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by American Dream » Sun Nov 16, 2014 11:22 pm
by American Dream » Mon Nov 17, 2014 3:05 pm
talk.politics.drugs ›
CIA , LSD and the Moro kidnapping
1 post by 1 author
Stephen Abrams
2/4/98
Dr. Ronald Stark ran the Brotherhood of Eternal Love using Timothy Leary as
a front-man. According to the Italian Courts, Stark worked for the CIA from
1960 onwards. He was posted to top secret NATO activities connected with
Gladio and its variants. In 1975 Stark was arrested in Italy and sentenced
to 14 years in prison. At his apeal he claimed to be a Palestinian named
Khouri Ali and gave his evidence in Arabic. Stark took over the Red Brigade
from within prison. A detailed account is given by Philip Willan in "The
Puppet Masters - The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy." (Constable 1991;
ISBN 0 09 470590 9) Stark is also featured in "The Brotherhood of Eternal
Love" by the Times' crime correspondent Stuart Tendler, and other books
(e.g, "Acid Dreams" and "Operation Julie".
In Italy it is widely believed that Stark and his lieutenant David Linker
organised the Moro kidnapping. This accusation has resurfaced in response to
the abortive trial of Andreotti. When Stark was in prison in Italy, the US
was invited to apply for his extradition, as he had been indicted by the US
Senate as proprietor of the Brotherhood. Over 100 others indicted were
sent to prison, but when Stark eventually returned to the US in 1983 all
charges against him were dropped. (The Italians released Stark in April,
1979 upon receipt of evidence proving his connection with the CIA.) When the
material about Gladio resurfaced at the end of the '80s, the Italians tried
to extradite Stark to continue his 14 year sentence and face further charges
connected with Moro. The Americans provided a death certificate backdated
to 1984, but Stark was reported at the Brotherhood Ranch as late as 1986 in
good health. If still alive he is now 60.
The most important new material in David Black's book, which is not
particularly reliable or comprehensive, is the publication of a photograph
of Stark at Hilton Hall. Otherwise, the only known photos of Stark are
unrecognizeable mug shorts and passport photos in disguise. This picture may
well help jog memories in Italy and elsewhere and it is to be hoped it will
be reproduced in the Italian media. The original is in colour and very
striking. It can be obtained from Black's publisher, Vision paperbacks.
I can add some information about the whereabouts of David Linker, who is
currently the object of as supposed Interpol search. Two years ago Linker
was living in Holland, where he retrained as a market gardner.
If the US did knock off Moro, that was an even more serious crime than the
Kennedy assassination. I am not a conspiracy buff but cannot resist adding
that, according to Willan, the man who originally accused Stark and Linker,
Martin Woodrow Brown, was himself arrested in connexion with the Kennedy
assassination. Stark told me that in 1963 he was posted to the White House
where he worked for the DIA. The idea of a connexion between the Kennedy
and Moro asassinations is probably too good, or too bad to be true.
Does anyone in California have anything to add?
Vision paperbacks advise that David Black's book sold 5,000 copies in its
first month and has now been reprinted with corrections. Of course, there
hasn't been a single review.
American Dream » Tue Oct 28, 2014 8:57 am wrote: http://psypressuk.com/2014/03/25/a-psyc ... 1938-2012/
A Psychedelic Trickster: A Steve Abrams Obituary (1938-2012)
BY PSYCHICDELI · MARCH 25, 2014This obituary appeared in the PsypressUK 2013: Anthology of Pharmacography.
by American Dream » Mon Dec 01, 2014 7:22 pm
Stranger in a Strange Land: The Curious Life of Ronald Stark Part III
Welcome to the third installment in my examination of the life and times of LSD baron Ronald Hadley Stark, one of the most bizarre figures the 1960s counterculture spawned (which in and of itself is something of an accomplishment). Stark is a difficult figure to get a handle on and I am greatly indebted to the work of Skilluminati for the excellent article published on that website several years ago concerning Stark. Those of you looking for a preview of where this series is headed are strongly advised to check out that piece. But moving along.
During part one I addressed what little is known of his background prior to 1969, with a special emphasis on his alleged ties to the Bellevue Medical Hospital and to possessing patents his father smuggled out of Nazi Germany. With the second installment I noted Stark's obsession with Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and briefly addressed Heinlein's deep background. I also touched upon Stark's time in Paris during May 68, his mingling with radical groups such as the IRA and the Angry Brigade committed to the "armed struggle" and the relationship that developed between the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Weather Underground after Stark became involved with the former.Stark's possible modus operandi?
At the conclusion of that piece I noted that Stark was the only figured linked to the Brotherhood whom authorities declined to pursue charges against despite his by that time decade-spanning endeavors in the international drug trade. With this piece I'd like to begin addressing Stark's British LSD operations which still have not gained nearly as much attention as his dealings with the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love (at least in the US, anyway). So, let us start things off my noting a partnership that developed in 1968 between two figures whom Stark would soon befriend:"In 1968 Richard Kemp, a Liverpool University science drop-out and his partner, Christine Bott, a doctor of medicine, met David Solomon, the writer on LSD and cannabis research. At Solomon's request Kemp attempt to synthesize THC, the active ingredient of cannabis. This venture failed but in early 1969 they decided to try making LSD after Solomon managed to obtain some ergotamine tartrate. Kemp got to work in a makeshift lab in the shed of his parents' house in Liverpool and succeeded in making dark syrupy acid. Although it was rather poor quality, it was good enough to sell and Kemp decided to have another go a few months later. At this point, summer 1969, Ronald Stark arrived in Solomon's house in Cambridge and introduced himself, saying he had obtained Solomon's address someone he met in Parisian radical circles. Solomon soon told Stark about Kemp's promising work and at Stark's request, invited Kemp to meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance.' A meeting was convened at Stark's rooms at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on Pall Mall."
(Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, David Black, pg. 119)
Before we can get on with the fruit's of this meeting, a bit need's to be said about the enigmatic figure of David Solomon. Here's a bit concerning his background:"David Solomon left the United States with his family in 1966 as a rising authority on drugs. The man who first took mescaline as a magazine assignment after reading Huxley's books turned from jazz criticism to a series of works in which he pulled together and edited the views of artists, philosophers and experimenters on drugs. The books on LSD and marijuana added, for their readers at least, a gloss of respectability to the growing drug culture. Many of them might well grow out of the culture eventually, but Solomon did not. In his early forties he did not shrug aside the faith he had acquired. The psychedelics – to which he had been introduced in the first fevered period of lay interest, becoming part of an LSD pipeline in the IFIF days – were a natural part of an unconventional philosophy he already accepted.
"From the United States the Solomon family moved to Majorca where their friends included the poet Robert Graves. But they did not stay long. Arrested by the police for drug possession, Solomon left the island without paying the court fine. In late 1967, he moved to Britain and settled in Cambridge."
(The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stewart Tendler & David May, pgs. 140-141)Solomon
Let us pause here so I can make a few points. The above-mentioned IFIF stands for International Federation for Freedom. This organization was a nonprofit group established by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert probably some time in early 1963. It was a advocacy group for psychedelics and quickly attracted some three-thousand dues paying members. Presumably Solomon was among this group. In summer 1963 the group established its headquarters at a hotel in Zihuatanejo, Mexico and soon drew the ire of local authorities. Some six weeks later they returned to United States after being booted out of Mexico.
It was at this point that Leary encountered the notorious William Mellon Hitchcock (of whom I've written much more on before here) and relocated to the heir's family estate in Millbrook, New York. For a time Leary and his followers would reside here. It was at this location that "Farmer" John Griggs journeyed to speak to Leary before founding the Brotherhood. And it was here a representative of Stark's would travel to and be sent in the direction of the Brotherhood. The go-between was David Solomon, who seems to have been involved with Leary for several years by this point."Farmer John Griggs (right) with Leary (center)
Leary was hardly the only acquaintance Solomon had by this point with a interest in psychedelics, however. There's also the curious relationship his family, as noted above, had with the famed poet and mythologist Robert Graves. Graves himself expressed an interest in psychedelics in some of his mythological works such as The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. He also kept some interesting company during his time on Majorca."... Graves was a close friend of William Sargant, author of the standard text on mind control and brainwashing, The Battle for the Mind, to which book Graves even contributed a chapter. According to Sargant's introduction, he credits Graves with having encouraged him to complete the work while he stayed at Graves' home in Majorca, Spain..."
(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pg. 91)Graves
by American Dream » Tue Dec 02, 2014 7:59 pm
by American Dream » Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:15 pm
“Either way they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of a dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating while reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe as a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books […] Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut Oedipa, out of your skull”.
-Thomas, Pynchon. 1965. The Crying of Lot 49, 117-118.
by American Dream » Sun Dec 07, 2014 10:40 am
American Dream » Fri Jul 12, 2013 1:36 pm wrote:ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND
In September 1967 the Beatles went on an adventurous trip modeled after the Merry Pranksters' odyssey. Loading a large school bus with freaks and friends, they headed for the British countryside. Like the Pranksters, they also made a movie -- an ad-lib, spontaneous dream film entitled Magical Mystery Tour (with an album of the same name). During this period there was an abundance of LSD in the Beatles family thanks to Owsley, who supplied several pint-sized vials of electric liquid along with a cache of little pink pills. Lennon was at the height of his acid phase. He used to "trip all the time," as he put it, while living in a country mansion stocked with an extravagant array of tape recorders, video equipment, musical instruments, and whatnot. Since money was no object, he was able to fulfill any LSD-inspired whim at any time of day or night.
By his own estimate Lennon took over one thousand acid trips. His protracted self-investigation with LSD only exacerbated his personal difficulties, as he wrestled with Beatledom and his mounting differences with Paul over the direction the group should take, or even if they should continue as a group. Unbeknownst to millions of their fans, the Beatles, even at the height of their popularity, were well along the winding road to breakup. That acid was becoming problematic for Lennon was evident on some of his psychedelic songs, such as "I Am the Walrus," with its repeated, blankly sung admission "I'm crying."
Eventually the mind-boggled Beatle couldn't stand it anymore. He got so freaked out that he had to stop using the drug, and it took him a while to get his feet back on the ground. "I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego," he later explained, "and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary's [the psychedelic manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead] and all that shit. We were going through a whole game that everyone went through, and I destroyed myself.... I destroyed my ego and I didn't believe I could do anything."
Lennon's obsession with losing his ego typified a certain segment of the acid subculture in the mid and late 1960s. Those who got heavily into tripping often subscribed to a mythology of ego death that Leary was fond of preaching. The LSD doctor spoke of a chemical doorway through which one could leave the "fake prop-television-set America" and enter the equivalent of the Garden of Eden, a realm of unprogrammed beginnings where there was no distinction between matter and spirit, no individual personality to bear the brunt of life's flickering sadness. To be gratefully dead, from the standpoint of acid folklore, was not merely a symbolic proposition; the zap of superconsciousness that hit whenever a tab of LSD kicked the slats out of the ego might in certain instances be felt as an actual death and rebirth of the body (as the psychiatric studies of Dr. Stanislav Grof seemed to indicate). Acid could send people spinning on a 360-degree tour through their own senses and rekindle childhood's lost "tense of presence," as a Digger broadside stated.
