HOMELESS HOLOCAUST: June 2016

Monday, June 6, 2016

Jan Irvin GnosticMedia=CIA Disintel Agent.

Of course, Irvin is a Raging Jew-Hater, and severely psychotic. He spent quite a bit of time in San Berdadinio County Psychiatric Treatment center, where I met him. This was in the late 1980's and early 1990's, he has serious psychiatric diesease, and has a Police Record of Attacks and Verbal confronts.
BeefLegBeefLeg June 2013

Hrair
I think Gnostic Media was great for a while, when it first started. The interviews were really, really good. Then Jan started expressing his own opinions more and more and it got gross.
Read through the comments on a lot of his audio. He replies to so many in such an irrational way, all the while calling it "Trivium" and screaming "fallacy" at everyone, while his nonsense is just one fallacy after another.
I'm really disappointed in the way he's taken his work. He's done a lot of good, and put out so many hours of interesting material. But he really lost it. I think he let it all go to his head a bit.
BeefLegBeefLeg June 2013
Hrair
I just opened the last show to see the comment thread. Check out how he replies to EVERYONE saying "Where's your citations?" One of the first comments I saw was this:
"It’s nothing but specious rumor, from someone whom I pointed out was already in question – a man who sells blood diamonds to support the Zionists who have an agenda against the Vatican..."
In the same comment, all a rambling tirade against one short comment, he goes on:
"But my god, have the brains, the common sense, to understand what the onus of proof is and don’t be a lazy ass and spread lies if you haven’t verified them YOURSELF. If you have NO EVIDENCE it’s called arguing the arbitrary and is dimissed by default, so therefore you lose, no name calling or lazy ass excuses necessary. And how lame to go through life believing all these lies you tell yourself rather than spending just a few minutes to verify them before you believe them. I’ve said it so many times… why haven’t you heard that?"
The reason I point these out is that if you look through the comments of ANY of his shows, there's a thousand like this. The man is psychologically unstable and doing the psychedelic movement harm, in my opinion.
Sansome September 2013

Hrair
The thing is with people like Irvin, they are clearly on an agenda.
Someone posted earlier a response suggesting that Irvin can back up all his claims. Then I would suggest people go up and check out these sources before proclaiming his position infallible.
What is interesting is that they (Irvin and the likes of his followers and on-line big mouths like Thomas Sheridan, who says similar things, but if anyone question him, he calls them Psychopaths..easy is it not?) use interpretations of words and phrases to make their claims. These interpretations can be utterly ridiculous when looked at properly and then reveal that the entire argument is flawed at its most basic, and thus the entire conclusion is erroneous.
It also comes across as if this creating of a false premise and thus conclusion is deliberate. No one can be so silly surely.
One example requires us to believe that the Esalen adherents were Eugenists. The notion of Eugenist is implied as a maniacal monster who would kill people to reduce the world population. Yet if we look at any lecture on the subject by the likes of Terence Mckenna, it is clear what he means by Eugenics, and it is not sinister by any means, just his earnest concern about overpopulation and the entirely "Humane" ways in which mankind might keep it under control.
This also has to be taken into context as in the period of the 70's through to the 90's (and much longer before and after I'll wager) many people feared that the world population was to explode and become unmanageable. Hence many reasonable people would consider this in light of sustainability. Mckenna et al were such people. Right or wrong in this concern, should we condemn them as evil plotters of the down fall of the common man?
Aldous Huxley is also condemned in a way that must have him turning in the grave.
These arguments are entirely contrived and designed to create cognitive dissonance as some of the most enlightened minds and means (entheogen/Shamanic) are denigrated and denied to us by these "commentators".
edicius13HAHAedicius13HAHA September 2013

Hrair
I think dude's interesting.
[Deleted User] September 2013
I really enjoyed this conversation: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/an-interview-with-prof-john-rush-pt-5-entheogens-and-the-development-of-culture-171/
Post edited by [Deleted User] at 2013-10-02 13:06:09
[Deleted User] September 2013
This is a good place to start:
[Deleted User] September 2013
http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9-D742DA541AAA
prettygoodprettygood September 2013
Hrair
He needs to give that white Kangol a break.
Does it have Mrs. Piggy? Does it have a clown? Then why is it funny?
Sansome September 2013

