Leary home video

[professorpan]

Just dropping back in to share this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaumQvMWBA

First time I've ever seen Capt. Al Hubbard on video.

Peace out, peeps.

PP

[2012 Countdown]

Hello there. Haven't seen you around in some time.
I recently thought about Penguin too. Maybe he'll show up as well.

On the vid you posted, more info-

This is a video of a candid meeting at Leary's home with many notable figures of the early days of LSD research. Filmed in the 1970's or early 1980's. The conversation is on LSD.

[Occult Means Hidden]

Weird! I was just thinking about Leary about a minute before I saw this. It wasn't a particularly favorable thought, since may be appropriate because I'm not inclined to favor Hubbard either.

[norton ash]

Nice to see you, PPan, and thanks!

[StarmanSkye]

I was initially confused about whether Al Hubbard, the man sitting just to Leary's right, considered the 'Johnny Appleseed' of LSD, was also L. Ron Hubbard, the dci-fi author and creator of Scientology. (He isn't).

A very enigmatic, mysterious figure, Captain Hubbard.

Fascinating vid. Thanks for posting it PPAN!
Trying to ID the various guests/speakers in this histroic film. The British-accented fellow on the other couch to Leary's left is who?

Background and etc. on Captain L. Hubbard.

http://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com ... 4/acid-al/
Acid Al

Dr Alfred M Hubbard, the "Johnny Appleseed of LSD"
Al “Cappy” Hubbard was a mysterious fellow. His life was certainly fascinating, even extraordinary. Inventor, spy, adventurer, sea captain, pilot, doctor, snitch, and eccentric millionaire were all on his resume, but he is best known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”

Born a poor Kentucky hillbilly, Hubbard first found fame in Seattle in 1919 as the boy inventor of a coil contraption that, according to the Post-Intelligencer, generated electricity with no apparent power source.

Al Hubbard’s relationship with Vancouver probably began while working for millionaire George Reifel’s rum running operation in the 1920s. Hubbard operated a wireless shore-to-ship communications system out of a phony Seattle taxicab, allowing the rum fleet to stay one step ahead of the police and coast guard. He was eventually pinched for this and after an 18 month prison stint switched sides and began helping the US government stem the flow of illicit booze.

During WWII, Hubbard’s talents were utilized to secretly transport American ships and planes into Canada to aid the British war effort in the days before the US officially entered the fray.


Captain Al Hubbard mowing his lawn.
Little is known about his work with the OSS during the war, but in a September 1980 article in Vancouver Magazine, Ben Metcalfe claimed that Al Hubbard had once shown him “photographs of himself accompanying the American-Canadian party into Port Radium to pick up the first shipment of uranium for the Manhattan Project.”

Hubbard settled in Vancouver after the war and became filthy rich. He drove a Rolls Royce, bought a Gulf Island, and owned a big yacht and a small fleet of airplanes. His riches were apparently derived from a company called Marine Manufacturing and perhaps from his role as the Scientific Director of the Uranium Corporation of BC Ltd.

Strengthening the theory that Hubbard continued his spy career with the CIA after the war (which he emphatically denied), these endeavours seem to have been as sketchy as his espionage and criminal activities. For instance, the mailing address of the Uranium Corporation was 500 Alexander Street, a residential building originally built as a brothel and now a skidroad rooming house – hardly an address befitting an important sounding company or its millionaire director. In any case, Hubbard’s wealth enabled him to pursue his true passion: turning people on to LSD.


500 Alexander Street, headquarters of the Uranium Corporation of BC.
After his first acid trip in 1951, Hubbard was sold. He contacted Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical company that discovered LSD, and became its main North American distributor. He soon became known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD” supervising literally thousands of acid trips and supplying others to do the same.

Hubbard became a doctor by purchasing a degree in biopsychology from a Tennessee diploma-mill. In 1957, he teamed up with Dr J Ross MacLean who had recently taken over Hollywood Hospital, a private mental health facility in New Westminster. Hubbard already had years of experience supervising acid trips under his belt, including those of Aldous Huxley, Vancouver Sun publisher Don Cromie, and Reverend JE Brown of the Cathedral of the Holy Rosary.


