Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[Hammer of Los]

...

Quite so.

Nameless dao before after during all times.

But in some ages it is understood more clearly than in others.

Although it is only veiled to be revealed.

...

[Hammer of Los]

...

After several scenes wherein the characters are led by the alchemist through several death/rebirth rituals, they carry staffs topped with their planets' symbols; the alchemist's symbol is the Sun, the thief is the Moon, and the alchemist's silent assistant is Mercury. They all journey to Lotus Island to gain the secret of immortality from nine immortal masters who live on a holy mountain. Once on Lotus Island they are sidetracked by the "Pantheon Bar", a cemetery party where people have abandoned their quest for the holy mountain and instead engage in drugs, poetry or acts of physical prowess. Leaving the bar behind, they ascend the mountain and each have personal symbolic visions representing each character's worst fears and obsessions. Near the top, the thief is sent back to his "people" along with a young prostitute and an ape who has followed him to the mountain. The rest confront the cloaked immortals who are shown to be only faceless dummies. The alchemist then breaks the fourth wall and reveals the film apparatus just outside the frame (cameras, microphone, lights and crew) and says "Zoom back camera!", instructing everyone including the audience of the film, to leave the holy mountain. "Real life awaits us," he says, and the movie ends.

Chapel Perilous?

Panic Station?

Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

No.

It's simply the Pantheon Bar.


...

[American Dream]

...

After several scenes wherein the characters are led by the alchemist through several death/rebirth rituals, they carry staffs topped with their planets' symbols; the alchemist's symbol is the Sun, the thief is the Moon, and the alchemist's silent assistant is Mercury. They all journey to Lotus Island to gain the secret of immortality from nine immortal masters who live on a holy mountain. Once on Lotus Island they are sidetracked by the "Pantheon Bar", a cemetery party where people have abandoned their quest for the holy mountain and instead engage in drugs, poetry or acts of physical prowess. Leaving the bar behind, they ascend the mountain and each have personal symbolic visions representing each character's worst fears and obsessions. Near the top, the thief is sent back to his "people" along with a young prostitute and an ape who has followed him to the mountain. The rest confront the cloaked immortals who are shown to be only faceless dummies. The alchemist then breaks the fourth wall and reveals the film apparatus just outside the frame (cameras, microphone, lights and crew) and says "Zoom back camera!", instructing everyone including the audience of the film, to leave the holy mountain. "Real life awaits us," he says, and the movie ends.

Chapel Perilous?

Panic Station?

Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

No.

It's simply the Pantheon Bar.


...

Those who don't speak Italian can probably glean the general idea...

[American Dream]

Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organised crime

http://datacide.c8.com/dope-smuggling-l ... 0s-london/

I can’t identify with any certainty the first international drug smuggler my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – befriended, but one she met early on was Damien Epsilon, an Irishman who’d lived in Ibiza before moving to London in the early 1960s. In 1962 my mother approached Epsilon in Henekey’s pub in Portobello Road. She wanted to go to Spain and had been told he was driving there. Epsilon agreed to take my mother and her boyfriend Geoff Thompson to Ibiza if they shared the petrol costs. After spending a few weeks in Ibiza, Epsilon returned to London and my mother travelled on to Andorra alone. Thompson, who’d proved somewhat erratic about covering petrol costs, went back to London at the same time as Epsilon, but separately. When my mother returned to London, she socialised with Epsilon until he moved back to Ibiza in 1963. She returned to Ibiza many times in the mid-sixties to hang with Epsilon’s set, and this may well have constituted the first of a number of international drug smuggling sets with which she was acquainted.

In 1965 Epsilon had to flee the Balearic Islands because he was stopped on the Spanish border in a van filled with pot, which he’d driven overland from Istanbul. Seeing a customs officer prising open the panelling behind which drugs were concealed, Epsilon with his passport held aloft, wandered off pretending he was looking for an office at which to present his papers. He got up onto a hillside from where he could observe what was going on at the checkpoint. When he saw one of his companions being led away in handcuffs, he escaped into Spain. Recently Epsilon explained the situation that then unfolded as follows: “I knew I’d be wanted by the police from the moment of the bust. When I reached Barcelona, I dropped my friend’s passport at the American Embassy and with a note asking that they made representation to the Spanish authorities to the effect that I was totally responsible for the dope of which my companion was entirely innocent. I made it to Ibiza where I hid out in various houses for a month until I escaped the island (The) Police had searched for me in Formentera and were on the look out for me in Ibiza. It was the biggest bust ever in Spain at the time.”

After escaping Spain and the potential drug rap hanging over him there, Epsilon relocated to London, where by moving into the antique business he found himself working alongside one-shot novelist Bill Hopkins. My mother first met Hopkins in the early-sixties via her work as a hostess at Murray’s Cabaret Club. After the publication of his only book The Divine & The Decay, Hopkins was briefly considered one of the leading Angry Young Men; but by the time my mother met him he’d reinvented himself as a entrepreneur dealing in used goods. Hopkins introduced Epsilon to a girl he knew called Tina Lawson, who also happened to be Francis Morland’s babysitter. At this point in time Morland and his partner Keith Wilkinson knew nothing about drug scamming but they quickly became major players though the fortuitous combination of their money and Epsilon’s contacts after hooking up with the Irishman via Lawson.

Morland himself was an ex-public school smoothie, a former ski champion who belonged to the fast-set clustered around Princess Margaret, and would have inherited the Somerset Morland wool ‘fortune’ had the family business not gone belly-up in the seventies. In the sixties, he was a London art world insider with a teaching job in the sculpture department at St Martin’s College of Art. His mother, Dorothy Morland, had been director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morland’s work in bronze of the early-sixties was well received. A Times critic covering the Sculptors of Today exhibition at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford praised him for ‘distinguished modelling coupled with imaginative insight’ (11 May 1962). The following year, alongside David Hockney, Joe Tilson, Peter Blake, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, he appears in Gerald Laing’s photograph London Artists in Paris; this was taken during the Paris Biennale des Jeunes. 1963 was a key year for Morland, since he moved from working in bronze to using fibreglass finished in coats of cellulose paint.

