ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

Postscript

Acid and After

Ronald Stark liked to brag to members of the Brotherhood that he had developed a new process for synthesizing LSD-25 of exceptional quality. But as was often the case with Stark, this was only a partial truth. Actually it was Stark's assistant in France, a young British chemist named Richard Kemp, who in 1970 discovered the cheap and easy method Stark took credit for. Kemp had been working for Stark in his French laboratories. Eventually they had a falling out, and Kemp left with his payoff -- 200 grams of pure LSD -- and returned to England.

A self-described political revolutionary, Kemp viewed LSD as a tool for furthering the radical cause. While living in a cottage in Wales, he gathered around him a core of like-minded individuals and set up an elaborate network for disseminating his product. During the mid-1970s Kemp's group succeeded the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as the main psychedelic distribution operation in the world. Kemp's high-quality acid flowed from the United Kingdom to France, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia, West Germany, and the US. The British smuggling ring, however, had none of the mythos attached to the Brotherhood. Their notoriety would only come after they were busted. For even as Kemp was completing a manufacturing run of a kilo and a half of crystalline LSD, the police were watching him closely.

Scotland Yard assigned twenty-eight detectives to nail Kemp's operation. The thirteen-month investigation became known as Operation Julie, so named after the key undercover agent, Sergeant Julie Taylor, who penetrated Kemp's network. (She was immortalized in the song by the British rock group the Clash: "Julie's been working for the drug squad ...") The police arrested a hundred and twenty people, including Kemp, in the spring of 1977. Six million doses of LSD were seized in the raid. (Curiously, all of the acid later disappeared, prompting speculation that the police may have sold the drug.) During the trial the prosecution claimed that Kemp's group produced half the world's supply of LSD in the mid-1970s. Kemp, unrepentant to the end, was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Sixteen others also received jail terms.

But this wasn't the end of the Julie story. By quirk of legal necessity, Kemp had to reveal the formula he used for making LSD. Once this new information entered into the public record, it quickly moved along the underground grapevine, sparking a major acid renaissance that continues to this day. A United Nations survey in the early 1980s noted that LSD was reappearing in considerable amounts in many countries. During this period tens of millions of doses were seized in a few busts in California. As any special agent for drug enforcement knows, supply like that means demand. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, 8% of today's high school seniors are using LSD, and 25% of people from eighteen to twenty-six years of age have experimented with hallucinogens.

Acid has indeed outlived the 1960s, but the psychedelic underground has changed in many ways. The recent recrudescence of LSD use has occurred without the press fanfare of years past. As John Lennon noted shortly before his death in 1980, "You don't hear about it any more, but people are still visiting the cosmos. We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That's what people forget. ... They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform."

The most prevalent form of LSD currently available on the black market is blotter paper soaked with the drug. The "blotters" are cut into small squares and adorned with various emblems: R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, rocket ships, the atomic rings, or Walt Disney characters such as Goofy and Mickey Mouse. The dosage level of street acid usually falls between 100 and 125 micrograms, which is half the average dose found on the black market during the 1960s. As one San Francisco-based dealer put it, "It's just another high now. Doses are lower, just enough to put a smile on your face, give you a buzz, not like the heavy colors and trips of the sixties."

The return of acid in the 1980s has spawned a new wave of psychedelic rock bands. These acts frequently dress in granny glasses, sport pudding-bowl haircuts, and play hits from the 1960s. In London the psychedelic bands constitute a movement of sorts on the club circuit, where they are known as the "Paisley Underground." But the bands openly proclaiming themselves psychedelic do not represent a unique genre of music; rather, they blend in with the contemporary pop music scene, where the parameters of personal and group identity have been pushed to the outer limits.

A few of the original psychedelic bands from San Francisco still tour -- most notably, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. The Dead made a mystical pact with their fans, vowing to carry the psychedelic torch as long as they can play their music. They still attract the old sixties Deadheads, as well as younger people who feel they are connecting with that era through the music. Cults have formed around legendary rock figures such as Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. (Morrison's gravesite in Paris is a magnet for young people who regularly come to pay their respects to the Lizard King.) Dr. David Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic reports that teenagers today are taking LSD and listening to Beatles records as a rite of passage. "They seek a nostalgic cultural experience, to individually experience what happened in the sixties," Smith said.