But this experience was fraught with pitfalls, among them a tendency to become attached to the pristine vision, to want to hang on to it for as long as possible. Such an urge presumably could only be satisfied by taking the "utopiate" again and again. But after countless trips and sideshows of the mind one arrived at an impasse: "All right, my mind's been blown.... What's next?" Little could be gained from prolonged use of the drug, except perhaps the realization that it was necessary to "graduate acid," as Ken Kesey said. Oftentimes this meant adopting new methods to approximate or recreate the psychedelic experience without a chemical catalyst -- via yoga, meditation, organic foods, martial arts, or any of the so-called natural highs. That was what the Beatles concluded when they jumped off the Magical Mystery Tour for a fling with the Maharishi and Transcendental Meditation. "Acid is not the answer," said George Harrison. "It's enabled people to see a bit more, but when you really get hip, you don't need it." Ditto for McCartney: "It was an experience we went through ... We're finding new ways of getting there."
For many who turned on during the 1960s there was a sense that LSD had changed all the rules, that the scales had been lifted from their eyes and they'd never be the same. The drug was thought to provide a shortcut to a higher reality, a special way of knowing. But an acid trip's "eight-hour dose of wild surmise," as Charles Perry put it, can have unexpected consequences. People may find themselves straddling the margins of human awareness where all semblance of epistemological decorum vanishes and form and emptiness play tricks on each other. Things are no longer anchored in simple location but rather vibrate in a womb of poetic correspondences. From this vantage point it is tempting to conclude that all worlds are imaginary constructions and that behind the apparent multiplicity of discernible objects there exists a single infinite reality which is consciousness itself. Thus interpreted, consciousness becomes a means mistaken for an end -- and without an end or focus it becomes an inversion, giving rise to a specious sort of logic. If the "real war" is strictly an internal affair and each person is responsible for creating the conditions of his own suffering by projecting his skewed egotistical version of reality onto the material plane, does it not follow that the desire to redress social ills is yet another delusion? In this "ultimate" scheme of things all sense of moral obligation and political commitment is rendered absurd by definition.
Herein lay another pitfall of the tripping experience. Even after they stopped taking LSD, many people could still hear the siren song, a vague and muffled invitation to a "higher" calling. Those who responded to that etheric melody were plunged willy-nilly into an abstract vortex of soul-searching, escaping, and "discovering thyself." Some were intensely sincere, and their quest very often was lonely and confusing. The difficulties they faced stemmed in part from the fact that advanced industrial society does not recognize ego loss or peak experience as a particularly worthy objective. Thus it is not surprising that large numbers of turned-on youth looked to non-Occidental traditions -- Oriental mysticism, European magic and occultism, and primitive shamanism (especially American Indian lore) -- in an attempt to conjure up a coherent framework for understanding their private visions.
Quite a few acidheads and acid graduates subscribed to the Eastern belief that reality is an illusion. They were quick to mouth the phrases of enlightenment -- karma, maya, nirvana -- but in their adaptation these concepts were coarsened and sentimentalized. The hunger for regenerative spirituality was often deflected into a pseudo-Oriental fatalism: "Why fret over the plight of the world when it's all part of the Divine Dance?" This slipshod philosophy was partially due to the effects of heavy acid tripping -- "the haze that blurs the corner of the inner screen," as David Mairowitz said, "a magic that insinuates itself 'cosmically,' establishing spectrum upon confusing spectrum in the broadening of personal horizons. It could cloud up your telescope on the known world and bring on a delirium of vague 'universal' thinking." Or it might just reinforce what poet John Ashbery described as "the pious attitudes of those spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing."
http://www.american-buddha.com/aciddreams.7summer.htm
by American Dream » Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:34 pm
Stranger in a Strange Land: The Curious Times of Ronald Stark Part IV
Welcome to the fourth installment in my examination of the life and times of the enigmatic LSD baron Ronald Hadley Stark. From 1969 till the late 1970s networks Stark was involved with would dominate the international trade in acid, one of several contraband items Stark dealt in. Stark would rub shoulders with many of the key figures of the 1960s counterculture as well an individual or two with a deep background. As I've stated throughout this series, this researcher is greatly indebted to the fine work done by Skilluminati and readers looking for a quick run down of Stark's life are advised to check out the groundbreaking article already published there.
For those of you just joining me, here's a brief rundown of what's been covered thus far: During the first installment I went over what little information is available concerning Stark's background prior to 1969 and briefly addressed his introduction to the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love. With the second installment I noted the heavy influence Robert A Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress had on Stark as well as outlining Heinlein's own curious life; I also addressed the down fall of the Brotherhood and the militant groups Start kept ties with during the early 1970s. With the third and most recent installment I considered the origins of the "Microdot Gang", the British LSD syndicate that replaced the Brotherhood after 1973 as the world's leading supplier in the mid-1970s. With this installment I'll finish up with the Microdot Gang, among other things, so on with the show:
Stark in theory broke from chemist Richard Kemp after 1970 and the ties between the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Microdot Gang theoretically vanished. Kemp allegedly set out on his own with the assistance of his partner, Christine Bott, Stark's old associate (and a former member of the OSS) David Solomon, and a new partner named Henry Todd. Around the time the Brotherhood was being rounded up by the DEA the Microdot Gang was just coming into its own."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... 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 the 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."
