizable amount of data and then the whole thing just fell in on us. Many who formerly were regarded as groundbreakers making an important contribution suddenly found themselves disenfranchised. "
Certain officials suggested that those who practiced psychedelic therapy were themselves to blame for the crackdown on LSD research. In a thinly veiled reference to Leary, Drs. Jonathan Cole and Robert Katz of the National Institutes for Mental Health expressed concern that some investigators "may have been subject to the deleterious and seductive effects of these agents." AMA president Roy Grinkler harped on the same theme, proclaiming, "At one time it was impossible to find an investigator willing to work with LSD-25 who was not himself an 'addict.'"
As far as Grinkler was concerned, the elimination of psychedelic studies was necessary to insure the health and safety of the American public. In a widely circulated editorial that echoed the psychosis-producing view of hallucinogens, the AMA president stated, "Latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology. Psychic addiction is being developed." He issued an urgent warning to the psychiatric profession that "greater morbidity, and even mortality, is in store for patients unless controls are developed against the unwise use of LSD-25."
Many LSD researchers were quick to point an accusing finger at Leary for bringing the government's wrath down on everybody. But is it plausible that one wayward individual was single-handedly responsible for provoking a 180-degree shift in official government policy with respect to psychedelic research? Was the FDA simply overreacting to Leary's flamboyant style, or were there other forces at work?
Up until the early 1960's LSD studies had flourished without government restrictions and the CIA had sponsored numerous research projects to enhance its mind control capabilities. In 1962, however, the Technical Services Staff, which ran the MK-ULTRA program, began to orient its behavioral activities exclusively toward operations and away from peripheral long-range studies. This new strategy resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers. Extensive LSD testing was no longer a top priority for the MK-ULTRA crew, which had already learned enough about the drug to understand how it could best be applied in selected covert operations. They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe." While acid was still an important part of the cloak-and-dagger arsenal, by this time the CIA and the army had developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon.
The CIA and the military were not inhibited by the new drug laws enacted during the early 1960's. A special clause in the regulatory policy allowed the FDA to issue "selective exemptions," which meant that favored researchers would not be subject to restrictive measures. With this convenient loophole the FDA never attempted to oversee in-house pharmacological research conducted by the CIA and the military services. Secret arrangements were made whereby these organizations did not even have to file a formal "Claim for Exemption," or IND request. The FDA simply ignored all studies that were classified for reasons of national security, and CIA and military investigators were given free reign to conduct their covert experimentation. Apparently, in the eyes of the FDA, those seeking to develop hallucinogens as weapons were somehow more "sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities" than independent researchers dedicated to exploring the therapeutic potential of LSD.
In 1965 Congress passed the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, which resulted in even tighter restrictions on psychedelic research. The illicit manufacture and sale of LSD was declared a misdemeanor (oddly enough, possession was not yet outlawed). All investigators without IND exemptions were required to turn in their remaining supplies to the FDA, which retained legal jurisdiction over psychedelics. Adverse publicity forced Sandoz to stop marketing LSD entirely in April 1966, and the number of research projects fell to a mere handful.
The decision to curtail LSD experimentation was the subject of a congressional probe into the organization and coordination of federal drug research and regulatory programs. The inquiry in the spring of 1966 was led by Senator Robert Kennedy (D- N.Y), whose wife, Ethel, reportedly underwent LSD therapy with Dr. Ross MacLean (a close associate of Captain Hubbard's) at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver. Senator Kennedy asked officials of the FDA and the NIMH to explain why so many LSD projects were suddenly canned. When they evaded the issue, Kennedy became annoyed. "Why if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren't they worthwhile now?" he demanded repeatedly. The dialogue seesawed back and forth, but no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. "Why didn't you just let them continue?" asked the senator. "We keep going around and around . If I could get a flat answer about that I would be happy. Is there a misunderstanding about my question?"
Kennedy insinuated that the regulatory agencies were attempting to thwart potentially valuable research. He stressed the importance of a balanced outlook with respect to LSD: "I think we have given too much emphasis and so much attention to the fact that it can be dangerous and that it can hurt an individual who uses it that perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly."
Kennedy's plea fell on deaf ears. The FDA steadfastly refused to alter the course it had chosen. In 1967 a Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee (a joint FDA/NIMH venture) was established to process all research applications. Members of this committee included Dr. Harris Isbell and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, two longtime CIA contract employees. Shortly thereafter the NIMH terminated its last in-house LSD project involving human subjects. In 1968 the Drug Abuse Control Amendments were modified to make possession of LSD a misdemeanor and sale a felony. Responsibility for enforcing the law was shifted from the FDA to the newly formed Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Two years later psychedelic drugs were placed in the Schedule I categoryóa classification reserved for drugs of abuse that have no medical value.
While above ground research was being phased out, the CIA and the military continued to experiment with an ever more potent variety of hallucinogens.* In effect the policies of the regulatory agencies were themselves "regulated" by the unique requirements of these secret programs. As an official of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (of which the FDA was part) explained, "We are abdicating our statutory responsibilities in this area out of a desire to be courteous to the Department of Defense rather than out of legal inability to handle classified materials." The same courtesy was proffered to the CIA. The FDA collaborated with the Agency in other ways as well. FDA personnel with special security clearances served as consultants for chemical warfare projects. Information concerning new developments in the field of psychopharmacology was exchanged through confidential channels. The FDA also provided laboratory facilities and samples of new drugs that might prove useful to the CIA.
* 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/CHICK-WIT 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-3i67 produced "prolonged psychotic effects in laboratory personnel."
In light of the FDA's relationship with the intelligence community, it is highly unlikely that a major policy decision regarding LSD would have been made against the wishes of the CIA. If the Agency had wanted aboveground LSD studies to proliferate, they would have. But this type of research was no longer essential as far as the CIA was concerned. The spymasters viewed LSD as a strategic substance, as well as a threat to national security, by virtue of its psychotomimetic properties, which had been fully explored during the 1950's. Creative or therapeutic considerations were not part of the covert game plan. When push came to shove, the medical establishment implemented a policy based on the psychosis-producing view that is to say, the C.l.A's view of hallucinogens, even though this perspective was vigorously contested by many scientists.
By the early 1960's, when the new regulatory policy was enacted, a large number of people had already heard about LSD. Some were eager to try the drug, but they no longer had access to psychedelic therapists, who were the original "gatekeepers," so to speak. "The whole thing was just moving geometrically," Dr. Oscar Janiger recalled. "Obviously those people who couldn't get it from us would be seeking to get it elsewhere." A certain momentum had been generated thanks in no small part to the CIA and it quickly reached a point where the government could no longer contain it. Black market acid began to turn up on the street to meet the growing demand. This remarkable social phenomenon continued to gather strength despite the repeated admonitions of educators, doctors and politicians. Soon the "laboratory" would stretch across the entire continent as millions of young investigators undertook their own experiments with this consciousness-quaking chemical.
to be continued...next....
4 Preaching LSD
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