SLOUCHING, part 10

IMPLICATIONS OF SECRECY (continued)

There was a convincing rationale for secrecy during the Cold War. It was a vital part of covert action and psychological operations, and even if the rights of a few individuals were occasionally violated, such strategies seemed to offer less brutal options than conventional war. However Adolf Berle’s arguments about “necessary solutions for which the public may be unprepared” neglected a price to be paid for clandestinity. The information revolution at the end of this century has proven that an open exchange of ideas enhances creativity and viability in organizations. Secrecy has the opposite effect, severely limiting the number of minds which might test, contribute to or qualify any idea or project.(126) The CIA’s grand objective for drug projects and other mind control research was to develop technical precision in prediction and total control of individual human beings. After a decade of intense and expensive work the benefits of that research were put to a critical test and found to have little or no basis in reality.

When Yuri Nosenko, a high-level Soviet KGB officer, defected to the United States in 1964, every plausible device in the MKULTRA arsenal was employed over five years to prove or disprove his legitimacy. Richard Helms alternately awarded one intelligence medal to a CIA man who “unmasked Nosenko as a Soviet plant,” and the identical honor to someone else who “rehabilitated” him. To this day the divisive issue remains undecided within CIA. Nosenko was released from his long solitary confinement and put on the payroll in 1969, but as late as 1981 a lengthy new report was sent to the Director of Central Intelligence about “Why Nosenko is a plant and why it matters.”(127) The bottom line proved that the practitioners of mind control who brought LSD to the world as their own breakthrough couldn’t even decide whether to trust one man, faced with the highest possible necessity and provided with every resource.

Such abysmal failures raise the question of how people can separate themselves from reality far enough for expectations and results to be so different. Secrecy, which is the hiding of reality, creates exactly that opportunity. When Oscar Janiger incorporated the Albert Hofmann Foundation, he expected great things to occur, but the project never got off the ground. It turned out there were no wealthy patrons of sixties psychedelic culture waiting to pay the rent for an LSD museum, and the public never demanded new LSD research. Perhaps the secrets Janiger accumulated in the sixties had something to do with his mis-estimation of reality. Not surprisingly, he was not quoted anywhere in the press about the new foundation as saying he might need to put together another private network for obtaining child research subjects.

Exploring Inner Space by Adelle Davis and Myself and I by her friend Thelma Moss were similar books about the same thing: LSD, the wonderful simultaneous breakthrough in the fields of science, religion and human consciousness that would surely transform the world. The two authors, like all the characters in this story, knew they were onto something big, something that brought them one step beyond the edge of Western Civilization’s charted moral territory and something that somehow needed to be a secret. Robert Davidson, echoing the earlier conspiracies of Captain Al Hubbard, Humphrey Osmond and Aldous Huxley, revealed that:

There are those of us who would like to see the opportunity to experience a series of LSD sessions given to most of the people in positions of influence and leadership, such as doctors, lawyers, ministers and politicians.(128)

That was the real secret: the new possibility of self overcoming on a grand scale; the chance that a tiny amount of mind drug, delivered in just the right way or to just the right people, might create just the right explosion in men’s minds to shortcut politics, evolution or death. It was the secret hope of people like Thelma Moss and Adelle Davis in the late fifties. It was a secret shredded by Helms and Gottlieb with the CIA’s MKULTRA files. Even today, it may remain a secret dream for Oscar Janiger and the Albert Hofmann Foundation’s “John,” or even for George Leisey. And it may still offer alternative Psychological Warfare tactics for unknown and desperate bureaucrats, somewhere in the secret bowels of some invisible government agency that has the job of saving the innocent, unprepared public from nuclear terrorists or extremists now that the threat of Soviet communism is gone.

Footnotes:

126. See Bruce D. Berkowitrz and Allan E. Goodman, “The Logic of Covert Action,” in The National Interest, Number 51, Spring 1998, page 38; Washington, DC: National Affairs, Inc.
127. See Richard J. Hebert, Jr., “Nosenko: Five Paths To Judgment,” in Studies in Intelligence, vol. 31, no. 3, Fall 1987, pages 71-101; Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency. Also David Wise, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA; New York: Random House, 1992. The Nosenko saga was a catastrophe in slow motion for the CIA that ultimately motivated Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton’s destruction of the Directorate of Operations’ Soviet Division, and indirectly set up the career of super-mole Aldrich Ames.
128. Dunlap, page 9.

NEXT: CONCLUSION

SLOUCHING, part 9

IMPLICATIONS OF SECRECY

The experiences and recollections of Adelle Davis and George Leisey, along with the projects of the psychiatrists who gave mother and child LSD in 1959, raise questions about how perceptions of “respectability” and “scientific legitimacy” were formed and how they changed from the fifties to the sixties, and about the recent role of secrecy in our culture. Leisey, a child of the sixties himself, partly views Janiger’s clinical LSD trials as more “respectable” or “legitimate” than the later Kesey “acid tests,” even while acknowledging that today’s sensibilities would have put his mother in prison, and even after personally witnessing the ultimate disgrace (in the jungles of Southeast Asia) of the social order that judged such things as “respectability” and “legitimacy.”

Oscar Janiger was cast as charming but slightly eccentric in 1988, between the lines of the press about his new foundation. But the people who were sources of LSD in the fifties and their experimental motives seemed at that time as “respectable” and “legitimate” as it was possible to be. They were doctors and scientists, and they were Americans. Today we might consider some of them to have been mad scientists, especially those who worked for Richard Helms, who probably should have been charged with “crimes against humanity” rather than perjury for his MKULTRA role(103). Dr. Paul Hoch, who was later New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, served as a consultant to the CIA by conducting an experiment in which he administered a hallucinogenic drug to a patient along with local anesthetic, and then had the patient describe his visual experiences while surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex. Hoch stated, “It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value.”(104) Dr. Ewen Cameron of MaGill University’s psychiatric facility in Montreal kept patients drugged unconscious for up to six weeks while giving them daily LSD and electroshock without their consent, to find out for the CIA whether he could completely “depattern” their memories; Cameron was president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Were these examples of legitimate and respectable research or atrocity? George Leisey states with conviction that the psychiatric researchers whom he knew personally, especially David Snow and Bob Davidson, would never have willingly participated in the kind of agenda that motivated the CIA researchers.(105) But how about convincing therapy patients to bring in their children for LSD experiments?

