CONSPIRACY THEORY

JFK Allegedly Penned a Revealing Letter to This Mistress Before She Met a Very Mysterious End


Alice Kelly
Thu, November 9, 2023


In a letter written a month before his 1963 assassination, then-President John F. Kennedy had a heartfelt message for one of his alleged mistresses who later died under suspicious circumstances. Kennedy’s much-talked about affairs have become synonymous with his legacy and biographers and historians are still trying to separate rumor from fact when it comes to flings with stars like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and more. But some of the affairs have been as good as confirmed by witness accounts, diary entries and, in the case of Mary Pinchot Meyer, letters.

Mary Pinchot Meyer first met JFK when the two were prep school students but allegedly began an affair in the 1960s. Pinchot Meyer was marred to a CIA agent named Cord Meyer and the couple were friends with JFK and Jackie Kennedy, even living near the future President and First Lady in Washington D.C.

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Their affair allegedly carried on until JFK’s death in 1963 and, a year later, Pinchot Meyer also met a tragic end when she was murdered while walking in Georgetown.

A 2016 auction resurfaced a 1963 letter allegedly written by JFK but never sent to Pinchot Meyer. “Why don’t you leave suburbia for once – come and see me – either here – or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th,” Kennedy allegedly wrote, per People, in the four-page letter. “I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it – on the other hand you may not – and I will love it.” He continued: “You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years – you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes,” signing the letter off with a simple ‘J.’ On November 22 of the same year the President was shot dead while on an official visit to Dallas, Texas.


Lieutenant Cord Meyer, Jr. and Mary Pinchot Meyer.

On October 12, 1964, Pinchot Meyer was shot in the head while taking an afternoon walk, People reports. Her murder remains unsolved. Nina Burleigh, who wrote a 1999 biography about Pinchot Meyer, says, “Passersby heard screams and a witness looked over the wall and saw a man standing near her body. The police came and shortly arrested a Black male [Ray Crump Jr.] soaking wet who said he fell into the Potomac while fishing. … No gun was ever found.” Crump plead not guilty and was acquitted at trial because of a lack of evidence. “The theory is that she had to die because she knew too much,” says Burleigh.

”Her murder just ten days after the Warren Commission report was released makes a lot of people suspicious that she had to be silenced,” Burleigh notes with reference to the investigation into JFK’s assassination. She adds: “She lived in a world of secrets … the secrets of spies running complicated international plots, trying to control a dangerous world at the dawn of the nuclear age.”

Adding to the suspicious nature of her death is claims from Pinchot Meyer’s brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, who alleges that he caught chief of CIA counterintelligence James Angleton breaking into Pinchot Meyer’s artist studio on the night of her murder to retrieve her diary.

Bradlee allegedly claimed that Angleton told him he was concerned for JFK’s reputation and, consequently, broke in to hide the evidence that was stored the diary. Bradlee claims he later took the diary back from Angleton after learning he had kept it. “Despite the braying of the knee jerks about some public right to know,” Bradlee claims his wife, Pinchot Meyer’s sister Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot, burned the diary.

The diary allegedly contained references to her affair with the President without explicitly using his name.

Burleigh notes that JFK and Pinchot Meyer’s affair likely began sometime between 1961 and 1962. “Her name first appears on the White House logs in October 1962,” she says. “She was by his side… She was often signed in when Jackie was away…” It is unclear whether Jackie was aware of the alleged tryst. “Maybe, nobody knows,” says Burleigh. “She would sometimes seat them together. Either that meant she trusted her or she thought Mary was keeping Kennedy entertained in a good way.”

Mary Pinchot Meyer - Wikipedia 

In his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, former Harvard University psychology lecturer Timothy Leary claimed to have met Pinchot Meyer several times. According to ...

Spartacus-educational.com

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKlearyT.htm

Timothy Leary - Spartacus Educational 

According to his biography, Flashbacks, Timothy Leary claims that Mary Pinchot Meyer phoned him the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated: "They couldn ...

Facebook.com

https://www.facebook.com/CaveRadioBroadcasting/videos/the-401-show-ep-003-jfk-mary-pinchot-meyer-lsd-timothy-leary-weather-control-edi/273453703579235

The 401 Show EP 003: JFK, Mary Pinchot Meyer, LSD ... - Face... 

Mar 30, 2019 ... patreon.com/davidhooper. The 401 Show EP 003: JFK, Mary Pinchot Meyer, LSD, Timothy Leary & Weather Control *EDITED*

Nytimes.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/books/review/a-real-life-jfk-lover-murdered-in-1964-stars-in-two-new-novels.html

A Real-Life J.F.K. Lover, Murdered in 1964, Stars in Two New... 

