CONTEXT: LSD AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE (continued)
Soon after the unique agreement with Sandoz, the CIA persuaded Indianapolis-based Ely Lilly and Company to synthesize LSD in a new process which bypassed the need to grow the rare natural fungus ergot. This breakthrough ensured a domestic supply of a potential chemical warfare agent and enabled the practical manufacture of “tonnage quantities” for the government, according to a memo to Allen Dulles from an official in the Technical Services Staff of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.(32)
Dulles authorized Operation MKULTRA, CIA’s umbrella designation for clandestine mind control research projects conducted by government agencies and private contractors, on April 15, 1953, three days after he told a Princeton University audience that a battle for men’s minds had erupted with the Soviet Union. His description of “brain perversion techniques… so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them”(33) purportedly described what the Soviets were doing. But in reality the MKULTRA researchers themselves had picked up where the Nazi doctors of Dachau left off in 1945,(34) and Dulles knew it. By the end of 1953 the first known victim of CIA human experimentation, Frank Olson, jumped out a window on the tenth floor of Statler Hilton in New York. Olson’s suicide followed several weeks’ treatment by CIA psychiatrist Dr. Harold Abramson, who had diagnosed his condition as a depressed psychotic state. Olson had no previous record of mental problems, but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the MKULTRA crew, had spiked his drink with LSD during a weekend retreat for CIA and Army technicians. In the wake of the Olson suicide, Allen Dulles briefly suspended LSD tests. An internal CIA investigation resulted in mild, off-the-record reprimands for Sid Gottlieb and his team. Very quickly MKULTRA resumed experiments on a much wider scale; Dulles himself obviously wanted it that way.
Meanwhile, Frank Olson’s wife and children spent the next twenty-two years wondering why their husband and father had deserted them by committing suicide, until they happened to read the Washington Post in 1975. President Gerald Ford ultimately made a personal apology to the Olson family, and in 1976 Congress passed a bill to pay them $375,000 in compensation. Alice Olson and her three by-then-adult children read a prepared statement on national television (which with the darkest irony, seemed to refer to the Nuremberg Code), noting that Frank Olson had been experimented upon illegally and that the nature of his death had been concealed for more than two decades. They expressed hope that their husband and father might “become part of American memory and serve the purpose of political and ethical reform so urgently needed in our country.”(35) But the main characters of the MKULTRA story were no longer on the scene. Sid Gottlieb of TSS was virtually forgotten; his powerful benefactor Richard Helms was politically isolated as a convicted perjurer; and Allen Dulles, fired in 1961 by John F. Kennedy for the CIA’s disastrous Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, had died in 1969.
Allen Welsh Dulles was an archetype of the elite political class of nineteen-fifties America and a key personality in the history of U. S. Intelligence, as well as a leading character in the LSD narrative. He was the child of an elegant East Coast family which had “savored life at the summit of Washington society” for generations. The men in the family generally attended Princeton and then became U. S. Secretaries of State.(36) Allen Dulles wrote his first book on international politics before he was eight years old, and it was published in an addition of 700 copies which sold for fifty cents each to benefit charity.(37) In 1910 he arrived at Princeton and quickly settled into a lifelong, man-about-town routine. He collected admirers such as James Forrestal and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and became a scholar of William James’ pragmatism, which would serve him well as a defining philosophy for the rest of his life.
In Dulles’ freshman year, a former history professor named Woodrow Wilson was Princeton’s president. Three years later, Wilson was elected President to the United States, only the second Democrat to attain the office since the Civil War. Wilson’s progressive, internationalist philosophy made one deep imprint on the young Allen Dulles; a popular novel by the English author Rudyard Kipling made another. Kim was a classic in the literature of espionage. From the book’s main character Dulles learned, “When he comes to the Great Game, (a man) must go alone — alone and at the peril of his head.”(38) Decades after his impressionable, privileged Princeton years, Allen Dulles alone authorized the CIA’s programs to test LSD on unwitting American citizens. He did so out of his Wilsonian faith in rational, scientific human progress, and in the thrall of the Great Game of espionage as one of its foremost captains.
Dulles also had personal motives for his support of the drug research. His only son had suffered a severe head wound in Korea in 1952 and never completely recovered. Though he had regained full physical abilities, he was not the same man mentally or emotionally, and Allen Dulles and his wife Clover spent years consulting with psychiatric specialists. One such specialist, Dr. Harold Wolff of Cornell, was a close friend of Adolf Berle. While Wolff was treating Allen Dulles’ son, he was also working under a secret and lucrative CIA contract researching the brain and nervous system. All of this, coincidentally, began during the very time that Frank Olson’s suicide was under investigation. As Dulles’ biographer Peter Gross speculated:
Grasping at any signs of medical progress that could restore a son to mental health, a father would perhaps pause before imposing restrictions on scientific research that might provide an answer. (Allen and Clover Dulles’) son never regained his full mental capacities, but the CIA drug program proceeded in such secrecy that Allen’s successor, John McCone, was not informed about it until his second year in office.(39)
Footnotes
32. Ibid, page 71-72. As far as I know, there are no subsequent details about whether Lilly ever did manufacture tonnage quantities of LSD, or any quantities at all. This is one big hole in the history of LSD. It appears as though immediately after the memo to Dulles was written everyone mysteriously forgot that their new domestic source was ready and willing. Of course that’s not likely, and it can be suspected that further data on the Lilly connection somehow disappeared with the main MKULTRA files which Helms and Gottlieb destroyed in 1973. The bulk of the information which finally did come to light on CIA programs was in a separate cache of financial records, but whatever secret budget included payments to the Indianapolis pharmaceutical firm must have been well segregated.
33. Lee and Shlain, pages 79-93.
34. The first experiments with mescaline as a “truth serum” in hostile interrogation occurred at Dachau. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence inherited the records for this work after Germany was overrun, and turned them over to O.S.S. Thus the Nazi morality of human experimentation was a direct precedent for MKULTRA. See, Lee and Shlain, and Marks; also Scheflin, Alan W. And Edwin M. Option, Jr., The Mind Manipulators. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.
35. Marks, pages 79-93.
36. Gross, Peter. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. New York: Houghlin Mifflin, 1994. I exaggerate only a little: the three Secretaries of State in the Dulles family were Allen Dulles’ maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, under President Benjamin Harrison; Allen’s “Uncle Bert” Robert Lansing, under President Woodrow Wilson; and Allen’s brother, John Foster Dulles, under President Eisenhower.
37. Ibid., pages 13-14.
38. Quoted in Gross, page 18.
39. Ibid., 396.
(To be continued further...)
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Monday, October 29, 2018
SLOUCHING, part 3
CONTEXT: LSD AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
By late 1953 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had total, monopoly control over the world supply of LSD, and that control continued for more than a decade. It was a Cold War secret, one of the most closely guarded secrets in the country’s history.(12) This context demands close consideration, because the militarization of social science for national security interests and the monopolization of the right of discovery in the field of human consciousness may have been what the counterculture attempted to counter more than anything else. A single chemical was both a mortal weapon and a precious sacrament in the same society. Only the history of both aspects contributes to analysis of the times; one without the other perpetuates myth.
