Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Wed May 15, 2013 11:34 am
by Canadian_watcher » Wed May 15, 2013 11:56 am
American Dream wrote:
BRAZIL: PAINTING: BRUNO9LI
I’m instantly entranced by the paintings of São Paulo artist Bruno 9li. The combination of color, texture and vivid imagination has me in awe.
According to his website, Bruno’s most recent pieces, some of which are pictured above, “[evoke] infinite narratives in an unknown universe of excess and frenzy.” However, there is something familiar in his aesthetic, and it’s possibly due to his “deep interest in Amazonian rituals” and the history of painting.
Bruno 9li’s website. Mango Popsicle on Facebook.
http://kalisherni.tumblr.com/post/49971 ... runo9li-im
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 2:13 pm
Canadian_watcher wrote:American Dream wrote:
gorgeous. i love these pieces
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 6:06 pm
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 6:11 pm
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 6:30 pm
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 7:01 pm
http://www.dprogram.com/willis_harmanp1.html
Global Mind Change
How did your own interest in the subject of consciousness start? Was it an early passion?
Willis Harman:
No, I was trained as a scientist, thought I was going to be a chemist for a while, ended up as an electrical engineer and then systems engineer. And then in 1954 at age 36 I had an up-ending experience that I hadn't asked for and the net result was my path through life took a sudden swerve. It was a two-week seminar which, there was nothing like it at the time although later on there were things like Est and Silva Mind Control and all kinds of things, but at that time, it was a fairly intensive seminar and I only came into it because I didn't realise that. I was tricked into coming into it, thinking it was going to be a nice, safe intellectual discussion.
What was the seminar, specifically?
Willis Harman:
It was called The Secora [Sequoia] Seminar. The same group became Beyond War, they still exist, I think. It became apparent to me through that experience that I had feelings that I was not even aware of, you know my unconscious mind. Its rather hard to explain how an experience suddenly opens you up. It's not exactly a rational, linear process. At any rate I just started to search around for whoever knew something about any part of this.
I made one trip to Europe and got aquainted with The Society for Psychical Research, that was back in the days of Sir George Joy and Rosalyn Heywood. Celia Green was just a youngster coming in at that time. So in the next half dozen years or so I got somewhat involved in psychical research and somewhat involved in the psychedelic research. That sort of blew up in a way in the 1960's! So I shifted over to doing research on the future.
To give another illustration of how things were developing: in 1954 Gerald Heard gave a lecture in Palo Alto to an organization called the Sequoia Seminar. Sitting in the audience was an engineer named Myron Stolaroff. Stolaroff was in charge of long-range planning at
Ampex, which was one of the first of the high-technology companies to emerge in the valleys south of San Francisco. Stolaroff had heard Gerald speak several times before and considered him one of the world's outstanding mystics. So when Heard began rhapsodizing
about the effects of certain mind-altering drugs, Stolaroff was predictably upset. "I thought you went to all these places anyway," he asked. "Why do you take this?" And Heard had replied, "Oh, but it just opens the doors in so many ways to so many vast dimensions."19
Whether he admitted it to himself or not, Myron Stolaroff was hooked, and a few months later, in Los Angeles on business, he visited Heard and had another long discussion about these new mind drugs. At one point Hubbard's name had come up, and Heard had implied
that if Stolaroff wished to try any of these substances, Al was the man to guide him through the experience. So Stolaroff had written Hubbard and one day Al had turned up on the doorstep, bounding into Myron's office with a tank of carbogen, a "fun-loving guy" who "radiated an enormous energy field."20 After the formal introductions were over, Hubbard had suggested that Stolaroff take a few lungfuls of the carbogen, and twenty or thirty breaths later the director of long-range planning was abreacting all over his office.
Stolaroff, who had been skeptical of a lot of Gerald's claims, was convinced. He arranged to visit Vancouver at the earliest opportunity for one of Hubbard's patented LSD sessions—by 1959 Hubbard was claiming he had conducted seventeen hundred LSD sessions.
It was a terrible experience. During those hours in Hubbard's apartment, Stolaroff relived his birth, the actual physical birth, gasping and writhing for what felt like days, until he broke through to the world, which actually smelled of ether. Although it was a torturous few
hours, Myron emerged from the LSD womb convinced that many of his personal eccentricities and neuroses could be traced back to the trauma of his birth. This was not a radical possibility as far as psychoanalysis was concerned; Otto Rank, one of Freud's last
disciples, had explored the effects of birth on the emerging psyche in numerous articles. But it would have taken psychoanalysis years to attain the level that LSD had reached in one climactic rush. Stolaroff returned to Ampex convinced that LSD "was the greatest discovery
that man had ever made."21
...
Myron Stolaroff was a good example. Stolaroff had been in charge of long-range planning at Ampex, one of the first of the big electronics firms to settle south of the Bay Area, when he had been bitten by the psychedelic bug. Together with Hubbard he had tried to interest Ampex's management in a program that would use LSD to solve all kinds of corporate problems, interpersonal problems, design problems, long-range planning problems. But the plan had foundered on Al's penchant for Christian mysticism. Stolaroff didn't let go, though: he started holding weekly LSD sessions for some of Ampex's more adventurous engineers;
Hubbard came down from Canada one weekend and took them all to a remote cabin in the Sierras where he guided them through the kind of ontological earthquake only Al could manufacture. The senior management of Ampex had been horrified. Having gotten to know
Hubbard through rather extraordinary circumstances, it didn't seem at all irrational for them to be worrying, "What if this nutball drives our best men crazy?" So there had been sighs of relief when Stolaroff decided to leave Ampex and set up his own nonprofit psychedelic
research center in Menlo Park, California—the International Foundation for Advanced Study. The Foundation, which opened in March 1961, wasn't the only organization working with LSD in the San Francisco area.
The Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had been studying the drug since 1958, and had been instrumental in introducing dozens of local psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as interested laymen like Allen Ginsberg, to the perplexities of the Other World. But the Institute's composure had been shaken by several terrifying incidents—colossal bad trips in which the subject returned from the Other World in questionable shape—and interest in LSD's therapeutic potential had diminished. LSD programs were also under way at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, the San Mateo County Hospital, and Napa State Hospital, but no one was offering psychedelic therapy, and what little research was being done was unexciting: Leo Hollister (who will soon reappear in association with a hopeful young writer named Ken Kesey), at the Veterans Hospital, was still doing model psychoses work.