Apr 13, 2020 ... The Lost Diary of M” and “JFK and Mary Meyer” are both fictional diaries of the A-list Washington socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer.

Mangu.tv

https://mangu.tv/did-jfk-drop-lsd

Did JFK Drop LSD? - mangu.tv 

'JFK had close relationship with socialite painter Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer and she was also in close relationship at the time with Tim Leary.

People.com

https://people.com/politics/jfk-mistress-murdered-mary-pinchot-meyer

JFK's Mistress Who Was Murdered: Some Say Mary Pinchot M... 

Sep 25, 2017 ... “I also interviewed Timothy Leary in California months before his death. He confirmed to me what he had written, that she came to his place in ...

Thedailybeast.com

https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/02/the-mysterious-murder-of-mary-pinchot-meyer-revisited

The Mysterious Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer—Revisited 

Apr 2, 2012 ... She also dropped acid with Timothy Leary and painted abstract art with Kenneth Noland, but her greatest claim to fame is the tragic and ...

Johnstonlibrary.com

https://www.johnstonlibrary.com/pac/?pac_page=bib-detail&Bib=214344

The CIA Conspiracy To Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot .... 

... Mary Pinchot Meyer -- including her exploration of psychedelic drugs as a protege of Timothy Leary and her support of her secret lover, the President of the ...

Thedailybeast.com

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-jfk-mistress-mary-pinchot-meyer-was-gunned-down-in-cold-blood-why

The JFK Mistress Gunned Down in Cold Blood - The Daily Beast 

Jan 23, 2020 ... ... Leary), and she may have learned of JFK's alleged plans to thwart the ... Kennedy—and Mary Pinchot Meyer as well. Janney says he is sure that ...

REVEAL DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
The East Village Other

The East Village Other, a countercultural newspaper founded in 1965, published interviews with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.

Timothy Leary on the cover of the September 15, 1970 issue of The East Village Other
via JSTOR

By: Jeremy Guida
June 3, 2021

The East Village Other (EVO) was founded in 1967 by a number of people who became well-known authors of the Underground Press: Allan Katzman, Walter Bowart, and John Wilcock. At its peak, the paper published 60,000 copies of individual papers. The EVO blends psychedelic interests with revolutionary politics. It regularly published interviews with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. It also became known for the sex ads that populated much of the back of the newspaper.

One regular column featured the images and biographies of East Village females. Titled “Slumgoddess,” the column regularly depicted scantily-clad (and often nude) images of local, sexually liberated and counterculturally inclined women. Although the subject of much controversy, Allan Katman felt that the sex ads in the back of the paper played an important role for the “lonely people of New York,” who relied on the paper for human companionship. The paper also became well-known for publishing underground comics. Well known artists like R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman published work with the EVO.

From Volume 1, Issue 12

The EVO was largely responsible for initiating the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a nation-wide syndication network that made it possible for papers in small towns to emerge all over the country. In May 1966, the East Village Other began a column that would be syndicated across the country in five other underground papers. Timothy Leary started the column “Tune in / Turn on / Drop out” in part to help his defense in a recent drug charge. Leary intended to help readers achieve consciousness expansion without the use of drugs. The column was short lived, but appears to have sparked the idea for the UPS. Allan Katzman suggested the more explicit idea for an underground syndicate in the EVO in June 1966. Walter Bowart of the EVO claimed to have come up with the name spontaneously. After seeing a United Parcel Service truck drive by during an interview he replied, “We’re… ah… UPS – the Underground Press Syndicate.”
The paper is an excellent resource for anyone studying the personalities and events characteristic of the American counterculture.

For a small fee, papers in the UPS could reprint any articles from any other members’ papers free of charge. This provided enough content for underground publishers in small cities and towns to produce a paper. The idea that editors could reprint any article from other member papers reflected a belief popular among underground authors and writers that copyright laws were obtrusive and out of date.

Because of the EVO’s longevity (it lasted until 1972), popularity, location, and role in the UPS, the paper is an excellent resource for anyone studying the personalities and events characteristic of the American counterculture. The EVO carried on a close relationship with Timothy Leary. As the counterculture was amping up in the late 1960s, Leary was finishing his time at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York where he was running “experiments” with LSD. The paper followed closely his numerous run-ins with the law, advertised on behalf of the campaign to raise bail when he was finally arrested, and when the Weather Underground broke Leary out of a California prison, the EVO announced on its cover, “Proud Eagle Flies Free.” (September 15, 1970).

