Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD

by Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Cia

345 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Ward]

In november las ik The Jakarta Method van Vincent Bevins, waarin Vincent Bevins verhaalt over hoe de CIA in de jaren zestig massamoorden op linkse burgers aanmoedigde en faciliteerde in Indonesië. Gelijktijdig luisterde ik de onderzoekspodcast The Santiago Boys van Evgeny Morozov, waarin de auteur vertelt over de antidemocratische terreur van de CIA in Chili in de jaren 70 tegen de socialistische regering van Salvador Allende.

In deze periode leerde ik ook mijn nieuwe collega’s kennen binnen het drugsbeleid, terwijl ik werkte aan MDMA: Voorbij de extase . Omdat ik redelijk vocaal was over mijn herijkte opvattingen over de CIA, kreeg ik van een collega deze klassieker cadeau, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD van Martin Lee en Bruce Slain. De ultieme thematische synthese van burgerslachtoffers gemaakt door de CIA, het onderwerp psychedelica, en natuurlijk mijn vak de geschiedenis.

Tijdens het werken aan het rapport over MDMA, pakte ik Acid Dreams niet op. Alhoewel MDMA een psychedelicum is, is het een atypische psychedelicum dat niet hallucinogeen is. Ik voelde me weinig aangetrokken tot het thema LSD. Dat veranderde toen ik op 7 juni 2024 op de Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research in Haarlem was, waar het bredere psychedelisch thema wat meer gezicht voor me kreeg.

Alhoewel ik vooral lezingen heb bezocht over psychdelica-ondersteunde therapie, heb ik ook enkele presentaties meegepakt over recreatief en spiritueel LSD-, ayahuasca- en DMT-gebruik. Het gemêleerde publiek maakte daarbij indruk. Voorafgaand aan een presentatie van Taita Juan Bautista Agreda uit Colombia vertelde mijn Britse buurvrouw op de tribune dat ze haar baan in de duurzaamheidssector had opgezegd, “omdat zulke ambities toch geen zin hebben zolang niet iedereen eens een psychedelicum heeft genomen.” Tot dan toe had ik alleen nog gelezen over full-time psychedelica-activisten die geloven dat de normalisatie van psychedelica-gebruik een noodzakelijke voorwaarde is voor wereldvrede, gelijkheid en ecologische vooruitgang. Zo dichtbij was ik nog nooit bij hen in de buurt gekomen.

Thuis heb ik toen Acid Dreams opgepakt. Wat een wonderlijk verhaal. Een deel gaat inderdaad over mensenrechtenschendingen door de CIA. Een ander deel verhaalt over academici en vervolgens hippies die geloven dat LSD de sleutel is tot wereldvrede. Het grootste gedeelte van het boek gaat over die momenten dat deze twee werelden elkaar raakten. Deep states operatives die hippie worden; hippies die informanten voor de deep state worden; CIA-agenten en hippies die drugsdealers worden; en dan vervolgens weer in federale gevangenissen terechtkomen.

Het boek eindigt met de ontnuchtering. De jaren zestig lopen ten einde en de extase is voorbij. De auteurs trekken de conclusie dat LSD zowel destructief als constructief is ingezet; dat het veel meer de omgeving en de persoon zijn die de uitkomst bepalen dan de drugs zelf. Daarmee is het meteen een goede gebruiksvoorlichting. Een mooie reflectie komt van Timothy Leary — die ik hiervoor alleen kende als ogenschijnlijk gerespecteerd psycholoog, geciteerd in mijn basishandboek pedagogiek op de lerarenopleiding — die na een leven van psychedelica-activisme, non-profit drugsdealership, prisonbreaken en internationaal voortvluchten, concludeerde dat hoezeer hij zich ook misdragen had in zijn leven, de Amerikaanse staat zelf nog altijd misdadiger was.

Tot slot nog een noot over de vorm, die ik schrijf als gediplomeerd “sociaal historicus”. Dit boek noemt zichzelf “the complete social history of LSD”. Die titel bevat natuurlijk al een paar historiografische faux-pas, maar ik wil even stilstaan bij het woordje “social”, omdat dit boek ongeveer het tegenovergestelde van een sociale geschiedenis is. Waar een sociale geschiedenis normaliter tendensen en structuren van delen van de samenleving als geheel probeert te begrijpen, is Acid Dreams meer een soort cultuurgeschiedenis op basis van een uitgebreide netwerkanalyse. Het zijn vooral de verknoopte levens over Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin en anderen die de rode draad door het verhaal zijn en het drijft. Wie houdt van een geschiedenisboek met een sterk biografische component, heeft aan deze dus een goede.

