Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: LSD

A CIA covert operation, MK-ULTRA, designed by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles, was directly responsible for the wide availability of LSD in the 60's. Much worse, MK-ULTRA was responsible for the massive distribution of PCP, STP and other poisonous synthetics as an intentional COINTELPRO.

Looking for a truth serum in 1942, the OSS' General William Donovan enlisted Harry Anslinger, no doubt for access to the FBN's operational capacity, along with a few prominent physicians and pychiatrists. They experimented with a potent cannabis extract, THC acetate, finding that it induced "great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn't feel physically threatened, some useable reefer madness. Peyote and scopolamine were simply too much of a fantasy trip.

Donovan, and his successors Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, had always regarded Beria and Canaris as teachers as much as adversaries, so the Nazi experiments with mescaline at Dachau aroused great interest. So great, in fact, that when the CIA imported 800 Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip and others between 1945 and 55, it made sure to include Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who became "the father of aviation medicine." Strughold's experiments at Dachau, for which his subordinates were tried as war criminals, involved unspeakable torture. He did, however, learn a lot about human endurance, and the cactus alkaloid mescaline. This was the mind-set that the CIA took to its drug work. The Nazis weren't just evil, they were good. This amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the MK/ULTRA experiments in which Americans were dosed with very potent drugs without their knowledge or consent.

Dr. Albert Hofmann, above, the Sandoz chemist who made ergonovine basic to obstetrics, synthesized LSD in the same series of experiments. He used the naturally occuring lysergic acid radical, the common nucleus of all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the molecule. As Hofmann was fully aware, the grain fungus ergot had a long cultural history as both medicine and poison. These experiments, conducted over a period of years in the 1940's, also yielded hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important blood pressure stabilizer.

Naturally occurring lysergic acid derivatives include the human neurotransmitter serotonin and the mushroom alkaloid psilocybin, also first synthesized by this seminal chemist. The human neurotransmitter, that is, and the plant alkaloids are virtually identical. That is, exactly as ancient Greek midwives used to say when they administered their ergot-based "mixture," "the mother of your mother will help you to become a mother."

It was such ancient cultural hints that led the erudite Hofmann to the isolation of ergonovine, one of the most important tools of modern obstetrics. The "mixture" (kykeon) used by the ancient Greek midwives was the same brew that was drunk at Eleusis, the central sacrament of Classical Greece. Sacramental Aztec morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

But, aware of the artificial potency of his synthetic ergot concentration, Dr. Hofmann was against the general use of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25: "...the very deep effects of LSD are not at all just pleasurable. There is always a confrontation with our deepest ego....It turns out that my fear was well-founded because so many people were not conscious enough to use it well. They did not have the respect which the Indians in Mexico had. The Indians believe you should only take the mushrooms if you have prepared by praying and fasting and so forth, because the mushrooms bring you in contact with the Gods. And if you are not prepared they believe it can make you crazy and even kill you. That's their belief based on thousands of years of experience..."

In a culture that is careful to raise pharmaco-shamanic ignoramuses, shamanic incompetence came as no surprise to Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable for many psychiatric purposes, is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as ten-millionths of a gram, which makes it 5000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is accusing the other guy of doing what you are doing. Allen Dulles, at Princeton, on April 10, 1953, warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and the the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain…becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control." Dulles, of course, was that genius. Three days after warning of these techniques he approved Richard Helms' Operation MK/ULTRA to perfect them.

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's expert on lethal poisons, headed up the operation as chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. Former U.S. Army Special Forces Capt. John McCarthy, who ran the CIA's Saigon-based Operation Cherry, aimed at assassinating Prince Sihanouk, says that MK-ULTRA stands for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

By late 1953 the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. John Marks, in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identifies the CIA's LSD pioneers as Robert Hyde's group at Boston Psychopathic, Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York, Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, and Harold Hodge's group at the University of Rochester.

It wasn't on LSD, but on mescaline, supplied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, that Aldous Huxley wrote his seminal 1954 The Doors of Perception. Mescaline is the predominant alkaloid of Peyote. Dr. Osmond, below right, reported on his Peyote experiences as a guest of the Native American Church in 1961.

Huxley was a shaman with an intensely personal vision of history: "I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing - but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like 'grace' and 'transfiguration' came to my mind…" Obviously, this ain't the CIA talking, and, given Huxley's incredible intellectual power, vision and compassion, we're not talking about a "model psychosis" either.

Giving someone mescaline while they're being tortured to death at Dachau, or lobotomized, or electrified, is going to tell you more about torture than mescaline. Noted Huxley, "Those idiots want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The 'scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics." The CIA didn't want to bomb its enemies with beatitude, but that's exactly what occurred to Huxley and his children, the "sixties generation." Jim Morrison led The Doors [of Perception].