Cathedral of the Holy Rosary, 646 Richards Street. Hubbard convinced church leaders that LSD had great potential for enhancing the religious experience.

1957 memo to parishioners of the Cathedral of the Holy Rosary about the religious possibilities of LSD. (Click to enlarge)
Although mainly associated with hippies and evil CIA experiments, LSD was born out of the same pharmaceutical revolution that rejuvenated the profession of psychiatry and gave us antidepressant and antipsychotic medications. In the 1950s, LSD was largely still the fodder of researchers and scientists, not the freaks and dropouts who later claimed it as their own.

Thanks to Hubbard, Canada was already a top centre for LSD research. A 1953 meeting at the Vancouver Yacht Club with Dr Humphrey Osmond (the man who coined the term “psychedelic”) resulted in Saskatchewan becoming one of the top LSD research centres in the world. Osmond relocated from Britain to take advantage of the supportive environment for experimental medical research in Saskatchewan under the Tommy Douglas government. Hubbard contacted Osmond after hearing about his work in exploring the potential of mescaline to better understand schizophrenia.

Hollywood Hospital carved out its niche by using LSD to treat alcoholism. The initial hypothesis was that an acid trip would be akin to the delirium tremens that alcoholics suffered when hitting rock bottom. Researchers instead found that alcoholics benefited from LSD, not by inducing rock bottom, but because the experience heightened their awareness of themselves and gave them insight into the nature of their problems.


The Acid Room at the Hollywood Hospital. The setting was considered very important in LSD therapy at the hospital. The room featured a state-of-the-art hi fi system, a strobe light, and a print of Salvador Dali's Crucifix. Photo from J. Ross MacLean et al, "LSD-25 and Mescaline as Therapeutic Adjuvants: Experience from a seven year study," January 1965
Although there was some criticism and debate concerning methodology, LSD therapy proved an impressive remedy for 50 – 80% of the people seeking treatment for alcoholism. Another interesting finding to come out of Hollywood Hospital was that while LSD failed to cure homosexuality, it was beneficial to homosexuals trying to cope in a heterosexist world:

Few homosexuals in our group have attained a satisfactory heterosexual adjustment, yet many have derived marked benefit in terms of insight, acceptance of role, reduction of guilt and associated psychosexual liabilities.

The same report also notes that LSD was attractive for non-therapeutic purposes:

Although the patients reported in this paper all had clearly identifiable personality or behavioural problems, ranging from the mildly disturbed to the acutely ill, a growing number of ‘normals’ are seeking the benefits often derived from a psychedelic experience. For this group, and to some extent for our patients, the term ‘therapy’ is perhaps not entirely appropriate.

In 1957, a Province reporter named Ben Metcalfe arrived at Hollywood Hospital looking for missing-in-action Socred Forestry Minister Robert Sommers. It turned out that Sommers and many other high profile people sought treatment at the hospital, including Cary Grant, crooner Andy Williams, and Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel. For Metcalfe, it was the beginning of a long friendship with Al Hubbard.

Metcalfe returned to Hollywood Hospital in 1959 and dropped acid under Hubbard’s supervision for a series of articles published in the Province newspaper in September 1959.

Besides taking LSD himself for the assignment, Metcalfe observed sessions of patients and interviewed test subjects. One Vancouver woman quit heroin after a 3½ year addiction, and others had given up alcohol. According to Metcalfe, the treatment was “the most dramatic experience made accessible to the human mind.”

Besides uncovering all the old wounds of the mind, the traumatic areas of fear, shock and guilt, it seems to reveal to the patient that he alone is responsible for who he is and what he will be. He learns to accept this. This period of acceptance of reality on a practical basis lasts for several months. “It is during this time when the patient can practice on the truth,” Dr. MacLean says. “He or she is relaxed at last, they have seen a great deal that is true about themselves and their relationship with others. Now they can work at it.” This is the real cure period.

Metcalfe later recalled that his articles “stood this town on its ear.” Notably, they riled Dr James Tyhurst, the head of the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Psychiatry Department at VGH. Tyhurst had been trying to have Hollywood’s funding cut and claimed that he could induce the same effect on the mind using only salinated water.