Why did Harcourt Brace and World insist that Davis publish Exploring Inner Space under a pseudonym? In the months of research for this thesis I had dozens of conversations with Adelle Davis fans. I found only one person who was aware of the nutrition guru’s book about personal experiences under LSD-25.(106) In 1961 it seems there should have been no disgrace for an adult participating in a medical research project to study this completely legal drug. The attitude of the reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle — “What’s wrong with that? Why can’t the rest of us poor slobs have some?” — seems like the most obvious logic for the time. But there was always a consideration that secrecy was appropriate, whether the people testing LSD thought they worked to enhance national security or mental and spiritual development. LSD was still legal in 1965, before the “acid tests,” before the Psychedelic Shop opened in the Haight, and before the public had ever heard the word “hippie.” But this drug had an aura of revolution:

That was one of the mysteries of psychedelics. Taking LSD was like being in a secret society. Hardly anything was being said about it publicly. As a matter of fact, LSD was not an illegal drug, but people acted as if it were; it seemed illegal…. There was no way of knowing how many people might be messing with psychedelics. If you thought about it, you might conclude the only people taking LSD were Leary and the Harvard crowd, some Beats, and a few others, possibly not many more than your own circle of insane friends.(107)

It is possible that the sources of the drugs and its secret intelligence origins were not as unknown to Adelle Davis and the critics who reviewed Exploring Inner Space, not to mention Oscar Janiger, Leary and Kesey, as it would seem at first glance. Davis’ dedication at the front of the book read, “…to those wonderful stagehands who helped pull back the curtains.” She made a point of thanking the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company by name for discovering and producing LSD and for spending millions of dollars researching it. Her book not only reports her own experiences on the drug, but also refers to reports others had written about taking it.(108) One wonders how a volunteer subject in a medical experiment might get access to reports written by other volunteers. Robert Davidson wrote in the Introduction that more than 600 scientific papers had been published about LSD,(109) so he was not isolated from the fact of a large bulk of research. In the Appendix, Davidson discussed the difference between the action of LSD and schizophrenia at some length.(110) He also mentioned that “distribution of LSD is carefully controlled by the manufacturer.”(111) And he acknowledged cryptically, “Some hallucinogens are said to be used in other less humanitarian experiments being carried out in the fields of chemical warfare and prisoner interrogation.”(112) The bottom line is that Robert Davidson, and (we can reasonably assume) through him Adelle Davis, did have an overview of the whole LSD picture.

Just because Davis and Davidson were grateful to Sandoz and had an inkling of the darker side of LSD research, we cannot arbitrarily tar them with the same brush as Allen Dulles, Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms. Nevertheless, these clues in Exploring Inner Space become impossible to ignore as more context is assembled around this time and these events. At least one other oddly similar book, which was in fact written by a friend of Adelle Davis(113) and published only a year later, contained the same clues.

Thelma Moss wrote Myself and I under the pseudonym Constance A. Newland.(114) A clinical psychologist(115) and an M.D. psychiatrist(116) wrote a Forward and Introduction (respectively) in this case, and like Davidson in the Dunlap book, they both made a point of their own experiences with LSD. The author herself wrote the Appendices. The sources listed most frequently in the bibliography and notes include Harold Abramson, Louis Cholden, Paul Hoch, Abram Hoffer, Aldous Huxley, Harry Pennes, R.A. Sandison and Charles Savage, all familiar names from the LSD conferences of the fifties sponsored by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and/or CIA funding cut-outs like the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation or the Geschicter Fund. Moss referred to her doctor and friend who ran the LSD research in which she participated only as “Dr. M.” In Appendix A, Moss repeated the same (incorrect) figure given by Davison in the Dunlap book: “Since… 1947, well over 600 articles on LSD-25 have appeared in the journals of Canada, Hungary, France, South Africa, Italy, Argentina, England and the United States.”(117) Failing to be a conservative LSD proponent despite her best efforts, Moss evangelized: “These unsurpassed events occurred in that far reach of the mind, the unconscious, which had previously seemed an inaccessible myth. Now it became reality, amazingly accessible, simply through the taking of a drug.”(118) And: “I no longer feel a desperate emptiness inside… my life has new savor, new meaning — and new mystery.”(119) She also included a passive-voice, unattributed, one-sentence mention of the dark side: “leaving the antipodes of mysticism for a far sterner outpost, it has been suggested that LSD might prove an effective — because harmless — means of chemical warfare….”(120)

Alan Watt’s The Joyous Cosmology(121) completed a trilogy evidencing by 1962 that “it was too late to turn off the publicity machine (producing) anecdotal accounts of the Other World.”(122) One earlier example can be mentioned as well. R.H. Ward’s A Drug-Taker’s Notes(123) actually came out four years before Dunlap, but referred to many of the same CIA-connected psychiatric authorities (Hoch, Rinkel, Sandison, Hoffer and Osmond) and kept certain identities secret (the doctor who administered LSD to the author was only “Dr. X” and another subject was just “A”). It is probably a coincidence, but Ward mentioned  authors de Quincy and Baudelaire, two names dropped conspicuously by Nathan S. Kline in his New York Times book review of Exploring Inner Space four years later.

These coincidences and little hints of connection add up to a substantial likelihood that the apparent innocence of George Leisey’s family who conducted and participated in LSD research to expand the boundaries of human consciousness, supposedly without affinity for the darker agenda of the military and intelligence establishments, was in fact “selective attention” or “insulation.” These were two factors which helped make many projects throughout the social sciences respectable and legitimate despite their underlying connection to a violent agenda of Psychological Warfare, according to a 1968 study done for the U.S. Air Force. Scientists asserted their attachment to issues like the Pentagon’s cause against Stalinism while sidestepping others like the rise of the military-industrial complex.(124) Oscar Janiger was proud of his earlier adoration for Captain Al Hubbard years after the LSD experiments were over, though it had been clear to him and his cohorts in the fifties that Hubbard’s background in intelligence and connection to defense interests were the reason he could supply them with hallucinogenic drugs. It is not likely that Janiger, Sidney Cohen, Bob Davidson and David Snow were entirely innocent of the fact that their research was possible only with the tacit blessing of the CIA. Secrecy was a catalyst for extremely adroit selectivity of attention. At a time when secrecy was necessary and even patriotic across many scientific fields, scientists could easily assert that they never knew what someone else was doing. Even Aldous Huxley, whose work clearly reflected spiritual pursuits with LSD, could not resist offering advice to MKULTRA researchers, though he probably never had to admit it. Huxley once wrote Louis Jolyon West, a CIA psychiatrist, to suggest hypnotizing subjects prior to administering LSD to find out whether post-hypnotic suggestion could influence the drug experience. The CIA was quite interested in this idea.(125)

Footnotes:

