LSD
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
This site does not advocate or encourage any illegal activity.
In the Beginning: Ancient Ergot
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/osu-afl020915.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/osu-afl020915.php
http://www.heffter.org/docs/hrireview/02/chap6.pdf
LSD and Its Lysergamide Cousins
David E. Nichols, Ph.D.*
LSD and Its Lysergamide Cousins
David E. Nichols, Ph.D.*
Intel History
Military History
Excerpt from Acid Dreams:
The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond,
by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlai, Grove Press, 1985:
During the early 1960s Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the US Army Chemical Corps <and launching pad for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, received an average of four hundred chemical "rejects" every month from the maior American pharmaceutical firms. Rejects were drugs found to be commercially useless because of their undesirable side effects. Of course, undesirable side effects were precisely what the army was looking for.
It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual pattems. The effects generally lasted three days, although symptoms --headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior -- could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an army doctor, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment."
According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ." Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975. During this period an estimated 2,800 soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ.
During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house [LSD] tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army's standard incapacitating agent. By this time the super-hallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large-scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was later employed by American troops as a counterinsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Maj. Gen. William Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, "We'll use these things as we see fit, whenever we think it is in the best interest of the US."
The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond,
by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlai, Grove Press, 1985:
During the early 1960s Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the US Army Chemical Corps <and launching pad for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, received an average of four hundred chemical "rejects" every month from the maior American pharmaceutical firms. Rejects were drugs found to be commercially useless because of their undesirable side effects. Of course, undesirable side effects were precisely what the army was looking for.
It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual pattems. The effects generally lasted three days, although symptoms --headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior -- could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an army doctor, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment."
According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ." Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975. During this period an estimated 2,800 soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ.
During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house [LSD] tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army's standard incapacitating agent. By this time the super-hallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large-scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was later employed by American troops as a counterinsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Maj. Gen. William Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, "We'll use these things as we see fit, whenever we think it is in the best interest of the US."
Psychiatric History
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Sandoz Delysid; Mothercorn
Born in New York City, Dr. Sidney Cohen was a psychiatrist and early LSD researcher. He received his PhD from Columbia University in New York, and his MD from Bonn University in Germany. He worked as Chief of Psychosomatic Medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, as Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCLA, and was editor of the Journal of Psychopharmacology. On November 10, 1955, Betty Eisner became Cohen's first subject in his first LSD study; she worked with Cohen studying LSD for about a year and a half, before moving on to her own psychedelic research. During their time working together Cohen and Eisner took LSD with Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, resulting in Wilson's unsuccessful attempt to incorporate LSD into the A.A. program. In the late 1960s, Cohen served as the Director of the Division of Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Maryland. Cohen was the "Dr. C", referenced by Laura Huxley in This Timeless Moment, who supplied the LSD for Aldous Huxley's deathbed experience.
In 1962 Sidney Cohen presented the medical community with its first warning about the dangers of the drug LSD. LSD had arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an investigational drug, authorized only for experimental use, by the late 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were administering it to cure neuroses and alcoholism and to enhance creativity. Cohen's 1960 study of LSD effects concluded that the drug was safe if given in a supervised medical setting, but by 1962 his concern about popularization, nonmedical use, black market LSD, and patients harmed by the drug led him to warn that the spread of LSD was dangerous. The subsequent government crackdown and regulation of LSD preceded the 1960s drug movement and was prompted by medical, not social, concerns. http://www.erowid.org/references/refs_view.php?ID=6281
In 1962 Sidney Cohen presented the medical community with its first warning about the dangers of the drug LSD. LSD had arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an investigational drug, authorized only for experimental use, by the late 1950s psychiatrists and psychologists were administering it to cure neuroses and alcoholism and to enhance creativity. Cohen's 1960 study of LSD effects concluded that the drug was safe if given in a supervised medical setting, but by 1962 his concern about popularization, nonmedical use, black market LSD, and patients harmed by the drug led him to warn that the spread of LSD was dangerous. The subsequent government crackdown and regulation of LSD preceded the 1960s drug movement and was prompted by medical, not social, concerns. http://www.erowid.org/references/refs_view.php?ID=6281
Prehistory
A Pre-History of LSD by Mark Stahlman
The following is the of a summary of an extensive collection of notes assembled over nearly 40 years as a result of interviews and experiences with over a hundred people, some living and some dead, regarding the fascinating history of LSD. My first personal encounter with LSD was in late 1967 and, off-and-on, I've been exploring its relation to human endeavors ever since.
This summary of the pre-history of LSD is being published in anticipation of the international symposium "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug" being held in two weeks time in Basel. It has been compiled with a particular mind towards the conference theme, "The Spirit of Basel."
I have not exhaustively crosschecked all the details and make no claims about the accuracy or completeness of what follows. In addition to a great deal of published material in many fields, these notes are largely the compiled accounts of many discussions with scholars, witnesses, psychonauts, initiates, spies and acolytes and given the nature of each individual recollection, may very well contain inconsistencies and contradictions.
While I have dispensed with the customary "probably" and "very likely," it would be advisable to consider these notes as mere starting points for further, more rigorous, investigations.
Summary of the Notes --
1) Appreciation for the psychotropic effects of ergot is older than the human race.
2) In human pre-history, ergot was extensively used as an aid for mothers in childbirth and less frequently in the death process.
3) The close association between ergot and the fertility rites at Eleusis transformed this ancient birthing application into an enduring cult practice.
4) As the dominant cult for Athens, the Eleusinian Mysteries and ergot begin to became central to critical aspects of 2000+ years of Western culture.
5) One of the subjects investigated at Eleusis was the relationship between dosage of a "poison" and one's fate. What may be medicinal at small doses can become psychotropic and then lethal at higher doses - as shaped by one's personal relationship to the Gods.
6) Following the end of ceremonies at Eleusis after Goths destroyed the sanctuary around 400, these ergot-based initiatory practices were preserved in the Greek community in Constantinople and elsewhere.
7) Early crusaders carried a version of these ergot-based practices back to southern France along with the relics of St. Anthony the Hermit (desert father of monasticism) in the 11th century. Centered near Arles, on the east side of the Rhone, the hospice escaped the Albigensian Crusade.
8) Based around this knowledge and these artifacts, a Roman Catholic monastic order known as the Hospital Order of St. Anthony (aka Antonians or Antonites) was established under the rule of Augustine in 1247 and spread its influence from London to Jerusalem and beyond. According to Sandoz' corporate history, the Antonites eventually had two hospitals in Basel.
9) This Order was assigned the public role of countering the effects of ergot poisoning, otherwise known as St. Anthony's Fire, through operating what may have been the first worldwide pharmacy as well as the specialized use of amputation. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the order was responsible for caring for the sick of the papal household.
10) Privately this Order continued to practice initiations, with the acceptance and participation of Church authorities, based partly on the use of ergot-derived preparations. In addition, there were various related "military" orders related to the Antonites, including the Knights of Saint Anthony.
11) There is widespread artistic evidence of these religious practices, particularly in the work of Antonite-related painters Hieronymus Bosch (see his c.1500 "Temptation of St. Anthony" triptych in Lisbon) and Mathis Neithardt (aka "Grunewald," see the c.1515 Isenheim Altar polyptich, now in Colmar.) W.A. Stoll later mentions the Isenheim Altar in his 1947 account of the effects of LSD.
12) In the 18th century, the Roman church became increasingly threatened by "secret" initiatory societies -- as shown by the 1738 order excommunicating Catholics who belonged to Masonic Lodges -- culminating in the anti-clerical role of the "Illuminati" in the French Revolution.
13) In 1777, after having been nearly wiped out during the Reformation, a failed reform of the order in 1630 and confiscation of its properties in the French Revolution, the Antonites were canonically merged into the Knights of Malta, which in turn was broken up (and partially re-Romanized) after Napolean captured Malta in 1798.
14) There is evidence that these Mysteries-derived and at times ergot-based initiatory practices did not disappear with the Antonites and found their way into 19th century Theosophical and Rosicrucian groups as well as those involved in "Greek" oriented classical studies.
15) In 1847 at Columbia College in New York, the "Greek" fraternity St. Anthony Hall (aka Delta Psi) was formed to continue this "secret tradition" and Col. Henry Steele Olcott -- who was later join with Madame Blavatsky to form Theosophy -- was one of four 1849 pledges at Columbia.
16) In 1866 at the University of Leipzig, Frederich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde became ergot-based initiates of a "neo-Eleusinian" group that was devoted to understanding early Greek culture by actually living as the Greeks did.
17) In 1872 in Basel, Nietzsche published his first work, "Birth of Tragedy," based on his close association with his mentor and prominent Basel citizen Johann Jacob Bachofen -- in which he counterpoises Dionysis (i.e. Eleusis) with Apollo.
18) Nietzsche, who was removed from the streets of Turin in 1889 and presumed to have "gone mad," was known to have been a wide-ranging drug taker, in part for his infirmities. Among the compounds citied is a preparation that is presumed to have included cannabis and opium as well as an ergot-derivative, ostensibly meant for migraines.
19) In 1896 in Wiemar, German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner was invited to become Nietzsche's archivist by his sister, giving him access to Nietzsche's private papers. Steiner had previously studied the esoteric aspects of Goethe's work and had begun publishing his own theosophical writings in 1894.
20) In 1897 in Munich, Ludwig Klages (another Leipzig graduate), Stefan George, Otto Gross and others started a group known as the "Cosmic Circle." Explicitly based on recreating "Eleusinian" cult activity and implicitly on using drugs to achieve "ecstatic" states, the circle also popularized the works of Bachofen and Nietzsche.
21) In 1918 in Basel, Sandoz scientist Arthur Stoll isolates the ergot alkaloid Ergotamine, which is later offered as Gynergen, intended to be used in birthing to stop post-pardum hemorrhaging as well as for severe migraine headaches.
22) In 1922 in Dornach, Rudolf Steiner's original wooden Goetheanum "cathedral" is burned to the ground, presumed to be on orders from Steiner's rival "magician, " Adolf Hitler. Steiner's Anthroposophy continues to have its headquarters outside Basel to this day, following Steiner's death in 1925.
23) In 1927 in Basel, Sandoz hired 21 year-old Albert Hofmann to work as an organic chemist. Hofmann, who was born in 1906 in Baden and studied in Zurich, later describes a series of natural "mystical" experiences he had as a youth, perhaps similar to those described by Capt. Al Hubbard in his youth.
Please feel free to copy and circulate this summary as you see fit. I appreciate comments and corrections and can be reached at [email protected].
I do not intend to write a book based on this research and I'm happy to assist others with their projects. In addition, I'm limited by only having English at my disposal so I'm always grateful for help with references that are only available in other languages.
Lastly, since ergot grows worldwide, it seems only reasonable that ergot preparations also have a long history outside the "Western" tradition. The unique association between ergot and Athens as well as the urge to connect initiatory rites with presumed-to-be ancient practices weaves ergot preparations into the history of esoteric initiations throughout millennia in the West. Perhaps there is a similar pre-history to LSD in the East?
The following is the of a summary of an extensive collection of notes assembled over nearly 40 years as a result of interviews and experiences with over a hundred people, some living and some dead, regarding the fascinating history of LSD. My first personal encounter with LSD was in late 1967 and, off-and-on, I've been exploring its relation to human endeavors ever since.
This summary of the pre-history of LSD is being published in anticipation of the international symposium "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug" being held in two weeks time in Basel. It has been compiled with a particular mind towards the conference theme, "The Spirit of Basel."
I have not exhaustively crosschecked all the details and make no claims about the accuracy or completeness of what follows. In addition to a great deal of published material in many fields, these notes are largely the compiled accounts of many discussions with scholars, witnesses, psychonauts, initiates, spies and acolytes and given the nature of each individual recollection, may very well contain inconsistencies and contradictions.
While I have dispensed with the customary "probably" and "very likely," it would be advisable to consider these notes as mere starting points for further, more rigorous, investigations.
Summary of the Notes --
1) Appreciation for the psychotropic effects of ergot is older than the human race.
2) In human pre-history, ergot was extensively used as an aid for mothers in childbirth and less frequently in the death process.
3) The close association between ergot and the fertility rites at Eleusis transformed this ancient birthing application into an enduring cult practice.
4) As the dominant cult for Athens, the Eleusinian Mysteries and ergot begin to became central to critical aspects of 2000+ years of Western culture.
5) One of the subjects investigated at Eleusis was the relationship between dosage of a "poison" and one's fate. What may be medicinal at small doses can become psychotropic and then lethal at higher doses - as shaped by one's personal relationship to the Gods.
6) Following the end of ceremonies at Eleusis after Goths destroyed the sanctuary around 400, these ergot-based initiatory practices were preserved in the Greek community in Constantinople and elsewhere.
7) Early crusaders carried a version of these ergot-based practices back to southern France along with the relics of St. Anthony the Hermit (desert father of monasticism) in the 11th century. Centered near Arles, on the east side of the Rhone, the hospice escaped the Albigensian Crusade.
