LSD and the CIA – November 2002 Scientist oversaw gave 'acid' to human guinea pigs
By History House - Thursday, 17 October, 2002
Copyright: History House
Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, has been a sacrament of artists, would-be prophets, and other such social chaff since the 1960s. Invented in 1938 by chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann while looking for an analeptic (circulatory stimulant), he found it had no effect on lab animals and forgot all about it. Years later, on the fateful day 16 of April, 1953, he accidentally absorbed a little through his fingertips and went flying on the first acid trip. By then the CIA had a ten-year-old program running, looking for interrogation drugs and truth serums. They'd played with caffeine, barbiturates, peyote, and marijuana. They also tried to get subjects to kill while under hypnosis, rounding out an operation seemingly concocted from the plots of situation comedies. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain report in their Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, that by 1953, the CIA had authorized project MK-ULTRA, designed to perfect mind-control drugs during the Cold War.
Conceived by Richard Helms of the Clandestine Services Department, it went beyond the construction of mere truth serums and ventured into disinformation, induction of temporary insanity, and other chemically-aided states. The director of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, figured LSD's potential as an interrogative agent paled in comparison to its capacity to publicly humiliate. Lee and Shlain note the CIA imagined a tripping public figure might be amusing, producing a memo that says giving acid "to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc." But Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain, agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a ... colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.... The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party ... a Security memo writer... concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did 'not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.'
The in-house testing phase now over, MK-ULTRA decided to use the drug surreptitiously in the street to gauge its effects. They contract-hired George Hunter White, a narcotics officer, to set up Operation Midnight Climax, according to Lee and Shlain, "in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment." Lee and Shlain go on to comment, "when [White] wasn't operating a national security whorehouse," White threw wild parties for his "narc buddies" with his ready supply of prostitutes and drugs. He sent vouchers for "unorthodox expenses" to Gottlieb, and later said, "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" In case one needs reminding, these claims are backed by recently unclassified information. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Major General William Creasy, chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps at the time, felt that psychoactive chemicals such as LSD would be the weapons of the future. He felt that, say, spiking a city's water supply with acid and taking over would be much more humane than firebombing it. "I do not contend," he told This Week magazine in May 1959, "that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect. But warfare is never pleasant... would you rather be temporarily deranged... by a chemical agent, or burned alive...?" This sounds humanitarian: why kill if unnecessary, eh? Unfortunately, Creasy wasn't all roses and sunshine. Lee and Shlain reveal that
Major General Creasy bemoaned the fact that large-scale testing of psychochemical weapons in the United States was prohibited. "I was attempting to put on, with a good cover story," he grumbled, "to test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud was laid down on a city. It was denied on reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me."
Major General? And they say the Army is a true meritocracy.... Anyway, not to be outdone by the CIA, the Army Chemical Corps later came up with quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ, coined a super-hallucinogen. It affected individuals for three days, "although symptoms - headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior - have been known to persist for as long as six weeks."
Dr. Van Sim, chief of the Clinical Research Division, tried all new chemicals himself before subjecting volunteers to them. "Did he enjoy getting high, or were his acid trips simply a patriotic duty?" ask Lee and Shlain. Sim, who had tried acid on "several" occasions, reported, "It's not a matter of compulsiveness or wanting to be the first to try a material." He later described his first experience with BZ: "It zonked me for three days. I kept falling down and the people at the lab assigned someone to follow me around with a mattress." He later received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, cited for "exposing himself to dangerous drugs 'at the risk of grave personal injury.'" Talk about lying down on the job....
Some 2800 soldiers were subsequently exposed to BZ, most of them knowingly. Air Force enlisted man Robert Bowen noted one paratrooper temporarily lost all muscle control and later seemed mad: "The last time I saw him he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar." We find that an acceptable alternative to a nuclear arsenal around here, but feel it might behoove the Government to stop abusing its own army and direct its efforts exclusively to those, say, in middle management positions.
http://www.historyhouse.com/
World: Discoverer of LSD Urges Medical Use of the Drug – Q2 2003 Discoverer of LSD Urges Medical Use of the Drug
Published by Reuters - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: Reuters
VIENNA (Reuters Health) - The man who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD 60 years ago this week says its use should be allowed under controlled circumstances, including to help psychiatric patients.
Dr. Albert Hofmann, now 97, made the discovery of the properties of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) at the Sandoz pharmaceutical research laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, on April 19, 1943.
The road to the discovery started in 1929 when he shunned the synthetic chemistry so fashionable at the time to work on the chemistry of natural products.
By 1935 he had become interested in the alkaloids of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye. It had poisoned thousands in the Middle Ages by contaminating bread, although medieval midwives had also used it tentatively, and sometimes lethally, to induce childbirth.
Three years later, Hofmann developed the first artificial ergot alkaloid, clearing the way for its safer use in obstetrics. Then, looking for other uses, he produced a twenty-fifth derivative -- labeled D-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25.
It aroused no special interest, and testing was discontinued after Hofmann noted that experimental animals showed some signs of disturbance.