The cover of Volume 4, Issue 38

The EVO is also an excellent resource for documentation of countercultural events. Take the March on Washington, where tens of thousands of activists stormed and occupied the front steps of the Pentagon. The paper helped Ed Sanders, a member of the band The Fugs and an owner of the Peace Eye Bookstore, raise funds to perform the Exorcism of the Pentagon that took place at the march. Perhaps because of its proximity, the EVO advertised and documented to a greater extent than many other papers the best-known countercultural event, Woodstock, also known as “The Aquarian Exposition.” The paper printed advertisements for the festival and a thorough review of the event by John Hilgerdt (August 13, 1969, August 20, 1969). For Hilgerdt, Woodstock was only the beginning of a mass countercultural movement. He writes, “A few thousand of the absolutely most together and peaceful and beautiful heads in the world are gathered in a grand tribal new beginning… All the petty bullshit that before kept us apart vanished and for the first time we were free” (August 20, 1969, 7).

The EVO provides documentation of the activities of one of the most active countercultural communities in the US in New York’s East Village. Although there were remnants of the counterculture that lived on after the EVO had closed its doors, by the time the paper ceased publication, the countercultural movement had already begun to fade. Because the paper was one of the earliest underground papers, and because its lifespan covers the rise and fall of the counterculture, the paper is a good resource for gauging the general attitudes of the counterculture. It’s an excellent resource for those studying the aesthetics of the counterculture, especially comics, and its proximity to New York and role in the UPS make it an excellent reference for those interested in countercultural leaders and in many of the events that have become emblematic of the counterculture more generally. 

Read The East Village Other and other countercultural publications in the Independent Voices archive from Reveal Digital.

The East Village Other
By: Multiple Authors
Volume 1, Issue 12

The East Village Other
By: Multiple Authors
Volume 5, Issue 42

The East Village Other
By: Multiple Authors
Volume 4, Issue 38

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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Canada
Albert Hoffman
LSD
Sandos

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/

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LSD 

 

Healing Hearts, Changing Minds awards $566,260 to seven projects to advance psychedelic-assisted end-of-life care

Healing Hearts, Changing Minds

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Derry, NH, January 27, 2026 — Healing Hearts, Changing Minds (HHCM) today announced the seven awardees of Walking Each Other Home: A Fund to Promote Psychedelic Compassion for End-of-Life Care, a $566,260 philanthropic initiative supporting innovation, compassion, and dignity for people at life’s end.

Anxiety when facing serious, life-threatening illnesses is a significant issue for society. In fact, it is often so painful that it prevents patients from living fully. Research has shown that psychedelic therapy can be extremely effective in reducing anxiety and helping people to live fully and meaningfully. HHCM recognized that more research is needed to identify the best ways to deliver the therapy to people in need.

Following an extensive listening tour with over two dozen leaders across palliative care, hospice medicine, spiritual care, psychedelic research, and end-of-life advocacy, HHCM launched this funding round in July 2025 to catalyze bold, field-defining work. The response was extraordinary: 59 proposals requesting a total of $4.8 million. 

The proposals were reviewed by six independent subject matter expert reviewers in psychedelic end-of-life care. using a scoring rubric that assesses the criteria in the RFP and aligns HHCM’s values of compassion, integrity, and community empowerment. HHCM selected seven outstanding grantees whose work exemplifies the fund’s mission and values. This represents an acceptance rate of 12% in a competitive group of submissions, underscoring both the strength of the submissions and the growing capacity in the field of psychedelic end-of-life care.

2026 ‘Walking Each Other Home’ Grantees

The following seven projects received grants. More information about each of them is available on our webpage Grantees.

1. End of Life Psychedelic Care (EOLPC), Ashland, Oregon — $75,025
Collaboration between EOLPC, Institute for Rural Psychedelic Care (IRPC) in Arcata, California, and Ligare in Savannah, Georgia. The pilot program will deliver home-based ketamine therapy integrated with spiritual care for hospice and palliative patients across three sites in the US. The team includes Christine Caldwell; Michael Fratkin, MD; Hunt Priest; Gayle Bereskin, DO; Catherine Durkin Robinson; Sherika Newman, DO; Aubrey Gates; and Diana Noyes.

2. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota — $82,405.70
Brain cancer has one of the highest mortality rates of all cancers, causing many patients who face the diagnosis deep distress. Using an integrative oncology approach, the Mayo Clinic will run the first-ever clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for patients with brain tumors and existential distress. The research team includes Stacy D’Andre, MD; Ken Olivier, MD; Maria Lapid, MD; Andrea Randall. PharmD; and Ugur Sener, MD.

