Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

This month marked the 100th birthday day of Albert Hoffman the discoverer of LSD.

Father of LSD recalls his famous bicycle trip


LSD inventor keeps on truckin' at 100 The drug was popularized by Timothy Leary, the one-time Harvard lecturer known as the “high priest of LSD,” whose “turn on, tune in, drop out” advice to students in the 1960s glamorized the hallucinogen. The film star Cary Grant and numerous rock musicians extolled its virtues in achieving true self-discovery and enlightenment.

But away from the psychedelic trips and flower children, stories emerged of people going on murder sprees or jumping out of windows while hallucinating. Heavy users suffered permanent psychological damage.

The United States banned LSD in 1966 and other countries followed suit.

Mr. Hofmann maintains that was unfair, arguing the drug was not addictive. He has repeatedly said the ban should be lifted so LSD can be used in medical research, and he took the drug himself, purportedly on an occasional basis and out of scientific interest, for several decades.

And it has been 58 years since LSD was discovered and applied to scientific and psychiatric assessment. LSD - My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann

LSD was studied extensively by Dr. Oswald from Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Boing Boing: Midcentury LSD Experiments at Canadian mental hospital Yep little old Saskatchwan.

Dr. Oswald had done earlier experimentations with mescaline which he had administered to the author Aldous Huxely.

Mescaline, LSD, Psilocybin and Personality Change

Oswald was a pioneer in LSD investigations, he was the originator of the term 'psychedelic'. The experiments conducted in Saskatchewan were the more positive aspect of LSD experimentation during the late fifties and early sixties.

Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective

In the popular mind, d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) research in psychiatry has long been associated with the CIA-funded experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Quebec. Despite this reputation, a host of medical researchers in the post–World War II era explored LSD for its potential therapeutic value. Some of the most widespread trials in the Western world occurred in Saskatchewan, under the direction of psychiatrists Humphry Osmond (in Weyburn) and Abram Hoffer (in Saskatoon). These medical researchers were first drawn to LSD because of its ability to produce a “model psychosis.” Their experiments with the drug that Osmond was to famously describe as a “psychedelic” led them to hypothesize and promote the biochemical nature of schizophrenia. This brief paper examines the early trials in Saskatchewan, drawing on hospital records, interviews with former research subjects, and the private papers of Hoffer and Osmond. It demonstrates that, far from being fringe medical research, these LSD trials represented a fruitful, and indeed encouraging, branch of psychiatric research occurring alongside more famous and successful trials of the first generation of psychopharmacological agents, such as chlropromazine and imipramine.

During the 1950's and 1960's the Canadian Defense Department, and the American Defense department and the CIA funded LSD research on unsuspecting Canadian subjects. They also did joint secret studies of Biological Chemical warfare weapons on the citizens of Winnipeg, and as we are finding out now, Agent Orange tests on unsuspecting Canadian troops and citizens in Gagetown NB.

Bio-Chemical Warfare and You

The most infamous of the CIA LSD mindcontrol experiments was the work of Dr. Ewan Cameron, but he was not alone. McGill university was also implicated in the illegal and unethical treatment of prisoners and unsuspecting patients by psychiatrists using LSD as well as other behavioral modification drugs and techniques.

Canadian experiments

The experiments were even exported to Canada when the CIA recruited Albany, New York doctor Ewan Cameron, author of the psychic driving concept which the CIA found particularly interesting. In it he described his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely. He commuted to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKULTRA experiments there. The CIA appears to have given him the potentially deadly experiments to carry out since they would be used on non-U.S. citizens.

In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroshock "therapy" at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for months on end (up to three in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.

It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal only a decade earlier.

Resources on Drug Experiments Performed by the US Government

Letter re: LSD experiments at Prison for Women, Kingston

bioethics

LSD TESTS KINGSTON PRISON FOR WOMEN 1960'S

The Canadian military funded LSD experiments on students and musicians in Montreal

Canada was the one country that was extensively doing scientific and psychiatric studies on LSD, and would later influence the American studies such as those Ken Kesey went through and documented in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

THE USE OF LSD IN THE TREATMENT OF ALCOHOLISM


In fact it was the CIA which popularized LSD in the research community and can be thanked for its becoming the popular hippie drug it would become. The Original Captain Trips

The CIA aghast at the result of its 'experiment' getting out of control later would plant phony LSD fear stories in the press of the day, Time Magazine in partiuclar, about how LSD caused people to stare at the sun and go blind or leap off buildings because they thought they could fly. The incidents may have occured, not during hippie Timothy Leary style 'trips', but when unsuspecting CIA agents had been drugged without their knowing it.

The CIA dropped LSD but continued to practice narcopolitics with guns and weapons for heroin exchanges begining with the Vietnam war and it still continues today. As well as later connections between the CIA and the Cocaine cartels in Latin America. The War on Drugs was really about the war on drugs NOT supplied by the CIA. Always has been.

The CIA and The Politics of Heroin

CIA Hawking Heroin in Baghdad?

And while Dr. Hoffman blames LSD's wayward travels as the popular Tune In , Turn On, Drop Out drug of the Leary hippie era, its scientific banishment was orchestrated deliberately by the U.S. government after MKULTRA and other CIA experiments on mind control proved failures, and the popularity of the drug was getting out of their control.

Scientific research using LSD had to be restricted if not outright banned to cover up the covert studies done by CIA funded psychiatrists or else the scientific community would find out that results of so called benign studies were something more sinister.

The effect of lysergic acid diethylamide(LSD-25) on perception with stabilized images


The Guardian reports on one of the original British scientists who studied LSD prior to the famous Timothy Leary psychedlic revolution, who wants to return to studying its impact on mental illness.

Re-opening doors of perception
Sarah Boseley reports on the psychiatrist who wants to reverse the taboo against using LSD to help troubled patients

The revival of the idea of studying the impact of LSD is because the British Home Secretary has called for an extensive review of the drug legislation in Britain.