8) Based around this knowledge and these artifacts, a Roman Catholic monastic order known as the Hospital Order of St. Anthony (aka Antonians or Antonites) was established under the rule of Augustine in 1247 and spread its influence from London to Jerusalem and beyond. According to Sandoz' corporate history, the Antonites eventually had two hospitals in Basel.
9) This Order was assigned the public role of countering the effects of ergot poisoning, otherwise known as St. Anthony's Fire, through operating what may have been the first worldwide pharmacy as well as the specialized use of amputation. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the order was responsible for caring for the sick of the papal household.
10) Privately this Order continued to practice initiations, with the acceptance and participation of Church authorities, based partly on the use of ergot-derived preparations. In addition, there were various related "military" orders related to the Antonites, including the Knights of Saint Anthony.
11) There is widespread artistic evidence of these religious practices, particularly in the work of Antonite-related painters Hieronymus Bosch (see his c.1500 "Temptation of St. Anthony" triptych in Lisbon) and Mathis Neithardt (aka "Grunewald," see the c.1515 Isenheim Altar polyptich, now in Colmar.) W.A. Stoll later mentions the Isenheim Altar in his 1947 account of the effects of LSD.
12) In the 18th century, the Roman church became increasingly threatened by "secret" initiatory societies -- as shown by the 1738 order excommunicating Catholics who belonged to Masonic Lodges -- culminating in the anti-clerical role of the "Illuminati" in the French Revolution.
13) In 1777, after having been nearly wiped out during the Reformation, a failed reform of the order in 1630 and confiscation of its properties in the French Revolution, the Antonites were canonically merged into the Knights of Malta, which in turn was broken up (and partially re-Romanized) after Napolean captured Malta in 1798.
14) There is evidence that these Mysteries-derived and at times ergot-based initiatory practices did not disappear with the Antonites and found their way into 19th century Theosophical and Rosicrucian groups as well as those involved in "Greek" oriented classical studies.
15) In 1847 at Columbia College in New York, the "Greek" fraternity St. Anthony Hall (aka Delta Psi) was formed to continue this "secret tradition" and Col. Henry Steele Olcott -- who was later join with Madame Blavatsky to form Theosophy -- was one of four 1849 pledges at Columbia.
16) In 1866 at the University of Leipzig, Frederich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde became ergot-based initiates of a "neo-Eleusinian" group that was devoted to understanding early Greek culture by actually living as the Greeks did.
17) In 1872 in Basel, Nietzsche published his first work, "Birth of Tragedy," based on his close association with his mentor and prominent Basel citizen Johann Jacob Bachofen -- in which he counterpoises Dionysis (i.e. Eleusis) with Apollo.
18) Nietzsche, who was removed from the streets of Turin in 1889 and presumed to have "gone mad," was known to have been a wide-ranging drug taker, in part for his infirmities. Among the compounds citied is a preparation that is presumed to have included cannabis and opium as well as an ergot-derivative, ostensibly meant for migraines.
19) In 1896 in Wiemar, German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner was invited to become Nietzsche's archivist by his sister, giving him access to Nietzsche's private papers. Steiner had previously studied the esoteric aspects of Goethe's work and had begun publishing his own theosophical writings in 1894.
20) In 1897 in Munich, Ludwig Klages (another Leipzig graduate), Stefan George, Otto Gross and others started a group known as the "Cosmic Circle." Explicitly based on recreating "Eleusinian" cult activity and implicitly on using drugs to achieve "ecstatic" states, the circle also popularized the works of Bachofen and Nietzsche.
21) In 1918 in Basel, Sandoz scientist Arthur Stoll isolates the ergot alkaloid Ergotamine, which is later offered as Gynergen, intended to be used in birthing to stop post-pardum hemorrhaging as well as for severe migraine headaches.
22) In 1922 in Dornach, Rudolf Steiner's original wooden Goetheanum "cathedral" is burned to the ground, presumed to be on orders from Steiner's rival "magician, " Adolf Hitler. Steiner's Anthroposophy continues to have its headquarters outside Basel to this day, following Steiner's death in 1925.
23) In 1927 in Basel, Sandoz hired 21 year-old Albert Hofmann to work as an organic chemist. Hofmann, who was born in 1906 in Baden and studied in Zurich, later describes a series of natural "mystical" experiences he had as a youth, perhaps similar to those described by Capt. Al Hubbard in his youth.
Please feel free to copy and circulate this summary as you see fit. I appreciate comments and corrections and can be reached at [email protected].
I do not intend to write a book based on this research and I'm happy to assist others with their projects. In addition, I'm limited by only having English at my disposal so I'm always grateful for help with references that are only available in other languages.
Lastly, since ergot grows worldwide, it seems only reasonable that ergot preparations also have a long history outside the "Western" tradition. The unique association between ergot and Athens as well as the urge to connect initiatory rites with presumed-to-be ancient practices weaves ergot preparations into the history of esoteric initiations throughout millennia in the West. Perhaps there is a similar pre-history to LSD in the East?
NARCO-HYPNOSIS
The shadow of the social revolution still casts its long shadow back from the future. The 60s were a topsy-turvy time where nearly every aspect of society was converted into its opposite, precisely according to the blueprint of the Tavistock Agenda and the machinations of its allies — CIA, RAND and SRI. Together they created an ersatz utopia with a heavy dark side much like Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. It is the forerunner of the New Age and Conspiracy cultures. Counterculture and subculture became new buzzwords which sprung up like Flower Children to describe the morphing social landscape.
“…Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.” –From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1vMWjknRzw
http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=5995
The “Case Officer” for Britain’s Opium War was Aldous Huxley. He spearheaded Tavistock’s plan for pharmaceutical control with LSD’s mindbending results which led to the counterculture, the dialectical response to culture on the way to a totally controlled society. Those who thought they were creating a new society were unwittingly “sleeping with the enemy” by essentially brainwashing themselves and paying for the priviledge with their hearts and minds.
Thus, Tavistock channeled and directed youth dissent and rebellion, and disabled the anti-war movement. Youth culture became distracted and disengaged from practical reality and political activism. The revolution was definitely not televised but it was psychoelectric shock treatment.The movement was induced from the top down via CIA-Tavistock agendas. Socially-engineered ‘hippies’ dropped out of the sociopolitical loop. Psychotropic warfare came to the homefront.
In 1936 Aldous Huxley wrote “Propaganda and Pharmacology” – a more detailed prediction of mind-control drug technology than the “soma” found in his 1932 novel “Brave New World”. Huxley predicted: The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers.” Moksha – Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963″ Aldous Huxley, Penguin, 1983, p.38
LSD came to America in 1949. Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.
Humphry Osmond was at the cutting edge of psychiatric research in the 1950s. He believed that hallucinogenic drugs might be useful in treating mental illness and he studied the effects of LSD on people with alcohol dependency. His investigations led to his association with the novelist Aldous Huxley and to involvement with the CIA and MI6, which were interested in LSD as a possible “truth drug” to make enemy agents reveal secrets.
Osmond sought a name for the effect that LSD has on the mind, consulting the novelist Aldous Huxley who was interested in these drugs. Osmond and Huxley had become friends and Osmond gave him mescaline in 1953. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” and sent a rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Instead, Osmond chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show), and suggested, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He announced it at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957.
Huxley was Tavistock’s main propagandist and recruiter. Huxley first tried LSD in 1955. He got it from “Captain” Al Hubbard, rumored to have connections with CIA’s MK Ultra program. In a 1961 handwritten letter from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Huxley mentions meeting Dr. “Jolly” West, a CIA MK-ULTRA operative. Huxley goes on to note that: “You are right about the hopelessness of the “Scientific” approach. These idiots want to be Pavlovians, not Lorenzian Ethnologists. 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 psychoses.”
Timothy Leary consulted the British philosopher who wrote the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. He urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for human betterment. “That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on,” Huxley tells him. “Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they’ll educate the intelligent rich.”
“Soma” became a cultural reality in a variety of hypnotic and narcotizing forms. Drugs became the tecnique of choice for crowd control. For some, psychedelics became gateway drugs to harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. Pharmaceutical soporifics from Ritalin to anti-depressants became the norm for mood and behavior regulation. In the name of “human potential,” consciousness was put to sleep. Psychiatric control of consciousness became an authoritarian imperative.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” –Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
The counterculture is a conspiracy
The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and LSD, was launched from London by the self-described “utopian” circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of “soma” depicted in Aldous Huxley’s cult-novel, Brave New World.
The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense’s Special Warfare division, including projects such as “Delta Force.” The post-war “Beatniks,” and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the “rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture” launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the “Beatles” on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Marilyn Ferguson wrote her Aquarian Conspiracy manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to
the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’, the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
The high priest for Britain’s Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a
founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee
himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British
intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. Toynbee’s “theory” of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western
civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties.
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British
foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy.
Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open
Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The “Open Conspiracy,” Wells wrote, “will appear
first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy
men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the
existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a
mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort
of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be
influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government.”
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a “one-world brain” which would function
as ” a police of the mind.” Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But
Wells’s popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his
proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written
as “mass appeal” organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are
these “science fiction classics” taught in grade school as attacks against fascism. Under Wells’s tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton — who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World
War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood
were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was
already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph
Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and “Bugsy” Siegel,
the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm ;
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth
Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture,
by recruiting a core of “initiates” into the Isis cults that Huxley’s mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky,
and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India.
LSD: ‘Visitation from the Gods’
“Ironically,” writes Ferguson, “the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was
largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation into the substances for
possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code
names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs.
Soon they were synthesizing their own ‘acid.’ “The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the public. In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and “out of body” experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic drugs. As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter: “Esalen started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening, gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and government.”
Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen; millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the country.
The next leap in Britain’s Aquarian Conspiracy against the United States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson’s work. The report is entitled “Changing Images of Man,” Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of “spiritualism.” The study asserts that in our present society, the “image of industrial and technological man” is obsolete and must be “discarded”: “Many of our present images appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science, technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security, material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have brought with them problems of being too successful — problems that themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly.”
Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the industrial-technological image of man fast: “Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that . . . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era.” The counterculture, New Age of the Aquarian Conspiracy was born:
Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 — provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same opium network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic “mind-expanding” drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the “Dialectics of Liberation,” chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of “initiates.” All of them — Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert — became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of “Flower People” in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
The LSD connection begins with one William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California.
The shadow of the social revolution still casts its long shadow back from the future. The 60s were a topsy-turvy time where nearly every aspect of society was converted into its opposite, precisely according to the blueprint of the Tavistock Agenda and the machinations of its allies — CIA, RAND and SRI. Together they created an ersatz utopia with a heavy dark side much like Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. It is the forerunner of the New Age and Conspiracy cultures. Counterculture and subculture became new buzzwords which sprung up like Flower Children to describe the morphing social landscape.
“…Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.” –From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1vMWjknRzw
http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=5995
The “Case Officer” for Britain’s Opium War was Aldous Huxley. He spearheaded Tavistock’s plan for pharmaceutical control with LSD’s mindbending results which led to the counterculture, the dialectical response to culture on the way to a totally controlled society. Those who thought they were creating a new society were unwittingly “sleeping with the enemy” by essentially brainwashing themselves and paying for the priviledge with their hearts and minds.
Thus, Tavistock channeled and directed youth dissent and rebellion, and disabled the anti-war movement. Youth culture became distracted and disengaged from practical reality and political activism. The revolution was definitely not televised but it was psychoelectric shock treatment.The movement was induced from the top down via CIA-Tavistock agendas. Socially-engineered ‘hippies’ dropped out of the sociopolitical loop. Psychotropic warfare came to the homefront.
In 1936 Aldous Huxley wrote “Propaganda and Pharmacology” – a more detailed prediction of mind-control drug technology than the “soma” found in his 1932 novel “Brave New World”. Huxley predicted: The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers.” Moksha – Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963″ Aldous Huxley, Penguin, 1983, p.38
LSD came to America in 1949. Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.
Humphry Osmond was at the cutting edge of psychiatric research in the 1950s. He believed that hallucinogenic drugs might be useful in treating mental illness and he studied the effects of LSD on people with alcohol dependency. His investigations led to his association with the novelist Aldous Huxley and to involvement with the CIA and MI6, which were interested in LSD as a possible “truth drug” to make enemy agents reveal secrets.
Osmond sought a name for the effect that LSD has on the mind, consulting the novelist Aldous Huxley who was interested in these drugs. Osmond and Huxley had become friends and Osmond gave him mescaline in 1953. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” and sent a rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Instead, Osmond chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show), and suggested, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He announced it at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957.
Huxley was Tavistock’s main propagandist and recruiter. Huxley first tried LSD in 1955. He got it from “Captain” Al Hubbard, rumored to have connections with CIA’s MK Ultra program. In a 1961 handwritten letter from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Huxley mentions meeting Dr. “Jolly” West, a CIA MK-ULTRA operative. Huxley goes on to note that: “You are right about the hopelessness of the “Scientific” approach. These idiots want to be Pavlovians, not Lorenzian Ethnologists. 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 psychoses.”
Timothy Leary consulted the British philosopher who wrote the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. He urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for human betterment. “That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on,” Huxley tells him. “Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they’ll educate the intelligent rich.”
