SLOUCHING, part 15

The following is the one part of my thesis from 28 years ago which I apparently never did publish on this blog. I was reminded of Appendix 3 recently when I was talking to someone about how Adelle Davis' various best-selling books were all mentioned in the substantial June 1, 1974 NY Times obituary, except one: her book about LSD authored under the pseudonym "Jane Dunlap." This obituary was what led me to George Leisey during my thesis research. Leisey recalled being interviewed by the Times obit writer Wolfgang Saxon, and said that he had certainly spoken about the LSD book to Saxon, and didn't know why that part of his mother's life was never mentioned. 

I'm petty sure this completes the serialization of my 1998 history thesis on this blog. With psychedelic drugs all the rage in psychiatry now, more than half a century after Adelle Davis' death, some lessons from the 1950s and 60s may be worth learning. My sense is that many details of the earlier story will repeat, and it won't be a good thing.

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Adelle Davis, Best-Selling Author, Nutritionist, Dies

PALOS VERDES ESTATES, Calif., May 31 (UPI)—Adelle Davis, one of the nation's best known authorities on nutrition, who contended that almost any disease could be prevented by proper diet, died at her home today of bone cancer. She was 70 years old.

Miss Davis had written four widely read books and made countless lecture and television appearances with the message, “You are what you eat.”

She had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recently returned from a hospital to her home in this Los Angeles suburb.

She is survived by her husband, Frank Sieglinger, a, lawyer; a son, George Leisey, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Frodahl.

A funeral service is to be held Monday.

An Outspoken Believer

By WOLFGANG SAXON

The guru of lay nutritionists, Adelle Davis was a strong and outspoken believer in a healthful diet as the key to well‐being, and she propounded her message in books that sold in the millions and as a television talk‐show guest who would mince no words.

When informed last year that she was suffering from cancer of the bone marrow, Miss Davis later recalled, her reaction was one of shock and disbelief. “I thought this was for people who drink soft drinks, who eat white bread, who eat refined sugar and so on,” she told an interviewer.

Miss Davis said her first thought was, “I have been a failure.” But in reviewing her life, she concluded that while she had eaten well on the Indiana farm on which she grew up, she changed her diet for the worse when she went away to college and ate what she called “junk food” until the nineteenfifties.

Until recently the picture of health, with glowing skin, Miss Davis castigated Americans for paying a lot of money for food that, she said, couldn't be unhealthier if it had been designed that way. “A woman wants to murder her husband can do it thoroughly in the kitchen,” she once said in the blunt way of speaking that was one of her trademarks. “There won't even be an inquest.”

She bristled at the very thought of “enriched” white bread and packaged mixes, and advocated whole‐grain bread, milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, an egg or two and some cheese every day and liver and fish several times a week.

On the question of cholesterol, she told an interviewer once, “We need choesterol in the body.”

Advocate of Vitamins

Miss Davis was among the country's most vocal proponents of vitamins to supplement a good diet, and she swallowed dozens of vitamin pills daily. She also carried her own brewer's yeast wherever her lectures or television appearances would take her, and at home in California she played tennis five times a week until recently.

Miss Davis's books—“Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit,” “Let's Cook It Right,” Let's Get Well” and “Let's Have Healthy Children”—were entitled as positively as she sounded in person.

They also sold more than two and a half million copies in hard covers and about seven, million in paperback.

University based nutritionists often tended to agree with what she said about bad dietary habits and the poor nutrition of Americans, regardless of income. But they objected that she derived her conclusions mainly from anecdotal evidence or from an unscientific approach to the subject.

Thus, they would seize upon her suggestion that Germany conquered France in World War II because German black bread and beer were nutritionally superior to French white bread and wine, her warning that Russians eat much less of what she said were illness‐breeding refined foods than do Americans, or her statement that there was no crime where there was good diet, while, she noted, the murderous Manson clan of Southern California had subsisted mainly on candy bars.

Yet Miss Davis did have an academic and practical background in her field. After leaving her native farm in Union Township, Indiana, where she was born the last of five girls, she attended. Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California at Berkeley, where shse majored in dietetics. Fellow students at Purdue called her “Vitamin Davis” in 1924 because she talked about vitamins incessantly as she pursued the search for information on nutrition.

