Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 05, 2014 11:02 pm

Really worth a review:

http://www.rudge.tv/blog/psychoactivesubstances/

Making Madness Before America: Saint Peter’s Snow, Psychotomimetics, and the German Experimental Imaginary

Below is the text of a conference paper recently presented at the ‘Tonics, Elixirs and Poisons: Psychoactive Substances in European History and Culture’ Conference (8-9 September 2012) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, organised by the Antipodean East European Study Group.


Abstract


Leo Perutz’s novel Saint Peter’s Snow (1933) offers a fascinating representation of the ideas circulating in the 1930s about the possible chemical synthesisation of such “vegetable substances” as mescaline and psilocybin in Germany and central Europe. Promptly banned by the Nazi government upon its publication, Perutz’s text revolves around a “secret experiment to make a mind-altering drug from a white mildew occurring on wheat—a mildew called Saint Peter’s Snow.” By considering Perutz’s dystopic novel in combination with the radically revisionist claims of Willis Harmann about the German origins of LSD and historical studies of state-run psychological experiments, this essay will examine the literary and historical representations of the “psychotomimetics” in the period immediately before, during and after their first appearance in Central Europe.

__

Paper


Humphry Osmond, the English psychiatrist responsible for the introduction of LSD to the writer and intellectual Aldous Huxley in 1953, in Los Angeles, California, is also responsible for the invention of the term ‘psychedelic’, which he proposed to Huxley as a descriptor for the totality of the experience brought about my mescaline or LSD and in response to Huxley’s earlier suggestion of the almost completely unrepeated ‘phanerothyme’.[1] In the title of his first comprehensive review of hallucinogens, presented to the New York Academy of Science in 1957, however, Osmond describes the hallucinogens mescaline and LSD not as ‘psychedelic’, but as ‘psychotomimetic agents’—that is, as agents which imitate psychosis—offering a sense not only of the psychiatric nomenclature of the time but also the view held by those in the mainstream of the chemical and mind sciences about these drugs: that they generated a ‘model psychosis’ or a model of schizophrenia. Osmond, however, had a different idea about the psychotherapeutic potential of these drugs, and so, as he writes:

If mimicking mental illness were the main characteristic of these agents, “psychotomimetics” would indeed be a suitable generic term. It is true that they do so, but they do much more. Why are we always preoccupied with the pathological, the negative? Is health only the lack of sickness? Is good merely the absence of evil? Is pathology the only yardstick? Must we ape Freud’s gloomier moods that persuaded him that a happy man is a self-deceiver evading the heartache for which there is no anodyne? Is not a child infinitely potential rather than polymorphously perverse?[2]

Osmond’s remarks evoke the sense of wonder about these substances, and the positive purposes to which he and his colleagues believed they could be put. Prior to Osmond’s experiments with mescaline and LSD of the 1950s in Saskatchewan, Canada, however, the former substance had quite clearly been understood by science as a psychosis-imitator; mescaline was looked upon with considerably less optimism than as a means of enlightening psychotherapy, and had been imagined to be useful for far more sinister purposes than Osmond’s humanistic efforts, with Abram Hoffer, to improve the mental life conditions of those with schizophrenia and other psychotic syndromes.[3]

In fact, the potential for mescaline to radically bring about alterations in the user’s mind had been other state interests had occurred to scientists as early as the 1940s in Germany, where, in the Dachau concentration camp, the SS had been investigating the potential of mescaline as an interrogation tool to defeat the mental resistance of those under scrutiny. While individuals had used mescaline for centuries [check] for self- exploration and mystical purposes, the origin of clinical human experimentation with the hallucinogens, as with a range of other scientific interrogation and psychological science, lies in Nazi Germany.

While there is little known about, and few historical records illuminating the attitudes or knowledge held by Germans at the beginning of the Nazi rule about the hallucinogens, Leo Perutz’s novel, Saint Peter’s Snow (Le Petri Schnee), first published in 1933, offers a fascinating representation of the kinds of ideas developing at the time about the possible chemical synthesisation of such “vegetable substances” as mescaline and psilocybin (as it was later to be identified) in Germany and in central Europe. Promptly banned or ‘boycotted’ by the Nazi government after its publication, Perutz’s text revolves around a “secret experiment to make a mind-altering drug from a white mildew occurring on wheat—a mildew called Saint Peter’s Snow.”[4] It is told from the point of view of Dr. George Amberg who, in hospital, apparently recovering from an automobile accident, compares the official account of his mishap, written on the doctor’s report, with a range of disturbing memories about his recent past, which he discloses as the narrator. (This literary device whereby the hero either generates or recollects memories the veracity of which is uncertain while in a coma was of course later adopted in the film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.[5]) The unverifiability of Amberg’s story is emblematic of the novelty and power of the mind-altering drug which Amberg begins to remember as having been the subject of a plan to reintroduce religious fervour and to revive the Holy Roman Empire in Germany through the development of a synthetic chemical by Baron von Malchin. As Robert Diantonio suggests, Amberg, as if experiencing a disorienting flashback after having used a hallucinogenic substance, “seems trapped among many different realities.”[6]

Despite his evident talent, the historical significance of his works, and the praise he offered of his writing by the likes of Borges, little to no academic scholarship is written in English on the Perutz’s novels. In Le Figaro, for instance, one reviewer remarked that it was “no wonder Borges loved Perutz; they both liked to encapsulate history within a fable.”[7] Similarly, as Franz Rottensteiner writes, Petutz’s “books skillfully merge authentic historic detail with visionary events, so that the reader is often uncertain where reality fades into fantasy. His heroes are frequently the victims of an implacable destiny, almost in the style of a Greek tragedy.”[8]Perutz’s fascination with history and fables explains the uncanny sense in which the story of Saint Peter’s Snow is resonant with familiar archetypes and yet is an original work of contemporary fiction offering a critique of modern science. To begin with, the so-called Saint Peter’s snow, the white mildew which occurs on wheat which gives the novel its name and which is the organic precursor to the synethetic psychoactive drug being developed by baron von Malchin (much to the puzzlement and curiosity of Georg Amberg, the protagonist doctor of the novel) is a clear reference to ergot (claviceps purpurea (Fr.)), a fungal growth and a parasite on rye as well as barley, wheat and on certain wild grasses.[9]

Before Perutz’s day, the folkloric history of ergot pervaded Germany, and, as Albert Hoffman, the 1943 discoverer of LSD points out, there “seem to be more variants” in names and nicknames for ergot of rye in German “than in other languages: Mutterkorn,Rockenmutter, Afterkorn, Todtenkorn and many others.”[10] As Hoffman writes:

In German folklore there was a belief that, when the corn waived in the wind, the corn mother (a demon) was passing through the field; her children were the rye wolves (ergot). In our context we observe that [the name] Tollkorn (“mad grain”) point[s] to a knowledge of the psychotropic effects of ergot [and] an intimate knowledge of its properties, at least among herbalists, deeply rooted in European traditions.[11]

Calling not only upon the folkloric fabulae which had accreted around the psychotropic effects of rye in Germany, but also upon the name sometimes given to large outbreaks of ergotism in Europe in the Middle Ages (caused by the eating of bread contaminated by rye), namely ignis sacre (“holy fire”) often called “St Anthony’s fire”, Perutz’s illustration of the fictional chemical, Saint Peter’s Snow, evokes the potential power of such mind-changing drugs to affect societies and their relation with ideology. At one stage of the novel, the wealthy baron, who for the ambiguous although seemingly well-meaning reason of reintroducing religious fervour to the masses, has set about developing the psychochemical so as to, reveals his intentions for having determined to invent the drug by quoting Amberg’s (the protagonist’s) late father, a gifted scientist:

The starting point was something your father said. ‘What we call the fervour and ecstasy of faith’, he said to me in this room, sitting at this table, ‘whether as an individual phenomenon or as a group phenomenon, nearly always presents the clinical picture of a state of excitation produced by a hallucinogenic drugs. By what hallucinogenic drugs produces this effect? None is known to science.’ (88-9)

Not believing that his father would have used such “blasphemy”, Amberg dismisses the baron and his the idea that religious experience could be occasioned psychochemically.

