Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:50 pm

South Africa's 'Dr Death' Was Accused of Selling Ravers Super Strength MDMA

Image

The bin bag contained red and black caps filled with MDMA - MDMA that research chemist Tim McKibben would testify, at Basson's trial, was created by a "unique" synthesis and was more than 95 percent pure.

Ehlers and his team arrested Basson and proceeded to search his house. No evidence of drug-dealing was found, but Ehlers did find documents marked "top secret", which he confiscated.

Within hours, National Intelligence and the South African Defence Force (SADF) had both placed furious calls to the station, asking about Basson and the documents. Ehlers was ordered to turn over all the documents he'd found to the Office for Serious Economic Offences. He had no idea he'd just uncovered the South African government's 20-year-old top-secret chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme "Project Coast", which was being headed up by Basson.

Project Coast was created in the early-80s by the SADF, under then-president PW Botha's government. Exactly when is uncertain, but it's now accepted that the 1976 Soweto uprisings - massive protests against the Apartheid regime - are what prompted the formation of the project, with the South African government hoping to develop methods of incapacitating or controlling large crowds.

However, Coast's eventual mandate extended far beyond its relatively mundane origins. Basson and his cohorts created several front companies to regulate cash flow and divert attention from the military, with a main base of operations at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories near Pretoria. There, they developed an arsenal of CBW weapons and poisons. One of these was allegedly used to kill over 200 SWAPO prisoners-of-war in Namibia, the reports claiming they were injected with potent muscle relaxants and dumped into the ocean from a helicopter.

Experiments with contraceptives were conducted on baboons and Beagle dogs with the ultimate goal of sterilising black women without their knowledge or consent. Classic spy stuff - umbrellas that could discharge toxins unnoticed, whisky and cigarettes laced with arsenic - were developed. High-profile anti-Apartheid politicians, like the Reverend Frank Chikane, were poisoned. POWs were tied to trees, smeared with an experimental poison and left to die.

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Frederik de Klerk with Nelson Mandela in 1992

In 1990, the recently elected President FW de Klerk ordered Project Coast to be wound down. From there, it cut ties with the SADF and turned to the development of non-lethal chemicals, including quaaludes and MDMA.

It's here that our story picks up again. Hennie Jordaan, a scientist at a Coast front company named Delta G, is credited with the unique formula used to create the MDMA found by Ehlers that morning in Magnolia Dell.

Lower-ranked scientists at Delta G were unaware of what they were involved in, with most of them told they were making rocket fuel for France. One employee, Johan Koekemoer, had been told the drugs were being synthesised for crowd-control purposes, but he was sceptical as his direct superior was unable to produce an official SADF brief for the project.

Basson himself maintained at his trial that the drugs were made for crowd-control purposes, but few believed this story, least of all the prosecution. Colonel Johann Smith - a former SADF liaison with UNITA, Angola's second-largest political party - stated during an interview in March of 2000 that he "was certain that Basson turned to dealing ecstasy and other drugs because his money was in Swiss banks and he still needed to raise cash in South Africa".

The prosecution, led by Advocate Anton Ackermann and Dr Torie Pretorius, was convinced that "at some point the emphasis shifted to producing drugs for profit. However, the motives remain unknown, as do the targets [or customers], and the planned or actual methods of distributing these drugs. There is little evidence that [quaaludes] and ecstasy were produced for illegal sales in South Africa. Instead, the prosecutors are still exploring the possibility that the bulk of these drugs were destined for illicit sale in Europe, India and possibly the United States."

§
A former Civilian Cooperation Bureau agent (AKA an operative of a government-sponsored ​Apartheid death squad) named Danie Phaal also testified that Basson had asked him whether he would be willing to sell 100,000 hits of quaaludes to surfers in the global surfing hotspot Jeffreys Bay in 1992. Phaal refused, but evidently this didn't deter Basson. Trevor Floyd, another CCB assassin, testified during the trial that Basson had asked him in 1992 if he had contacts in Europe and, specifically, England who could distribute a large amount of ecstasy, to which Basson had access. He refused. Basson would later testify that he had merely been "testing" Floyd. International concerns were raised when a drug bust in Chicago traced almost completely pure ecstasy all the way back to South Africa and the Delta G laboratories, which led to cooperation between American and South African intelligence.


https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wout ... cstasy-957
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Karmamatterz » Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:06 am

The "Thumbprint" and Other Hallucinated Truths

AD, help me out with this. Are you suggesting taking LSD is a bad thing? Or perhaps it's usage while at a Dead show was bad? What about mushrooms?

The author of that story could not have ever attended a Dead show. If he did then he truly sucks at writing. His descriptions of the Dead are awfully lame. Perhaps he should try a dose and chill out.

AD, have you been to a Dead show?
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:18 am

I am experienced. And I am not anti.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Jan 28, 2017 11:41 pm

.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/01/prweb14024272.htm


New York Times Carries a Full Page Ad about Plant Medicine Ibogaine to Combat the Opiate Epidemic Presented by Social Movement "Your Mind Has Rights"


The New York Times carried a full page letter today that urges President Trump to make the opiate epidemic a "First 100 Days Issue." The article shows how plant medicine Ibogaine could be used to safely and effectively end addiction, and help veterans to overcome their PTSD and live a joyful life.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (PRWEB) JANUARY 28, 2017

Below are excepts from the full page letter that was published in the New York Times today.

The writers of the article credit President Trump on his ability to think for himself, and demonstrate that he has the opportunity to save millions of lives, by using psychedelics including the African root Ibogaine. "We want to point out to President Trump that the opiate epidemic is as important as the Economy, and Terrorism, since it affects every family in America" said Mike "Zappy" Zapolin, Founder of the "Your Mind Has Rights" Movement. Zappy as he is known is also the award winning documentary film Director who won the Amsterdam Film Festival's Van Gogh Award for his documentary "The Reality Of Truth" which features Zappy and friends including actress Michelle Rodriguez going inside their minds for answers and healing. Zappy went on to say "Our team is convinced that we can quickly, safely, and cost effectively save the Veterans Administration Billions of Dollars and help millions of veterans to lead joyful lives." The letter was also signed by Pat Baker a global authority in the area of breaking addiction with plant medicine who said "We don't blame anyone for not knowing about Ibogaine, but we need to use the knowledge we have about its efficacy to move quickly, given that so many people are suffering." The social movement "Your Mind Has Rights" is fighting for the right for individuals to go inside their own minds for answers and healing using any means necessary including psychedelics and plant medicines.

Dear President Trump,
Please make the Opiate Addiction/Overdose Epidemic a “First 100 Days” Issue.

Your legacy and leadership are already significant, but you may not realize how much it could be affected by what you wind up doing, or not doing about the epidemic of opiate and alcohol addiction. There are tens of thousands of people dying of overdoses every year, with millions more suffering as they accelerate towards becoming the next victim. Three out of four people that are addicted to opiates and heroin took their first opiate when their doctor prescribed it to them. I understand you lost a family member to alcoholism, so you know the agonizing pain of watching a loved one die from this disease.
All over the Country, our police officers, firefighters, and EMT’s are being overwhelmed with calls related to narcotic overdoses. On the front lines, they are having to use larger and larger doses of Narcan to attempt to bring people back from opiate overdoses, the few lucky ones that survive, still remain hopelessly addicted. The toll this is having on our emergency medical workers is debilitating, and the stress this is beginning to have on our financial well being is becoming more significant by the day, if we wait years to address this it will become exponentially worse.

