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ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND |
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Chapter 8: Peaking In Babylon A GATHERING STORM There is the story of the Zen master who tells his student, "Don't think of a carrot." Naturally a carrot is the first image that pops into the student's mind. So, too, the establishment media constantly decried LSD and warned in shrill tones of an epidemic of drug abuse sweeping the nation. The net effect of the immense publicity, even though much of it was negative, was to arouse intense interest and curiosity, leading to ever-widening patterns of use. For in an era of generational disaffection the quickest way to spur adolescent action is to say, "Don't do it!" The evolution of the psychedelic scene was intimately bound up with the media coverage it attracted. Prior to the big publicity barrage, those who lived in the Haight, New York's East Village, and other hip redoubts did not necessarily think of themselves as belonging to an overarching "counterculture." The quantum leap from community to counterculture was precipitated by the first major media event, the San Francisco be-in of January 1967. The organizers of the be-in consciously sought to use the media to send a message throughout the country. On its own terms the event was an astounding achievement: the psychedelic butterfly fluttered through the TV cameras directly into the hearts and minds of America's restless youth. But the ramifications of this sudden exposure were ambiguous, double-edged. As a result of the be-in, Haight-Ashbury became a national symbol. Shortly thereafter the original fabric of the hip community began to unravel as young people responding to the "hippie temptation" (examined in a CBS documentary of that title) inundated the Haight. In fact it was the media doing the tempting, and the acid ghetto was trampled to death during the Summer of Love, leaving a social sewer in its place. A similar pattern was repeated in the East Village, where a combination of runaways, tourism, and Mafia heroin destroyed a creative scene that had been many years in the making. The psychedelic pioneers in New York were an informal group of beats, students, and pacifists who frequented an arcane bookstore on East Ninth Street run by Eric Loeb; it sold peyote buttons that were on display in the storefront window in the late 1950s. Street acid was available by 1963, and as more people turned on, the gathering places became more explicit: Ed Sanders' Peace Eye Bookstore, the Electric Circus performance space on Saint Mark's Place, Fillmore East on Second Avenue, Tompkins Square and Washington Square Park. There was also an array of coffeeshops, including the Psychedelicatessen, and other conspicuous hangouts offering copies of Inner Space, a psychedelic newsletter published by Lynn House. The topography of New York City made the situation all the more intense, and there was plenty of street action leading up to the be-in at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Easter Sunday 1967. The New York be-in, organized by Abbie Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and others, was inspired by its San Francisco prototype. Thousands of glassy-eyed youths smoked pot and gobbled acid while suspicious cops and TV cameramen surrounded the site. The psychedelic community quickly degenerated after this event, and a series of brutal drug murders in the fall of 1967 marked the end of an exotic social experiment. The decimation of the East Village and the Haight might have been the final chapter of a unique phase in cultural history if not for the profound impact these communities had on American society as a whole. Like a cueball scattering the opening shot, the media laserbeam broke open the energy cluster that had coalesced in these hip enclaves and spread the psychedelic seed throughout the country. Soon there were love-ins and be-ins in nearly every major city in the US as hippie colonies sprang up across the land. Wherever LSD appeared on the scene, it announced itself in obvious ways: long hair, way-out clothing, funny glasses, and overall freakiness. (Frank Zappa, leader of the Los Angeles-based rock group, the Mothers of Invention, defined "freaking out" as "a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express CREATIVELY his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.") People who turned on were entertained and enlightened by distinctive modes of art, film, dance, poetry, and, perhaps most important, music. The new electric sound, at once lyrical and dissonant, had broad appeal without losing any of its rebellious bite. For the first time in history young intellectuals and the young masses were not only grooving to the same beat but getting high on the same drugs. "No corporate leader can afford to ignore the changing social, political and intellectual standard summed up in the phrase 'the generation gap,"' lectured David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, to a group of executives at the University of Chicago's annual management conference in early 1968. By this time Madison Avenue had appropriated hip lingo to sell consumer goods, and snatches of popular songs could be heard in various advertising jingles. Opel promised to "light your fire," while a new brand of laundry detergent was touted as "out of sight." (The hippies, meanwhile, adapted the motto of the megacorporation: "Better living through chemistry.") The mystique of the Haight was ripped off by the bell-bottom salesmen and the promoters of Hair, a box-office triumph that took Broadway by storm in the fall of 1967. "LSD, LBJ, FBI, CIA," sang the cast of this widely acclaimed "tribal love-rock musical " which featured nudity, draft