The point was that most LSD researchers were fairly conservative. So when a couple of engineers set up shop (Stolaroff's vice president, Willis Harman, had been an engineering professor at Stanford) and began poaching bread and butter patients—unlike Osmond and Hotter, Stolaroff wasn't just concentrating on chronic alcoholics, he was soliciting the man off the street, who in this case was the neurotic professional in the high tech-high education hub that surrounded Stanford—there were more than raised eyebrows. Charging five hundred dollars for one session with a highly questionable drug? The whole thing smacked of chicanery, despite the fact that Stolaroff had a licensed psychiatrist running the actual therapy sessions. But what was worse, it was chicanery with good word of mouth. The San Mateo Call Bulletin, scenting a medical scandal, had interviewed a number of Stolaroff's patients and found them laudatory to the point of hyperbole. At the Foundation's first and last open house, Stolaroff had been cornered by a disgruntled therapist who growled, "One of my ex-patients thinks you're a saint” making it clear that he thought Stolaroff was a charlatan.14 What was one to make, after all, of the Call Bulletin's statement that the Foundation's aims were "partly medical, partly scientific, partly philosophical, partly mystical"?15 The first two, okay, but philosophy was for philosophers, and mysticism? mysticism was for cranks!
http://fileshare200.depositfiles.com/au ... dustry.pdf
by American Dream » Thu May 16, 2013 9:32 pm
by American Dream » Fri May 17, 2013 8:27 am
by American Dream » Fri May 17, 2013 12:57 pm
Take a day to heal from the lies you’ve told yourself and the ones that have been told to you.
— Maya Angelou
by American Dream » Fri May 17, 2013 5:24 pm
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft1870045n&chunk.id=d0e1544&doc.view=print
Psychology in Sequoia Seminar
Psychology was the most poorly defined of all the elements that made up Sequoia Seminar's philosophy, yet it was one of the most important and, even more than the ideas of Buchman or Heard, it set Sequoia Seminar apart from the tradition of Henry B. Sharman. Since Harry always argued that psychology would eventually prove what religion already knew, why bother with psychology at all? Because, among the three appropriate objects of love—God, self, and other—love of self or integrity required that people come to understand their subconscious needs and fears so that they could be free to carry out the will of God. The movement believed psychology could help people toward religion, and religion could help them psychologically.
A physician participating in a 1953 seminar wrote that he had learned that psychiatry taught, "To be happy you must be properly oriented to your environment and totally integrated, so that every action is a productive one leading to full potentiality." The seminar taught him that Jesus had said the same thing two thousand years ago and, he concluded, "a well-adjusted person is, by definition, religious."[81]
Psychology was, nevertheless, also perceived as potentially dangerous; when wrongly used it could either undermine the religious message or become the primary purpose of the group, relegating the teachings of Jesus to a secondary role. Freudian psychology, which defined religious belief as neurotic, was an example of the first danger. Harry believed that "Freudian psychology leads to a mechanistic view of the universe and to a philosophy of meaninglessness."[82] There is some indication that the Rathbuns felt, not without reason, that Boyden and her followers fell into the second danger when they split off from the main Sharman group in 1941 and began their own work.[83] The Rathbuns referred to them as "the psychologizers."
The exact role that psychology played in Sequoia Seminar meetings prior to 1955 is not clear, although its flavor is suggested by a list of recommended readings from 1950 that included works by Rollo May and Erich Fromm in addition to books by Kunkel, Jung, and Heard.[84] Much of the psychological activity that did occur took place under the direction of Emilia [Rathbun] with the assistance of Betty Eisner. Eisner had been a student of Harry's in the business law course. She had attended a Records study group at the Rathbuns' home in 1936 and was at the first Sequoia Seminar in 1946. She had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and came up from her home in southern California to help lead some special seminars in the mid-1950s.[85]
A set of very complete notes from a 1952 continuation seminar gives some insight into the kind of psychological activity that took place in the sessions. A parenthetical comment near the beginning of the notes indicate that there were "several sessions during which Seminar participants verbalized their 'seventh veil' matter, their inmost blocks to further growth and progress on the Way."[86] These group confessions may have owed something to Emilia's years of experience hearing confessions in her Oxford Group work. When she told the participants, "nothing that has been said is a surprise, at least to me," she was repeating language she had used to describe her Buchmanite experience. Emilia assured the group that they became more lovable when they opened up and admitted their "inmost natures and problems," and explained that it was all part of the process of discovering what they could be so that they could see where they were and how they could move toward what God intended them to be.[87]
As the decade progressed the role of psychology in the group's activities increased. In 1956 Emilia and Betty Eisner were coleaders of a group that wrote spontaneously on themes suggested by Emilia, "trying to express their own feelings rather than intellectual concepts."[88] In addition to spontaneous writing, they also did Jungian dream interpretation in groups and used art to express their feelings.[89] The 1958 annual report explained, "painting and other art work is becoming an increasingly important part of our program, particularly at the Continuation seminars. We are learning how such activities can contribute to the process of individual change with which we are concerned."[90]
So pervasive was the psychological approach by 1958 and 1959 that almost all of the continuation seminars given in those summers were psychologically focused and many included art. The most explicit was a seminar entitled "Group Therapy" led by Betty Eisner. It was described as "an intensive group therapy situation and will be conducted on a very personal level aimed at removing barriers within the individual which obstruct his growth in creative living. . . . The use of art materials will play an important role."[91]
Two comments made in 1959 indicate that the heavy emphasis on psychology may have gotten out of hand. The announcement letter for the 1959 seminar season cautioned potential participants that the leaders were "neither qualified nor intended to perform the function of psychotherapy," and they would not accept anybody who seemed more interested in that than in pursuing a religious life. About the same time, a handwritten memo from Emilia asked if people should not be "well grounded in the teachings of Jesus and have made the decision to follow the 'way' before they are enrolled in any group which has as its objective the process of introspection (therapy)." And, conversely, she asked if people who started work in psychotherapy should be "told that the process in the seminar structure leads to a choice of 'the way' of life commended by Jesus (commitment)?"[92]
Emilia's [Rathbun] fear that the psychotherapeutic aspects of the work might have begun to take precedence over the religious purpose seems particularly apt in retrospect. Although nobody knew it at the time, Sequoia Seminar was one of a stream of sources for what would become the "human potential" movement of the 1960s. Their stress of religious values kept them from total involvement, but for several years in the late 1950s they were the place where some of the California activists in the human potential movement got their start.