Later, the baron explains that having “made no progress” with the “scientific works of Greek and Latin authors”, he then turned to “the religious and philosophical writings of antiquity”, and then to other histories, from which he learned about a “wheat disease” of “early centuries” and which “was known by a different name wherever it appeared.” (93) As the baron then states:

In Spain it was called Mary Magdalene’s Plait, in Alsace it was known as Poor Soul’s Dew. In Adam of Cremona’s Physician’s Book it was called Misericord Seed, and in the Alps it was called St Peter’s Snow. In the St Gallen area it was known as the Mendicant Friar, and in northern Bohemia as St John’s Rot. Here in Westphalia, where it appeared especially often, the peasant’s called it Our Lady’s Fire. (93-4)

The religious connotations of the names given to ergotism, although real in the case of St Anthony’s Fire and while mostly fictitious in the case of the Baron’s list, suggest the sense in which excitation of the senses by the effects of ergot had been always mythically tethered to an influence or interaction with nature that was divine, saintly, and even miraculous. More than this, however, the baron’s recognition of the influence of ergot and grain upon state and national religion and ideology is crucial for readers of Perutz’s novel; as the baron at one stage notes, the “Chinese have no religious ideas, only a kind of philosophy” since in “the Middle Kingdom no grain as been cultivated for thousands of years. Only rice.” (95))

The link between the nation-state, ideology, religion and drugs is of particular interest to Perutz, who understood the potential of each of these social influences to produce mass hysteria in society. And ultimately, Perutz’s experience and his concerns about the rise of ideological anti-semitism meant that he could no longer live in Germany. As Perutz’s biographer, Hans Herald-Müller writes

The establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany had drastic consequences for Perutz [and the] deliberate creation of mass hysteria plays an important role in his contemporary novel Saint Peter’s Snow. By the beginning of 1933, distribution of the book in Germany had shrunk to a trickle. Soon afterwards, all the novels of this Jewish author were boycotted. When Nazi troops marched into Vienna on 13 March 1938, he knew that he had no choice but to emigrate.[12]

In addition to the novel’s allusions to the mass hysteria, however, Saint Peter’s Snow also offers an instructive representation of individual hysteria in the form of Dr. Amberg’s disoriented and tendentious narrative. Indeed, Amberg’s disorientation not only prefigures and reflects Perutz’s own desubjectivised and disempowered position as a jew in an increasingly anti-Semitic dictatorship, but also the negative effects of a psychosis-inducing drug. Thus, Dr. Amberg, as he recalls his story, disarmed in a hospital bed, is never quite aware whether the story he recalls is real or unreal; whether it all an elaborate hoax on which his medical staff are ‘in’. In a case of doctor’s word against doctor’s mind, the medical superintendent reminds Amberg of the incident by which he came to be hospitalized thus:

“No,” said the medical superintendent. “You never reached the station. You walked straight into a car and were knocked down. The base of the skull was broken and there was brain haemorrhage, and that was the state you were in when you were brought here…but now you’re out of danger.”

I tried to read his face. He could not have seriously meant what he said, it was absurd.

(…)

“I beg your pardon,” I said quite diffidently, “but the head wound is the result of a blow with a blunt instrument. It was done with a flail.”
(8)

Amberg resigns himself to the fact that he will not convince others of his memory of the baron and the plot to synthesise the mind- (and society-) altering psychochemical, but in the exchange that follows, the superintendent puzzledly observes that flails have not been used in Germany to thresh crops since the invention of machinery; that is, not for over a “hundred” years (8). Here, Perutz’s reminder to readers of the improbability of flailing in contemporary Germany also suggests the improbability of Amberg’s narrative; more than this, however, it signals the ahistoricality of Amberg’s tale, or—if it is to be regarded as at all chronometrically stable—it serves as an allusion to the ancientness and thus the ‘superstitiousness’ of Amberg’s own ideas, as well as the anteriority of ergotism, whose “severity had decreased as improved milling techniques and other agricultural innovations” which had, by the late nineteenth century, lessened the threat”[13] to the public of, and the familiarity of doctors with the condition.

Together with a rich folkloric history, investigations into ergot alkaloids were an energetically studied subject in the ‘formal’ sciences throughout Europe, both before and after 1933, when Perutz published Saint Peter’s Snow. The pharmacological history of ergot and ergotamine alkaloid isolation has been characterized as “the story of the unexpected,”[14] and even as a “history of the unexpected.”[15] Before 1933, ergotamine—an ergot alkaloid derivative, present in the sclerotia of the Claviceps purpurea fungus—had been isolated in its crystalline form by Arthur Stoll in 1918 at Sandoz laboratories, not far from Germany and Dachau (where the Dachau concentration camp was later to be established by the Nazi government), and Stoll patented the alkaloid. In 1917, Sandoz had granted Stoll, then a young Swiss chemist and a student of the Jewish German organic chemist Richard Willstätter,[16] the opportunity of setting up a laboratory to develop new bioactive drugs.[17] But the goal of isolating these alkaloids had been underway for more than fifty years prior to Stoll’s discovery, with Charles Tanret obtaining ergotinine cristalisee in 1875, and the Swiss pharmacist F. Kraft having, among discovering many other ergotamine alkaloids, extracted a fraction composed mainly of the ergotoxine group alkaloids, which he named ‘hydroergotonine’ in 1906.[18] The ergotoxine group (so-called hydroergotonine) and ergotamine found medical use in the treatment of severe migraine, although because these drugs had a tendency to produce effects on blood-vessels the same as those which gave rise to ergotism, they have largely been replaced by different ergot alkaloids and non-ergot based substances.[19]

To one side of the history of modern ergot alkaloid research, however, sits a narrative based in the occult and mystical traditions, and which may be tied specifically to Jewish religious tradition—interesting and perhaps instructive for an account of Perutz’s Jewish heritage and his individual perspective on the religious potential of the ergot-based psychochemical.[20] As “the grain of the poorest of the poor”, spurred rye was an “ethnic cuisine” very “popular among Jews of Eastern Europeans,”[21] and its consumption throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Eastern Europe had been coincidental with the emergence of a range of religious and mystical movements in that area. As Sharon Packer notes,

Curiously, three major mystical movements of Judaism erupted at the same times and places as these ergot epidemics, while these sects were largely ignored, if not outrightly scorned, in areas free from endemic ergotism…It is possible that the simultaneous occurrence of the mystical movements and ergot epidemics peaks was no coincidence…: Subtle transcendent states can occur in early ergotism…

Such transcendental mental states were regarded as divine interventions, and, for both those who experienced them or who knew of their experience, these divine states “were seen as supernatural events until the 18th century, if not later.”[22] Furthermore, as Packer astutely points out, given that there are almost a dozen naturally occurring psychoactive ergot alkaloids, each seasonal crop of claviceps would produce a very different variety of ergots in different and inconsistent combinations and thus the specific symptomatological character of each outbreak of ergotism would have differed, making the source of the toxification difficult to identify with any precision.[23] Consequently, there were two very injurious forms of ignis sacer: in one, the limbs became gangrenous, while in the second form, convulsions accompanied by intense pain, and sometimes with blindness or deafness took place.[24] In relation to our own present moment, interestingly, a biologist from the US has recently hypothesized that the alkaloidal potency of scopolamine and atropine—alkaloids found in the so-called Jimson weed—or datura from the Solanaceae (nightshade) family—may have increased in the last half-century due to the temperature rises and carbon increases in the atmosphere, and has suggested that similar changes may have taken place in respect of the ergot fungus.[25]

Some have argued that the very origins of religion stem from a psychoactive state induced by an alkaloid of ergot rye. As R. Gordon Wasson and his colleagues have argued, in ancient Greece initiates to the Eleusinian mysteries (in which communication with the Gods is said to have taken place) are said to have witnessed “a vision that made all previous seeing seem like blindness” after drinking the kykeon, a potion prepared from weeds which it has been demonstrated were likely to have been a parasitized species of the claviceps,Claviceps paspali.[26] Similiarly, as Packer asserts, the invention of the printing press in around 1100 represents an “ironic twist of technology” since, while this “made mystical texts” (such as “the Zohar—the compendium of Jewish Mystical writings” which became “the first Hebrew best-seller”)—readily “available to the masses,” ergot experiences had fuelled the “demand for mystical materials,” and “the very existence of such a pro-mystical milieu would establish the psychological expectations that are so critical to sculpting the exact phenomenology of the ergot experience.”[27] As Packer’s language suggests, here mysticism becomes an elaborate phenomenology of ergotism whose potential as a political and social-reformist ideology—as is well known to the baron in Saint Peter’s Snow—is seemingly limitless.