“Soma” became a cultural reality in a variety of hypnotic and narcotizing forms. Drugs became the tecnique of choice for crowd control. For some, psychedelics became gateway drugs to harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. Pharmaceutical soporifics from Ritalin to anti-depressants became the norm for mood and behavior regulation. In the name of “human potential,” consciousness was put to sleep. Psychiatric control of consciousness became an authoritarian imperative.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” –Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
The counterculture is a conspiracy
The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and LSD, was launched from London by the self-described “utopian” circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of “soma” depicted in Aldous Huxley’s cult-novel, Brave New World.
The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense’s Special Warfare division, including projects such as “Delta Force.” The post-war “Beatniks,” and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the “rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture” launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the “Beatles” on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Marilyn Ferguson wrote her Aquarian Conspiracy manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to
the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’, the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.
The high priest for Britain’s Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a
founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee
himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British
intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. Toynbee’s “theory” of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western
civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties.
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British
foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy.
Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open
Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The “Open Conspiracy,” Wells wrote, “will appear
first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy
men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the
existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a
mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort
of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be
influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government.”
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a “one-world brain” which would function
as ” a police of the mind.” Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But
Wells’s popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his
proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written
as “mass appeal” organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are
these “science fiction classics” taught in grade school as attacks against fascism. Under Wells’s tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton — who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World
War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood
were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was
already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph
Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and “Bugsy” Siegel,
the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm ;
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth
Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture,
by recruiting a core of “initiates” into the Isis cults that Huxley’s mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky,
and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India.
LSD: ‘Visitation from the Gods’
“Ironically,” writes Ferguson, “the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was
largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation into the substances for
possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code
names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs.
Soon they were synthesizing their own ‘acid.’ “The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.
Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the public. In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and “out of body” experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic drugs. As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter: “Esalen started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening, gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and government.”
Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen; millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the country.
The next leap in Britain’s Aquarian Conspiracy against the United States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson’s work. The report is entitled “Changing Images of Man,” Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of “spiritualism.” The study asserts that in our present society, the “image of industrial and technological man” is obsolete and must be “discarded”: “Many of our present images appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science, technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security, material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have brought with them problems of being too successful — problems that themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly.”
Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the industrial-technological image of man fast: “Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that . . . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era.” The counterculture, New Age of the Aquarian Conspiracy was born:
Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 — provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same opium network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic “mind-expanding” drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the “Dialectics of Liberation,” chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of “initiates.” All of them — Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert — became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of “Flower People” in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.
The LSD connection begins with one William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California.
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ALBERT HOFMANN on his 100th Birthday, photo J. Keim
Storming Heaven: http://books.google.com/books?id=clFOY2-E6CcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Psychedelic therapy never become popular in Europe and with a few exceptions has not even been recognized or accepted by European therapists. Its use has remained by and large limited to the North American continent where it originated. Its most noted representatives in Canada have been Hoffer, Osmond and Hubbard, Smith, Chwelos, Blewett, McLean, and McDonald. In the United States, the beginnings of psychedelic therapy were associated with the names of Sherwood, Harman and Stolaroff; Fadiman, Mogar and Allen; Leary, Alpert, and Metzner; and Ditman, Hayman and Whittlesey.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/grofhist.htm
Psychedelic therapy never become popular in Europe and with a few exceptions has not even been recognized or accepted by European therapists. Its use has remained by and large limited to the North American continent where it originated. Its most noted representatives in Canada have been Hoffer, Osmond and Hubbard, Smith, Chwelos, Blewett, McLean, and McDonald. In the United States, the beginnings of psychedelic therapy were associated with the names of Sherwood, Harman and Stolaroff; Fadiman, Mogar and Allen; Leary, Alpert, and Metzner; and Ditman, Hayman and Whittlesey.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/grofhist.htm
Leonard Pickard The Acid King:
American LSD usage declined in the 1970s and 1980s, then experienced a mild resurgence in popularity in the 1990s. Although there were many distribution channels during this decade, the U.S. DEA identified continued tours by the psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead and the then-burgeoning rave scene as primary venues for LSD trafficking and consumption. American LSD usage fell sharply circa 2000. The decline is attributed to the arrest of two chemists, William Leonard Pickard, a Harvard-educated organic chemist, and Clyde Apperson. According to DEA reports, black market LSD availability dropped by 95% after the two were arrested in 2000. These arrests were a result of the largest LSD manufacturing raid in DEA history.
Pickard was an alleged member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love group that produced and sold LSD in California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is believed he had links to other “cooks” associated with this group — an original source of the drug back in the 1960′s — and his arrest may have forced other operations to cease production, leading to the large decline in street availability.
The DEA claims these two individuals were responsible for the vast majority of LSD sold illegally in the United States and a significant amount of the LSD sold in Europe, and that they worked closely with organized traffickers. While this claim may have some bearing, the extent of Pickard’s direct influence on the overall availability in the United States is not fully known. Some attest that “Pickard’s Acid” was sold exclusively in Europe, and was not distributed through American music venues.
For more than two decades, authorities believe, Leonard Pickard was a major player in the LSD underground. Now, sitting in a federal prison, he tells his tale for the first time.
Late last year, a new prisoner arrived at the Shawnee County Jail in Topeka, Kansas a polite beanstalk of a man from the San Francisco Bay Area who stood out amoung the petty criminals who make up the majority of Shawnees inmate population. He spoke in a rapid whisper, practiced yoga, meditated in his cell and read difficult books on mathematics and physics. Along with his prison blues, he wore sandals with socks. A princely mane of silver hair fell almost to his shoulders.
The mans name was William Leonard Pickard. A few days before, on November 7th, 200, the fifty-five-year-old Harvard graduate had been arrested not far from an abandoned Atlas E missile silo outside Topeka and charged with being one of the busiest manufacturers of LSD in the world, a chemist with the means to cook up acid by the kilos. If the governments charges prove true, this would make him one of the high priests of acid manufacture, part of a clandestine fraternity that probably numbers no more than a dozen worldwide.
Acid cookers are notoriously hard to catch. A lab can be set up quickly and broken down easily, and it only takes about ten days to perform a series of complicated chemical reactions to produce a sizable batch of the drug enough, once diluted and dipped onto blotter paper, for hundreds of thousands of hits. The trickiest part of the process is obtaining the precursor chemical known as ergotamine tartrate, or ET.
Heavily regulated in this country, where it is used to treat migraines, ET is often smuggled in from Eastern Europe, where sale of the compound is less restricted. Acid manufacturing might be one of the last criminal enterprises where those involved are motivated by more than the prospect of making money. Even now, more than three decades after the Summer of Love, to cook acid is to perform a sacrament, a public service. Members of this small band operate with great stealth and are rarely informed on by their associates, even those facing long prison terms. The Drug Enforcement Administration had not taken down an LSD lab since 1991.
The case of U.S. v. Pickard is just the latest, and perhaps final, chapter in the strange and often fantastic tale of William Leonard Pickard and his journey from a privileged boyhood in Atlanta, through the manic, hallucinogenic heart of the 1960s, to the forefront of social drugs research in the 1990s, conducted at some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Along the way, under various aliases - he crossed paths with such rock stars as Sting, and befriended members of the British House of Lords, State Department officials and the district attorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan. He earned a master's from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he studied drug trends in the former Soviet Union.
Pickard also has a rap sheet stretching back to his teens and has served two prison terms for manufacturing drugs, including LSD and the rarely seen synthetic mescaline. In recent years, though, his life seemed to come together - he'd fathered a child and had become a serious convert to Buddhism. He had a Job at a respected drug-policy think tank, and he planned to attend medical school so he could finally dedicate his life to alleviating the suffering of others. But he had also become bizarrely entwined with - and then, he says, hideously betrayed by - a man named Gordon Todd Skinner, a Porsche-driving pot dealer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, twenty years younger than Pickard When Pickard comes to trial, most likely later this year, the proceedings promise to shed light on the dangerous and secret world of LSD manufacturing for the first time in decades. Perhaps greater truths will be revealed, too.
In some ways, the story of Leonard Pickard and Todd Skinner is a story about the collision of Sixties idealism with the materialism and pragmatism of the nineties -Timothy Leary's America versus Bill Clinton's, if you will. And its moral will be clear even before the Judge calls the court to order; The sweet but easily corruptible dream of the flower-power generation never really stood a chance - but It was fun while it lasted.
The Acid Triangle
Most of the Acid consumed in the past thirty years is believed to have been made in temporary basement and warehouse labs in and around San Francisco's Bay Area, a part of California drug agents call the Acid Triangle. The last time those agents made a significant (1 million hits plus) acid bust, in 1993, they identified a supplier who lived in Bolinas, the northernmost point of the triangle.
A supplier, that is - not a chemist. The narcs never located the chemist. LSD today is a much lower dose (20 micrograms versus 2oo-plus) than the high-test stuff Augustus Owsley Stanley III sold as orange sunshine'' in the Sixties; more of a party high than an eight-hour trip. "Triple set - LSD that is reworked three times to in- crease purity - it's not found as often," says Dave Tresmontan, special agent in charge of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement's San Francisco office.
"The LSD today tends to be a little dirtier and not nearly as sophisticated as it once was," It's difficult to tell exactly when Leonard Pickard first involved himself with LSD. BNE believes he was part of the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which operated in and around the Acid Triangle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, selling hashish and LSD cooked by Owsley and other important chemists like Tim Scully and Nick Sand.
The Brotherhood's philosophy, at least the beginning, was simple and beneficent: with LSD, turning people on, expanding consciousness and changing the way people perceived the world took precedence over making a profit.
When the subject of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love came up one day in the Shawnee County jail, Pickard stopped short of admitting any contact with the group, but did speak of their activities with a certain knowing reverence: "I understand there have been a few LSD chemists that would never make a batch of LSD ever, ever, without offering prayers for the safety of the people that might use it. And it should act as a good medicine throughout the world. So I'm told." He added, "I think their mantra was something on the order of, 'Those that say, don't know. And those that know, don't say." Pickard smiled, conspiratorially, as he talked, sitting cross-legged and as calm as a Buddha on a plastic chair in an interview room barely big enough to contain his six-and-a-half-foot frame.
A federal trial in San Francisco in 1973 crippled Brotherhood operations and seemed to fragment the cooking culture, or at least send it further underground. BNE didn't take down a lab of any real size in the Acid Triangle for years after the Brotherhood case, just a few seizures now and again. "We might find some pretty good chunks, 15,000 hits or 100,000 hits," says Dave Tresmontan. Then, in 1988, reports came into the Bureau of strong chemical smells emanating from a ware- house in the city of Mountain View, California, about forty-five mites south of San Francisco. On December 28th, as the narcs arrived to execute a search warrant, a tall, pleasant man of forty strolled out of the warehouse, carrying multiple pieces of identification bearing a number of different names. His real name was William Leonard Pickard.
Read more: http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=133091#ixzz2VTNLTOYc
American LSD usage declined in the 1970s and 1980s, then experienced a mild resurgence in popularity in the 1990s. Although there were many distribution channels during this decade, the U.S. DEA identified continued tours by the psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead and the then-burgeoning rave scene as primary venues for LSD trafficking and consumption. American LSD usage fell sharply circa 2000. The decline is attributed to the arrest of two chemists, William Leonard Pickard, a Harvard-educated organic chemist, and Clyde Apperson. According to DEA reports, black market LSD availability dropped by 95% after the two were arrested in 2000. These arrests were a result of the largest LSD manufacturing raid in DEA history.
Pickard was an alleged member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love group that produced and sold LSD in California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is believed he had links to other “cooks” associated with this group — an original source of the drug back in the 1960′s — and his arrest may have forced other operations to cease production, leading to the large decline in street availability.
The DEA claims these two individuals were responsible for the vast majority of LSD sold illegally in the United States and a significant amount of the LSD sold in Europe, and that they worked closely with organized traffickers. While this claim may have some bearing, the extent of Pickard’s direct influence on the overall availability in the United States is not fully known. Some attest that “Pickard’s Acid” was sold exclusively in Europe, and was not distributed through American music venues.
For more than two decades, authorities believe, Leonard Pickard was a major player in the LSD underground. Now, sitting in a federal prison, he tells his tale for the first time.
Late last year, a new prisoner arrived at the Shawnee County Jail in Topeka, Kansas a polite beanstalk of a man from the San Francisco Bay Area who stood out amoung the petty criminals who make up the majority of Shawnees inmate population. He spoke in a rapid whisper, practiced yoga, meditated in his cell and read difficult books on mathematics and physics. Along with his prison blues, he wore sandals with socks. A princely mane of silver hair fell almost to his shoulders.
The mans name was William Leonard Pickard. A few days before, on November 7th, 200, the fifty-five-year-old Harvard graduate had been arrested not far from an abandoned Atlas E missile silo outside Topeka and charged with being one of the busiest manufacturers of LSD in the world, a chemist with the means to cook up acid by the kilos. If the governments charges prove true, this would make him one of the high priests of acid manufacture, part of a clandestine fraternity that probably numbers no more than a dozen worldwide.