Dietitian at Bellevue

She went to work as a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital in New York, supervised nutrition in the Yonkers public schools and, in 1931, became a consulting nutritionist for three New York obstetricians. During that period, she also wrote two small books and a textbook.

Later in the thirties, she moved to California, married—and was subsequently divorced —and earned a master's degree in biochemistry at the University of Southern California. Again she worked as a consultant nutritionist, for California clinics, and planned thousands of individual diets for people suffering from a great variety of illnesses or malfunctions.

Miss Davis was one crusader and mother who was hardly surprised when consumerism and the demand for organic food came to the fore in recent years, with millions of Americans who began to take the warnings of nutritionists more seriously.

Yet she witnessed the sudden proliferation of “health food” stores with a wary eye. “It's tragic the junk a lot of them sell, the misstatements they make,” she said recently. She also observed that cancer, in her opinion, was related to the inadequacies of the American diet, and voiced the hope that her illness would not dishearten people who had held her nutritional advice in high regard.

Miss Davis, who with her second husband grew vegetables and fruit in their garden, recommended a minimum daily vitamin supplement that might include vitamin C, at least 100 units of vitamin E and one or two fish‐liver oil tablets, the source of both vitamins A and D.

“And if you want to feel twice as good, brewer's yeast,” she would remark.

Psychiatry, psychedelic drugs and democracy

"God forbid that in a democratic society, we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people." 

--Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, concerning federal drug research and regulation of LSD (May 24, 1966).

These comments by Robert F. Kennedy (note... not "Jr.") were recorded almost exactly sixty years ago. He was talking about how the U.S. government should think about psychedelic drugs, which at that time pretty much just meant LSD. 

Other psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, ayahuasca, mescaline, bufo and ketamine, have very different historical contexts: they may come with long indigenous traditions and sacred rituals, or medical applications which predate populist recreational use/abuse in Western societies. LSD was unique or paradigmatic, as having been accidentally invented in a pharma company lab and later, within a single human generation, widely disseminated to be used secretly and illegally as both a sacrament and a weapon, creating huge socio-cultural impact.

LSD started out as a psychiatric drug. It presents a simpler, historical picture of psychedelics for mental health medicine because intentions connected to it, however various from one individual user to another, have not significantly changed, but were all there in 1943 for Albert Hoffman's bicycle ride. It can be seen as one short, peculiarly Western narrative.

These days we get very complicated indeed (and political once again), with our discussions and debates about human salvation, chemical Christianity, mental health, science and brains. One recent (May 2026) editorial by several international experts almost reads like a Cold War intelligence estimate, suggesting elaborate countermeasures against an impending demise of scientific medicine.

Despite eerily reminiscent hoopla from groups like MAPS and boosters like RFK, Jr., there is increasingly significant evidence that psychedelics will only become the next discreditable dead-end for psychiatry. The "science" is all about rebranding LSD as "DT120ODT", toad venom as "GH001", or Ecstacy (MDMA) as "DT402". But the problem of researching benefits vs. risks remains intractable. Functional unblinding is finally just ignored as though it's irrelevant, completely contrary to fundamental psychological principles and experience.

However with the internet and social media, we live in a very different world from the one when an earlier generation of Kennedys dropped acid secretly, behind closed doors, while their military and security experts researched it to help save the free Christian world. The "Russian roulette" character of psychedelic drug taking has changed, and the odds are dire.

Instead of one bullet in the cylinder, there now are three or four.

NY Times on "fears among psychiatrists"

Supposedly, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is mounting a push to rein in the use of depression medications. Ellen Barry reports from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Francisco that thousands of psychiatrists gathering there are feeling a current of anxiety due to Kennedy's policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe SSRI's. The worry is that Kennedy's statements will convince people to refuse psychiatric medications.

Dr. Marketa Wills, the CEO of APA promised that her organization will be standing tall against "anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need."

That's easy until you question what she means by "care" and who defines what patients "need".  The only kinds of treatment psychiatrists have specialized in for a couple generations are drugs and shock. Presumably, drugs and shock are "care" whether people want them or not, and "need" is determined by any arbitrary DSM "diagnosis" that usually gets assigned after the fact of a chosen prescription anyway. 