You have the power to change all of this right now using a natural plant that has been shown for decades to be safe, clinically proven , and very cost effective. A single dose of the plant medicine Ibogaine has been proven to break the addiction to opiates, cocaine, and alcohol, and is safe when done with proper medical oversight. Ibogaine was available for sale in France until 1970 under the trade name Lamberene. In the 1960’s it was listed as a schedule 1 drug, which made it illegal to use, possess, and difficult to conduct a clinical study. This ruling was accepted as being in the interest of public safety, with the understanding that research needed to be done.

In the 1990’s, the FDA approved the clinical study of ibogaine in academic setting at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine under the direction of Professor Deborah Mash. Unfortunately, these studies did not advance because of a lack of public or private funds to support the clinical trials.
Since then, patients treated in St. Kitts, WI, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Panama and elsewhere have shown that Ibogaine is highly effective, so continuing to keep it from people who suffer from dependence to heroin, methadone and suboxone is the equivalent of “Modern Day Slavery.”

To Read the Full Letter Click on this link:
http://yourmindhasrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/New-York-Times-Letter-to-the-president.pdf

Mike “Zappy” Zapolin BIO:
Zappy is the winner of the Amsterdam Film Festival’s Van Gogh award for his documentary film “The Reality Of Truth” which focuses on the importance of going inside ones own mind for answers and healing. The film follows Zappy and his friends, including actress Michelle Rodriguez as they explore ancient wisdom techniques for modern problems.

Zappy is also the visionary behind such Internet brands as Music.com, Beer.com, Computer.com, Creditcards.com, and Diamond.com.
Zappy is the creator of the Harvard Business School elective "eBusiness," and recently moderated a first of its kind panel at the Milken Global Conference titled “Highs and Lows of the Cannabis Economy”
Spiritual Director: Kismet Clinic: Ketamine treatments for depression and addiction
YourMindHasRights.org
Zappy.com

Pat Baker BIO:
Pat is recognized globally as a leading authority in treating addiction and depression with plant medicine. He believes that this approach is the only pathway to true freedom, peace, love of oneself, and the world around them. His viral videos show what the horror of addiction does to the human condition, and profiles the inadequacies of the current drug treatment system to even dent this epidemic. His graphic videos have been seen by millions, and continue to save lives every single day. Pat has been fighting for the underprivileged, addicted, and mentally ill, for his entire adult life.

As a Co-Founder of Addiction Assassins, he is dedicated to creating awareness about the power of Ibogaine’s transcendent ability to wipe away one’s pain, mental illness, and addictions, in the safest and quickest way known to man.
AddictionAssassins.com (Kill Your Addiction Before It Kills You)
IboLife.com (Re-Gain your Life With Ibogaine)




http://yourmindhasrights.org/wp-content ... sident.pdf

Dear President Trump,
Please make the Opiate Addiction/Overdose Epidemic a “First 100 Day’s” Issue.

Your legacy and leadership are already significant, but you may not realize how much it could be affected by what you wind up doing, or not doing
about the epidemic of opiate and alcohol addiction. There are tens of thousands of people dying of overdoses every year, with millions more
suffering as they accelerate towards becoming the next victim. Three out of four people that are addicted to opiates and heroin took their first opiate
when their doctor prescribed it to them. I understand you lost a family member to alcoholism, so you know the agonizing pain of watching a loved
one die from this disease.

All over the Country, our police officers, firefighters, and EMT’s are being overwhelmed with calls related to narcotic overdoses. On the front lines,
they are having to use larger and larger doses of Narcan to attempt to bring people back from opiate overdoses, the few lucky ones that survive, still
remain hopelessly addicted. The toll this is having on our emergency medical workers is debilitating, and the stress this is beginning to have on our
financial well being is becoming more significant by the day, if we wait years to address this it will become exponentially worse.

The current medical solution is to prescribe millions of addicts an alternate opiate called Suboxone. Suboxone keeps people from using needles
and street drugs, but patients become immediately addicted to Suboxone, which is even more difficult to detox from than Oxycodone or Heroin. It
is impossible to cure an opiate addiction with another opiate, so patients wind up staying on Suboxone for years and years, remaining all the time
completely addicted to opiates, and plagued with side effects including depression and suicidal tendencies. Suboxone is a billion-dollar industry in
our country, because people are addicted to this drug, unable to break the cycle of addiction.

You have the power to change all of this right now using a natural plant that has been shown for decades to be safe, clinically proven , and very cost
effective. A single dose of the plant medicine Ibogaine has been proven to break the addiction to opiates, cocaine, and alcohol, and is safe when done
with proper medical oversight. Ibogaine was available for sale in France until 1970 under the trade name Lamberene. In the 1960’s it was listed as
a schedule 1 drug, which made it illegal to use, possess, and difficult to conduct a clinical study. This ruling was accepted as being in the interest of
public safety, with the understanding that research needed to be done.

In the 1990’s, the FDA approved the clinical study of ibogaine in academic setting at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine under the
direction of Professor Deborah Mash. Unfortunately, these studies did not advance because of a lack of public or private funds to support the clinical
trials.

Since then, patients treated in St. Kitts, WI, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Panama and elsewhere have shown that Ibogaine is highly effective, so
continuing to keep it from people who suffer from dependence to heroin, methadone and suboxone is the equivalent of “Modern Day Slavery.”
The reason Ibogaine works is that it is a gentle detoxification from opioids and other drugs. The drug experience also allows people to see their
trauma in a non-emotional way, to accept what happened to them in the past, and re-connects them with their inner-self, which they have been trying
to suppress through a variety of drugs and destructive behaviors. Ibogaine immediately provides a rapid detoxification of the patient. They emerge
completely free of cravings for heroin, pharmaceutical opioids, cocaine and alcohol.

People report that they have a new appreciation for how incredible life is. Over the next several days if they receive proper aftercare and lifestyle
training, they can maintain their transition to sobriety and remain free from the bondage of addiction and the torturous daily life of drug and alcohol
dependence. These people are now in a state of mind where they can be immediately productive members of society, restoring their families, and
their faith in God.

Big Pharma, drug treatment centers, and the liquor companies, are very resistant to Ibogaine because it disrupts their business models, which
includes keeping customers highly addicted to their products for the rest of their lives.

1985 – Rapid method for interrupting the narcotic addiction syndrome (USPTO #: 4,499,096)
1986 – Ibogaine vs. stimulants (cocaine and amphetamine. USPTO #: 4,587,243)
1989 – Ibogaine vs. alcohol (USPTO #: 4,857,523)
1991 – Ibogaine vs. nicotine (USPTO #: 5,026,697)
1992 – Ibogaine as a Rapid method for interrupting or attenuating poly-drug dependency syndromes (USPTO #: 5,152,994).