(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pgs. 288-289)
by American Dream » Mon Dec 08, 2014 8:51 am
A Brief History of Acid Spikings
November 20, 2014
by Mike Pearl
In March, Ronnie Morales and his girlfriend Jessica Rosado bought some allegedly LSD-spiked steaks for themselves and their two kids at a Tampa Walmart. The ensuing family trip became national news, and involved the family going to the hospital, where the nine-months-pregnant Rosado gave birth. Eight months later, no one knows where the heck that acid came from; it emerged yesterday that Tampa police have turned up nothing in their investigation, even after checking the whole supply chain from slaughterhouse to retail floor.
The story of the Walmart steaks is a bit confusing—for one thing, the acid could have easily been destroyed when the steaks were cooked, since LSD hates heat. It seems more likely that the drug was in their water, or a side dish, not the meat.
In the decades-long history of mythical acid spikings, nothing ever quite adds up. Often, between eyedropper and mouth, there's a gap in time and space where motives can become shrouded and blame is misallocated.
The CIA's MKULTRA Mind-Control Scheme - 1953
By the time former CIA agent Sidney Gottleib died in 1999, the project known as MKULTRA had ceased being regarded as a conspiracy theory that was too farfetched and too downright psychopathic to be true. Instead it turned out to just be another sad chapter in the big book of fucked-up shit perpetrated by the American government. Essentially, the CIA figured that if acid could alter perception and cognition, it only stood to reason that that power could be harnessed for mind control and interrogation purposes. That resulted in horrible experiments during which lots and lots of people—including the johns of San Francisco prostitutes, mental patients, and an entire French town—were involuntarily dosed with acid and very few of them had a good time.
Perhaps the most famous individual case of a CIA spiking is the story of Frank Olson a military scientist. One night, a colleague handed Olson a glass of Cointreau, which he assumed was just a normal glass of orange liqueur—if such a thing exists—and he drank it. According to legend, in the ensuing trip, he jumped out a window, thinking he could fly, and fell to his death instead.
But other facts lead away from the idea that he was killed by drugs: Olson was troubled, was trying to quit his job, and had also been recently roped into a violent interrogation experiment in which he'd had his skull cracked with the butt of a gun. LSD was just one of many of the stressors that had been in his life that month, which is why his death leap didn't occur until nine days after his acid trip.
The Beatles' Dentist Giving Them LSD-Laced Coffee - 1965
Something happened involving the Beatles, a dentist, and coffee in 1965, but we'll never know exactly what. The accounts we have are from the two dead Beatles, and their stories contradict each other a little—long story short, a dentist named John Riley gave John Lennon, George Harrison, and their wives some LSD-laced coffee, maybe without really telling them what was in it first. The best part of Harrison's version is the part about dentist John Riley's alleged pervy intentions:I'm sure he thought it was an aphrodisiac. I remember his girlfriend had enormous breasts and I think he thought there was going to be a big gang-bang and that he was going to get to shag everybody.
The rest of the story is just the usual stuff: thinking an elevator is on fire, Harrison's wife trying to break a window, and driving really slow in a Mini Cooper (don't drive on acid). It's better if you hear the story in goofy Beatles accents:
Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests - 1968
One of the central figures involved in turning LSD from a scary weaponized chemical to a counterculture staple was Ken Kesey, as Tom Wolfe documented in his seminal 1968 book on the subject:This new San Francisco-LA LSD thing, with wacked-out kids and delirious rock 'n' roll, made it seem like the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among the youth—which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
And I know, Ken Kesey is a hero of yours, but here's the thing: If you read back through the book and refresh your memory about what Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were doing back then, it kinda sucked. They weren't telling people they were giving them acid, or even what it was, since people were still figuring out what LSD was back then. When people stopped by the Magic Bus, they were just handed Kool-Aid and told to drink up.
People who didn't pass the test would freak out, and if that happened, the Pranksters would put a microphone in front of them and broadcast the sound of their terror through loudspeakers. Some of the Pranksters started to doubt the ethics of what they were doing, probably because what they were doing sounds pretty dickish.
by American Dream » Sun Dec 14, 2014 12:20 pm
by American Dream » Thu Dec 18, 2014 6:20 pm
Rock Scully and David Dalton on “The Band That Changed History”
by Rock Scully and David Dalton on December 17, 2014
Last night, longtime Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully lost his battle with lung cancer. He was 73. In August of 2005, Relix documented the ten year anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death. In that issue, Scully and David Dalton penned this piece about the early days of the Dead.
by American Dream » Sat Dec 20, 2014 10:27 pm
After he made his initial studies of the properties of lysergic acid in 1043, Hoffman turned on Werner Stoll, the lab collaborator's son, and Stoll turned on his patients--sixteen schizophrenics and twenty "normals." The results of this experiment were reported in 1947 in the Swiss Journal of neurology. From here on this psychedelic message quickly spread.
The decade following Stoll's initial report saw LSD enter the heads of psychiatric patients, volunteers and, of course, psychotherapists. In 1949 the molecule came to America via psychologist Max Rinkle. A few years later in Canada, a group of psychologists and related workers headed by Drs. Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer began giving it to alcoholics in the hopes of sobering them through artificial d.t.'s. Instead many saw the light, and psychedelic was born as a word and perhaps a philosophical concept as well.
Most of the early work with LSD was done with small doses--often only 30 to 50 micrograms and rarely over 100. Hofmann's opinion is that 250 micrograms is the maximum dosage, and he felt his initial experience on that amount was an overdose. Large single-shot doses were first suggested by Al Hubbard, a former Canadian uranium salesman, considered a wild man by hi associates in alcoholic therapy.