In a curious connection, Willis Harman, a senior social scientist at the Stanford Research Institute known as SRI International, and the initiator of the institute’s futures research program (and later the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences), suggested, in an interview on ABC radio in 1977, that the origins of LSD began with an esoteric or mystical movement specifically following the twentieth century mystic Rudolf Steiner.[28] As Harman explains, the story of LSD “really starts” in “1935 with a group of followers of [this] German mystic [and] members of this group set out very deliberately to synthesise chemicals which were like the natural vegetable substances which they were well aware had been used in all the world’s major religious traditions down through the centuries.” As Harman continues, “By 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin, LSD and about thirty other drugs.”[29] Harman thus suggests that LSD had been deliberately synthesized for its connection to religiosity, and at least five years before our history records say that the substance was first administered to a human (by Hofffman to himself).[30] More extraordinarily, Harmann’s remarks directly make the claim that psilocybin had been identified and isolated at least twenty years before the time on record in all of the histories of psilocybin about the first identification, isolation and chemical synthesis of this alkaloid, by Albert Hoffman and his colleagues in 1958, and at least seventeen years before the first western study of the use of magic mushrooms by R. Gordon Wasson in 1955.[31] Harmann’s claims are not supported by any written evidence, so it would be irresponsible to speculate too long on the possibility that either LSD or psilocybin were developed chemically before the historically confirmed dates or to credit this proposition with having a basis in fact. It would perhaps be better to take Harmann’s claim as an embellished version of the more likely and better supported claim that there did exist some specific knowledge before the 1930s of the potential uses of, and of the methods by which certain ergot-based compounds were capable of generating hallucinatory or ecstatic altered mind-states, and that of this experimental imaginary in Europe, Perutz’s novel provides some evidence. However, that Harmann designates 1938, the year on which Hoffman had first synthesized LSD, as the date by which this “group of followers” had synthesized these so-called vegetable substances, seems to suggest that Harmann means to include Hoffman—and possibly the initiative begun by Arthur Stoll, the director of the pharmaceutical department at Sandoz, to isolate psychoactive constituents from a range of medicinal plants—as part of this project of the “group of followers of Rudolf Stein.”

Whether as members of Steiner’s anthoposophy movement, as unwitting auxillaries or servants of its cause, or as an assemblage of straightforward chemists altogether unrelated to anthroposophy, it is notable that the mission set by Arthur Stoll bears a striking resemblance to the mission that Harmann attributes to the this group of followers. As Albert Hoffman observes, in his biography and history of his discovery of LSD:

In Stoll’s laboratory I found employment that completely agreed with me as a research chemist. The objective that Professor Stoll had set for his pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratories was to isolate the active principles (i.e., the effective constituents) of known medicinal plants to produce pure specimens of these substances. This is particularly important in the case of medicinal plants whose active principles are unstable, or whose potency is subject to great variation, which makes an exact dosage difficult. But if the active principle is available in pure form, it becomes possible to manufacture a stable pharmaceutical preparation, exactly quantifiable by weight. With this in mind, Professor Stoll had elected to study plant substances of recognized value such as the substances from foxglove (Digitalis), Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), and ergot of rye (Claviceps purpurea or Secale cornutum), which, owing to their instability and uncertain dosage, nevertheless, had been little used in medicine.

Given the link between Hoffman’s description and Harmann’s characterisation of the mission of the Steiner-followers, it is possible that Harman’s claim may be read simply as a dramatized version of the actual history in which the role of mysticism and folklore in the context of the development and discovery of these drugs is emphasized—either for effect or so as to frame, but not properly make, an argument about the extent to which such mystical beliefs were actually motivating factors to people, such as Arthur Stoll, who were involved in the direction of such psychopharmacological research and drug discovery programs, possibly even at political and policy levels.

As with ergot rye and the psylocibe mushrooms, the hallucinations and other mind-alterations brought about by the peyote cactus (and other cacti) and the psychoactive alkaloid of these plants, mescaline, had been known to traditional cultures: for instance, to the Native Indians in Mexico, who have used the peyote cactus for over 3,000 years.[32] The discovery and chemical synthesis of the phenythaline mescaline, however, predated the discovery of a hallucinogenic ergoline-tryptamine LSD and tryptamine psilocybin by a few decades, having been first isolated and identified by the German chemist Arthur Heffter in 1897 and having its first chemical synthesisation in 1918.[33] Notwithstanding the increasing regulation of opiates under the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act of 1914, clinical research on human subjects with mescaline and peyote began at around the same time in the US and in Europe: in 1927, the German physician Kurt Beringer published a description of his mescaline studies in research subjects and, only a year later, Dr Kluver from the University of Chicago published the first scientific monograph in English on mescaline and perception.[34]

It was not until the 1940s, however, that mescaline was systematically studied on involuntary and sometimes-unknowing human subjects by Nazi scientists at the Dachau Concentration Camp, which, incidentally, was located only about 200 miles from the Sandoz laboratories in Basel where Hoffman first synthesized and used LSD within the same decade.[35] As Alfred McCoy suggests, the “Nazis’ use of human subjects … shattered long-standing clinical restraints” including unprecedented breaches by medical doctors of the Hippocratic oath, however, the results of these experiments were later to intrigue and garner the respect from scientists in the US.[36] In this sense, the experiments in Dachau initiated the intentional making of madness that would follow in the 1950s and 1960s in the US by the CIA under the MK-Ultra or ‘Mind Kontrol Ultra’ program. Directly inspired by and curious about the initial results of the Nazi experiments in Dachau and the overriding investigation question of these experiments—Can the human mind come under the control of an interrogator?— the CIA would later initiate its own experiments on unwitting subjects with LSD and by inflicting other forms of psychological torture in a multifaceted project to build a science of coercion and to investigate weapons of “mass persuasion and individual interrogation” whose costs, as McCoy points out, “reached, at peak, a billion dollars a year.”[37]

The history of the circumstances in which the mescaline experiments on humans in Dachau took place is, however, seemingly mostly incomplete. What is known about these experiments is perhaps most helpfully conveyed by a 1945 technical report of the US Naval Technical Mission, kept in the Harvard Medical Library, which was composed for the purpose of reporting to the US military and intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense on the Nazi experiments and the potential of mescaline’s effectiveness as an interrogation agent.[38] Nevertheless, this report indicated that mescaline was at best inconclusive as an adjunct to interrogation and at worst virtually ineffectual. As Lee and Shlain note:

The navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation agent when American investigators learned of mind control experiments carried out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. After administering the hallucinogen to thirty prisoners, the Nazis concluded that it was “impossible to impose one’s will on another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given.” But the drug still afforded certain advantages to SS interrogators, who were consistently able to draw “even the most intimate secrets from the [subject] when questions were cleverly put.” Not surprisingly, sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case.[39]

The Naval Technical Mission’s report was probably based on the cache of documents and data that was found, remarkably, in Heinrich Himmler’s cave depository of SS materials in Hallein, Germany by the Joint Intelligence Objectives search teams. The documents had originally been reviewed at the Seventh Army Documents Centre by Dr Leo Alexander, who, in 1945, compiled his own report (‘The Alexander Report’) based on these documents and his data findings in respect of the experiments at Dachau as the psychiatrist involved in offering advice to those adjudicating the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg Trial.[40]

Even in view of the reprehensible and inhumane methods and the racist and fascist ideology in whose name it proceeded, it cannot be denied the Nazi’s medical science program made a number of significant psychopharmacological and medical advances during the Third Reich. In the pursuance of improving the “health of the Aryan race,” as Richard Evans notes, for instance, “It was a Nazi epidemiologist who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, establishing a government agency to combat tobacco consumption in June 1939.”[41]

In 1936, the leader of the Reich’s Physician’s Chamber, Gerhard Wagner had announced the “New German Medicine” which would sideline conventional medicine in favour of a new emphasis on “the healing power of herbs.”[42] Further, as Jonathan Lewy suggests, this new emphasis by the Reich’s physicians chamber may also have developed out of the possibility that the Nazi government, when it withdrew from the League of Nations and adopted a seemingly ‘isolated’ position vis-à-vis the international drug control regime, possibly “had hoped to avoid sanctions prescribed in the 1931 [Conference on the limitation of Manufacturing of Narcotic Drugs] treaty, which would have made it difficult to obtain raw materials for drugs from countries enforcing the treaty.”[43] It is interesting also that, as Lewy notes, the Nazi government did not make it illegal to use or consume any drugs whatsoever in the Third Reich: the Nazi government preserved “the basic tenets” of the Opiumgesetz legislation under which “not a single drug was banned” and presumably relied on the Law against Habitual Criminals, enacted in 1933, to ensure that drug addicts were incarcerated. Although, as Lewy notes, there are no records that a single drug-addicted individual had ever been sent to a Nazi concentration camp; instead, the records demonstrate that the Nazis preferred drug-addicted persons to enter a sanitarium or Heil- und Pflegeanstalt, “which could have been either a regular or a mental hospital.”[44]