card burning, and an AM chartbuster hailing the day when peace would rule the planet and love would steer the stars. America may not have approved of its flower children, but commercially it ate them up. The styles associated with psychedelic drugs achieved widespread cultural diffusion throughout North America and the Western world thanks to the ubiquitous reach of the mass media. Even those who did not actually sample LSD were apt to wear their hair longer and partake, however indirectly, of the psychedelic groundswell. But LSD had a much deeper effect on those who actually experimented with the drug. The media fanfare surrounding Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love catalyzed the sudden explosion of the acid scene. Four million North Americans are said to have tried acid in the late 1960s, and the average user, according to an extensive survey by Dr. Sidney Cohen, Richard Alpert, and Lawrence Schiller, was taking a dose every three or four months. Seventy percent of the turned-on set were of high school or college age, and many of them were involved in radical politics at one time or another. The burgeoning acid scene raised more than a few eyebrows within the intelligence community, and a number of CIA-connected think tanks, including the Rand Corporation, [1] analyzed the broader questions relating to the social and political impact of LSD. Based in Santa Monica, California, the Rand Corporation played a crucial role in designing strategies for counter-revolution and pacification that were implemented in Vietnam. In the mid-1960s the think tank approach was expanded to include domestic issues; along this line Rand personnel examined the short and long-term effect of LSD on personality change. A Rand report by William McGlothlin refers to "changes in dogmatism" and political affiliation: "If some of the subjects are drawn from extreme right or leftwing organizations, it may be possible to obtain additional behavioral measure in terms of the number resigning or becoming inactive." While Rand Corporation specialists pondered whether LSD might be an antidote to political activism, the Hudson Institute, another think tank with strong ties to the intelligence community, kept tabs on shifting trends within the grassroots psychedelic movement. Founded by Herman Kahn, [2] one of America's leading nuclear strategists, the Hudson Institute specialized in classified research on national security issues. Kahn experimented with LSD on repeated occasions during the 1960s, and he visited Millbrook and other psychedelic strongholds on the East Coast. From time to time the rotund futurist (Kahn weighed over three hundred pounds) would stroll along Saint Mark's Place in the East Village, observing the flower children and musing on the implications of the acid subculture. At one point he predicted that by the year 2000 there would be an alternative "dropped-out" country within the United States. But Kahn was not overly sympathetic to the psychedelic movement. "He was primarily interested in social control," stated a Hudson Institute consultant who once lectured there on the subject of LSD. The psychedelic subculture and its relationship to the New Left and the political upheavals of the 1960s was the subject of an investigation by Willis Harmon, who currently heads the Futures Department at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Located in Palo Alto, California, this prestigious think tank received a number of grants from the US Army to conduct classified research into chemical incapacitants. Harmon made no bones about where he stood with respect to political radicals and the New Left. When Michael Rossman, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, visited SRI headquarters in the early 1970s, Harmon told him, "There's a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose." Harmon was turned on to LSD in the late 1950s by Captain Al Hubbard, the legendary superspy, who took a special interest in his new convert. Shortly thereafter Harmon became vice-president of the International Federation for Advanced Studies (IFAS), an organization devoted to exploring the therapeutic and problem solving potential of LSD. IFAS was the brainchild of Hubbard, who undoubtedly leaned on his political connections in Washington to insure that Harmon and his colleagues would be allowed to continue their drug investigations even after the first big purge of above-ground LSD research by the FDA in the early 1960s. During this period IFAS charged $500 for a single session of high-dose psychedelic therapy -- an arrangement that led some critics to accuse IFAS of bilking the public. Adverse publicity forced IFAS to disband in 1965, whereupon Harmon, who considered himself a disciple of the Captain, became director of the Educational Policy Research Center at SRI. In October 1968 he invited Hubbard, then living in semi-retirement in British Columbia, to join SRI as a part-time "special investigative agent." As Harmon stated in a letter to his acid mentor, "Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug usage prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of long-range educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available." Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant's fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for SRI. "His services to us," explained Harmon, "consisted in gathering various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at schools and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature." Hubbard was the ideal person for such a task. He boasted a great deal of experience both in the law enforcement field and in the use of psychedelic drugs. As a special agent for the FDA in the early 1960s, he led the first raids on underground acid labs, and a number of rebel chemists were arrested because of his detective work. The Captain was particularly irked when he learned that LSD in adulterated form was circulating on the black market. To Hubbard this represented degradation of the lowest order. The most precious spiritual substance on earth was being contaminated by a bunch of lousy bathtub chemists out to make a quick buck. The Captain was dead set against illicit drug use. "Impure drugs are very dangerous," he explained, "and the Law takes a dim view of it." He kept a sample of street acid for "comparative purposes" each time he busted an underground LSD factory during the 1960s; most of these outfits, Hubbard maintained, were run by the Mafia. Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers, he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut Captain was the quintessential turned-on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdos -- especially long-haired radical weirdos who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and the acid subculture. After conferring with Harmon, the Captain donned a khaki uniform, a gold-plated badge, a belt strung with bullets, and a pistol in a shoulder holster. That was the uniform he wore throughout his tenure as an SRI consultant, which lasted until the late 1970s. Ironically, while Harmon and Hubbard were probing the relationship between drugs and radical politics, a number of New Left activists grappled with a similar question. Political and cultural radicals from both sides of the Atlantic discussed the drug issue at a conference on "the dialectics of liberation," which took place in London during the summer of 1967. Some were wary of mixing acid and politics. "Don't give LSD to Che Guevara, he might stop fighting," said Dr. David Cooper, a British psychiatrist who feared that drugs might undermine political commitment (the same thesis put forward by the Rand Corporation). But others, such as Allen Ginsberg, saw great advantages in a "politics of ecstasy." The pro-LSD faction insisted that acid was a radicalizing factor and that psychedelics would continue to galvanize the youth rebellion. Obviously there was a great deal of confusion about LSD and its influence on the New Left. But an assessment of the overall impact of LSD cannot be couched solely in terms of whether acid "politicized" or "depoliticized" those who turned on, for the drug is capable of producing a wide range of reactions. A common mistake with respect to LSD was to attribute the personal effects of an acid trip to something inherent in the drug itself; as a result of this subtle transference, acid acquired the qualities of a particular mind-set or milieu, depending on who was experimenting with it. The love-and-peace vibrations thought to be intrinsic to the psychedelic high were largely an amplified reflection of the unique spirit that animated the mid-1960s, just as the CIA's obsession with LSD-induced anxiety and terror mirrored the Cold War paranoia of the espionage establishment. Strictly speaking, acid is neither a transcendental sacrament, as Leary claimed, nor an anxiety-producing agent, as initially defined by CIA and army scientists. Rather, it is a nonspecific amplifier of psychic and social processes. LSD "makes you more of what you are," Aldous Huxley concluded. "It gives each person what he or she needs." At the same time acid catalyzes whatever forces are already active in a given social milieu and brings forth those that are latent. Everyone who belongs to a particular culture shares, in the words of Peter Marin, "a condition, a kind of internal landscape, the psychic shape that a particular time and place assumes within a man as the extent and limit of his perceptions, dreams, and pleasure and pain." This internal landscape was jolted by a series of earthquakes in the 1960s and early 1970s, and psychedelic drugs intensified and accelerated each phase of the youth rebellion as it developed over the years. The crucial turning point occurred in 1967, when the grassroots acid scene was floodlit by the mass media and young people started turning on in greater numbers than ever before. This period marked the beginning of a new phase of political and countercultural transition. The media would be deeply implicated in everything that happened thereafter. In effect, the media catalyzed the widespread use of LSD, itself a catalyst, and the pace of events suddenly flew into high gear. The fuse had been lit in 1965, and now it was as if the second stage of that acid-fueled rocket had blasted into hyperspace. The fallout from the psychedelic explosion was enormous, reaching even those who shuddered at the prospect of turning on. Every sector of the New Left was affected by it, if only by contamination or the rush to denounce it. Soon the acid crazies would run amok, trashing what remained of the old political style and further upsetting the equilibrium of a movement that was already wobbling in the glare of publicity. But if LSD knocked things off-balance, it also gave the New Left "its first-ever dose of real fun," as Mairowitz put it, and a lot of young people wanted a piece of the action. _______________ Notes: 1. James Schlesinger, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense, is a senior strategic analyst at Rand. Henry Rowen, former Rand president, previously served as head of the CIA's National Intelligence Command. 2. A well-known futurist, Kahn coauthored a book called The Year 2000 with Anthony Wiener, a professor at MIT's Center for International Studies. Wiener had previously received a $12,000 grant from the Human Ecology Fund, which served as a cutout for funding numerous CIA behavior control studies under Operation MK-ULTRA.
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