[Rosie]

I enjoyed this book. I didn’t adore it, but I was never extremely bored, and it was engaging enough to finish quickly. It’s a solid introduction to this time period and what the CIA was doing, how they were involved—though the authors don’t quite make as many conclusions as I would have liked, instead, prodding, questioning, making subtle implications. Only, I wished there was more material about the CIA, rather than the actions of the influential acidheads of the time, because the discussions of MK-ULTRA and Project Paperclip were far more fascinating to me than whatever hijinks Timothy Leary was up to. In terms of solid negatives, sometimes I found the writing style a little grating, and sometimes the value judgments scattered throughout the book by the authors rubbed me wrong, but I would still consider this a solid, worthwhile read. It helped me put into context the feminism of the 70s and 80s, as a lot of those women were coming from the leftist movements of the 60s—leaving to create their own movement, as they realized, due to the way the men mistreated them and the misogyny they were subject to, that they needed to liberate women before they could try to liberate another class of people. And I’m starting to understand how they felt, due to some of the credos of the 60s that were decidedly not women friendly. I’m a little surprised that this book has so little reviews here on Goodreads!

Quotations:

From Hitler to Uncle Sam: How American Intelligence Used Nazi War Criminals by Charles R. Allen, Jr.
His quotation from this work: “There was a clear pattern to the various experiments with poison, gas, deliberate infestations of victims with malaria, typhus and other virulencies causing instant or prolonged anguishing to death. Whether the tests concerned high-altitude, freezing or the potability of sea water; or the shooting of ‘volunteers’ with gas bullets—the patent purpose of the entire body of tests conducted at Dachau was to enhance the effectiveness of Hitler’s criminal warfare against humanity.”

“This is not to suggest that the CIA had given up on LSD. . . . Of all the chemicals that caused mental derangement, none was as powerful as LCD. Acid not only made people extremely anxious, it also broke down the character defenses for handling anxiety. A skillful interrogator could exploit this vulnerability by threatening to keep an unwitting subject in a tripped-out state indefinitely unless he spilled the beans. This tactic often proved successful where others had failed. CIA documents indicate that LSD was employed as an aid to interrogation on an operational basis from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s.” (19)

“When they finally learned the hallucinogenic ropes, so to speak, they agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a TSS colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations—which usually meant taking the rest of the day off. Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to TSS members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Such tests were considered necessary because foreknowledge would prejudice the results of the experiment.” (29)

“The scientist who directly oversaw this research project was Dr. Paul Hoch, an early advocate of the theory that LSD and other hallucinogens were essentially psychosis-producing drugs. In succeeding years Hoch performed a number of bizarre experiments for the army while also serving as a CIA consultant. Intraspinal injections of mescaline and LSD were administered to psychiatric patients, causing an ‘immediate, massive, and almost shocklike picture with higher doses.’ Aftereffects (‘generalized discomfort,’ ‘withdrawal,’ ‘oddness,’ and ‘unreality feelings’) lingered for two to three days following the injections. Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psychosurgery. (‘It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value,’ Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.” (38)

“It was from Hoffman-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 patterns. The effects generally last about three days, although symptoms—headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior—have been known to 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.’” (41)

“During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army’s standard incapacitating agent. By this time the superhallucinogen 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 reportedly 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 Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, ‘We will use these things as we very well see fit, when we think it is in the best interest of the US and their allies.’” (43)

“Whereas most psychedelic therapist were prepared to assist their patients should difficulties arise, Dr. Salvador Roquet, a maverick Mexican psychiatrist, consciously sought to induce a bummer as part of his ‘treatment.’ Roquet utilized various hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, datura, and ketamine. Known as ‘a master of bad trips’ and ‘a pusher of death,’ Roquet subjected people to adverse stimuli while they were drugged; Jewish subjects, for example, were given acid and then forced to listen to a recording of Hitler’s speeches.” (64)

