Albion Dreaming (9 page)

Laing’s reputation as a therapist spread rapidly among London’s artistic crowd, leading him to have some very high profile, and unlikely, patients.

Diane Cilento, first wife of actor Sean Connery, wrote that
following his success in 1964’s
Goldfinger
the second James Bond film, Connery felt insecure and spiritually blocked; he was convinced he wouldn’t feel “safe” until he had a million pounds in the bank. Cilento met Laing and was impressed with his radical ideas about LSD therapy, which meant patients could be helped without spending years on the analyst’s couch. Cilento eventually arranged a consultation for Connery and Laing accepted the Bond star for treatment. In keeping with the times Laing didn’t believe in selling himself short and demanded: “... a great deal of money, complete privacy, a limo to transport him to and from the meeting and a bottle of the best single malt Scotch at each session.”

At their first session Laing gave Connery a full dose of LSD, taking a much smaller amount himself to enable him to act as guide during the session. Cilento claims the initial session didn’t go too well. Connery couldn’t “let go” and resisted the drug, having to spend several days recovering in bed as a result. But the LSD had worked its magic in loosening Connery’s tightly wrapped subconscious: “This initial trip opened a Pandora’s box ... Suddenly, Sean began to remember challenging childhood scenes with his mother or father. Buried anger, victories or defeats came tumbling out without warning.”
²⁸

Laing moved easily between the tight-knit world of psychotherapy and the night-life of swinging London, becoming a frequent sight at counter culture events. When Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett was undergoing his LSD induced nervous breakdown bassist Roger Waters tried to arrange treatment for him with Laing. After some persuasion Barrett eventually agreed to meet Laing and they took a taxi to his flat, but at the last moment he wouldn’t get out of the cab. A few months later they tried again but Barrett wouldn’t even leave his flat when the taxi arrived.
²⁹

Laing remained a staunch advocate of the personal and professional use of LSD to his death, his writings making a considerable impact on the Sixties and Seventies counter culture.

Ronnie Sandison left Powick in 1964. He had worked with LSD for twelve years and wanted a break and running LSD psychotherapy sessions on a daily basis was a time consuming, physically and mentally draining, experience. Powick was
changing too, becoming more a centre for community psychiatry. Two new consultants had recently joined the staff team, both of whom had no interest in pursuing LSD psychotherapy. For Sandison these were all signs that it was time to move on and he took an appointment as Consultant Psychiatrist at Knowle Hospital, near Southampton, in Hampshire. Though he used the drug with a few patients in 1965 after leaving Powick his days of practising LSD psychotherapy were behind him.

LSD psychotherapy was slowly but surely coming to an end in Britain. From early 1966 onwards the British and American media regularly featured lurid stories and exposés about the social use of LSD. Though LSD had caused no fatalities and there had been a surprisingly low number of episodes of mental illness, for the media LSD had become a social panic. Privately, medical professionals who were practising LSD psychotherapy became concerned that LSD was going to face trial by media. This would bring their activities into the public eye and they realised that if that were the case the notoriously conservative medical establishment would try to distance itself from the drug even though it was still legal to use in a medical context. As legislation to outlaw the drug other than for medical use loomed large, a number of those working with LSD began to openly express their concerns in the medical press.

Following Sandoz’ decision in 1966 to cease the supply of LSD, Powick Hospital’s Chief Medical Superintendent Arthur Spencer wrote a strongly worded letter to the
British Medical Journal
. Spencer railed against Sandoz, claiming that their action to terminate the supply of LSD without notice had left many patients midway through a course of treatment. A Dr. S.E. Browne wrote to the
BMJ
to point out that LSD therapy was the only form of psychotherapy available to those on a limited income. Browne wrote: “Some patients being treated with lysergic acid are, in fact, fighting for their lives; treatment has already been stopped of patients who were responding very well to lysergic acid after all possible forms of physical therapy had failed.”

Browne’s final paragraph starkly highlighted what many have seen as the essential inequality of the laws against LSD, “What seems to me an extraordinary state of affairs is that any doctor
can (and some still do) prescribe amphetamines, the use of which is therapeutically unjustifiable because of the danger of addiction and psychosis, while a potentially life-saving drug is withdrawn.” These feelings were echoed by a trio of doctors who wrote to the
BMJ
from West Park Hospital in Surrey, who claimed: “It will be unfortunate if LSD becomes available only for ‘kicks’ and not for serious psychotherapeutic endeavour.”
³⁰

These pleas notwithstanding, the era of LSD psychotherapy in Britain was rapidly ending. After Ronnie Sandison left Powick, Spencer found a new source of the drug and continued working with it until the mid-1970s. A few other therapists continued work with LSD but the constant media vilification made its use as a psychotherapeutic tool increasingly unfashionable, if not professionally untenable. A CV that boasted years of LSD aided psychotherapy was unlikely to help anyone’s career in the climate engendered by the media’s vigorous defamation of psychedelic drugs. Psychiatric medicine was moving away from what it considered to be contentious, possibly unreliable therapies. The aggressive marketing of the large pharmaceutical companies was funnelling psychiatry towards a culture of prescribing other drugs for depression, anxiety and conditions for which LSD therapy had proved effective.

Though high profile medical practitioners such as Ronnie Laing, who arguably had other agendas to pursue on the back of his personal and professional LSD use, continued to use and champion LSD, by the mid-Seventies therapy with LSD had ceased completely in Britain, its use quickly regarded as something of an archaic curio. It wouldn’t be until the first decade of the twenty-first century that the idea of LSD as a viable therapeutic tool would be taken seriously again.