Acid cookers are notoriously hard to catch. A lab can be set up quickly and broken down easily, and it only takes about ten days to perform a series of complicated chemical reactions to produce a sizable batch of the drug enough, once diluted and dipped onto blotter paper, for hundreds of thousands of hits. The trickiest part of the process is obtaining the precursor chemical known as ergotamine tartrate, or ET.
Heavily regulated in this country, where it is used to treat migraines, ET is often smuggled in from Eastern Europe, where sale of the compound is less restricted. Acid manufacturing might be one of the last criminal enterprises where those involved are motivated by more than the prospect of making money. Even now, more than three decades after the Summer of Love, to cook acid is to perform a sacrament, a public service. Members of this small band operate with great stealth and are rarely informed on by their associates, even those facing long prison terms. The Drug Enforcement Administration had not taken down an LSD lab since 1991.
The case of U.S. v. Pickard is just the latest, and perhaps final, chapter in the strange and often fantastic tale of William Leonard Pickard and his journey from a privileged boyhood in Atlanta, through the manic, hallucinogenic heart of the 1960s, to the forefront of social drugs research in the 1990s, conducted at some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Along the way, under various aliases - he crossed paths with such rock stars as Sting, and befriended members of the British House of Lords, State Department officials and the district attorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan. He earned a master's from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he studied drug trends in the former Soviet Union.
Pickard also has a rap sheet stretching back to his teens and has served two prison terms for manufacturing drugs, including LSD and the rarely seen synthetic mescaline. In recent years, though, his life seemed to come together - he'd fathered a child and had become a serious convert to Buddhism. He had a Job at a respected drug-policy think tank, and he planned to attend medical school so he could finally dedicate his life to alleviating the suffering of others. But he had also become bizarrely entwined with - and then, he says, hideously betrayed by - a man named Gordon Todd Skinner, a Porsche-driving pot dealer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, twenty years younger than Pickard When Pickard comes to trial, most likely later this year, the proceedings promise to shed light on the dangerous and secret world of LSD manufacturing for the first time in decades. Perhaps greater truths will be revealed, too.
In some ways, the story of Leonard Pickard and Todd Skinner is a story about the collision of Sixties idealism with the materialism and pragmatism of the nineties -Timothy Leary's America versus Bill Clinton's, if you will. And its moral will be clear even before the Judge calls the court to order; The sweet but easily corruptible dream of the flower-power generation never really stood a chance - but It was fun while it lasted.
The Acid Triangle
Most of the Acid consumed in the past thirty years is believed to have been made in temporary basement and warehouse labs in and around San Francisco's Bay Area, a part of California drug agents call the Acid Triangle. The last time those agents made a significant (1 million hits plus) acid bust, in 1993, they identified a supplier who lived in Bolinas, the northernmost point of the triangle.
A supplier, that is - not a chemist. The narcs never located the chemist. LSD today is a much lower dose (20 micrograms versus 2oo-plus) than the high-test stuff Augustus Owsley Stanley III sold as orange sunshine'' in the Sixties; more of a party high than an eight-hour trip. "Triple set - LSD that is reworked three times to in- crease purity - it's not found as often," says Dave Tresmontan, special agent in charge of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement's San Francisco office.
"The LSD today tends to be a little dirtier and not nearly as sophisticated as it once was," It's difficult to tell exactly when Leonard Pickard first involved himself with LSD. BNE believes he was part of the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which operated in and around the Acid Triangle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, selling hashish and LSD cooked by Owsley and other important chemists like Tim Scully and Nick Sand.
The Brotherhood's philosophy, at least the beginning, was simple and beneficent: with LSD, turning people on, expanding consciousness and changing the way people perceived the world took precedence over making a profit.
When the subject of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love came up one day in the Shawnee County jail, Pickard stopped short of admitting any contact with the group, but did speak of their activities with a certain knowing reverence: "I understand there have been a few LSD chemists that would never make a batch of LSD ever, ever, without offering prayers for the safety of the people that might use it. And it should act as a good medicine throughout the world. So I'm told." He added, "I think their mantra was something on the order of, 'Those that say, don't know. And those that know, don't say." Pickard smiled, conspiratorially, as he talked, sitting cross-legged and as calm as a Buddha on a plastic chair in an interview room barely big enough to contain his six-and-a-half-foot frame.
A federal trial in San Francisco in 1973 crippled Brotherhood operations and seemed to fragment the cooking culture, or at least send it further underground. BNE didn't take down a lab of any real size in the Acid Triangle for years after the Brotherhood case, just a few seizures now and again. "We might find some pretty good chunks, 15,000 hits or 100,000 hits," says Dave Tresmontan. Then, in 1988, reports came into the Bureau of strong chemical smells emanating from a ware- house in the city of Mountain View, California, about forty-five mites south of San Francisco. On December 28th, as the narcs arrived to execute a search warrant, a tall, pleasant man of forty strolled out of the warehouse, carrying multiple pieces of identification bearing a number of different names. His real name was William Leonard Pickard.
Read more: http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=133091#ixzz2VTNLTOYc
When the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/kreca1.html
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."
--William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."
--William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
Literary Review: ‘LSD – Doorway to the Numinous’ By Stanislav Grof
http://psypressuk.com/2009/12/26/literary-review-%E2%80%98lsd-%E2%80%93-doorway-to-the-numinous%E2%80%99-by-stanislav-grof/
http://psypressuk.com/2009/12/26/literary-review-%E2%80%98lsd-%E2%80%93-doorway-to-the-numinous%E2%80%99-by-stanislav-grof/
Mindmaps
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These videos contain a lot of negative spin and propaganda - so, Be Aware
Storming Heaven
According to Lyndon LaRouche's EIR: http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AquarianConspiracy
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm of Babinowitz, Boudin and Standard to conduct a feasibility study of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Timothy Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established [sic] an LSD cult [sic] called the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968. Mary Jo Warth, "The Story of Acid Profiteers," Village Voice, August 22, 1974.
This article is an excerpt from the EIR book "Dope Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against the World" (1978). A new edition by Progressive Press (2010).
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm of Babinowitz, Boudin and Standard to conduct a feasibility study of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Timothy Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established [sic] an LSD cult [sic] called the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968. Mary Jo Warth, "The Story of Acid Profiteers," Village Voice, August 22, 1974.
This article is an excerpt from the EIR book "Dope Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against the World" (1978). A new edition by Progressive Press (2010).
Storming Heaven: Lsd and the American Dream By Jay Stevens
http://books.google.com/books?id=clFOY2-E6CcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Worldview Warfare
"In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA engaged in an extensive program of human experimentation, using drugs, psychological, and other means, in search of techniques to control human behavior for counterintelligence and covert action purposes. According to Walter Bowart of the East Village Other, the CIA was the world's largest consumer of Sandoz LSD. They'd worked with the Bureau of Narcotics, the NIMH, LEAA and other agencies to covertly give LSD to unwitting persons in "real life settings."
Once they were done with unwitting individuals, CIA let the LSD genie out of the bottle into the general population with their own choice of High Priest, who they had already initiated in their trial by fire. Was “the Pope of Dope” a “tool” of the cryptocracy?
Bowart reports finding stronger evidence of Leary/CIA links: While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program. (Bowart)
When Bowart asked, "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" He reports, without hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary admitted to Bowart that even in the 60s he knew he was being wittingly used by intelligence agencies. He claimed from 1962 forward he operated as an intelligence agent aware of the world struggle for the control of minds – of consciousness. He wanted to be on the winning side.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" Bowart asked, disbelieving everything he said. "I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..." “…nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA..."
Then he back-pedaled, again declaring that CIA sponsored his and all other personality assessment research, including that used to assess those for CIA employment and other intelligence agencies. They also supported J.B. Rhine’s ESP experiments at Duke University. He was relatively clueless about other LSD researchers, such as Walter Pankhe and Stanislav Grof.
The whole question is muddied by the possibility Leary was trying to make money as a writer on MK Ultra, and wanted to increase his journalistic credibility. Many thought he was just lying, a habit for which his best friends give him a mixed review. Others contend he himself was a victim of chemical and electronic mind control in prison, designed to break and “turn” him. Did he turn state’s evidence for a “get out of jail, free card?” FBI records indicate it is so. Either way, wittingly or unwittingly, truth or lie, the “king of the hippies” was a pawn in CIA’s Great Game of global manipulation. “Why not indeed?” Isn’t the REAL question just WHO is directing the Skull and Bones “retail outlet,” CIA?
Drugs rule, or he who controls the drugs rules and controls by means of drugs and the enormous cash slush funds they generate. Destruction of the real economy and the replacement of development with looting on a global scale is already in an advanced stage throughout the world. The world runs on top of a black market in guns, gold and drugs.
In 1969 Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhood's chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been "tipped off".
I doubt any of us realized we were part of possibly the biggest CIA experiment ever unleashed on an unwitting public, but later revelations proved it so. Congress exposed it. LSD experiments and unwitting guinea pigs were major parts of the CIA dark ops known as MK ULTRA, a mind control program. The CIA released LSD on an unsuspecting public through the agenda devised by Tavistock Institute, the "Aquarian Conspiracy", from SRI and select co-evolving projects. Ultimately, CIA deemed LSD useless as a truth serum and abandoned that avenue of research, but the genie was out of the bottle and dropped onto the sugar cube. The cultural engineering of the 60's was underway.
The connection was notorious Captain Al Hubbard, the American superspy and uranium entrepreneur. He was the first Johnny Appleseed of LSD, turning on thousands of people, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, church figures, and housewives. Aldous Huxley got his acid from "Captain Trips" in 1955. Later, Leary would also acquire his experimental doses through CIA back channels.
Hubbard had an angelic vision telling him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he read about LSD the next year, he immediately sought and acquired LSD, which he tried for himself in 1951. Although he had no medical training, during the Fifties Hubbard worked at the Hollywood Hospital with Ross McLean, with psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond, with Myron Stolaroff at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, and with Willis Harman at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) running psychedelic sessions with LSD.
At various times over the next twenty years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. It is also rumored that he was involved with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project. How his government positions interacted with his work with LSD is unknown.
Hubbard is reputed to have introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures. He became known as the original "Captain Trips", traveling about with a leather case containing pharmaceutically pure LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.
I became aware of this backstory in my later relationship with the journal, Psychedelic Monographs & Essays, the first serious journal to recount the early history of dissemination and psychedelic culture. No one was talking about a "hippie mafia" at the time of the psychedelic explosion, at least, not to me. It was a spiritual crusade.
Later I asked Tim Leary how do you "turn it off," but he was no help on that. Once I tapped my psychedelic wellspring it became a gusher -- an infinity of visionary imagery which continues to flow and demands its own creative emergence. My question to the answer of drugs was, "How do you do this without drugs." Many found that answer in meditation. The drug became irrelevant. Years later, another friend would fill me in on what went on in Leary's Harvard years with "The Pink Power Pills", http://ionamiller2008.iwarp.com/whats_new_24.html
LSD: Weapon or Sacrament?
Counterculture vs. Counterintelligence
In forming counterculture, the whole self disengages from cultural currents, the electronic environment and corpo-political propaganda and Agit Prop. What happens when an entire generation questions social norms? This ‘spiritual’ quest might be alienating if it wasn’t something shared with most of one’s generation. It became the American psychedelic underground, and many subculture lifestyles followed it.
A drug culture that began as a narcissistic dissociation from the warring world devolved into a polydrug abusing culture of self-medication by the early 70s.The CIA bait-and-switch tactic, starting with LSD, created the 1970s cocaine fad and made liberalism synonymous with depravity. Any hope of controlling economies or cultures or unfolding events is doomed to sub-optimize the results and yield only nasty unintended consequences.
The subversively indoctrinated counterculture failed to realize that in adopting the hedonistic ‘spiritual’ drug, they were inadvertently “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA. The therapeutic promise of the drug was lost on the conservative government and sanctioned research stopped cold the rest of the century.
Nevertheless, many of the wold’s greatest minds were inspired by psychedelics. For example, Francis Crick was on 50mcg. of LSD when he came up with the double-helix structure of DNA. Others include Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Dr. Kary Mullis and the notorious Timothy Leary.
Pychedelics gave rise to the Human Potential movement, “Californian” ideology, mind spas like Esalen, and the so-called Aquarian Conspiracy which has blossomed into New Age thought. All have a root in CIA experiments in extraordinary human potential, parapsychology, and creativity. As with many alchemical panaceas, the substance is both a cure is a poison – a dream to some, a nightmare to others.
Acid Cult: Weapon or Sacrament?
CIA’s favorite stepchild was LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), developed at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. CIA was their biggest customer because they thought they could weaponize it. Later, acid was manufactured for the government by Eli Lilly. Lilly has been featured as one of the most unethical of all drug companies by the Wall Street Journal. Daddy Bush has run both CIA and Lilly during his career.
In 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a synthesized batch of LSD, which they patented (US Patent for Lysergic Acid Amides, Serial No. 473,443, issued February 28, 1956) and promoted heavily.