The FDA recently approved phase three clinical trials for the psychedelic, MDMA (ecstasy) for the treatment of PTSD. Johns Hopkins University
recently proved that Psilocybin from psychedelic mushrooms is a highly effective way to treat patients with terminal cancer, who are dealing with end
of life awareness. The FDA just fast tracked Ketamine for treating depression, and the Cleveland Clinic called it a top 10 medical breakthrough. We
need to use our common sense, modern scientific knowledge, and the proven medical facts, to begin to integrate these powerful medicines into our
healthcare system. You single handedly have the ability to do what no administration has ever done before, by making plant medicine a part of our
medical protocol for drug addiction and mental illness (depression and PTSD).


The tragic event at Fort Lauderdale Airport show us once again that we need to make this a top priority. If veterans can be safely relieved of PTSD
using novel natural product medicine, we owe it to them to be able to access it without delay.


We urge you to pass “Emergency Legislation” allowing U.S. Citizens to be treated with Ibogaine to immediately counter the opiate overdose
epidemic, and the drug dependency crisis that is gravely affecting every single American family. This epidemic of addiction is growing exponentially.
This is a matter of life and death, public safety, financial security, and is in keeping with our American way of helping our fellow citizens to pursue
their own happiness.

Thank you for being as brave as you have been in your life, and for using your unique intuition when it comes to important issues like this that
requires one to transcend conventional wisdom. You have the power to save millions of people’s lives with this common sense, medically fact based
approach.

We are certain that every American regardless of political party, race, religion, or sexual identity, will stand behind you on this critical issue.
We are grateful to you for your leadership to our country.

Peace.

Mike “Zappy” Zapolin and Pat Baker - January, 2017
“Your Mind Has Rights” Movement
Fighting for the right to go inside our own minds for answers and healing.

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby liminalOyster » Sun Jan 29, 2017 8:24 am

Belligerent Savant » Sun Jan 29, 2017 4:41 am wrote:.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/01/prweb14024272.htm


New York Times Carries a Full Page Ad about Plant Medicine Ibogaine to Combat the Opiate Epidemic Presented by Social Movement "Your Mind Has Rights"


Fuck, this is great. Thank you for posting, BS. Recalls the early days of Ibo therapy in the 80s when there were a few enthusiasts who were also involved in Act Up.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby dada » Sun Jan 29, 2017 11:33 am

Adjusting to a sick society without becoming sick yourself is not easy to do. It's no wonder people get depressed.

How much of the 'healing' is the work of the drug, and how much the set and setting, the intention and the will? Of course, everyone is different. Some can be tricked into moving towards healthier states of mind. We'll call that the 'Dumbo's magic feather' method.

In a healthy person, the drugs can open up vistas for exploration. Another trick. Or maybe a better way to put it, like putting training wheels on a bicycle.

No one should take my word on this, or anything for that matter. I think you should be your own fucking authority. Although I'm not the first to arrive at this viewpoint. I remember Alan Watts saying about psychedelics, "once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone!" I used to think, "yeah, but what if they call back?" ha. I just don't answer. Let the machine get it.

Ecsatsy for veterans with PTSD. That about sums it up. Mainstream drug culture has totally given up on being socially and politically active.

In the introduction to Naked Lunch, Burroughs talks about junk being the ideal product, the ultimate merchandise. The 'algebra of need.' There are many forms of addiction. In a society of consumer junkies, one that produces war-zone slums where life is worthless and there's no hope to be found, junk addiction is a natural result, a symptom. The health problem of heroin is a cultural sickness. Mainstream drug culture has lost the narrative.

In my experience as an artist, ecstasy makes you stupid. I don't mean literal brain damage. It interferes with the creative process. Again, don't take my word for it, try it for yourself. The ecstasy-glow lasts a few years. Once the glow wears off, look back at the things you've created during that time. I think you'll be embarrassed.

Ketamine to treat depression, now there's something. Give depressed people something else to occupy their thoughts, that's for sure. High doses bring on a state similar to DMT. Short acting, very powerful. Pronounced awareness of 'alien communication,' 'coincidence control.' I wonder if an experience like that isn't so much hooking up the antenna, enhancing the signal, as it is silencing everything else, including the critical faculties. But maybe those signals are present all the time, can be better picked up and decoded by sober sensitivity. Training the mind would make much more sense. I wonder.

Recreational Ketamine users always talk about a space they worry about falling into, the dreaded 'k-hole.' I always thought that sounded like a space where they might learn something. But they're using it recreationally, to escape. Learning something is the last thing they'd want to do. They're in the wrong set and setting.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Elvis » Sun Jan 29, 2017 12:28 pm

Q: What did the Deadhead say when he ran out of drugs?

A: "Man, this music sucks!!"


:mrgreen:
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:08 am

They're just harmless hippies, of that you can be sure:


The Cult at the End of the World

This is the story of the ultimate cult: a wired, high-tech, designer-drug, billion-dollar army of New Age zealots, focused around the leadership of a blind and bearded madman, armed with weapons of mass destruction. Like scenes of an apocalyptic future in a cyberpunk novel, this story is also the stuff of nightmares.

Cultists wired electrodes to their heads while chanting ancient mantras and logging on to computer nets. Methamphetamine, LSD, and truth serum – the product of homemade laboratories equipped with the latest gear – ran through their veins. Those same labs worked at refining enough chemical and biological weapons to kill millions. Other cultists attempted to build a nuclear bomb while massive facilities were built to manufacture handguns and explosives. All this activity went toward preparing for – and then unleashing – Armageddon.

In 1984, guru Shoko Asahara had a one-room yoga school, a handful of devotees, and a dream: world domination. A decade later, Aum Supreme Truth boasted 40,000 followers in six countries and a worldwide network that brought it state-of-the-art lasers, lab equipment, and weaponry. Aum's story moves from the dense cities of postindustrial Japan to mountain retreats where samurai once fought, and then overseas – to Manhattan and Silicon Valley, Bonn and the Australian outback, and finally to Russia. It is there, in the volatile remains of the Soviet empire, that the cult found ready suppliers of military hardware, training, and, quite possibly, a nuclear bomb.

Aum leaders systematically targeted top Japanese universities, recruiting brilliant but alienated young scientists from chemistry, physics, and engineering departments. They forged relations with Japan's ruthless crime syndicates, the yakuza, and with veterans of the KGB and Russian and Japanese militaries. They enlisted medical doctors to dope patients and perform human experiments that belong in a horror movie.

For years this went on, with barely a question from police or the media on three continents. Before long, Aum had become one of the world's richest, most sophisticated, and most murderous religious sects. Few would know the scope of the cult's madness until Aum burst onto the world scene in March 1995 with a cold-blooded nerve gas attack in the subways of rush hour Tokyo.

In a world poised between the Cold War and the new millennium, the tale of Aum is a mirror of our worst fears. Heavily armed militias, terrorist cells, zealous cults, and crime syndicates all find their voice in the remarkable ascent of this bizarre sect. For years, experts have warned us: the growing sophistication of these groups, combined with the spread of modern technology, will bring about a new era in terrorism and mass murder. The coming of Aum Supreme Truth shows just how close these nightmares have come to reality.