Exploring the “Other World” came naturally to spies. A primary target of any intelligence organization must be the culture of its own command, because only by reaching beyond that, effectively defeating it as culture, can enemies be clearly perceived, predicted and covertly controlled. Both LSD and espionage push toward a simultaneously attractive and terrifying existential abyss. An LSD trip can dissolve the individual ego; a sustained national intelligence effort necessitates social self-overcoming and a never ending “wilderness of mirrors.”(13) The rational justifications for spying — “Modern Defense!” and “National Security!” — ultimately offer poor cover for a more personal, and always slightly mystical goal, of power in human affairs. As one American veteran of secret operations put it:
The secret possessor of information produces a feeling of unease in us for an even more fundamental reason than the political history or social organization of the human race. It is simply that in any situation of human conflict information is power…. The power of one man over another by virtue of superior information… is an element in every situation of competition or conflict.(14)
The advent of the nuclear age accelerated the ascendance of the power of secret information and intensified the push toward the abyss. On August 8, 1945, the New York Times proclaimed “an explosion in men’s minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima,” from the sudden reality of a atomic weapons.(15) Part of that mental explosion was the revelation of the Manhattan Project itself, a secret $2 billion megamachine which, before the American people even knew it existed, had a public relations staff and a captive Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times science reporter as the only allowed source of news on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.(16) In 1943 Secretary of State Henry Stimson told Harry Truman that he was one of only two or three men in the whole world who knew about the Manhattan Project.(17) The power of the atomic bomb was bound up with the power of secret information or preternatural knowledge, as is science itself for unprivileged laymen, and this unprecedented scientific endeavor was specially enhanced through being a military secret during total war. The same total war brought the first enduring American organizations for centralized intelligence and covert action. Apparently, the earliest concerted attempts to modify human behavior through chemical means were carried out by OSS in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, which provided the first dozen human subjects for marijuana “truth drug” tests conducted by Dr. Winfred Overholser at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.(18)
When the CIA was formed, it was unprecedented as the first democratically sanctioned secret service in the world, but it was far from populist. Mirroring British intelligence services whose people were exclusively Oxbridge, CIA personnel and leaders came overwhelmingly from elite social circles in the Eastern Ivy League establishment. Forty-two members of the Yale class of 1943 had joined Donovan’s wartime OSS, and even by the late 1960s, a full quarter of the CIA’s top people had advanced degrees from Harvard. Early in its existence, the agency earned a reputation as a “secret last bastion of mugwump privilege.”(19) Infused with an elite, intellectual culture at its highest levels, the growing U.S. intelligence community was prone to theoretical models of political strategy which quickly acquired pseudo-scientific qualities. Science had, after all, won World War II; American technology was the primary ace-in-the-hole against the power of the brute Russian hordes and sinister communist subversion. By the time Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency, Psychological Warfare had gained great status as a technical discipline.(20) Ike was determined to avoid a destructive conventional military contest with the Soviet Union and to limit the power and expense of a huge and growing American military-industrial complex. The substitutes for millions more men under arms were based in the United States’ unique advantage as a rich, technologically advanced nation against the more populous and brutally conditioned Russians. U.S. nuclear capability was one substitute for expensive mass armies; the new intelligence mystique with its hope of magical results from covert action devised and coordinated by the very best and brightest, was the other.
Both these substitutes required alterations of basic political philosophy. The waves of social anxiety, denial and guilt after Hiroshima chronicled by Paul Boyer and Robert Lifton(21) demonstrate the clash of the new concept of scientific warfare with American morality. David Halberstrom noted that the new fascination for intelligence also implied a sacrifice of certain democratic freedoms.(22) The national security establishment “was, in effect, created so America could compete with the communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press…. The laws for the secret regime were being set by our sworn adversaries, who, we were sure, followed no laws at all.”(23) One of the most popular Cold War spy novels, Smiley’s People by John Lecarre, later dramatized this kind of confusion by portraying its hero as overwhelmed with moral tragedy in his moment of greatest triumph:
Smiley had seen it all before. He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley has descended the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.(24)
Such drama was not limited to fiction. In a book aimed at “educating” the American public on foreign relations, career diplomat Adolf Berle(25) cast the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as a moral and philosophical conflict, “not between economic systems (communist-capitalist), but between a conception of man as a being of supreme significance and a conception which reduces him to the status of a tool or counter in a social-engineering problem.”(26) A few years earlier Senator Joseph McCarthy had expressed a similar opinion of the struggle as “a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity… (in which) ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”(27) Needless to say, McCarthy’s crusade made a huge impression on the lives of many Americans. Adolf Berle was of higher social status, but his description of the foreign menace was hardly less shrill than McCarthy’s. Berle said Western culture was facing extinction unless it could be saved from domination by the Soviet system. The only men Berle figured were capable of effecting such salvation were “men in all countries… (who) may be dreamers. They may be starry-eyed; some may be impractical; and some are living more in the future than in the present. But without them the world would have little hope of achieving peace.”(28) It was in such a context of desperate heros bearing the weight of the world on their noble shoulders and trudging toward the ultimate battle, that Berle made the following confession on the first two pages of his 1957 book:
As the year 1956 closed, we seemed to be moving into a new high pressure area. Mishandled, any of these crises may result in wars, little or big; at worst, they could provide an atomic convulsion capable (literally) of tearing the planet to pieces. A terrifying fact is that the men who grapple with these crises are dealing with forces of which most people are unaware. Often they must seek solutions for which the prevailing politics and public opinion of the United States are unprepared… (T)he men who are obliged to understand, have the job of meeting the crises, and are responsible for the results… can not expect to get, and often do not try to get, agreement on policies they know are necessary, or on measures they know to be essential.”(29)
One example of precisely the kind of measures Berle was referring to, which the elite leaders of the foreign policy establishment knew to be essential regardless of niceties of political agreement, is, in fact, the very existence of LSD in any significant quantities. For the first fifteen years after the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized it, a grand total of 40 grams of the drug (less than two ounces) had been made. But in November 1953 agents of the CIA flew to Switzerland and convinced Sandoz Pharmaceuticals to begin manufacturing and shipping one hundred grams per week immediately. Sandoz was also persuaded to report all details of future orders for LSD from any and all other buyers, to the CIA.(30) In 1953 Berle’s heros, “fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines”(31) for service in a Holy War against communism, went a long way toward making the psychedelic counterculture of the Haight possible twelve years later. Adolf Berle’s close friend, Allen Welsh Dulles, who had just become Director of Central Intelligence earlier that year, personally signed the bill.
Footnotes:
12. President Nixon fired Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms in January of 1973. At about the same time Helms became aware that as a result of the Watergate scandal the CIA would almost certainly face a serious Congressional investigation into its secret activities. During his last ten days in office, Helms took just two steps to protect the secrets he considered most vital: he destroyed his own personal files and he ordered the destruction of the files on the CIA’s drug-testing programs in the fifties and sixties. Thus in the judgment of this man who was arguably in a better position to know than any American, it was more important to hide the history of the drug programs than anything else. Powers, Thomas; The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA; New York: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster, 1979.
13. Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors; New York: Harper, 1980. The classic title has become a buzz-term for the general impossibility of ever trusting anyone in a complex world of Balkanized motives and constant betrayal.
14. Felix, Christopher. A Short Course in the Secret War. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963. Page 40. Thirty-four years after it was published, this book remains at the top of the “Suggested Reading List” contained in the CIA’s public home page on the internet.
15. McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “The Prometheus Role of the United States,” New York Times, August 8, 1945. Page 22.
16. Lifton, Robert Jay and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima In America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. The authors’ description of William L. Laurence’s role as Leslie Groves’ official reporter is especially unique.
17. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, page 289.
18. Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979. Page 6.
19. Jeffrey’s-Jones, Rhodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Pages 20, 71.
20. In fact Ike had been an early champion of “psywar.” The President’s brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, had taken the trouble to explicitly define the value of psychological warfare as early as the spring of 1943 in an address to the Kansas Bankers Association in Topeka. At about the same time, C. D. Jackson, the editor of Fortune magazine, an apostle of Henry Luce and a vice-president of Time-Life, Inc., was given the job of integrating psychological warfare into the Joint Allied Command. Jackson went on to become one of President Eisenhower’s special assistants for the Cold War. Cook, Blane Wiesen, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare; New York: Penguin, 1984. For a more general history of government-funded psychological warfare projects and their huge influence on the academic research which founded the whole field of communication studies, see Simpson, Christopher, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
21. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Caroline Press, 1994. And Lifton, Hiroshima in America.
22. In fact espionage always had a uniquely immoral cast in the American mind. For example in Michael Shiara’s novel The Killer Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1974) Robert E. Lee is portrayed as asking General Longstreet with disgust in his voice right before the battle of Gettysburg, “Am I to move on the word of a paid spy?” Sixty-six years later, Secretary Henry L. Stimson reacted the same way to the discovery that his own State Department harbored a covert intelligence gathering function. He closed down the offending Black Chamber with the infamous admonition, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Richelson, Jeffrey T., A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Now the Unites States budgets $26.6 billion a year for its peacetime intelligence community (Los Angeles Times report, March 21, 1998). The Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies distribute scholarly papers urging the necessity of a dedicated national intelligence capability and expanded “human intelligence.” Greenberg, Maurice R., Chairman and Richard N. Haas, Project Director, Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U. S. Intelligence; New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. Internet metapages refer World Wide Web surfers to hundreds of sites devoted to intelligence. “Intelligence on the Web” at http://www.odci.gov/csi/index.html; “Virtual World of Spies and Intelligence” at http://www.dreamscqape.com/frankvad/intelligence.html; the Center for the Study of Intelligence Home Page at http://www.odci.gov/csi/index.html; and the CIA’s own home page at http://www.odci.gov/cia/ciahome.html. William Colby canonizes OSS veterans who kept the flame of intelligence burning in America after World War II as the most honorable of all men. Colby, William, and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA; London: Hutchinson, 1978; and more than a hundred colleges and universities across the nation offer courses on intelligence or national security, often taught by former professionals who retired when the Cold War ended, from syllabuses duly cleared by the CIA’s own Publications Review Board. Badrich, Steve, “Cold Warriors Woo Generation X: As the world turns, history hits the spin cycle;” NameBase News Line, No. 6, July-September 1994; New York: Public Information Research, Inc. Today the ultimate propriety of effective intelligence work is rarely questioned, only the record of its success or failure and the return on the public dollar are debated.
23. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
24. LeCarre, John. Smiley’s People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
25. A fascinating reference concerning Berle appears in “Clandestinity and Current Intelligence” by William R. Johnson (Studies in Intelligence, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1976; Washington. DC: Central Intelligence Agency). The author discusses the history of William Donovan’s bearucratic victories leading to the establishment of the U.S. intelligence community in its current form. He notes the fact that Donovan did have competition for President Roosevelt’s attention on matters of intelligence. Johnson’s footnote no. 14 states, “One competitor of whom Donovan was apparently unaware until after the war was Colonel Jean Valentin Grombach, whose espionage organization was truly clandestine in its administration and communications.... The history of the Gromback organization has not yet been compiled from the mass of data on hand. Nor have the various conspiratorial and clandestine activities been chronicled of one of Grombach’s patrons, Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr. The selection of Berle’s papers published by his widow... sheds no light.” (Emphasis added.) Berle is remembered as a diplomat, but he had much involvement in clandestine affairs and his influence on the CIA, especially through Allen Dulles, may have been greater than anyone realizes.
26. Berle, Adolf A., Jr. Tides of Crisis: A Primer on Foreign Relations. New York: Reynal & Company, 1957. Page 297.
27. McCarthy, Joseph R. “The Internal Communist Menace.” Speech introduced into the Congressional Record (81 Congress, 2d Session, pages 1954-7) on February 20, 1950.
28. Berle, page 245.
29. Ibid, pages 7-8.
30. See, Marks or Lee and Shlain.
31. Marks, page 130.
To be continued....
By late 1953 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had total, monopoly control over the world supply of LSD, and that control continued for more than a decade. It was a Cold War secret, one of the most closely guarded secrets in the country’s history.(12) This context demands close consideration, because the militarization of social science for national security interests and the monopolization of the right of discovery in the field of human consciousness may have been what the counterculture attempted to counter more than anything else. A single chemical was both a mortal weapon and a precious sacrament in the same society. Only the history of both aspects contributes to analysis of the times; one without the other perpetuates myth.
Exploring the “Other World” came naturally to spies. A primary target of any intelligence organization must be the culture of its own command, because only by reaching beyond that, effectively defeating it as culture, can enemies be clearly perceived, predicted and covertly controlled. Both LSD and espionage push toward a simultaneously attractive and terrifying existential abyss. An LSD trip can dissolve the individual ego; a sustained national intelligence effort necessitates social self-overcoming and a never ending “wilderness of mirrors.”(13) The rational justifications for spying — “Modern Defense!” and “National Security!” — ultimately offer poor cover for a more personal, and always slightly mystical goal, of power in human affairs. As one American veteran of secret operations put it:
The secret possessor of information produces a feeling of unease in us for an even more fundamental reason than the political history or social organization of the human race. It is simply that in any situation of human conflict information is power…. The power of one man over another by virtue of superior information… is an element in every situation of competition or conflict.(14)
The advent of the nuclear age accelerated the ascendance of the power of secret information and intensified the push toward the abyss. On August 8, 1945, the New York Times proclaimed “an explosion in men’s minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima,” from the sudden reality of a atomic weapons.(15) Part of that mental explosion was the revelation of the Manhattan Project itself, a secret $2 billion megamachine which, before the American people even knew it existed, had a public relations staff and a captive Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times science reporter as the only allowed source of news on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.(16) In 1943 Secretary of State Henry Stimson told Harry Truman that he was one of only two or three men in the whole world who knew about the Manhattan Project.(17) The power of the atomic bomb was bound up with the power of secret information or preternatural knowledge, as is science itself for unprivileged laymen, and this unprecedented scientific endeavor was specially enhanced through being a military secret during total war. The same total war brought the first enduring American organizations for centralized intelligence and covert action. Apparently, the earliest concerted attempts to modify human behavior through chemical means were carried out by OSS in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, which provided the first dozen human subjects for marijuana “truth drug” tests conducted by Dr. Winfred Overholser at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.(18)
When the CIA was formed, it was unprecedented as the first democratically sanctioned secret service in the world, but it was far from populist. Mirroring British intelligence services whose people were exclusively Oxbridge, CIA personnel and leaders came overwhelmingly from elite social circles in the Eastern Ivy League establishment. Forty-two members of the Yale class of 1943 had joined Donovan’s wartime OSS, and even by the late 1960s, a full quarter of the CIA’s top people had advanced degrees from Harvard. Early in its existence, the agency earned a reputation as a “secret last bastion of mugwump privilege.”(19) Infused with an elite, intellectual culture at its highest levels, the growing U.S. intelligence community was prone to theoretical models of political strategy which quickly acquired pseudo-scientific qualities. Science had, after all, won World War II; American technology was the primary ace-in-the-hole against the power of the brute Russian hordes and sinister communist subversion. By the time Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency, Psychological Warfare had gained great status as a technical discipline.(20) Ike was determined to avoid a destructive conventional military contest with the Soviet Union and to limit the power and expense of a huge and growing American military-industrial complex. The substitutes for millions more men under arms were based in the United States’ unique advantage as a rich, technologically advanced nation against the more populous and brutally conditioned Russians. U.S. nuclear capability was one substitute for expensive mass armies; the new intelligence mystique with its hope of magical results from covert action devised and coordinated by the very best and brightest, was the other.