When writing about Morland’s contribution to The New Generation 1966 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in Studio International, P. Procktor said of this change of direction: “Comparing the new work with the old there can be few transformations of style more radical. The break is complete. These large entwining serpentine shapes relate to the work of other sculptors in this idiom, speak in a sculptural language which is familiar because it is to a certain extent a shared language. What interests me is not the grammatical principles of the language nor who invented them, one can safely assume that Morland did not, but what this language is used to say. Kiss, the only title of the four pieces in the exhibition which has a specific human connotation, provides a clue to all. The twisting and entwining shapes are metaphors of the body, headless, limbless, featureless, but miming the poses of relaxation or sexual intercourse like gigantic strings of macaroni…”

1966 was to prove another turning point in Morland’s life, since as we’ve noted it was then that he secured an introduction to Damien Epsilon. Morland was unable to pay for his extravagant life-style from the sale of his work, and was keen to find alternative sources of income. Once he gatecrashed the drug scamming game, he realised that one of the ways he might smuggle hash was to seal it inside his large fibre-glass sculptures, a hole which could be re-plugged was all that was required to get the dope in and out of his art works. Many years down the line this ploy was imitated by Howard Marks, who substituted Morland’s modernist constructions with the speaker systems used by rock bands. To Morland smuggling was a means of subsidising his real passions, fast living and making art. In the late sixties Morland’s work appeared in group shows such as New British Sculpture organised by the Arnolfini Gallery at outdoor locations in Bristol and the 1st Burleighfield Sculpture Exhibition at Burleighfield House, Loudwater, Bucks (both 1968). Morland’s one person show Recent Sculpture opened on 12 September 1969 at the Axiom Gallery, London W1. Under the headline ‘Hinged and Unhinged’, Guy Brett dismissed it as ‘decorative’ in a Times review of 19 September 1969.

Morland’s first bust occurred in October 1969, hot on the heels of his Axiom show. The art world reacted with horror, seeing taking drugs as one thing and smuggling them as quite another. Morland’s career as a professional sculptor came to an abrupt halt, and he was dropped by many of his professional friends. The charges against him took some time to wind their way to a conclusion in the courts but The Times dutifully covered this on 23 March 1971 under the heading ‘Diplomats In Drug Ring, Crown Says’. Morland failed to answer his bail so he wasn’t actually up before the beak. Others not present were a Mr Khaled and Fulton Dunbar, Third Secretary at the Liberian Embassy in Rome. Morland and Dunbar were said to have made statements admitting their guilt and that of others. Morland’s partner Keith Wilkinson pleaded not guilty and so was tried separately. It was claimed the gang smuggled £150,000 worth of cannabis into the UK, and had plans to ship a lot more around the world. In the dock was Robert Paul Palacios who used his catamaran to transport the drugs from Morocco to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, from where he drove them to London in a Rolls-Royce car. Palacios who’d been hired to do the job by Morland was fined £4000. Morland’s wife Susan was said to be only on the fringe of the gang and was fined £500 for possession of cannabis and cannabis resin.

Morland began his first jail sentence for smuggling in America. After sailing his 47 foot ketch loaded with hash from Morocco to the US in July 1971 and being caught upon entry, he was jailed for eight years and fined $15,000. The Times tersely covered Morland’s second bust on 4 June 1972 under the headline ‘London Man Jailed in US Drug Case’. After doing time for his first two ‘crimes’, Morland was next nicked attempting to land cannabis worth £3.5 million in northern Scotland. When he was jailed for nine years and had assets of more than £232,000 confiscated, The Times of 25 June 1991 covered the case under the headline ‘Drug Smuggler – Francis Morland’: Unfortunately this 1989 bust was not his last, nor did the 1991 judgement result in his final stiff sentence.

Like Morland, Terry Taylor is another figure who has been treated as relatively minor within the history of swinging London and yet played a key role in London’s sixties drug culture. Described by Tony Gould as ‘unconventionally successful’ [1], Taylor was for a time chiefly of interest to cultural historians because characters in the Colin MacInnes novels Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice had been based to a greater or lesser extent upon him. In 1956 MacInnes introduced Taylor to photographer Ida Kar and he became her lover for a few years. Karr’s husband Victor Musgrave, who ran Gallery One, was apparently very happy with the arrangement. Simultaneously Taylor worked as Kar’s photographic assistant and she encouraged him to paint. [2] After getting his first drug novel published in 1961, Taylor went to Tangier to work on a follow-up. While away he smoked a lot of weed and hung out with a variety of fellow psychedelic explorers including William Burroughs. I can at this point allow the American poet Johnny Dolphin to take up the story:

“One day a curved-nose, thatched-haired tall thin Englishman about thirty, coiled beside me and ordered a mint tea [...] After ordering the mint teas, Terry brought out his kief bag. He began deftly and with luminous attention to separate seed from the dried leaves. The seeds grew in size for me until they became as large as peas. He worked like a goldsmith. Then he laid out two pipes, wooden, curved, painted. I had gone on two peyote trips and for seven days had done a small amount of hashish, but never before had I seen anyone who knew what to do, exactly. I abandoned myself to a master… “ [3]

In his memoir Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, Dolphin goes on to describe how he got heavily involved in a magic group formed by Terry Taylor and various Berbers which met to materialize thought forms:

“Each one would concentrate, projecting his inner scene. The one with the most power would make the scene that would take over the night in the Magic Room. That one would have made the greatest magic. I learned how to measure power. Terry, lean, deft and poised, prepared the kief from the dried plants, carefully selected from the Berber women’s stocks. Then he would pass out the majoom cookies [...] We sat backs to the wall in silence focusing on making the scene appear. In one I heard Walid, the mute, screaming, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ His eyes burned like a man newly sentenced to life imprisonment. Terry and Hamid became one glance which became tensile, material, then alive, as their two I’s danced out upon that high wire that their live bodies lavished their energies upon creating and maintaining. Lita and Mark, two bright six year old Jewish kids from Shtetl immigrants, played pat-a-cake on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side. My head rolled off my right shoulder and sat on the floor, taking it all in while I watched myself become a contemplative head with no body to care for or react to. This scene had not been the one I projected nor did anyone else claim it. The great magic scenes came from an undiscoverable magician…” [4]