The story of Aum is the story of its charismatic and increasingly psychopathic leader, Shoko Asahara. The son of a dirt-poor weaver of tatami mats, Asahara attended a boarding school for the blind. There the partially sighted boy grew into a bully, dominating and scamming his classmates. Eventually, he opened an acupuncture business that specialized in quack cures, but in 1986, the ever-ambitious Asahara was traveling the Himalayas in search of enlightenment.

On descending the mountains, Asahara transformed himself into a guru, shopping the world's religions to form Aum. He blended mystical Buddhism with Hindu deities, added the physical rigor of yoga, and, from Christianity, drew on the concept of Armageddon. But Asahara the con man never lay far from the surface. The aspiring guru also began to offer an array of high-tech devices, shortcuts on the road to enlightenment for the youth of Japan. There were electrode caps, astral teleporters, magic DNA – one could give Aum credit for enterprise, at least. Unfortunately, the cult's darker side would not be limited to scamming naive kids out of their hard-earned money.


Brain waves

"We have a new initiation," said the cult doctor. "Please drink this."

It was September 1994, and Dr. Ikuo Hayashi was experimenting. A cardiovascular surgeon, the 48-year-old Hayashi had joined Aum after nearly killing a mother and daughter in a car accident. With his anesthesiologist wife and a dozen cult doctors and nurses, Hayashi presided over a horror shop of human testing, drugging, and crackpot medicine.

The victim this time was a Japanese army veteran, a 25-year-old personal bodyguard for Asahara. Hayashi had summoned the cult member and handed him a glass used for urine samples. Inside was a yellow liquid. "Soon I got dizzy and was knocked out," the man recalled. "When I came to, I was on a bed and didn't know what was going on. It seemed many days had passed, but I had no memory. When I touched my head, there were swollen spots – they were so painful both inside and outside my head. It was a dull, aching pain."

The "spots" were in fact surgical incisions, made at four points in the man's skull – one at each temple and two in the back. Each cut was 1 centimeter long and 2 centimeters wide. Fresh scars and swelling bald spots showed through what was left of his hair.

The man was later rescued and nursed back to health. "When I went home I had a thorough exam of my brain," he said. "But a CAT scan showed nothing. As for the four scars Š I think they might have put electrodes in my head."

"Electrodes in my head" – the phrase echoes, as if from some distant retrograde future. Aum, the high-tech death cult, had met the cyberpunk world of Neuromancer, William Gibson's science fiction classic. In Gibson's book, a "console cowboy" called Case prowls the holographic backstreets of Tokyo and wires his mind directly onto computer nets. He might have felt right at home inside Aum's laboratories.


Aum's scientists were fascinated by electronics and the brain. Their main focus, though, was not so much in logging on, but in locking up – in finding new ways to achieve mind control. Dogma, drugs, and brainwashing apparently were not enough to keep Asahara's legions in line. What Asahara really wanted to create was a realm of zombies.

Brain wave patterns had always interested Aum's scientists. These were, after all, the basis of the electrode caps worn by the cult priesthood. But the scope of their experiments expanded radically. One set of tests performed by Dr. Hayashi used electric shocks to wipe the memories of suspicious followers. According to Hayashi's detailed medical records, 7 shocks of 100 volts each, delivered to the scalp, were enough to blank the short-term memory of one of Asahara's drivers, who had been branded a spy. The man couldn't remember he had ever driven the guru's car.

A worker at the compound who tried to escape received 11 shocks, while a male follower accused of sexual relations got 19. During one three-month period beginning in October 1994, Dr. Hayashi administered more than 600 electric shocks to 130 followers. Afterward, some of them forgot which cult they were in, what the guru was called, even their own names.




[b]More at:[/b https://www.wired.com/1996/07/aum/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 12:42 pm

Sam Cutler: "You Can't Always Get What You Want..."

“…my life with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and other wonderful reprobates.” At three-hundred-odd pages, it’s a surprisingly quick read. As the sub-title implies, the book covers the five years between mid-1969 and mid-1974, during which time Cutler managed the Rolling Stones’ American tour and the Grateful Dead. It describes all the debauchery of the rock and roll circus, complete with a colorful cast of drug dealers, con men, cops, shady lawyers and ruthless promoters.

It is very well written; better, I confess, than I would have expected from a man whose life experience is so far removed from literary academia. Suspecting that it was ghost-written, I took a look at Cutler’s blog. The styles match, and if there was clearly some professional editing, Cutler’s language and turns of phrase are prettier than Phil’s and more colloquial than McNally’s.

From a strictly academic point of view, there are some deficiencies. Written thirty-five years after a period during which, by his account, he was high (on any number of drugs) and/or drunk virtually all the time, he outlines certain events with suspicious specificity. There are also a few inconsistencies and factual errors sprinkled about – for instance the claim that Keith Godchaux joined the Dead in 1970, rather than ’71. This book is a memoir, not a piece of historical literature, and while I had trouble nailing down any hard facts of objective significance, it was immensely enjoyable.

The first half of the book – after a cursory summation of the author’s childhood and coming-of-age – focuses on the troubled US tour that the Rolling Stones engaged upon in October 1969, with a special focus on the Altamont debacle. Cutler outlines, in the introduction, his intention to set the record straight on the Stones’ responsibility for Altamont. While I for one had a different impression, he starts from the premise that to this day, the Stones are held responsible for the whole thing, that they organized it and hired the Hell’s Angels to do security. The picture he weaves is highly complete and nuanced, written from the perspective of someone at the center of the disorganized, uncontrollable zoo.

As tour manager, Cutler’s job was to take care of the band members themselves, a position that put him in the administrative center of the tour yet conferred on him very limited power: he saw all but could affect nothing. On one side were the groupies, stunning girls who insinuated themselves into every backstage area, hotel room, airplane and limousine to engage in every manner of drug-addled debauchery with any member of the touring party, no matter how far removed, in a quest to get access to the band themselves. Then there were the legions of local personnel, promoters, agents, peripheral business executives and assorted hangers-on that constantly entered and exited the circus as the band traveled along, a constant gaggle of authorized personnel that nobody at the center knew nor cared about. Finally, and this is where the intrigue starts, there were a few highly connected people who, despite not having any official connection to tour management, became centrally influential players in daily operations.

One of these was Ken “Goldfinger” Connell, a rich and well-stocked drug dealer, a friend and confidant of the West Coast rock scene, who had lost a hand in a freak accident while running drugs out of Mexico. Another was a certain John Jaymes who first introduced himself as the “man from Chrystler,” on scene to smooth out a little trouble with missing rental cars. Within weeks, however, Jaymes was inexplicably handling security with twenty off-duty NYPD officers and a private drug dealer to keep the band and crew well-supplied with cocaine and everything else, entirely without contract or payment from the Stones’ management.