Both these substitutes required alterations of basic political philosophy. The waves of social anxiety, denial and guilt after Hiroshima chronicled by Paul Boyer and Robert Lifton(21) demonstrate the clash of the new concept of scientific warfare with American morality. David Halberstrom noted that the new fascination for intelligence also implied a sacrifice of certain democratic freedoms.(22) The national security establishment “was, in effect, created so America could compete with the communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press…. The laws for the secret regime were being set by our sworn adversaries, who, we were sure, followed no laws at all.”(23) One of the most popular Cold War spy novels, Smiley’s People by John Lecarre, later dramatized this kind of confusion by portraying its hero as overwhelmed with moral tragedy in his moment of greatest triumph:
Smiley had seen it all before. He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley has descended the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.(24)
Such drama was not limited to fiction. In a book aimed at “educating” the American public on foreign relations, career diplomat Adolf Berle(25) cast the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as a moral and philosophical conflict, “not between economic systems (communist-capitalist), but between a conception of man as a being of supreme significance and a conception which reduces him to the status of a tool or counter in a social-engineering problem.”(26) A few years earlier Senator Joseph McCarthy had expressed a similar opinion of the struggle as “a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity… (in which) ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”(27) Needless to say, McCarthy’s crusade made a huge impression on the lives of many Americans. Adolf Berle was of higher social status, but his description of the foreign menace was hardly less shrill than McCarthy’s. Berle said Western culture was facing extinction unless it could be saved from domination by the Soviet system. The only men Berle figured were capable of effecting such salvation were “men in all countries… (who) may be dreamers. They may be starry-eyed; some may be impractical; and some are living more in the future than in the present. But without them the world would have little hope of achieving peace.”(28) It was in such a context of desperate heros bearing the weight of the world on their noble shoulders and trudging toward the ultimate battle, that Berle made the following confession on the first two pages of his 1957 book:
As the year 1956 closed, we seemed to be moving into a new high pressure area. Mishandled, any of these crises may result in wars, little or big; at worst, they could provide an atomic convulsion capable (literally) of tearing the planet to pieces. A terrifying fact is that the men who grapple with these crises are dealing with forces of which most people are unaware. Often they must seek solutions for which the prevailing politics and public opinion of the United States are unprepared… (T)he men who are obliged to understand, have the job of meeting the crises, and are responsible for the results… can not expect to get, and often do not try to get, agreement on policies they know are necessary, or on measures they know to be essential.”(29)
One example of precisely the kind of measures Berle was referring to, which the elite leaders of the foreign policy establishment knew to be essential regardless of niceties of political agreement, is, in fact, the very existence of LSD in any significant quantities. For the first fifteen years after the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized it, a grand total of 40 grams of the drug (less than two ounces) had been made. But in November 1953 agents of the CIA flew to Switzerland and convinced Sandoz Pharmaceuticals to begin manufacturing and shipping one hundred grams per week immediately. Sandoz was also persuaded to report all details of future orders for LSD from any and all other buyers, to the CIA.(30) In 1953 Berle’s heros, “fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr. Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines”(31) for service in a Holy War against communism, went a long way toward making the psychedelic counterculture of the Haight possible twelve years later. Adolf Berle’s close friend, Allen Welsh Dulles, who had just become Director of Central Intelligence earlier that year, personally signed the bill.
Footnotes:
12. President Nixon fired Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms in January of 1973. At about the same time Helms became aware that as a result of the Watergate scandal the CIA would almost certainly face a serious Congressional investigation into its secret activities. During his last ten days in office, Helms took just two steps to protect the secrets he considered most vital: he destroyed his own personal files and he ordered the destruction of the files on the CIA’s drug-testing programs in the fifties and sixties. Thus in the judgment of this man who was arguably in a better position to know than any American, it was more important to hide the history of the drug programs than anything else. Powers, Thomas; The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA; New York: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster, 1979.
13. Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors; New York: Harper, 1980. The classic title has become a buzz-term for the general impossibility of ever trusting anyone in a complex world of Balkanized motives and constant betrayal.
14. Felix, Christopher. A Short Course in the Secret War. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963. Page 40. Thirty-four years after it was published, this book remains at the top of the “Suggested Reading List” contained in the CIA’s public home page on the internet.
15. McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “The Prometheus Role of the United States,” New York Times, August 8, 1945. Page 22.
16. Lifton, Robert Jay and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima In America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. The authors’ description of William L. Laurence’s role as Leslie Groves’ official reporter is especially unique.
17. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, page 289.
18. Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979. Page 6.
19. Jeffrey’s-Jones, Rhodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Pages 20, 71.
20. In fact Ike had been an early champion of “psywar.” The President’s brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, had taken the trouble to explicitly define the value of psychological warfare as early as the spring of 1943 in an address to the Kansas Bankers Association in Topeka. At about the same time, C. D. Jackson, the editor of Fortune magazine, an apostle of Henry Luce and a vice-president of Time-Life, Inc., was given the job of integrating psychological warfare into the Joint Allied Command. Jackson went on to become one of President Eisenhower’s special assistants for the Cold War. Cook, Blane Wiesen, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare; New York: Penguin, 1984. For a more general history of government-funded psychological warfare projects and their huge influence on the academic research which founded the whole field of communication studies, see Simpson, Christopher, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
21. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Caroline Press, 1994. And Lifton, Hiroshima in America.