“To those in the inner circle it quickly became apparent that the psychedelic movement ‘would be sold like beer, not champagne,’ as Kleps put it. Whether or not the liberation was bogus, the style was strictly Madison Avenue. Leary not only hyped LSD as a shortcut to mystical enlightenment but also fused it with something that had proven mass appeal: sex. In his 1966 Playboy interview he discussed psychedelics in the broad social context of ‘erotic politics’ and ‘hedonic engineering.’ Acid was portrayed as a ‘cure’ for homosexuality and a means of inhabiting a supremely sensual reality. ‘In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session,’ Leary stated, ‘a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and make love with a woman…. That is what the LSD experience is all about. Merging, yielding, flowing, union, communion. It’s all lovemaking…. The sexual impact is, of course, the open but private secret about LSD.’
“Leary had a knack for telling his audiences exactly what they wanted to hear.” (113-114)

“But even as they got stoned during their daily activities, the SDS staffers were always cognizant of the difference between changing their heads and changing the system. ‘The hip thing,’ explained former SDS president Carl Oglesby, ‘was fundamentally a mass introspection, a drug-boosted look-in. The New Left, on the other hand, went out to the world from a set of shared moral perceptions about race, war, and imperialism; it was recreating a private moral judgment as a public political act. Of course, the hippie’s every instinct indisposed him to war and made him wholly eager to demonstrate this, provided someone else set the stage. But he was satisfied to act without strategic thought, without any sense of political plan, except that the more people who smoked grass, the better the country would be.’” (165)

“The psychedelic style had a certain meaning for the first wave of self-conscious innovators who were engaged in acting out communal modes of existence. Mundane objects such as love beads and peace insignias were tokens of self-imposed exile that communicated a forbidden identity; they warned the straight world of a threat and issued an oblique challenge to consumer society. But this meaning was not readily apparent to the multitudes who tuned on for the first time after the be-in. Before long, teenyboppers and ‘plastic hippies’ from the suburbs started frequenting the hip hotspots for some weekend entertainment. Department stores blossomed out in paisley swirls and psychedelic color schemes, and hippie lingo entered into common usage; suddenly everyone was ‘rapping’ about ‘doing their own thing.’ Long hair, beads, and dope—anyone could be a hippie by following the latest fashions.” (175)

“Originally the main source of LSD in the Haight was Owsley, but the scene got totally out of hand with all the media fanfare after the be-in, and renegade chemists started moving in on the drug trade. The Mafia exploited the situation by setting up its own production and distribution networks. In June 1967 James Finlator, chief of the FDA’s Bureau of Drug Abuse and Control, announced that ‘hard core Cosa Nostra-type criminal figures’ were behind ‘an extremely well-organized traffic in hallucinogenic drugs.’ Consequently the quality of black market LSD began to deteriorate. Signs posted in the Haight expressed the consensus among hippies: ‘Syndicate acid stinks.’” (188)

“There is the story of the Zen master who tells his student, ‘Don’t think of a carrot.’ Naturally a carrot is the first image that pops into the student’s mind. So, too, the establishment media constantly decried LSD and warned in shrill tones of an epidemic of drug abuse sweeping the nation. The net effect of the immense publicity, even though much of it was negative, was to arouse intense interest and curiosity, leading to ever-widening patterns of use. For in an era of generational disaffection the quickest way to spur adolescent action is to say, ‘Don’t do it!’” (194)

“A common mistake with respect to LSD was to attribute the personal effects of an acid trip to something inherent in the drug itself; as a result of this subtle transference, acid acquired the qualities of a particular mind-set or milieu, depending on who was experimenting with it. The love-and-peace vibrations thought to be intrinsic to the psychedelic high were largely an amplified reflection of the unique spirit that animated the mid-1960s, just as the CIA’s obsession with LSD-induced anxiety and terror mirrored the Cold War paranoia of the espionage establishment.” (200)

“‘The effect of LSD was really heavy,’ acknowledged John Sinclair, former head of the White Panther party in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ‘Acid blew all sense of proportion, all sense of a frame, to smithereens. I mean it just blew the frame right out of the picture…. It gave you a sense of infinite possibility. You could do anything if you just did it—totally! You could walk right into the sky.’ Sinclair now considers this attitude foolhardy. ‘All your big decisions were made on LSD. And while that might be an exciting way to operate, it’s not the most intelligent way. To think that your personal consciousness can overcome historical forces is a mistake.’” (217)