Will Clarke go soft on LSD and Ecstasy?

Charles Clarke has ordered a sweeping review of drug laws which could lead to the effective downgrading of Ecstasy and LSD.

The Home Secretary, who caused fury by resisting demands to toughen the rules on cannabis, said the current system of classifying drugs could be torn up.

He is considering a new system which would take into account the 'social' consequences of each drug, including links to muggings and burglaries. Drugs are currently split into Class A, B and C.

In 1972 Canada like Britain plans to do today, did a comprehensive Royal Commission into the use of drugs. The Ledain commission is noted for its work around cannibis and the controversial reccomendation at the time, one that remains controversial, for the decriminalization of cannibis and recreational drugs. The study also included research on LSD.

Canada was the soul source of scientific experimentation on LSD and for access to LSD even after the U.S. banned it.

BC's Acid Flashback

Long before Timothy Leary and the Summer of Love, patients at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster were being treated with LSD.

To Rick Doblin, New Westminster's Hollywood Hospital was a far-off place of myth and legend. It was 1972, and being a college student in Florida, he was keen to expand his mind. So he wrote to the hospital to see whether he could undergo its most famous treatment; a 12-hour trip into his consciousness, under the influence of pure Sandoz LSD.

"It was the only place left where you could have a guided LSD experience in a controlled setting," Doblin says. But the hospital told him it would cost $600, more than an 18-year-old could afford, and the trip never happened.

He never forgot about that hospital, though. After doing a PhD in public policy at Harvard, he became director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a Florida-based research group that designs experiments using mind-altering drugs in psychiatric therapy. Last month Doblin was in the news because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved a MAPS-designed study using MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder. Now Doblin is helping create an experiment using LSD - which, like MDMA, was successfully used by therapists for years before it was outlawed. So he's set his sights once again on Hollywood Hospital - or at least the files for the thousands of patients who were treated there with LSD between 1957 and 1975

Canada remained a source of LSD for drug studies conducted in the late 1970's all were done on animals none on humans after the US Administration banned the scientific use of LSD.

DISAGGREGATION OF BRAIN POLYSOMES AFTER LSD IN VIVO Involvement of LSD-Induced Hyperthermia

RNA Synthesis in Isolated Brain Nuclei after Administration of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) In Vivo


Today a new age of mind explorers, working in the computer enhanced virtual reality of the wired culture have re-discovered the positive uses of LSD. LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug?

The earlier researchers like Dr. Timothy Leary and Richard Albert (Baba Ram Dass) who used LSD to open the doors of perception ( as Aldous Huxely refered to his experiences on a similar hallucinogen; mescaline) this generation of mind explorers has their work to build on and Dr. Leary's later interest in computers. What goes around comes around and goes around and comes around.

Todd Brendan Fahey made the Digital Leap at the close of 1994.

The synthesis of psychedelic drugs and the Internet has not been widely written of by the mainstream media, but Fahey and others believe the relationship to run deep.

John Perry Barlow remarked to Fahey, in an as-yet unpublished interview: "I'll go so far as to say, if the government succeeds in its War On (some) Drugs--if everyone who used marjiuana and LSD were to really be put in jails--America would not have an operational computer left."

This remark mirrors Timothy Leary's assertion, to Fahey in 1992, that "Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were barefoot, long-haired acid freaks" and that Bill Gates was known to use LSD while at Harvard.

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Microdosing LSD: Are there benefits? What about risks?
2024/03/11

Better moods, higher concentration levels, more creativity - and all without the usual risks associated with hard drugs: Proponents of microdosing LSD - taking tiny fractions of the amount needed for the usual 'trip' - say it works wonders. And what does the science say? Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa

It doesn't take much LSD, short for lysergic acid diethylamide, to substantially alter a person's state of consciousness.

Compared with many other substances, the amounts are very small, says Dr Volker Auwärter, director of the forensic toxicology laboratory at the University of Freiburg Medical Centre in Germany: "Upwards of 50, 100 micrograms are said to be a psychedelic dose."

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) calls the hallucinogen "one of the most potent drugs known."

But what happens if you greatly reduce the dose - to about 10 micrograms? Let's check the facts on LSD microdosing:

Claim: Taking minute amounts of LSD is safe.

Assessment: Possible side effects are still unclear.

Facts: A person who microdoses LSD typically takes about 10 micrograms, just a tenth or twentieth of the amount normally taken for a "trip," or psychedelic experience, says Dr Felix Müller, deputy senior physician at Basel University Psychiatric Clinics in Switzerland, where he's in charge of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

In contrast to people who take psychedelic drugs in higher doses, however, microdosers usually take another dose after a few days, says Müller, who's been doing research on LSD for about 10 years.

Randomized controlled trials on microdosing examine the regular intake of tiny amounts of psychedelic substances - about every three days over a prolonged period.

What does this means in terms of possible risks?

As with other hallucinogens, dependence on LSD doesn't occur, the EMCDDA says. Nor is there a risk of poisoning in the sense of toxic injuries to internal organs, even at high doses, according to Auwärter.

The risks that do exist, Müller says, are more to mental than physical health, adding that whether this also applies to LSD microdosing hasn't been conclusively determined. "[LSD microdosing] is a relatively recent phenomenon," he remarks. "And it's certainly conceivable that repeated use is another matter altogether."

Müller points out that pharmacologists once suspected that LSD could cause changes in heart valves, as had occurred a number of years ago with then-available medications that bound to and activated the same receptor in the body.

Accordingly, Dr Matthias Liechti, director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at Basel University Hospital and head of the Department of Biomedicine's psychopharmacology research group, says studies should investigate possible side effects on heart valve function from regular, months-long LSD use.

In a randomized controlled trial of microdosed LSD's effects on healthy adult men, published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers from the University of Auckland's School of Pharmacy conclude that microdosing "appears to be relatively safe ... notwithstanding a risk of anxiety."