Thus it is specifically in respect of the drug discovery initiatives, the larger medical program of Wagner, and the legal ambiguity around the drug policy under the Nazi government, that Harman’s claim about the origin of LSD—as well as the characterization of a drug-induced or involuntary increase in religious fervour visualized in Perutz’s novel—begins to obtain something of a clearer historical significance. During this time in the 1930s, it was the will of the party, as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy stated, to “discourage the German people from harmful foreign spices and artificial drugs and to switch to the use of natural herbs.”[45] Thus, as Schmid notes, “Through prisoner slave labor, 20 acres of moorland were appropriated in Dacahau [and] the locally grown spices covered almost the entire demand of the Wehrmact and the SS. [There] the prisoners were abused not only as free labor, but also as human guinea pigs … For about 700 Reichsmark, a German pharmaceutical company could buy a camp of people on whom they could then test their drugs.”[46]

One of the most prominent Nazi researchers in this area was Dr Kurt Ploetner, who led the mescaline research at Dachau and by 1944 had been made the SS head of the Institute for Military and Scientific Research.[47] And while, as John Marks points out, these “mescaline tests .. were not nearly so lethal as the others in the “aviation” series [such as the hypothermia experiments] … the drug could still cause grave damage, particularly to anyone who already had some degree of mental instability.” As Marks continues, “The danger was increased by the fact that the mescaline was administered covertly by S.S. men who spiked the prisoners’ drinks. Unlike Dr. Hofmann, the subjects had no idea that a drug was causing their extreme disorientation. Many must have feared they had gone stark mad all on their own.”[48]

As contemporary studies of the hallucinogens have demonstrated, a significant distinction should be drawn between involuntary or unwitting clinical uses of these drugs and those that are knowing and voluntary or consensual due to the unpredictability of the drug’s action, and the fact that reactions are “heavily dependent on the expectations of the user (“set”) and the environment (“setting”) in which the use takes place.”[49] The variability and unpredictability of user reactions was described by those who took part in the Dachau experiments; although so was the potential they saw in mescaline as a truth serum. As Marks notes, Neff, Ploetner’s inmate assistant, stated when asked by American investigators that

the subjects showed a wide variety of reactions….[and] that the drug caused certain people to reveal their “most intimate secrets.” Still, the Germans were not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for their more physical methods of interrogation. They went on to try hypnosis in combination with the drug, but they apparently never felt confident that they had found a way to assume command of their victim’s mind.

Thus, almost twenty years after the German chemist Karl Beringer had proposed that mescaline generated a ‘model psychosis’, producing a symptomatology similar to that of acute schizophrenia—a proposition of which Nazi scientists such as Ploetner must have been aware—they were deployed in order to determine whether an individual subject was telling the truth.[50] In addition to the cruelty of generating such adverse reactions (largely owing to the setting in which mescaline was given to the prisoners), the non-consensual and unwitting position in which these experiments were undertaken ultimately led to the formulation, by Leo Alexander, of the Nuremberg Code of Scientific Research, which was applied to the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg Trial, and whose first principle, simply, was that “[r]esearchers must obtain full voluntary consent from all subjects.”[51]



Notes

[1] As quoted in Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2. As Dyck notes, Osmond later confided to his colleague that he did not “relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.” (also quoted in Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 2. It is arguable that by contrast Osmond would today find a similarly small niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley to write one of his best-known and most original prose works, The Doors of Perception (1954).

[2] See, for instance, Humphrey Osmond, “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 66(3), 1957: 418-434.

[3] On this subject, Erika Dyck’s detailed history of Hoffer and Osmond’s pioneering research is indispensable. See Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 32-52.

[4] As quoted in Leo Perutz, Saint Peter’s Snow, trans. Eric Mosbacher , New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990, book dust-jacket.

[5] See Joseph Switzer, “Saint Peter’s Snow by Leo Perutz,” November 2, 2008, accessed August 10, 2012, http://markswitzer.blogspot.com.au/2008 ... erutz.html.

[6] Robert Diantonio, “Banned By The Nazis,” review of Saint Peter’s Snow, by Leo Perutz, Jerusalem Post, March 29, 1991, 15.

[7] As quoted in Leo Perutz, Saint Peter’s Snow, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), book dust-jacket; and as Robert Diantonio notes, “It is little wonder that writers like Jorge Luis Borges drew inspiration from his inventive novels”: see Robert Diantonio, “Banned By The Nazis,” review ofSaint Peter’s Snow, by Leo Perutz, Jerusalem Post, March 29, 1991, 15.

[8] Franz Rottensteiner, The Fantasy Book: the ghostly, the gothic, the imaginary, the unreal (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 144.

[9] Albert Hoffman, “A Challenging Question and My Answer,” in R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, Carl A.P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 8. Also see: Arnold Burgen, “St Anthony’s Gift,” European Review, 11:1 (2003), 27-35; Sharon Packer, “Jewish Mystical Movements and the European Ergot Epidemics,” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 35:3 (1998), 22-41; Pieter W.J. van Dongen, Akosua N.J.A. de Groot, “History of ergot alkaloids from ergotism to ergometrine,” European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 60 (1995), 109-116;

[10] While Hoffman first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide in 1937, the psychoactive effects of the substance were not discovered by him until 1943. See Albert Hoffman, LSD: My Problem Child, [DETAILS].

[11] Ibid.

[12] Hans-Herald Müller, “Prague, Vienna, Tel Aviv-The Life and Work of Leo Perutz (1882-1957),” accessed August 6, 2012, http://www.new-books-in-german.com/featur67.htm.

[13] Packer, “Jewish Mystical Movements and the European Ergot Epidemics,” 230.

[14] Heinz G. Floss, “The Biosynthesis of Ergot Alkaloids (or The Story of the Unexpected)” in Indole and Biogenetically Related Alkaloids, eds. J.D. Phillipson and M.H. Zenk (London: Academic Press, 1980), 249-270; and Anacleto Minghetti and Nicoletta Crespi-Perellino, “The History of Ergot,” in Ergot: The Genus Claviceps, eds. Vladimir Kren and Ladislav Cvak (Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 1.

[15] Minghetti and Crespi-Perellino, “The History of Ergot,” 1.

[16] Willstätter was Professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin and the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. He was the first chemist to determine the structure of chlorophyll and was a recipient of the Nobel prize for Chemistry (1915). Interestingly, in 1924, at the age of fifty-three and in response to increasing anti-Semitism, Willstätter retired, notwithstanding many prestigious offers both “at home and abroad.” See ”Richard Willstätter – Biography”, last accessed 10 Aug 2012, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ ... atter.html.

[17] Arthur Stoll, “Ergot—A Treasure House for Drugs,” The Pharmaceutical Journal, 194 (1965), 605-13, cited in Minghetti and Crespi-Perellino, “The History of Ergot,” 2.

[18] Albert Hoffman, ‘Analytik der Mutterkornalkaloide,” in Die Chemie der Mutterkoralkoloide (Stuttgard: Ferdinand Enke, Verlag, 1964), 14-175, cited in Minghetti and Crespi-Perellino, “The History of Ergot,” 2.

[19] Arnold Burgen, “St Anthony’s Fire,” 31. Notably, lysergic acid and other tryptamines such as psylocibin and diemtethyltriptamine (DMT) have been found to have had similarly positive medical effects on approximately half of those who suffer episodically from severe migraines or so-called ‘cluster headaches’: See M. Leone, et. al., “Melatonin versus Placebo in the Prophylaxis of Cluster Headache: A Double-Blind Pilot Study with Parallel Groups,” Cephalalgia 16 (1996), 494-496; DR Nyholt, et. al., “Migraine association and linkage analyses of the human 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT2A) receptor gene,” Cephalalgia 16(1996 ) 463-467.

[20] See Packer, “Jewish Mystical Movements and the European Ergot Epidemics,” 227-41.

[21] Ibid., 227.

[22] Ibid. 227-8.

[23] Ibid., 228.

[24] See Arnold burgen, “St Anthony’s Gift,” European Review, 11:1 (2003), 27-35 (27).