The Altamont concert was a half-baked idea thrown about on the suggestion of Bay Area acquaintances, primarily the Dead’s Rock Scully, which grew legs of its own when Mick Jagger, constantly needled by media attacks about greed and high ticket prices, announced the free concert as a fact. The West Coast people organized it, such as it was, as a one-day festival, while it was represented in the media as a Rolling Stones affair. Cutler had serious reservations about the feasibility of the event, and into the breach stepped Jaymes. He claimed to represent the Stones (with no legal authority to do so) and, unsolicited, set about “making it happen.” The last-minute venue changes, the pathetically small stage and the organizational issues of the concert itself are fairly well known, but there were wider intrigues as well, including a huge, mysterious batch of extremely potent LSD which had extremely adverse effects on a large portion of the attendees, causing freak-outs and fights almost from the moment people started showing up 24 hours before the show.

The central revelation of the book is Cutler’s assertion that the Federal authorities had a major hand in the catastrophic mood of the concert. He asserts that Jaymes was a small-time mafioso affiliated with the Castellano mob in New York and who had testified against another mafia group in New England, and that he was somehow also working for the FBI. The Feds were supposedly seriously concerned with the potential impact of the Woodstock culture and were determined to sabotage any further mass concerts. Largely on the word of Ken Goldfinger, Cutler states that Jaymes and a lawyer, also involved in the planning, had recently been meeting with the FBI, and that there were a number of undercover federal agents at the show, including the head of the FBI’s San Francisco branch. He also reveals that the mysterious acid contained a nearly toxic 1600 micrograms of pure LSD, “almost seven times the normal “meeting God” dose,” and that, according to the small Bay Area community of underground LSD manufacturers, it was created using a pill press worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a sum vastly beyond the means of any underground chemist but easily accessible to a government authority.


http://moderndeadhead.blogspot.com/2010 ... t-you.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 5:12 pm

A close encounter with the "Judo Gang":

The Random's Had It: a Memoir of Steve Carey

by Keith Abbott

One of Steve's most maddening traits was calling up (or writing) to announce he'd been in town but hadn't stopped by. His needs seemed as mysterious as his sources of income. With his veiled references, it was never clear why he had been in San Francisco. Usually he bounced from Los Angeles to New York. His earliest publishing was done with the poets around St. Marks Poetry Project; eventually he came to live there in the late 1980s. After the disintegration of the Haight-Ashbury scene, he sought some poetic community and support for his work, but yet appeared unable to quit the LA scene, which seemed to paralyze his writing.

Steve's relationship with the film industry fueled his more allusive conversations. At some time he labored at a ghostwriting job on some television hack's work. The rewrites consisted of substituting modern slang and sentences in dialogue. He once showed me outtakes from this work, quite hilarious in a ghastly way, as the original was riddled with 1940s slang (Hey sister; hotcha; what's cooking? etc.). If I remember correctly, one script was for the cop drama, Hawaii Five Oh. The screenwriter apparently paid Steve in lump sums of cash, but I doubt it was steady work.

During phone call around autumn of 1977, Steve asked me for a favor. He was coming to San Francisco to collect on a pornographic screenplay that he had written. Alice in Wonderland provided the concept for this production. He asked me if, when he went in and hassled the producers, I would act as a silent muscle and back him up.

I said absolutely not. The people who made porno, I knew, usually had other people behind them, and they were seldom nice.

Steve badgered me and pleaded his case, but gave up when it was clear that I had no interest in doing this. It was one of the only times I ever heard him sound truly desperate. He insisted that he really needed to get the money.

Shortly after that, in mid-October 1977, I got a phone call; Steve was in Berkeley; "You gotta come and rescue me, Abbott."

When I asked him where he was, he didn't know, and then had to shout to someone and get the address.

At the time I was doing tree and landscape work in the Berkeley hills; the street he mentioned was on my regular routes. I agreed to come get him and left in my pickup. The address proved elusive. There seemed to be no hope of finding it. The number of the last residence on a dead end road was higher than the one Steve had given me. No continuation of the street showed up on the map and there was only a ravine where this house should have been.

Back home I called him, and he had to ask people there how to get to the place. Then I consulted the map as he gave me directions. I'd been in the right spot, but the street apparently continued on the other side of the ravine for a half a block, although this didn't show on my map. The new directions seemed plausible, so I returned to the hunt.

The house was reachable only on a narrow gravel road off a main street. (In the 1970s I had worked for a few places like that in the Berkeley hills, which had their own private roads and usually did not show up on maps.) The residence was in a cul de sac, a large Spanish style stucco newly built. In the driveway was a huge Chrysler New Yorker Brougham coupe painted a deep midnight blue. The street was so narrow, I had to park my truck on a slant, the right wheels in a shallow ditch.

The front door was thick, massive, with a small window set behind a black metal grill. When it swung open, an exquisitely beautiful Eurasian woman in a bronze silk dress was smiling at me.

"Keith! You're here!" and she hugged me. Her perfume smelled like orchids and sex. "Oh I'm so glad you found it," she whispered in my ear.

Then, instead of drawing away from me, she moved into me, around me, and all over me. This startled me, and I looked down at her, to check if I had ever met her before, and in the overhead light I saw her bronze silk dress turned into gold shimmers.

One hand stroking my neck, her other hand sliding across my chest, she ushered me into the foyer, and then, in an act that was so casual it stunned me, she shoved herself up on my thigh, riding it. I paused, completely disoriented and aroused by her hands, her perfume, and that slithering cool bronze silk dress.

We lurched down the long foyer as if we were in some three-legged potato sack race together, only my third leg was a crowbar erection sliding around under my pants with each push of her bush against me. Lightheaded with lust, I staggered into an open archway to our right.

Inside was a dark, rounded room with high windows showing the night sky and stars through its glass. On the floor were heaped rugs. Even under the dim starlight it was clear that they were amazingly beautiful Kalim rugs, one overlapping the other as if they were in a showroom and had just been ravished by a horde of buyers. There was a rustling sound, of feathers, and I craned my head sideways to look further into the darkness.

In the dim far corner were birds on dangling perches, all tropical and gorgeous, with brilliant white and red and scarlet and orange and smoldering emerald plumage. They were jockeying for positions, nudging each other one way or the other on their perches. Under the darkness, white streaks and blotches on the rugs came into focus; the only sounds were soft plops of birds shitting.

There was something malevolent and casually nasty about that room with its faint wet sounds, as if a ghost were squatting there in the gloom pulling apart fingers at their joints.

"Steve here?" I asked this woman. "Is Steve Carey here?"

"Yes." She cooed unintelligible little wet things in my ear as she guided me through a left hand turn off the foyer into another long hallway and we paused at another doorway.

Inside a high-ceilinged long large kitchen was a swarthy Indio-Mexican woman before a shiny stainless steel industrial range. All six burners were on: steaming menudo pot sat on two, on others, steam table pans of quesidillas and fajitas warmed; to the side chimichangas bubbled and bobbled in a deep fat boiler. Aluminum trays lined the counters with enchiladas streaked with red and yellow. There was enough food for an army in there.

My left hand was now riding on the base of Selina's spine, even though my palm on the silk seemed no longer merely sexy but sinister, as if this kitchen scene were a frightening annex in some sideways dream, and we were slipping back and forth between menace and ecstasy.

"What's your name?"

"Here," she said.

As we mounted some tiled steps, she steered me through a large arch into an immense front room with white plaster walls. More rugs were piled up in a corner to our right two men were conversing in low tones.