103. Project MKULTRA was entirely Helms’ brainchild. He conceived it and convinced Dulles to approve it. He saved it every time it was threatened, and hid all evidence of it to the best of his ability when it was over. In my opinion the purposeful bureaucratic organization of the full scientific and financial resources of the United States Government and economy toward technical production of human robots, to be used as unknowing assassins and sacrificed for some mystic goal of political dominance over the human race, puts Richard Helms in a league with Joseph Mengele and the Nazi psychiatrists and sociologists who stood on the selection ramps to direct human freight to the right or to the left, as it unloaded at Auschwitz.
104. Lee and Shlain, page 38.
105. April 30 interview.
106. I’m sure there are more, but they must be a very small segment of the public who bought Davis’ books on nutrition. George Leisey told me that after his mother died he received many calls from strange characters, usually spiritual mediums, who claimed they had “just been in contact with Adelle” and that it might shock George, but his mother did not really die of natural causes. These (however well-intended) crackpots often seemed to know about the LSD book. Mrs. Linda Kravitz of Oak Park, IL was the one fan who remembered the Dunlap book. She told me, in a whisper to prevent her fourteen-year-old daughter from overhearing, “God, I loved LSD! People found out that Adelle Davis had written a book about it, but they said, Oh it’s okay that she took it, like they had to think of an excuse or something!”
107. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1985. Page 7.
108. Dunlap, page 18.
109. In fact by 1961 the total was over 1000. The National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare; 1943-1966 Bibliography on Psychotomimetics (reprinted with permission of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals).
110. Dunlap, page 211-12.
111. Ibid, page 213.
112. Ibid, page 7.
113. Per George Leisey, interview of April 30, 1998.
114. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962.
115. Harold Greenwald, Ph.D.
116. Dr. R.A. Sandison, no less.
117. Newland, page 251-52.
118. Ibid, page 22.
119. Ibid, page 243.
120. Ibid, page 262.
121. New York: Vintage, 1962.
122. Stevens, page 183.
123. London: Victor Gollanz, Ltd., 1957
124. Albert Biderman and Elizabeth Crawford, Political Economics of Social Research: The Case of Sociology (Springfield, VA: Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technological Information, 1968); quoted in Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion, pages 95-97.
125. Lee and Shlain, page 48.

(NEXT: IMPLICATIONS OF SECRECY, continued…)

SLOUCHING, part 8

PSYCHEDELIC GENERATIONS: ADELLE DAVIS AND GEORGE LEISEY (continued further)

Acid wasn’t a new thing to George Leisey like it was to the hippies. After all, his mother and her friends had been taking it many years earlier, and in fact, so had George himself. In 1959 he was only thirteen years old, but his mother’s psychiatrist friends “wanted to find out for their research what LSD would do if they gave it to an obnoxious little kid.”(91) Adelle Davis took her young son down to Oscar Janiger’s office and acted as his guide the first time he took LSD. Leisey recalls being told there were five kids all together who were subjects in Dr. Janiger’s experiments. Janiger, Sidney Cohen, Bob Davidson and David Snow “had kind of a private network…”(92) through which they obtained children fo their research. Leisey doesn’t quite remember the names of the other kids…. There was one girl named Joyce, on whom he’d had a crush: she caused no small surprise one day when George discovered her tripping in his own house on her seventeenth birthday. Mother Adelle acted as Joyce’s LSD guide, too. In fact, Leisey’s mom had talked Joyce’s mother into letting her be a subject in the experiments, apparently acting on behalf of the “private network….” Years later Leisey knew the daughter of Art Linkletter who committed suicide while using LSD. He says he had at least five childhood friends who committed suicide, and he knows several of those deaths were probably caused by drugs.

Leisey readily admits, “Adelle Davis would have ended up in the slammer real fast, if she had given her son and other kids LSD these days.”(93) But even in the fifties, before LSD had a bad reputation or any reputation at all, giving an experimental mind altering drug to children was a morally questionable business. The psychiatrists with whom Davis was friendly knew that. But Leisey is far from bitter toward his mother.(94) To this day he would probably approve of clinical LSD research, and he tends to credit the view that a widespread drug culture in the sixties torpedoed chances for more work similar to what his mother’s friends had done.

In 1986 Oscar Janiger organized an art exhibit in his home in Santa Monica to begin rehabilitating his favorite outlawed drug’s public image.(95) A year later he founded the Albert Hoffman Foundation in Los Angeles, hoping a groundswell of opinion would encourage legalization of the kind of projects run in the late fifties.(96) On one hand George Leisey wishes Janiger success.(97) However a recent phone call to the Hoffman Foundation revealed that in the eleven years since it was founded donations never brought in the resources to permanently house historical archives from Janiger’s research or open a planned public museum, despite front page press coverage when the Foundation was first announced.(98) On the other hand Leisey obviously finds it difficult to locate himself on any scale of attitudes about LSD. His early experience, like his mother’s, was constructed around a concept of a carefully controlled trip with clinical psychiatric attention to every detail of “set and setting.”(99) But when he implies that the sixties drug culture damaged chances for careful attempts to expand human consciousness, Leisey has to separate himself from his own behavior. The stories of wandering naked in the desert, etc., are straight out of Keseyan legends in the true “prank ‘em” style.(100)

Individual statements and behavior which appear to be logically inconsistent or hypocritical with several decades’ hindsight are usually evidence that real events and real lives are much more complicated than historians can record. When George Leisey was asked how his mother could have taken drugs and then blamed others for taking them, how she could have turned such a glib “anti-commie” phrase despite her personal awareness of McCarhtyism’s injustices, he found it awkward to explain. But he insisted that Adelle Davis was, if nothing else, entirely genuine in her stated opinions at the time she offered them.(101) People do change their minds during their lives, futures are hard to predict. Leisey knew certain very intelligent people who kept personal supplies of LSD for the day when each would lie on his or her death bed. His mother was one such person, but in the event her drug of choice had far fewer implications for the next world. The final stages of bone cancer apparently involve a degree of pain which just sucks one’s attention back to the present, away from all the higher contemplations. Adelle Davis spent her own final weeks, days, hours and minutes… in the softest fog that increasing doses of morphine could provide.(102)

Footnotes:

91. April 16, 1998 phone interview.
92. April 30, 1998 phone interview.
93. Ibid.
94. When I mentioned Leisey’s claim that his mother made him the subject of LSD experiments to Professor Lane Fenrich, he immediately cautioned me against believing a bitter son’s charges about what his mother did to him. But in fact George Leisey and Adelle Davis, whatever their relationship had been in the fifties, were quite close later. Davis died in her son’s arms in 1974, after he had cared for her personally during many months of severe physical degeneration from bone cancer and the chemotherapy and radiation treatment for that disease. There is no trace of bitterness in his memories of her.
95. Goldstein, Alan, “Psychiatrist Holds Art Exhibit to Encourage New Study of LSD”, Los Angeles Times. June 30, 1986, page 1.
96. Klein, Dianne, “50 Years Later, New Acid Test for LSD”, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1988, page 1. Fleming, Anne Taylor, “A Mecca For Psychedelic Pilgrims”, New York Times, August 10, 1988.
97. April 16, 1998 interview with Leisey.
98. I actually called the number listed in the September, 1988 article in the LA Times first, and got a recording which gave an address in Laguna Beach to which I could send my request to be added to their mailing list, and referred me to another number belonging to “John” in Los Angeles. When I reached John he was very anxious to find out if I was or knew a potential financial donor, but he had no interest in answering any other questions, including what his last name might be. As I talked with him for about five minutes, I was aware that he was either using a speaker phone or located in a high-echo space of some sort. Then came the clear sound of a “john” flushing, and I realized the Albert Hoffman Foundation is hurting if “John” is its only contact with the public.
99. “Set and setting” was the phrase which defined the methodology of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and the Harvard and Millbrook commune crowd. They had learned it from Captain Al Hubbard. See Lee and Shlain or Stevens.
100. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters advocated the exact opposite address to LSD use from Leary. They insisted that the more uncontrolled and unpredictable the experience could be made, the better. Lee and Shlain, Stevens.
101. Phone interview with George Leisey, April 30, 1998.
102. Ibid.

(NEXT: IMPLICATIONS OF SECRECY)

SLOUCHING, part 7

PSYCHEDELIC GENERATIONS: ADELLE DAVIS AND GEORGE LEISEY (continued)


It was fateful that Americans generally did not distinguish between the opposing factions of the mental health movement in the fifties. Shrinks were shrinks, and they mainly worked for the rich or the government; normal people avoided them and told jokes about them. Even when hundreds of articles were being published about LSD every year in technical journals, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed the Jane Dunlap book as though no one had ever heard of the psychedelic substance that would soon change the international image of the city, as singer Scott McKensie told anyone going to San Francisco to “be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”(73) The Chronicle reviewer noted, “LSD-25, a newly discovered hallucinogenic drug… this frantic form of pot…” was experienced by Dunlap as one of the lucky few people allowed to try it. He then pointedly asked, “Why can’t the rest of us poor slobs have some?”(74) When Dr. Davidson wrote in the Introduction of Exploring Inner Space, “The wonder of LSD is that it can bring within the capabilities of ordinary people the experience of universal love and the reality of our divine nature,”(75) he did not express sentiments associated with a Nathan Kline or a Harold Wolff; he was closer to the Chronicle. But Davidson and other psychoanalysts were still trying frantically to compete with non-Freudians, for grant dollars and prestige in LSD research, and increasingly for real market share in the business of mental health.

Four years after the APA round table, a three-day international conference was sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and supported by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Princeton, NJ. The same divergent views were expressed even more emphatically than in 1955. The CIA’s own Harold Abramson received general agreement when he said, “I have always felt that the importance of LSD was not LSD, but that LSD will bring to medicine what it really needs: to have psychiatry a branch of experimental medicine.”(76) However the Dutch psychiatrist C. H. Van Rhijn suggested a broader goal, one which in an ironic sense, actually was fulfilled seven or eight years later in Haight-Ashbury: “I had a vision, and I still have this vision, of mass therapy: institutions in which every patient with a neurosis could get LSD treatment and work out his problems largely by himself.”(77)

Adelle Davis’ motives for publishing the Jane Dunlap book are a fascinating subject for speculation. They seem to have expressed all the confusion brewing just beneath the surface of American society at the time. She wrote:

As a result of this spiritual fulfillment, an amazingly deep optimism has come to me. Formerly when I felt the hot breath of Communism on my neck I was thrown into a miserable depression, agreeing with Spengler that the West was indeed declining… But to one who accepts the God pull of reversed gravity and maintains a geological time sense, the future seems gloriously bright.(78)

Her words show that within months after the Macy Foundation’s conference, the science problem — or brain problem, or the problem of psychiatry’s place in the world, whatever it was in which LSD played such a pivotal role for mental health professionals — was already becoming something embarrassingly different: a populist spiritual quest which would not be confined to the proper synaptic spaces. Davis and Davidson certainly wrote Exploring Inner Space and its introduction and Postscript to evangelize LSD, perhaps not as freely as Ken Kesey would evangelize it beginning a couple of years later, but nevertheless to bring to the book-reading public the good news about a new chemical salvation. Inner Space still paid lip service to the conservative position that LSD should be available only to the “proper scientific researchers,” but it is obvious that the author and her psychologist friend considered at least some of the public worthy of being let in.

Adelle Davis was a fascinatingly mixed personality, one part respectable scientific professional and another part rebel. She was extensively trained as a nutritionist, having moved relentlessly from her parents’ hard scrabble Indiana farm through Purdue University, UC-Berkeley, University of Southern California, Columbia University, and UCLA to get her several degrees and do postgraduate work. She lectured and wrote prolifically on her subject, and stood up to what she considered the ignorant criticisms of her work from a medical establishment which saw no need to educate its clinicians in nutrition. George Leisey contends that at one time or another, practically every federal agency he had ever heard of was after his mother.(79) She was at the center of FDA and FCC issues regarding the advertising of natural foods. In her own way she was a prototype in the late fifties of the younger California generation that would create a “New Age” culture that would spread across the country.

A Los Angeles Times article on May 18, 1972 headlined, “Nutrition Crusader Adelle Davis Challenged on Theories: FCC Commissioner Sparks Food-Related Gathering”(80) offered an interesting view of the author’s public renown at the time.(81) The headline and the first few paragraphs, which media-wise professional spinners know is all most people will ever read, gave a clear impression that Adelle Davis was chastened and repentant in a public confrontation with “real” scientists from the government who had the public interest at heart. The balance of the piece contained much more information on Ms. Davis’ views, and readers who bothered to turn to the inside pages would have realized that the debate was not one-sided against Davis at all, the bureaucrats probably got the worst of it. One very curious quote from Davis, however, directly concerns our story. In the final few lines of the article she stated: “Young people are far more interested in nutrition than their parents — a lot of them lost their health because of drugs, during the hippie time a few years ago.” Considering Davis’ own role in promoting what she thought were phenomenal human benefits of LSD in 1961, there is something funny about this 1972 characterization. She was the one who had written:

Many hundreds of people given LSD have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory. People who have had such experiences usually agree that deep within each of us lie goodness unimaginable, wisdom, music, talents of every variety, joy, peace, humility, love, and spirituality, to mention only a few.(82)

Perhaps by the seventies the popular author was, like most people, prone to occasional hypocrisy. If that is the explanation, she remained in 1972 a harbinger of social trends in the baby boom generation: young people were beginning to abandon the ideological movements to become the “yuppies” of the eighties. But maybe Davis meant that young people had lost their health by using drugs other than LSD, or because of the way they experimented with drugs on their own, outside of the clinical environment and psychiatric supervision.