Letter to Dr AM Hubbard from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals regarding the shipment of 43 boxes of LSD ampuls. Later the same year, Hubbard provided Aldous Huxley with his first dose of LSD. (click to enlarge)
Tyhurst’s goal of having Hollywood Hospital shut down wasn’t realized until 1975. By then, LSD’s reputation had shifted from being a new pharmaceutical with exciting therapeutic possibilities to a street drug corrupting our youth and driving them insane. Leading the crusade against LSD in Vancouver was Pat McGeer, a UBC brain researcher and Liberal MLA for Vancouver-Point Grey.

In a 1967 speech to the legislature, McGeer demanded that university professors and school teachers who advocated the use of the drug be immediately fired. “Contrary to the opinion of pseudo experts,” he said, “LSD does not expand the mind but shrinks it and interferes with the chemical processes of the brain… LSD is a universally terrifying drug and I am alarmed by its spread into Vancouver high schools. Fifty pounds of it is enough to produce mental illness in everybody in North America. This is how powerful it is.”

McGeer was reacting to police reports that high school students were dropping LSD, and went on to describe how LSD use can lead to suicide, homicide, mental breakdown, and an addiction that is “every bit as hellish as heroin addiction.”

University officials were quick to respond to McGeer’s claims. UBC president Dr John B. Macdonald’s generous interpretation was that McGeer was speaking hypothetically, but that “no one at UBC had advocated the use of LSD.” The head of the faculty association said that McGeer’s statements were “a little bit half cocked” by implying local professors were actually promoting LSD use. The only professor that was identified as a promoter of LSD use was Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who was famously fired years earlier for his work with hallucinogens. Curiously absent from the debate was anyone with any actual expertise regarding LSD.

Pat McGeer was at the forefront of a full-blown moral panic that resulted in his government outlawing LSD in 1967. McGeer claimed that the new law had eliminated the problem, at least amongst high school students. “I really believe that the popularization of LSD has passed its peak and that a much more common sense attitude is going to prevail,” he said. “This attitude is just a recognition that this is a dangerous agent.”

Although Hollywood Hospital plodded along until its demise in 1975, the drug panic pretty much killed serious research into LSD by the end of the sixties. Sandoz Pharmaceuticals stopped production and distribution entirely in 1965, claiming that widespread abuse of the drug, along with the inability to control its production and regulation and the unmanageable “flood of requests for LSD” it received combined to make it no longer worthwhile for the company despite “the important role that this substance could play as an investigational tool in neurological research and in psychiatry.”


Rear view of Hollywood Hospital, 525 Sixth Street in New Westminster, shortly before it shut down in 1975. This private facility was one of the main LSD research centres in North America. Celebrities, politicians, and anyone with $600 could come here for LSD therapy to treat alcoholism or anxiety and other disorders. Province, 8 July 1975
Al Hubbard, meanwhile, left Hollywood Hospital because he disagreed with Dr MacLean using LSD primarily as a money maker. Hubbard felt all along that it was a spiritual and therapeutic tool rather than a commodity and therefore that it should be freely distributed to the right people. The divergent views of the two men manifested in their pocketbooks: Hubbard had pretty much blown through his fortune and ended up having to sell his island sanctuary. MacLean became rich enough from Hollywood Hospital to purchase Casa Mia, the lavish mansion built by George Reifel, Hubbard’s old boss in the rum running business in the 1920s.

LSD’s reputation took its first hit with sensational media stories in the early 1950s that conflated its effects with mental illness. One of the first of these was “My 12 Hours as a Madman” in which reporter Sidney Katz tested “an experimental drug and explore[d] the terrifying world of insanity” for the cover story of the 1 October 1953 issue of Maclean’s Magazine. And of course Timothy Leary of “tune in, turn on, and drop out” fame helped strip away any aura of respectability or scientific legitimacy that LSD might once have had. For this, Hubbard literally wanted to murder Leary.