[25] Minda Berbeco, Ye Olde Biowarfare: how climate change is affecting hallucinogens (Part 1),” http://mindaberbeco.scienceblog.com/201 ... ens-part-1, accessed Thursday 23 August 2012.

[26] Packer, “Jewish Mystical Movement and the European Ergot Epidemics,” 231, quoting R.G. Wasson, S Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott and Carl Ruck, Persephone’s quest: Entheogens and the origin of religion, New Haven: Yale University, 1986.

[27] Packer, “Jewish Mystical Movement and the European Ergot Epidemics,” 233.

[28] See Willis Harman, quoted in Peter Fry and Malcolm Long (eds.), Beyond the Mechanical Mind (Based on the radio series ‘…And Something Else is Happening’), Sydney: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1977, 101-2.

[29] Ibid., p. 102.

[30] See for instance Albert Hoffman, LSD: My Problem Child,

[31] See Albert Hofmann, Roger Heim, et. al., “Psilocybin, ein psychotroper Wirkstoff aus dem mexikanischen Rauschpilz Psilocybe mexicana Heim [Psilocybin, a psychotropic drug from the Mexican magic mushroom Psilocybe mexicana Heim]” (in German), Experientia 14 (3), 1958: 107–9.

[32] Rosalyn Carson-DeWitt, Encyclopedia of Drugs, Alcohol, & Addictive Behavior, (2nd edition), Durham, North Carolina: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001, 714-715.

[33] Here I deploy the chemical classification proposed by David Nichols, (perhaps the world’s foremost authority on the psychopharmacology LSD) in his invaluable and comprehensive article on hallucinogens; see David E. Nichols, “Hallucinogens,” Pharmacology & Therapeutics 101, 2004, 131-181 (135).

[34] See Heinrich Kluver, Mescal: The Divine Plant and its Psychological Effects, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1928; and Kurt Beringer, “Der Meskalinrausch (The Mescaline Inebriation),” Monogra, Gesamtgeb, Neurology and Psychiatry, 49, 1927, 1-315 (German); for an analytical history of the various laws that came to regulate the use of psychedelics such as mescaline, see Richard Elliot Doblin, “Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000).

[35] John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, New York: Times Books, 1979, 5.

[36] Alfred McCoy, “Science in Dachau’s Shadow: Herb, Beecher, and the development of CIA Psychological Torture and Modern Medical Ethics,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 45(4), 2007, 401-417 (403).

[37] Ibid. 402, citing Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-60, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 9.

[38] See Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-60, 4, 25-30, 127-132, quoted in McCoy, “Science in Dachau’s Shadow”, 403.

[39] Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams, New York: Grove Press, 1985, 6-7. The report to which Lee and Schlain refer is the ‘German Aviation Medical Research At the Dachau Concentration Camp’, Technical Report No. 331–45, U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, October 1945, a copy of which resides in the Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

[40] Robert Pozos has included in his article on the Nazi’s hypothermia experiments at Dachau an attachment which reproduces the chronology of Alexander’s discovery process of the Dachau documents: see Robert Pozos, “Nazi Hypothermia Research: Should the Data Be Used?”, in Milirary Medical Ethics (Volume 2), Washington: Office of the Surgeon General and the Borden Institute, 437-461, accessed 28 August 2012, http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/pub ... sVol2.html. (This chronology originally appeared in Leo Alexander, The Treatment of Shock From Prolonged Exposure to Cold Especially in Water, Washington DC: Office of Publication Board, Department of Commerce, 1946, Report #250.) Also see Leo Alexander, “War Crimes and their Motivation: The Socio-Psychological Structure of the SS and the Criminalization of a Society,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 39:3, 1948, 298-326; Leo Alexander, “Sociopsychologic Structure of the SS: Psychiatric Report of the Nuremburg Trials for War Crimes,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 59:5, 1948, 622-634.

[41] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, New York: Penguin Books, 2007, 319, quoted in Daniel Rhodes, “An Anarchist Psychotherapy: Ecopsychology and a Pedagogy of Life,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2008).

[42] See Hans Schmid, “Psychopathen, Psychiater und Psychonauten (Teil 1: “Besondere Verhörmethoden” im Kalten Krieg) [Psychopaths, psychiatrists and psychopaths (Part 1: Specific Interrogation techniques of the Cold War],” (German) Telepolis, 8 August 2009, accessed 27 August 2012.http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/30/30803/1.html, my translation.

[43] Jonathan Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 22:2, 2008, 157.

[44] Ibid. 158.

[45] Scmid, “Psychopathen, Psychiater und Psychonauten,” Telepolis, 2009.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid., Also see Werner Pieper, Nazis On Speed 1:Drogen im 3. Reich, Löhrbach : Pieper & The Grüne Kraft, 2002. Relying on entries from Wolfram Sievers’ diaries and Nuremberg testimony, Peter Levenda has hypothesized that similar experiments had taken place in Auschwitz under the authority of the Ahnenerbe, the German think tank founded by Heinrich Himmler: See Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, London: Continuum, 2002, [PAGE].

[48] Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”, 5 (fn. 5).

[49] Nichols, “Hallucinogens,” 137.

[50] See Nicholas Langlitz, “Ceci n’est pas une psychose. Toward a Historical Epistemology of Model Psychoses,” Biosocieties, Volume 1, 2006, 159-180 (161); Beringer, “Der Meskalinrausch (The Mescaline Inebriation),”, 35-97 (quoted in Langlitz, “Psychose,”, 162). Levenda has suggested that the purpose of the Dachau mescaline experiments stemmed from the longstanding aim of Himmler, beginning with an assassination attempt on Hitler in 1941, to develop a method by which loyalty and innocence within the Nazi ranks could be tested: Levenda, Unholy Alliance, [PAGE].

[51] Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”, 5.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:04 pm




Meditation
I've been doing my meditation
I can feel this meditation
For so long, so long...
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby elfismiles » Fri Nov 07, 2014 5:03 pm

ASMR therapy: Videos of people whispering is the latest YouTube craze
Zac Seager / Friday 07 November 2014
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 46720.html

elfismiles » 22 Sep 2013 14:37 wrote:Wasn't really aware of this (ASMR) before this week...

"TingleHeads"

https://www.youtube.com/results?q=ASMR


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRyhEISY4PU

Autonomous sensory meridian response
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 07, 2014 9:39 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 07, 2014 9:59 pm

http://www.matiklarweinart.com/en/gallery/evil-1972.htm

Evil by Mati Klarwein - 1972


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Evil - Mati Klarwein - 1972

I hooked up with Miles the way I hooked up with everything else in life: through the women I've known. Be they friends or lovers, they are all mothers with excellent taste. Without them I'd be a dead spermatozoid in a dry puddle, and Miles saw that in my paintings. The only time he discussed subject matter was for Live-Evil. He asked me to paint a toad for the 'Evil' side. So I painted J Edgar Hoover as a toad in drag - which turned out to be another one of my prophetic insights.


This painting, along with Live, was used as cover art on the Miles Davis album Live-Evil.


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

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 08, 2014 10:47 am

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

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:30 pm

From 'Rausch' to Rebellion:

Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism


An introductory essay by Scott J. Thompson


IV. Joël's Critique of Psychopharmacology

Benjamin's critique of the Kantian concept of experience found its parallel in Dr. Ernst Joel's critique of Kraepelinian psychopharmacology. Emil Kraepelin (1855-1926), father of modern psychopharmacology and "discoverer" of "dementia praecox" (later called "schizophrenia" by Jung's teacher, Bleuler) had advanced the technical capabilities of psychology by treating it as a physical science. Rather than treating a human personality, the Kraepelinian method artificially severed partial functions of psychic life, altered them with psychopharmaka and subjected them to testing. A cursory scan of German monographs on mescaline written during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich reveals this method in a great number of monograph titles, e.g., "Meskalinwirkung auf das Phantomglied" (Mescaline-effect upon the phantom limb) or "Meskalinwirkung bei Stoerungen des optischen Systems" (Mescaline-effect in disturbances of the optic system). [19] It is not at all surprising that such titles predominate the research during the Third Reich, for the humanity lacking in the Kraepelinian paradigm was easily steered in the direction of mind-control and chemical-biological warfare. Under the Nazis mescaline research continued, but laboratories like the Dachau concentration camp were the preferred setting. Humanistic and therapeutic research with psychopharmaka was forbidden under the pretext of "Rauschgiftbekaempfung,"a component of the racist ideology which perceived a threat to the "performance principle" in the exotic inebriants coming into Germany from the "racially inferior" peoples of Asia and Latin America (the introduction to Reko's Magische Gifte written in 1938 spells it out quite clearly). [20]