Adelle Davis’ son remembers the fifties well. He lived within an easy drive of Hollywood, in the suburb where his mother had moved so her children didn’t have to grow up in the city. As teenagers George and his friends got tickets every year to the Academy Award ceremonies. Leisey remembers his mother and stepfather taking acid and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms (which had also been a subject of earlier fascination for American Intelligence, and which soon became Timothy Leary’s first avenue to psychedelic experience), beginning perhaps in 1957.(83) He remembers David Snow and Bob Davidson very well, as longtime family friends. His mother’s comment in her book about “the hot breath of communism” clashes slightly with George’s memories of her private rage when the House Un-American Activities Committee chose to harass her friends with subpoenas. But perhaps if Harcourt, Brace & World edited the truth of Adelle Davis’ psychedelic experimentation down to what they felt would seem scientific and respectable, political etiquette was also maintained in Inner Space at a time when reputations could still be endangered by suspicions of sympathy for communism. Or maybe Adelle Davis only objected to the devices of anti-communist paranoia when they were aimed against her own friends; maybe she thought the HUAC investigations in general were a necessary and just process.

Leisey remembers the sixties, too. He served in Vietnam and says he was stationed near Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive. He recalls the assassination of Martin Luther King only a month before he was scheduled to return home. During that last month he knew he could no longer trust the black men in his unit even though many of them had been his friends; the camp was suddenly armed one race against another, with the yellow a mere background consideration. “It was the weirdest experience I ever had,” says Leisey.(84) Another weird thing slightly earlier in the same decade had been one of Ken Kesey’s “acid test” parties.(85) Leisey distinguishes “pharmaceutical” LSD like what Dr. Janiger had obtained from Sandoz in the fifties from the drug which was grabbed out of shopping bags passed around to the long-haired devotees of high-volume Jefferson Airplane music in dark San Francisco concert halls punctuated by strobes and light shows. When asked about the promotional claims by Augustus Owsley Stanley that his LSD was even purer than the Sandoz product,(86) Leisey replies, “Yeah, well, you could have told those people (at the Kesey acid tests) anything. How would anyone ever have known? You just reached into the bag when it came around and got this little piece of blotter paper and ate it.”(87) Leisey claims that during his Sixties psychedelic times he once drove out into the desert, dropped acid and left his car to wander along while tripping. “It was fantastic. I was real lucky though, to ever find my clothes and my way back.”(88) He and a friend once completely disassembled a motorcycle while tripping. “We learned a lot of things about motorcycle engines that no one else knows, like the fact that you can actually fall into a carburetor, and your hand can meld to the metal of a gas tank.”(89) He recalls being unable to “unstick” his feet from the beach one day, and the impossibility of finding his way out of the marketplace labyrinth on another.(90) But Leisey says LSD was less interesting to him in the sixties than, for example, some of the things certain Indian tribes in Mexico were doing with mushrooms.


Footnotes:

73. McKensie, Scott. “If You’re Going To San Francisco” song lyrics, 1967. (From memory only.)
74. San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 1961.
75. Dunlap, page 9.
76. Abramson, Harold A., M.D., ed. The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy: Transactions of a Conference on d-Lysergic Diethylamide, April 22, 23 and 24, 1959, Princeton, NJ. New York : Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1960. Page 239.
77. Ibid. Page 14. Professor Fenrich commented to me that this quote reads like a joke; to the contrary, it was a completely serious point of discussion among experts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis at an international conference sponsored by a foundation which enjoyed government support.
78. Dunlap, 1961. Page 206-7.
79. Part of this  was due to Davis’ later use of illegal laetrile to treat the bone cancer which killed her. However, Davis testified twice before Congress and her comments about the nutritional ignorance of entrenched “education” authorities were no doubt quite threatening to people who considered themselves targeted. George Leisey interview, April 30, 1998.
80. Gettinger, Louise. (Exclusive to the Times from the Washington Post.) Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1972; section VI, page 1.
81. In my opinion, it also revealed tactics which would have been easily recognized by any intelligence operator who ever planned a campaign to reduce the popular reputation and influence of a celebrity. See for example, as an excellent case study, Burroughs, Bryan; Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmund Safra; New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
82. Dunlap, 1961. Page 207-208
83. Since Davis claims in the Dunlap book that she first took LSD in October of 1959, Leisey’s recollection seems at first glance to indicate that his mother altered this history. However, I cannot be certain from what Leisey has told me. His memory might be slightly vague, or he might have been covering things up a little bit, especially in our earlier conversations. He also said once that if there was experimentation going on outside of the five experiences written about in Inner Space, the it was of minor significance.
84. April 2, 1998 phone interview with George Leisey.
85. Beginning in the fall of 1965, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters held a series of publicly-advertised parties at which LSD (usually the Owsley brand) was made freely available to anyone who would take it. The most famous of these was the “Trips Festival” held in Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in early 1966, attended by 6000 people. According to Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven, Ken Kesey introduced more people to LSD in a few months than the psychiatric researchers, the CIA, Sandoz and Timothy Leary combined had in the previous 23 years, and was the single most important catalyst in the explosion of the hippie population of the Haight in 1966.
86. “Owsley was obsessed with making his product as pure as possible — even purer than Sandoz, which described LSD in its scientific reports as a yellowish crystalline substance. As he mastered his illicit craft, Owsley found a way to refine the crystal so that it appeared blue-white under a fluorescent lamp; moreover, if the crystals were shaken, they emitted flashes of light, which meant that LSD in its pure form was piezoluminexcent — a property shared by a very small number of compounds.” Lee and Shlain, page 146-7.
87. April 16, 1998 phone interview with George Leisey.
88. Ibid.
89. April 30, 1998 phone interview.
90. Ibid.