One was Del Carlson. Carlson was a Marine Corps veteran who had been attracted to a Records study group at San Jose State College in 1947 and who had participated actively in Students Concerned. He stayed with the movement after the demise of Students Concerned and was, for a dozen years, one of the mainstays of the group. A high school art teacher, he had his summers free and devoted them to Sequoia Seminar. He was the group's registrar, business manager, and leader of art therapy sessions until 1962.[93]
...
Carlson was also a friend of Michael Murphy, the man who founded Esalen. In fact, Carlson was a coleader of the first formal seminar ever held at Esalen in 1962, when it was still called Slate's Hot Springs.[94]
...
Even more important, both to Sequoia Seminar and the human potential movement, was Willis Harman.
An engineering professor at Stanford, Harman had attended a study group led by Harry [Rathbun] and then had gone to a Sequoia Seminar in 1954. He had not expected the heavy emphasis on meditation, introspection, and self-exposure, but he found that his engineer's rational world view was "permanently destroyed" as a result of his experience there. He embarked on an extended period of self-education in mysticism and psychic phenomena and moved into the inner circle of Sequoia Seminar.[95]
Harman had been very impressed by Gerald Heard's lectures on his experience with mescaline; he also made contact with Myron Stolaroff, one of the original American experimenters with LSD, who was also briefly involved with Sequoia Seminar.
On November 16, 1956, eight of the Sequoia Seminar leadership group accompanied Harman to the home of a physician member of the movement, where Harman took LSD for the first time [Interesting Harman in another interview says 1954] . In subsequent years almost every member of the Sequoia Seminar inner leadership group experimented with LSD on a number of occasions.
Many of the drug sessions were led by Betty Eisner who was very interested in the psychotherapeutic possibilities of low doses of the then legal hallucinogen. She and Harman disagreed strongly, however, on how the drug should be used since he [Harman] preferred larger doses that would provide the user with mystical experiences, rather than the milder effects that Eisner sought.[96]
Even though LSD was still a noncontrolled substance and, therefore, legal to use, Sequoia Seminar employed it very cautiously. It was never distributed to anyone other than group leaders, and their sessions were carefully planned and supervised, usually with the presence of one of the planning group members who was a medical doctor. There appear to have been few if any "bad trips," and the drug-induced mystical experiences and psychotherapeutic sessions are usually remembered positively by those who partook of them.
Experimentation with LSD stopped after 1959 because most of those involved felt there was nothing more to be gained from continued use and perhaps also because of a difficult confrontation between Emilia Rathbun and Betty Eisner that may have involved the use of the drug. Those, like Harman, who wished to pursue further interests in the drug left Sequoia Seminar and became active in other
groups such as Esalen and the International Foundation for Internal Freedom.[97]
Just how far the Rathbuns had moved from the tradition of Henry B. Sharman by the end of the decade is illustrated by the controversy that surrounded the last meeting of the trustees of the Sharman will in 1959. Harry was not only one of the trustees of the self-liquidating foundation set up by the will; he was also its executor.
In 1958 plans were made to dispose of the last twenty-five thousand dollars of the funds from Sharman's estate, and Harry apparently hoped that the bulk of the money could go to Sequoia Seminar. To convince the others that his group met the intention of the will, Harry invited them out to California for a seminar.[98] Opposition from the other trustees to the kind of program that the Rathbuns were running killed both the visit and any hope Harry had of getting Sharman funds, although Harry did lead a seminar for the trustees the next year at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
Word of the psychological emphasis had spread, and those who toed the orthodox Sharman line were not pleased with what they had heard. One trustee reported that a number of students of his had gone to Stanford and had reported back unfavorably on the Rathbuns' work. Another summed up his objections by telling Harry that he believed Sequoia Seminar was "quite different from those led by Dr. Sharman. Very little serious study of the Records themselves seems to be attempted and much time is devoted to the personal problems of the individual members. Training and skill in psychology and psychiatry seem to be very important."[99] And finally, a third pointed out that Sharman had wanted efforts directed at students and faculty, but Harry and Emilia were working mainly with nonacademic adults.[100]
The alienation of the trustees and the experimentation with LSD were both aspects of the way psychology had come to dominate the work of the group. This domination could have made the group an ongoing force within the new human potential movement in California. That course was not followed, however, because in the period between 1959 and 1962 Emilia underwent a number of severe personal strains that eventually climaxed in a religious revelation. This revelation was the basis for a reclarification of the whole meaning and purpose of the movement.
The psychologizing that Emilia had first questioned back in the early 1940s when it was led by Elizabeth Boyden had slowly worked its way into her own group, and by the end of the decade it threatened to eclipse the religious work completely. The philosophy that had evolved was based in part on the validity of psychology as a means for personal insight, but it also used the evolutionary and mystical theories of Gerald Heard, and always the objective study of the life of Jesus in the Sharman tradition. Emilia's personal crisis of the period after 1959 would have the effect of redressing the balance and putting psychology back into a secondary role. Psychology would be exchanged for a new interpretation of the religious message that would finally move Sequoia Seminar from proto-sect to a fully self-conscious religious movement.
The increasing stress on psychology toward the end of the 1950s, and the growing formalization of ideology, were both indications that the group was moving away from the churches (both literally and theoretically) and toward the sect end of the church-sect continuum. The codification of the movement's ideology decreased the likelihood that they would change to go along with trends in the larger society. The focus on psychology was perceived by members as a "service," exactly the kind of service predicted by the economic model as compensation for the increased cost of sect membership. The transition was not yet complete. The most obvious component of a sect is its divergence from standard church values. It is that divergence that makes membership so costly. At the end of the 1950s, Sequoia Seminar was still primarily a gospel study group that could operate from within the churches. There were signs of uniqueness beginning to appear, but they would not be fully embraced until after Emilia had her vision of a New Religion for the Third Age.
| ------------------
http://www.erowid.org/culture/character ... etty.shtml
Sep 29, 1915 - Jul 1, 2004
Summary
Betty Grover Eisner, Ph.D. was a clinical psychologist who was part of the group of LSD researchers active in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.
According to Oscar Janiger, she participated in discussions about potential socially acceptable uses of LSD with a group including Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Anais Nin, and Sidney Cohen.