These scenes were destined to be repeated in London, albeit with a different group of ‘initiates’. Intimating a little of what was to come, Dolphin writes:

“Terry labored for the perfect pipe of kief and the perfect cookie of majoom. Terry labored to become the perfect observer. Terry got the unreliable cheap Chinese batteries that did enable us to hear what he said we must hear by candlelight, the Beatles, and Ginsberg doing Howl. Terry wanted to turn all London on and later helped start the process with street acid together with his tall, thin-nosed call-girl friend from Chelsea. Terry could talk about the fine points of sentence structure and the power of paragraphs. He had written a novel of which he had no copy available and had been in prison in England once on a drug count. “ [5]

In 1964 Taylor introduced my mother Julia Callan-Thompson to Detta Whybrow, the woman Dolphin describes as Taylor’s ‘call-girl friend’, and with others they formed a magic group in west London. Fuelled by grass alone the attempts of this coven to materialise thought forms appear to have borne some strange results but when they came to be powered by LSD their activities immediately took off into another stratosphere. At that time Detta Whybrow had a john who was a chemist and I’ve been told that through a combination of her charms and various weird rituals, this boffin was persuaded to make acid. There may be some mythologising going on here, while Detta does seem to have suggested to the john he manufacture acid for her friends to deal, the lure of easy money was probably enough to convince him it was a good idea. That said, when the cops raided the two acid laboratories set up by Victor James Kapur, they also recovered a huge stash of photographic negatives showing him having sex with Whybrow and various other women; agreeing to pose for these shots could have been the means by which Whybrow’s circle got the chemist to commit to manufacturing LSD for them. Terry Taylor informed me recently that at first he thought Detta had gone crazy when she told him she had a john who’d make acid for her. Street sources say the acid was extremely pure and potent; the English equivalent of the legendary Orange Sunshine.
In November 1967, after a series of police raids across north and west London aimed at smashing an LSD manufacturing and distribution operation, Detta Whybrow then aged 39 was one of ultimately nine individuals hauled up before the beak at Bow Street Magistrates’s Court over drug offences. Hauled in alongside Detta was her 29 year-old boyfriend of the time, John Sherwood Pendry. Their chemist Victor James Kapur, who was just a year younger than Detta, was given a nine-year stretch at the Criminal Court at the end of May 1968 for manufacturing LSD. Amazingly, Whybrow got off with two years probation. A 54 year-old antique dealer Harry Nathan of Chelsea copped the main blame for overseeing the distribution of the acid and was jailed for seven years; my view is that Nathan was a very minor player and Detta was the only individual who played a key role in the acid distribution to be arrested. A 31 year-old dispenser Mohammed Hassan Ally who assisted Kapur got 21 months. The authorities claimed the LSD involved had a black market value of a quarter of a million pounds. But prior to this bust taking place, another important drug connection opened up for the circles to which Detta and my mother belonged.

While travelling in the Middle East in 1967, Graham Plinston met Salim Hraoui [6] through a third party. Among other things Hraoui wholesaled hash and the two men decided they could do business. The Lebanese connection Plinston established in this casual fashion regularly couriered hash to London on his behalf via ordinary airline flights, arranging for the pot to be concealed in body harnesses strapped to those paid to act as drug mules. It was by such means that Plinston’s supply was smuggled until Hraoui introduced him to Mohammed Durrani in 1969. Durrani knew some Pakistani government officials who were prepared to exploit their diplomatic immunity to smuggle hash. By this means Durrani’s diplomats were able to get drugs into mainland Europe but not the UK. The biggest hurdle for dope smugglers was getting their gear into Europe; transporting it around the continent was viewed as considerably less risky. Nonetheless Plinston and Geoff Thompson were busted in Lorrach in 1970, as they ferried dope in a car from Switzerland across the West Germany border. This is the famous seizure that gave Howard Marks his break into the major league of the pot trade. After being sent by Mandy Plinston to sort things out in Germany and then reporting back to various Middle Eastern connections about what had and hadn’t been compromised, Marks took over portions of Plinston’s business while his friends Plinston and Thompson did time in jail. [7]

Bizarrely, John Pearson in his tomes on sixties British gangsters the Kray Twins writes about a man called Alan Bruce Cooper, [8] who it is claimed was working reluctantly and under threat of imprisonment for the American Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Among other things, the American authorities are said to have known that Cooper had been manufacturing LSD and trafficking in this drug. Supposedly, it was decided that Cooper should entice Ronnie and Reggie Kray into committing crimes for which they could be convicted because the authorities in the USA were concerned about their connections to the American Mafia. Regardless of exactly what role various intelligence agencies did or did not have in controlling Cooper, he was a major player in the events that culminated in the conviction of the Kray twins for murder. In The Profession of Violence, Pearson provides the following details about a few of Cooper’s schemes:

“Cooper had the big ideas that Ronnie needed and seemed as thrilled as Ronnie by them all. They often talked about narcotics. Cooper had European contacts and clearly knew the market. This was the quickest, safest way for the twins to become millionaires. As a start Cooper suggested setting up a flat in Belgrave Square as a clearing house for wealthy addicts and their pushers. Cooper got as far as renting the flat when Ronnie said he wasn’t interested. Other rackets they discussed were large-scale gold smuggling, further currency deals, a take-over of an existing marijuana racket carried on through the diplomatic immunity of some Pakistani diplomats and the traffic in illegal Asian immigrants from Belgium. And each time it was Reggie’s caution that prevented Ronnie from becoming involved…” [9]