In the late Fifties in Los Angeles, a number of psychologists began to administer LSD to patients for therapeutic purposes. Via this process they managed to turn on such popular figures s TV comedian Steve Allen, the first o announce his turn-on on television. Gary Grant credited LSD with enabling him to become a parent for the first time. One fascinating record from this period is My Self and I, by Constance Newland, the Thelma Moss of recent Kirlian and psychotronic fame. By about 1957, according to the writer Chester Anderson, a substantial leak led from the Sandoz plant in Hanover, New jersey, to Manhattan's East Village, Peyote, pot, and eventually LSD were the main condiments used by the Beats to turn on--and they were also among the most active proselytizers. But word passed quickly of other possibilities for mind expansion. Alan watts described this type of experience as "instant satori" in his 1959 book This Is It. Ginsberg and Burroughs soon were bringing back additional tales relating to the yage intoxication of South America. Though there was much about their reports and those of others indicating unpleasant effects, a search for mind alteration was clearly part of the ethos, and many were turned on in the process.
The Chilean psychologist Claudio Naranjo acquired yage after deciding he wanted to go into country where "people ate people." He says he knew he couldn't learn the languages he would encounter so he brought along a Polaroid camera and some acid, which he dropped onto drawings he had made of stars, moons, and the sun. he would tell the natives that he was a medicine man and they should meditate upon the heavenly bodies after swallowing the "medicine" appearing on the drawings. Then he paddled away his canoe as quickly as possible, not knowing what the effects would be. Later, however, the natives indicated thy were impressed and grateful--and gave him lots of yage. Naranjo was the fist to try MDA after its discoverer, Gordon Alles, and he also gave the first scientific report on ibogaine, after hearing reports of African natives of their rituals and experiences.
Then in May of 1957, Wall Street Banker R. Gordon Wasson published his account of being one of the first two white men to be "bemushroomed." Life Magazine gave Wasson's story a full color spread as part three of a "Great Adventures" series. This was to lead o Albert Hofmann's synthesis of psilocybin and psilocin, the primary active substances in the Mexican psychedelic fungi. Hundreds would travel to Oaxaca, Mexico, in search o magic mushrooms and/or Maria Sabina, the curandera who had conducted Wasson on his remarkable nighttime journey. Budd Schulberg, author of What makes Sammy Run? was one of those seekers, as was Jeremy Sandford, who wrote In Search of the Magic Mushroom. By the late Fifties, Sandoz was sending samples of these synthetics out to investigators. One of them was Sabina, who reported that "the spirit of the mushroom is in the pill."
A significant even of the early Sixties occurred when a seeker named Timothy Leary tripped out poolside in Cuernavaca, near Mexico City. His rational, symbolic mind took a vacation, and he resolved to dedicate the rest of his lie to studying this new instrument. Having just been appointed to a lectureship in psychology at Harvard, Leary took it upon himself to initiate research into this with his graduate students. Thus was born the Harvard Psilocybin Project-- which rapidly turned on hundreds of creative individuals, religious figures, convicts, psychologists, and graduate students. Leary also turned Allen Ginsberg onto psilocybin, whereupon Ginsberg immediately tried to phone Jack Kennedy, Kerouac, and Nikita Khrushchev (his three favourite Ks) to tell them about it.
In 1960, Dr. John Beresford wrote Sandoz from New York and explained he was interested in investigating LSD-25's possible effects on amoebas. Back by return mail came a gram labelled "pharmaceutically pure" and a bill for $285. Before the year was out, Beresford, Jean Houston, and Michael Corner had established an LSD research center, the Agora Scientific Trust. Much of the turning on they performed is described in Th varieties of Psychedelic Experience.
Eventually the gram Beresford bought was split up with an associate, Michael Hollingshead, who conveyed part of it to Harvard, where he turned on dozens of scientists and volunteers. He stayed for a while with Leary at a house hat was the site of many psilocybin turn-ons. Despite this, many were afraid of LSD. One of those declaring himself most uninterested was Timothy L. By 1962, jazz musician Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo were obviously having such a good time on it that Hollingshead finally was able to convince Leary to try a spoonful from his LSD-25 mayonnaise jar.
In addition to Leary, Hollingshead turned on Paul Krassner, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Donovan Leitch, Keith Richard, the Yardbirds, and others of early English rock scene, from a center he established in London (having been sent there for that purpose by Leary). Though Leary claims to have turned on very few people personally, he and some thirty graduate students, young professors and theologians were, in his words:
...thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard... believing it was a time (after the shallow, nostalgic Fifties) for far-out visions... With... scientific concepts as suggestive text and with LSD as instrumental sacrament and with prayers for grace, we began to write and to talk publicly about the possibility of a new philosophy, a new individual scientific theology.
Soon Harvard Square became the center of the "psychedelic revolution," with consequences well known. After being forced out of Harvard, Leary, Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass) and their associates decided it was time for the psychedelic movement to go public and established their International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In 1964 IFIF even opened a pilot LSD-training center in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and the following summer offered a week at this resort for $200. They received over 1,500 applications.
Acid has appeared in many forms, but one of the strangest was one that Alpert went down to retrieve after he and Leary had been thrown out of their resort hotel in Zihuatanejo. To bring it through Customs, Alpert put it in a shaving lotion bottle. At the airport, his luggage was thrown up on the rack and fell off. He thought that the bottle might have broken, but he didn't dare check until speeding from the airport in a taxi. Sure enough, the suit the LSD had been wrapped up in was all wet. One idea was to cut the suit up into squares like fabric samples; instead, it was just hung on the wall, where anyone who wanted to turn on could suck on it. (A seersucker suit, as it were).