Dr. Eisner worked with LSD, mescaline, amphetamine, ketamine, Ritalin, and carbogen with her patients, both in individual and group settings. Some of the sessions she facilitated in group settings included "encounter group"-style expression, experimental combinations of psychoactive drugs and body work. She conducted important early research into the the use of LSD to treat alcoholism, notably with colleague Sidney Cohen.
In 1959, Dr. Eisner participated in the 10th Josiah Macy Conference on LSD. She also served on the Board of Advisors for the Albert Hofmann Foundation before her death in 2004. Her publications and personal correspondence are archived at Stanford University.
http://www.erowid.org/culture/character ... herapy.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Eisner
Eisner was a therapist for Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, when he tried LSD. In addition to using hallucinogens like LSD and mescaline in psychedelic therapy, Eisner also gave stimulants such as methylphenidate and the inhaled gas mixture carbogen to her patients.
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hoffer.htm
Treatment of Alcoholism with Psychedelic Therapy
Abram Hoffer
From: PSYCHEDELICS, The Uses and Implications of Psychedelic Drugs
edited by Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond Doubleday & Company, 1970.
©Aaronson & Osmond.
Introduction
Alcoholics Anonymous, the great self-help group-therapy movement, is the only established treatment for alcoholics. Until much more is known about the personal (biochemical and psychological), familial, and social factors that contribute to alcoholism, so it will remain. Most new therapies are merely adjunctive to AA and will continue to be so until it is shown that they have therapeutic value when used alone. In my view, psychedelic therapy is best used as a preparation for AA.
When Bill W. and Dr. Bob founded AA, alcoholism had not been accepted as a disease, either by society at large or by the medical profession. Society considered it a moral problem, but found itself confronted with an interesting dilemma, for only a small proportion of the total drinking society drank excessively. No moral sanctions were required for the majority, who eventually made social drinking an integral part of the culture.
The majority who remained moral drinkers could not understand why a minority became intemperate or alcoholic. Moral sanctions were applied on the premise that excessive drinking arose from defects of character, defects of will, and defects in society. These sanctions included education, persuasion, incarceration, and banishment. Unfortunately, the most stringent measures had little permanent effect, and the proportion of the drinking society (a concept developed by Dr. H. Osmond) remained the same or increased. Medicine also considered alcoholism a non-disease.
The founders of AA introduced the medical model first to alcoholics, later to society, and finally to the medical profession. This concept was very appealing to alcoholics because it gave them a satisfactory explanation for their misfortunes. If they were sick and not evil, then they might expect the same sort of treatment they would receive if they developed pneumonia or diabetes. Bill W. and Dr. Bob also introduced the concept of allergy, which thirty-five years ago was incorporated into medicine as a new group of diseases. (1)
But AA insisted that alcoholism was more than a physical illness. It also carried strong personal responsibility. An alcoholic could not be censured for being an alcoholic, but he could be for doing nothing about it.
Society resisted the idea that alcoholics are sick, since it got no guidance from a reluctant medical profession. Doctors expect diseases to be more or less definable, to have treatment that may be ineffective but must be in common use, and to have a predictable prognosis. When they became convinced that AA did help large numbers of alcoholics remain sober, they gradually accepted alcoholics as patients. Even now, the majority of hospitals are extremely reluctant to admit alcoholics who are drunk, and many doctors dread seeing them in their offices. Eventually AA forced the profession to accept the fact that alcoholism, which has been estimated to afflict 5 per cent of the population, is a disease. This marked the beginning of the final solution to the problem. For, having accepted the disease concept, doctors were challenged by the enormous problems, and, in a matter of a few years, several major therapeutic discoveries were made.
The newer adjunctive therapies developed for alcoholism may be divided into the psychological and the biochemical. Psychotherapy, deconditioning therapy, and psychedelic therapy are examples of purely psychological therapy, while sugar-free diets for relative hypoglycemia, mega vitamin B3, megascorbic acid, and adrenocortical extracts (or extracts of licorice) are examples of pure chemotherapies.
Psychedelic therapy is the only therapy that has prepared alcoholics to become responsible members of AA, when previously they had been unable to do so.
Psychedelic Therapy
We must distinguish sharply between psychedelic reactions and the means for inducing them. Failure to understand this distinction has led to several futile researches, best exemplified by the study of Smart and Storm (1964), which was widely circulated in an extreme form before publication of the watered-down version.
Psychedelic therapy refers to a form of psychotherapy in which hallucinogenic drugs are used in a particular way to facilitate the final goal, which for alcoholics is sobriety. The drugs may be mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, and many others, as well as combinations. It is therefore trivial to test the effect of LSD or other hallucinogens on alcoholics in such a way that there is no psychedelic reaction. In fact, these trivial experiences have led to trivial data, as reported by Smart et al. (1966), who claimed that a group of ten alcoholics given LSD did not differ in outcome from a group of ten given another psychoactive drug. Close examination of their report shows that no therapy was given, nor was there any encouragement of discussion of problems. The experience was not psychedelic, but was more in the nature of an inquisition, with the subject strapped to the bed, pretreated with dilantin, and ill from 800 mcg of LSD.
Since no investigator has ever claimed that LSD used in this way does have any therapeutic effect, this experiment suggests that LSD used with no therapeutic intent or skill is not apt to help. One of the subjects given LSD by Smart et al. described his experience in comparison with a psychedelic reaction he received from smaller quantities of LSD in Saskatchewan. The experiences and the outcome were quite different.
Psychedelic therapy aims to create a set and a setting that will allow proper psychotherapy. The psychedelic therapist works with material that the patient experiences and discusses, and helps him resynthesize a new model of life or a new personal philosophy. During the experience, the patient draws upon information flooding in from the altered environment and from his own past, and uses it to eliminate false ideas and false memories. With the aid of the therapist, he evaluates himself more objectively and becomes more acutely aware of his own responsibility for his situation and, even more important, for doing something about it. He also becomes aware of inner strengths or qualities that help him in his long and difficult struggle toward sobriety.
The book The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, edited by H. A. Abramson (1967), contains the best collection of scientific papers on psychedelic therapy.
Around 1952, Osmond and I had become familiar with psychotomimetic reactions induced by LSD. There was a marked similarity between these reactions and schizophrenia and the toxic psychoses. Delirium tremens is one of the common toxic states. It occurred to us that LSD might be used to produce models of dt's. Many alcoholics ascribed the beginning of their recovery to "hitting bottom," and often "hitting bottom" meant having had a particularly memorable attack of dt's. We thought that LSD could be used this way with no risk to the patient.