Hrair
Just consider what I wrote please.
If people are deliberately colouring the waters, then nothing that they say can be taken at face value, or seriously.
Worse than that, it is a then is damaging tool of disinformation.
For truth to become contaminated it requires the smallest amount of toxic information. If that information is coming closer to the source of a matter (and this is, think about it, if people cannot use Shamanic tools for some inner growing and a clear objective look at what is supposedly "real", then most will not ever experience by any direct means, the truth of what we are involved in) , then that Truth is very powerful, but also utterly disempowered by the smallest of contaminations in the right place.
A little change here and there of words or even just the interpretation of a word here and there can Totally destroy the truth of a matter. Now if we cannot see that....?!
And that is certainly what this diatribe of Irvin sounds like.
In truth direct experience of the wider consciousness should be enough for people to know what is and what is not. Irvin's is an attempt to ensure that less people take this path....it is "exactly" the same message that the establishment put out.."don't go there, its DANGEROUS"!
Can it be any clearer?

Post edited by Sansome at 2013-09-28 04:22:36
orgoneorgone September 2013
I'm a Troll. Don't Feed Me.
@Sansome I agree with you on the effects, but I have a feeling Jan Irvin is a victim of the very fear about psychedelics he's spreading. I don't know how many drugs he's done, but he obviously needs to go back to the well.
The truth about psychedelics cannot be removed through the means of negative propaganda. The truth about psychedelics lies in their use. As long as they are there to be digested, those in the know will rightfully mock anyone who has put themselves in Irvin's psychic posture.
Post edited by orgone at 2013-09-28 23:39:34
image

mysterybuddhamysterybuddha September 2013
Hrair
Me thinks Jan needs to get laid, and stop with the "everyone who disagrees is working for the Mossad,CIA, Banks, etc". Fucking clown of the earth.
@mysterybuddha
www.suredesigntshirts.com
sherpa17 August 2014
Hrair
Guy sounds like a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Rainman with rabies on the latest THC.
http://thehighersidechats.com/
mysterybuddhamysterybuddha August 2014
Hrair
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
@mysterybuddha
www.suredesigntshirts.com
piledawg August 2014
Hrair
mysterybuddha said:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If all one has is a hammer, then all one can do is strike out in any direction till contact with something is made generating a reaction. A nail would be nice but not necessary.