22. In fact espionage always had a uniquely immoral cast in the American mind. For example in Michael Shiara’s novel The Killer Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1974) Robert E. Lee is portrayed as asking General Longstreet with disgust in his voice right before the battle of Gettysburg, “Am I to move on the word of a paid spy?” Sixty-six years later, Secretary Henry L. Stimson reacted the same way to the discovery that his own State Department harbored a covert intelligence gathering function. He closed down the offending Black Chamber with the infamous admonition, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Richelson, Jeffrey T., A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Now the Unites States budgets $26.6 billion a year for its peacetime intelligence community (Los Angeles Times report, March 21, 1998). The Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies distribute scholarly papers urging the necessity of a dedicated national intelligence capability and expanded “human intelligence.” Greenberg, Maurice R., Chairman and Richard N. Haas, Project Director, Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U. S. Intelligence; New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. Internet metapages refer World Wide Web surfers to hundreds of sites devoted to intelligence. “Intelligence on the Web” at http://www.odci.gov/csi/index.html; “Virtual World of Spies and Intelligence” at http://www.dreamscqape.com/frankvad/intelligence.html; the Center for the Study of Intelligence Home Page at http://www.odci.gov/csi/index.html; and the CIA’s own home page at http://www.odci.gov/cia/ciahome.html. William Colby canonizes OSS veterans who kept the flame of intelligence burning in America after World War II as the most honorable of all men. Colby, William, and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA; London: Hutchinson, 1978; and more than a hundred colleges and universities across the nation offer courses on intelligence or national security, often taught by former professionals who retired when the Cold War ended, from syllabuses duly cleared by the CIA’s own Publications Review Board. Badrich, Steve, “Cold Warriors Woo Generation X: As the world turns, history hits the spin cycle;” NameBase News Line, No. 6, July-September 1994; New York: Public Information Research, Inc. Today the ultimate propriety of effective intelligence work is rarely questioned, only the record of its success or failure and the return on the public dollar are debated.
23. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
24. LeCarre, John. Smiley’s People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
25. A fascinating reference concerning Berle appears in “Clandestinity and Current Intelligence” by William R. Johnson (Studies in Intelligence, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1976; Washington. DC: Central Intelligence Agency). The author discusses the history of William Donovan’s bearucratic victories leading to the establishment of the U.S. intelligence community in its current form. He notes the fact that Donovan did have competition for President Roosevelt’s attention on matters of intelligence. Johnson’s footnote no. 14 states, “One competitor of whom Donovan was apparently unaware until after the war was Colonel Jean Valentin Grombach, whose espionage organization was truly clandestine in its administration and communications.... The history of the Gromback organization has not yet been compiled from the mass of data on hand. Nor have the various conspiratorial and clandestine activities been chronicled of one of Grombach’s patrons, Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr. The selection of Berle’s papers published by his widow... sheds no light.” (Emphasis added.) Berle is remembered as a diplomat, but he had much involvement in clandestine affairs and his influence on the CIA, especially through Allen Dulles, may have been greater than anyone realizes.
26. Berle, Adolf A., Jr. Tides of Crisis: A Primer on Foreign Relations. New York: Reynal & Company, 1957. Page 297.
27. McCarthy, Joseph R. “The Internal Communist Menace.” Speech introduced into the Congressional Record (81 Congress, 2d Session, pages 1954-7) on February 20, 1950.
28. Berle, page 245.
29. Ibid, pages 7-8.
30. See, Marks or Lee and Shlain.
31. Marks, page 130.
To be continued....
Sunday, October 28, 2018
SLOUCHING, part 2
INTRODUCTION (continued)
LSD had a different and more fascinating history than the American public had any clue about in 1967 and one which few historians have examined even today. The drug originated exclusively from two interrelated parts of the liberal anticommunist establishment, at least one of which was utterly despised by the counterculture. The military and intelligence communities, in their all-out war against Soviet communism, had been “turning on” in clandestine state laboratories since 1951 to research new chemical weapons and mind control techniques. And an expanding “scientific” American mental health movement, in its need to reduce people and consciousness to neuro-chemical mechanisms, had been using LSD at least that early to model psychosis and pry open the enigmatic Freudian subconscious.
Psychiatrists, psychologists and spies were secretly way into LSD by the mid-fifties. Some archetypical establishment people were ahead of Leary, Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, the flower children, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band(7) by a good many years. This is a connection which in a strange way threatens to debunk the romance of rebellion or fill in the fabled Generation Gap. Possibly, LSD use in elite segments of American society between 1953 and 1963 had a catalytic influence on the upheavals which followed. But certainly, if middle-aged Americans now believe nothing psychedelic could possibly predate their Sixties Generation, or that LSD belongs primarily or exclusively to their original Rebellion, they should reinterpret some of their old rock ‘n roll song lyrics. No lesser example of elitism than Claire Booth Luce commented even while she was a member of Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: “Oh, sure, we all took acid (in the fifties). It was a creative group — my husband and I and Huxley, and (novelist Christopher) Isherwood…. (But) we wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”(8)
This thesis first attempts to establish a point of irony about “the Sixties,” that fierce eruption of culture unequaled since the Civil War or perhaps the French Revolution, which gave birth to so much of our present social reality. Those institutions of the adult establishment which were most opposed and caught most unaware by the turmoil, had been involved during the fifties in an important element of the deviance they later feared. America kept certain secrets from itself, and the dramatic contrast between two decades was partly a result of keeping those secrets.
Following that context my thesis presents personal recollections by Vermont photographer George Leisey, the son of celebrity nutritionist and author Adele Davis. Leisey’s unique perspective on LSD, far from setting the sixties apart, provides unexpected connection to the whole Twentieth Century narrative of world war, anticommunist paranoia, consumer materialism, social conformity, and American scientific, economic and cultural ascendence.
A chronology of selected events, which to my knowledge has not been assembled before, is provided as an appendix. The odd history of LSD has previously been painted in thematic frames, omitting a vital element of sequence between one picture and another. Different authors have detailed particular aspects of the story. For example, John Marks(9) got the CIA’s mind control Projects Bluebird, Artichoke and MKUltra in good order, but he confused time with regard to earlier and concurrent psychiatric research or the later roles of experimental subjects like Ken Kesey; Jay Stevens brilliantly chronicled the procession of high society psychotherapists and their LSD exploits through the fifties, but he never related that picture to the Cold War in an understandable way; Lee and Shlain(11) omitted little, but often mixed things together within overly broad time segments as if describing an LSD trip of their own. Sequence is extremely significant for the irony in this story and a fascinating sense of fate and connection disappears when it is altered. The specific appended chronology in this thesis is presented as a pilot remedy for questions about what really happened in a recent and frenetic time, to better explore how the fifties ever could have become the sixties.
My end notes occasionally offer substantial digressions into tangential subjects which fascinate me but may not interest readers or directly affect my main arguments. Some notes do add to the irony in the story or suggest unanswered questions but remain unnecessary for the basic analysis. Others are just the standard citations of source. I would like all readers to pour over every word, but of course each will budget his or her own effort.
Footnotes:
7. The Beatles’ stunning benediction for a blossoming psychedelic counterculture earned them dramatic contradictory reviews from Timothy Leary and Spiro Agnew. The acid guru declared the Beatles to be mutants sent by God; the vice-president suggested they were part of a communist conspiracy and noted that their music showed an understanding of the principles of brainwashing. (Lee and Shlain.)