Müller cautions, however, that such studies are few and short-term, expressing surprise that people - "relatively naively" - would get involved with LSD microdosing. After all, he says, it's a bit like taking a medicine that hasn't yet been approved for use as it's still being tested for side effects.

What other risks are there?

LSD microdosers can't be sure of the amount they're actually taking. "Whether microdosed or taken in the 'classic' manner, the content of active pharmaceutical ingredient is never really known," says Müller, explaining that the only way to find out is to have it tested at an addiction prevention centre.

"LSD is usually sold dripped onto plotter paper - similar to blotting paper - that's cut into squares," Müller says. A square typically contains doses of 100 or 200 micrograms. Microdosers cut the paper squares into smaller pieces.

Dosing this way is "inexact though, of course" Müller says, just as it is when LSD is sold dissolved in water or alcohol - 100 micrograms per drop, for example - and further diluted into microdoses.

While Müller doesn't regard this as being physically dangerous - "extremely high doses" are necessary before LSD becomes problematic - he says the mental health effects of higher doses are stronger and longer lasting.

"When you microdose it's naturally possible to be way off the mark," he warns.

Claim: Microdosed LSD enhances concentration and creativity.

Assessment: Studies haven't proven this.

Facts: Clinical evidence on whether tiny doses of LSD can boost concentration and creativity, and help combat depression and anxiety disorders is in short supply.

"Because of the small number of controlled trials that have been done, there's hardly any data on the effects of LSD microdosing," notes Liechti, who says the immediate effects are similar to, but weaker than, those from high doses.

Although there are indications of improved well-being in trial participants who are given a small dose of LSD compared with those receiving a placebo, "it's only on the day of treatment, not afterwards," Liechti says.

Moreover, due to the dearth of trial results, nothing can yet be said on to what extent - if any - LSD microdosing eases depression and anxiety, he adds. And the University of Auckland study showed no significant effect on creativity.

Reports of improved mood and cognitive functioning by LSD microdosers have been supported only to a limited extent in randomized controlled trials to date, according to the New Zealand researchers, and none have found lasting effects in these areas from repeated use of minute amounts of LSD.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PSYCHEDELIC 

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

There are series of new academic papers and a documentary film published by U of A researcher Erika Dyck on the Weyburn Saskatchewan LSD experiments done in the fifties and sixties.

LSD finds new respectability

Old research on LSD treatment for alcoholism gets new look ...

LSD & Alcoholism Treatment: Saskatchewan Alcoholism Treatment with LSD

'Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom': LSD Treatment for Alcoholism

Long-forgotten LSD treatment might aid alcoholics start a trip to recovery


The Weyburn experiments along with later research by Leary, Albert, etc. proved LSD was a useful and safe drug.

It had to be safe or of course the CIA would never have used it. However the CIA planted stories in the press about LSD suicides, LSD users going blind staring at the sun, all of which were fictions like WMD in Iraq.

In Canada and the US counter studies were used to 'prove' LSD was harmful. Of course as most LSD users and researchers know it is all about the 'setting'. If you are in a secure comfortable setting you have a good trip. Being strapped down and tortured of course would create a bad trip.

The Saskatchewan results were soon attacked by institutions including the Toronto-based Addiction Research Foundation. It argued Osmond's research, in which subjects were given LSD in comfy surroundings and stimulated with art or music, was poorly designed and proved nothing. In contrast, the foundation sometimes blindfolded or restrained its LSD test subjects to isolate the effect of the drug. It failed to reproduce the Saskatchewan results, a finding that, combined with growing social concern about LSD, eventually led to the end of research into such therapy.

Well of course they failed, they deliberately did not use empirical research to 'duplicate' the experiment. They used a different technique, one closely resembling torture, to disprove the Weyburn experiments. They of course had an agenda, one that was anti-LSD and thus anti-scientific.



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LSD




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Preface to Psychedelic Tricksters:
A True Secret History of LSD
by David Black
JUNE 3, 2020



Preface to Psychedelic Tricksters:

 A True Secret History of LSD by David Black

BPC Publications. London 2020 

Preface

Like atomic power and artificial intelligence, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered in the closing years of World War Two. Since then, atomic bombs and computers have been the constant source of fears that combined they might bring about the destruction of humanity. LSD has aroused similar fears. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered its effects in 1943, likened the LSD trip to an ‘inner bomb’. He warned that, if improperly used and distributed, LSD might bring about more destruction than an atomic detonation. But it has also been argued that, if properly used and distributed, LSD use might actually change people’s consciousness for the better and help to prevent nuclear war. Professor David Nutt, who sat on the British Labour government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs until he was sacked in 2009, argues that the study of psychedelics is essential for understanding the nature of consciousness itself:

‘This is core neuroscience. This is about humanity at its deepest level. It is fundamental to understanding ourselves. And the only way to study consciousness is to change it. Psychedelics change consciousness in a way that is unique, powerful, and perpetual – of course we have to study them’.

As is well known, in the 1950s and early ‘60s the US Central Intelligence Agency used LSD, in secret and illegal experiments, on unwitting subjects. The CIA did so according to Cold War logic: if the Russians could work out how to use LSD in bio-chemical warfare — or in ‘brain-washing’, as a ‘truth drug’, or even as a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ — then the USA needed to work it out first.

In 1953, the CIA launched a top-secret ‘mind-control’ project, code-named MK-Ultra. The CIA’s assets in the US medical profession ‘officially’ labelled LSD as ‘psychosis-inducing drug’, only of use in psychiatric analysis and research. Many CIA officers, contractors and assets however, became enthusiastic trippers themselves, in full knowledge that LSD could produce atrocious as well as enchanting hallucinations. Knowing the secrets of LSD, they thought of themselves as a kind of anti-communist spiritual elite who, unlike the US citizenry at large, were ‘in the know’.