[DeletedUser] August 2014
Hrair
That THC interview was great despite Jan's argumentative approach. No one can deny that he is well researched and I admire that about him and in my opinion for that very reason (his dedication to accuracy in research) he brings far more to the table than any psychedelic aficionado.
That being said here are some of the qualms I had with some of the theories that Jan presented during that interview. It seems convenient that Jan changed his view from the early Christians used the mushroom for spiritual reasons to the early Christians essentially used them for mind control (suggestibility is the word I believed he used) much like the CIA. It would appear that had he stuck to Allegro's original theory that early Christians used the mushroom for spiritual purposes it would directly contradict his claims that R. Gordon Wasson in collaboration with the CIA was the first individual to invent this notion that mushrooms can be used for religious purposes. And that Wasson actually “forced” his “pre-conceived religion” on the Mexican tribe (Mahaca/Masatec [sp?] Indians) he spent time with to use the mushroom in this religious manner so that he could go around promoting the mushrooms in this manner to our society.
Prior to that the tribe used the mushroom for non spiritual purposes and Jan cites a lady by the name of Maria Sabina as evidence that Wasson came to Mexico in order to corrupt the Mexican tribe to help push his agenda to westerners (i.e. he couldn't admit that the CIA came up with this notion that psychedelics help you commune with God so he use these Indians as his source). According to Jan, Maria Sabina was “furious with Wasson” because prior to his arrival and subsequent coercion “nobody [in the tribe] took the mushrooms to commune with God”.
To be fair maybe he was only referring to the Mexican tribe that used the mushroom for things other than religious experiences and not every and I am also not sure if he was referring only to psilocybin mushrooms or also to the amanita muscaria (or also to all psychedelics which he seems to suggest later on in the interview when he claims that McLuhan came up with this idea of marketing psychedelics by introducing the idea that they will help you connect with God) which the Christian mushroom cult allegedly centered around (that last part wouldn't matter as much since he scraped his view that the early Christians used the mushroom to commune with God or for any other spiritual/religious reasons).
Side note: By the way what is Jan's counter-argument to the argument that the amanita muscaria is not native to the parts of the world where Christianity originated?
Later on in the interview he says that Marshall McLuhan originally came up with the idea of associating psychedelics with religion and spirituality and maybe I am reaching but Jan seems to suggest that this started with McLuhan and no people/culture in the history of psychedelic usage considered these drugs to have spiritual/religious purposes.
Jan however openly admits that one of the uses by tribal peoples of psychedelics is healing, yet he denies that they use it for spiritual reasons. The present day ancestors of Amazonian tribes (the shamans specifically) use ayahuasca to commune with spirits while on the drug (among other things) in order to conduct this healing if I am not mistaken. Communing with spirits would in essence be a spiritual usage of this psychedelic. Obviously Wasson did not individually go to every tribe that conducts this spiritual usage of psychedelics and force them to do this. In other words it predates Wasson's/McCulhan's supposed invention of the use of psychedelics for spiritual reasons. This is one aspect of his theory which I feel Jan should revise.
Side note: Jan also says that the mushrooms were used by the Mexican tribe not for religious reasons but “specifically to heal people from the sickness that our culture suffers from” (among other things). I wonder if he believes that this is a valid reason for the members of our society to use mushrooms. He implied that whatever name was assigned to mushrooms by the CIA would influence the experience of the user, so I don't see why he wouldn't believe that these drugs can be used in a positive psychologically healing manner despite the fact that he settled for the name “suggestogens” i.e. drugs that make you susceptible to “hyper-suggestibilty” (I also found it interesting that Jan still consumes marijuana).
It is getting late, if I still feel motivated I will comment on what Jan said in regards to the Kennedy assassination and Huxley's death tomorrow (I was too tired to proof read the above more than once, so my apologizes for any grammatical/spelling errors).

Post edited by [DeletedUser] at 2014-08-18 04:02:50
TodesangstTodesangst August 2014
Hrair
zor said:
Also, this 3 part interview is great
I've only watched part of the first vid, but I heard of Colin Ross years before I heard of Irvin, and in the midst of the case(s) he makes about mind-control, I heard some pretty sketchy stuff regarding himself and some of his past UFO views, and his contributions to the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s and disputed MPD theories that show up in so many conspiranoia circles. Here's an interesting article dissecting some of these allegations of malpractice around him (and his lazer eyes):

http://www.process.org/discept/2010/02/08/dr-colin-a-ross-psychiatry-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/
"According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen. The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions: To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction). The magnitude of Ms. Hart’s mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric “care” brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions."
who are the head-fuckers here?

Post edited by Todesangst at 2014-08-19 01:11:16
image
mysterybuddhamysterybuddha August 2014
Hrair
well written piece on Jan.
http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-ship-of-sun-is-drawn-1.html