In 1955, Aldous Huxley (Britain’s “Timothy Leary,” who wrote the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World) had his first LSD trip and published Heaven and Hell. He had written The Doors of Perception in 1954 detailing his experiences with mescaline. He contributed to the debate on “Paradise-engineering,” and issues of universal happiness, biotechnology, post-genomic medicine, peak experiences and designer drugs.Hedonism and the state-sanctioned sugarcoating the Four Horsemen of Pain, Disease, Unhappiness, and Death. Consumption of mass produced goods and beliefs.
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modeled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. http://www.huxley.net/
Former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)—along with the Washington Post (1985) and the New York Times (1988)—reported an amazing story about the CIA and psychiatry.
A lead player was psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Cameron was curious to discover more powerful ways to break down patient resistance. Using electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was able to produce severe delirium. Patients often lost their sense of identity, forgetting their own names and even how to eat.
The CIA, eager to learn more about Cameron’s brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project code-named MKULTRA. According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army of the CIA’s LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA get its LSD? Marks reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was uncomfortable relying on a foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to the CIA.
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levinepr0504.html
Need To Know
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that throughout history the smartest people were directed into specialties that kept them from getting the “Big Picture” so kings and the elite remained unthreatened by them in their power. The church did much the same. They began losing control when the Freemasons sowed Enlightenment thought. Academia still forms and directs our thinking processes and what kind of opportunities are open to us.
Those whose imaginations range into the areas of suppressed science quickly find out it is neither supported nor tolerated. Funding and careers are at stake, and in some cases lives. Are there some things we should not know? Dangerous subjects? Forbidden subjects?
In these days thick with conspiracy theories, it isn’t hard to imagine yet another one. But perhaps the most useful approach is to take a look backward to find the taproot of forces manipulating our society today. Are sinister forces shaping our moral, educational, political, economic, and cultural lives?
Is the fruit of that poisoned tree coming to fruition? The answer is a hearty, “Yes.” In fact, insiders say that no pop culture phenomenon since the 50’s is an accident. Once TV entered virtually every home, some mind control experiments came to a rather abrupt halt; they weren’t needed. Mass mind control from the cradle to the grave had been accomplished. The era of Madison Avenue, stylish fads in possessions and beliefs, had begun. Recent political propaganda, spin doctoring, and agit-prop have become painfully obvious even to the uninitiated.
But the antecedents of programmed consumerism go back much further to the time of Freud and fomenting political forces in Great Britain. The mother of all propaganda machines can be found in The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and its forerunner Tavistock Clinic or Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, which has tremendously influenced both left and rightwing thinking and put itself in the service of the “racket of war.”
A great game is being played on us unawares, and we are pawns in that game. Call it “Global Architectronics.” Public opinion cannot only be manipulated, it can be created --a perception not a reality. But, who or what would want to shape and control public opinion? We can ask ourselves like Parcival in the Grail Castle, “Who do these things serve?” and/or follow the modern investigative imperative to “Follow the Money.”
Synthetic Religion
Since civilization began, monarchs and their militaries have sought to control their own populations and those who threatened them. Elitists with overarching ambitions have existed in all eras. One of the most effective means of social control predates civilization, arising in the superstitious world of neolithic period.
By healing, birth and death rites, and oracles shamans gained a stranglehold on the minds of their followers with magical medicine and mysterious incantations. They told the people what to expect in the future and what fearsome and mysterious forces were operating out of view in nature. Their rites controlled the food supply, the weather, and tribal beliefs. Myths were imposed on fresh minds.
Drugs were also a staple in the medicine kit, both to kill pain and to provide pleasure and communion in tribal celebrations. These mind expanding drugs revealed a separate reality, populated by fabulous and fearsome creatures of the imagination. After these close encounters, naturally, their shamans claimed to placate the demonic and serve the greater good.
Shared beliefs bound groups together in common cause with a groupthink worldview. They “belonged.” But shamanism and sorcery are centered truly around illusion and power, not spirituality. It is an attempt to define the reality – to impose a pre-scientific definition of reality.
Shamanism finds its modern counterpart in psychology/psychiatry but also in the cultural fad of the New Age movement, a nostalgic, if self-absorbed, spirituality. And the founding of Tavistock is rooted in the careers and theories of many of the most imminent mind doctors of the last century: Freud, Jung, Laing, Bateson, and more.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
Today, our minds can be tortured, directed and contained through subtler but more nefarious means.We are still put in mental stocks by megamedia and Big Pharma, and their combination – pharmaceutical adverts.Chemical straightjackets range from Ritalin, to antidepressants, to hormones, prescriptions and recreational drugs.
Paradoxically, there is an alleged War on Drugs by the very governments and agencies who are accused of profiteering on Black Market importation and distribution.CIA has been implicated in the infamous "Air America" Golden Triangle heroin importations in the Viet Nam era, cocaine running during Iran Contra, the crack epidemic in American ghettos, poppy production in Afghanistan (largest crop ever in 2006), and in promoting Orange Sunshine LSD through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to derail and discredit the peace movement in the 1960’s.
This follows an older tradition, an aspect of psychological warfare.British profiteers grew narcotics in India and forcibly sold them to China during the Opium Wars.Even tea was notorious during the American Revolution.Black Ops have a history of being supported via illicit drug trade.Anyone who is the end-user drives the whole karmic chain of supply and demand.And, it’s a bloody trail.
All drugs, even alcohol, tobacco and sugar are big business. It’s all part of The Spectacle, whether the source is nation-states, megacorporate drug companies (Big Pharma), global drug rings, or designer independents. Humans are hardwired with a “craving for ecstasy.”Social issues include suppression of direct mystical experience (religious experimentation vs. “pharmacratic inquisition”), modulating your own pleasure/pain axis, sexuality, and self-determination (individual freedom vs. state control).
We’ve developed even more cruel and unusual punishment for would-be “free thinkers,” and dissidents since the era of MK Ultra, the CIA mind control programs.During the Cold War, the CIA attempted to outdo Soviet and Asian brainwashing techniques and close the “mind control gap.”
With the Manchurian Candidate, they tried to secretly manufacture the perfect assassin – a cyborg. Then the agency experimented with a variety of drugs designed to neutralize or disable the enemy, or to use as truth serums.They also used electroshock, sensory deprivation, psychotronics, and radical hypnosis. Brain washing wipes the mind and numbs the emotions; reprogramming plugs in new "software" that contours thoughts and feelings, and can trigger behaviors at the will of the programmer.
Though it was a leading candidate, LSD was determined no good for mind control, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be an influential social control.Once the drug became associated with the counterculture, it was banned (1967), which only made it more attractive.Yet it still worked its magic by deflecting energy and attention into hedonistic druggie lifestyles instead of confrontational political activism.
Through its Psychological Warfare Division, CIA-controlled media used CIA promoted drugs to discredit the peace movement.It used CBS, The New York Times, Associated Press, United Press International, even The National Enquirer, and other major United States media to maintain its control over sensitive subjects.This gave new meaning to the phrase, “the medium is the message” – infowars.
Once they were done with unwitting individuals, CIA let the LSD genie out of the bottle into the general population with their own choice of High Priest, who they had already initiated in their trial by fire. Was “the Pope of Dope” a “tool” of the cryptocracy?
Bowart reports finding stronger evidence of Leary/CIA links: While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program. (Bowart)
When Bowart asked, "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" He reports, without hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary admitted to Bowart that even in the 60s he knew he was being wittingly used by intelligence agencies. He claimed from 1962 forward he operated as an intelligence agent aware of the world struggle for the control of minds – of consciousness. He wanted to be on the winning side.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" Bowart asked, disbelieving everything he said. "I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..." “…nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA..."
Then he back-pedaled, again declaring that CIA sponsored his and all other personality assessment research, including that used to assess those for CIA employment and other intelligence agencies. They also supported J.B. Rhine’s ESP experiments at Duke University. He was relatively clueless about other LSD researchers, such as Walter Pankhe and Stanislav Grof.
The whole question is muddied by the possibility Leary was trying to make money as a writer on MK Ultra, and wanted to increase his journalistic credibility. Many thought he was just lying, a habit for which his best friends give him a mixed review. Others contend he himself was a victim of chemical and electronic mind control in prison, designed to break and “turn” him. Did he turn state’s evidence for a “get out of jail, free card?” FBI records indicate it is so. Either way, wittingly or unwittingly, truth or lie, the “king of the hippies” was a pawn in CIA’s Great Game of global manipulation. “Why not indeed?” Isn’t the REAL question just WHO is directing the Skull and Bones “retail outlet,” CIA?
Drugs rule, or he who controls the drugs rules and controls by means of drugs and the enormous cash slush funds they generate. Destruction of the real economy and the replacement of development with looting on a global scale is already in an advanced stage throughout the world. The world runs on top of a black market in guns, gold and drugs.
In 1969 Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhood's chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been "tipped off".
I doubt any of us realized we were part of possibly the biggest CIA experiment ever unleashed on an unwitting public, but later revelations proved it so. Congress exposed it. LSD experiments and unwitting guinea pigs were major parts of the CIA dark ops known as MK ULTRA, a mind control program. The CIA released LSD on an unsuspecting public through the agenda devised by Tavistock Institute, the "Aquarian Conspiracy", from SRI and select co-evolving projects. Ultimately, CIA deemed LSD useless as a truth serum and abandoned that avenue of research, but the genie was out of the bottle and dropped onto the sugar cube. The cultural engineering of the 60's was underway.
The connection was notorious Captain Al Hubbard, the American superspy and uranium entrepreneur. He was the first Johnny Appleseed of LSD, turning on thousands of people, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, church figures, and housewives. Aldous Huxley got his acid from "Captain Trips" in 1955. Later, Leary would also acquire his experimental doses through CIA back channels.
Hubbard had an angelic vision telling him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he read about LSD the next year, he immediately sought and acquired LSD, which he tried for himself in 1951. Although he had no medical training, during the Fifties Hubbard worked at the Hollywood Hospital with Ross McLean, with psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond, with Myron Stolaroff at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, and with Willis Harman at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) running psychedelic sessions with LSD.
At various times over the next twenty years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. It is also rumored that he was involved with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project. How his government positions interacted with his work with LSD is unknown.
Hubbard is reputed to have introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures. He became known as the original "Captain Trips", traveling about with a leather case containing pharmaceutically pure LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.
I became aware of this backstory in my later relationship with the journal, Psychedelic Monographs & Essays, the first serious journal to recount the early history of dissemination and psychedelic culture. No one was talking about a "hippie mafia" at the time of the psychedelic explosion, at least, not to me. It was a spiritual crusade.
Later I asked Tim Leary how do you "turn it off," but he was no help on that. Once I tapped my psychedelic wellspring it became a gusher -- an infinity of visionary imagery which continues to flow and demands its own creative emergence. My question to the answer of drugs was, "How do you do this without drugs." Many found that answer in meditation. The drug became irrelevant. Years later, another friend would fill me in on what went on in Leary's Harvard years with "The Pink Power Pills", http://ionamiller2008.iwarp.com/whats_new_24.html
LSD: Weapon or Sacrament?
Counterculture vs. Counterintelligence
In forming counterculture, the whole self disengages from cultural currents, the electronic environment and corpo-political propaganda and Agit Prop. What happens when an entire generation questions social norms? This ‘spiritual’ quest might be alienating if it wasn’t something shared with most of one’s generation. It became the American psychedelic underground, and many subculture lifestyles followed it.
A drug culture that began as a narcissistic dissociation from the warring world devolved into a polydrug abusing culture of self-medication by the early 70s.The CIA bait-and-switch tactic, starting with LSD, created the 1970s cocaine fad and made liberalism synonymous with depravity. Any hope of controlling economies or cultures or unfolding events is doomed to sub-optimize the results and yield only nasty unintended consequences.
The subversively indoctrinated counterculture failed to realize that in adopting the hedonistic ‘spiritual’ drug, they were inadvertently “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA. The therapeutic promise of the drug was lost on the conservative government and sanctioned research stopped cold the rest of the century.
Nevertheless, many of the wold’s greatest minds were inspired by psychedelics. For example, Francis Crick was on 50mcg. of LSD when he came up with the double-helix structure of DNA. Others include Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Dr. Kary Mullis and the notorious Timothy Leary.
Pychedelics gave rise to the Human Potential movement, “Californian” ideology, mind spas like Esalen, and the so-called Aquarian Conspiracy which has blossomed into New Age thought. All have a root in CIA experiments in extraordinary human potential, parapsychology, and creativity. As with many alchemical panaceas, the substance is both a cure is a poison – a dream to some, a nightmare to others.
Acid Cult: Weapon or Sacrament?
CIA’s favorite stepchild was LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), developed at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. CIA was their biggest customer because they thought they could weaponize it. Later, acid was manufactured for the government by Eli Lilly. Lilly has been featured as one of the most unethical of all drug companies by the Wall Street Journal. Daddy Bush has run both CIA and Lilly during his career.
In 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a synthesized batch of LSD, which they patented (US Patent for Lysergic Acid Amides, Serial No. 473,443, issued February 28, 1956) and promoted heavily.