We treated our first two alcoholics at the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and one recovered.
Other early pilot studies were encouraging, and we increased the tempo of our research until at one time six of our major psychiatric centers in Saskatchewan were using it. As of now, we must have treated close to one thousand alcoholics.
Within a few years after our first patients were treated, we became aware that a large proportion of our alcoholics did not have psychotomimetic reactions. Their experiences were exciting and pleasant, and yielded insight into their drinking problems. It became evident that a new phenomenon had been recognized in psychiatry. Osmond created the word psychedelic to define these experiences, and announced this at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957.
Following this, our researches were aimed at improving the quality and quantity of psychedelic reactions. Within the past ten years, major studies, under the direction of Dr. Ross MacLean, Hollywood Hospital, New Westminster, British Columbia, and under the direction of Dr. S. Unger at Spring Grove State Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, have added materially to our knowledge of the effect of psychedelic therapy on alcoholism.
I will not review the results of psychedelic therapy in detail. This has been done in the books edited by H. A. Abramson and in The Hallucinogens by A. Hoffer and H. Osmond (1967). The one striking conclusion is that every scientist using psychedelic therapy with alcoholics found the same proportion of recoveries. Whether the experiments were considered controlled or not, about 50 per cent were able to remain sober or to drink much less. This seems to be a universal statistic for LSD therapy.
(1). Dr. Walter Alvarez recently told me that when he wrote a paper on food allergies at the Mayo Clinic about fifty years ago, he was severely criticized by his colleagues. Only strong support from one of the Mayos, who discovered that he himself had a food allergy, protected Alvarez from even-more-powerful assault. Medicine seems very reluctant to take unto itself new diseases. (back)
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml
LSD comes in several different forms. The most common is paper blotter. Other forms include gell caps, liquid, and gelatin. Each form will contain different quantities and purities of lysergic acid diethylamide. The chart below shows dosages for pure LSD measured in micrograms (ug). Micrograms are 1/1,000,000 of a gram.
Oral LSD Dosages
Threshold 20 ug
Light 25 - 75 ug
Common 50 - 150 ug
Strong 150 - 400 ug
Heavy 400 + ug
LD50 (Lethal Dose*) 12,000 ug
Excerpts from John Markoff - What the Dormouse Said
http://fileshare200.depositfiles.com/au ... dustry.pdf
...
Myron Stolaroff had grown up in a Jewish household in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. His father was a local merchant, and the family was prominent locally. Myron graduated first in his class both from his high school and from the local military junior college. At Stanford University, he received a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Tau Beta Pi key in recognition of his scholarship. He was a student at Stanford when David Packard and Bill Hewlett came back to campus to show off their first commercial oscillator. Near the end of the Second World War, he received an engineering degree and took a job working as the first employee of Alexander M. Poni-atoff at a small electric-motor company in Belmont, California.
He began as a design engineer and later helped Poniatoff prototype the first magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorder, which launched the company that took its name from Poniatoff's initials plus "ex" for excellence. Ampex Electric and Manufacturing had been founded in San Carlos after Poniatoff had begun looking for new applications for his high-quality motors. Ampex is no longer a factor in Silicon Valley and today is remembered largely because its corporate logo is still prominently visible on Highway 101, the freeway that slices through the heart of the Valley. However, Ampex was as significant as Hewlett-Packard in the Valley's lineage, and many pioneering engineers still remember the company fondly.
...
Of course, none of that was apparent from what was nothing more than an invitation to attend a lecture being given by Harry Rathbun, a professor of business law at Stanford. Rathbun was a charismatic teacher who was tremendously popular on campus, where he lectured to overflow classes on subjects that included discussions of personal ethics and values.
Rathbun's presentation was given in a small library in South Palo Alto, and it struck Stolaroff "between the eyes."14 The themes the law professor addressed that evening included "Who are we?" and "Where are we going?" They were Big Questions About Life. Stolaroff was transported, realizing that his life had been hollow and that the questions Rathbun
was asking and answering mesmerized him.
...
As it turned out, Rathbun's own life had been transformed when he and his wife, Emilia, attended a 1935 wilderness retreat led by Henry B. Sharman, a wealthy retired Canadian. Sharman had written a book entitled Jesus as Teacher, which probed the historical records surrounding the New Testament.
After returning to Stanford, the Rathbuns began conducting study groups for Stanford students in their home on the teachings of Christ. The sessions were later expanded to include a two-week retreat at a center that was established in the mountains about forty miles southwest of campus near the sleepy beach town of Santa Cruz.
They became known as the Sequoia Seminars and ultimately, in the 1970s, spun off a series of cultlike groups (including the Creative Initiative Foundation, Beyond War, and Women to Women Building the Earth for the Children's Sake) that attracted a broad, largely upper-middle-class following.
In many cases, people who joined them sold their homes and personal belongings and dedicated their lives completely to these groups. However, long before the 1970s, the Sequoia Seminars had a less well known but more dramatic and far-reaching consequence, in their immediate impact on Myron Stolaroff. Although he had been angered by Harry Rathbun's sneaky trick of guiding him to the phi-losophy of Jesus, Stolaroff remained intrigued by Rathbun's ideas.
The following year, he decided to set aside his anti-Jesus bias and his concern about what was happening to Jews around the world in the name of Jesus and attend a longer set of discussion groups led by the Rathbuns. At the seminar, Stolaroff became a convert. By the time it was over, he felt that he had experienced true love for others for the first time in his life and become a believer in "the power of the message" of Jesus.15
He decided that the most important thing that he could do with his life was to commit himself to the will of God.
....
It was during one of his visits in 1956 that Heard spoke enthusiastically to Stolaroff about a new drug called LSD. The very idea shocked the young engineer, who couldn't figure out why a world-famous mystic would need to take a drug. Nevertheless, Heard was fervent and told Stolaroff about an unusual man who would occasionally come from Canada and administer the substance to both him and Aldous Huxley.
With two passports and with a murky history of connections to both law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Al Hubbard was without question one of the most curious characters in America during the 1950s and 1960s. There are conflicting accounts of Hubbard's life, but the best summary of his early years appears in Jay Stevens's Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.