But by the end of the 1950s, with no sign of the Russians contaminating the water supply with LSD, there were plenty of signs in the United States that the psychedelic experience was escaping its captors. Some of the researchers in American hospitals – who had little awareness that their work was being secretly sponsored by the CIA — realised that LSD had ‘spiritual’ implications, i.e. for developing an ‘integrative’ enlightened consciousness, conducive to visionary creativity. These researchers stressed the importance of ‘set and setting’ in properly supervised LSD sessions. The English scholar, Aldous Huxley, who took his first LSD trip in 1955, related in his essay Heaven and Hell the hallucinogenic experience to the visionary works of William Blake:

‘Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and “going to heaven” is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point, from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence’.

Huxley, though an advocate for psychedelic drugs, wanted them strictly controlled. In contrast, Timothy Leary, who first took LSD in December 1961, became the ‘guru’ of psychedelia as LSD ‘escaped’ into the counter-culture of the 1960s. The ‘escape’ has been the subject of conspiracy theories which have been weaponised in today’s so-called Culture Wars. According to one widely-held view, the entire psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s was engineered by the CIA as part of a plot by some secret global elite bent on mass mind-control. For elements of the Right, the psychedelic counter-culture undermined ‘traditional values’ such as patriarchy, nationalism and subservience to authority. On the Left, some see the 1960s hedonism of ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll’ as having been a distraction from politics. The theory, as it has spread, has thrown in extra villains for good measure: satanists, MI6, the psychiatrists of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, etc, etc.

In truth, the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s has always been difficult to determine; not least because Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, illegally destroyed the project’s operational files in 1973. Nonetheless, some leading figures of the counter-culture, such as Timothy Leary, can hardly be discussed without reference to the CIA – not least because Leary himself had so much to say about it. In the present work, whilst I pay only scant attention to conspiracy theories, I make no apologies for investigating, where necessary, real conspiracies.

The underground networks of acid producers and distributors on both sides of the Atlantic were described after their downfall in the nineteen-seventies in such terms as ‘Hippie Mafia’ or ‘Microdot Gang’: so out of their heads that they didn’t know any better; or were ‘only in it for the money’; or were tools of organised crime and/or state agencies. In an earlier ebook I noted that nearly everyone involved – the psychedelic revolutionaries, the financiers, intelligence and anti-drugs agencies, CIA-sponsored scientists and researchers – operated to a greater or lesser extent outside of accepted standards of ‘legality’, or didn’t even recognise them; hence the title: Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution. But although the term ‘outlaw’ certainly fits many of people in this study, it doesn’t fit all of them by any means. Stephen Bentley, ex-undercover police officer and author of Undercover: Operation Julie – The Inside Story, takes exception to my use of the term ‘questionable legality’ regarding of some of the surveillance methods he and his colleagues used:

‘Questionable by who? Illegal – mostly not… Yes, I smoked a lot of hash… and did some cocaine. Technically, that was illegal. Tell me what I was supposed to do given I was undercover. I wasn’t Steve Bentley. I was ‘Steve Jackson’ – wild, carefree, giving all the impression I was a dealer. I’m now 72 years’ old. I don’t care for the historical revisionism applied to Operation Julie recently. It was a highly successful and unique police investigation carried out professionally under difficult circumstances’.

On my reference to the ‘ham-acting of drunken undercover officers’, Bentley retorts:

‘Maybe you should try living a lie for the best part of a year; doing things alien to you; becoming a different person. Those who know will scoff at the thought of it being an act. It’s not. You become someone else – believe me’.

The point is, I concede that although Stephen Bentley mixed with ‘acid outlaws’ and behaved like one when he was infiltrating them in north Wales in the 1970s, he certainly wasn’t one himself. Steve Abrams – who inspired me twenty years ago to write about this subject in the first place – wasn’t an outlaw either. He is described in an obituary in Psychedelic Press – quite accurately — as a ‘psychedelic trickster’. Many of the leading players who feature in this tale were certainly outlaws at various times but primarily they were tricksters. In Carl Gustav Jung’s definition of archetypes, the ‘Trickster’ surfaces in many stories in mythology, folklore and religion. More generally, anthropologists studying indigenous cultures in various parts of the world identify the trickster with cunning crazy-acting animals such as the fox or coyote, shape-shifting gods such as Loki in Norse mythology and rustic pranksters in human form. In the literature of Greek antiquity, Prometheus, the son of a Titan, tricks the gods with his buffoonery and steals fire from heaven for the benefit of human kind, for which he is severely punished by Zeus. As the historian of religion, Klaus-Peter Koepping, puts it:

‘In European consciousness Prometheus becomes the symbol for man’s never-ceasing, unremitting, and relentless struggle against fate, against the gods, unrepentingly defying the laws of the Olympians, though (and this again shows the continuing absurdity) never being successful in this endeavor, which, however, is necessary for the origin of civilized life (the ultimate paradox of rule breaking as a rule)’.

Like fire, psychedelic drugs can be dangerous as well as beneficial. In various ways the tricksters who feature in this book tended to believe that their antics were beneficial to humanity as well as themselves; and in most cases had to suffer the consequences of their actions. CIA MK-Ultra chief, Sidney Gottlieb, believed that that his immoral and dishonest actions were outweighed by his patriotism and dedication to science, but his reputation has been posthumously trashed (a biography by Stephen Kinzer calls him as ‘the CIA’s Poisoner-in-Chief’). On the ‘other’ side, the reputation of Timothy Leary, who likewise believed he was acting as a patriot and saviour of civilisation, has shape-shifted from brilliant scientist to mystical guru, wanted criminal, wild-eyed revolutionary, renegade informer and finally self-aggrandising ‘showboater’.