If this is to be believed, then it appears that American intelligence may have known in 1967 about the drug pipeline Plinston benefited from two years later. If what Pearson says on this score is reliable, it is possible that having failed to get the Krays to take over the pipeline the American authorities left it up and running for future use, and it is the same drug conduit that Plinston later stumbled upon. That said, despite the paranoia that permeates the drug subculture, I’m unaware of anyone from the circles around Plinston and Thompson who believes they were set up to be busted in Lörrach. It is nonetheless curious that on 18 July 1968 when Alan Bruce Cooper appeared as a Crown witness at Bow Street Magistrates Court against the Kray brothers, he should deny he’d given the police information about Victor James Kapur and Harry Nathan, claiming: “I discovered my father-in-law (Nathan) was a runner for the LSD Kapur was manufacturing when it came out in the papers.” Nathan was busted in his son-in-law’s car, and the police found Cooper at Nathan’s flat when they went to search it immediately after this arrest. [10]

Under oath on the same day of the Kray hearing, Cooper also denied that he’d planned to kidnap the Pope and hold him to ransom, and repeated his claims that he’d had a two year involvement with American intelligence, stating that the Krays’ lawyers could check this by applying to the European office of that service. This was reported in The Times of 19 July 1968. Top cop Leonard Read in his autobiography Nipper Read: The Man Who Nicked The Krays (MacDonald & Co, London 1991) provides a more complex take on Cooper’s relations with the British police than the one given at Bow Street Magistrates Court. Read does, however, assert that the evidence Cooper gave against the Krays was essentially true, and implies Harry Nathan was wrongly convicted as an LSD runner when he says in his book that it was Cooper – and not Cooper’s father-in-law – who was involved with Kapur’s drug factory. Read’s account appears to me reasonably consistent with the police file on the Kapur case, and what various street sources have to say on the subject. However, while Nathan may have been completely innocent, it seems to me more likely he was a minor player; but even if this was the case, his role in the drug running was very small in comparison to that of his son-in-law.

Cooper confirmed in court during the Kray trial that he’d made a living from gold smuggling, something to which Kapur was also connected. Two months before he was busted for manufacturing LSD, Kapur acted as a crown witness at Bow Street where he testified against former speedway champion Squire Francis ‘Split’ Waterman and three others who were charged with ‘attempted illegal export of gold, receiving gold bars, and possessing firearms and counterfeiting equipment’. This was reported in The Times of 23 September 1967. The case against Waterman ran in part that he’d been cutting and smelting gold from a bullion robbery in Clerkenwell, and that he’d enlisted Kapur’s aid in choosing and purchasing a furnace with which to do it. Likewise The Times of 19 July 1968 reported that in court testifying against the Krays, Cooper confirmed he was acquainted with Split Waterman who he knew to be both a gold smuggler and an arms dealer.

Under the headline ‘Four-Year Term For Split Waterman’, The Times of 20 March 1968 had already reported that the police believed Waterman to be a gun-runner as well as a gold smuggler. Reporting on the Kray trial on 20 July 1968, The Times records the claim that Waterman had fitted up an attaché case with a hypodermic syringe loaded with hydrogen cyanide, so that Cooper could furnish it to a third party who was to carry out an assassination for the Kray brothers. At the time this seemed an utterly fantastic escapade, but such methods of assassination were later taken up by eastern bloc security agencies. It is impossible for me to say exactly what Waterman, Cooper and Kapur, were doing; but it is reasonable to conclude that they were known to each other and collaborated on what were either criminal or intelligence enterprises, and possibly both. It is certainly strange that Alan Bruce Cooper, a man claiming to be a willing police informant as well as an American intelligence asset and former gold smuggler, may have had inside knowledge about what on the surface would appear to be two unrelated suppliers of drugs peddled by the group centred on Detta Whybrow, my mother and other individuals such as Mike Burton (who I am naming because I know he is dead, I have other names that I won’t include here). It is unclear to me where Whybrow and her circle were sourcing drugs immediately after the Kapur bust, but by the end of 1969 both the acid and the pot they were dealing was supplied by Graham Plinston and his associates.

Stewart Home

1. Tony Gould, Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London: Allison & Busby, 1993), p. 144.
2. Gould, Inside Outsider, p. 114.
3. Johnny Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet (Oracle, AZ: Synergetic Press, 1990), p. 3.
4. Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, p. 5.
5. Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, p. 6.
6. Salim Hraoui is called Lebanese Sam by Howard Marks in his autobiography Mr Nice (London: Vintage, 1998).
7. The history of the illicit drug trade of the sixties and seventies has to date been rather poorly served by English-language print sources. For example, while invoking Graham Plinston’s 1970 bust in Lörrach as a key event in the Howard Marks story, both David Leigh in his authorized biography High Time: The Life & Times of Howard Marks (London: Unwin, 1985), and Howard Marks in his autobiography Mr Nice (London: Vintage, 1998) omit to mention that rather than being alone, Plinston was arrested and subsequently jailed alongside Geoff Thompson.
In his autobiography, Howard Marks is two months out in his dating of the Lörrach bust. The fact that Marks and those drawing on his recollections get their facts wrong can be demonstrated easily enough by consulting press reports of the time. A Reuters news agency wire of 18 March 1970 led, for example, to coverage on page 5 of the London Times the following day headlined ‘Britons Held On Drugs Charge’. This report makes it clear that both Plinston and Geoff Thompson were in jail after the discovery of ‘about 105lbs of hashish in their car’, and that they had been arrested upon entering Germany ‘from Switzerland on February 26.’ The Times piece explicitly cites information contained within it as being provided by a British consulate spokesman in Stuttgart, and the authorities notified Thompson and Plinston’s families of the arrests before speaking to the press about them.
Therefore it is ridiculous of David Leigh to assert in his authorised Howard Marks biography High Times that in the spring of 1970 Mandy Plinston sent Marks to Frankfurt to investigate her dope smuggling partner’s disappearance. As should already be clear, Mandy Plinston knew of the bust before Howard Marks; as did my mother Julia Callan-Thompson, my mother’s boyfriend of the time Bruno de Galzain, Geoff Thompson’s partner of the time Jane Ripley, Charlie Radcliffe, Alex Trocchi and many others immersed in the London counterculture. The claim made by Leigh and some later writers to the effect that Howard Marks learnt of the bust by looking through German newspapers in Frankfurt, and then relayed this ‘discovery’ back to the UK, is utterly spurious. Its reiteration demonstrates the rather dubious status of a number of texts that claim to provide inside information on the dope trade.
8. John Pearson, The Profession of Violence: The Rise & Fall of the Kray Twins (London: Grafton Books, 1985); John Pearson, The Cult of Violence: The Untold Story of the Krays (London: Orion, 2001). Cooper is often referred to as The Yank rather than by his name in the ghostwritten gibberings of Kray camp followers. Those wanting to look further at the extensive if often wildly inaccurate literature about the Krays might start with Albert Donoghue and Martin Short, The Enforcer: Secrets of my life with the Krays (London: John Blake Publishing, 2001) or Reg Kray, Born Fighter (London: Arrow, 1991). However, Pearson’s Profession of Violence in its various revised editions from 1972 on remains the best work on the subject.
9. Pearson, The Profession of Violence, p. 281.
10. Barry Cox with John Shirley and Martin Short in The Fall of Scotland Yard (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), address the corrupt nature of the London drug squad in a detailed if restrained fashion. While the bent coppery Cox addresses landed certain detectives in jail, considerably more serious allegations have been made elsewhere. It should be noted that Norman ‘Nobby’ Pilcher one of the bent cops who features prominently in The Fall of Scotland Yard played a key role in the Kapur bust.