Ernst Joel proposed the alternative of "experimental psychopathology." Substances which were thought to be "psychotomimetic" would be used to arbitrarily engender "rausch-states" in specially selected test subjects outside the clinical laboratory setting. It was under this very loose "supervision" that Walter Benjamin agreed to participate as a "Versuchsperson" [test subject or proband] in Ernst Joel and Fritz Fraenkel's hashish experiments in Berlin, for as Theodor W. Adorno described it, it was Benjamin's philosophical intention "to render accessible by rational means that range of experience that announces itself in schizophrenia." [21]



V. Psychopathology in the Weimar Republic

Of the hundreds of books, articles, essays, monographs and dissertations on Benjamin (over 3000 exist), only a handful discuss the writings on hashish and opium and the Drogenversuchen [drug experiments] and none of them situate the experiments within a historical context. When Benjamin became a "test subject," he also became part of a long-forgotten community, the Weimar Republic's psychonautic avant-garde, which included Benjamin's friend, Ernst Bloch, his cousin Egon Wissing and Egon's wife, Gert. With the synthesis of mescaline from peyote by Arthur Heffter in 1896-1897, Germany became the leader in psychopharmacological research. The year Benjamin began his experiments (1927), Louis Lewin published his second edition of Phantastica in Berlin, which appears on the list of books which Benjamin read from cover to cover. [22] This book alone would have supplied Benjamin with a library of information about psychopharmaka.

Hermann Schweppenhaeuser's claim that Benjamin's writings on hashish, opium and mescaline are among the most genuine ever put to paper can only be evaluated against the context of Weimar experimentation with psychopharmaka. Kurt Beringer's amazing monograph on mescaline, Der Meskalin-Rausch was also published in 1927, and remains the greatest work ever written on the subject. Beringer's book contains over 200 pages of protocols from 60 experiments in Heidelberg among doctors, medical students, natural scientists, and philosophers, all of whom demonstrate remarkable articulateness. Only within the full context of this research, which produced literally hundreds of monographs on peyote, mescaline, cannabis, opiates, ayahuasca and cocaine, can we really begin to evaluate Benjamin's writings and experiments, in which he participated not merely as test subject, but at times as supervisor. In the third one of the published protocols Benjamin wrote the protocol of Joel's own hashish experiment.

What does make Benjamin's contribution to this research unique is summarized quite concisely by Scholem in his essay, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel": to rescue the intoxication of cosmic experience that the human being of antiquity possessed for the proletariat in their coming seizure of power. This attempt to wed 'rausch' and 'rebellion' in a "profane illumination" should come as no surprise to anyone who came into majority during the late 1960s. It is hard to imagine the anti-war demonstrations becoming as large as they did if they had not been partially fueled by marijuana and LSD, and this is precisely what the moribund left in the U.S. seems to have forgotten. Nor should we forget that the rites of Dionysos were seen by the Roman Senate at the time of the Republic as a dangerous rebellion against the state.

Benjamin scholars have more often than not misinterpreted "profane illumination" as an awakening 'from' rausch. Hermann Schweppenhaeuser, Peter Demetz, Richard Sieburth, John McCole, Margaret Cohen, Susan Buck-Morss and other Benjamin scholars continually repeat the refrain that Benjamin considered the most important aspect of his experiments to be the crystallized intellectual yield gleaned after the rausch had subsided. In Schweppenhaeuser's depiction, it is as if Benjamin were heroically running some painful gauntlet in order to capture the pearl from the rausch-dragons of obscurantism. But 'profane illumination' can take place within the inebriated voyage itself. If rausch is analogous to being adrift in a turbulent sea, then 'profane illumination' is like suddenly awakening in the midst of a dream, seizing the helm, and becoming the pilot of one's inner voyage. Norbert Bolz understood this perfectly well in his essay "Vorschule der profanen Erleuchtung," [Propadeutics of Profane Illumination] and he has prefaced his essay with the following quote:

" 'Man kann nicht immer im Rausch leben.' Kann man es nicht? Man muß ihn nur richtig orientieren." [Trans.:"'One can't always be high.' Oh no? One only has to properly orient oneself." [23]

The autoworkers who smoked pot, dropped acid, and instead of 'tuning out' SHUT DOWN auto-factories in wildcat strikes, understood what Walter Benjamin was describing whether they had read him or not.

Herbert Marcuse seemed to be coming to a similar idea in his Essay on Liberation which postulated a "new sensibility" as a biological necessity for revolution. Discussing this new sensibility in 1969, Marcuse wrote:

Today's rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception. The 'trip' involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society - an artificial and short-lived duration. But the artificial and "private" liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment. Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception, for a new sensorium, is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search. [24]


The drawback to this search, according to Marcuse, was the "narcotic character" of the artificial paradise, which all-too-often tended to free one from concern for social liberation. For Marcuse, like Benjamin, the voyage into the secret garden had to be a messianic voyage, and the psychonaut was duty-bound to articulate his perceptions and discoveries to the entire community. Marcuse, however, did not seem to realize that 'psychedelics' were not narcotic. The reproach that the narcotic may give one the idea of liberation while at the same time depriving one of the will to liberate cannot be leveled at psychopharmaka like mescaline, psilocybe mushrooms, LSD or related compounds. Marcuse did realize, however, that the late capitalist state would be willing to mobilize its entire army and police forces into an all-out effort to eradicate self-induced euphoria once and for all. [25]



VI. Conclusion:

At the end of his book, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse quoted Benjamin's famous dictum: "It is for those without hope that hope is given to us." Those of us fortunate enough to have hope owe it to our fellows to become articulate in our ecstasy. Meeting in October 1996 in San Francisco for an international conference on Entheobotany, 800 psychonautic researchers came together for a progress report. My own inconclusive discussion is best summed up by the concluding remarks of Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado, who delivered a brilliant paper on "Inebriation as Experience of the Spirit."

The crusade against drugs, in fact a war against self-induced euphoria, is an enterprise born in the U.S.A. and exported by this country at the very same rhythm in which it became the world's superpower. The effect of this American crusade is identical to the effect of crusades in general, and especially to the crusade against witchcraft, that is, aggravating to unheard-of extremes a hypothetical evil to justify the destruction and plundering of countless persons, the ill-gotten wealth of corrupt inquisitors, and a prosperous black market in all the forbidden items, which in the 17th Century were sorcerors concoctions, and today are heroin and crack. We will not break the crusade's vicious circle unless the standards of barbaric obscurantism are replaced by principles of enlightenment focused on the spreading of knowledge among people. Drugs have always been around and they will certainly ever remain. To pretend that both users and non-users will be better protected because some drugs are impure and very expensive and sold by criminals, who by the way are indistinguishable from undercover policeman and plain businessmen, is simply ridiculous. And yet more so when the street supply grows year after year. The obvious result is a growing output of crimes committed by illiterate youngsters, who use the illicit substances, partly as an adult initiation rite and partly as an alibi: declaring oneself irresponsible, unfree, a victim - a very comfortable position by the way - at such a critical moment of life when they should learn responsibility and the abnegation practiced by their elders. So the true option is not vice as opposed to law and order, the real choice is between irrational consumption of adulterated products or an informed use of pure drugs. Demonizing them has only made us more helpless, more cruel towards our fellows, and more "idiotic" in the original sense of the word, for "idiotes" in classical Greek means a person who blindly deligates the things of his own to the public care of others. Not only our well-being, but the well-being of our sons and grandsons depends on disseminating patterns of "sobriae ebrietas" (sober inebriation), which reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs as a moral and aesthetic challenge, essentially related to the adventures of knowledge, and as palliatives for difficult parts of our lives, and for very bitter lives. In other words, we should dignify what is now being debased in order to cope with the generalized delusion and abuse created by the prohibitionist experiment.



VII. Postscript: Mann's Appeal to Reason

We have good reason to question Mann's representation of his medical source, Dr. Frederking.

To those conversant with the literature in English and German on early psychedelic and psychotomimetic therapy, Dr. Walter Frederking is a familiar name. His article "Intoxicant Drugs (Mescaline and LSD-25) in Psychotherapy" appeared in the Journal for Nervous Mental Diseases (121:262-266,1953).