I sent a copy of the previous book to Tim Scully, a most significant actor in the events unfolded in this story. Scully is a meticulous researcher (he is compiling a history of LSD production in the US) and, as it turns out, a very reliable witness. Scully, born 1944, was in 1966 taken on as apprentice to the famous LSD chemist Owsley Stanley (AKA Bear Stanley). After Owsley withdrew from LSD production following a bust of his tableting facility in December 1967, Scully was determined to continue. After making LSD in successive laboratories in Denver, Scully began to work with fellow psychedelic chemist, Nick Sand (another trickster). Their collaboration led to the establishment in November 1968 of a lab in Windsor, California, which ultimately produced well over a kilo (more than four million 300 μg doses) of very pure LSD that became known as Orange Sunshine. Scully, in writing to me, pointed to a number of errors in my writings regarding events in the USA. Generously, he provided me with a lot of very useful information: firstly, on how underground LSD production was organised in the United States in the 1960s; secondly, on the relations between the American LSD producers in the United States, their collaborators in Great Britain, and the ‘Brotherhood of Eternal Love’; and thirdly on the alleged CIA asset, Ronald Stark, who Scully knew and did business with. With further research and fact-checking I realised that none of the previous books on the subject (including mine) have accurately covered these three issues. I hope – whilst making no claim to have written anything like a comprehensive or definitive history of the LSD underground – that this one does.

Contents

1 – MK-Ultra: The CIA’s ‘Mind Control’ Project

Sorcery

Midnight Climax

Heartbreak Hotel: the Death of Frank Olson

Human Ecology: an MK-Ultra Front

Personality Assessment

2 – How the CIA Failed the Acid Test

Magic Mushrooms

Harvard Trips

Timothy Leary and Mary Pinchot

‘Captain Trips’: Alfred Hubbard

Coasts of Utopias

3 – London Underground

Centre of the World

Psychedelic Situationists

The 1967 ‘Summer of Love’

4 – David Solomon and the Art of Psychedelic Subversion

Psychedelic Jazz

Acid Revolution

5 – Steve Abrams: E.S.P., C.I.A., T.H.C.

Parapsychology

Potboilers

SOMA, Solomon and Stark

6 – The New Prohibition versus the Acid Underground

Psychedelic Alchemy

Owsley and the Grateful Dead

Heat

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Money Matters

Orange Sunshine

7 – The Atlantic Acid Alliance

Richard Kemp – Liverpool’s LSD Chemist

Tripping with RD Laing

8 – The British Microdot Gang and the Veritable Split

9 – The Downfall of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Ronald Stark and the Brotherhood

Takeover

Operation BEL

The Scully-Sand Conspiracy Trial

10 – Timothy Leary’s Reality Tunnels: One Escape After Another

Political Intoxication

Weather Underground: Stalinism on Acid

Armed Love

Hotel Abyss

Leary ‘Co-operates’

11 – Operation Julie: the Hunters and the Hunted

S.T.U.F.F.

The Chase

Showtrial

12 – The Many Faces of Ronald Hadley Stark

Busted in Bologna

Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’

The Red Brigades

Lebanon

Prison Wager

13 – Tricksters

14 – Acid 2.0: Redux or Recuperation?

The Barbarism of Pure Culture
Psychedelic Culture, Situationist Poetics and Films, Radical Politics, Working-Class History

http://thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk/wp/preface-to-psychedelic-tricksters-a-new-secret-history-of-lsd-by-david-black/

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LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LSD 

Study on LSD microdosing uncovers neuropsychological mechanisms that could underlie anti-depressant effects

A single, low dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can increase reward-related brain activity, according to new research published in Neuropsychopharmacology. The study indicates that the psychedelic drug alters neuropsychological processes that tend to be blunted in patients with depression.

The findings could have important implications for understanding the relationship between microdosing and mental health.

Microdosing is becoming increasingly popular as a means of improving productivity, creativity, or overall psychological wellbeing. The practice involves taking very small doses of LSD or other psychedelic substances on a regular basis. But there is little scientific evidence regarding the purported benefits of microdosing.

“After seeing the numerous media reports of the benefits of microdosing, I felt that there was a need for controlled studies,” explained lead researcher Harriet de Wit, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory. “My laboratory is equipped to investigate whether very low doses of LSD produce changes in mood, behavior or, in this study, brain function.”

“The use of this drug under naturalistic conditions is influenced by strong expectancies of benefits by the users, and expectancies are known to affect responses to drugs. By studying the drug under double-blind, placebo controlled conditions we can determine what the drug itself does without the expectancies. In this particular study, we wanted to know whether low doses of LSD change the brain’s signature response to a rewarding stimulus.”

In the study, 18 healthy young adults participated in three five-hour laboratory sessions in which they received placebo, 13 μg of LSD, or 26 μg of LSD in randomized order. The sessions were separated by at least 7 days. Approximately 120 minutes after receiving placebo or LSD, the participants completed a monetary incentive delay task as the researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography.

During the task, the participants responded as quickly as possible to target stimuli displayed on a computer screen, which signaled the potential opportunity to win small sums of money. They received positive or negative feedback after each attempt, based on their performance.

The researchers were particularly interested in three different patterns of electrical brain activity. Reward-Positivity reflects a hedonic effect that occurs after a person receives a reward, and it is thought to reflect the encoding of feedback about the success of reinforcement learning. Late-Positive Potential occurs after a person learns about an outcome, and it is thought to reflect the processing of emotional stimuli. Feedback-P3 occurs after a person receives feedback about their performance, and it is thought to reflect the updating of predictive models.

“In this study we showed that a low dose of LSD, in the range of doses that people use when they ‘microdose’ LSD, can increase the brain’s response to a rewarding stimulus,” de Wit told PsyPost. “Previous studies have shown that individuals with depression show a dampened brain response to reward. In our study, we found that a low dose of LSD increased the reward-related signal in a way that is consistent with possible anti-depressant effects. This may be related to the purported beneficial effects of microdosing.”

Compared to placebo, De Wit and her colleagues found that both doses of LSD increased Feedback-P3 amplitudes, but only 13 μg of LSD increased Reward-Positivity and Late-Positive Potential amplitudes when the participants were presented with a potential reward.