@mysterybuddha
www.suredesigntshirts.com
psillytom October 2014
Hrair
Only amateurs and the ignorant take Jan Irvin seriously. It is no coincidence that *every single person* that ever supported him in the psychedelic research community wants nothing to do with him. From his former writing partner Andrew Rutajit (who has a restraining order against that lunatic) to Carl Ruck at BU (a TRUE scholar that considers Irvin a phony), no one with any historical training (or basic sense) believes Jan Irvin. Even Judith Anne Brown (John Allegro's daughter) thinks that Irvin is a fraud at this point. One person tried to give him a platform to speak, Ben Sessa, and Irvin started acting a maladjusted fool (as he is want to do), and Sessa pulled his invitation.
Why anyone takes that nutjob seriously is beyond me. His citations are nonsense. And he knows it, which is why he never actually defends them. He just tells *you* to study the Trivium (which he doesn't even pronounce correctly, btw).
Here is that buffoon's argumentation style broken down:
1. He says something ridiculous.
2. An intelligent person says, "Gee Jan, that sounds ridiculous."
3. Jan says, "You're making an argument to ridicule, so I don't have to answer to you!"
That's his entire method. Why do you think he claims to be such a *great* debater, but yet he never debates anyone?
I personally offered to meet him at the podium to discuss his ridiculous ideas and he cried and hid like the fraud he knows he is. Poor bastard. (BTW: this was *after* he said he'd mop the floor with me during an interview).
Pathetic.
He's also the most boring speaker and most horrific writer the psychedelic research community has ever known. Why do you think he publishes his own books? Cause no publisher that is concerned with the quality of its authors would ever give that fraud a deal. Park Street Press (my publisher), one of the more prominent publishers of psychedelic literature, laughed at him! Even North Atlantic Books (which is pretty lenient with who they publish) won't give that phony the time of day.
He's nothing more than a deadbeat dad, a washed up fool drunk on his own bullshit, and recently, an embezzler. FYI: if you donated any money at all to Irvin for film or research purposes in the past year, call a lawyer and sue him - cause he used your money to pay his rent and car insurance (i.e., embezzlement) instead of putting it towards his ...ahem .... "research" (if you can call it that).
Finally: his entire "1960s counterculture CIA op." bullshit theory can be easily debunked through a basic analogy:
Let's say you walk into a Starbucks and order a coffee. Then a masked individual comes in and robs the place at gunpoint. According to the genius Jan Irvin, since you were at the Starbucks you were in cahoots with the thief. YES - his connections and "citations" are as weak as that (again, why NO publisher will touch him).
Pathetic.

ehhrrwalehhrrwal October 2014
Hrair
psillytom said:
Only amateurs and the ignorant take Jan Irvin seriously. It is no coincidence that *every single person* that ever supported him in the psychedelic research community wants nothing to do with him. From his former writing partner Andrew Rutajit (who has a restraining order against that lunatic) to Carl Ruck at BU (a TRUE scholar that considers Irvin a phony), no one with any historical training (or basic sense) believes Jan Irvin. Even Judith Anne Brown (John Allegro's daughter) thinks that Irvin is a fraud at this point. One person tried to give him a platform to speak, Ben Sessa, and Irvin started acting a maladjusted fool (as he is want to do), and Sessa pulled his invitation.
Why anyone takes that nutjob seriously is beyond me. His citations are nonsense. And he knows it, which is why he never actually defends them. He just tells *you* to study the Trivium (which he doesn't even pronounce correctly, btw).
Here is that buffoon's argumentation style broken down:
1. He says something ridiculous.
2. An intelligent person says, "Gee Jan, that sounds ridiculous."
3. Jan says, "You're making an argument to ridicule, so I don't have to answer to you!"
That's his entire method. Why do you think he claims to be such a *great* debater, but yet he never debates anyone?
I personally offered to meet him at the podium to discuss his ridiculous ideas and he cried and hid like the fraud he knows he is. Poor bastard. (BTW: this was *after* he said he'd mop the floor with me during an interview).
Pathetic.
He's also the most boring speaker and most horrific writer the psychedelic research community has ever known. Why do you think he publishes his own books? Cause no publisher that is concerned with the quality of its authors would ever give that fraud a deal. Park Street Press (my publisher), one of the more prominent publishers of psychedelic literature, laughed at him! Even North Atlantic Books (which is pretty lenient with who they publish) won't give that phony the time of day.
He's nothing more than a deadbeat dad, a washed up fool drunk on his own bullshit, and recently, an embezzler. FYI: if you donated any money at all to Irvin for film or research purposes in the past year, call a lawyer and sue him - cause he used your money to pay his rent and car insurance (i.e., embezzlement) instead of putting it towards his ...ahem .... "research" (if you can call it that).
Finally: his entire "1960s counterculture CIA op." bullshit theory can be easily debunked through a basic analogy:
Let's say you walk into a Starbucks and order a coffee. Then a masked individual comes in and robs the place at gunpoint. According to the genius Jan Irvin, since you were at the Starbucks you were in cahoots with the thief. YES - his connections and "citations" are as weak as that (again, why NO publisher will touch him).