One man was dressed in casual khakis, a cashmere sweater tied around his neck, and on his belt was a beeper. The second man bent his head to one side, listening to Beeper Man murmur numbers. He looked Arabic or Indian, his pants a gray wool, his shirt silk, open, a gold chain around his neck. The two paid no attention to us as they talked in low tones, the Beeper Man bending over to hold up a rug for the other man to finger as we turned to our right.

There Steve was lost in a enormous plush chair in the opposite side of the room, watching a late night I Love Lucy rerun on a gigantic console television. He barely looked up as my succubus and I toppled onto the couch to his left.

"I take it you've met Selina?" Steve asked, not taking his eyes of the screen.

Selina adroitly squirmed off my hip as we floundered around on the sofa, shifting over onto my lap so she straddled my hardon.

"Oh I'm so glad Keith could get here!" So far she seemed to possess only two tones: husky whispers and moans. She twisted put her arms around my neck, hugging my head as she rested her cheek against my ear, lovey-dovey style.

While these sensations were so intense I seemed close to passing out, the house itself was making me dry-mouthed and scared.

"Steve! What's . . .uh . . .what's uh . . .?"

The Beeper Man shifted slightly away from his negotiations and he glanced over at me. His eyes had a dead look as he appraised me, once, and then glanced over at the coffee table.

On the coffee table to one side of the television was a large black onyx tray. On it was a mound of sparkling powder about the size of a small white cat.

The I Love Lucy laugh track exploded with chortles and glee. I looked at Steve very closely, but I was sure he was not stoned or sped. He seemed inert, pinned back in that mammoth chair by something.

The phone rang somewhere else in the house. Selina leapt off my lap and rushed out of the room. Watching her bronze silk dress walk away made me feel like I was losing all the sex I had ever had in my entire life.

After a few tries to clear my throat, I managed, "Steve, talk to me."

Without taking his eyes off Lucy and Ethel, Steve only raised one large white hand up and made a flopping, dismissive, hopeless gesture and then he sighed.

Selina hurried into the room and said something to Beeper Man. The two men left with her, but then she returned in a hurry. She sat on my lap again, briskly adjusting her legs around the lump in my pants, taking my right hand and draping it on her knee. Her skin felt hot under the cool silk.

"Steve, hey! Steve! " I appealed to him over Selina's shoulder. "Where do you need to go?"

Selina's lips found my ear lobe again, then she pulled away, leaving it moist. Her low cut silk dress hung open exposing one of her dark nipples, which was barely brushing the inside of her dress. Her nipple seemed to gleam and the sight of that made me dizzy.

"Go?" she whispered, "You're not going are you?'

Someone called her name elsewhere in the house. Selina hopped off me and disappeared down the hallway.

Steve turned his attention away from the comic mayhem on I Love Lucy and laughed, watching me as I watched Selina walk away. "That's okay, Abbott," Steve reassured me, pointing to his crotch. "I don't have one of those."

This stunned me. In all the years I'd known Steve I had never heard him ever make any kind of crude sexual remark.

"Can we get out of here?" I asked. "Steve, I'm going to leave here without you if you don't tell me what's going on."

Steve roused himself up from the chair for a moment, sitting on the edge. I got up, hoping he was going to leave, but it was all I could do to stand; my erection felt like it were cutting me in half.

The Beeper Man drifted back in a careless glide, but that grace was coupled with instinctive casing of the room, checking where I was and where Steve was. He picked up the rug he'd been discussing earlier and fingered its edges, looking annoyed, as if something the other man had said about this rug was correct, that the rug was flawed or less than perfect.

I hobbled over to the onyx tray and stared down at its mound of glittering powder. On one end of the tray was a slim gold post topped by a thin statuette of a skier gracefully leaning into a turn. At the other end of the tray was a gold razor blade and a gold tube.

I stuck a finger on the mound, lightly, a little smudge on the tip. As I tasted it, the Beeper Man looked up from inspecting his rug. He waited to judge my reaction. The powder was bitter, pure raw metallic methamphetamine. Our eyes met; his held only a kind of indifferent predatory gaze, as he were watching something small, something about to move one way or the other.

I was almost certain that Steve was not wired on meth, but I couldn't be sure until I saw him walk. I broke off eye contact with Beeper Man to look at Steve. Steve only grimly smiled as Ricky and Lucy ran hysterical numbers on each other.

The acrid meth flavor dissolved in my mouth and my forehead was touched by some invisible breeze. The sweat simply evaporated. What have taken? crossed my mind.

The Beeper Man looked amused, as if he knew exactly what had just happened.

I marched over to Steve. "Up and at 'em, cowboy." I took him by the arm and pulled on his dead weight. "Steve!" I yanked again, "Let's go!" He didn't budge.

For a moment it seemed as if he were terminally suicidal, industrially depressed, or comatose on intravenous Valium. Then, as I Love Lucy cut away to some commercials, he leaned forward and stood up reluctantly.

When I escorted Steve through the archway of the room, Selina was back, fastening herself to my hip. "Oh, you don't have to go, do you, Keith?"

"Gotta go, gotta go," I tried to sound as if I meant it. Somewhere toward the back of the house a phone rang and Selina was gone, leaving a hot silky place on my hip.

"What did you tell her about me?" I hissed to Steve.

"Nothing!" Steve protested. Then, with a tardy shrug, "Oh--just that you were a world famous novelist."

As we passed the observatory archway, the tropical birds jockeyed for positions on their perches, spattering the rugs underneath with their runny crap in the darkness.



*

The moment I climbed into my truck, I knew the chassis was tilted wrong. Steve hopped on the running board and perched on the truck bed, waiting for me to pull out of the ditch so he could get in the passenger side. I got out from behind the steering wheel and went around the Chevy and looked. A flat tire. I'd driven over a board and punctured the right front on three nails.

Steve took this opportunity to slide into the cab, over on the passenger side. He looked over at me. "What's wrong?"

"Flat. I don't have my spare. It's down at my house."

"I'm not going back in there," Steve informed me pleasantly.

"The fuck you aren't. I'm not going back in there, either. That house is evil, man, that guy is evil."

"Forget it, Abbott. I'm so glad you got me out of that place."

"You didn't act like it. You want to walk all the way down to my place? Get back in there and call us a tow truck."

Steve looked alarmed. "I'm not moving. Go back and borrow Selina's car, we'll drive down and get your spare. She likes you, Abbott. She thinks you're more famous than Hemingway."

*

Even though it cost me yet another tour of my erogenous zones, that's what I had to do. Selina's midnight blue Chrysler came equipped with all the trimmings, two-toned blue velour upholstery and fake mahogany dashboard, plus this boat was so huge that most drivers probably had to use a current passport to get to the hood ornament.

During the drive Steve remained morose. He only got talkative after we got down to my house and plied him with some excellent tea. Selina's services ran a thousand dollars a night. Five hundred for drop-in service, extra for any exotic routines. Judging from my brief contacts with her, the woman was grossly underpaid.

Steve was staying at her house in Marin. She'd been trying to contact the pornmeisters who owed Steve his script money. Steve didn't say how he'd met her.

"And Mr. Beeper Man?"

He had brought Selina in for party favors, "as an entertainment for his guests."