Revelations in the 1970s about evil mind control experiments that the CIA conducted at McGill University and elsewhere didn’t help the future of LSD research either. (Socred minister Rafe Mair looked for similar connections at Hollywood Hospital in 1980, but found no direct evidence of covert CIA or government LSD experimentation.) Only in recent years are researchers again looking at LSD and other psychedelic drugs for their potential therapeutic benefits. The snag this time around appears to be lack of support from governments still firmly entrenched in drug war thinking and pharmaceutical companies that prefer developing more profitable drug treatments that require more than a few doses.

Al Hubbard spent his final years living in a trailer park in Arizona and working as a security guard. He died 31 August 1982 at the age of 81.


(see link to Click image to watch "Hofmann's Potion," an NFB documentary on the early history of LSD research (Connie Littlefield, 2002, 56 min 35 s))

[American Dream]

Here's Todd Brendan Fahey's article on Al Hubbard:

http://www.fargonebooks.com/high.html

The Original Captain Trips

by Todd Brendan Fahey



Published originally by High Times, November 1991



Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...before Timothy Leary...before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests...before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.

You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life--a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.

They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.

Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."

He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and friendly like a golden retriever.

The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank Vancouver Yacht Club. Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."

Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline, and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some. "He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs. Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain" came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in the US Merchant Marine.

At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver--a former Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it was the inner voyage that drove the Captain until his death in 1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever in his brain.

His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.

"He blew in with that uniform...laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!" Leary recalls. "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn't believe...claimed he was friends with the Pope."

Did Leary believe him?

"Well, yeah, no question."

The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me," Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him."

Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley, author of the sardonic novel Brave New World. Huxley had been turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook The Doors of Perception. Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals then known as "psychotomimetic"--literally, "madness mimicking."

But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a credo for the next generation:

To fathom hell or soar angelic,

Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

* * *



Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a "barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had absolutely no training, "but he had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.

In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post- Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11" x 14" box, had powered a ferry- sized vessel around Seattle's Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard Energy Transformer.

Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the boy inventor. Vancouver magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.

After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.

The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently became agent Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of World War II--an operations of dubious legality, which had him facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.

Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early 40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By 1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and a Canadian island. And he was miserable.

"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth. He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to," says Harman. "But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."

In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conducting the experiment and came back with some LSD for himself. After this first acid experience, he had become a True Believer.

"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament," recalls Leary.

A 1968 resume states that Hubbard was at various times employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73 by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."

Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology, often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with such a project, "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."

[Note: Recently, a researcher for WorldNetDaily and author of a forthcoming book based on the Frank Olson "murder," revealed to this writer that he has received, via a FOIA request of CIA declassified materials, documents which indicate that Al Hubbard was, indeed, in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White--an FBI narcotics official who managed Operation Midnight Climax, a joint CIA/FBI blackmail project in which unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose exploits were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at posh hotels in both New York and San Francisco. The researcher would reveal only that Al Hubbard's name "appeared in connection with Gottlieb and White, but the material is heavily redacted."]
Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."

"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."

Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That letter would be priceless--but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both there in full force."

Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.'"

He was not alone.

Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.

Hubbard abandoned his uranium empire and, for the next decade, traveled the globe as a psychedelic missionary. "Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," says Stolaroff. His first pilgrimage was to Switzerland, home of Sandoz Laboratories, producers of both Delysid (trade name for LSD) and psilocybin. He procured a gram of LSD (roughly 10,000 doses) and set up shop in a safe-deposit vault in the Zurich airport's duty-free section. From there he was able to ship quantities of his booty without a tariff to a waiting world.

Swiss officials quickly detained Hubbard for violating the nation's drug laws, which provided no exemption from the duty-free provision. Myron Stolaroff petitioned Washington for the Captain's release, but the State Department wanted nothing to do with Al Hubbard. Oddly, when a hearing was held, blue-suited officials from the department were in attendance. The Swiss tribunal declared Hubbard's passport invalid for five years, and he was deported. Undeterred, Hubbard traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he had another gram of LSD put into tablet form by Chemapol--a division of the pharmaceutical giant Spofa--and then flew west.

Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.

According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.

His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.

Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.

But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.