In the same spirit people still visit the Haight as a kind of pilgrimage. They come to the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury as if it were a shrine or a power place. Some take the ritual walk up the street to Golden Gate Park and sit atop "Hippie Hill" near the Polo Fields, where the first be-in was held. A few familiar places remain from the old days, such as the Free Clinic, and scattered street freaks still haunt the neighborhood. But these are ghosts from the past now that the area has been gentrified after ten years as a slum.

Many turned-on youth continue to view LSD as a sacrament and approach the drug experience with due respect and caution. But for others, acid is primarily a recreational buzz. Psychedelics are used by more people than ever before, appealing to a larger cross-section of American society -- from young debutantes tripping at the disco to high school joyriders downing acid with their six-packs. LSD has made inroads among blacks, Latins, and gays in addition to middle-class whites. The drug is prevalent on the club scene in big cities, as well as on the college campus. Today's students, whether buttoned-down or punked-out, seek a strong dose of intense fun, and that's what acid gives them. LSD parties are common on weekends with psychedelic clans hitting the drugs as heavily as they hit the books. It's for getting guiltlessly -- if not righteously -- high. LSD is one among many popular drugs on the campus scene: alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, nitrous oxide, Quaaludes, and new compounds such as "ecstasy" (an MDA-related substance) and ketamine (a "psychedelic anesthetic").

While more people are using psychedelics than ever before, bad trips are much less frequent, largely because the psychosocial matrix surrounding LSD has evolved. When the social and political movements symbolically entangled with LSD collapsed in the early 1970s, the climate informing expectations about the drug lost much of its emotional charge. The new generation of acid trippers has not been weaned on the psychedelic controversies of yesteryear, when taking LSD was tantamount to an act of social defiance. Without the shrill warnings about psychosis or chromosome damage, or all the hubbub about the glories of expanded consciousness, there are fewer freakouts and untoward incidents.

The recreational use of LSD as a "technology of the self" has its corollaries in the proliferating hi-tech leisure industry that includes computer video games, cable television, home video, and films whose multimillion-dollar special effects threaten to outstrip the theater of the mind. Ways of playing with reality are big business indeed. Many of today's TV commercials are more "psychedelic" than the most far-out acid poster of the 1960s. (Psychedelic poster art was recently shown in a special exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) The corporate cooptation of psychedelia is evident in the army's television ads, which feature flashing images, strobe effects, hard rock, and the slogan "Be all that you can be ... you can do it in the army."

The resurgence of LSD in the 1980s is part of a boom in recreational drug usage throughout the US and Western Europe (where a highly politicized counterculture continues to thrive in various cities, most notably Amsterdam and West Berlin). Marijuana is now a $15-to-$20-billion-a-year industry (making it the third-largest American business, behind Exxon and GM), even though federal allocations for drug law enforcement have grown more than 75%, to $1.2 billion, during the last five years. Although marijuana possession is currently a parking ticket fine in some places, the laws governing LSD are as stringent as ever. LSD remains classified as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for substances deemed to have no medical value whatsoever. Scientific investigations into LSD are at a complete standstill, and psychiatrists who once used the drug for therapeutic purposes are pessimistic about future prospects. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- these restrictions, an underground network of LSD therapists quietly persists in the United States.

Meanwhile the CIA, which has always been at the cutting edge of developments in psychopharmacology, continues to conduct secret research aimed at creating more sophisticated forms of chemical control. There are new superpowerful mind drugs that affect sensory modalities in highly specific ways. (One substance, for example, only alters auditory perception; under its influence all sounds become atonal, while other human faculties remain unaffected.) Scientists have developed other compounds with recreational applications, including aphrodisiacs and a "two-martini pill" that produces a euphoric state without the subsequent hangover. Some of these drugs -- such as "designer heroin" and "designer cocaine" -- have already moved from the laboratory to the street, and the consequences have been fatal.

The use of acid in a recreational context is a far cry from how the LSD pioneers of the 1950s -- both the spies and the doctors -- originally envisioned its future. It was Timothy Leary who first spoke of LSD in terms of "hedonic engineering." He promoted acid as a sacrament of play, the drug of homo ludens. "The American people today are quantum jumps more sophisticated," Leary said recently -- "About consciousness, about the nervous system ... about self-actualization and self-indulgence, about pleasure being itself a reward. Pleasure is now the number one industry in this country. Recreational travel, entertainment, sensory indulgence. There's no question about that being Number One. Now that was my goal."