"What guests? There was no one else there. It's two-thirty in the morning! And Beeper Man, he one of the producers of this porn?"

Steve said nothing.

"You were trying to get money out of that guy?"

When I asked again if Beeper Man was one of the producers who owed him money, he only waved the subject away, as if he didn't want to discuss it.

Back at Mr. Beeper Man's mansion, I changed the tire on my truck and then went up to the door to drop off the keys to the Chrysler. I actually stood back from the door and held them out away from my body.

I needn't have bothered. Selina was upset that our trip took so long because she had to go. I went back to tell Steve that he had to ride with Selina, but he refused to get out of my truck.

"You have no idea how she drives, Abbott."

We tried to follow Selina back to Marin County. By that time it was about four in the morning. The highway was almost empty of traffic. To say Selina drove erratically wasn't even close. Selina alternated her speeds between twenty and seventy mph, in ten, twenty and thirty second bursts, irrespective of surrounding traffic, road conditions, neighborhood or weather. On the foggy Richmond Bridge she lost us, hitting speeds of over 100 mph, My poor 1953 Chevy six-cylinder could not keep up.

"She's gone," I said when her taillights disappeared into the fog. "You'll have to direct me to her house."

Steve cleared his throat. "I don't know where it is."

"You don't know where it is? You've been there, what? Three days and you don't know where it is?"

Turned out that Steve had been ferried to her house by her from the San Francisco airport, in what he called one of the most terrifying drives of his life, and this erased everything but an incoherent gratitude that he was still alive. He never got the address, only the phone number.

"In three days you never walked outside and looked at the street sign or the numbers on the front door?"

"It's on a hill," Steve tried.

"In Mill Valley, that's a big help. It's surrounded by hills." I told him we'd turn around once we got off the bridge and go back to my house.

Fortunately some fit of melancholy, probably caused by our failed romance, must have overtaken Selina because just west of San Quentin prison we came out of the fog and found her Chrysler inexplicably poking along in the right hand lane of the highway. Thinking that she remembered me, I pulled up alongside her and waved, to let her know we were back in synch, but she didn't seem to know who we were.

The ride to her house through Mill Valley was just as loony, but on the city streets, her spurts and slowdowns careened between 20 and 60 mph, so my truck could stay close.

The house turned out to be the top of the highest hill in Mill Valley. Even if Steve claimed that he was numb with terror when he got there, how he could have missed the fact that the front deck had a lovely 180 degree view of the bay and night lights of San Francisco I don't know, but it had slipped his mind. By the time we got in her house, Selina showed absolutely no further interest in either of us.

That tiny smudge of speed was still romping around my circuits. I felt crystal clear and insanely thirsty, so I got a beer out of the fridge for me and a soft drink for Steve while Selina cajoled someone over the phone. We sat out in the front room and talked about writers, Steve's recent New York stay, and watched the fog banks shift around on the bay. When I returned for seconds, Selina was putting the finishing touches on negotiating what sounded like a three-or-four way sex orgy at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco. She left shortly after that. Before I decamped, Steve took me down to her bedroom and showed me her S&M gear under the bed.

Around two months later the Beeper Man and everyone in his house were slaughtered. Someone carved him, his wife and his sister up with knives. Apparently the housekeeper was gone, because no Latina name showed up in the police report, or Selina's name, either. Turned out that Beeper Man was a main importer of LSD for the Western states, apparently brewed up to his specifications in Germany and Scotland, but he smuggled other dope, too. Until they came to the house and found the butchered bodies along with half a million dollars worth of LSD, around fifteen grand in cash, plus a half pound of grass, the police never knew he or his network existed. Informers said Beeper Man routinely kept $150,000 around in cash for buys and had about $1-2 million dollars of ergotamine tartrate--the chemical base for acid--stashed somewhere. He had half interest in a Liberian oil tanker, large real estate holdings in the Bay Area, plus a million bucks in local banks. Both his grandfather and father had been murdered, granddad by the Mafia on the East Coast.

A true entrepreneur, Beeper Man had gone west and graduated with honors from University of California with a Criminology Degree to scope out his opponents' tactics. His covers were two: an owner of a black belt, he specialized in karate and martial arts and sponsored teams, while also working the rug import biz. The police speculated that the karate teams were employed as mules. One of his couriers was arrested for the murders. No motive was ever established. He claimed Beeper Man had assassinated possibly two to four people in Miami. The suspect was described as deranged and incoherent, unable to furnish any details of the murders, and confined to a mental hospital until his trial.


Excerpted from: http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_2/ ... bbocar.htm
American Dream
 
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 11:39 pm

http://theinfluence.org/art-is-my-god-s ... cid-cooks/


"Art Is My God"—Sarah Matzar Isn’t Like Other Acid Cooks

Image

Jesse Jarnow
June 2nd, 2016


[Editor’s note: The following excerpt from Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, by Jesse Jarnow, relays the never-before-told story of Sarah Matzar (above), a Guatemalan quilter and groundbreaking LSD chemist. In the 1980s, Matzar was living in the US, making quilts and working to get her master’s in Anthropology, when a revelation hit her. Her story serves as a counter-narrative to the all-white, all-male patina often given to psychedelic culture.]


Sarah Matzar is dosed and looking up at the ceiling of the Grateful Dead’s Front Street rehearsal hall in San Rafael when she figures out what she’s going to do with the crystal LSD. Besides make money, that is. Sarah is in her mid-twenties and no utopian, though she likes acid well enough and loves the Dead.

But Sarah just wants to support her family. Desperately. She is in a fix.

By life circumstance, here she is tripping at Front Street, looking up at the fixture over the fluorescent lights with its patterned plastic bubbles undulating across the surface. And she realizes that the indentations are the perfect shape to serve as molds for LSD gel tabs.

An early ’70s graduate of Pacific High, the experimental institution outside Palo Alto where students built geodesic domes and interacted with monks, Sarah is well placed in the Dead world and already has her reasons for being around Front Street in the early ’80s. She asks Dead roadie and Front Street manager Kidd Candelario where he got the light fixture, acquires one, and brings it back to her new residence in Berkeley.

Along with her Pacific High chemistry classes, she picks up further specialized knowledge from Melissa Cargill, Owsley’s lab collaborator and LSD pioneer. Sarah and Melissa have been friends for a few years, bonding over textile design, which is Sarah’s true passion.

“Melissa was like, ‘You go girl!’” Sarah laughs. Cargill, out of the acid game since the ’60s and working for George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic on Raiders of the Lost Ark and other projects, suggests that Sarah grease the plastic bubbles with aerosol-butter Pam. It works like a charm.

Sarah Matzar isn’t like other acid cooks. For starters, she is a woman, which—besides Melissa Cargill and Rhoney Stanley of Owsley’s lab and scattered others in the UK—is rare in LSD chemistry circles. Sarah is 4’10” and possesses a lacerating wit. She is starting her own textile business and getting her master’s in anthropology at UC Berkeley, studying Mayan art. She is not here to save the world.

“Do I believe in LSD? Yes, I do,” she says, “but it’s not for everybody.” She is doing this for her family, lowercase. She is doing this to send money back to Guatemala, where she belongs. She’d spent part of her childhood in the States and part in Central and South America, where her mother is from. “Sometimes where you’re born isn’t where you’re from,” she notes.

