Dunlap Day

This will be the second "official anti-psychiatry holiday" that I have suggested. (The first one was "Bye-bye Jeffrey Day", February 23). Now "Dunlap Day" will be October 24, as an annual remembrance of Adelle Davis' first LSD trip on that date in 1959. 

The celebrity nutritionist and author of such best-sellers as Let's Get Well (1965), Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954), and Let's Have Healthy Children (1951) became a Hollywood phenomenon. But she wrote one book which most of her fans never knew about. If not for the requirement by her regular publisher that she use a pen name and refrain from any publicity, this little-known book could have been, Let's All Trip on LSD!

The actual title was Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25, and the author (the pseudonym) was "Jane Dunlap." I wrote a history thesis about this at Northwestern University almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, which I later serialized on this blog, albeit a bit awkwardly in 14 parts (e.g., here, here, here, here and here).

I highly(!!) recommend the Dunlap book, if you can get a copy. It is almost shocking to read the justifications, theories, and public relations statements about psychedelic drugs from almost three quarters of a century in the past, and to notice that they are very nearly, sometimes close to word-for-word, the same things that are repeated today by the purveyors of a so-called "psychedelic renaissance."

I became aware of the Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) when I was at the 2019 annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco ("APAAM2019"), and I happened to meet and speak briefly with a woman whose name I didn't get at the time, but who I now suspect was none other than MAPS board member, and more recently a media spokesperson for the organization's vaunted "Psychedelic Science 2023" conference in Denver, Vicky Dulai.

MAPS has funded studies where researchers have been accused of professional misconduct, boundary violations and sexual abuse. The psychedelic renaissance enthusiasts are all worried that people like Vicky Dulai (or for that matter, that old wannabe-hippy Rick Doblin himself) will embarrass the movement and bring Nixonian enforcement tactics down on their heads to take away their beloved acid again, just like Allen Dulles took away Sid Gottlieb's acid in 1953, and like in 1968, when Congress found it to be a "cultural threat" and oh-so-tragically took it away from everybody. 

Some of the freaks think it will be best to defend against this existential threat to a new version of Tim Leary's "internal freedom" by making sure there are lots of MD psychiatrists close at hand wherever and whenever people take psychedelic drugs. But my guess is, it will always devolve into another Supernova festival with terrorists arriving on para-gliders, or another innocent Tate-LaBianca Hollywood home soaked in blood. And just by the way, psychiatrists are about as far removed from the best intentions for "internal freedom" as it is possible to get.

Adelle Davis wrote that, "Many hundreds of people given LSD  have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory." There is a deep, and deeply tragic, irony in her evident favor (assuming the final word in that sentence wasn't just added by a derelict editor) of compulsion. 

Richard Helms thought LSD was "dynamite!" for the fight against godless communism. Cary Grant, Henry Luce, and (probably) Jack Kennedy all believed, this just might be a drug to save the world.

Sorry guys, but we'll have to do the hard, honest work of learning to communicate with each other. That's what Dunlap Day will be about, for somber Yom Kippur-type reflection, balanced against a more celebratory Passover-like tone or freedom feast on Bye-bye Jeffrey Day.

And I should always conclude: Psychiatria delenda est!