“One surprising finding was that the effects of the drug were not simply, or linearly, related to dose of the drug,” de Wit said. “Some of the effects were greater at the lower dose. This suggests that the pharmacology of the drug is somewhat complex, and we cannot assume that higher doses will produce similar, but greater, effects.”

Whether microdosing has any positive benefits remains unclear. In a previous study, de Wit and her colleagues failed to find evidence that taking low doses in LSD resulted in improvements to mood or cognition. The researchers said that more research is needed to determine the long-term effects of microdosing, and whether it holds promise as a safe and effective way to improve mental health.

“Many questions remain unanswered,” de Wit explained. “First, can this finding be replicated by others? Does the effect hold true in other subject populations, such as individuals who report low mood states? What happens if the drug is administered repeatedly – do the effects increase or decrease? And, does the drug improve psychiatric symptoms, and if so, how are these brain changes related to the possible clinical benefits?”

The study, “Low doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) increase reward-related brain activity“, was authored by James Glazer, Conor H. Murray, Robin Nusslock, Royce Lee, and Harriet de Wit.

© PsyPost

2022/12/03

 

Psychedelic Medicine: LSD, a Future 

Anti-Anxiety Pill?

By MCGILL UNIVERSITY MARCH 20, 2022

 

New study by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi reveals the neurobiological mechanisms by which LSD could relieve anxiety.

The craze for psychedelics used for therapeutic purposes is real. However, the scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness and explaining their mode of action in treating mental health disorders is still very thin. A new study led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a senior scientist in the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), sheds light on previously unexplained neurobiological mechanisms by which LSD is believed to relieve anxiety.

While preliminary studies suggested that psychotherapy-assisted microdosing was effective in alleviating anxiety and depressive symptoms in people with severe psychiatric or neurological problems, the biological mechanisms underlying these effects had remained unclear to date. The study conducted by Dr. Gobbi’s team demonstrates for the first time that regular administration of low doses of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) reduces anxiety symptoms through neurobiological mechanisms that are similar to some commonly prescribed classes of antidepressants and anxiolytics: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). SSRIs are better known by their trade names: Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Cipralex, etc.

“Our lack of knowledge of the biological processes associated with psychedelic drugs hinders the development of potential new treatments,” says Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, also a Professor and Head of the Neurobiological Psychiatry Unit in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. “Understanding the mechanisms of action and efficacy of psychedelics will allow us to develop a more precise indication of hallucinogenic drugs for psychiatric and neurological diseases,” she says.

The study, which was published today in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, was conducted in collaboration with researchers in psychiatry at McGill University, as well as researchers in neuroscience at Vita Salute San Raffaele University and in Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Padua, Italy.

Neurobiological mechanisms under the microscope

According to the results of the study, the use of LSD increases the nervous transmission of serotonin, also called 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT). Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that plays an essential role in the state of well-being. It has been shown that prolonged periods of stress result in a decrease in the activity of the neurons that transmit serotonin (5-HT neurons). Like the SSRI antidepressants, LSD is believed to desensitize the receptors, which decrease the electrical activity of serotonin on these neurons, thereby stimulating them to release more serotonin.

Dr. Gobbi’s study also found that low doses of LSD promoted the formation of new dendritic spines in rodents. These spines are the branches of neurons that are responsible for transmitting the electrical signal to the nerve cell body. “We have shown that LSD can rebuild these branches that are ‘dismantled’ due to stress. This is a sign of brain plasticity,” explains Dr. Danilo De Gregorio, who is today an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at San Raffaele University in Milan and first author of the study.

The research team evaluated the administration of low doses of LSD over a period of seven days on a group of mouse models subjected to chronic stress conditions. Repeated doses showed optimal results in decreasing anxiety-like behaviors caused by stress. More studies are needed to demonstrate the drug effectiveness for depressive and anxiety disorders in humans and the inherent mechanisms of action.

Another study by Dr. Gobbi, published in 2016, had already shown that low doses of LSD affected only the nerve transmission of serotonin while higher doses affected the dopamine system, causing the psychotic effects.

“I began my research on psychedelics several years ago out of personal curiosity. How is it possible that a simple drug can change your state of mind so profoundly? What is its mechanism of action? To my surprise, this research is now in the spotlight,” says Dr. Gobbi. The next step for her team will be to evaluate the mechanisms of action of other psychedelic substances, such as psilocybin (an active component of magic mushrooms) and ketamine.

Caution and patience are required

There have been no major advances in psychiatric care in the last decade. It is essential to develop new therapeutic alternatives, because for a proportion of people with serious mental health problems, current treatments are not working. LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca and MDMA are among the drugs that are being developed to treat various psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction, as well as certain neurodegenerative diseases. Health Canada authorized the use of psychedelic drugs in a very strict clinical setting last January.

However, there is still a long way to go, says Dr. Gobbi. “Interest in LSD stems from its ability to influence serotonin levels and produce feelings of happiness, confidence and empathy as well as improvement of social behavior. However, more studies are needed to identify safe and effective therapeutic uses, as psychedelics can cause psychosis and neurotoxic effects,” says the researcher, who warns the public about the dangers of self-medicating with illegal drugs.

Reference: “Repeated lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) reverses stress-induced anxiety-like behavior, cortical synaptogenesis deficits and serotonergic neurotransmission decline” by Danilo De Gregorio, Antonio Inserra, Justine P. Enns, Athanasios Markopoulos, Michael Pileggi, Youssef El Rahimy, Martha Lopez-Canul, Stefano Comai and Gabriella Gobbi, 17 March 2022, Neuropsychopharmacology.
DOI: 10.1038/s41386-022-01301-9

About the RI-MUHC

The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) is a world-renowned biomedical and healthcare research centre. The institute, which is affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University, is the research arm of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) – an academic health centre located in Montreal, Canada, that has a mandate to focus on complex care within its community. The RI-MUHC supports over 450 researchers and around 1,200 research trainees devoted to a broad spectrum of fundamental, clinical and health outcomes research at the Glen and the Montreal General Hospital sites of the MUHC. Its research facilities offer a dynamic multidisciplinary environment that fosters collaboration and leverages discovery aimed at improving the health of individual patients across their lifespan. The RI-MUHC is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS).