8. Remarks on The Dick Cavett Show, April 9, 1982, quoted in Lee and Shlain, page 71.
9. Marks, John, The Search for the Manchuria Candidate; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.
LSD had a different and more fascinating history than the American public had any clue about in 1967 and one which few historians have examined even today. The drug originated exclusively from two interrelated parts of the liberal anticommunist establishment, at least one of which was utterly despised by the counterculture. The military and intelligence communities, in their all-out war against Soviet communism, had been “turning on” in clandestine state laboratories since 1951 to research new chemical weapons and mind control techniques. And an expanding “scientific” American mental health movement, in its need to reduce people and consciousness to neuro-chemical mechanisms, had been using LSD at least that early to model psychosis and pry open the enigmatic Freudian subconscious.
Psychiatrists, psychologists and spies were secretly way into LSD by the mid-fifties. Some archetypical establishment people were ahead of Leary, Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, the flower children, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band(7) by a good many years. This is a connection which in a strange way threatens to debunk the romance of rebellion or fill in the fabled Generation Gap. Possibly, LSD use in elite segments of American society between 1953 and 1963 had a catalytic influence on the upheavals which followed. But certainly, if middle-aged Americans now believe nothing psychedelic could possibly predate their Sixties Generation, or that LSD belongs primarily or exclusively to their original Rebellion, they should reinterpret some of their old rock ‘n roll song lyrics. No lesser example of elitism than Claire Booth Luce commented even while she was a member of Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: “Oh, sure, we all took acid (in the fifties). It was a creative group — my husband and I and Huxley, and (novelist Christopher) Isherwood…. (But) we wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”(8)
This thesis first attempts to establish a point of irony about “the Sixties,” that fierce eruption of culture unequaled since the Civil War or perhaps the French Revolution, which gave birth to so much of our present social reality. Those institutions of the adult establishment which were most opposed and caught most unaware by the turmoil, had been involved during the fifties in an important element of the deviance they later feared. America kept certain secrets from itself, and the dramatic contrast between two decades was partly a result of keeping those secrets.
Following that context my thesis presents personal recollections by Vermont photographer George Leisey, the son of celebrity nutritionist and author Adele Davis. Leisey’s unique perspective on LSD, far from setting the sixties apart, provides unexpected connection to the whole Twentieth Century narrative of world war, anticommunist paranoia, consumer materialism, social conformity, and American scientific, economic and cultural ascendence.
A chronology of selected events, which to my knowledge has not been assembled before, is provided as an appendix. The odd history of LSD has previously been painted in thematic frames, omitting a vital element of sequence between one picture and another. Different authors have detailed particular aspects of the story. For example, John Marks(9) got the CIA’s mind control Projects Bluebird, Artichoke and MKUltra in good order, but he confused time with regard to earlier and concurrent psychiatric research or the later roles of experimental subjects like Ken Kesey; Jay Stevens brilliantly chronicled the procession of high society psychotherapists and their LSD exploits through the fifties, but he never related that picture to the Cold War in an understandable way; Lee and Shlain(11) omitted little, but often mixed things together within overly broad time segments as if describing an LSD trip of their own. Sequence is extremely significant for the irony in this story and a fascinating sense of fate and connection disappears when it is altered. The specific appended chronology in this thesis is presented as a pilot remedy for questions about what really happened in a recent and frenetic time, to better explore how the fifties ever could have become the sixties.
My end notes occasionally offer substantial digressions into tangential subjects which fascinate me but may not interest readers or directly affect my main arguments. Some notes do add to the irony in the story or suggest unanswered questions but remain unnecessary for the basic analysis. Others are just the standard citations of source. I would like all readers to pour over every word, but of course each will budget his or her own effort.
Footnotes:
7. The Beatles’ stunning benediction for a blossoming psychedelic counterculture earned them dramatic contradictory reviews from Timothy Leary and Spiro Agnew. The acid guru declared the Beatles to be mutants sent by God; the vice-president suggested they were part of a communist conspiracy and noted that their music showed an understanding of the principles of brainwashing. (Lee and Shlain.)
8. Remarks on The Dick Cavett Show, April 9, 1982, quoted in Lee and Shlain, page 71.
9. Marks, John, The Search for the Manchuria Candidate; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.
10. Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1987.
11. Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, New York: Grove Weidenfelg, 1985.
(Next part, “CONTEXT: LSD and the Cult of Intelligence” coming soon.)
(Next part, “CONTEXT: LSD and the Cult of Intelligence” coming soon.)
SLOUCHING, Part 1
...the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, and the worst
Are filled with passionate intensity.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(From “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats)
_____________
A lot of writers, forced to contemplate the noisy confusion that has since coalesced in the phrase the sixties, turned to these evocative lines... For a lot of Americans, that image, the rough, slouching beast, captured perfectly the unease they felt when they contemplated their children. Indeed the only editorial change the poem needed to be completely contemporary was the location: for “Bethlehem,” read “San Francisco”.
(From Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stevens(1))
INTRODUCTION
Only a few months after illusions of an American Camelot were dashed by the bullets of a Dallas assassin, a remarkable young orator named Mario Savio told fellow children of the sixties that they were not raw materials to be made into products for sale to clients of the University of California at Berkeley. He urged them to resist that suppression of individuality and creativity which was apparently required for membership in the American economic system, and to “die rather than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant.”
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from operating at all.(2)
Within three years of Savio’s speech from the top of a police car, a revolution was consuming America’s youth, who ostentatiously proclaimed they were “alive again in the middle of this monstrous funeral parlor of western civilization.”(3) The adult establishment began to fear that society would indeed be prevented from working at all, as the new generation asserted in ever more bizarre ways that it had “escaped from a culture where the machine is god.”(4) The best authorities in social science had predicted that baby boomers would be loved by American corporate leaders because they would be so easy to control, but all of a sudden many were ready to turn on, tune in and drop out. What happened? Did the Ozzie and Harriet world of the fifties really evolve as quickly as it seemed, without logical transition, into a decade of turmoil and psychedelic counterculture?
Images of Haight-Ashbury hippies and the 1967 San Francisco Summer of Love are an outstanding representation of the history recalled under the rubric of “the sixties.” The cultural glue which briefly held the little corner of the country in that picture together was the “dynamite”(5) mind drug, d-lysergic acid diethylamide. By early 1965 LSD use was endemic in the Haight. But as late as September of that year a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle suggested there was little public awareness of anything new happening in the obscure old neighborhood which reportedly had become “A New Haven For Beatniks.”(6) Ken Kesey had already crossed the country in a psychedelic bus with his Merry Pranksters and turned the Hell’s Angels into acid heads, and Timothy Leary’s International Foundation for Internal Freedom was well established. But even by the following spring of 1966, when a U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings on LSD, the subject was discussed as a new manifestation of the old fifties bugaboo, “juvenile delinquency.” Things changed so quickly that by the time of the media heyday over hippies and the Haight, by the time network news anchors recognised a widespread “drug problem,” the energy of the real psychedelic culture was in fact already spent.