[American Dream]

Lords of Acid
How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Became OCs Hippie Mafia

CAPTAIN STICKY

With the possible exception of John Gale, nobody grew richer—and ultimately lost more—from cocaine than Robert "Stubby" Tierney. At one time, Stubby had millions of dollars, all the beautiful women he could want, and friends in high places. Now he has nothing but memories and mementos: a signed photo of late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, a faded picture of Timothy Leary in Algiers, and a photo of himself with director George Lucas. He lives off a Social Security check of less than $900 each month in a Newport-area senior citizens' home, doesn't drive a car, and eats at a Costa Mesa soup kitchen.

"Cocaine destroyed our scene," he says. "Brothers started taking opium and doing cocaine and amphetamines. That took all the spirituality out and made people selfish. We took so long to destroy the ego. We were a Brotherhood, a family beyond family. In the beginning it was really strong, and later the coke would make everyone paranoid. Some of the Brothers got turned around," he says, meaning they became police informants. "Others got into worse stuff."

Stubby left Orange County within months of Leary's arrest and headed to San Francisco, where he enjoyed music and dealt marijuana. "Then I got into cocaine, because it was a small package with a big profit," he says. He helped arrange the sale of a Brotherhood-owned ranch in Oregon to raise cash to bust Leary out of prison. "We took $50,000 or $60,000 and gave it to this guy saying he represented the Black Panthers and that the Weathermen would get the money."

Soon thereafter, Leary jumped a prison fence at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo and climbed into a waiting van driven by members of the Weather Underground, the radical group responsible for a string of anti-Vietnam War bombings. He made his way to Europe, then to Algeria, and finally to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was arrested in 1973. Leary spent the next three years in prison before moving to Beverly Hills, where he died of prostate cancer in 1996. At his wishes, his ashes were placed in a rocket and blasted into space. Before Leary died, Stubby says, he hounded Leary to get his money back, but Leary kept dodging him.

After arranging Leary's release, Stubby headed to Mexico, and thanks to his connections with the Mexican mafia, carried papers identifying himself as a federal agent investigating marijuana smuggling. Posing as a narc, he conned his way onto the Brotherhood's yacht, which had been confiscated in Mazatlan. "I couldn't believe it, but I got the boat out of there," he says.

He spent the next two years on the boat, traveling the Pacific and eventually the Panama Canal, where, in 1973, he was captured and deported. He spent the next year at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. After being released, he headed to the Caribbean and then to northern California. "That's when I started really dealing cocaine, and it made my life miserable," he says.

After serving time, Stubby lived under an assumed name, which helped him find work in television while he continued dealing drugs. He became a successful TV producer for NBC, working on both Real People and That'sIncredible. He even developed his own Real People character, Captain Sticky. (The actor who actually played Captain Sticky recently died in Thailand, where he moved to establish a sex-tour business.) In between shoots in San Diego, Stubby flew to San Francisco and met an ambassador from "a foreign country" who would walk through airport security with diplomatic immunity and 25 to 50 kilos of coke in two suitcases. "We'd bring it to a stash house in Daly City, and El Salvadoran soldiers with their whores and girlfriends and submachine guns would guard it," he says. "We had millions of dollars."

http://www.ocweekly.com/2005-07-07/feat ... acid/full/

[Hammer of Los]

...

Nameless formless motionless invisible soundless tasteless textureless dao before during after through within without above below beyond all times.

I arose from nothing.

But Nirvana has an aroma.

...

[American Dream]

...

Nameless formless motionless invisible soundless tasteless textureless dao before during after through within without above below beyond all times.

I arose from nothing.

But Nirvana has an aroma.

...

Wisdom of Sun Ra:

Are you afraid? . . . What is it you want to know?

Do you want to know where the universe came from?

I’ll tell you:

At first there was nothing . . . then nothing turned itself inside out and became something.

Why don’t you turn yourself inside out?




.

[American Dream]

http://hallucihoop.tumblr.com/post/25442426651

[undead]

^^^^^
Makes the Holy Mountain look like a walk in the park.

[Jerky]

You really think Santa Sangre is more "out there" than The Holy Mountain? I love both films almost unconditionally - I really, really do - but i think the reverse is true.

Jerky

[undead]

I wouldn't say it is more out there. It's more like the opposite of out there, dealing with extreme subconscious issues, trauma, childhood abuse and such. I just meant that it is a lot more challenging to watch and integrate. That could be just for me, though.