His departure came as the Canadian Medical Association was becoming increasingly suspicious of Hollywood Hospital in the wake of publicity surrounding MK-ULTRA. The Canadian Citizen's Commission on Human Rights had already discovered one Dr. Harold Abramson, a CIA contract psychiatrist, on the board of MacLean's International Association for Psychedelic Therapy, and external pressure was weighing on MacLean to release Al Hubbard, the former OSS officer with suspected CIA links. Compounding Hubbard's plight was the death of his Canadian benefactor, leaving Hubbard with neither an income nor the financial cushion upon which he had become dependent.

His services were eventually recruited by Willis Harman, then-Director of the Educational Policy Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Stanford University. Harman employed Hubbard as a security guard for SRI, "although," Harman admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work."

Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special [LSD] sessions for us."

According to Dr. Abram Hoffer, "Al had a grandiose idea that if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society."

Hubbard's tenure at SRI was uneasy. The political bent of the Stanford think-tank was decidedly left-wing, clashing sharply with Hubbard's own world-perspective. "Al was really an arch-conservative," says the confidential source. "He really didn't like what the hippies were doing with LSD, and he held Timothy Leary in great contempt."

Humphry Osmond recalls a particular psilocybin session in which "Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea that he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea...I became much concerned that he might shoot me..."

"To Al," says Myron Stolaroff, "LSD enabled man to see his true self, his true nature and the true order of things." But, to Hubbard, the true order of things had little to do with the antics of the American Left.

Recognizing its potential psychic hazards, Hubbard believed that LSD should be administered and monitored by trained professionals. He claimed that he had stockpiled more LSD than anyone on the planet besides Sandoz--including the US government--and he clearly wanted a firm hand in influencing the way it was used. However, Hubbard refused all opportunities to become the LSD Philosopher-King. Whereas Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves. When cornered by a video camera shortly before this death, and asked to say something to the future, Hubbard replied simply, "You're the future."

In March of 1966, the cold winds of Congress blew out all hope for Al Hubbard's enlightened Mother Earth. Facing a storm of protest brought on by Leary's reckless antics and the "LSD-related suicide" of Diane Linkletter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Drug Abuse Control Amendment, which declared lysergic acid diethylamide a Schedule I substance; simple possession was deemed a felony, punishable by 15 years in prison. According to Humphry Osmond, Hubbard lobbied Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who reportedly took the cause of LSD into the Senate chambers, and emerged un-victorious.

"[The government] had a deep fear of having their picture of reality challenged," mourns Harman. "It had nothing to do with people harming their lives with chemicals--because if you took all the people who had ever had any harmful effects from psychedelics, it's minuscule compared to those associated with alcohol and tobacco."

FDA chief James L. Goddard ordered agents to seize all remaining psychedelics not accounted for by Sandoz. "It was scary," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, whose Beverly Hills office was raided and years' worth of clinical research confiscated.

Hubbard begged Abram Hoffer to let him hide his supply in Hoffer's Canadian Psychiatric Facility. But the doctor refused, and it is believed that Hubbard buried most of his LSD in a sacred parcel in Death Valley, California, claiming that it had been used, rather than risk prosecution. When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research--none using humans, and none of them associated with Al Hubbard. In 1968, his finances in ruins, Hubbard was forced to sell his private island sanctuary for what one close friend termed "a pittance." He filled a number of boats with the antiquated electronics used in his eccentric nuclear experiments, and left Daymen Island for California. Hubbard's efforts in his last decade were effectively wasted, according to most of his friends. Lack of both finances and government permit to resume research crippled all remaining projects he may have had in the hopper.

After SRI canceled his contract in 1974 Hubbard went into semiretirement, splitting his time between a 5-acre ranch in Vancouver and an apartment in Menlo Park. But in 1978, battling an enlarged heart and never far away from a bottle of pure oxygen, Hubbard make one last run at the FDA. He applied for an IND to use LSD-25 on terminal cancer patients, furnishing the FDA with two decades of clinical documentation. The FDA set the application aside, pending the addition to Hubbard's team of a medical doctor, a supervised medical regimen, and an AMA-accredited hospital. Hubbard secured the help of Oscar Janiger, but the two could not agree on methodology, and Janiger bowed out, leaving Al Hubbard, in his late 70s, without the strength to carry on alone.

Says Willis Harman: "He knew that his work was done."

