Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (51 page)

The use of acid in a recreational context is a far cry from how the LSD pioneers of the 1950s—both the spies and the doctors—originally envisioned its future. It was Timothy Leary who first spoke of LSD in terms of “hedonic engineering.” He promoted acid as a sacrament of play, the drug of
homo ludens.
“The American people today are quantum jumps more sophisticated,” Leary said recently. “About consciousness, about the nervous system . . . about self-actualization and self-indulgence, about pleasure being itself a reward. Pleasure is now the number one industry in this country. Recreational travel, entertainment, sensory indulgence. There’s no question about that being Number One. Now
that
was my goal.”

Leary was granted an early parole for good behavior in 1976, shortly after sensational reports of secret CIA acid tests began to surface in the press. Publicity surrounding the sordid details of the CIA’s drug programs only added to the negative mystique of LSD, giving it an even worse name. For Leary, however, these revelations were something of a pardon—the same government that had put him behind bars for abusing drugs was guilty of far more heinous crimes.

Tim and Joanna split up as soon as he was released from jail. She left for the island of Grenada and points beyond. Her confidant, Dennis Martino, died of an apparent drug overdose in Spain in 1975. It wasn’t long before Leary turned up on the college lecture circuit, hyping space migration and life extension with the same zeal he
once displayed for psychedelics. His next venue was nightclubs, where he performed as a “stand-up philosopher,” a self-described “cheerleader for change.” It was soft stuff by sixties standards, but Leary still managed to stir up controversy in his public and private life. When he appeared as a guest on a TV talk show, Art Linkletter called the station. Linkletter, whose twenty-year-old daughter committed suicide in the mid-1960s, blames Leary and LSD for her death.

In February 1979 Leary showed up at an “LSD Reunion” in Los Angeles, hosted by Dr. Oscar Janiger. An animated discussion ensued among the thirty psychedelic pioneers who attended this private gathering. Dr. Humphry Osmond and Laura Huxley were there, along with Sidney Cohen, John Lilly, Willis Harmon, and Nick Bercel. The legendary Captain Al Hubbard, then seventy-seven years of age, swaggered into Janiger’s home wearing his security uniform, with a pistol and a bandolier around his hip. “Oh, Al! I owe everything to you,” Leary greeted the Captain. “The galactic center sent you down just at the right moment.” To which Hubbard responded, “You sure as heck played your part.” It was the last time most of them would see the Captain, for he died a few years later, not long after receiving a card from President Reagan wishing him a happy birthday.

Leary popped up in the news again when he was busted at his home in Beverly Hills in the spring of 1979. But the only drugs found were new brain-changers that were not yet illegal and virtually unknown to the general public. A few years later he went on tour with his old nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy. Both men had come a long way since the Millbrook days, when Liddy first made a name for himself by arresting the High Priest of LSD. Liddy went on to work for CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President) in Washington, serving as a “plumber” and hatchet man for Nixon. In this capacity he proposed dosing columnist Jack Anderson and other “enemies” of the Nixon administration with an LSD-like substance. After doing time for his involvement in the Watergate break-in, he gladly teamed up with Leary for a tongue-in-cheek debate that caricatured their former roles.

The Liddy-Leary spectacle provided additional fodder for a floodtide of antisixties propaganda that has reduced the memory of that era to a battered corpse. Nevertheless, the Shockwaves of those tumultuous years continue to reverberate throughout society. The 1960s remain the watershed of our recent history, and the decade’s warring impulses are still being played out on the cultural and political
landscape. Ronald Reagan began his ascent to the White House by riding a crest of backlash sentiment against hippies, blacks, and student radicals in California. When Reagan became president, he “unleashed” the CIA, which continues to function as an international Pinkerton organization—company cops running amok in the Third World and spying on domestic dissidents. Indeed, the concerns of the 1960s have hardly withered away. Racism, sexism, militarism, and economic injustice are still the burning issues of the day. Opposition movements arising in response to Reagan will champion these same causes. And the new wave of political activists will also inherit the complex and unresolved legacy of the 1960s.

The tremendous outburst of energy in the sixties did not succeed in revamping the American power structure, but it had a profound effect in other ways. Avenues of choice were irrevocably opened, and a new set of options became available to everyone. Experimenting with psychedelic drugs was one of these options. This practice, now firmly rooted in the culture for good or ill, will endure no matter what the legal restrictions may be. People are still starving with the same hungers, and they will take LSD to satisfy a deep-rooted need for wholeness and meaning. In all likelihood acid will continue to ravage as many people as it liberates and deceive as many as it enlightens. Whether it will play a more significant role in the future remains a matter of conjecture, for the psychedelic experience carries the impress of a constellation of social forces that are always shifting and up for grabs.

It’s not over yet.

Afterword

Since
Acid Dreams
was first published, six years ago, we have been treated to a series of congressional and news media revelations about CIA involvement with international drug traffickers. Massive amounts of still-unaccounted-for U.S. aid to Pakistani military officers and Afghan guerrilla leaders helped grease a major arms-for-heroin pipeline in Southwest Asia during the Reagan-Bush era. Much of the dirty cash was laundered through institutions such as the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which functioned, not coincidentally, as a conduit for CIA operations in the region.

At the same time in Central America, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and high-level CIA personnel aided and abetted big-time cocaine smugglers who were ferrying weapons to the Nicaraguan contras. North and three other Iran-contra conspirators were banned for life from Costa Rica after that country’s government came up with evidence of the Reagan administration’s role in secretly facilitating the flow of narcotics—all this while U.S. officials were preaching about the war on drugs.