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/02/consum ... tripo.html

Consumer guide to drugs: Tripology

Because most psychedelic drugs are illegal, reliable consumer information about them is rare. For many years I have been looking for a comparative survey of available “head drugs” that would truthfully and simply provide basic info on each. What is it? What effects does it have when you take it? What’s a typical dose? What is the trip like? What are the dangers, risks and side effects? I looked everywhere for this kind of information, but with no success. Most people get their info from friends of friends, and it is usually unreliable. I finally found what I was looking for in a small book published by a non-profit drug treatment and advocacy center in the UK. The thin cartoonishly illustrated booklet is aimed at young people who use drugs and it is simply stating the facts: Here’s what the drug is, why people use it, and what the effects and downsides of using it are. In addition to the highs, the book realistically addresses the “costs” of use, overuse, and abuse. (Note: their discussion of the legal status is UK-based.)

This is the best consumer guide to mind-bending drugs I’ve seen. If you know of a better one, please comment. Don’t just say No. Say Know. -- Kevin Kelly


Tripology

[American Dream]

http://www.ww4report.com/node/12287

Alice Walker: off her rocker
Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Thu, 05/30/2013

Man, it just gets worse every damn day. All the lefties are cheering on Alice Walker for urging Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming concert in Israel, calling on the singer to honor the boycott and visit Gaza instead. (Ha'aretz, May 29) But just a few days earlier, asked by a BBC reporter what book she would take with her to a desert island, she named David Icke's Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. Yes, David Icke—the same crypto-fascist conspiranoid freak who I was sacked from WBAI for opposing. As The Independent notes in its report on Walker's endorsement of the evil little twit, Icke's book purports that the world is secretly ruled by "shape-shifting reptilians" from outer space, that the Moon is actually a "gigantic spacecraft" which sends us a "fake reality broadcast," and that we live in a manipulated reality "in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy." On her own website, Walker gushes:

I have been dragging along David Icke's monumental book: Human Race Get Off Your Knees for the last month. [Sic] ...Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm's fearlessness... how he called our oppressors "blue eyed devils." Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke's book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). [Sic] Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we're space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. [Sic, incorrect ellipses in original.] And they were.

They wanted gold and they wanted slaves to mine it for them. Now gosh, who does this remind us of? I only am asking. You do the work.

Yet after thusly admonishing us to "do the work," she refers in the very next paragraph to "Illuminati bloodline families and their puppets." Are we supposed to ignore this sinister wackiness and pretend that Alice Walker is on the side the angels because she supports the Israel boycott? Really?

The invocation of Malcolm X is particularly nauseating. Malcolm espoused the blue-eyed-devils rhetoric when he was still in the thrall of Elijah Muhammad, who also promulgated theories that the human race's oppressors are non-human beings and mixed up his ideas with UFO-ology. Malcolm repudiated all that in the final year of his life, and embraced a more rational, humanistic and universalist militancy (as Walker should know!). That is, a more truly revolutionary stance. In Malcolm X Speaks, he famously stated:

I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin...

And it probably isn't a coincidence that he was assassinated months after he spoke those words. This is the kind of vision that truly threatens the system. It isn't threatened at all by obscurantist pseudo-mystical bullshit of the David Icke variety. And until Alice Walker repudaites this toxic crap, she isn't doing the Palestinians any favors by speaking on their behalf.

[American Dream]

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

The Great LSD Conspiracy

Reflecting upon the sixties, a surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse so as to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion. "LSD makes people less competent," contends William Burroughs. "You can see their motivation for turning people on. Very often it's not necessary to give it more than just a little push. Make it available and the news media takes it up, and there it is. They don't have to stick their necks out very much."

Burroughs was one of the first to suspect that the acid craze of the 1960s might have been a manipulated phenomenon -- an opinion shared by John Sinclair, the former White Panther leader who once sang the praises of LSD as a revolutionary drug. "It makes perfect sense to me," Sinclair stated. "We thought at the time that as a result of our LSD-inspired activities great things would happen. And, of course, it didn't.... They were up there moving that shit around. Down on the street, nobody knew what was going on."

Even Ken Kesey, who still views LSD in a positive light, would not dismiss the possibility that the CIA might have meddled in the drug scene. "Could have been," Kesey admitted. "But, then again, they were giving us the cream, and once you've seen the cream, you know how good it is. And once you know how good it is, you know they can never take it away from you. They can never take that strength away."

Nearly a decade before Kesey was introduced to psychedelics as part of a government-funded drug study in Palo Alto, the CIA embarked upon a major effort to develop LSD into an effective mind control weapon. The CIA's behavior modification programs were geared toward domestic as well as foreign populations; targets included selected individuals and large groups of people. But in what way could LSD be utilized to manipulate an individual, let alone a subculture or a social movement? LSD is not a habit-forming substance like heroin, which transforms whole communities and turns urban slums into terrains of human bondage. Whereas opiates elicit a predictable response, both pharmacologically and socially, this is not necessarily the case with psychedelics. The efficacy of acid as an instrument of social control is therefore a rather tenuous proposition.

The CIA came to terms with this fundamental truth about LSD only after years of intense experimentation. At first CIA researchers viewed LSD as a substance that produced a specific reaction (anxiety), but subsequent studies revealed that "set and setting" were important factors in determining its effects. This finding made the drug less reliable as a cloak-and-dagger weapon, and the CIA utilized LSD in actual operations -- as an aid to interrogation and a discrediting agent -- only on a limited basis during the Cold War. By the mid-1960s the Agency had virtually phased out its in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ and related derivatives, which were shown to be more effective as incapacitants. But that did not mean the CIA had lost all interest in LSD. Instead the emphasis shifted to broader questions related to the social and political impact of the drug. A number of CIA-connected think tanks began to examine the relationship between the grassroots psychedelic scene and the New Left.