“‘School sucks,’ declared the White Panther manifesto. ‘The white honkie culture that has been handed down to us on a plastic platter is meaningless to us! We don’t want it! Fuck God in the ass. Fuck your woman until she can’t stand up. Fuck everybody you can get your hands on. Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone. And we are committed to carrying out our program. We breathe revolution. We are LSD-driven total maniacs in the universe.’” (218) I can understand why so many women left the movement and made their own…

“According to Army intelligence documents later obtained by CBS news, nearly one out of six demonstrators at the Chicago convention was an undercover operative. . . .
“The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a massive sub rosa campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joining the FBI in this effort was an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the intelligence divisions of all the military services, and numerous local police forces. Over a quarter of a million Americans were under ‘active surveillance’ during this period, and dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities and personal lives of millions more. Those affiliated with black militant, antiwar, and New Left groups were prime targets of dirty tricks and other underhanded tactics designed to stir up factionalism and ‘neutralize’ political activists.” (224)

“As a catalyst of psychic and social processes, LSD amplified a chaotic cultural milieu which in the late 1960s was completely saturated by the inflated images of the mass media. Both these perceptual technologies—LSD and the media—combined to accelerate the temporal flux and fuel the wishful thinking of the young activists who jumped from rebellion to revolution without knowing what they were really getting on. Television was particularly insidious, reducing history to a series of discontinuous freeze-frames or, as Gitlin put it, ‘a sequence of tenuously linked exclamation points’—Columbia! Sorbonne! Chicago! In this mythic ‘event time,’ each tumultuous confrontation was a peak moment, like an LSD trip, packed full of vivid experience not always easy to assimilate or put into proper context in the short term.” (233-4)

“Documents prepared at the army’s ‘limited war laboratory’ at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, one of three major military installations where BZ is stored, indicate that the government seriously considered using the superhallucinogen as a domestic riot control technique. One scheme involved the use of tiny remote-controlled model airplanes nicknamed ‘mechanical bees.’ The bees, mounted with hypodermic syringes, would be aimed at selected protesters during a demonstration to render them senseless. Another plan called for spraying BZ gas to incapacitate an unruly mob. A CIA memo dated September 4, 1970, reaffirmed the importance of BZ-type weapons: ‘Trends in modern police action and warfare indicate the desire to incapacitate reversibly and demoralize, rather than kill, the enemy….With the advent of highly potent natural products, psychotropic and immobilizing drugs, a new era of law enforcement…is being ushered in.’” (235)

“The capacity to absorb its critics is among the chief characteristics of American capitalism, and one of the keys to its enduring hegemony. Although they begin by posing a symbolic challenge to the status quo, rebellious styles invariably wind up creating new conventions and new options for industry. Even long hair—the outstanding symbol of revolt in the 1960s (at least for men)—proved to be a commercial bonanza for hairdressers: $20 a clip and everyone could look like their favorite rock star! By the turn of the decade the counterculture had millions of visible adherents. Rock and roll, drugs, and hip fashion were incorporated into the social mainstream like so many eggs being folded into batter.” (254)

“For nearly twenty years the staff at Edgewood included Nazi scientists who were brought to the United States after World War II under the auspices of Project Paperclip, a program designed to harness the skills of German researchers and technicians. At least eight Nazi scientists were employed by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, where they tinkered with deadly nerve gas and super-hallucinogenic drugs. . . .
“Meanwhile, CIA drug research plows ahead. Agency spokespersons are tight-lipped about this activity, but a former CIA contract employee indicates that much of the work is being conducted at universities in foreign countries.” (296-7)

[Christian Klepac]

As any psychonaut worth their salt can tell you, lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, was discovered by accident in 1938 by the chemist Albert Hofmann, who was experimenting with rye ergot fungus on behalf of Sandoz laboratories, in search of a new headache cure. The 25th iteration of the experiment initially showed little promise, and Hofmann shelved it for five years, until an April day in 1943, when, possessed by "a strange feeling" that he should take a closer look at old #25, he broke out the compound and did some more experiments, during which he accidentally absorbed some into his skin. The resulting psychological state was so unusual and fascinating that he decided, a few days later on April 19th, to purposefully ingest a minuscule amount of the substance, just to see what would happen. The 250 micrograms he took would be a tiny dose for most compounds, but Hofmann was unaware that LSD is profoundly psychoactive in the tiniest of doses (a fact that would have tremendous significance in the world-wide spread of the drug, as this meant you could create massive numbers of individual doses simply by dipping a sheet of perforated paper in it, a method that would be useless for 99% of other substances). Hofmann had taken enough LSD to trip in earnest, and in a state of rising alarm he took to his bicycle and pedaled for home through an ever-intensifying kaleidoscopic landscape of vivid colors and phantasmagorical images. Today, April 19th is known among LSD aficionados as "Bicycle Day", in commemoration of Hofmann's maiden voyage into territory that remains, however thoroughly explored by those who came after, profoundly and mystically mysterious.