“Art is my God,” she says, and her God manifests in the form of intricate Guatemalan quilt making, symbols and systems colliding. “My Guatemalan color sense combined with my psychedelic color sense,” she says. In her quilting she attempts to “break out of the block,” the traditional division in pattern making, and does so, the fabrics continuing their conversation across rippled quilted surfaces.

She is not in the United States by choice, which is where the urgency comes from. In the late ’70s, Guatemala’s decades-running civil war grew too turbulent, so she and her family—her mother, brother, sister and she—are living in a condemned house in Berkeley, near the Ashby Flea Market.

One of the other squat residents is a Deadhead from New York, who has a line on grams of crystal LSD, fresh from a European chemist. And, just like that, Sarah is pulled into the upper-middle-class Grateful Dead scene she’d known during her high school years in Palo Alto. She re-establishes old connections, partially for business’s sake. She always did love the Dead, though, and acid, too, but this is pure economic opportunity. In time, much of her family will return to Guatemala, but Sarah will support them.

The psychedelic world had always at least presented itself as classless. But in addition to being a woman in the LSD scene, Sarah finds herself as an outsider in the hippie-bourgie Dead scene. She uses the LSD and her not inconsiderable natural intelligence to bootstrap herself into business and, in short, into the upper echelons. In that regard, the psychedelic world becomes an access point, a place with its own social ladder with its own skills.

In the Berkeley squat, Sarah experiments with various methods before landing on the gel tabs. They’re a hit, and the plastic light fixture technique becomes a standard manufacturing method in the chemical underground. There are perhaps dozens of other chemists like Sarah, picking up crystal from various sources, usually European, and converting it into marketable doses.

“A lot of people learned how to do it,” she says. “But a lot of people learned how to do it badly.” There is one acid cook she knows who works exclusively in gas station bathrooms. He rolls up, plugs in a portable dehumidifier, lays the crystal into consumable form, and is out within an hour and a half. He is not the most precise operator, though a memorable character. They come in all stripes, as do the European chemists. The one who supplies Sarah’s supply is an idealist of the old-guard Owsleyian sort.

Sarah makes all kinds of LSD besides the gels, including blotters, from unmarked squares to intricate designs she creates herself. Sometimes she works for hire, but usually she’s in charge, alongside a few partners. When it gets going, about half of her vast business is with the Dead world, and about half elsewhere. She spends some time hanging out among the Talking Heads’ art-punk circles in New York in the early ’80s, too. She’s got plenty of connections, is fun to talk to, and the product moves well.

She feels inherent sexism in plenty of interactions, customers expecting they’d be able to talk her prices down. But her resolve is strong, and fuck them, she’s got a family.

A group of associates forms around her, about half women, unusual in the psychedelic world, as well. The crystal LSD market in the early ’80s is big on speculation, she recalls later. People will often sit on good supplies for years before converting it.

She wires money home, no more than $600 at a time, and makes $40,000 in less than a year. And though she doesn’t move LSD at shows or on tour, she is absolutely part of the Grateful Dead’s extended family and—since before she was in the acid game—friends with Owsley himself.

“He was a total textile freak,” Sarah says of their early bond. They have long conversations about how the Jacquard loom was the first computer.

Sarah estimates that there are perhaps a half-dozen heads at her level of acid manufacture moving in and out of the band’s inner circle. Though cordial with most, she wouldn’t characterize any as “Grateful Dead Family.” Not since the days of Owsley and Goldfinger could anyone make that claim, she says. But there is Grateful Dead and there is Family and there is acid, sometimes brought back from Europe by old friends who know.

She travels with the band from coast to coast and goes to shows. Sometimes she sells her quilts, but rarely. Owsley shows her the ropes of the alternative business structures that are starting to thrive around the Dead. “He definitely operated in penny-ante kind of world,” she says. “I would believe that he never had a real bank account.” He teaches her about hip economics, even still using the exact phrase.

One time, out on tour somewhere, at a rest stop perhaps, someone offers Sarah Matzar her own acid gels.

“It’s really good,” she is told. Sarah declines.


[You can read more on Sarah Matzar’s adventures in LSD cooking, including a prolonged encounter with the American government in Heads]


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Excerpted from Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow is the author of Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and The Rise of Indie Rock. His writing on music, technology, and culture has appeared in the Times (London), the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Wired.com, Relix (contributing editor), Dupree’s Diamond News and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and hosts The Frow Show on the independent Jersey City radio station WFMU. He tweets via @bourgwick and @HeadsNews.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 02, 2017 12:32 pm

Image
Late 60′s poster by Black Mask / Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers,
an anarchist affinity group based in New York City from 1966 to the mid 70’s.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Id_5HmIok

https://libcom.org/history/against-wall ... -ben-morea

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... .12129/pdf



http://fuckyeahanarchistposters.tumblr. ... gainst-the
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 02, 2017 12:58 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 02, 2017 6:25 pm

This is what originally got me on to the Ragusa story:



Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America
Jesse Jarnow - 2016
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 04, 2017 9:20 am

Also from Jarnow:


The Secrets Inside 1960s Editions of the US Government's Private Drugs Newsletter

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The FEDS Funded Studies of the Long-Acting Psychedelic "STP"

The tales of three-day freak-outs on STP—2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine; the initials stand for Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace—are the stuff of both psychedelic legend and fact. STP was so intense that thorazine, the usual emergency room reversal for LSD, actually made the problem worse.

First manufactured by chemist Owsley Stanley and his crew in 1966 and 1967, some truths of STP are revealed in the first issue of Micro-Gram: that it's actually an intense overdosed form of DOM, first synthesized at Dow Chemical in 1964 and tested by Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin. Formal psychedelic research had all but stopped by 1967, but Micro-Gram paints the way to some government-funded STP studies that year at both Johns Hopkins University in Maryland (a site of current psychedelic studies) and the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto (where future Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter had first experienced LSD a few years earlier).

Micro-Gram discerns that the problem with STP isn't necessarily the drug—"low doses produced euphoria"—but dosage. At first, they get the thorazine issue wrong, suggesting that it counters the effects. A correction comes quickly. They don't quite suss out the truth of the matter, either, about how DOM/STP turned into a disaster: Owsley Stanley put a decimal point in the wrong place.


The Unceasing Search for New Highs Was Well Under Way

"Season's Greetings," says the second issue of Micor-Gram, published in December 1967 and leading with the news of the latest psychedelics to be criminalized: bufotenine, diethyltyptamine (DET), and ibogaine. The authors duly note some appropriate info about the materials (including bufotenine's availability in "dried glandular secretions of certain toad species") but aren't so up on their underground knowledge.

"The behavioral effects of the pure [ibogaine] compounds in man have not been reported," the issue reads, mentioning its horrifying effects on cats and dogs. A few years earlier, an underground drug user named Howard Lotsof had accidentally discovered that ibogaine's intense multi-day trip also served as an addiction interrupter. But by 1967, the prohibition of LSD had landed Lotsof in jail, and his knowledge with him.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the- ... newsletter
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