Timothy Leary grew up in this CIA-funded research milieu. From 1954 to 59 he was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees.

Leary's graduate school classmate, CIA-contractor Frank Barron, worked at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary knew to be "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists." In 1960 Barron, with the Agency's funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology. Leary's Harvard associates included former OSS chief psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early "Truth Drug" experiments, and numerous other witting CIA contractors.

The point about the sixties is what the sixties remembered, and how that memory was manipulated. Traditional shamanic herbalism was herbalism, not alkaloidism. Overenthusiastic revolutionaries like Leary and Ginsburg failed to stress that, although the technically competent Leary clearly undertood the artificial potency of LSD, carefully stressing mind-set, setting and dosage in the wonderful book he wrote with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience.

But The Psychedelic Experience was based on an ancient pharmaco-shamanic manual, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that referred to an herbal brew that was far less toxic than LSD, and insisted on yogic discipline as an inherent part of the process. Incan pharmaco-shamanism, for instance, an invaluable source of knowledge and power, uses whole herbs like ayahuasca and coca leaf, not their refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique is taught as an inherent part of the process. For young adults who are surrounded by friends and lovers, small doses of LSD are quite safe. Dosage, however, is a learned art, and LSD was the most highly concentrated psychoactive substance known. Overdoses produce very bad trips, something young people tolerate very poorly.

The inquisitors, using their fascist violence in concert with the rank ignorance and emotional instability of many LSD users, had found their "devil drug," replete with tragic horror stories of bone-lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within Company rules to sell LSD laced with strychnine so as to create useable horror stories. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in street samples of "LSD." That could only have come from the Department of Dirty Tricks.

That jive phrase "the drug culture" was born, as if the sixties had been a uniquely contemporary mania and not, in large part, a remarkable exercise in genuine mnemosyne. "Flower power" had seen a creative explosion that included the politically potent insertion of true poetry into pop music, the transformation of visual art, and the birth of the ecology and women's liberation movements. The powerful flower was the ancient shamanic herb marijuana, not the refined alkaloid LSD.

Consistent with its policy of confusing the ancient shamanic herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloids, thereby destroying real mnemosyne in the culture, military intelligence pumped numerous synthetic chemical poisons, masquerading as "psychedelics," into the market. The formula for STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow (the maker of napalm), was published by Dow in 1967. It was then immediately pumped into the market by the Department of Dirty Tricks, using its Mafia dealers. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting kids on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

The Army tested Angel Dust, PCP, on GI's in the late fifties at Edgewood Arsenal. It was also tested by Operation MK/ULTRA at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal. The Army then stockpiled PCP as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Higher doses, however, according to the CIA, could "lead to convulsion and death." PCP was soon flooding the streets. This was, and is, a COINTELPRO - this is how the distribution of mild, pharmaceutical-grade psychedelics can be demonized. Teach the kids that there is no difference between safe whole herbs and dangerous refined alkaloids, make the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloids unavailable, and then flood the streets with poisonous synthetics. Angel Dust continues to be a great Prohibitionist argument.

These fascist tactics were learned from the Nazis, and were, I guess, appropriate for use against them. But the COINTELPROS were aimed by the CIA/FBI against its own people. Every American Indian Movement or Black Panther community event or political demonstration was turned into an armed confrontation by the simple device of physically attacking it. A good example of a typical FBI COINTELPRO was Sullivan's rigging of the 1974 elections for Oglala tribal president at Pine Ridge. Although the Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the election had been fixed and that AIM leader Russell Means was the real winner, FBI goon Dick Wilson was installed, literally at the point of a gun. Wilson's FBI-run death-squads then proceeded to murder more than 60 AIM activists. Means himself was shot repeatedly, surviving at least three separate assassination attempts.

It is extremely strange that when the manufacture and distribution of LSD fell apart in 1969, as the California Brotherhood of Eternal Love - CIA-connected bikers - disintegrated, due to the lack of ergotamine tartrate and internal and external pressures, a CIA agent put it back together again. That agent was the amazing Ronald Stark, who could speak Arabic, German, Chinese, French and Italian as fluently as English. Stark had unlimited funds, contacts in business and intelligence throughout the world, and a French manufacturer of LSD.

When Stark was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Floridia documented this with a list of Stark's intelligence contacts. Using the CIA's Castle Bank of the Bahamas, Stark refinanced and reorganized the Brotherhood and so continued the massive production and distribution of a very toxic strain of LSD known as "Orange Sunshine," which was about as mellow as a sledgehammer in the hands of a biker.