What happened next? The general pop-culture outlines of the story take us to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, and Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Woodstock, New York, not to mention swinging London and points east, as LSD spread through the global underground and the beatniks gave way to the hippies in an explosion of sound and color. You had a few years of peace and love, which gave way to the paranoid hangovers of Altamont, Nixon, and the Hell's Angels (as chronicled by Hunter Thompson), and into the 80s and 90s, where LSD found a new and less culturally threatening home in warehouse raves and jam band festival parking lots. This is, as far as it goes, not entirely wrong, but as the book Acid Dreams makes clear, it's a story with a gigantic hole in the middle, a hole in the shape of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hofmann understood right away that the deep introspection common to the LSD experience made it an intriguing candidate for use in psychotherapy, and immediately began to spread the word of this new chemical within and beyond the walls of Sandoz. Many were listening, and they weren't all doctors looking for new therapeutic modalities. Tales of this new drug caught the ear of one William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of a government organization that was at that time known as the OSS. Donovan and his cronies had long been in search of a chemical to assist with enemy interrogations, the mythical "truth serum" that, like the fountain of youth, seemed to hover forever out of reach. They had already auditioned a pharmacy's worth of compounds, but none of them inspired America's prisoners of war to magically bare their souls and betray their handlers. As the OSS slowly mutated into the CIA, this search for a skeleton key to the human mind passed through various programs, with names like BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and finally one that is by now familiar to anyone with a passing interest in conspiracies: MKULTRA.

The arrival of LSD in the halls of Langley was, much like its arrival in other milieus, shocking and transformative. No one had ever seen a drug that behaved like this. Keep in mind that magic mushrooms did not make their way to the American consciousness even as a rumor until 1957, via a LIFE magazine article by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson. The spooks in the CIA labs had no context or precedent for the bizarre and transcendent states they were witnessing in their experimental subjects. Langley immediately became Sandoz' number one customer, and when that wasn't enough they commissioned the Eli Lilly company to create their own home-grown stash.

Unfortunately for the CIA, although luckily for the rest of us, LSD is pretty terrible as an aid to interrogation, for many obvious reasons, but it took the intelligence service quite awhile to reach this conclusion, and in the process they engaged in such legendary and horrific shenanigans as the operation of a brothel where they would dose unsuspecting johns and watch from behind a two-way mirror ("Operation Midnight Climax"), and an increasing pattern of chaotic fast-and-loose behavior wherein it became de riguer to dose the coffee of one's fellow spies at the office Christmas mixer. The fun and games came to a close when agent Frank Olson jumped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, having been dosed without consent at a CIA conference some weeks prior and having found the resulting shifts in metal state intolerable. Allen Dulles, the new CIA director, called for an end to such funny business while at the same time pushing the agency's weaponization research on LSD into high gear. Tests were conducted on a wide swath of victims, including American troops.

The labs of the CIA were awash in vast quantities of a life-altering chemical, and it was only a matter of time and circumstance before the genie escaped the containment of the bottle. Several enterprising figures appeared who seemed to straddle the line between the intelligence community, the counter-culture, and the criminal underworld. Captain Alfred Hubbard, "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD", was responsible for getting the drug into the hands of the author Aldous Huxley, who detailed his experience in The Doors of Perception, a book which arguably did more than any other to alert a curious public to the psychic locomotive barreling towards them (not to mention inspiring the name of Jim Morrison's new rock group). Huxley's correspondence with Army psychiatrist Humphry Osmond led the latter to coin the word "psychedelic", meaning "mind-manifesting", to describe the effects of the substance. Osmond and his peers initially supposed that the action of LSD comprised a simulation of schizophrenia and other states of organic insanity, but it quickly became apparent that this reductive model didn't really tell the whole story. Rather than cause madness, LSD had the potential to cure it - at least according to early and vocal boosters like actor Cary Grant, who credited LSD therapy for the complete remission of his neuroses, and proselytized about its benefits for the rest of his days.