There is nothing in Frederking's article to support Mann's position, but there is a great deal in it which lends support to the opinion that Frederking himself would have applauded Huxley's effort. In the introduction to his article, for example, Frederking writes:

In an effort to save the patient time and money, many and varied attempts have been made to shorten the course of psychoanalysis. Only those procedures which are within the realm of depth psychology deserve consideration. Among these are: 1) Steckel's method of active psychoanalysis, 2) Frank's psychocatharsis, and 3)narco-analysis. A few years ago I described another method, 'deep relaxation with free ideation.' This procedure makes it possible to induce in the fully awake and conscious patient, during intrview in the physician's office, physical and visual experiences which may be interpreted as genuine dreams. Such experiences can take the place of true dreams or can supplement incomplete or sketchy dreams. This procedure, however, cannot be used with sufficient reliable results in every patient in whom it would appear indicated. In such cases we make use of certain drug-induced dream-like states. These are particularly effective since the patient's critical consciousness is not impaired during these states or at least remains at all times ready to intervene.

Under the heading, "The Drug," Frederking mentions that "I have had personal experiences with mescaline for more than seventeen years," "As for LSD-25, I have been using it for nearly three years in my psychiatric practice." Under the heading, "Differentiation between Mescaline-induced and LSD-25-induced Intoxication," the following important sentences are to be found:

Indications for these drugs should be decided upon as soon as familiarity has been acquired with the nature of the intoxicative state. The therapist must be familiar with this from his own personal experience so that he may be able to cope with the frequently somewhat difficult emotional situations arising under the influence of these drugs; he must also have experience in psychotherapy. Such experience serves to exercise caution in the case of patients afflicted with schizophrenia or endogenous depressions, thus reducing risks in such cases. I have, incidentally, never experienced any dangers of addiction.

Nor is there anything in Frederking's Summary to support Mann's conclusions:

The writer has made use of drug-induced states of intoxication as an aid in psychotherapy. To attain the states of intoxication, he has used mescaline and LSD-25. Mescaline was used in a dosage from 0.3 to 0.5 gm. intramuscularly and LSD-25, 30 to 60 mic. administered orally. These led to states of a dream-like nature with experiences that were clearly remembered afterwards. The procedure is indicted when it is desirable to shorten a course of therapy, reactivate a stalled treatment of a neurosis, and for the purpose of breaking down affect or memory blocks. A psychocathartic effect is almost uniformly produced. Mescaline has a more intensive effect than LSD-25 and should be preferred to the latter in cases where it is desired to obtain the strongest possible emotions. On the other hand, LSD-25 seems to have a broader spectrum; it frequently causes the patient to relive scenes from his earlier personal life and it can also have lasting influences on organic-neurotic states. In the hands of the experienced psychotherapist, and after appropriate experimentation on oneself, and provided the indication is prudently selected, the effects of both mescaline and LSD-25 may constitute very valuable therapeutic aids.

Mann took Frederking's phrase: "in the hands of an experienced psychotherapist" out of context, saying:

The Hamburg doctor Frederking has warned us that the excited state of a mescaline-rausch, psychotherapeutically speaking, is only suitable for very experienced individuals. (And Huxley is not such a person, but rather a dilettante.) The suggested treatment would have be strict and restricted. Nor could it in any way be predicted that the outcome of a mescaline-experiment would be at all worthwhile.

Mann thereby falsifies everything Frederking said in his article. None of the persons cited in Frederking's 'Case Histories' section were 'very experienced' individuals. Moreover, in the section, 'Effect on Normals', Frederking says that he has experimented with said substances "on myself as well as friends outside my medical practice." It was precisely this kind of experimentation which Huxley reported in his Doors of Perception.

Sleeping off his bad conscience by taking 'a bit of Seconal,' Thomas Mann wags his finger at Huxley for writing his 'irresponsible book' which can 'only contribute to the stupefaction of the world.' I respectfully submit that 'stupefaction' is not an accurate description of the state mescaline is considered to engender, but that it more accurately describes the narcotized state induced by Seconal and other barbiturates.



VIII. Endnotes

* John McCole has concisely defined the German word 'Rausch' and its usage in his Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition : "Rausch is far more suggestive than the English equivalent 'intoxication': it quite naturally bears the connotations of such overwhelming feelings as exhilaration, ecstasy, euphoria, rapture, and passion; its onomatopoetic qualities have an equivalent in the slang term 'rush.' 'Intoxication' is the only real option for rendering 'Rausch' in English, but its strong associations with alcohol and toxicity can be misleading. Benjamin uses it to refer to various states of transport, providing a bridge to Klages' theories of dream consciousness and 'cosmogonic eros'." [Cornell Univ. Press, 1993, p. 225].
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 09, 2014 12:52 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 11, 2014 12:01 pm

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/ ... d-s-police

Man High On LSD Breaks Into Homes Demanding Ride To McDonald’s: Police

By Sarah Fruchtnicht, Sun, October 12, 2014

ImageA Washington state man was high on LSD when he allegedly went on a week-long home invasion and robbery spree in the town of Roy.

George Jacobson, 23, is charged with robbery, kidnapping, burglary and theft of a firearm, KCPQ reported. He allegedly broke into homes on Sept. 26 stealing weapons and demanding a ride to McDonald’s. According to police, he said he was high on acid the whole time and making bizarre demands of his victims.

A homeowner told police he walked into his barn to find Jacobson holding a single black rubber boot.

When he asked what he was doing in the barn, Jacobson allegedly went outside, bent down and put his hands in the air.

The homeowner threatened to “sic his dogs” on him and that’s when Jacobson ran away, police said.

He allegedly went to a neighboring home where a female homeowner claims Jacobson drew a gun. She says he wasn’t making sense and kept repeating the words “mean neighbor.”

She asked him what he wanted and he allegedly demanded a sandwich. She made him one and while he ate he allegedly showed her the black boot. He reportedly told her the “boot contained his jewels” and that he was on a “spiritual journey.”

When her husband arrived home they managed to persuade Jacobson to leave and dropped him off at the end of their driveway. The couple later found that a handgun had been stolen from their home.

Police searched for the suspect, but he wasn’t heard from again until the morning of Oct. 3. He was reportedly spotted going through a car at a conference center. He left items, including knives, in the vehicle.

A short time later he was discovered inside a home holding the homeowner’s wallet and keys, according to police. He then fled in the woman’s Honda and crashed the car into a ditch a few miles away.

He left the vehicle and entered another home. There he allegedly demanded a ride from the homeowner. The victim took him to a McDonald’s drive-thru for a soft drink. Then he instructed the victim to drop him off at Rainier where police picked him up.

According to authorities he was high when he was arrested. He allegedly told police that he had a “bad trip” and black out for about a week. The only thing he said he could recall was the “nice man” who took him to the drive-thru.

Jacobson is being held in Pierce County Jail on $1 million bond.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 11, 2014 12:06 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 12, 2014 12:53 pm

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you are Here!

pretty good template for a CHORE WHEEL



http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com/pos ... mplate-for
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:03 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 12, 2014 5:12 pm

http://www.crimemagazine.com/life-and-t ... rug-dealer

Life and Times of a Suburban Drug Dealer

Special to Crime Magazine

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An excerpt from Seth Ferranti’s new book, Gorilla Convict: The Prison Writings of Seth Ferranti. To buy the book or for more information, go to http://www.strategicmediabooks.com or Amazon


by Seth Ferranti

I don't know why I became a drug dealer. Free drugs I suppose. It wasn't something I planned. It just happened. I used to buy quarter ounces of weed or hits of acid from my godbrother and his friends. They had a party house by Springfield Mall. I was always cruising over to score. I was like 17 and these dudes were all 21 or so. I idolized them. They didn't work or nothing. Just hung out, partied, got laid, and sold drugs.

I was bringing them crazy business. Finally I said fuck it. I can do this myself. But I needed some contacts. I asked my godbrother to hook me up and he took me down to Kentucky. It was a long trip but worth it. My godbrother introduced me to country boy Scott, who became my contact. He had a tobacco farm down in Monticello and grew a little weed on the side. He didn't fuck around though. He and his partners had it down to a science. These guys were straight-up country. I'm talking shotguns, moonshine, cockfights, muscle cars, and pit bulls. They planted and cultivated their weed to perfection. They showed me a patch once, way out in the deep forest. I thought they might try to kill and rob me and leave me buried out there. But they didn't. Their marijuana plants were like trees, easily 15-feet tall, with tree size trucks, and an IV-bag mainlined into the roots pumping in plant vitamins. It was some crazy fucking shit.