So, if you couple that perspective with the fact that psychiatry is uniquely dependent upon coercion to maintain its status as a branch of medicine or any market for its services, RFK, Jr. might appear to APA types much as Frederick Douglass appeared to Southern slaveholders in the Nineteenth Century: he is threatening to abolish their way of life.

One interesting question will be whether APA can ever benefit from RFK's favor of psychedelic drugs. Psychiatrists apparently worry that Kennedy will work to generally discredit psychiatric "treatment"  (the currently approved drugs, ECT). Psychedelics were originally psychiatric drugs, and they may be again if a desperate last resort is required to maintain the guise of a medical specialty. Psychiatry was a post-World War II political tactic before it became "medical treatment" in the United States. Many members of RFK, Jr.'s extended family were closely connected to the history of LSD. 

Right now we all probably have to wonder which is tail, which is dog, and who's wagging whom....

Indira Vazzalwar, M.D. (overseer)

Indira Vazzalwar, M.D., is a psychiatrist currently in charge at the Kiley snake pit. She makes a salary of more than $300,000 a year which the taxpayers are on the hook for, presumably along with benefits, pension, etc. I have been advocating on behalf of a mother whose disabled adult child is one of Dr. Vazzalwar's slaves there in Waukegan, although Dr. Vazzalwar only just came to my attention today as an overseer. I'm not sure how long she's been "Medical" (the quotation marks are sarcastic, of course) Director of Kiley snake pit, perhaps several years. From a quick internet search, she doesn't seem very proud of that position, and she doesn't apparently promote it as any sort of professional credit. It's hard to blame her for that.

Kiley is one of several state-operated facilities housing developmentally disabled ("DD") adults in Illinois. I don't know whether it's the worst of them all, or (God forbid!) the best, because I have spent almost all of my 20+ years in this business of abolition at forensic mental health (rather than DD) facilities. But Kiley is bad, that's for sure. It's bad because the staff there (not all, just some) are bad or badly intended, not because they don't get enough of our money. They cannot improve the conditions or the lives of the people they call their "patients" with any "treatments" they pretend should be medically or scientifically helpful. They are not worth what the public pays them. They lie, incessantly, necessarily and unnecessarily (without knowing the difference), to the public and to themselves.

The situation of my client's adult child at Kiley is one good example among many, on a list offering an unlimited supply. Only a few years ago she was mildly impaired, verbal, social, clean and physically healthy. Now she strongly prefers to sequester herself in her bedroom at Kiley for up to 22 hours a day. She suffers from occasional seizures, is essentially non-verbal, and most of the clinical staff are afraid of her. They cannot convince or help her to maintain acceptable hygiene. She throws things, refuses medications, and worst of all, she accuses people of physically abusing her, pushing her down, hitting her. Her mother believes the abuse allegations against staff, and causes trouble.

One reason this "patient" is believed by her mother, is that once a week or more, she is actually injured in some way that plausibly evidences physical abuse. On April 19th, 23rd, 27th, and May 1st, 2026, there were fresh bruises or lacerations. Three of those four occasions prompted emergency room visits for stitches or other treatment. Hospital clinicians not affiliated with Kiley are generally horrified.

The Illinois Department of Human Services' (IDHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is supposed to protect against abuse and neglect of vulnerable people in state institutions.  They don't do it; they are useless at best, or worse, complicit in coverups. And this despite elaborate rules and training for reporting and investigating any and all suspicions of abuse. The regime is known as OIG Rule 50. My client the mother was not told about Rule 50 or how it is supposed to protect her child, until recently (probably by me). When she learned that all staff at Kiley snake pit are required to report any suspicion of abuse to OIG within four hours, she started asking questions. Some of her questions were directed toward Dr. Vazzalwar, e.g.:

      Dr. Indira, did you report the injuries to my daughter which we saw on 4/19, 4/23, 4/27 and 5/1 to OIG... or did the nurses who were present call OIG?

The Kiley "Medical" Director was evasive about that, but eventually she answered:

       It was reported to ISI and ISI reported to OIG.