Born in Kentucky, Hubbard surfaced publicly in Seattle in 1919 with the invention of a perpetual-motion machine.17 Later, there were tales of his running war materials by boat up the West Coast, where they were then shipped by land through Canada to Great Britain. And there was an intimation that he had had some loose affiliation with the Manhattan Project as a black-market supplier of uranium. Even after Stolaroff had come to know Hubbard well, he wasn't certain where the truth lay. But he soon fell under Hubbard's spell, viewing him as an especially powerful and articulate individual.
Hubbard is intriguing in part because while most popular accounts of the introduction of LSD in America focus on the roles played by author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary, Hubbard was an earlier proponent, and an important influence in the use of psychedelics by a number of Silicon Valley's pioneering engineers.
Hubbard, while he was the president of a Canadian uranium mine, had discovered psychedelics in the early 1950s when he participated in mescaline experiments at the University of Vancouver.
He found LSD in 1955, and in addition to Huxley, Heard, and perhaps more than one thousand others during the 1950s, he introduced the drug to Stolaroff and indirectly to a small group of engineers who formed a splinter group from the Rathbuns' Sequoia Seminar.
...
Myron Stolaroff
He [Stolaroff] returned to California a zealot, a convert to the new LSD faith. He had decided that experiences like the one he had had in Canada were the answer to the world's problems.
LSD would give society a new set of powerful tools to advance human development. Like Engelbart, Stolaroff set off on his own grand quest to augment the human mind.
His first stop was his closest friends at the Sequoia Seminar, where he had become a member of the group's planning committee. He introduced them to LSD in turn and created an informal research group composed of five fellow engineers and their wives.
The group included a young Ampex engineer, Don Allen; Stanford electrical engineering professor Willis Harman; and several others from both Hewlett-Packard and SRI.
Stolaroff's study group set in motion an unheralded but significant train of events, plunging a small group of technologists into the world of psychedelics almost a decade before LSD became a standard recreational drug on American college campuses.
...
Fadiman had gone to Harvard and studied social relations. He soon came to consider the field as psychology without rats, and he had instead focused his energy on being an actor. After graduating in 1960, he spent a year in Paris, and while he was there Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert along with Aldous Huxley passed through on their way to deliver an academic paper on psychedelics in Copenhagen.
In Paris, Alpert, who had been Fadiman's professor at Harvard, told him, "The greatest thing in the world has happened to me, and I want to share it with you." He proceeded to pull a small bottle out of his pocket, introducing his former student to LSD.
Forced back to America by the threat of the draft, Fadiman moved to California a year later and arrived at Stanford as a distinctly unhappy graduate student in 1961. He was feeling that school was a waste of his life, which he would have rather spent in more cultured
Augmentation Europe.
Moreover, having recently been introduced to psychedelic drugs, the world suddenly seemed like a much different place. Full of self-pity, he began leafing through the Stanford class catalog looking for something that might be interesting to study. He found a small section of crossdisciplinary classes, including one being taught by an electrical engineering professor, Willis Harman, called "The Human Potential." The class was to be a discussion of what was the highest and the best to which human beings could aspire.
In his new, more highly attuned state, Fadiman thought to himself, There's something here. That morning, he walked across campus to visit Harman. The man to whom he introduced himself looked like a totally straight and conservative engineering professor, and when Fadiman asked if he could take the interdisciplinary course, Harman replied that it was already full for the quarter, and perhaps he should think about it for the next quarter.
"I've taken psilocybin three times," Fadiman said quietly. The professor walked across the room, shut his office door, and said, "We'd better talk."
In the end, Fadiman became Harman's teaching assistant. He was able to talk to the students about things that Harman felt he couldn't. He also soon became the youngest researcher at the newly founded International Foundation for Advanced Study, Myron Sto-laroff's project for continuing his research on the uses of LSD.
When Stolaroff and Harman set up shop in Menlo Park in March 1961, they weren't the only ones on the Midpeninsula exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD. Experiments were already being conducted at the Veterans' Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had also begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists, and even writers such as Allen Ginsberg, to psychedelic drugs.15
But the foundation was something new. Engineers rather than medical professionals led the project, and the clinic was intent on charging a five-hundred-dollar fee for each experience. An early local newspaper report described the foundation's goals as being "partly medical, partly scientific, partly philosophical, partly mystical."16
Stolaroff, with the help of Willis Harman, largely funded the foundation, the real purpose of which was to conduct the research needed to make LSD credible in the medical profession. They worked with several psychologists, including Fadiman, as well as the mysterious Al Hubbard, who was a mentor to both Harman and Stolaroff and who became a member of the board of directors.
Fadiman, who soon was teaching at San Francisco State, finished his Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford, and his research at the foundation focused on the changes in beliefs, attitude, and behavior that resulted from taking LSD.
...
The foundation was not far from Roy Kepler's bookstore and a short walk from the hole-in-the-wall store where the Midpeninsula Free University store and print shop were to locate in the mid-sixties. In another building a block away, Brand later established the Whole Earth Truck Store and the Whole Earth Catalog. About a mile away from the truck store, the original People's Computer Company settled and in turn was the catalyst for the Homebrew Computer Club in the mid-1970s. The club itself served to ignite the personal-computer industry.
...
Most of the Bay Area was comfortably oblivious. Beginning in 1961, for a period of more than four years, the International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through LSD experiences.
...Among the participants were Dr. Charles Savage, a physician who had conducted medical experiments for the U.S. Navy in the early 1950s, exploring the use of psychedelics as a truth serum,
...
In his hunt for subjects for the foundation's creativity studies, Fadiman called George Leonard, a California-based editor for Look. The magazine was at work on a special issue entitled "California: A New Game with New Rules." Leonard and a colleague came to the foundation and took part in an LSD session in an attempt to help them think through the design of the issue.
In the end, Leonard, who wrote about his trip in his autobiography, Walking on the Edge of the World, wasn't sure if the experience made a difference. However, the June 28,1966, edition of Look introduced the rest of the world to the social and cultural changes that were ripping through California. On the cover was a photo of Jim and Dorothy Fadiman, locked in a deep embrace amid a field of California poppies.
A backlash was inevitable. Fadiman continued to oversee the LSD creativity research with scientists and engineers, until one day, while he was at the office with a group of four scientists lying on the floor listening to music in preparation for work on their technical problems while under a low dose of LSD, he opened an official-looking letter from the Food and Drug Administration. He knew what was coming.
It was July 1966, and the government was looking for ways to show that it was acting to stop teenage drug use. The letter was an order to immediately stop the foundation's research. Fadiman turned to his colleagues and said, "I think we opened this letter tomorrow."