MK-ULTRA
Did the CIA's notorious mind control program create an infamous killer? (SHORT ANSWER, YES)

Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent,
 Yahoo News•March 2, 2020

Sidney Gottlieb. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: AP)

SKULLDUGGERY PODCAST http://aca.st/f26c27

MK-Ultra was the code name for a notorious government mind control program conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in which the CIA directed scientists to dose unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD and other drugs. The program was recently back in the news when a juror in the case of one of those guinea pigs — the late Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, whom the CIA had injected with LSD when he was a young prison inmate — said she wouldn’t have voted to convict him of 11 murders had she known what the U.S. government had done to him. Bulger, who was given LSD over 50 times, would go on to terrorize South Boston as the notoriously violent leader of the Winter Hill Gang.

In a new episode of “Buried Treasure,” a regular feature of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman interview historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer, the author of the new book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” It’s a biography of the man behind MK-Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, who also devised poisons the agency used to try to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.Yahoo News: Let’s just start out by telling our listeners about Sidney Gottlieb. Who was he?

Stephen Kinzer: I’ve devoted a lot of my career to try to find out what happens behind the facade of public politics and public diplomacy that we can see. I’ve discovered a lot of things in the course of that research. ... This is the first time I’ve been shocked. I still can’t believe that this happened, that there was such a thing as MK-Ultra and that there was such a person as Sidney Gottlieb. He lived in total invisibility. So in a sense, my book is the biography of a man who wasn’t there.

You approached a former director of the CIA, who professed not to know who Sidney Gottlieb was.

Gottlieb has faded away almost entirely, and that was his desire. He was conducting the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been conducted by any agency or officer of the U.S. government. He had what was, in effect, a license to kill. ... Gottlieb was probably the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century.

Is it possible that one reason Sidney Gottlieb has escaped attention is because the CIA never confronted ... the awful things he was doing?

They ultimately have said, essentially, that Gottlieb was some kind of wacko. He was not supervised well, things got off the rails, the project got out of control, there were problems with supervision. ... It was all Sidney’s fault. This is a way of eliminating all institutional responsibility on the part of the CIA.
How did he fit in at the CIA?

Sidney Gottlieb joined the CIA in its early years, in 1951. ... Almost all of the senior officers of the CIA came from a particular social class. They were silver spoon products of the American aristocracy, who knew each other from prep school, and the same colleges, and investment banks, and law firms. Sidney Gottlieb was completely different ... from the rest of them. He was the son of Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Bronx. He stuttered. He had a limp. So he was very much of an outsider. ... [Agency officials] knew that what he was doing was brutal, was bloody, and was causing an unknown number of deaths. They didn’t want to put somebody from their own social class in the position of having to oversee this project that they knew was very horrific.

What Sidney Gottlieb was running was a covert program aimed at mind control [and] experimenting with LSD on some of the most vulnerable Americans with no consent at all.

The idea behind MK-Ultra was to find a substance that would allow the CIA to control people’s minds and manipulate them and make them do things that they would never otherwise do. And then, if you were lucky, just forget that they had ever done them. … [Gottlieb] decided that before you could find a way to insert a new mind into somebody’s brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there.

... He used every kind of drug combination he could imagine, plus sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques, all aimed at trying to find a way to destroy a human mind. ... Behind him, he left a trail of wounded and dead in numbers that nobody can even estimate because records were all destroyed as Gottlieb left the CIA.

Gottlieb, left, a former CIA scientific chief, talks with his attorney, Terry Lenzner, before testifying to a Senate health subcommittee on Sept. 21, 1977. (AP)

So this was a Cold War program started in the early 1950s. And like much else from the Cold War era, it arose out of fears that the Soviets and international communism were doing something like this, and therefore we couldn’t have a mind control gap, as it were. What do we know about what the Soviets were up to and what U.S. intelligence thought the Soviets were up to?

Now those are two very different things: what the Soviets were doing and what we thought the Soviets were doing. So I asked myself the same question. ... What led the early directors of the CIA, and in particular, Allen Dulles, and then the person he hired to run this MK-Ultra project, Sidney Gottlieb, to believe that there was such a thing as mind control? In the end, after 10 years, Sidney Gottlieb finally concluded that there is no such thing as mind control. ... But what made them think that it was possible? ... I think it has to do with the cultural conditioning with which they were brought up. Think of all the books, and the stories, and the movies, about mind control. ... There are Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Sherlock Holmes stories, and movies like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Gaslight.” Those guys grew up watching those movies, and reading those stories, and I think they believed that since fiction could imagine it, there probably was an element of truth to it. That also fed their desire to plunge into this project.

There was “The Manchurian Candidate,” a novel and then a movie, that came out in the early 1960s, which was about Korean mind control programming an American to assassinate a presidential candidate. And ironically, it was the book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” by John Marks, in the 1970s, that I believe first revealed the existence of MK-Ultra?

You’re right. When Sidney Gottlieb left the CIA in 1973, along with his longtime mentor, Richard Helms, who was at that time the director of the CIA, the two of them sat down and quickly decided that all the files from MK-Ultra should be destroyed. Gottlieb actually had to go out to the CIA records center in Wharton, Va., and oversee the destruction of seven crates of documents. ... A priceless archive was lost.

Later on, in the mid-1970s, this researcher, John Marks, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking if there were any other documents. ... This request landed at a time when the CIA was under orders from a new president, Jimmy Carter, to open up and be more honest. … [A] search turned up ... a set of records that listed expense accounts for many of the people involved in MK-Ultra. From those records, we have been able to develop an idea of what were these 149 sub-projects. ... “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” is the foundation for later research that has deepened our understanding of this project.