An accurate investigation would have shown that sizable amounts of street acid first appeared around college campuses and bohemian enclaves in 1965. This was an exceptionally creative period marked by a new assertiveness among young people. LSD accentuated a spirit of rebellion and helped to catalyze the expectations of many onto greatly expanded vistas. The social environment in which drugs were taken fostered an outlaw consciousness that was intrinsic to the development of the entire youth culture, while the use of drugs encouraged a generalizing of discontent that had significant political ramifications. The very expression of youth revolt was influenced and enhanced by the chemical mind-changers. LSD and marijuana formed the armature of a many-sided rebellion whose tentacles reached to the heights of ego-dissolving delirium, a rebellion as much concerned with the sexual and spiritual as with anything tradition ally political. It was a moment of great anticipation, and those who marched in that great Dionysian rap dance were confident that if they put their feet down on history, then history would surely budge.

But the mood had changed dramatically by the end of the decade, and the political fortunes of the New Left quickly plummeted. There were many reasons for this, not the least of which involved covert intervention by the CIA, FBI, and other spy agencies. The internecine conflicts that tore the Movement apart were fomented in part by government subversion. But such interference would have been far less effective if not for the innate vulnerability of the New Left, which emphasized both individual and social transformation as if they were two faces of an integral cultural transition, a rite of passage between a death and a difficult birth. "We had come to a curious place together, all of us," recalls Michael Rossman.

As politics grew cultural, we realized that deeper forces were involved than had yet been named, or attended to deliberately. We were adrift in questions and potentials. The organizational disintegration of the Movement as a political body was an outer emblem of conceptual incoherence, the inability to synthesize an adequate frame of understanding (and program) to embody all that we had come to realize was essential for the transformation we sought.

An autopsy of the youth movement would show that death resulted from a variety of ills, some self-inflicted, others induced from without. There was the paramilitary bug that came in like the plague after Chicago, a bug transmitted by provocateurs and other government geeks who were welcomed by the Movement's own incendiaries. A vicious crackdown on all forms of dissent ensued, while domestic violence played on the TV news as a nightly counterpoint to the appalling horror of Vietnam. It was the war, more than anything else, that drove activists to the brink of desperation. If not for the war, the legions of antiauthoritarian youth would never have endured the totalitarian style of the dogmatic crazies and the militant crazies who combined to blow the whole thing apart.

"What subverted the sixties decade," according to Murray Book. chin, "was precisely the percolation of traditional radical myths, political styles, a sense of urgency, and above all, a heightened metabolism so destructive in its effects that it loosened the very roots of 'the movement' even as it fostered its rank growth." In this respect the widespread use of LSD contributed significantly to the demise of the New Left, for it heightened the metabolism of the body politic and accelerated all the changes going on -- positive and negative, in all their contradictions. In its hyped-up condition the New Left managed to dethrone one president and prevent another from unleashing a nuclear attack on North Vietnam. These were mighty accomplishments, to be sure, but the Movement burnt itself out in the process. It never mastered its own intensity; nor could it stay the course and keep on a sensible political track.

During the intoxicating moments of the late 1960s, many radicals felt they were on the verge of a cataclysmic upheaval, an imminent break, a total revolution. In their dream world apocalypse was never far away. The delusions of grandeur they entertained were amplified by psychedelic drugs to the point that some felt themselves invested with magical powers. They wanted to change the world immediately -- or at least as fast as LSD could change a person's consciousness. By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued. Even activists who never took an LSD trip were affected by this process.

http://www.american-buddha.com/aciddrea ... piracy.htm

[American Dream]

David Icke: A Biographical Profile

David Icke was born in Leicester, UK in 1952, the son of a British World War II hero. He did not do well in school, but was talent-scouted by a football (we call it soccer in the U.S.) team, Coventry City. He also played for Hereford United. Early onset of arthritis ruled out a football career, and Mr. Icke retired from the sport in 1973. During the 1970s and 1980s he was a print and television journalist. He also began to dabble in politics, and after 1988 became one of the spokesmen for the UK Green Party.

About 1990, Mr. Icke began to get heavily into New Age ideas, evidently while searching for alternative cures to the pain of his arthritis. In early 1991 he claims to have had a spiritual experience at a pre-Columbian burial site in Peru. Not long after he returned to the UK, he resigned from the Green Party. At this point in his life he began wearing only clothes that were turquoise colored, believing it channeled positive energy. He also began making bizarre doomsday predictions, such as a prognostication that Great Britain would crumble into the sea as a result of earthquakes. (There is no significant seismic activity in Britain). Mr. Icke later recanted these predictions, admitting they were “nonsense.”

What really projected Mr. Icke into the public eye was an April 1991 interview with BBC personality Terry Wogan. You can see a video of the interview here. In the interview, Mr. Icke continued to make strange apocalyptic predictions. He also claimed, or at least implied, that he was the Son of God—later Mr. Icke said this was misinterpreted. The studio audience present at the interview laughed. The BBC brass cringed; many thought the show went too far. Fifteen years later, Mr. Wogan admitted that he was too hard on Mr. Icke during this interview. Certainly the interview had a devastating effect—Mr. Icke said he was afraid to walk down the street for fear of public derision, and he dropped out of sight for several years.

In 1999, Mr. Icke came out with his most famous book, The Biggest Secret, the book with which he is identified on-screen in Thrive. This book established the central tenet of Mr. Icke’s philosophy: that the world is run by a race of reptilian aliens that can change their shape and appear to be human, and that the world’s political, economic and social systems are a colossal conspiracy by these evil aliens to enslave mankind. These aliens are supposedly from the constellation Draco, but also from another dimension. Over his various series of books and lectures, Mr. Icke has expounded on this theory, weaving a complicated science-fiction history of the world wherein these aliens have been breeding humans since ancient times. People whom Mr. Icke thinks are secretly reptilian shape-shifting aliens from Draco include Bill Clinton, the late Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, President George W. Bush (of course), and, for whatever reason, Hollywood actor and former country star Kris Kristofferson.

Mr. Icke has not changed this basic narrative in 13 years. Indeed, he’s still out there today, giving lectures all over the world and getting paid handsomely for it. According to one estimate, he may make as much as £300,000 (about $475,000) for one appearance in the UK.