* * *

The Captain lived out his last days nearly broke, having exhausted his resources trying to harness a dream. Like in the final fleeting hour of an acid trip--when the edge softens and a man realizes that he will not solve the secrets of the Universe, despite what the mind had said earlier--Hubbard smiled gracefully, laid down his six-shooter, and retired to a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona.

On August 31, 1982, at the age of 81, Al Hubbard was called home, having ridden the dream like a rodeo cowboy. On very quiet nights, with the right kind of ears, you can hear him giving God hell.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Hello there. Haven't seen you around in some time.
I recently thought about Penguin too. Maybe he'll show up as well.

On the vid you posted, more info-

This is a video of a candid meeting at Leary's home with many notable figures of the early days of LSD research. Filmed in the 1970's or early 1980's. The conversation is on LSD.

He is posting under the name gnomad.

Lost his account or something.

[Joe Hillshoist]

This page is about an alleged free energy device Hubbard built:

http://www.rexresearch.com/hubbard/hubbard.htm#pi1

[brainpanhandler]

Bump



What a strange, awkward gathering. Leary's acting even weirder than normal. I assume he was tripping.

[Elvis]

At about 53:00 there's an odd exchange between who I think is Myron Stolaroff, and Hubbard, about a check for a million dollars he says Hubbard used to carry around.

Stolarif says, "the person who furnished the money got it back," and Hubbard challenges him about it, denying knowledge. Stolarif says, "You know..." and adds, "but it's not a matter of public record."

Everyone in the room seems to know about the check.

Any clue about the 'million dollars' and "the person who provided" it?

[justdrew]

At about 53:00 there's an odd exchange between who I think is Myron Stolaroff, and Hubbard, about a check for a million dollars he says Hubbard used to carry around.

Stolarif says, "the person who furnished the money got it back," and Hubbard challenges him about it, denying knowledge. Stolarif says, "You know..." and adds, "but it's not a matter of public record."

Everyone in the room seems to know about the check.

Any clue about the 'million dollars' and "the person who provided" it?

sounds like a typical con-artist tool. there may not have been any money behind such a check, just something to show off.

---

early on, WTF is that about "introduced us to CO2" "used to carry it around in big tanks"

did the guy misspeak and mean nitrous ? I suppose if one were damn careful, one could "trip" on CO2, but it sure sounds risky as hell.

[annie aronburg]

Great article, Starman, it touches on so many of my fascinations. I thought that address sounded familiar.

In 1911, Ruth Richards took over 502 Alexander, and a year after that, Dollie Darlington is the first listing at 500 Alexander. Which means 500 Alexander was probably built as a brothel.

In recent years, both buildings have fallen into disrepair.

"[500 Alexander] probably hadn't been touched by the previous owners in 45 years," said Abbott. "It was one of the grossest SRAs [single room accommodations] I've even been in. When you went in there, it smelled like dead bodies, it was just abysmal."

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/City+second ... z1Xx4iVjwd

Hubbard settled in Vancouver after the war and became filthy rich. He drove a Rolls Royce, bought a Gulf Island, and owned a big yacht and a small fleet of airplanes. His riches were apparently derived from a company called Marine Manufacturing and perhaps from his role as the Scientific Director of the Uranium Corporation of BC Ltd.

Strengthening the theory that Hubbard continued his spy career with the CIA after the war (which he emphatically denied), these endeavours seem to have been as sketchy as his espionage and criminal activities. For instance, the mailing address of the Uranium Corporation was 500 Alexander Street, a residential building originally built as a brothel and now a skidroad rooming house – hardly an address befitting an important sounding company or its millionaire director. In any case, Hubbard’s wealth enabled him to pursue his true passion: turning people on to LSD.

Pat McGeer was at the forefront of a full-blown moral panic that resulted in his government outlawing LSD in 1967. McGeer claimed that the new law had eliminated the problem, at least amongst high school students. “I really believe that the popularization of LSD has passed its peak and that a much more common sense attitude is going to prevail,” he said. “This attitude is just a recognition that this is a dangerous agent.”

My godfather achieved a modest level of regional fame with a novelty song mocking that man.