This curt, passive-voice answer was not satisfactory. As a matter of fact, in my opinion it was evidence of deflection and cover-up. "It was reported...." Oh really..? By whom? When exactly? 

The acronym ISI is for Kiley snake pit's own internal security staff, who are probably useful most of all to obscure the strict responsibility of each and every individual staff member, including Dr. Vazzalwar herself, to personally call OIG, about any allegation, even if it is only based on mere suspicion of abuse. Having staff report allegations to ISI and designating ISI to report to OIG is what Rule 50 calls "screening", and it's illegal.

My client's child continues to be tortured, made worse rather than better; and my client herself is incessantly insulted, threatened and gaslighted by people who are supposed to be helping professionals and reasonably honest public servants. 

Indira Vazzalwar seems more like a criminal to me.

Pritzker, Trump, and National Health Security

The top three most-read articles on this blog for the past week suggest a tie-in theme: what used to be a secure establishment, or orthodoxy, is in big trouble.

   Do you hear the people sing?

   Singing the song of angry men?

   It's the music of the people 

   Who will not be slaves again!

J.B. Pritzker's mandatory universal mental health "screening" in Illinois public schools will certainly be resisted. I intend to be out on the barricades myself over that! Trump's psychedelic intentions will go down in flames, if not from social resistance based on religious morality, then from scams and public failures of the medical "science" that would be necessary to make these so-called "medicines" respectable.

Unfortunately, this will be bad for our national health security. Covid pandemic mishandling was already nearly fatal by itself. The country's top doctor-scientist-hero (Fauci) was rendered a joke. Investigations and conspiracy theories will keep rolling for at least another decade into the future even if nothing else really bad happens. Nobody has the kind of confidence in "expert authority" that they used to have. Only a few people have gone out to assassinate health care CEO's. But that's so far: it won't take a whole lot more.

   Turning and turning in the widening gyre

   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

   Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

The prospect that some really bad thing like the pandemic will not happen again soon is remote, especially if psychedelic drugs become as widespread as now appears likely. Those drugs actually create insanity in a person, and profound, broad impatience with morality and the social norms of the culture. The sexual "liberation" of erotic pleasure from reproduction and institutions of marriage was born directly from the struggles of 1968, a high-water mark of LSD consumption. When I was in college in the seventies, we all knew that hallucinogenic drugs made everybody horny. That was the bigger attraction than prospects for any "Jane Dunlap" version of spiritual breakthrough. 

No matter what utopia or Vahalla one hopes or advocates for, insanity will derail it; and brute sexual instinct will forever frustrate Platonic rationality. Psychedelic-induced psychosis and unrestrained sexual obsession will ruin Trump's USA, and kill Pritzker's mental health system in Illinois.

If people suddenly believe they have lost their mental health, what will be left to them? Efforts organized by the authorities will never have support from any popular will, catastrophic failure of confidence in authority might materialize overnight, as social cohesion flies out the window. "They decide and the shotgun sings the song!"

   I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

   Take a bow for the new revolution

   Smile and grin at the change all around

   Pick up my guitar and play

   Just like yesterday

   Then I'll get on my knees and pray

   We don't get fooled again

   Yeah

   Meet the new boss

   Same as the old boss

Trump's order on psychedelics

My CCHR buddies might be freaked out over the President's executive order fast tracking approval of psychedelic drugs. I myself have gotten used to the idea that this disaster is coming. It will be a disaster, but the only thing that can mitigate it is better fundamental understanding of people. As long as we harbor this false idea that a person is mostly a brain, we will continue to fiddle with brains in the hope that we can "improve" problematic people.

Psychedelic drugs are an effective way to dramatically fiddle with brains. They are not an effective way to help anyone or to do anything predictable with problematic people, but only to fiddle with brains. I can predict what the result of Trump's executive order will be: lots and lots of confusion and noise. The main thing psychedelic drugs do is confuse people. No one has figured out whether LSD is a medicine, a weapon or a sacrament, and it's been most of a century since Albert Hoffman's famous bicycle ride. 