Is There Any Evidence to Support David Icke’s Theories?

No.

There is not a single shred of evidence anywhere in the world to suggest that (1) shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the constellation Draco actually exist; (2) various world leaders, celebrities and country-western stars are actually reptilian shape-shifting aliens from the constellation Draco; or (3) that there is a such thing as an “Illuminati,” a “New World Order” or a “Global Domination Agenda.” On this blog, I have already debunked the Global Domination Agenda and demonstrated why we can be certain that it does not exist. All of the so-called “evidence” produced by Mr. Icke and/or his supporters falls along exactly the same lines as the discussion in that article about why evidence proffered by Illuminati/NWO/GDA believers does not, in fact, prove the existence of this group or their supposed agenda. Mr. Icke’s theories are total fantasy.

A favorite activity of believers in Mr. Icke’s fantastic delusional scenarios is to scrutinize videos on YouTube of world leaders suspected of being reptilians for “evidence” of them changing from their human into their reptilian form. Sometimes believers will seize upon a glitch or anomaly in the video, often lasting only split seconds, and trumpet it as “proof” that the person is “changing into a reptile in front of our eyes!” Often the culprit will be a bulging vein in the person’s neck, a common retinal flash (red-eye), or a pixellation error in the streaming video which the believer insists makes the person look like they have “lizard eyes.” For some reason, former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush are favorite targets for this ludicrous accusation. Here is an example of a video which reptilian believers cite as total vindication of Mr. Icke’s claims.



As you can see, it’s a pretty boring interview by the former presidents, and despite the frenzied claims of the subtitles, neither of them change into reptiles, nor anything even remotely close.

I challenge any believer of Mr. Icke’s theories to explain how and why this video proves (I) that reptilian shape-shifting aliens exist; (II) that these aliens come from Draco; (III) that these aliens rule the world, or (IV) that President Clinton and President Bush are said reptilian aliens.

To those supporters of Mr. Icke who will invariably say, “But you haven’t proved that what he says isn’t true,” I will reply, I don’t have to. It’s Mr. Icke’s burden to prove that what he says is true. The burden of proof never shifts to skeptics to disprove conspiracy theories. I am not suggesting that we reject David Icke’s theories about reptilian shape-shifting aliens because they sound crazy. I’m suggesting that we reject them because there is no evidence to support them, and because, as if this is not enough reason to reject them, they have another very serious and troubling problem.

What Do David Icke’s Theories Really Mean?

The problem with Mr. Icke’s false assertions is that they are essentially science-fiction redresses of the old “Jewish world conspiracy” theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with reptilian shape-shifting aliens from Draco standing in for Jews. Mr. Icke even believes in the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery that was proven false almost a century ago. Of course, in Mr. Icke’s mythology, it was not the Jews who wrote about their plans of world domination in the Protocols, but aliens.

Michael Barkun, an academic researcher who studies comparative religion, wrote a book called A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Dr. Barkun is the leading scholarly expert on conspiracy theorists in the United States today. On page 104, in a chapter where Dr. Barkun describes the conspiracist ideology of Mr. Icke, he says:

“This set of nested conspiracies [described by David Icke] achieves its goals through control of the ‘world financial system’ and its mastery of ‘mind control’ techniques. Its goal is a ‘plan that, according to Icke, had been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although Icke is careful to suggest…that the Illuminati rather than the Jews wrote The Protocols, this is the first of a number of instances in which Icke moves into the dangerous terrain of anti-Semitism.”

The reason that aliens became stand-ins for Jews has to do with the evolution of conspiracy theory during the 1980s and 1990s, when right-wing militia conspiracy milieu (think Timothy McVeigh) became intertwined with the UFO/alien subculture. Dr. Barkun states, on page 144:

“This type of speculation projects terrestrial racial categories onto creatures from outer space….Such racial classificatory schemata are common among those who argue for multiple types of alien visitors. Even among writers who most unambiguously reject anti-Semitism, the alien racial types disquietingly appear to reproduce old stereotypes. The evil Grays are dwarfish with grotesque features—not unlike stereotypes of the short, swarthy, hook-nosed Jew of European anti-Semitic folklore. They are contrasted to the tall, virtuous Nordics or Aryans. Although there is little to suggest that those who employ such terms do so to make direct parallels to earthbound categories, the images seem clearly to be refracted versions of older racial anti-Semitism.”

This is useful background, but it isn’t really about Mr. Icke per se. However, Dr. Barkun does get there, after discussing how conspiracists like David Icke are inconsistent about proclaiming to not be anti-Semitic while advancing clearly anti-Semitic theories:

“David Icke also seeks to have it both ways, simultaneously claiming to be offended at the thought that anyone might find him anti-Semitic and hinting at the dark activities of Jewish elites. He protests that the charge of anti-Semitism is merely a ruse to silence truth seekers, a tactic of the shadowy ‘Global Elite,’ who ‘denounce anyone who gets closer to the truth as an anti-Semite.’ According to Icke, the Anti-Defamation League is the conspiracy’s tool for silencing ‘researchers who are getting too close to the truth about the global conspiracy.’…

The more strongly Icke is condemned for anti-Semitism, the stranger are his protestations of innocence. He attacks alleged exploiters of the Jewish people, including B’nai B’rith, which he identifies as the Rothschilds’ ‘intelligence arm,’ used to ‘defame and destroy legitimate researchers with the label anti-Semitic.’ It was supposedly the Rothschilds who brought Hitler to power, created Zionism, and ‘control the State of Israel.’…Icke and other UFO anti-Semites obsess about ‘Jewish bankers.’ They are alleged to be the international wire-pullers behind countless episodes of national collapse and international turmoil. The old names, such as Rothschild and the firm of Kuhn, Loeb, continually recur. Given this penchant for recycling old themes, it is scarcely surprising that that hoary forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, exerts an abiding fascination.”

http://thrivedebunked.wordpress.com/201 ... avid-icke/