LSD was primed to become the center of a new secular religion, and as if called from the wings, onto center stage bounded the charismatic trickster Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychiatrist who was quickly booted from American academic for his psychedelic proselytizing. Standing in his shadow, but arguably due to have larger cultural impact in time, was his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert, who was so deeply affected by LSD that he cast off the trappings of western society entirely and decamped for India, where he would become known as Baba Ram Dass, a leading light of the en masse importation of Eastern thought to America that eventually led us to such concepts as "mindfulness".

Rock stars, poets, and radical left political figures embraced LSD, and perhaps all such scales must be balanced in time, because I can no longer put off mentioning a few notorious historical villains. As San Fransisco bloomed with be-ins and freak-outs, soundtracked by the acid-drenched sounds of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the underground chemist Augustus Owsley ("Bear") Stanley spread tabs of pure and mega-potent "white lightning" around the west coast like confetti, a small free clinic opened in the Haight, staffed by some curiously well-connected characters, among whom was one Dr. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West. West was already an old hand in the government's LSD game, an "expert" in chemical mind control with an outrageous history of dark coincidences. West was the last doctor to examine Jack Ruby in prison, immediately before Ruby began declining from an incredibly fast-acting cancer. If you've ever heard the story about an elephant being killed by a massive dose of LSD? That was Jolly - it's unclear what exactly he was trying to prove at the time.

Like a nightmarish Forrest Gump, Jolly West tends to be found skulking (while smiling benignly) around the corners of just about any American conspiracy theory you would care to name. He was involved in the Korean War "brainwashing" incident that planted the seeds of the "Manchurian Candidate" in the collective culture. He examined Patty Hearst after her arrest, and was somehow coincidentally on site to examine Timothy McVeigh shortly after his. While West was passing through Haight-Ashbury, he may or may not have made the acquaintance of a habitue of the free clinic: an intense and unkempt singer-songwriter surrounded by a retinue of enraptured young women, born Charles Maddox but preaching his strange new drug-fueled religion under the name Charles Manson.

Here we start to see the various cultural waves released by LSD start to crash into one another. Ultimate freedom and boundless paranoia. Theater, magic rituals, pipe bombs, and the National Guard. The armies of the mind clashed in riotous confusion, and the Stones met their psychedelic Waterloo at Altamont, where Don McLean saw "Satan laughing with delight". The government passed new laws making LSD one of the most illegal substances in America, driving its distribution into the hands of ultra-violent criminal syndicates that doubled as toxic cults. American GIs tripped in Vietnam, while all of academia shuttered its research projects. The drug that promised transformative therapies for everything from alcoholism to OCD vanished from the pharmacy, and psychedelic therapy plunged into a state of disrepute from which it is only now starting to emerge, some forty years later.

The discovery of LSD and its chemical relatives are comparable to the invention of the atom bomb in their impact on the collective psyche. Our mainstream and underground cultures have psychedelic roots so deep they can be difficult to see, because the influence of these chemicals is all around us. For a brief moment in time, the western world seemed poised to step through a doorway into an entirely different way of thinking, feeling and living. Then, a combination of reactionary forces within and without slammed the door shut. In our era, there have been tentative movements in academia and medicine to recapture some of the promise of these substances, and of course in the underground they have never really gone away, but we are culturally older and wiser about the various dangers and pitfalls inherent in the very concept of a magic tablet. Seeing eternal truths for a few transcendent hours can radically transform a human life, but by itself the experience is not enough to transform a society that has no time or space for such things. Despite the predictions of Huxley's Brave New World, it appears that the story of psychedelics will continue to play out in the shadows, if occasionally stepping into the light to offer the culture at large transient, beautifully-colored visions of a world that might have been, but never came to pass.

[Cary Brecher]

too optimistic about the hippie movement and its values and implications

[Brian]

It only makes sense that the most unbelievable drug would have the most unbelievable history.

A well-researched investigation of the 1960s and the emergence of LSD into popular culture, Acid Dreams is a history of the early (and absolutely bananas) secret operations of the CIA and their attempts to use LSD as a military weapon of mind control and espionage all the way to the era of the hippies' summer of love and the ultimate downfall of the psychedelic movement. It is like a play with the most interesting cast of characters you can imagine, ranging from double (perhaps triple) agents, US presidents, an old money baron, famous authors and musicians, Hell's Angels, Black Panthers, and above all the "high priest" himself Timothy Leary.