The formal experiments ended, but the secret was out. In 1966 and 1967, LSD was seeping out of an isolated bohemian niche and into the mainstream of America. It would even permeate SRI, the largely military funded research center that sat just blocks away from offices of the foundation and the Whole Earth Truck Store.
by American Dream » Fri May 17, 2013 10:37 pm
...Owsley's scientific aptitude gained him admittance to the University of Virginia's School of Engineering. He lasted a year. By 1956 he was in the Air Force. He spent eighteen months at Edwards Air Force Base, in the high desert plateau east of Los Angeles, specializing in electronics and radar.
After his discharge, he moved to Los Angeles, where the electronics boom was just beginning, and spent the next few years drifting from job to job, never making more than eight thousand dollars a year, and never really exercising the intellect he knew he possessed.
During these years Owsley married, divorced, and remarried in a Tijuana ceremony that was later invalidated. He fathered a child, moved back with his first wife and then out again—"just a little boy afraid to grow up, a Peter Pan," one of his wives later told a reporter.
In 1963 he was arrested for writing $645 dollars worth of bad checks, for which he received a suspended sentence and three years' probation.
After his trial ended, Owsley decided to take another crack at college, this time at Berkeley. He rented a room in a cheap boarding-house that catered to students and ex-students and began "moving in boxes full of such stuff as ballet shoes, a complete beekeeper's outfit and a painting in progress that showed the arm of Christ on the cross, portrayed more or less from a Christ's-eye view."5 Whatever competition he had as "house eccentric" was soon routed.
Owsley wrote poetry, studied Russian, drew strange but technically acceptable pictures, was a ballet enthusiast and an electronics nut. He was a sharp but eccentric dresser, a bit of a dandy, and he preferred to be known by his nickname. Bear. He reminded housemate Charles Perry of a character in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the one who "has a theory on everything, like what kind of underwear is healthy."6 Some of his theories were truly brilliant, others merely weird, but he defended them all with a tenacity that was wearing on those who thought the whole thing was about becoming mellow, hanging out, absorbing and contemplating. But if Owsley was hyperopinionated, he wasn't a bully about it. "There was something disinterested and nobly intentioned in his relentless enthusiasms. And his ideas were never boring," remembered Perry.
Owsley never ate dinner with us because he was antivegetarian. He argued that since the human race is descended from carnivorous apes, our digestive system is designed for meat alone, and vegetables are slow poison. Once when we smoked some hashish and developed a case of the munchies, he accused me of trying to poison him with apple pie. "I haven't had any plant food in my system for years," he groused between mouthfuls. "My digestion will be f_cked up for a month."7
He lasted a semester at Berkeley before quitting to take a technical job at KGO-TV. On the surface it seemed he was settling back into his habitual rut, and indeed he might have but for two additional factors. The first was his discovery of LSD. What happened to Owsley in the Other World we can only surmise from the reports of others.
Tim Leary, in his incomparable style, wrote how Owsley had "taken the full LSD trip, hurled down through his cellular reincarnations, disintegrated beyond life into pulsing electronic grids, whirled down beyond atomic forms to that unitary center that is one, pure, radiant, humming vibration."8 And when he whirled back up he was no longer the dilettante artist, the brilliant f**k-up.
Owsley returned with a mission: he was going to save the world by making the purest and cheapest and most abundant LSD possible.
And this was where the second factor became important. By the purest chance, Owsley had just begun a romance with a chemistry graduate student at Berkeley named Melissa.
Owsley's first lab was in the bathroom of a house near the Berkeley campus. There is some evidence that in addition to LSD, he was also making Methedrine. At least this was what the police thought when they raided the house in February 1965, and confiscated a chemical that may or may not have been an intermediate step toward LSD. It wasn't Methedrine, in any case, although that is what the police decided to charge him with.
Owsley's reaction to the bust became the foundation of his legend. Instead of panicking, he hired Arthur Harris, the deputy mayor of Berkeley, as his lawyer, and Harris quickly got the case thrown out on the grounds that no Methedrine had been found. But Owsley wasn't content with simple vindication. Once the charges were dropped, Owsley turned around and successfully sued the police for the return of all his confiscated laboratory equipment. Then he disappeared.
He surfaced briefly in Alexandria, Virginia, where he contacted his family. "He was only four miles away but we spoke on the phone," his father later told a reporter. "He got mad at me, tried to tell me booze is worse [than drugs]. I told him to wash his hands and come back and talk to me about it … We haven't had a pleasant relationship. We're not in accord with what he's doing. His life is divorced from ours. He's had two wives and a child by each and lives with another woman. When he came here with that floozy I wouldn't let him in."9 As a parting shot, AOS2 described his son as "emotionally unbalanced, but has a brilliant' mind."
Los Angeles became Owsley's new base of operations. He formed a company called Bear Research Group and began ordering the necessary chemicals for synthesizing LSD. Using the Bear Research cover, he purchased substantial quantities of lysergic monohydrate, the essential ingredient in the LSD synthesis. All told he accumulated 800 grams—500 from Cycio Chemical and 300 from International Chemical and Nuclear Corp—signing, in both instances, affidavits to the effect that the chemicals would be used for research purposes only. He paid cash—twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills to Cycio alone, which suggested that the Berkeley factory, despite its short lifespan, had been more lucrative than anyone supposed.
Owsley received his first shipment of lysergic monohydrate on March 30, 1965. By May he had turned it into LSD. His method of distribution was largely word of mouth, which may be why the police once again learned of his clandestine lab. Unbeknownst to Owsley, Captain Alfred Tremblay, commander of the Los Angeles narcotics division, was emptying his garbage cans at regular intervals. Among the items Tremblay retrieved were several order forms, one of which came from Portland, Oregon, with a request for forty capsules and a postscript: "love to Melissa."10
A year later Owsley's garbage would be prominently displayed during Tremblay's Congressional testimony. But by then Owsley had vanished from Tremblay's turf. As soon as his first run was complete he returned to San Francisco, where he amazed his old housemates with the fact that he had actually made his own LSD. According to Charles Perry, Owsley's first product was "devastatingly strong in an almost heavy-handed way that recalled Owsley's own insistent manner." Like the Pranksters, Owsley's psychedelic perspective contained a lot of machismo; he was always taunting his friends to "take two and really cut loose into the cosmos."11
Owsley learned of Kesey sometime in the summer of 1965, setting the stage for their fateful meeting in the early morning hours after the aborted Beatles party. Fateful because without Owsley the Acid Tests probably would never have taken place, for the simple reason that LSD was too difficult to obtain. The dream of handing out thousands of doses was just that, a fantasy, or had been until that cocky little boho materialized out of the crowd of teenyboppers and said, "I'm Owsley."