After Zihuatanejo, this hearty band of experimenters set out for the British West Indies seeking island sanctuary. Discouraged, the returned to the U.S., and at the invitation of Peggy and William Hitchcock--heirs to the Mellon banking fortune--established a longer-lasing psychedelic vortex in Millbrook, New York. From here emanated the Psychedelic Review, early light shows carried to New York City and other messages transmitted via pilgrims who had made the trek to visit the Castalia Foundation and the League for Spiritual Discovery, the slightly altered names for IFIF. The high visibility of such activities dismayed more conservative investigators, but nonetheless drew much media attention leading to the mass turn-ons of the mid-Sixties.
In the spring of 1963, according to Beresford, Bobby Kennedy was known to be taking LSD or psilocybin and providing psychedelic entertainment for foreign dignitaries in a fashionable New York apartment. JFK reportedly smoked pot in the White House with Judith Campbell Exner. By this time, Eric Loeb ran a store with window displays on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, where he legally sold peyote buds from Arizona, mescaline, harmaline, and ibogaine. And the Englishman Gerald Heard had by now turned on the publisher of Time and Life, Henry Luce, and his wife, the vivacious playwright Clare Booth Luce.
Even more public an outrageous than the psychedelic circuses and celebrations of the Leary clique and upper-class New York society were the antics of Ken Kesey. Kesey, oddly enough, was turned on by the U.S. Army, which along with the CIA had been conducting its own turn-ons from the early Fifties onward. Of course, these turn-on were given many times without preparation-yet many, such as Kesey, had good trips despite the lack of structure, and this may have inspired Kesey's Merry Pranksters to create their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the namesake of a Tom Wolfe book. Th test turned on many who had little advance knowledge, from the Fillmore ballroom to a Watts church. Wavy Gravy, former nightclub comedian Hugh Romney and one of the Pranksters, denied that he put the acid in the punch on those occasions.
Jerry Garcia could be considered another Army turn-on. The lead guitarist or the Grateful Dead, a notorious peyote-gulper in his early Berkeley coffeehouse days, Garcia recounts what caused him to gain the moniker "Captain Trips":
[In] '60, '61, '62, I guess, or '63, the government was running a series of drug tests over at Stanford, and Hunter [the Dead's lyricist] was one of the participants of those. They gave him mescaline and psilocybin and LSD and a whole bunch of others and put him in a little white room and watched him. And there were other people on the scene who were into that. Kesey. And as soon as these people had had those drugs they were immediately trying to get them, trying to find some way to cop 'em or something, but there was no illicit drug market then like there is now.
The acid tests beginning in mid-decade were something entirely new. Instead of the turn-on being spread from friend to friend, communal conversions were now the order of the day and a new term was introduced into the language--"freaking freely." The first real "gathering of the tribes" occurred on October 16, 1966, the day when California became the first state to ban LSD. This was the earliest of what might properly be called the "Human Be-ins," and it was celebrated by thousands on both coasts. A wave of media publicity about the gentleness of this mass turn-on resulted in an even larger gathering in San Francisco's Golden gate Park in January 1967. An estimated 10,000 turned on while listening to Leary, Ginsberg, Lenore Kandel, McClure and many others praise the psychedelic revolution, accompanied by rock bands from San Francisco, such as Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful dead, and the Jefferson Airplane. Augustus Owsley Stanley, already known by his middle name as a great acid maker, dropped by parachute into the crowd. Longhairs sporting flowers blew bubbles in the grass. By the time the beautiful, vibrant day was over, everyone knew that San Francisco would soon celebrate a "Summer of Love."
The likes of Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Country Joe McDonald and others formed a loose-knit "family" of turned-on rock stars on the West Coast. Chester Anderson has referred to such groups as Sturgeonesque "homogestalts" in Crawdaddy, the earliest rock magazine. Anderson partially explained why these San Francisco musicians and other acid-rockers such as th Stones the Beatles, the Mothers, and the Doors, no to mention hundreds of other bans of similar odd fellows, were such an encouragement to the turn-on:
Rock is a legitimate avant-garde art form, with deep roots in the music of the past (especially the baroque and before), great vitality and vast potential for growth and development, adaptation, experiment, etc.
Its effects on the younger generation, especially those effects most deplored by type-heads, have all been essentially good and healthy so far.
With rock's heavy profit orientation today, these principles may sound a bit high-flown, optimistic an idealistic. Yet in the mid-Sixties, millions thought of the Beatles almost as gods (or at least as the four evangelists), and for months after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band became available, people argued endlessly about the secret meaning of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
LSD-25 made its debut in rock in 1962 in a single by the Gamblers. By 1965, Eric Burden and the Animals were crooning their love song, "To Sandoz"; the Stones were singing about how "Something Happened To Me Yesterday"; the Byrds were harmonizing about how they were "Eight Miles High," and the Beatles had long been advising everyone to "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. This is not dying..."
Ginsberg says he was turned onto pot by Al Arnowitz, a pop-rock writer for the New York Post who also performed the same service for Bob Dylan. Ginsberg mentions that the Beatles were turned on by Dylan when their planes once crossed at JFK airport. He asked whether they wanted to turn on, and they were hesitant. Finally, Ringo said he'd try it. They went behind a hangar, an after returning to the others, Ringo was asked what he thought of it. He was smiling so much, the others decided to try it too.
In retrospect, it may seem a strange quirk that the Beatles were turned on to acid by their dentist--the "Dr. Robert" of an early song--who over dinner slipped it into Paul's and John's coffees. "He didn't know what it was," one explained later. "We didn't ask for it but later we did say 'thank you.'" Jimi Hendrix was another first turned on in England. He responded by putting "Purple Haze" at the top of the charts. In Film About Hendrix, we see his acid taster, who followed Jimi wherever he went and checked out his tabs to see how good they were before he tried them. According to many stories, Owsley made a double-strength, special batch of acid for him, and Jimi once ate a handful of these tabs before going on stage.