In 1955, Aldous Huxley (Britain’s “Timothy Leary,” who wrote the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World) had his first LSD trip and published Heaven and Hell. He had written The Doors of Perception in 1954 detailing his experiences with mescaline. He contributed to the debate on “Paradise-engineering,” and issues of universal happiness, biotechnology, post-genomic medicine, peak experiences and designer drugs.Hedonism and the state-sanctioned sugarcoating the Four Horsemen of Pain, Disease, Unhappiness, and Death. Consumption of mass produced goods and beliefs.
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modeled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. http://www.huxley.net/
Former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)—along with the Washington Post (1985) and the New York Times (1988)—reported an amazing story about the CIA and psychiatry.
A lead player was psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Cameron was curious to discover more powerful ways to break down patient resistance. Using electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was able to produce severe delirium. Patients often lost their sense of identity, forgetting their own names and even how to eat.
The CIA, eager to learn more about Cameron’s brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project code-named MKULTRA. According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army of the CIA’s LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA get its LSD? Marks reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was uncomfortable relying on a foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to the CIA.
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levinepr0504.html
Need To Know
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that throughout history the smartest people were directed into specialties that kept them from getting the “Big Picture” so kings and the elite remained unthreatened by them in their power. The church did much the same. They began losing control when the Freemasons sowed Enlightenment thought. Academia still forms and directs our thinking processes and what kind of opportunities are open to us.
Those whose imaginations range into the areas of suppressed science quickly find out it is neither supported nor tolerated. Funding and careers are at stake, and in some cases lives. Are there some things we should not know? Dangerous subjects? Forbidden subjects?
In these days thick with conspiracy theories, it isn’t hard to imagine yet another one. But perhaps the most useful approach is to take a look backward to find the taproot of forces manipulating our society today. Are sinister forces shaping our moral, educational, political, economic, and cultural lives?
Is the fruit of that poisoned tree coming to fruition? The answer is a hearty, “Yes.” In fact, insiders say that no pop culture phenomenon since the 50’s is an accident. Once TV entered virtually every home, some mind control experiments came to a rather abrupt halt; they weren’t needed. Mass mind control from the cradle to the grave had been accomplished. The era of Madison Avenue, stylish fads in possessions and beliefs, had begun. Recent political propaganda, spin doctoring, and agit-prop have become painfully obvious even to the uninitiated.
But the antecedents of programmed consumerism go back much further to the time of Freud and fomenting political forces in Great Britain. The mother of all propaganda machines can be found in The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and its forerunner Tavistock Clinic or Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, which has tremendously influenced both left and rightwing thinking and put itself in the service of the “racket of war.”
A great game is being played on us unawares, and we are pawns in that game. Call it “Global Architectronics.” Public opinion cannot only be manipulated, it can be created --a perception not a reality. But, who or what would want to shape and control public opinion? We can ask ourselves like Parcival in the Grail Castle, “Who do these things serve?” and/or follow the modern investigative imperative to “Follow the Money.”
Synthetic Religion
Since civilization began, monarchs and their militaries have sought to control their own populations and those who threatened them. Elitists with overarching ambitions have existed in all eras. One of the most effective means of social control predates civilization, arising in the superstitious world of neolithic period.
By healing, birth and death rites, and oracles shamans gained a stranglehold on the minds of their followers with magical medicine and mysterious incantations. They told the people what to expect in the future and what fearsome and mysterious forces were operating out of view in nature. Their rites controlled the food supply, the weather, and tribal beliefs. Myths were imposed on fresh minds.
Drugs were also a staple in the medicine kit, both to kill pain and to provide pleasure and communion in tribal celebrations. These mind expanding drugs revealed a separate reality, populated by fabulous and fearsome creatures of the imagination. After these close encounters, naturally, their shamans claimed to placate the demonic and serve the greater good.
Shared beliefs bound groups together in common cause with a groupthink worldview. They “belonged.” But shamanism and sorcery are centered truly around illusion and power, not spirituality. It is an attempt to define the reality – to impose a pre-scientific definition of reality.
Shamanism finds its modern counterpart in psychology/psychiatry but also in the cultural fad of the New Age movement, a nostalgic, if self-absorbed, spirituality. And the founding of Tavistock is rooted in the careers and theories of many of the most imminent mind doctors of the last century: Freud, Jung, Laing, Bateson, and more.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
- HELP ME (Basic Survival)
- TRIBAL We (Collective Survival)
- GRATIFY Me (Immediate Wants)
- RIGHTEOUS We (Stable Authority)
- COMPETETIVE Me (Material Success)
- HOLISTIC Us (Global Harmony)
- INTERDEPENDENT Me (Sustainable World)
- SPIRITUAL We (Collective Renewal)
Today, our minds can be tortured, directed and contained through subtler but more nefarious means.We are still put in mental stocks by megamedia and Big Pharma, and their combination – pharmaceutical adverts.Chemical straightjackets range from Ritalin, to antidepressants, to hormones, prescriptions and recreational drugs.
Paradoxically, there is an alleged War on Drugs by the very governments and agencies who are accused of profiteering on Black Market importation and distribution.CIA has been implicated in the infamous "Air America" Golden Triangle heroin importations in the Viet Nam era, cocaine running during Iran Contra, the crack epidemic in American ghettos, poppy production in Afghanistan (largest crop ever in 2006), and in promoting Orange Sunshine LSD through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to derail and discredit the peace movement in the 1960’s.
This follows an older tradition, an aspect of psychological warfare.British profiteers grew narcotics in India and forcibly sold them to China during the Opium Wars.Even tea was notorious during the American Revolution.Black Ops have a history of being supported via illicit drug trade.Anyone who is the end-user drives the whole karmic chain of supply and demand.And, it’s a bloody trail.
All drugs, even alcohol, tobacco and sugar are big business. It’s all part of The Spectacle, whether the source is nation-states, megacorporate drug companies (Big Pharma), global drug rings, or designer independents. Humans are hardwired with a “craving for ecstasy.”Social issues include suppression of direct mystical experience (religious experimentation vs. “pharmacratic inquisition”), modulating your own pleasure/pain axis, sexuality, and self-determination (individual freedom vs. state control).
We’ve developed even more cruel and unusual punishment for would-be “free thinkers,” and dissidents since the era of MK Ultra, the CIA mind control programs.During the Cold War, the CIA attempted to outdo Soviet and Asian brainwashing techniques and close the “mind control gap.”
With the Manchurian Candidate, they tried to secretly manufacture the perfect assassin – a cyborg. Then the agency experimented with a variety of drugs designed to neutralize or disable the enemy, or to use as truth serums.They also used electroshock, sensory deprivation, psychotronics, and radical hypnosis. Brain washing wipes the mind and numbs the emotions; reprogramming plugs in new "software" that contours thoughts and feelings, and can trigger behaviors at the will of the programmer.
Though it was a leading candidate, LSD was determined no good for mind control, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be an influential social control.Once the drug became associated with the counterculture, it was banned (1967), which only made it more attractive.Yet it still worked its magic by deflecting energy and attention into hedonistic druggie lifestyles instead of confrontational political activism.
Through its Psychological Warfare Division, CIA-controlled media used CIA promoted drugs to discredit the peace movement.It used CBS, The New York Times, Associated Press, United Press International, even The National Enquirer, and other major United States media to maintain its control over sensitive subjects.This gave new meaning to the phrase, “the medium is the message” – infowars.
"Manson's supply of LSD may have come directly from the CIA. A new type of LSD known as "Orange Sunshine" was being used by the Manson Family immediately prior to the Tate-LaBianca murders according to Family member Charles "Tex" Watson, who wrote in his prison memoir that it was the use of the Orange Sunshine LSD that finally convinced him that Manson's Helter Skelter, apocalyptic vision was real. (13) And this special LSD may have been supplied by the CIA. Orange Sunshine was manufactured and distributed by a group known as "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love" who operated out of a beach resort near Los Angeles. The Brotherhood had among it's drug manufacturers and dealers, one Ronald Stark, a person with known connections to the CIA. It is believed that Stark was responsible for the manufacture of up to 50 million hits of LSD). (14)
(13) Will You Die for Me?: The man who killed for Charles Manson tells his own story by Tex Watson, as told to Chaplain Ray, Fleming H. Revell Company, page 118-120.
(14) Acid Dreams, pages 248-251”
(13) Will You Die for Me?: The man who killed for Charles Manson tells his own story by Tex Watson, as told to Chaplain Ray, Fleming H. Revell Company, page 118-120.
(14) Acid Dreams, pages 248-251”
Vintage Video with Al Hubbard & Tim Leary - A Conversation on LSD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaumQvMWBA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaumQvMWBA
Al Hubbard, Captain Trips, CIA Superspy
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/capthubbard.html
Ronald Stark: http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/rasputin.html
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/2010/05/al-hubbard-johnny-appleseed-of-lsd.html
Alfred Matthew Hubbard is reputed to have introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures. He became known as the original "Captain Trips", travelling about with a leather case containing pharmaceutically pure LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. He became a 'freelance' apostle for LSD in the early 1950s after supposedly receiving an angelic vision telling him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he read about LSD the next year, he immediately sought and acquired LSD, which he tried for himself in 1951.
Although he had no medical training, Hubbard collaborated on running psychedelic sessions with LSD with Ross McLean at Vancouver's Hollywood Hospital, with psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, with Myron Stolaroff at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, and with Willis Harman at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). At various times over the next twenty years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. It is also rumored that he was involved with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project. How his government positions interacted with his work with LSD is unknown.
by Todd Brendan Fahey
Published originally by High Times, November 1991
THE HANDLER - Captain Trips
Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...before Timothy Leary...before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests...before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.
You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life--a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.
They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.
Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and friendly like a golden retriever.
The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank Vancouver Yacht Club. Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."
Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline, and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some. "He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs. Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain" came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in the US Merchant Marine.
At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver--a former Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it was the inner voyage that drove the Captain until his death in 1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever in his brain.
His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.
"He blew in with that uniform...laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!" Leary recalls. "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn't believe...claimed he was friends with the Pope."
Did Leary believe him?
"Well, yeah, no question."
The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me," Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him."
Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley, author of the sardonic novel Brave New World. Huxley had been turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook The Doors of Perception. Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals then known as "psychotomimetic"--literally, "madness mimicking."
But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a credo for the next generation:
To fathom hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
* * *
Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a "barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had absolutely no training, "but he had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.
In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post- Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11" x 14" box, had powered a ferry- sized vessel around Seattle's Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard Energy Transformer.
Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the boy inventor. Vancouver magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.
After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.
The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently became agent Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of World War II--an operations of dubious legality, which had him facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.
Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early 40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By 1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and a Canadian island. And he was miserable.
"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth. He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to," says Harman. "But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."
In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conduction the experiment, and came back with some LSD for himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True Believer.
"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament," recalls Leary.
A 1968 resume states that Hubbard was at various times employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73 by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."
Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology, often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with such a project "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."
[Note: Recently, a researcher for WorldNetDaily and author of a forthcoming book based on the Frank Olson "murder," revealed to this writer that he has received, via a FOIA request of CIA declassified materials, documents which indicate that Al Hubbard was, indeed, in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White--an FBI narcotics official who managed Operation Midnight Climax, a joint CIA/FBI blackmail project in which unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose exploits were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at posh hotels in both New York and San Francisco. The researcher would reveal only that Al Hubbard's name "appeared in connection with Gottlieb and White, but the material is heavily redacted."] Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."
Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That letter would be priceless--but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both there in full force."
Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.'"
He was not alone.
Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.
Hubbard abandoned his uranium empire and, for the next decade, traveled the globe as a psychedelic missionary. "Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," says Stolaroff. His first pilgrimage was to Switzerland, home of Sandoz Laboratories, producers of both Delysid (trade name for LSD) and psilocybin. He procured a gram of LSD (roughly 10,000 doses) and set up shop in a safe-deposit vault in the Zurich airport's duty-free section. From there he was able to ship quantities of his booty without a tariff to a waiting world.
Swiss officials quickly detained Hubbard for violating the nation's drug laws, which provided no exemption from the duty-free provision. Myron Stolaroff petitioned Washington for the Captain's release, but the State Department wanted nothing to do with Al Hubbard. Oddly, when a hearing was held, blue-suited officials from the department were in attendance. The Swiss tribunal declared Hubbard's passport invalid for five years, and he was deported. Undeterred, Hubbard traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he had another gram of LSD put into tablet form by Chemapol--a division of the pharmaceutical giant Spofa--and then flew west.
Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.
According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.
His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.
Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.
But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.
His departure came as the Canadian Medical Association was becoming increasingly suspicious of Hollywood Hospital in the wake of publicity surrounding MK-ULTRA. The Canadian Citizen's Commission on Human Rights had already discovered one Dr. Harold Abramson, a CIA contract psychiatrist, on the board of MacLean's International Association for Psychedelic Therapy, and external pressure was weighing on MacLean to release Al Hubbard, the former OSS officer with suspected CIA links. Compounding Hubbard's plight was the death of his Canadian benefactor, leaving Hubbard with neither an income nor the financial cushion upon which he had become dependent.
His services were eventually recruited by Willis Harman, then-Director of the Educational Policy Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Stanford University. Harman employed Hubbard as a security guard for SRI, "although," Harman admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work."
Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special [LSD] sessions for us."
According to Dr. Abram Hoffer, "Al had a grandiose idea that if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society."
Hubbard's tenure at SRI was uneasy. The political bent of the Stanford think-tank was decidedly left-wing, clashing sharply with Hubbard's own world-perspective. "Al was really an arch-conservative," says the confidential source. "He really didn't like what the hippies were doing with LSD, and he held Timothy Leary in great contempt."
Humphry Osmond recalls a particular psilocybin session in which "Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea that he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea...I became much concerned that he might shoot me..."
"To Al," says Myron Stolaroff, "LSD enabled man to see his true self, his true nature and the true order of things." But, to Hubbard, the true order of things had little to do with the antics of the American Left.
Recognizing its potential psychic hazards, Hubbard believed that LSD should be administered and monitored by trained professionals. He claimed that he had stockpiled more LSD than anyone on the planet besides Sandoz--including the US government--and he clearly wanted a firm hand in influencing the way it was used. However, Hubbard refused all opportunities to become the LSD Philosopher-King. Whereas Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves. When cornered by a video camera shortly before this death, and asked to say something to the future, Hubbard replied simply, "You're the future."
In March of 1966, the cold winds of Congress blew out all hope for Al Hubbard's enlightened Mother Earth. Facing a storm of protest brought on by Leary's reckless antics and the "LSD-related suicide" of Diane Linkletter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Drug Abuse Control Amendment, which declared lysergic acid diethylamide a Schedule I substance; simple possession was deemed a felony, punishable by 15 years in prison. According to Humphry Osmond, Hubbard lobbied Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who reportedly took the cause of LSD into the Senate chambers, and emerged un-victorious.
"[The government] had a deep fear of having their picture of reality challenged," mourns Harman. "It had nothing to do with people harming their lives with chemicals--because if you took all the people who had ever had any harmful effects from psychedelics, it's minuscule compared to those associated with alcohol and tobacco."
FDA chief James L. Goddard ordered agents to seize all remaining psychedelics not accounted for by Sandoz. "It was scary," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, whose Beverly Hills office was raided and years' worth of clinical research confiscated.
Hubbard begged Abram Hoffer to let him hide his supply in Hoffer's Canadian Psychiatric Facility. But the doctor refused, and it is believed that Hubbard buried most of his LSD in a sacred parcel in Death Valley, California, claiming that it had been used, rather than risk prosecution. When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research--none using humans, and none of them associated with Al Hubbard. In 1968, his finances in ruins, Hubbard was forced to sell his private island sanctuary for what one close friend termed "a pittance." He filled a number of boats with the antiquated electronics used in his eccentric nuclear experiments, and left Daymen Island for California. Hubbard's efforts in his last decade were effectively wasted, according to most of his friends. Lack of both finances and government permit to resume research crippled all remaining projects he may have had in the hopper.
After SRI canceled his contract in 1974 Hubbard went into semiretirement, splitting his time between a 5-acre ranch in Vancouver and an apartment in Menlo Park. But in 1978, battling an enlarged heart and never far away from a bottle of pure oxygen, Hubbard make one last run at the FDA. He applied for an IND to use LSD-25 on terminal cancer patients, furnishing the FDA with two decades of clinical documentation. The FDA set the application aside, pending the addition to Hubbard's team of a medical doctor, a supervised medical regimen, and an AMA-accredited hospital. Hubbard secured the help of Oscar Janiger, but the two could not agree on methodology, and Janiger bowed out, leaving Al Hubbard, in his late 70s, without the strength to carry on alone.
Says Willis Harman: "He knew that his work was done."
* * *
The Captain lived out his last days nearly broke, having exhausted his resources trying to harness a dream. Like in the final fleeting hour of an acid trip--when the edge softens and a man realizes that he will not solve the secrets of the Universe, despite what the mind had said earlier--Hubbard smiled gracefully, laid down his six-shooter, and retired to a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona.
On August 31, 1982, at the age of 81, Al Hubbard was called home, having ridden the dream like a rodeo cowboy. On very quiet nights, with the right kind of ears, you can hear him giving God hell.
Ronald Stark: http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/rasputin.html
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/2010/05/al-hubbard-johnny-appleseed-of-lsd.html
Alfred Matthew Hubbard is reputed to have introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures. He became known as the original "Captain Trips", travelling about with a leather case containing pharmaceutically pure LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. He became a 'freelance' apostle for LSD in the early 1950s after supposedly receiving an angelic vision telling him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he read about LSD the next year, he immediately sought and acquired LSD, which he tried for himself in 1951.
Although he had no medical training, Hubbard collaborated on running psychedelic sessions with LSD with Ross McLean at Vancouver's Hollywood Hospital, with psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, with Myron Stolaroff at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, and with Willis Harman at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). At various times over the next twenty years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. It is also rumored that he was involved with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project. How his government positions interacted with his work with LSD is unknown.
by Todd Brendan Fahey
Published originally by High Times, November 1991
THE HANDLER - Captain Trips
Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...before Timothy Leary...before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests...before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.
You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life--a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.
They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.
Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and friendly like a golden retriever.
The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank Vancouver Yacht Club. Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."
Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline, and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some. "He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs. Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain" came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in the US Merchant Marine.
At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver--a former Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it was the inner voyage that drove the Captain until his death in 1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever in his brain.
His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.
"He blew in with that uniform...laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!" Leary recalls. "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn't believe...claimed he was friends with the Pope."
Did Leary believe him?
"Well, yeah, no question."
The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me," Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him."
Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley, author of the sardonic novel Brave New World. Huxley had been turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook The Doors of Perception. Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals then known as "psychotomimetic"--literally, "madness mimicking."
But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a credo for the next generation:
To fathom hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
* * *
Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a "barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had absolutely no training, "but he had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.
In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post- Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11" x 14" box, had powered a ferry- sized vessel around Seattle's Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard Energy Transformer.
Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the boy inventor. Vancouver magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.
After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.
The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently became agent Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of World War II--an operations of dubious legality, which had him facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.
Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early 40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By 1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and a Canadian island. And he was miserable.
"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth. He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to," says Harman. "But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."
In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conduction the experiment, and came back with some LSD for himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True Believer.
"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament," recalls Leary.
A 1968 resume states that Hubbard was at various times employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73 by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."
Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology, often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with such a project "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."
[Note: Recently, a researcher for WorldNetDaily and author of a forthcoming book based on the Frank Olson "murder," revealed to this writer that he has received, via a FOIA request of CIA declassified materials, documents which indicate that Al Hubbard was, indeed, in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White--an FBI narcotics official who managed Operation Midnight Climax, a joint CIA/FBI blackmail project in which unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose exploits were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at posh hotels in both New York and San Francisco. The researcher would reveal only that Al Hubbard's name "appeared in connection with Gottlieb and White, but the material is heavily redacted."] Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."
Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That letter would be priceless--but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both there in full force."
Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.'"
He was not alone.
Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.
Hubbard abandoned his uranium empire and, for the next decade, traveled the globe as a psychedelic missionary. "Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," says Stolaroff. His first pilgrimage was to Switzerland, home of Sandoz Laboratories, producers of both Delysid (trade name for LSD) and psilocybin. He procured a gram of LSD (roughly 10,000 doses) and set up shop in a safe-deposit vault in the Zurich airport's duty-free section. From there he was able to ship quantities of his booty without a tariff to a waiting world.
Swiss officials quickly detained Hubbard for violating the nation's drug laws, which provided no exemption from the duty-free provision. Myron Stolaroff petitioned Washington for the Captain's release, but the State Department wanted nothing to do with Al Hubbard. Oddly, when a hearing was held, blue-suited officials from the department were in attendance. The Swiss tribunal declared Hubbard's passport invalid for five years, and he was deported. Undeterred, Hubbard traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he had another gram of LSD put into tablet form by Chemapol--a division of the pharmaceutical giant Spofa--and then flew west.
Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.
According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.
His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.
Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.
But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.
His departure came as the Canadian Medical Association was becoming increasingly suspicious of Hollywood Hospital in the wake of publicity surrounding MK-ULTRA. The Canadian Citizen's Commission on Human Rights had already discovered one Dr. Harold Abramson, a CIA contract psychiatrist, on the board of MacLean's International Association for Psychedelic Therapy, and external pressure was weighing on MacLean to release Al Hubbard, the former OSS officer with suspected CIA links. Compounding Hubbard's plight was the death of his Canadian benefactor, leaving Hubbard with neither an income nor the financial cushion upon which he had become dependent.
His services were eventually recruited by Willis Harman, then-Director of the Educational Policy Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Stanford University. Harman employed Hubbard as a security guard for SRI, "although," Harman admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work."
Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special [LSD] sessions for us."
According to Dr. Abram Hoffer, "Al had a grandiose idea that if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society."
Hubbard's tenure at SRI was uneasy. The political bent of the Stanford think-tank was decidedly left-wing, clashing sharply with Hubbard's own world-perspective. "Al was really an arch-conservative," says the confidential source. "He really didn't like what the hippies were doing with LSD, and he held Timothy Leary in great contempt."
Humphry Osmond recalls a particular psilocybin session in which "Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea that he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea...I became much concerned that he might shoot me..."
"To Al," says Myron Stolaroff, "LSD enabled man to see his true self, his true nature and the true order of things." But, to Hubbard, the true order of things had little to do with the antics of the American Left.
Recognizing its potential psychic hazards, Hubbard believed that LSD should be administered and monitored by trained professionals. He claimed that he had stockpiled more LSD than anyone on the planet besides Sandoz--including the US government--and he clearly wanted a firm hand in influencing the way it was used. However, Hubbard refused all opportunities to become the LSD Philosopher-King. Whereas Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves. When cornered by a video camera shortly before this death, and asked to say something to the future, Hubbard replied simply, "You're the future."
In March of 1966, the cold winds of Congress blew out all hope for Al Hubbard's enlightened Mother Earth. Facing a storm of protest brought on by Leary's reckless antics and the "LSD-related suicide" of Diane Linkletter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Drug Abuse Control Amendment, which declared lysergic acid diethylamide a Schedule I substance; simple possession was deemed a felony, punishable by 15 years in prison. According to Humphry Osmond, Hubbard lobbied Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who reportedly took the cause of LSD into the Senate chambers, and emerged un-victorious.
"[The government] had a deep fear of having their picture of reality challenged," mourns Harman. "It had nothing to do with people harming their lives with chemicals--because if you took all the people who had ever had any harmful effects from psychedelics, it's minuscule compared to those associated with alcohol and tobacco."
FDA chief James L. Goddard ordered agents to seize all remaining psychedelics not accounted for by Sandoz. "It was scary," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, whose Beverly Hills office was raided and years' worth of clinical research confiscated.
Hubbard begged Abram Hoffer to let him hide his supply in Hoffer's Canadian Psychiatric Facility. But the doctor refused, and it is believed that Hubbard buried most of his LSD in a sacred parcel in Death Valley, California, claiming that it had been used, rather than risk prosecution. When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research--none using humans, and none of them associated with Al Hubbard. In 1968, his finances in ruins, Hubbard was forced to sell his private island sanctuary for what one close friend termed "a pittance." He filled a number of boats with the antiquated electronics used in his eccentric nuclear experiments, and left Daymen Island for California. Hubbard's efforts in his last decade were effectively wasted, according to most of his friends. Lack of both finances and government permit to resume research crippled all remaining projects he may have had in the hopper.
After SRI canceled his contract in 1974 Hubbard went into semiretirement, splitting his time between a 5-acre ranch in Vancouver and an apartment in Menlo Park. But in 1978, battling an enlarged heart and never far away from a bottle of pure oxygen, Hubbard make one last run at the FDA. He applied for an IND to use LSD-25 on terminal cancer patients, furnishing the FDA with two decades of clinical documentation. The FDA set the application aside, pending the addition to Hubbard's team of a medical doctor, a supervised medical regimen, and an AMA-accredited hospital. Hubbard secured the help of Oscar Janiger, but the two could not agree on methodology, and Janiger bowed out, leaving Al Hubbard, in his late 70s, without the strength to carry on alone.
Says Willis Harman: "He knew that his work was done."
* * *
The Captain lived out his last days nearly broke, having exhausted his resources trying to harness a dream. Like in the final fleeting hour of an acid trip--when the edge softens and a man realizes that he will not solve the secrets of the Universe, despite what the mind had said earlier--Hubbard smiled gracefully, laid down his six-shooter, and retired to a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona.
On August 31, 1982, at the age of 81, Al Hubbard was called home, having ridden the dream like a rodeo cowboy. On very quiet nights, with the right kind of ears, you can hear him giving God hell.
http://www.theoaktreereview.com/tim_scully.html
In 2003, I got in touch with Tim Scully. Back then, I was making research on The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and my main reason for getting in touch with Scully was to learn more of his days with the organization. We corresponded by e-mail. The the text below is an edited version of these messages.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams tells us their story of The Brotherhood, and also frequently mention you. The book gives the impression that you once were a very devoted man, with a firm belief in the inherent spiritual qualities of acid.
— I can't speak for everyone. Although when we took LSD we felt that we all understood each other and agreed on some deep level, I now think that feeling was sometimes an illusion.