Joining together with the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the birth of Rock and Roll, LSD helped make the 1960s one of the wildest and most incredible moments of human history. All described in detail in this one amazing book.

[Steven H]

TALK ABOUT A "LONG, STRANGE TRIP"... A FASCINATING HISTORY

The authors wrote in the Prologue to this 1985 book, "The central irony of LSD is that it has been used both as a weapon and as a sacrament, a mind control drug and a mind-expanding chemical. Each of these possibilities generated a unique history: a covert history, on the one hand, rooted in CIA and military experimentation with hallucinogens, and a grassroots history of the drug counterculture that exploded into prominence in the 1960s. At key points the two histories overlap, forming an interface between the CIA's secret drug programs and the rise and fall of the psychedelic movement.

"The LSD story is inseparable from the cherished hopes and shattered illusions of the sixties generation... Only by examining both sides of the psychedelic saga---the CIA's mind control program and the drug subculture---can we grasp the true nature of LSD-25 and discern what effect this powerful chemical agent had on the social upheavals of the 1960s." (Pg. xxv)

They note, "CIA documents indicate that LSD was employed as an aid to interrogation on an operational basis from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s." (Pg. 19) They observe, "the CIA grudgingly gave up on the notion of LSD as a brainwashing technique. But that was little consolation to those who served as guinea pigs for the CIA's secret mind control projects. Nine... former patients have sued the American government for $1,000,000 each, claiming that they are still suffering from the trauma they went through at Allain. These people never agreed to participate in a scientific experiment---a fact which reflects little credit on the CIA, even if Agency officials feared that the Soviets were spurting ahead in the mind control race." (Pg. 23-24)

They recount, "In 1955... he initiated Operation Midnight Climax, in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while [George H.] White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment. As payment for their services the hookers received $100 a night..." (Pg. 32)

They observe, "Indeed, it was impossible for an LSD researcher not to rub shoulders with the espionage establishment, for the CIA was monitoring the entire scene." (Pg. 45) They add, "The terminology used to describe the LSD experience in the scientific literature did not sit well with [Humphry] Osborn. Words like 'hallucination' and 'psychosis' were loaded; they implied negative states of mind... Aldous Huxley also felt that the language of pathology was inadequate. He and Osmond agreed that a new word had to be invented to encompass the full range of effects of these drugs... Osmond responded [to a letter from Huxley]: 'To fathom hell or soar angelic, Just take a pinch of psychedelic.' And so it came to pass that the word 'psychedelic' was coined." (Pg. 54-55)

They report, "LSD was the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the late 1950s as various movie stars were dosed on the psychiatrist's couch... People from all walks of life echoed [Cary] Grant's plaudits for the drug, and psychiatrists who practiced LSD therapy were inundated with inquiries." (Pg 57)

Of Timothy Leary's and Richard Alpert's research at Harvard, they state, "The dispute over Leary's research methodology quickly became tangled up with reports that sugar cubes laced with LSD were circulating on the Harvard campus. Unconfirmed stories about wild LSD parties and undergraduates pushing trips on the black market were rife. Leary did little to placate his superiors...

"While Leary was never directly accused of dealing drugs, his reputation as a freewheeling and euphoric type led many to assume that he was connected with the underground supply. It was a case of guilt by association, and it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. In May 1963 Richard Alpert was summarily dismissed from his teaching post for violating an agreement not to give LSD to undergraduate students. It was the first time a Harvard faculty member had been fired in the twentieth century." (Pg. 88)

There is much, much more in the fascinating history, which should have great appeal to students of the 1960s; those interested in alternative psychology; and those interested in "government coverups," at the very least.

[Gary Reger]

LSD-25, cooked up before WWII in a Swiss lab, drew the attention of the CIA and various military units after the war, part of their search for incapacitating and/or interrogation drugs. Years of experimentation yielded disappointing results, but the illegal use of oblivious citizens--including Ken Kesey--as lab rats introduced the drug to a wider public. At the same time, psychiatrists were trying it out as an adjunct to, or even replacement for, standard therapies. And the use by Aldous Huxley and other notables like Cary Grant contributed to the idea of LSD as a door of perception, opening to users a new universe of person and spiritual insight.

Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain do a good ob in Acid Dreams of recounting this early history, especially the horrifying experiments of the CIA on prisoners and patients at mental institutions. Much of the evidence for these crimes had only been declassified a few years before they wrote (the first edition came out in 1985), and Lee and Shlain make good use of this trove of further evidence about how cruelly our government behaved.

But once the book hits the early/mid-1960s, the focus shifts to the New Left, radical campus activists, the Weather Underground, and other major figures in that tumultuous decade. What disappears is any effort to delve into the social world of LSD among ordinary young people--college students especially, but a whole coterie of late teens/twenty-somethings for whom LSD was not a gateway to radical politics or a mental rocketship to distance galaxies, but a source of playful fun and social interactions with friends. In making this shift, Lee and Shlain lose an opportunity to offer readers a sociological analysis of how LSD affected youth culture in the 1970s and to present a far more textured picture of their topic. Indeed, LSD vanishes for long stretches of the later part of the book, both because of the magnetic pull of politics and because LSD wasn't necessarily that important to the radicals; indeed, some abjured LSD altogether as a distraction from the urgent task of making the revolution. Simply put, Acid Dreams, then, is not the "Complete Social History of LSD," as the subtitle proclaims.

The history of the New Left in all its configurations has been written many times, and in more detail than here. The first half is well worth a read, to be appalled, once again, at the immorality of the CIA, but I'd not bother with Part Two. "Acid for the Masses," a misleading title for what follows.

[Valentine]

Thoroughly researched on the history of LSD and its social impact. By the end it felt like a biography on Timothy Leary who was definitely quite the character but what stood out to me more was how LSD influenced the nation. It is apparent that the psychedelic-laced events of the 1960s continue to have an impact on culture today, 60 years later.


A quote from the book that stood out:
John Lennon noted shortly before his death in 1980, “You don’t hear about it any more, but people are still visiting the cosmos. We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That’s what people forget. . . . They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.”

[Mark Phillips]

Excellent starting book for a deep dive into the LSD culture of the sixties. A lot of it is bare-bones summaries of events that require whole books of their own, and I intend to use it that way. I stopped midway through this work to read Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I plan to follow this up with bios of Owsley, Peter Coyote. and Emmett Grogan. I had read the material on MK-ULTRA and the CIA's role in LSD as an interrogation drug before, but there were nuggets of interconnection laced throughout that make this a worthwhile read even if you are aware of the depths of evil our government seems to love to wallow in.

[t]

this took so very long to finish - it felt a little flat at parts by only diving into some parts of the countercultural movement that are more acceptable / normalised today - i did find it interesting though. crazy that the us government just have never stopped fucking around with anything remotely otherworldly.

perhaps i’m just a bit too serious and nostalgic for a gangrene festival in knee deep mud stuck at some farmers field in upstate NY with a sick lineup.

not bad but wouldn’t read again,,, nor would i gob a tab alone on a sunday afternoon - again.

xx

[Ben Jammin]

This was fairly dense, very thorough, and ultimately quite informative. A very strong collection of all things acid and its origins through the 1960's/early 70's. At times it was a bit hard to keep the countless names and organizations straight (take notes! - I almost want to go back and create a visual aid laying out all names/orgs) but overall a very interesting web of the various players and good analysis of how they worked together (and sometimes against) one another.

[Paul Whitman]

For anyone with a curiosity of the late 60's and how psychedelics started, became the center of counterculture and then also became the blame to end the hippie movement, this is a super in-depth journey into those crazy times. I have read other books so there wasn't much new about the San Francisco scene and Leary but the added history of the European sources of all the acid was fascinating and adds a lot more perspective to the era

[Michelle Miller]

So good.

I'm far from a Burning Man psychadelics prostheylizer, but I have always been curious about the history, and for someone to help me understand the whole it-was-legal-then-iit-wasn't / Harvard experiments / CIA: wait, what did they do details I'd heard over the years. This book was - is - exatly that. A brilliantly written, quick read play-by-play of psychedelics from their discovery through the 60s and up til today.

Such a fascinating story, and so well told.

[Jason Alter]

Enthralling read.

[Connie Hyberg]

At times very interesting and at times a bit too focused on hippie navel-gazing.

[Dever]

pretty good history of acid and its influence on 60’s and 70’s counterculture

[David]

An enjoyable read of history I was partially involved.

[Brendan Payne]

9/10

[Lisa Woodward]

Audible