We haven't said anything about the role played by the Fugs, Steppenwolf, Pearls Before Swine, H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Walker, the Seeds, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Arthur Brown, the Lovin' Spoonful and the Beach Boys, but these and hundreds of other groups contributed enormously to the turning-on of the world.
Grace Slick likes to tell the story of how she and Abbie Hoffman were invited to a party for Tricia Nixon which Richard Nixon attended. They planned to dose Tricky Dick with some of Owsley's best, contained beneath her fingernail, before they were stopped at the door by security.
Hoffman relates his version of becoming another of the Army's turn-ons:
Aldous Huxley told me about LSD back in 1957. And I tried to get it in 1959. I stood in line at a clinic in San Francisco, after Herb Caen had run an announcement in the Chronicle that if anybody wanted to take a new experimental drug called LSD-25, he would be paid $150 for his effort. Jesus, that emptied Berkeley! I got up about six in the morning but I was about 1,500 in line so... I didn't get it until 1965. The acid was supplied by the United States Army. My roommate from college was an Army psychologist...
By the last half of the Sixties, the psychedelic message was appearing almost everywhere, even if the lettering was somewhat difficult to read. The first Psychedelic Shop debuted in San Francisco, along with the Oracle, a newspaper that centered on psychedelics, showed up irregularly and ushered in for a shot while the use of a slit-font color technique that produced almost Day-Glo graphics. Both were quickly imitated by other shops and newspapers sprouting up to speak to new psychedelic consumers.
In Manhattan there was the East Village Other, started by Walter Bowart, now publisher of Omen press, and John Wilcock, a British journalist. Yarrowstalks came from Philadelphia, the Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, the Astral Projection from New Mexico, the Kaleidoscope from Milwaukee, the Seed from Chicago, the Georgia Straight from Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Nola Express from New Orleans, to name only a few. In L.A., the psychedelic message was conveyed by the Free Press, started by Art Kunkin at Pandora's Box on the Sunset Strip. Los Angeles also had its own Oracle, trying to reach the standards already set in San Francisco. Beyond this, a variety of "Communication Company" memos were issued sporadically in New York by Jimmy Fouratt and in San Francisco by Chester Anderson, the author of The Butterfly Kid.
All of these updating communiques were members of the rapidly growing Underground press Syndicate (UPS). Thy freely allowed the reprinting of psychedelic-encouraging material, such as this widely-quoted statement from Ginsberg:
Abruptly then, I will make a first proposal--on one level symbolic, but to be taken as literally as possible, it may shock some and delight others--that everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once, every man, woman and child American in good health over the age of 14--that, if necessary, we have a mass emotional nervous breakdown in these states once and for all, that we see bankers laughing in their revolving doors with strange staring eyes... I propose, then, that everybody including the president and his and our vast hordes of generals, executives, judges and legislators of these states go to nature, find a kindly teacher or Indian peyote chief or guru guide and assay their consciousness with LSD...
The surprising thing in the situation at this time was that so few, in the wider perspective, were very curious. A dean at Columbia spoke of this once when he suggested at a faculty meting that the university not graduate any senior who hadn't at least smoked some grass. Students who hadn't toked up by the late sixties, he said, showed such little interest in the real world that they could never be a credit to the institution.
Hollywood also was on the psychedelic bandwagon, using the turn-on as a central theme in wide-screen technicolor production. Peter Fonda was featured in The Trip, a Hollywood version of the psychedelic experience. It was reported at the time that Fonda would smoke grass on the patio of his Hollywood Hills home while police helicopters buzzed by periodically.
The namesake for I Love You, Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein's author-lover who had a notorious recipe for hash brownies. We can only speculate whether the film's star, Peter Sellers, partook. But Lew Gottlieb, the psychedelic guru in the movie, definitely did. Gottleib stated Morning Star, a communal far in Sonoma Count, California, and he was also one of the Limeliters. Other psychedelic films included The President's Analyst starring a dapper and possibly turned-on James Coburn; and that the tour de force of psychedelic animation Yellow Submarine which blended turn-on movement with the Beatles' music.
By the time the Beatles had gotten themselves decked out in Sgt. Pepper costumes, however, the country was also being tuned on by a new kind of film, which Gene Youngblood would call the "expanded cinema." This genre was typified by Jordan Belson's Re-Entry, Samadhi, and Momentum. Other filmmakers, including Jean Mayo and Francis lee, tried to convey an impression of their own psychedelic experiences.
Psychedelic cinema was being projected onto the walls and screens of light-show emporiums such as The Electric Circus in New York's Lower East Side, the Avalon, Fillmore and Family Dog in San Francisco, the Kaleidoscope and Shrine Auditorium in L.A. and in dozens of rock venues across the land. The ultimate rock-acid rush as Woodstock and the hundreds of festivals it begat.
Until 1960, accordin to Hofmann, the world supplies of ergot, the necessary precursor to the manufacture of LSD-25, were extremely limited. Peyote was available, but not to any great extent. Yage, DMT, psilocybin, MDA, STP, MMDA, and ibogaine were ll but unknown. But then, as Humphrey Osmond put it, somebody discovered how ergot could be grown in churns. Now the ball really had begun to roll.
The discover of how to mass cultivate ergot on Claviceps paspali was made in the Farmitalia labs in Milan, Italy. Before long, Farmitalia was offering LSD-25 at $10,000 a kilo, enough for eight million 250-microgram experiences. Then Spofa Pharmaceuticals in Czechoslovakia began manufacture, providing a high-quality product which became available to anyone in Prague who wished to try the experience under medical supervision. Communist party leader Alexander Dubcek and most of the city's artistic community took advantage of the offer, which many claim led to the "Prague Spring" of 1968 that ended in a Soviet invasion. Spofa, however, continued to supply the drug until just very recently.