— When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place, at a time when it was very troubled, e.g. the war in Vietnam . I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. I thought of LSD as an entheogen , though that term was not in use at the time. I also believed that this is what the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love] members believed.
— Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn't carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in Acid Dreams, that LSD is an amplifier. Given the proper set and setting it can be a powerful entheogen. But with different set and setting it can be an interrogation aid for the CIA or a party drug or any number of other things. So I think a good cultural context is needed for entheogens to function, such as in Huxley's Island or as in primitive cultures.
— I have also learned that although many idealists were drawn to make and distribute LSD, that this scene was and is also a magnet for con artists. I think Ron Stark probably was a world class example. I'm currently skeptical of the theory that he was a CIA agent, by the way.
— I only had close contacts with a few brothers during the time I was making acid, for security reasons. And the years I was making acid were from 1966-1970, with only the period from late 1968-mid 1970 overlapping with the Brotherhood. My main contacts were with John Griggs, Mike Randell and Ed May. I believe they were all sincere in sharing my beliefs. Of the three, only Mike Randell is still alive now. Since then, I have seen the testimony of several former brothers who became informers. I have read of the alleged involvement of some Brothers in dealing hard drugs. I don't have any personal knowledge of the accuracy of this last allegation. I was always of the opinion that forcing entheogens into the same channels as other drugs would corrupt some people, and that certainly happened to some people. It is too bad we weren't able to give them away.
— I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience. A few obviously did not and I feel bad about them. I think a higher percentage of the people who made or sold LSD were harmed by doing so.
— With regard to the accuracy of Tendler and May's book [The Brotherhood of Eternal Love], in many areas I am impressed with the research they did. I hope the Tendler and May book was inaccurate in saying that in later years the Brothers lost their idealism. Since I wasn't in touch with them, I don't know.
In 2003, I got in touch with Tim Scully. Back then, I was making research on The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and my main reason for getting in touch with Scully was to learn more of his days with the organization. We corresponded by e-mail. The the text below is an edited version of these messages.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams tells us their story of The Brotherhood, and also frequently mention you. The book gives the impression that you once were a very devoted man, with a firm belief in the inherent spiritual qualities of acid.
— I can't speak for everyone. Although when we took LSD we felt that we all understood each other and agreed on some deep level, I now think that feeling was sometimes an illusion.
— When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place, at a time when it was very troubled, e.g. the war in Vietnam . I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. I thought of LSD as an entheogen , though that term was not in use at the time. I also believed that this is what the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love] members believed.
— Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn't carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in Acid Dreams, that LSD is an amplifier. Given the proper set and setting it can be a powerful entheogen. But with different set and setting it can be an interrogation aid for the CIA or a party drug or any number of other things. So I think a good cultural context is needed for entheogens to function, such as in Huxley's Island or as in primitive cultures.
— I have also learned that although many idealists were drawn to make and distribute LSD, that this scene was and is also a magnet for con artists. I think Ron Stark probably was a world class example. I'm currently skeptical of the theory that he was a CIA agent, by the way.
— I only had close contacts with a few brothers during the time I was making acid, for security reasons. And the years I was making acid were from 1966-1970, with only the period from late 1968-mid 1970 overlapping with the Brotherhood. My main contacts were with John Griggs, Mike Randell and Ed May. I believe they were all sincere in sharing my beliefs. Of the three, only Mike Randell is still alive now. Since then, I have seen the testimony of several former brothers who became informers. I have read of the alleged involvement of some Brothers in dealing hard drugs. I don't have any personal knowledge of the accuracy of this last allegation. I was always of the opinion that forcing entheogens into the same channels as other drugs would corrupt some people, and that certainly happened to some people. It is too bad we weren't able to give them away.
— I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience. A few obviously did not and I feel bad about them. I think a higher percentage of the people who made or sold LSD were harmed by doing so.
— With regard to the accuracy of Tendler and May's book [The Brotherhood of Eternal Love], in many areas I am impressed with the research they did. I hope the Tendler and May book was inaccurate in saying that in later years the Brothers lost their idealism. Since I wasn't in touch with them, I don't know.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Timothy Leary and the Rise of LSD
http://markwalston.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-brotherhood-of-eternal-love-timothy-leary-and-the-rise-of-lsd/
On August 5, 1972, one of the biggest raids staged in America’s so-called “war on drugs” took place when a task force of state, local and federal law enforcement agencies combined to take down a secretive group of hippie LSD dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Police and federal agents busted dozens of members in California, Oregon and Hawaii – and sent an even larger group scattering around the world.
The group had begun as a self-sustaining, anti-establishment commune in the mid-1960s, settling into a wooded tract in Orange County, California, led into the countryside by counterculturalist John Griggs. By the mid-1960s, however, the group had evolved into one of the nation’s largest producers of LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinogenic drug most commonly referred to as “acid.” Reported one federal agency, “Between 1966 and 1971 the Brotherhood was virtually untouchable, but in the course of the investigation 750 members had been identified in a business the IRS estimated to be worth $200 million.” The Feds claimed that nearly 50% of all the acid sold in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s was produced by the Brotherhood; they even had their own “trademarked” version of the mind-altering drug, “Orange Sunshine.”
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who in the 1960s became a leading proponent of the ingestion of psychedelic drugs to expand consciousness, was a frequent visitor to the commune. However, his association with the Brotherhood would take a criminal turn in 1970, when Leary, behind bars for marihuana charges at a minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo, California, was sprung free after the Brotherhood paid the radical, violence-oriented group the Weatherman $25,000 to engineer his escape. As to why he attempted the daring move, Leary said, “Consider my situation: I was a forty-nine year old man facing life in prison for encouraging people to face up to new options with courage and intelligence. The American government was being run by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Robert Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cynical flouters of the democratic process.”
The Weathermen smuggled Leary out of the country, into exile in Algeria, and eventually into Switzerland. In 1972, President Richard Nixon – who had curiously and perhaps with a tinge of paranoia labeled Leary “the most dangerous man in America” – ordered his attorney general, John Mitchell, to persuade the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss ultimately refused to extradite him back to the United States and he was eventually released.
The Swiss had a long history with LSD; in fact, it was Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals who synthesized the drug in the late 1930s. Hofmann began experimentation with the drug on himself, self-dosing in 1943, totally unaware of what the consequences might be. He thought he had hit upon a fantastic drug, derived from ergot fungus which midwives had been using for centuries to induce childbirth, a drug which he thought would be beneficial as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant but proved to be something entirely different, as he discovered when, after taking a hit of 250 milligrams – about ten times more than a normal trip – he suffered countless horrendously terrifying hours when he thought he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbor was a witch, that his furniture was threatening him. It was a bad trip for Dr. Hofmann but a potential cash cow for Sandoz, which began marketing LSD in the US in 1948 as a cure-all for a host of psychiatric problems; the pharmaceutical company claimed it a remedy for everything from schizophrenia to alcoholism to sexual perversions.
Researchers in the United States gave LSD to unreformed drinkers in Alcoholics Anonymous, half of whom after a year of taking acid had not had another drink – having basically replaced one high for another. Cary Grant’s doctors treated the suave movie star with LSD in an attempt to cure his homosexual tendencies. At the same time, the CIA launched its top-secret MK-ULTRA project, which for 20 years explored the use of acid as a mind-control drug. Hundreds of government employees and military personnel, mental patients, prostitutes and average Joes pulled off the street were dosed without their knowledge for researchers to record the effects. The experiments devolved into psychological torture; many of the test subjects committed suicide or wound up in psych wards and while the drug proved useless as a truth serum some say the CIA covertly promoted the use of acid among the 1960s youth of America as a means of destabilizing the underground culture and its anti-war predilections.
But up in the rarefied heights of Harvard University, professor Timothy Leary, who was already promoting the use of magic mushrooms as a means of reforming prisoners, was turned onto acid by one of his students and LSD quickly became his mental catalyst of choice. Leary began experimentally dosing students – voluntarily, unlike the government — who reported incredibly profound mystical experiences – no bad trips like Dr. Hofmann – but uptight faculty and administrators at Harvard thought Leary had become somewhat of a loose cannon and he was sacked – although the CIA was closely following his research. Students began flocking to the drug while Leary split for Mexico. However, the Mexican government, labeling him subversive for his pro-drug writings, kicked him back across the border and he ended up in New York at the mansion of William Hitchcock, called Millbrook, where he kept the experiments going while publishing books with the titles of Psychedelic Prayers & Other Meditations and Start Your Own Religion and The Politics of Ecstasy.
In 1966, the government classified LSD as Schedule 1, which essentially made it illegal for the public to own and so acid went deep underground.
http://markwalston.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-brotherhood-of-eternal-love-timothy-leary-and-the-rise-of-lsd/
On August 5, 1972, one of the biggest raids staged in America’s so-called “war on drugs” took place when a task force of state, local and federal law enforcement agencies combined to take down a secretive group of hippie LSD dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Police and federal agents busted dozens of members in California, Oregon and Hawaii – and sent an even larger group scattering around the world.
The group had begun as a self-sustaining, anti-establishment commune in the mid-1960s, settling into a wooded tract in Orange County, California, led into the countryside by counterculturalist John Griggs. By the mid-1960s, however, the group had evolved into one of the nation’s largest producers of LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinogenic drug most commonly referred to as “acid.” Reported one federal agency, “Between 1966 and 1971 the Brotherhood was virtually untouchable, but in the course of the investigation 750 members had been identified in a business the IRS estimated to be worth $200 million.” The Feds claimed that nearly 50% of all the acid sold in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s was produced by the Brotherhood; they even had their own “trademarked” version of the mind-altering drug, “Orange Sunshine.”
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who in the 1960s became a leading proponent of the ingestion of psychedelic drugs to expand consciousness, was a frequent visitor to the commune. However, his association with the Brotherhood would take a criminal turn in 1970, when Leary, behind bars for marihuana charges at a minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo, California, was sprung free after the Brotherhood paid the radical, violence-oriented group the Weatherman $25,000 to engineer his escape. As to why he attempted the daring move, Leary said, “Consider my situation: I was a forty-nine year old man facing life in prison for encouraging people to face up to new options with courage and intelligence. The American government was being run by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Robert Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cynical flouters of the democratic process.”
The Weathermen smuggled Leary out of the country, into exile in Algeria, and eventually into Switzerland. In 1972, President Richard Nixon – who had curiously and perhaps with a tinge of paranoia labeled Leary “the most dangerous man in America” – ordered his attorney general, John Mitchell, to persuade the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss ultimately refused to extradite him back to the United States and he was eventually released.
The Swiss had a long history with LSD; in fact, it was Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals who synthesized the drug in the late 1930s. Hofmann began experimentation with the drug on himself, self-dosing in 1943, totally unaware of what the consequences might be. He thought he had hit upon a fantastic drug, derived from ergot fungus which midwives had been using for centuries to induce childbirth, a drug which he thought would be beneficial as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant but proved to be something entirely different, as he discovered when, after taking a hit of 250 milligrams – about ten times more than a normal trip – he suffered countless horrendously terrifying hours when he thought he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbor was a witch, that his furniture was threatening him. It was a bad trip for Dr. Hofmann but a potential cash cow for Sandoz, which began marketing LSD in the US in 1948 as a cure-all for a host of psychiatric problems; the pharmaceutical company claimed it a remedy for everything from schizophrenia to alcoholism to sexual perversions.
Researchers in the United States gave LSD to unreformed drinkers in Alcoholics Anonymous, half of whom after a year of taking acid had not had another drink – having basically replaced one high for another. Cary Grant’s doctors treated the suave movie star with LSD in an attempt to cure his homosexual tendencies. At the same time, the CIA launched its top-secret MK-ULTRA project, which for 20 years explored the use of acid as a mind-control drug. Hundreds of government employees and military personnel, mental patients, prostitutes and average Joes pulled off the street were dosed without their knowledge for researchers to record the effects. The experiments devolved into psychological torture; many of the test subjects committed suicide or wound up in psych wards and while the drug proved useless as a truth serum some say the CIA covertly promoted the use of acid among the 1960s youth of America as a means of destabilizing the underground culture and its anti-war predilections.
But up in the rarefied heights of Harvard University, professor Timothy Leary, who was already promoting the use of magic mushrooms as a means of reforming prisoners, was turned onto acid by one of his students and LSD quickly became his mental catalyst of choice. Leary began experimentally dosing students – voluntarily, unlike the government — who reported incredibly profound mystical experiences – no bad trips like Dr. Hofmann – but uptight faculty and administrators at Harvard thought Leary had become somewhat of a loose cannon and he was sacked – although the CIA was closely following his research. Students began flocking to the drug while Leary split for Mexico. However, the Mexican government, labeling him subversive for his pro-drug writings, kicked him back across the border and he ended up in New York at the mansion of William Hitchcock, called Millbrook, where he kept the experiments going while publishing books with the titles of Psychedelic Prayers & Other Meditations and Start Your Own Religion and The Politics of Ecstasy.
In 1966, the government classified LSD as Schedule 1, which essentially made it illegal for the public to own and so acid went deep underground.
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"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