3.  PRATI & Pravan Foundation, Colorado and Puerto Rico — $75,000

Through this grant, 20 hospice workers, palliative care providers, and doulas will be trained to deliver psychedelic-assisted therapy for existential distress in Puerto Rico, which has independent authority to reschedule psychedelic medicines., The teaching team includes Christine Pateros, MA, RN; Wilhelmina De Castro, LCSW;  Mary Cosimano LMSW; Darren Fisher RN, BSN; Charlotte Charfen, MD; Carmen Amezcua MD; and German Ascani, MD.

4. Red Willow Hospice, Taos, New Mexico — $100,000
This grant to a leading hospice provider in New Mexico will train hospice staff and provide ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) to terminally ill patients. Red Willow Hospice serves historically underserved rural populations integrating care for the mind, body, and spirit in their holistic care model. The research team includes Robyn Chavez, RN, BSN, CHCM; Justin Babin; Joanna Hooper, MD; Lynn Nauman; Felicia Cardenas; Jennifer Johnson; Melissa Martinez; Katrina Lucero; Lisa Stolarzyc, MD; Rev. Dr, Ted Wiard; Emma Okamoto; and Lisa Cheek.

5. Heal Ukraine Trauma, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Kyiv, Ukraine — $46,130
This project will expand trauma-informed group KAP training and services for veterans and their families affected by the devastating physical and emotional effects of war in Ukraine. The research team includes Amy Goodrich; Oksana Gryschenko, PhD; and Iryna Holub. 

6. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington — $100,000
This grant will fund a pilot that uses psilocybin therapy for cancer-related anxiety and depression in a group setting during a multi-day retreat. Findings from the project will offer insights into how a group setting might make psilocybin therapy more accessible to terminally ill patients. The research team includes Anthony Back, MD, and Bonnie McGregor, Ph.D.

7. Institute for Rural Psychedelic Care, Arcata, California — $87,700
This project will provide KAP and narrative medicine programs to terminally ill patients in rural communities. Patients treated with KAP will engage in interviews with a documentary filmmaker and photographer, answering open-ended questions aimed at helping them make meaning of their lives and end-of-life, and creating a legacy that helps ease death anxiety. The research team includes Michael Fratkin, MD; Carrie Griffin, MD; and Justin Maxon.

“At Healing Hearts, Changing Minds, we aim to support research and therapies that help people live fully and meaningfully, even as they face serious, life-threatening illness. Psychedelic assisted therapy has enormous and largely untapped potential to improve the care and support we provide to them,” said the organization's founder Robert Ansin. ”Taken together, these seven projects reflect the heart of HHCM’s trust-based philanthropic model: listening closely to community needs, supporting locally rooted organizations, and strengthening the ecosystem of psychedelic-assisted care. Together, they exemplify our Ripple Model of Good Effects—advancing healing at the individual, community, and systemic levels—while upholding HHCM’s commitment to employing gold-standard methodologies.”

About Healing Hearts, Changing Minds
HHCM is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation dedicated to expanding access to compassionate, culturally responsive psychedelic-assisted therapy. Through trust-based philanthropy, HHCM partners with frontline organizations that support healing, dignity, and empowerment across diverse communities.

Leathersmithe.comwww.leathersmithe.com/politicshandcraftsenvironme/the-psychedelic-experience.pdf

The Psychedelic Experience.Pdf - Leathersmithe

by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert. Page 2. General ... The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol, is a book of instructions ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/download/lp_the-psychedelic-experience_dr-timothy-leary-ralph-metzner-richard-alp/lp_the-psychedelic-experience_dr-timothy-leary-ralph-metzner-richard-alp.pdf

The Psychedelic Experience

* Leary, Timothy, Metzner, Ralph & Alpert, Richard. The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the. Tibetan Book of the Dead. New Hyde Park: University.

 

 AUDIOBOOK

 

Nfb.cawww.nfb.ca/film/tibetan_book_of_the_dead_the_great_liberation/

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation - NFB

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a two-part series that explores ancient teachings on death and dying. It was filmed over a four-month period on location in the ...

Theconversation.comtheconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-172962

Guide to the classics: the Tibetan Book of the Dead - The Conversation

Apr 5, 2022 ... The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an exemplar of Tibetan literary prose and a compelling commentary on the universal experience of death and dying from a ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.16167

Tibetan book of the dead : Evans-Wentz, W.Y. - Internet Archive

Nov 4, 2017 ... Book Title: Tibetan book of the dead Book Author: Evans-Wentz, WY Book Language: English Number of Pages: 346 Publisher: Oxford University Press; London; 1957