Footnotes:
1. Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1987. Page x.
2. Savio, Mario. Quoted in Bloom, Alexander, and Wini Breines, Takin’ it to the streets: A Sixties Reader. New York, Oxford University Press, 1995. Pages 111-115.
3. Sinclair, John. “Rock and Roll Is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution” -article reprinted in Bloom and Breines, pages 301-303.
4. Strait, Guy. “What is a Hippie?” -essay reprinted in Bloom and Breines, pages 310-312.
5. Although caracatures of tripped-out hippies crooning “dyn-o-MYTE” to the music of Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead probably come to mind first, this simile was first coined in reference to LSD by none other than Richard Helms of the CIA, in late1953. Helms was the prime instigator of the CIA’s LSD research programs in the fifties. See, Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985.
6. September 6. This was the headline, though the text of the article did use the word “hippies” to describe the local neighborhood people. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury, A History. New York: Vintage Books, 1985; page 19.
(To be continued.)
Ketamine, in the proud tradition of LSD & other psychiatric drugs
A recent conversation with Vikramjit Gill, a doctor who has been helpful to at least one client of mine, reveals the hair-trigger exhilaration of psychiatry for any and all all conceivable drug “solutions” to human problems in thinking, feeling and behaving.
I don’t recall how the subject came up, but Dr. Gill was enormously impressed, perhaps enchanted, by some clinical data he had recently seen or heard of indicating that Ketamine might be a very effective treatment for depression. Ketamine has been around since the heyday of the 60s and 70s drug culture. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration it has been known on the street as “Special K’, “K”, “Cat Valium” and “Kit Cat”. It has a reputation for producing mystical, euphoric or transcendent experiences glowingly described as the “K-hole” or “God”.
In case this sounds eerily familiar, it certainly is. The greatest push in the history of Western culture for drugs as catalysts of (or a materialistic substitute for) spiritual enlightenment was also a psychiatric innovation: LSD. That adventure did not end well, but many people never knew or don’t remember the details. Dr. Gill is apparently too young. (Or, maybe he’s just a psychiatrist.)
I studied the history of LSD for a thesis at Northwestern University. The title of my thesis was, “Slouching Towards Haight-Ashbury To Be Born: Secret Psychedelic Nation In The Fifties”. A nickel synopsis might be that, while I personally experienced the drug culture in my youth as a rebellion and part of a movement boiling up from the streets, in actual fact it was a manipulation that trickled down from the highest, most elite social and professional circles in the West. It was a plan to cure the human condition, to catalyze a higher evolution, to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.
In light of Dr. Gill’s evident enchantment with this newest Ketamine version of psychiatric hubris, I intend to serialize my thesis over a number of separate articles on this blog. It’s a good story, it’s quintessentially American, and it’s true. As I once wrote, we have spent huge amounts of money searching for drugs to heal our souls, and found only drugs that failed to heal the effects of our earlier drugs. Ketamine continues in the fruitless and destructive tradition of psychiatric slavery.
I don’t recall how the subject came up, but Dr. Gill was enormously impressed, perhaps enchanted, by some clinical data he had recently seen or heard of indicating that Ketamine might be a very effective treatment for depression. Ketamine has been around since the heyday of the 60s and 70s drug culture. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration it has been known on the street as “Special K’, “K”, “Cat Valium” and “Kit Cat”. It has a reputation for producing mystical, euphoric or transcendent experiences glowingly described as the “K-hole” or “God”.
In case this sounds eerily familiar, it certainly is. The greatest push in the history of Western culture for drugs as catalysts of (or a materialistic substitute for) spiritual enlightenment was also a psychiatric innovation: LSD. That adventure did not end well, but many people never knew or don’t remember the details. Dr. Gill is apparently too young. (Or, maybe he’s just a psychiatrist.)
I studied the history of LSD for a thesis at Northwestern University. The title of my thesis was, “Slouching Towards Haight-Ashbury To Be Born: Secret Psychedelic Nation In The Fifties”. A nickel synopsis might be that, while I personally experienced the drug culture in my youth as a rebellion and part of a movement boiling up from the streets, in actual fact it was a manipulation that trickled down from the highest, most elite social and professional circles in the West. It was a plan to cure the human condition, to catalyze a higher evolution, to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.
In light of Dr. Gill’s evident enchantment with this newest Ketamine version of psychiatric hubris, I intend to serialize my thesis over a number of separate articles on this blog. It’s a good story, it’s quintessentially American, and it’s true. As I once wrote, we have spent huge amounts of money searching for drugs to heal our souls, and found only drugs that failed to heal the effects of our earlier drugs. Ketamine continues in the fruitless and destructive tradition of psychiatric slavery.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Malis & Corcoran, sexual abuse, psychiatric slavery
I had the thrill today of being in the same room with Richard Malis and James Patrick Corcoran, simultaneously, for about twenty minutes! These are the two guys who (perhaps somewhat secretly) run the whole machinery of “treatment” at Elgin Mental Health Center, aka “DSH”.
Malis is a pasty-faced, plump M.D. psychiatrist who pretends to have no interest in anything beyond the clinical cases he is directly and officially responsible for on Hartman Unit. Corcoran is a pasty-faced, slightly less-plump M.D. psychiatrist whose actual job title (it may be “Statewide Forensic Medical Director”-?) almost no one knows. Corcoran once testified under oath that Malis had been unwilling to take the Medical Director position at DSH, just because of about a dozen “difficult” patients all legally represented by me.
During today’s monthly staffing, Malis and Corcoran made kind of a show, to establish a false pretense that Corcoran had no previous knowledge of my client Jack’s glaucoma and lack of proper medical attention caused by Malis’ mean-spirited revocation of his passes, which would require him to go to a public clinic in chains. (See my previous article on this situation. Today there was no Tom Zubik present, perhaps because Zubik can’t be trusted to whole-heartedly support institutional retribution against Jack or the totalistic “drug-them-all-whether-they-like-it-or-not” psychiatric cult.)
So far, Corcoran has been named as the lead defendant in two federal lawsuits for sexual abuse of “patients” (slaves) by staff (overseers) on this plantation. Malis has not yet been named in such a suit, although there will be various opportunities. One new case will be filed in the next month or so, and it will be no surprize if there are a dozen of them a year from now.
The sexual abuse is endemic on the plantation because Malis and Corcoran, and maybe others above them, find it useful. They cannot imagine that psychiatric slaves should have any rights to their own bodies or their own dignity anyway. As with the old slavemasters in the antebellum Southern states, the presumption is that these are subhuman beings; but it’s practical to keep them happy and quiet, so if sex with staff works for that purpose it can be ignored.
The idea fails mostly because the presumption is false. Ben Hurt, Mark Owens, Jack and the others are not subhuman. They know all too well that what Malis and Corcoran pretend is “help” is really monumental exploitation and existential spiritual harm. They will seek and demand justice.
Psychiatria delenda est!
Malis is a pasty-faced, plump M.D. psychiatrist who pretends to have no interest in anything beyond the clinical cases he is directly and officially responsible for on Hartman Unit. Corcoran is a pasty-faced, slightly less-plump M.D. psychiatrist whose actual job title (it may be “Statewide Forensic Medical Director”-?) almost no one knows. Corcoran once testified under oath that Malis had been unwilling to take the Medical Director position at DSH, just because of about a dozen “difficult” patients all legally represented by me.