Many people like the psychic "noise" these drugs seem to encourage. There was really good music in the 1960's. I think Jim Morrison's lyrics show the kind of confusion many of us liked back then, too. Things were too good, too successful, too predictable for adolescents. We needed adventure, and our parents were too afraid of communism and sexual immorality to let us have adventure. To them, "adventure" meant the Depression and world war. We of tender years didn't know the fears....

And then came Kent State, Charlie Manson and Jonestown. It seems to me that Donald Trump was around, and must remember all of this. He's a very strange man, though. I don't think he has the same view of history that I have. Why he (or anyone!) would expect improvement of the human condition to come from randomly mixing everything up is hard for me to understand. Trump has preternatural (delusional?) confidence in his own ability to know what's right and helpful for everyone, and he's certainly willing, right or wrong, to act. He thinks he has plans. I think he's an adolescent (that's passé, everyone says it).

Trump's order on psychedelics is the act of a bored or existentially panicked adolescent. Since he's President of the United States, it becomes the act of the whole world. It's dangerous, our adolescent world is dangerous right now. Teenagers usually survive though, so maybe the world will. The trick will be arranging just enough safety to give it time to learn and mature.

Arranging that safety means (to me), confronting psychiatry at every corner of humanity, stopping their epic violation of human rights and their epic insult to human dignity. Ban involuntary "treatment" and ban the insanity "defense." Eliminate the psychiatric slave plantations in Illinois and elsewhere.

Psychiatria delenda est! It's the only alternative.

Hermann Göring and JB Pritzker

I have to write this, the thought won't leave my mind if I don't.

My wife and I watched the 2025 movie Nuremberg last night, with Russell Crowe as Göring. It's a tough movie because of the Holocaust newsreel footage, and it distracts the viewer a bit, from the evolving unprecedented legal case to the relationship between Göring and the U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly (played by Rami Malek), back and forth between those two stories, perhaps without convincingly integrating them. Several critics noted this problem when the movie first came out. But it's well worth watching.

I've long said (I don't recall where I got this, it's not my original observation) that in any debate or argument, the first one to say "Nazi" or "Hitler" loses. I cannot compare JB Pritzker to Hermann Göring, nor the Illinois psychiatric plantations to the Holocaust, except in one very specific, limited and perhaps coincidental aspect which honestly came to me when I watched this movie and thought about it afterwards.

The comparison is hard to ignore once you see it simply: a fat man with political charisma, power and apparent high intelligence presides over a total disaster. 

Infamously of course, Göring's total disaster was the Holocaust. Pritzker's is the Illinois forensic mental health system, which almost nobody knows is a disaster. To me, both exemplify human evil. Almost everyone would tell me I'm suggesting an extreme and false, even delusional  equivalence, verging by itself upon evil ideation. I cannot argue the point, but only wait for history's ultimate judgment which may or may not ever come.

As best I can tell, Pritzker does not follow any leader even vaguely comparable to Hitler. If I were to successfully sue him for civil rights violations in Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS)-operated facilities, I am sure he would not take cyanide, no matter what verdict might be entered in my favor. My own ideological battles and middling drama are nothing like 1945. But if Germany had won WW2, the movie's Göring could appear quite similar to Pritzker today. If not for the successful armies of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, all evidence of the concentration camps might have been suppressed, and maybe almost nobody would recognize Göring's historical disaster.

At the time of the Nuremberg trials, the legal efforts to prosecute war crimes were understood to be on very shaky ground. If Göring had won his Not Guilty verdict, the military defeat of Nazi Germany might have been in vain, and the Third Reich might have survived. At least so says the movie.

L. Ron Hubbard said, "Ideas, not battles, mark the forward progress of mankind." Nuremberg shows that one purpose of the law is to draw a clear line between ideas and battles, between changing someone's mind and killing them. I once wrote about what I called "...the last century's high road to a black gate and a hot mushroom cloud."

The law is a tedious, imperfect but better road than world war. Psychiatry must be brought back under the law. I'm pretty sure JB Pritzker has never recognized that need, which was not explicit at the Nuremberg trials although it may have been implied, about five years before I was born.

Psychiatry pretends to replace law. Psychiatria delenda est!