Leary was granted an early parole for good behavior in 1976, shortly after sensational reports of secret CIA acid tests began to surface in the press. Publicity surrounding the sordid details of the CIA's drug programs only added to the negative mystique of LSD, giving it an even worse name. For Leary, however, these revelations were something of a pardon -- the same government that had put him behind bars for abusing drugs was guilty of far more heinous crimes.

Tim and Joanna split up as soon as he was released from jail. She left for the island of Grenada and points beyond. Her confidant, Dennis Martino, died of an apparent drug overdose in Spain in 1975. It wasn't long before Leary turned up on the college lecture circuit, hyping space migration and life extension with the same zeal he once displayed for psychedelics. His next venue was nightclubs, where he performed as a "stand-up philosopher," a self-described "cheerleader for change." It was soft stuff by sixties standards, but Leary still managed to stir up controversy in his public and private life. When he appeared as a guest on a TV talk show, Art Linkletter called the station. Linkletter, whose twenty-year-old daughter committed suicide in the mid-1960s, blames Leary and LSD for her death.

In February 1979 Leary showed up at an "LSD Reunion" in Los Angeles, hosted by Dr. Oscar Janiger. An animated discussion ensued among the thirty psychedelic pioneers who attended this private gathering. Dr. Humphry Osmond and Laura Huxley were there, along with Sidney Cohen, John Lilly, Willis Harmon, and Nick Bercel. The legendary Captain Al Hubbard, then seventy-seven years of age, swaggered into Janiger's home wearing his security uniform, with a pistol and a bandolier around his hip. "Oh, Al, I owe everything to you," Leary greeted the Captain. "The galactic center sent you down just at the right moment." To which Hubbard responded, "You sure as heck played your part." It was the last time most of them would see the Captain, for he died a few years later, not long after receiving a card from President Reagan wishing him a happy birthday.

Leary popped up in the news again when he was busted at his home in Beverly Hills in the spring of 1979. But the only drugs found were new brain-changers that were not yet illegal and virtually unknown to the general public. A few years later he went on tour with his old nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy. Both men had come a long way since the Millbrook days, when Liddy first made a name for himself by arresting the High Priest of LSD. Liddy went on to work for CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President) in Washington, serving as a "plumber" and hatchet man for Nixon. In this capacity he proposed dosing columnist Jack Anderson and other "enemies" of the Nixon administration with an LSD-like substance. After doing time for his involvement in the Watergate break-in, he gladly teamed up with Leary for a tongue-in-cheek debate that caricatured their former roles.

The Liddy-Leary spectacle provided additional fodder for a floodtide of anti-sixties propaganda that has reduced the memory of that era to a battered corpse. Nevertheless, the shockwaves of those tumultuous years continue to reverberate throughout society. The 1960s remain the watershed of our recent history, and the decade's warring impulses are still being played out on the cultural and political landscape. Ronald Reagan began his ascent to the White House by riding a crest of backlash sentiment against hippies, blacks, and student radicals in California. When Reagan became president, he "unleashed" the CIA, which continues to function as an international Pinkerton organization -- company cops running amok in the Third World and spying on domestic dissidents. Indeed, the concerns of the 1960s have hardly withered away. Racism, sexism, militarism, and economic injustice are still the burning issues of the day. Opposition movements arising in response to Reagan will champion these same causes. And the new wave of political activists will also inherit the complex and unresolved legacy of the 1960s.

The tremendous outburst of energy in the sixties did not succeed in revamping the American power structure, but it had a profound effect in other ways. Avenues of choice were irrevocably opened, and a new set of options became available to everyone. Experimenting with psychedelic drugs was one of these options. This practice, now firmly rooted in the culture for good or ill, will endure no matter what the legal restrictions may be. People are still starving with the same hungers, and they will take LSD to satisfy a deep-rooted need for wholeness and meaning. In all likelihood acid will continue to ravage as many people as it liberates and deceive as many as it enlightens. Whether it will play a more significant role in the future remains a matter of conjecture, for the psychedelic experience carries the impress of a constellation of social forces that are always shifting and up for grabs.

It's not over yet.

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