During today’s monthly staffing, Malis and Corcoran made kind of a show, to establish a false pretense that Corcoran had no previous knowledge of my client Jack’s glaucoma and lack of proper medical attention caused by Malis’ mean-spirited revocation of his passes, which would require him to go to a public clinic in chains. (See my previous article on this situation. Today there was no Tom Zubik present, perhaps because Zubik can’t be trusted to whole-heartedly support institutional retribution against Jack or the totalistic “drug-them-all-whether-they-like-it-or-not” psychiatric cult.)
So far, Corcoran has been named as the lead defendant in two federal lawsuits for sexual abuse of “patients” (slaves) by staff (overseers) on this plantation. Malis has not yet been named in such a suit, although there will be various opportunities. One new case will be filed in the next month or so, and it will be no surprize if there are a dozen of them a year from now.
The sexual abuse is endemic on the plantation because Malis and Corcoran, and maybe others above them, find it useful. They cannot imagine that psychiatric slaves should have any rights to their own bodies or their own dignity anyway. As with the old slavemasters in the antebellum Southern states, the presumption is that these are subhuman beings; but it’s practical to keep them happy and quiet, so if sex with staff works for that purpose it can be ignored.
The idea fails mostly because the presumption is false. Ben Hurt, Mark Owens, Jack and the others are not subhuman. They know all too well that what Malis and Corcoran pretend is “help” is really monumental exploitation and existential spiritual harm. They will seek and demand justice.
Psychiatria delenda est!
Monday, June 18, 2018
Malis with malice, and Juneteenth
A long-time client whom I’ll call Jack has been locked up at DSH, née Elgin Mental Health Center, for about 30 years. He did commit a murder, but he was found “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” by the court and sold into the forensic psychiatric slave system rather than sentenced to prison.
Fairly early on, Jack stopped taking psychiatric “medication”, and it has been many years now since he behaved badly, in any scary way or any way that’s more than a slight nuisance, at DSH. He’s a very bright man, actually. He could almost certainly work, contribute and be happy if he were manumitted. Unfortunately, at the moment Richard Malis is his psychiatrist.
Malis has seen a court order which ordered DSH to create a treatment plan for Jack that does not require psychiatric drugs. He violates that court order every month, by absolutely refusing to consider that Jack might not need drugs. He maliciously invents “delusions” which Jack supposedly has, to argue that this patient is psychotic and “needs” the drugs that he hates and Malis loves, and that everyone knows Jack doesn’t need and will never take.
Jack never voices those “delusions” that Malis accuses him of having. He just refuses to discuss his beliefs with Malis. Jack could easily disavow or clarify the beliefs which Malis says (but of course, can never prove) are “delusional”. However, Malis would almost certainly only try to incriminate Jack by any discussion, so I have advised him as his legal counsel that it’s probably wise to refuse all conversation with the plantation overseer. I think he mostly follows my advice.
The trouble is, Malis is malicious. Jack has glaucoma, and should see an opthamalogist regularly to test the pressure in his eyes and make sure the glaucoma medicine is working. He hates having to go to a medical facility in handcuffs, which are only required for a trip to the doctor because Malis has pulled his passes out of pure retribution for Jack’s getting better without psychiatric “medicine”. The life-long brain disease, “schizophrenia”, is a central and vital article of faith in psychiatry. Anyone who gets better, especially without drugs, insults Malis’ religion.
Thus Jack does not get the proper standard of care for glaucoma. He refuses to be transported in handcuffs and leg irons to the opthamalogy clinic, because it’s demeaning and counter-productive for his medical care. Doctors and nurses are not pleased to have a patient arrive in restraints with guards; it makes all their other patients nervous for one thing, and it prejudices clinicians against the apparent “dangerous criminal”.
I recently attended a monthly staffing for Jack. I commented in the presence of Tom Zubik, the current forensic director of DSH, that there just has to be some way to get Jack his opthamalogical care. Tom was concerned. He thinks it would be very inconvenient and embarrassing if Jack’s eyeball explodes, or if he ends up with a detached retina, because DSH is unable to get him to the clinic regularly. People might notice... that DSH sucks as a supposed “hospital”, and that in fact this is a slave plantation.
There’s nothing more powerful as a symbol or demonstration of slavery than a black man in chains. Malis is an idiot in his malice. And guess what, tomorrow is Juneteenth!
Psychiatria delenda est!
Fairly early on, Jack stopped taking psychiatric “medication”, and it has been many years now since he behaved badly, in any scary way or any way that’s more than a slight nuisance, at DSH. He’s a very bright man, actually. He could almost certainly work, contribute and be happy if he were manumitted. Unfortunately, at the moment Richard Malis is his psychiatrist.
Malis has seen a court order which ordered DSH to create a treatment plan for Jack that does not require psychiatric drugs. He violates that court order every month, by absolutely refusing to consider that Jack might not need drugs. He maliciously invents “delusions” which Jack supposedly has, to argue that this patient is psychotic and “needs” the drugs that he hates and Malis loves, and that everyone knows Jack doesn’t need and will never take.
Jack never voices those “delusions” that Malis accuses him of having. He just refuses to discuss his beliefs with Malis. Jack could easily disavow or clarify the beliefs which Malis says (but of course, can never prove) are “delusional”. However, Malis would almost certainly only try to incriminate Jack by any discussion, so I have advised him as his legal counsel that it’s probably wise to refuse all conversation with the plantation overseer. I think he mostly follows my advice.
The trouble is, Malis is malicious. Jack has glaucoma, and should see an opthamalogist regularly to test the pressure in his eyes and make sure the glaucoma medicine is working. He hates having to go to a medical facility in handcuffs, which are only required for a trip to the doctor because Malis has pulled his passes out of pure retribution for Jack’s getting better without psychiatric “medicine”. The life-long brain disease, “schizophrenia”, is a central and vital article of faith in psychiatry. Anyone who gets better, especially without drugs, insults Malis’ religion.
Thus Jack does not get the proper standard of care for glaucoma. He refuses to be transported in handcuffs and leg irons to the opthamalogy clinic, because it’s demeaning and counter-productive for his medical care. Doctors and nurses are not pleased to have a patient arrive in restraints with guards; it makes all their other patients nervous for one thing, and it prejudices clinicians against the apparent “dangerous criminal”.
I recently attended a monthly staffing for Jack. I commented in the presence of Tom Zubik, the current forensic director of DSH, that there just has to be some way to get Jack his opthamalogical care. Tom was concerned. He thinks it would be very inconvenient and embarrassing if Jack’s eyeball explodes, or if he ends up with a detached retina, because DSH is unable to get him to the clinic regularly. People might notice... that DSH sucks as a supposed “hospital”, and that in fact this is a slave plantation.
There’s nothing more powerful as a symbol or demonstration of slavery than a black man in chains. Malis is an idiot in his malice. And guess what, tomorrow is Juneteenth!
Psychiatria delenda est!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