(To be Continued further)

SLOUCHING, part 6

PSYCHEDELIC GENERATIONS: ADELLE DAVIS AND GEORGE LEISEY

Jane Dunlap’s 1961 book, Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25(53) is a somewhat pivotal document. It was published before the psychedelic culture began to flower in San Francisco, before there was any black market supply of LSD, just as the national security establishment was losing interest in the drug as a breakthrough intelligence weapon. According to the introduction by clinical psychologist Robert S. Davidson, Ph.D., Miss Dunlap’s book is the report of a subject in a scientific experiment, which “would have been written, as indeed most of it was written, with no thought of publication.”(54) However Dr. Davidson was deeply involved in the experiment himself, and he openly proclaims,

  I encouraged Miss Dunlap to publish her experiences… partly as an inspiration to people who still believe in the intrinsic spiritual power within the universe. I particularly hoped that her experiences would illustrate the possibilities of this drug’s power to expand the consciousness of the already well-integrated individual and those who seek a still deeper wisdom and awareness of a fundamental unity with the life process.(55)

Davidson had already taken LSD twenty-five times when Miss Dunlap’s much anticipated great day — October 24, 1959 — arrived, years before typical American suburbanites ever heard of LSD. Dunlap had begged to become a subject in LSD experiments. She had read Robert Gordon Wassen’s article in Henry Luce’s Life magazine about the magic mushrooms of Mexico.(56) She knew that LSD experiences were often deeply spiritual, and she considered her own spiritual development to be pitifully inadequate despite years of psychotherapy. It was through a therapist friend that Dunlap was referred to “the psychiatric department of a nearby university where research was in progress.” The university, UC-Irvine, was not identified in the book, and the therapist friend was only called Dr. Snow. David Snow was a real psychotherapist with a practice in Beverly Hills and excellent research connections, but “Jane Dunlap” was much better known to millions of Americans as Adelle Davis.

It surprises several generations of Adelle Davis’ nutrition disciples, who took her slogan, “You are what you eat!” to heart, that this particular guru would have participated in LSD experiments.(57) A New York Times obituary for Davis in 1974 filled thirteen column-inches without giving any hint of the connection.(58) It mentioned all her books except Exploring Inner Space,* even though the same paper had run a significant 1961 review which identified Jane Dunlap as a pseudonym, without mentioning for whom.(59)

Adelle Davis’ son George Leisey was a teenager working at a beat coffeehouse in Hermosillo Beach when his mother and stepfather were first experimenting with the drug that Ken Kesey would dub “acid” only a few years later. Leisey recalls that Harcourt, Brace & World, the publisher of the various Adelle Davis books on nutrition, pleaded with his mother not to publish a book about her LSD experiences at all.(60) However, Davis was utterly determined, as she always was on almost any issue that attracted her attention. Her publishers eventually came around, on the strict condition that she use a pseudonym. Davis herself apparently was never interested in concealing her authorship of Inner Space, and George Leisey claims that at the time of his mother’s death he dealt with the New York Times personally, giving them a complete list of Adelle Davis books from which the Dunlap book was definitely not omitted.(61) In addition to the New York Times review, Exploring Inner Space was reviewed separately by the Times of London(62), the San Francisco Chronicle(63), the Springfield (MA) Union(64) and several trade and library journals.(65) But whenever the fact of a pseudonym was mentioned at all, the identity of the author remained undisclosed.

The New York Times review deserves special discussion. It was written by an extremely influential psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan S. Kline. Dr. Kline was the founder and director of the Rockland Research Institute in Orangeburg, NY, and was said to be, “more than any other single psychiatrist… responsible for one of the greatest revolutions ever to occur in the treatment of the mentally ill.”(66) The revolution which Dr. Kline apparently helped to lead was the rise of a strictly biochemical, anti-moralistic and anti-spiritual interpretation of human behavior. This new framework developed into a belief system wherein the human mind is the brain, period! and the soul is a mythical entity that does not exist in reality. In fact such views go back to Democritus or even earlier, and they have not been conclusively decided by rational argument and empirical evaluation in thousands of years of philosophical attempts. But for America’s Cinderella science of psychology, the issue was a central dividing line in the fifties. Sigmund Freud had envisioned psychoanalysis as a medical specialty, yet the profession evolved without basing its theory strictly enough on experimental science for biologists or the American Medical Association. Sometime in the 1950s, the “headshrinkers” lost their clear leadership position in the mental health movement to shock doctors, lobotomists and pharmacists. Nathan S. Kline was one of the new leaders. He treated mental illness, simply assumed to be brain disease, with drugs; he did not wish to address psychosis or neurosis as non-mechanical phenomena and he had no professional interest in “mind” or “psyche.”

Kline’s New York Times review of Exploring Inner Space was thus the opinion of a medical doctor about a report on a drug study which had become, substantially, a spiritual quest. It inadvertently predicted the cultural turmoil, confused social purposes and conflicting attitudes about life and the universe, which would enthrall America in only a few years. Kline did his best to trump Jane Dunlap’s and Robert Davidson’s promises of a newly open and spectacular spiritual frontier by framing their whole viewpoint merely as man’s “search for identification,” by mentioning his own travels to India, and by implying his own competence with great and obscure names in philosophy and literature. He asserted that LSD and other “psycho-pharmaceuticals”(67) were proper tools for research into mental illness (to be conducted only by orthodox medical authorities, of course), but he obviously regarded Jane Dunlap’s report of her own experiences under LSD-25 with the condescension of a great scientist (or perhaps priest?) toward an ignorant (perhaps confessing, penitent) child.**

This attitude was one of two which contradicted each other during several LSD conferences and symposia during the fifties.(68) An early round table discussion of LSD and mescaline, conducted during the American Psychiatric Association’s May 1955 meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, included medical and psychoanalytic advocates plus one distinguished man of letters. Aldous Huxley, fresh from his second experience with mescaline and the writing of Heaven and Hell, his sequel to The Doors of Perception, was the only non-doctor invited to participate in a panel on psychotomimetics. The chairman of the Atlantic City proceedings, Louis Cholden, M.D. of UCLA Medical School, expressed hopes that,

The key to understanding psychiatry’s deepest mystery, schizophrenia, might lie in the production of an experimental, predictable, controllable, reproducible state — an artificial psychosis, the state of mind induced by giving lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).(69)

Two of Sondoz’s finest M.D. pharmacologists, E. Rothlin and A. Cerletti, were also in attendance to offer their own prognostication for their company’s trademarked product:

(E)lucidation of the mechanism (by which LSD produces its effects) may be of eminent importance for the understanding of the pathogenesis of mental illness, as well as its prophylaxis and therapy.(70)

Other contributors noted EEG changes caused by LSD, preliminary studies of its metabolism in the body and other drugs which tended to counter or alter its effects. In the dominant context of this round table, LSD was a chemical stimulus in a purely electrochemical brain.

However, R. A. Sandison took a different tack during the discussions.

There are good reasons for believing that the LSD experience is a manifestation of the psychic unconscious, and that its material can be used in psychotherapy in the same way that dreams, phantasies and paintings can be used by the psychoanalysts.