The CIA and Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments using LSD on unsuspecting people, in a way, that seeped in and helped ... is it overstated to say helped create the counterculture in the 1960s, particularly in San Francisco? [Were] people like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey ... experimenting and using LSD because of this program?

Sidney Gottlieb was fascinated by LSD. It was a newly discovered drug. It had only been discovered in the 1940s. It was colorless, odorless, and had amazing effects in very small quantities. Gottlieb himself used LSD, by his own estimate, at least 200 times.

He and the people around him began to feel that perhaps this drug could be what one of them called “the key that could unlock the universe.” In other words, it might be the answer to what’s the substance that can open up people’s minds to outside control? So in 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD. It was then being manufactured ... by one company in Switzerland, the Sandoz company. All of that LSD came to the United States, and came to the CIA. Gottlieb used it for two kinds of experiments. Some were horrifically brutal, carried out in prisons in the United States and in safe houses around Europe and East Asia. Many people were fed overdoses without being told what they were being given.

... One experiment at the federal prison in Lexington, Ky. ... Seven African-American inmates were given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days while locked in a padded room. So if the object of that experiment was to find out whether such an overdose could destroy a human mind. The answer is obviously yes.

... [But] who were among the first people who signed up to take LSD in those benign LSD experiments? Well, one of them was Ken Kesey, who went on to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that became a great bible of the counterculture. Another was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who listened to “Tristan and Isolde” on his headphones while taking LSD. Another was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. These guys all took LSD home with them. They turned on all their friends. This is how the Grateful Dead got its LSD.

It sounds like we have a lot to be thankful to Sidney Gottlieb for…

Later in life, all these people came to realize that their LSD had come from the CIA. I found an interview with John Lennon in which he was asked about LSD, and he said, “We must always remember to thank the CIA.” ... And of course, the irony is ... the drug that Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA the tool to control people’s minds actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was aimed at destroying everything the CIA believed in.

One of the most fascinating stories from your book is that of Whitey Bulger. Tell us how he became a subject of MK-Ultra.

Whitey Bulger fits very much into the category that I was just discussing. So under Gottlieb’s supervision, a number of federal prisons began experiments with LSD using inmates. And, of course, that’s an ideal population because those people are totally dependent on the prison doctor and the prison warden.

During the mid-1950s when MK-Ultra was at its peak, Whitey Bulger, the famous Boston gangster, was in prison as a truck hijacker in Atlanta, Ga. He was approached by the prison doctor, who told him that the prison was going to be participating in a major project aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. And if Bulger would agree to take a certain drug that they were investigating, he might have some considerations [such as] shorter time in prison and better conditions.

So he was given LSD for months, at least 50 times, without being told what it was. He later wrote what a nightmarish experience this was and how ... for his whole life, he never recovered from it. Years later, when he found out that this doctor was actually working on a CIA project and not trying to cure schizophrenia, he told other members of his gang, “I’m going back to Atlanta. I’m going to find that guy, and I’m going to kill him.”

He didn’t find that doctor, who died of apparently natural causes soon thereafter, but definitely Bulger is interesting because he’s one of the few MK-Ultra subjects who later came out and explained what had happened to him.

Gottlieb was involved in another very high priority operation of the CIA’s in the 1960s and that was the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Tell us that story.

MK-Ultra didn’t have a firm ending, but it kind of petered out towards end of the late ’50s and into the early ’60s. Gottlieb, as I said earlier, had come to realize ... these drugs like LSD were too unreliable to be used as tools for mind control. ... But then Gottlieb went on to a completely new phase in his career. He was the CIA’s chief chemist. So when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960 and the CIA decided to use poison, it was quite logical that Sidney Gottlieb would get the assignment. He knew more about poisons than anyone in the CIA, anyone in the United States, and I’m going to guess more than anybody in the world. He was obsessed with finding all sorts of natural poisons, and he was getting the gallbladders of crocodiles from Africa and poison barks from Southeast Asia and shrubs from Central America. Anything that could be seen as poison he assembled.

So it was Gottlieb who concocted all the poisons that were intended to kill Fidel Castro. One that was supposed to make his beard fall out, and one that would make him seem disoriented in public, but also ones that were supposed to be fatal. It was Gottlieb who made the L-pills — I learned a whole new vocabulary while writing this book— that means lethal. Those other fatal pills, when you drop it into someone’s tea they die. Gottlieb made those, and they were delivered to Cuba for use in killing Castro. Gottlieb made a poison wet suit, which was tainted with a virus inside that would eat away Castro’s skin if he put it on. Gottlieb made a poison pen with a hypodermic needle that was superthin so that if it was stuck into Castro’s thigh from behind, he wouldn’t even feel it.

Is there any indication at all that Gottlieb was held accountable?

Towards the end of his life, Gottlieb was facing two different situations. One was internal, the people around him in his final years have all said that he was obviously haunted by something that he wouldn’t talk about. One person who visited him in that period said he was haunted by guilt. Uh, he was a destroyed man, if he had been Catholic, he would have gone to a monastery. So he was obviously deeply troubled, but he would never speak about it. Then another factor that added to his anxiety was that after many, many years, a couple of lawsuits seemed to be getting closer to him.

What were these lawsuits?

One involved a case that stemmed from the poisoning by LSD of a young American who had met a guy with a limp in a bar in Paris and whose life was destroyed thereafter. So evidently this guy had been poisoned by Gottlieb. It took 20 years for this case to begin working its way through the judicial system. And finally, a trial date was set for the beginning of 1999. ... Just as the case was about to come to trial, Gottlieb died. The cause of death was never announced. ... I did find a few people who truly suspect that he might have killed himself to avoid having to testify, that he basically fell on his sword rather than be put in a position where he’d have to betray secrets that he had sworn to keep. Nobody knows if that’s true, but it’s a very intriguing footnote to Gottlieb’s death in 1999.

Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer in his office in Providence, R.I., on Jan. 30. (David Goldman/AP)


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MKULTRA

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LSD


SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CIA