From his home in Rittimatte, in Burg, Switzerland, the retired researcher told Reuters Health how, five years later, he came to fully appreciate what had happened to the animals when "on a peculiar presentiment," he synthesized a batch of the abandoned LSD-25 and experienced his first "trip" after spilling some on his hand.
Hofmann said: "I noticed strange effects coming over me in the lab. I was not sure what caused them. I thought maybe it was the chloroform. But then I began to realize that it must have been the LSD-25."
Three days later, on April 19, he decided to do a test by ingesting 400 micrograms, "a massive dose of five times the recommended amount."
"The lab assistant took me home and called a doctor. It was a hellish trip at first. But as I was coming out it was wonderful."
Years later -- after many others had repeated Hofmann's trip -- the drug was banned worldwide for researchers and chemical adventurers alike, a move that Hofmann said caused him great sadness.
"The problem was that in the beginning there was not enough care taken," he argued. "It came on the drug scene very quickly, especially in America. The doses people were getting were not controlled, were not right."
"I believe the answer is to make it possible for doctors to get access to it for therapeutic use like they do heroin or morphine. There are so many potentials for it -- people who respond to no other treatment other than LSD, for example. But it is banned, even though many, many doctors want to use it."
He claimed the drug is safe if carefully controlled, but the ban makes it more attractive and dangerous. "It is glamorous to chase something that's banned."
"I hope the ban is lifted," Hofmann added. "I am 97 now, and this is my hope for the future."
But Dr. Fabrizio Schifano, a senior lecturer at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London, told Reuters Health: "Nothing useful came out of the research of that time."
The consultant psychiatrist and pharmacologist sees no need for a relaxation of the ban.
"In twenty years I have never had the idea of giving psychedelic drugs to any of my patients," he said. "They have enough problems. I would like to say it should be banned forever, but I really don't want to offend a great researcher."
http://www.reuters.com/
World: LSD: A dose of madness – September 2002 dose of madness - Forty years ago, two psychiatrists adminstered history's largest dose of LSD.
By The Guardian - Sept 18 2002
Copyright: The Guardian
Mystified by the new wonder drug LSD, the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his colleague at the University of Oklahoma, Chester M Pierce, were looking for a new way to investigate the drug in 1962. They came up with an idea so outlandish it could only happen in the world of experimental psychology.
Male elephants are prone to bouts of madness; LSD seems to cause a temporary form of madness; perhaps if we combine the two, they reasoned, we could make an elephant go mad. Their research paper about this venture is a tragicomedy of high hopes and lessons not learnt. For only mindless optimism and blind faith can account for the events that unfolded on a hot summer day in Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo 40 years ago.
Having established that "one of the strangest things about elephants is the phenomenon of going 'on musth'," a form of madness that sees the animal "run berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time he may attack or attempt to attack anything in his path," West and Pierce enrolled the assistance of Warren D Thomas of the local zoo.
Thomas volunteered the services of Tusko, a 3,200kg, 14-year-old male elephant. They were all set to establish what an elephant on acid would get up to. One crucial point had to be decided - how much LSD would it take to make him run amok? Research had established that lower animals are less susceptible to the mind-altering effects of LSD than humans. It would be a waste to have an elephant ready to go and then miss out on the unique opportunity by giving it an insufficient dose.
West and Pierce decided to go for it. While 297mg might not sound a lot, it is enough LSD to make nearly 3,000 people experience hours of "marked mental disturbance," to use the researchers' phrase. This was the record-breaking quantity of the most potent psychoactive substance in existence fired into one of Tusko's rumps with a rifle-powered dart at 8am on August 3. What happened next is captured with an oddly moving economy of expression in the clinical voice of the research paper:
"His mate (Judy, a 15-year-old female) approached him and appeared to attempt to support him. He began to sway, his hindquarters buckled, and it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain himself upright. Five minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily on to his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus." An hour and 40 minutes later, Tusko was declared dead. Surely a more anticlimactic moment or a greater tragedy was never recorded by scientists.
The animal they had hoped would stomp around its pen in mad fury had fallen to the ground and slowly expired in the dust. But they drew something positive out of what in anyone else's view would be considered an abject failure. West and Pierce's conclusion, a staggering feat of positive thought, sums up an era's belief in the infallibility of science: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Men convicted for huge LSD lab operation 01.04.2003 3.11 pm
SAN FRANCISCO - Two Californians who operated a drug laboratory that could produce as much as US$100 million ($180 million) of LSD in little over a month have been convicted on drug charges.
William Pickard, 57, and Clyde Apperson, 47, were arrested in Kansas in November 2000 as they transported an illegal LSD lab in a rented truck. The Drug Enforcement Administration called it the largest LSD lab seizure ever.
Both men were from the San Francisco area, once a hot bed of the 1960s drug counter-culture.
The jury in the 11-week trial at a federal court in Topeka, Kansas heard evidence that the two men previously had a laboratory in Santa Fe, New Mexico that could produce 2.2 pounds of LSD every five weeks - enough to make 10 million doses.
The two men face at least 10 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute more than 10 grams of LSD and on one count of intent to distribute the drug.
They are scheduled to be sentenced in Kansas in August. Pickard is already in federal custody and Apperson was remanded into custody on Monday.
- REUTERS
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