This was the second bar in the Owsley legend: he was the Pranksters' chemist.
Flush with money, Owsley became the counterculture's most benevolent patron, buying sound equipment for indigent bands like the Grateful Dead and bankrolling the Haight's first newspaper, the San Francisco Oracle. According to his old housemate, Charles Perry, Owsley's Berkeley hideout frequently resembled a medieval court, with "a regular retinue of petitioners … present[ing] themselves like serfs pleading for boons from the King. I can still see Owsley listening warily but regally to their requests, enthroned in the nude on a huge fur-covered chair, drying his hair with a hair dryer."12 Owsley's personal enthusiasms, always exotic, became even grander. He collected oriental rugs and state-of-the-art electronics. He kept an owl, which he fed live mice. He made personalized perfumes, mixing the essences to suit his interpretation of the recipient's personality.
If Owsley didn't invent the hippie dealer look, he certainly perfected it, with his elaborate turquoise belts and handtooled boots. Food was another of his passions, and he enjoyed entertaining his entourage at various fine restaurants. The price of the meal was usually an Owsley soliloquy, either on the subject of antivegetarianism or else his famous LSD rap, a marathon romp through Einsteinian physics and Buddhist philosophy, which added up to one large apercu: the Divine Force had given mankind LSD to counteract the discovery of nuclear fission...
by conniption » Sat May 18, 2013 7:24 am
by American Dream » Sat May 18, 2013 12:55 pm
Whereas
We as women, transgender people, two-spirit people, queers, gender-oppressed people, and allies of the Bay Area mourn the loss of Oscar Grant;
Whereas we recognize that this young man was just one of countless victims of police violence;
Whereas we understand and experience police repression, particularly in poor, queer, and working-class communities of color;
Whereas we know that police violence both enables and enacts rape, brutalization, and degradation;
Whereas police violence compounds the dangers we face in domestic violence, sex trafficking, and homophobic and transphobic hate crimes;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our disabilities, addictions, and mental illnesses;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our skin color, sexualities, style of dress and speech, gender identities, religious practices, and nations of origin;
Whereas police violently enforce our subservience to an economy that enriches elites, while slaughtering, starving, sickening, and stealing from us as workers, child-rearers, and culture creators;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to violently crush our efforts toward self-determination, from queer social spaces to workplace strikes;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to kill or capture our leaders and heroes, like the recently deceased political prisoner Marilyn Buck;
Whereas police are employed to do as they are ordered;
Whereas police violence comes 10% from individual bigotry and improper training, and 90% from a capitalist state system designed to protect property, not people;
Whereas such a property-focused police system, controlled by the rich and influential, enacts and supports gender-based and sexual violence;
And Whereas such a system can never be adequately reformed, based as it is in the fundamental inequality borne of a patriarchal capitalist system:
We maintain compassion for individual police officers who both experience and inflict suffering; who face and enforce mortal danger.
We vow, in the effort to end sexist violence throughout the world, to eradicate the police system of the United States as we know it; and to transcend the misogynist capitalist system that demands this type of policing.
We undertake this mission with no hatred in our hearts toward individual police officers or those who support the police system.
We accept this responsibility out of love for all people, and the unquenchable desire for universal freedom and equality.
In the service of this calling, we will sing, strike, fuck, fight, rest, write, rebel, and rebuild until we achieve liberation for all beings.
by American Dream » Sat May 18, 2013 4:48 pm
Willis Harmon was turned on to LSD in the late 1950's by Captain Al Hubbard, the legendary superspy, who took a special interest in his new convert. Shortly thereafter Harmon became vice-president of the International Federation for Advanced Studies (IFAS), an organization devoted to exploring the therapeutic and problem solving potential of LSD.
IFAS was the brainchild of Hubbard, who undoubtedly leaned on his political connections in Washington to insure that Harmon and his colleagues would be allowed to continue their drug investigations even after the first big purge of above-ground LSD research by the FDA in the early 1960s. During this period IFAS charged $500 for a single session of high-dose psychedelic therapy—an arrangement that led some critics to accuse IFAS of bilking the public.
Adverse publicity forced IFAS to disband in 1965, whereupon Harmon, who considered himself a disciple of the Captain, became director of the Educational Policy Research Center at SRI.
In October 1968 he invited Hubbard, then living in semiretirement in British Columbia, to join SRI as a part-time "special investigative agent." As Harmon stated in a letter to his acid mentor, "Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug usage prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of longrange educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available."
Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant's fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for SRI.
"His services to us," explained Harmon, "consisted in gathering various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at schools and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature."
Hubbard was the ideal person for such a task. He boasted a great deal of experience both in the law enforcement field and in the use of psychedelic drugs. As a special agent for the FDA in the early 1960s, he led the first raids on underground acid labs, and a number of rebel chemists were arrested because of his detective work. The Captain was particularly irked when he learned that LSD in adulterated form was circulating on the black market.
To Hubbard this represented degradation of the lowest order. The most precious spiritual substance on earth was being contaminated by a bunch of lousy bathtub chemists out to make a quick buck. The Captain was dead set against illicit drug use. "Impure drugs are very dangerous," he explained, "and the Law takes a dim view of it." He kept a sample of street acid for "comparative purposes" each time he busted an underground LSD factory during the 1960s; most of these outfits, Hubbard maintained, were run by the Mafia.
Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers, he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut Captain was the quintessential turned-on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover; Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdos—especially longhaired radical weirdos who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and the acid subculture. After conferring with Harmon, the Captain donned a khaki uniform, a gold-plated badge, a belt strung with bullets, and a pistol in a shoulder holster. That was the uniform he wore throughout his tenure as an SRI consultant, which lasted until the late 1970S.
Ironically, while Harmon and Hubbard were probing the relationship between drugs and radical politics, a number of New Left activists grappled with a similar question. Political and cultural radicals from both sides of the Atlantic discussed the drug issue at a conference on "the dialectics of liberation," which took place in London during the summer of 1967.
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