The heyday of LSD therapy in Britain had spanned fourteen years. During that time large sums of taxpayers’ money had been used to fund what amounted to a unique experiment. Throughout those halcyon years the LSD psychotherapists believed they were alone in their use of the consciousness altering drug. But Sandison and his colleagues had been unaware that another strand of work with LSD had been running parallel, but completely separate, to
theirs. At the same time as the psychotherapists were using LSD to heal aberrant mental states; the British intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence were also using taxpayers’ money to fund LSD research. But rather than a tool for healing, they hoped LSD would provide them with a new weapon with which to destroy the will of combatants on and off the battlefield.

They stick to the old maxim: never apologise, never explain.

Don Webb
¹

I
n the early 1950s, the future for peace looked bleak. With World War II still a raw memory, the world was now rapidly descending into the Cold War, America and Britain teetering on the brink of hostilities with Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries. We are now all too familiar with the key weapons of the Cold War: nuclear bombs and warheads, supersonic jet fighters and bombers and the concept of mutually assured destruction. Throughout the twentieth century, governments were keen to parade these and other weapons before their citizens, the physical displays of strength intended as reassurance and warning to friend and foe. However, behind the public face of Britain’s military hardware lay a much more sinister cache of armaments, one that the government wanted to remain hidden from the public. These were chemical and biological weapons, one of which was LSD.

Unfortunately, the government’s refusal to open its files to the
general public means the full story of Britain’s LSD tests might well remain hidden forever. Decades of institutional secrecy and an unwillingness to be accountable to the taxpayer have ensured information about this most sensitive of subjects has been withheld at all costs. In recent years, however, a combination of the Freedom of Information Act and persistent lobbying from ex-Forces personnel has lifted the lid on the secrecy surrounding these sinister experiments.

Exactly what prompted the British government to initiate LSD testing is unclear, although it can be inferred from a number of sources. The CIA took an immediate interest in LSD following World War II and began tests with the drug on military and civilian personnel in 1947. The American and British intelligence services were both convinced that Russia was experimenting with LSD or its analogues to produce a “truth drug” for use in interrogations, and this seems to have been the driving force behind Britain’s decision to carry out experiments with LSD.

A 1956 MOD report titled “Abreactive Drugs”, prepared for the Defence Research Policy Committee, notes LSD first came to the attention of the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) “some 4 years ago”. This formal discussion about LSD took place during Professor Henry Beecher’s visit to Britain in the spring of 1952. The Harvard Professor of Anaesthesiology had a controversial involvement with psychedelic drugs, having first been involved in secret CIA mescaline experiments in Germany after World War II. Beecher saw a role for these drugs and wanted to spread the word among the Allied intelligence agencies.
²

The British intelligence community were intrigued by the drug but unsure of its potential, and so for further information they contacted one of the only two men in Britain who had any real knowledge of LSD. Joel Elkes was not a member of the intelligence services, but was closely connected to them. During World War II, he had researched human nerve conduction, which placed him at the forefront of research into how chemicals were assimilated in the brain. After the war, scientists at the British Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down supplied Elkes with a variety of chemicals for him to map how they worked within the
brain. Elkes already had the necessary scientific background and direct experience of LSD, so it was logical for the JIB to approach him for advice.

Elkes had founded Birmingham University’s Department of Experimental Psychiatry in 1951. A mercurial character, in the Fifties Elkes acted as both advisor to the intelligence services, while also being instrumental in the developing field of LSD psychotherapy, playing a crucial role in assisting Ronnie Sandison to obtain funding for the LSD therapy unit at Powick Hospital in 1956 (see
Chapter 3
). The JIB could have approached Sandison, but he did not have Elkes’ research credentials or any previous experience of working with the intelligence services. Whatever Elkes told the JIB, it gave them the confidence to investigate LSD further and, later in 1952, the Porton Down military facility was commissioned by the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS), better known as MI6, to run Britain’s first military LSD tests.

Porton Down, home to Britain’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, lies on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. Since opening in 1916, the top secret, secure establishment has carried out research into a wide variety of chemical weapons on behalf of Britain’s military and intelligence agencies. At the close of World War II, the Allies discovered that the Germans were far more advanced in chemical weapon development than was thought and had developed several nerve agents. On the basis that some of this knowledge would have been discovered and developed by Russian intelligence services, the thrust of work at Porton during the Fifties was on nerve agents such as Sarin and the riot control chemical, CS. A battery of tests was designed to measure the effects and resistance of these chemicals agents on service personnel who were attracted to the facility as volunteers, with the promise of extra pay and time off from their normal duties. It was against this broader backdrop of chemical warfare research, that the MI6 LSD tests at Porton Down were organised.
³

Porton scientists realised the only way to observe LSD’s effect on humans was to administer the drug to volunteers and monitor the results. Basic information about the action of LSD on human physiology and psychology was required to act as terms of
reference for the tests and an early summary of the drug’s effects on the human body appeared in a March 1953 paper prepared by the MOD’s Chemical Defence Advisory Board. The report cites research done in America by Rinkel which predates the earliest human LSD experiments in Britain.
⁴

Using the term “volunteer” to describe those who took part in LSD experiments at Porton Down is actually a misnomer. None of the participants was told what drug they would be taking, or what its effects might be. In reality the “volunteers” were all dupes, conned into taking a powerful mind-altering chemical in strange and unfamiliar circumstances. Porton Down scientists seem to have chosen to ignore the Nuremberg Code for human experimentation, failing to ensure that the volunteers gave informed consent before the tests.