In the early sixties, nearly all the LSD ingested cam from these pharmaceutical sources. When Sandoz recalled LSD after the heavy scare campaign of 1966, most users had become dependent upon underground supply. This had remand fairly amateurish and small until the advent of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, grandson of a Kentucky Senator.
Owsley came to the making of acid in 1961 after collaborating with one of the earliest manufacturers. Soon he was in business for himself in a makeshift laboratory behind a vacant store in Berkely, California. His acid varied from early white capsules to what became known as "Owsley tabs," blue at first, but later--when cheap imitations hit the market--in other colors. Some were stamped with the figure of Batman or Robin, bearing such names as "Midnight Hour," "White Lightning," or "Monterey Purple."
Owsley go into the game due to his inability to procure pharmaceutical LSD-25, and within five years it had made him a millionaire. But he was put out of business following his bust in December 1967 at his Orinda tabbing center. His apprentice, Tim Scully, carried on in association with Nicholas Sand, prolific Brooklyn alchemist. Together they put out most of the fabled "Sunshine" acid.
Sunshine was the second acid to gain a large distribution--world-wide, as a matter of fact. The main source of these orange, crumbly tablets was Laguna beach, a beautiful art colony on the coast of California. A "clean" scene developed there in the mid-Sixties, with many taking Sandoz on the picturesque sands. Here was where Timothy Leary stayed after touring communities of the southwestern United States, the sites of may religious turn-ons.
By 1969, five years after this town's first head shop was established, large amounts of Sunshine began to be pumped to an acid-hungry population by a group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Actually, the Brotherhood has stated several years earlier as a religious group. But as dealing became big business, new faces emerged. Brotherhood members made large fortunes from the import of Afghanistan hash, selling it from a center on a small street called Woodland Drive. The Brotherhood house burned down after a hookah filled wit the best "primo" tipped over. Brotherhood members and Afghani royalty escaped the flames.
In the Sunshine field, Nick Sand and Timothy Scully were the original suppliers, claiming to have produced the "improved" acid homologue ALD-52. By the turn of the decade some 35 million does of LSD--brown from oxidation and decomposition--had come via the European lab of Ronald Stark, presently a fugitive. The largest amount of this appeared on the West Coast late in 1970 (hence the designation "Christmas acid"). Leary, at this point, remarked, "The challenge to the dealer is not only must his product be pure and spiritual but he himself must reflect the human light he represents. Therefore, never buy dope never purchase sacrament from a person that hasn't got the qualities you aspire for."
by American Dream » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:35 pm
by American Dream » Tue Dec 23, 2014 12:52 pm
Was the Discordian Society a CIA Front?
Posted on December 9, 2014 by Gorightly
Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley,
Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation
by Adam Gorightly
An excerpt from my latest book Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation, available at Feral House and Amazon.
Among Jim Garrison’s more colorful unofficial investigators (otherwise known as the “Irregulars”) was Allan Chapman who subscribed to the theory that the JFK assassination had been orchestrated by the Bavarian Illuminati, that infamous secret society much ballyhooed in the annals of conspiracy lore.
After catching wind of Allan Chapman’s Illuminati theory, Kerry Thornley—with the support of some of his fellow Discordian Society pranksters—initiated what became known as Operation Mindfuck (OM), a campaign designed to screw with Garrison’s head by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he (Kerry) was an agent of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (AISB). Among the culprits who helped perpetrate OM was none other than Robert Anton Wilson. As Kerry later noted:
Wilson and I founded the Anarchist Bavarian Illuminati to give Jim Garrison a hard time, one of whose supporters believed that the Illuminati owned all the major TV networks, the Conspiring Bavarian Seers (CBS), the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy (ABC) and the Nefarious Bavarian Conspirators (NBC).
Another of the “Irregulars”—assassination researcher Harold Weisberg—was also on the business end of OM communiqués as demonstrated in the following anonymous letter authored by Robert Anton Wilson:
Robert Anton Wilson’s OM letter to Harold Weisberg.
From the Harold Weisberg Collection.
The above letter is unfathomable unless one is familiar with the Discordian antics that Thornley and his cohorts were engaged in during this period. Wilson’s prank letter to Weisberg mentions someone named Homer Ravenhurst, another named Hassan Saba X, in addition to Simon Moon and the Illuminat Eye. In Discordian lore, Kerry Thornley’s pseudonym was Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and so Wilson’s mention of a “Homer Ravenhurst” was a playful way of messing with Weisberg’s mind. As for Simon Moon, this was Wilson’s sometime alias and a character that later appeared in Wilson and Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Hassan Saba X (or Hassan-i-Sabbah X) was a fictitious black militant character that Thornley and Wilson created to propagate the Illuminati mythology, later to be immortalized in a put-on letter planted in the April 1969 issue of Playboy during the period Wilson was an editor at the magazine. As for the Illuminati Eye mentioned in the Weisberg letter, this was an obvious wink and nod to that aforementioned all-seeing secret society from Bavaria. No telling what Weisberg thought of this letter; however, he found it important enough to place in his files for future researchers to ponder.
These OM communiqués led Garrison to suspect that the Discordian Society was a CIA front organization involved in the JFK assassination. As outlandish as this all sounds, those of a conspiratorial bent might find some merit to this theory, due to the fact that—among the handful of people involved in the New Orleans Discordian Society—each of them was, in one way or another, connected to the Garrison investigation as either a witness, suspect or correspondent.
by American Dream » Wed Dec 24, 2014 3:17 pm
by American Dream » Wed Dec 24, 2014 3:20 pm
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