Pathetic.
Makes sense.
Welcome to the forum, if you're who I think you are based on a google search, it would be supremely fantastic if you could start a thread (or 50) about your work. I hope you didn't visit just to talk about Jan Irvin, I'm definitely interested in learning about you and what you've published.
Gargoyles, garglin' oil
80088008 October 2014

Hrair
not wasting my time in Jan is my thought
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree
GandalfsPipeGandalfsPipe October 2014

Hrair
Tell us more @psillytom, mostly about yourself and your books. Irvin has always offended me just on the fact that he is BORING. I would love to know some of the places to go for honest psychedelic scholarship or communication.
image The wizard finds beauty in all... and smokes mad bowlz!
tea_top-n_eviltea_top-n_evil October 2014

Hrair
He's a part of the diet, only an idiot would whole heartedly cling to his every word or claim, let alone anyone's words or claims. Every one out there pumping out "content" says retarded stuff and has dumb ideas mixed with the good, including duncan, joe, school sucks, jan, peace revolution, molyneux, corbet. If you have a good digestive system for separating the nutritious from the shit, then you're in good shape and you don't need to limit your self from people out of fear of mental corruption, but if your the other way, then yes you need to find the best host possible to suck and parasite from. So is Jan good? it depends on weather you are mentally parasitic or not! There's no shame in being a parasite if that's your nature. I would also recommend religion of some sort for the parasitic, or host seekers seeking a new lord of some sort!
Post edited by tea_top-n_evil at 2014-10-01 14:18:24
tea_top-n_eviltea_top-n_evil October 2014

Hrair
Jan, if your reading, I just got done watching " frozen ground". my woman and I were conversing and we concluded that there seems to be a connection of the 60's drug culture, the Vietnam war, and serial killers developing in this decade, it went from 19 documented serial killers in the 60's to 150 some odd killers in the 70's, peaking to 200 in the 80's, and now they are in decline with nearly all of them being subjected to the 60's. Probably nothing there but seems rather fishy. It would be neat if you could connect some dots yo!
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2011/01/blood_loss.html
Post edited by tea_top-n_evil at 2014-10-07 00:55:21

a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

April 19, 2001

"The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written."

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation (“thesis,”) devises a “solution,” to solve the “problems” created by that situation (“antithesis,”) with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control (“synthesis.”) It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, “inside the state” and thus controllable by the same.

In September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry Anslinger.

The OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan's Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.

Donovan's team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn't feel physically threatened, some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.

In May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia's most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names of several high ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results of White's tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly, the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold's work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during 1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr. Strughold's barbaric “medical experiments,” for which his subordinates were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)

Sandoz Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However, the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that of Dr. Hofmann's. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security" expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the pharmaceutical industry's pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric treatment – actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision – is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles's favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program’s “official termination” eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP — also called “angel dust”), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords–making the US government and Lilly the first illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These were distributed via the agency's sometime allies in organized crime and through the FBI's counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA's Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain&becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is condemning one's opponent publicly for doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick's bizarre "Dr. Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.

Meanwhile, George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war's end and continued to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a high ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White's team secretly filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA's bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed Earman's charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments were frightening:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on (Some) Drugs?

By the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA's LSD research pioneers as:

Dr. Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
Dr. Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However, there were prominent critics of the US government's activities, the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another novel entitled The Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like u2018grace' and u2018transfiguration' came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The u2018scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."

Obviously, this isn't a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley's incredible mind, creative vision and compassion, we're not talking about a moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they're being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.

As author Marks noted:

It would become supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons among drugs – fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines – would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral's son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother's Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans' Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer's professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer's influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During 1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary's, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he remained for three years. Leary's Harvard associates included former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray's many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

Even so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught as an key part of the process.

However, much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to the public.

One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During 1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.

Edgewood also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown acid."

BZ (some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones which aid the brain's transfer of messages and instructions across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days, although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior – could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.

In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe's 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine – the trademark "bad acid" of the day – which they were all on when, on Manson's orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark's numerous intelligence contacts.

These were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks — this is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of “the interest of national security” is used to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (in which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.