Then came the December 1989 Panama invasion, which the U.S. military undertook for the stated purpose of nabbing a drug pusher, General Manuel Noriega, who had been on the CIA’s payroll for years. Noriega is now standing trial in Miami on charges of cocaine trafficking, while his U.S.-installed successors in Panama revel in narco-dollars.

If the Noriega case tells us anything, it’s that U.S. intelligence officials will dutifully ignore evidence of dope smuggling when they deem it expeditious to do so. That appears to be what happened with
acid kingpin Ronald Stark, who, like Noriega, was adept at playing many sides off of one another.

“Drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog,” said former CIA analyst David MacMichael. When congressional probers scratched the surface of the drug trade, it became clear that certain cocaine and heroin dealers were okay by the CIA as long as they snorted the anticommunist line. Anything goes in the fight against communism—that could also have been the motto of MK-ULTRA and related CIA mind control projects hatched during the Cold War.

A number of victims of CIA drug tests have since come forward, seeking compensation for the injuries they sustained and the hardships their loved ones endured. In 1988 nine former psychiatric patients at Allain Memorial Hospital in Montreal reluctantly agreed to a meager out-of-court settlement after suing the CIA and the Canadian government. Adding insult to injury, during the legal proceedings a CIA attorney compared the plaintiffs to mice in a scientific laboratory, but the Agency steadfastly denied any responsibility for the cruelty they had underwritten. No apologies were forthcoming from the CIA or the Canadian government, which also sanctioned the controversial research program at Allain.

A Federal judge in Manhattan awarded $700,000 to the family of Harold Blauer, the tennis professional who died nearly four decades ago during an army chemical warfare experiment. Jim Stanley, another unwitting guinea pig in an army drug test, took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1987 ruled that enlisted personnel can’t sue for injuries related to their service. After this judicial rebuff, Stanley testified before Congress that in 1958 he volunteered to test protective clothing for the army but instead was given a clear liquid to drink at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the Army Chemical Corps. Stanley subsequently experienced severe behavioral changes that ruined his marriage and adversely affected his job.

As a result of congressional pressure, the Defense Department eventually consented to pay Stanley $625,000 in damages. But Congress assiduously sidestepped one of the thornier issues raised by the Stanley affair. For nearly twenty years the staff at Edgewood included Nazi scientists who were brought to the United States after World War II under the auspices of Project Paperclip, a program designed to harness the skills of German researchers and technicians. At least eight Nazi scientists were employed by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, where they tinkered with deadly nerve gas and super-hallucinogenic
drugs. Some of these men were involved in administering psychochemicals to soldiers like Stanley.

Meanwhile, CIA drug research plows ahead. Agency spokespersons are tight-lipped about this activity, but a former CIA contract employee indicates that much of the work is being conducted at universities in foreign countries.

Even as the ghosts of the Cold War continue to haunt us, the psychedelic underground marches on. According to U.S. drug authorities, a recent study showed that more high school students have tried LSD than cocaine. It’s not uncommon for today’s chemical astronauts to blast off by swallowing LSD-laced pictures of cartoon characters like the Simpsons. One way or another, the Promethean fire still burns in the local soul.

December 17, 1991

REFERENCES

The citations for sources from which material in the text is derived are arranged by Section and Chapter, with the beginning of a quotation or relevant phrase in italics.

CODE: A = Article

B = Book

CR = Congressional report

D = Declassified document (CIA, FBI, military, etc).

I = Interview

L = Letter

O = Other (including unpublished interviews by other authors)

PROLOGUE

Description of discovery of LSD-25. B Albert Hofmann,
LSD: My Problem Child,
pp.
1–15.

“Dr. Hofmann . . . there are thousands”
A
quoted in Spencer Rumsey, “The Most Exquisite Rascals of the Age,”
Berkeley Barb,
October 21–27, 1977.

“Am I, Allen Ginsberg”
B
Allen Ginsberg, “From Journals,”
Poems All Over the Place,
p. 53.

“The LSD movement was started by the CIA”
A
quoted in Walter Barney, “Grandfather of LSD Meets the Acid Children,”
San Francisco Sunday Chronicle and Examiner,
October 16, 1977.

“As I look at my colleagues”
A
quoted in Rumsey.

“LSD came along before”
A
quoted in Rumsey.

“We must disentangle ourselves”
A
quoted in Daniel Golden, “Allen Ginsberg: Politics of Emptiness,”
City on a Hill Press,
October 20, 1977.

“close the book on this chapter”
CR
Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977,
Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, p. 2.

“The knowledge that the Agency”
D
(CIA) Inspector General’s Memorandum to the Director of Central Intelligence, “Kennedy Committee Interest in IG Surveys of OTS,” 31 October 1975, p. 2.

“to investigate whether and how it was possible”
CR
Human Drug Testing By the CIA,
p. 169.

“The bottom line on this whole business”
A
Assassination Information Bureau, “Congress and the
MK-ULTRA
Whitewash,”
Clandestine America,
November-December 1977.

witnesses conferred among themselves, agreeing to limit
B
John Marks,
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,
p. 207.

programmed assassins who would kill on command
D
(CIA) “ARTICHOKE Report,” 22 January 1954.

“hypnotically-induced anxieties”
D
(CIA) MK-ULTRA, Subproject 5, Memorandum for the Record, 11 May 1953.

“We lived in a never-never land”
A
Tad Szulc, “The CIA’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,”
Psychology Today,
November 1977.

nearly every drug that appeared on the black market
A
Martin A. Lee, “High Spy,”
Rolling Stone,
September 1, 1983.

CHAPTER ONE: IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS MADNESS. . .

—The Truth Seekers—