He added in an obvious reference to his own use of LSD, “If these drugs can help us to understand more about life as well as to treat our patients, we shall have learned something.”(71) This attitude was more characteristic of the Freudians and Jungians. They were not the kings of the mental health hill they had once been and did not have the same access to inner circles of government-sponsored research, but they still had the attention of a wealthy, influential and bored segment of the American public as well as many artists and intellectuals, perhaps largely due to the association of psychoanalysis with sex and mysticism. R. A. Sandison was reportedly the man who gave Captain Al Hubbard his first dose of LSD.(72) Hubbard later turned Aldous Huxley on and became the early hero and supplier of the Beverley Hills psychedelic therapy crowd which included Oscar Janiger and several celebrities including Adelle Davis. Needless to say, Aldous Huxley was even farther out on the parascientific fringe than the psychoanalysts at the APA meeting.
__________

*   See Appendix 3 for the full text of the Adelle Davis obituary.
** See Appendix 2 for the complete text of the book review by Kline.
__________

Footnotes:

53. Dunlap, Jane. Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961.
54. Ibid, page 4.
55. Ibid, page 10.
56. Wasson, Robert Gordon. “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life, May 13, 1957. On page 11 of the Dunlap book the author states that this fascinated her more than any other article Life had carried from the very first issue. She had saved every issue as a reference archive for her children.
57. I have informally surveyed dozens of Adelle Davis fans about this, and to date I have found only one person who was aware of the connection. Otherwise the closest anyone came to it was some awareness that Davis had been a psychotherapy patient.
58. The New York Times, June 1, 1974; page 32, column 3.
59. Ibid, May 14, 1961; “Book Reviews” page 7.
60. Telephone interviews with George Leisey: April 2, 1998 and December 26, 1997.
61. April 2, 1998 phone interview with George Leisey. The author of the obituary in the Times was Mr. Wolfgang Saxon, who still works there. When I contacted him for any information or recollection he might have, he insisted he writes so many obituaries every week there was just no way he would remember anything about this one. Saxon sounded somewhat elderly, with a slight German accent. He said he was not even familiar with the name Adelle Davis. I explained in some detail, told him about the Jane Dunlap book and my conversations with George Leisey, etc., but it didn’t appear to mean anything to him. I suggested that he pull up the old obituary he wrote in 1974, in case that would remind him of anything. He responded that there was no use in that because he was sure it wouldn’t remind him of why he didn’t mention the Dunlap book.
62. December 13, 1961.
63. June 4, 1961; page 31.
64. April 30, 1961; page 4-D.
65. The Booklist and Subscription Books Bulletin, Library Journal (April 15, 1961), and Kirkus Reviews (March 1, 1961).
66. New York Times obituary, February 14, 1983.
67. It occurs to me that it might be a very interesting exercise to trace the modern origin and pattern of usage of the term “psycho-pharmaceutical.” It is a fair guess that Kline or a close associate nearly invented it, sometime around or within a few years prior to the Jane Dunlap book review quoted here.
68. It was the attitude of the people who held the public reins of political power and controlled interpretations of the law, and it was definitely the attitude of the MKULTRA crowd at CIA. A subject for research which I have not had the opportunity to complete is whether Nathan S. Kline was in fact an MKULTRA-connected psychiatrist himself. His name comes up in an Internet search of book indexes on intelligence twice, but the two references given are obscure. Kline was “the father of psychopharmacology,” best known as a pioneer and leading authority on tranquilizers and anti-depressants in the treatment of previously untreatable mental patients. (See New York Times obituary, February 14, 1983.) However he served as a research associate in Columbia University’s department of neurology from 1952 to 1955 and in its department of psychiatry from 1955 to 1957, giving him more than ample opportunity for an association with CIA’s Harold Abramson. He also had connections with early computer science and robotics, and he toured many foreign countries, including the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, to evaluate different national mental health systems. He believed that care of mental patients in the Soviet Union was superior to that in the United States, and warned that the U.S.S.R. was deriving propaganda benefits from that superiority in underdeveloped countries. (See Current Biographies, 1965.) All things considered, most readers of the history of modern intelligence organizations would instantly suspect Nathan S. Kline as a spook. Ironically, on May 21, 1982 Kline was forced to sign a consent decree in a Federal Court action in Manhattan, permanently enjoining him from using “in any manner whatsoever any investigational new drug.” Kline had been accused of experimenting on 33 patients with beta endorphin in 1977 and 1978 without obtaining government permission and without the informed consent of some of the patients.
69. Cholden, Louis, M.D., ed. Proceedings of the Round Table on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in Experimental Paychiatry, Held at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 12, 1955. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1956. Page ix.
70. Sandoz had trademarked the name “Delysid” sometime prior to 1953.
71. Cholden, pages 27-33.
72. See Lee and Shlain, page 45. There is some confusion about exactly when this occurred, as there is about most things in Alfred M. Hubbard’s life. Lee and Shlain say Sandison gave Hubbard LSD in 1951, though Jay Stevens mentions Hubbard’s having first heard about LSD in 1955 (see Storming Heaven, page 55). John Marks makes no mention of Hubbard at all. In my Appendix 1 chronology I have simply averaged the Stevens and Lee and Shlain dates, because I really don’t know which one is more likely.

(Next… PSYCHEDELIC GENERATIONS: ADELLE DAVIS AND GEORGE LEISEY continued.)

SLOUCHING, part 5

LSD AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE (continued further)

Even while Dr. Harold Wolff simultaneously searched for a cure for Allen Dulles’ son and a magic neurological button to control human minds for America’s epic battle against communistic atheism, Clover Dulles was continuing her long course of psychotherapy with a very different kind of magician-doctor, the Austrian disciple of Freud, Dr. Carl Jung.(40) Psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind were fashionable subjects in the early 1950s, and the CIA could easily remain invisible behind a group of researchers who persuaded clients like Henry and Claire Booth Luce, Aldous Huxley and Ethel Kennedy to try LSD as a short cut highway to mental health, chemical Christianity or the Freudian subconscious. Some of the acid psychiatrists and psychologists of the fifties might argue today that they were unaware of the “spooky” link to their own supplies of the drug. In fact, several did apply directly to Sandoz with research proposals.(41) However almost the entire point of the Social Sciences, especially psychology, from the end of World War II until well into the Cold War, was to support the work of the national security establishment and help develop more effective technologies of Psychological Warfare.(42) As early as 1954 all CIA field offices had been ordered to monitor all LSD research which came to their attention. The colorful career of a man known in the mid-1950s as “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD” helps to illustrate the ubiquitous interconnections between national security interests and mental health.

Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, a former OSS officer who had helped smuggle U.S. weapons to Canada for the British during official American neutrality before Pearl Harbor,(43) was described by Aldous Huxley as “the good Captain” who had his own “passport into the most exalted spheres of government, business and ecclesiastical polity.”(44) Huxley took his first LSD trip in 1955 under Captain Al’s supervision. Indeed, Hubbard did have access to exalted spheres. He ran an alcoholism treatment program at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, BC where Ethel (Mrs. Robert) Kennedy was treated, prompting her Senator husband to interrogate FDA and National Institute of Mental Health representatives in 1966 about why they were attempting to thwart valuable research.(45) Hubbard was also in the uranium business when that commodity had the highest strategic significance. Captain Al, along with the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond who is credited with coming up with the term “psychedelic” during correspondence with the recently turned-on Huxley,(46) plotted to bring about world peace by giving individuals, politicians and social opinion leaders LSD to transform their belief systems. Hubbard claimed to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in this project, traveling around the world scattering the acid he bought in bulk from Sandoz, alternately building his supply and giving it out to those whom he deemed worthy. Beverly Hills therapist Dr. Oscar Janiger told attendees at a 1979 “LSD reunion” that he sand his fellow psychiatric researchers and friends in Los Angeles had waited for the good Captain to arrive during those years, “…like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.”(47) Hubbard introduced many practices to “LSD therapy” in the fifties which would later become psychedelic rituals in the Haight, such as high dosages for profound religious experiences, strobe light enhancements, and the “guided trips” which later became the hallmark of Timothy Leary’s LSD methodology.(48)

It was the intersection in the 1950s between the secret MKULTRA program of human experimentation and the vogue of elite culture, the nexus of professional spies and Cold War strategists, Freudian shrinks and medical psychiatrists, which started the ripple effects that would circle back years later when Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey proselytized their acid dreams and called for a revolt of the guinea pigs. The secret drug research of American defense and intelligence agencies provided the necessary market for LSD to be manufactured in any quantity in the first place. If not for old OSS heros like William Donovan and Allen Dulles, and the new American reliance on psychological warfare to combat the threat of communist domination and avoid nuclear Armageddon, the future sacrament of the counterculture might have remained in a test tube on a shelf in Switzerland. The deep hostility in the sixties toward “Amerika” — its scientific authorities, the orthodoxy of anti-communism, and the class of gentleman spies and intellectuals who had conceived and founded its intelligence community — existed without knowledge of the fact that such establishment circles had been the original home of speculation about the power of LSD to transform the world and further the cause of peace.

It was hardly Wild Bill Donovan’s intention to effect wide distribution of a recreational hallucinogenic drug when he designed a postwar American intelligence service in 1944.(49) But a quarter of a century later four million Americans, most of them high school and college age and involved in radical politics, were attempting to chemically expand their own consciousness or perhaps mutate into some alien ideal of the hippie-as-superman or the Lizard King.(50) By the late 1960s, LSD had become an explosive catalyst in the political struggles of idealistic social reformers in the streets of America. A 1962 study by the Rand Corporation had suggested that LSD might operate as an antidote for political activism,(51) and indeed some historians now cite the expanding drug culture and excessive individualism it seemed to encourage as one likely cause of the abrupt scattering of the Movement coalition of New Left and Civil Rights organizations in late 1970.(52) Whether or not the Rand study suggests any specific intention by those who paid for it, the psychedelic counterculture, to the extent that it was based on the LSD experience (which it was, completely), must be considered first of all as one ironic legacy of the founders of American Intelligence, and an unintended consequence of weapons and tactics chosen in the epic ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Footnotes

40. Ibid. Clover Dulles began Jungian psychotherapy in 1945 in Switzerland, after being introduced to Jung by Mary Bancroft, who had become Allen Dulles’ mistress during the war and who was also described as a “groupie” of the great theoretician of abstract consciousness and metaphysics. Allen Dulles consulted Jung himself for advice on how to influence German culture toward democracy after the defeat of Hitler.
41. Dr. Oscar Janiger, who ran four of the studies in which Adele Davis participated, and Dr. Max Rinkel, the first person to bring LSD to the United States, were notable examples. (See Lee and Shlain.) However almost the whole point of the Social Sciences, especially psychology, from the end of World War II until well into the Cold War, was to support the world of the national security establishment and help develop more effective technologies of psychological warfare.
42. Simpson, Christopher; Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. People like Oscar Janiger had to willfully isolate themselves from the relevance of their work to strategic Cold War policy. Another view of this same connection is the evaluation after 1991 that the failure of U.S. Intelligence to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union amounted to no less than the failure of the social sciences themselves. LaQueur, Walter; The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
43. Lee and Shlain, pages 44-45. Hubbard was later given an official pardon and kudos by President Truman for his illegal activity, and he was still important enough decades later to receive birthday greetings from President Ronald Reagan (Lee and Shlain, page 293).
44. Huxley, Aldous. Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931-1963). Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer, eds. New York: Stonehill, 1977. Quoted in Lee and Shlain, page 48.
45. Lee and Shlain, page 93. The CIA had begun shutting off the supply of LSD and withdrawing support from private researchers as early as 1962, but beginning in 1965 new anti-drug laws made restrictions much tighter. Sandoz stopped marketing LSD entirely in 1966.
46. Ibid, page 54-55.
47. Quoted in Lee and Shlain, page 51.
48. See especially Stevens, Jay; Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Also see Lee and Shlain for many later comments and speculations about Hubbard from those who knew him as “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” It is almost impossible to imagine that Richard Helms and Sid Gottlieb at CIA were not informed of Al Hubbard’s exploits, though Hubbard himself convincingly claimed to hate the CIA for turning his beloved acid into a chemical warfare weapon.
49. The best source on this is Troy, Thomas F., Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency; Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981. This book was originally conceived to satisfy the curiosity of CIA employees about the history of their own institution. It was classified SECRET when it was finished in 1975, then re-edited and declassified. Donovan’s uniquely conspiratorial personality and his fascination with psychological warfare come through in a striking way, though the author did not purposely highlight those traits at all.
50. Morrison, Jim. “Not to Touch the Earth” song lyrics on the compact disc Waiting for the Sun by The Doors. Elecktra/Asylum Records, 1968. The final, exhausted line following a crashing rock crescendo at the end of this song is, “I am the Lizard King… I can do anything!” This may be a quintessential symbolic expression of the most radical aspects of the sixties cultural revolution. Rock writer Danny Sugarman described his first encounter with The Doors’ lead singer (“Nothing Would Ever Be the Same” reprinted in Bloom, Alexander and Wini Breines; Takin’ it to the streets: A Sixties Reader; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; page 299) as a personally apocalyptic event. Jim Morrison enthralled and terrorized his audiences. It wasn’t even acting, he really was insane; some creature-sorcerer, he wanted to be insane, just to refuse an insulting status as mere humanity.
51. McLothlin, William H. Long-Lasting effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes In Normals: An Experimental Proposal. The Rand Corporation: May, 1962.
52. Professor Nancy MacLean. Lectures to History C91, “The Sixties.” Northwestern University, Winter 1998.

(NEXT — PSYCHEDELIC GENERATIONS: ADELLE DAVIS AND GEORGE LEISEY)

SLOUCHING, part 4

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...)