I still needed an LSD source though, my godbrother said, "Go on tour dude."

The first Grateful Dead show I went to was in Deer Park, Indiana. I drove there from Fairfax with some deadhead wanna-be's. I wasn't really into The Dead, music wise, but I needed an LSD connect. Dead shows were filled with LSD peddlers. The parking lot scene was a carnival, half circus, half flea market, with drugs, tie-dyes, hippies everywhere. I met this kid, Drummer Al, a hardcore Deadhead who was at all the Dead shows. They called him Drummer Al because he was always in the drum pit banging on the congas. This dude was skinny and really burnt out, with natty dreadlocks to his waist. He wore cut-off fatigues and Birkenstocks, but never wore a shirt. He sold me 2,000 hits of triple-set, blotter acid and gave me a number to call in Frisco to order more whenever I needed it. Mail-order LSD was only a phone call away. What an awesome connection, I thought. I figured that, with the Kentucky bud contact and the new mail order acid, my fortune was made.

Back home in Virginia things were jumping. I was becoming very popular. "You got the kind dude?" Someone asked. "Fuck yeah." Everyone welcomed me to the party. The scene was straight suburbia: Burke Centre, Fairfax County, 1988, hot chicks, cool dudes and imported brewskies. Stolis. REM blasted on the stereo. All was enjoyed in the confines of somebody's parents' house. I greeted the hostess, an exotic looking brunette with large brown eyes and creamy olive skin who was a freshman at Penn State. She was wearing a tight black dress that stuck to her curvy, lithe form and magnified the prominence of her breasts which seemed to jut out at me. "Steph, where's the folks?" I inquired, trying not to stare at her tits.

"They're at the beach house, dude, all weekend." She beamed. "You can stay here if you want." She said with a hint of smile. Cool, I thought I can set up shop and possibly hook up with Stephanie.

Everyone had money and everyone wanted drugs. Luckily, I was holding. I had the kind from Kentucky and the blue unicorn trips from Cali. Like the Bluegrass State, I was open for business.

I made money but I spent it just as fast. It just seeped through my hands like water. More Becks for the party? Okay. I got it. Order Dominoes pizza. No problem. A little trip to the Union Street Bar and Grill. Don't worry. I got the tab.

I would take my inner circle of friends out to eat at Red Lobster or wherever. It was always my treat. I was the king of my own court and I was always decked out. I bought Eddie Bauer Polo shirts, Timberland boots, Doc Martins, Air Jordans, and whatever new CDs or Sega Genesis games came out. Shopping was an everyday thing. I would buy something, wear it once, and give it away.

And the drugs-- I smoked weed constantly, like cigarettes. I loved going to parties and busting out a Cheech-and-Chong size joint. "Fucking hell, dude," they would say, "Is that all weed?" I would smile with satisfaction as I nodded my head and lit the stogie. I enjoyed being the man.

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Seth Ferranti

It wasn't long before drugs became my whole life. I bought them. I sold them. I lived them. In '89 I graduated from Robinson High School. It was a blast but it was time to move on. I was still living at home and I'm sure my parents knew what was going on, but not to the full extent. One time I gave my mom twelve grand to hold for me. She was like "Where'd you get this?" I told her I orchestrated a couple of drug deals. "Well you better not do it anymore," she said. I promised her I wouldn't. But I was lying because I was already planning on getting the next load, then cashing out and re-upping. I thought I was a businessman, a professional drug dealer. It was like I had a career or something.

As my clientele grew, so did my cash flow. I started looking for other sources and reached out to my Robinson High School buddy Zane who attended the University of Texas at Arlington. This guy was a first-class stoner. I'm talking weed connoisseur. He had his shit together though. He went to University of Texas full-time and managed a little bar-restaurant at night. He was a solid dude.

I would fly down to Dallas and cop 30-pound loads of commercial-grade brick pot from Zane's source, Mexican Eddie. I would then wrap the bricks in hefty bags, pack them in my suitcase, and check it through baggage for my flight back to DC. I would pay someone $500 to pick up the load from the luggage carousel at DC National just in case there was any problem.

This proved to be a sweet connect as Mexican Eddie had a trucking company based in Matamoras, Mexico. He brought in 500- pound loads. He was always on. The weed wasn't as good as the Kentucky bud, but it was cheaper at $500 a pound. And it moved fast for $1,500 a pound. I also got it on the front so I didn't have to pay for it until I sold it.

This guy Mexican Eddie was a trip too. He had this apartment in Dallas where he entertained his customers and finalized deals. This place was jumping like 24 hours a day. Every time I went there, no matter what time it was, there was this fucking mariachi band playing their Mexican asses off in sombreros and Mexican bowtie suits. It was crazy. Mexican Eddie would be hooping and hollering like Speedy Gonzales, as some Latinas made burritos and served Coronas. A couple of big vatos stood in the background all silent like, acting as Mexican Eddie's personal bodyguards. I could never get over the sight of the mariachi band though at 2 a.m. in the morning playing loudly in the apartment’s living room. It was like a Tiajuana-mescalin trip or something.

Most of my friends were at colleges now and they all wanted drugs. So I started hauling loads up to the universities. I had a set route. I used to drive south down Interstate 81 in Virginia from Fairfax to Radford and Virginia Tech where the Miller brothers took care of business for me. The older brother was an acid freak who moved crazy LSD at Tech. The younger one attended Radford. His thing was pot and women. He hooked me up with a new cutie every time I rolled in. I would drop off Kentucky green. Brick pot. Acid. And I collected whatever money they had for me as I frolicked with whatever girl was at hand. I would then cut through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and meet up with country boy Scott, who always wanted trips to sell at Eastern Kentucky University.

Then I would drive north up Interstate 75 to Lexington and the University of Kentucky where this spacey, psych major Brandon bought acid and kind bud. Then I drove east to West Virginia University in Morgantown where my buddies in the Delta Fraternity sold drugs for me. This was definitely my biggest market and a major party place. I would stop and see the hot brunette Steph at Penn State, who knew a lot of dudes who could move a lot of drugs, before going back to Fairfax. At each stop it was like, "What do you got dude? Here's the money."

For a while I had this girl Kristi, running drugs with me. She would do most of the driving and when I drove she would give me blowjobs. She was also a nymphomaniac and was up for sex whenever, a real dream girl. We did have some close calls on the road though, such as when a Virginia State Trooper pulled right up behind us on Interstate 81 when we were carrying. "You don't think he saw the joint, do you?" Kristi asked me.

"I don't know. Just drive normal," I told her. "And think of white light. Only white light. It will make us seem innocent." Kristi put the joint in the ashtray and turned down the car stereo.

"Are you thinking of white light?" I asked as the five-o flicked on his lights. Momentarily we were gripped with panic, but then the cruiser switched lanes and rocketed past us. Kristi laughed as she grabbed the joint, fired it up, and turned up the thumping bass lines of NWA's "Fuck the Police." I really loved Kristi, but eventually she dumped me for heroin.

Trip parties were also a big event in Fairfax, especially in the summer time when everyone was home from school. A house was always available as people's parents went on vacation. I would make sure to invite everyone and supply the acid. I convinced this girl Shawnthia to throw a trip party one weekend when her parentals cruised. She was a pretty blond chick from Robinson who just graduated. The party was crazy. The techno music was pumping LA Style's "James Brown is Dead" as we held our own mini rave. Everyone was dosed out, chilling, but this one dude started freaking.

"Fuck dude, I'm like totally tripping," he said. "It's like the colors are in my head,.but they're floating and they're falling. I'm drowning in colors. They're everywhere. Don't you see them?" Shawnthia and I laughed as we tripped on the dude wigging out. I decided to make my play, so I grabbed Shawnthia's hand and pulled her into a bedroom. "What are you doing?" She asked.

"Trying to get some privacy," I answered as I guided her head down to my crotch. "Oh," she said, as she unbuttoned my jeans.

I loved my life. I was like a rock star. Drugs, girls, money, blowjobs. What more could I want? I was 19 and on top of the world. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would get busted. I mean, I was no criminal. I was from the suburbs. And I was white. They never busted people from the suburbs, especially not white kids. But I was wrong.

I was in Hawaii when I heard about the cop. The younger Miller brother was making moves via the mail-order LSD contact. Word was that a 16-year old Reston boy tripping on LSD shot and wounded a Fairfax County police officer, Darryl McEachern. The pig chased the kid down while breaking up a field party in Clifton. Apparently the punk was running naked through the woods.

Somehow he snatched the cop's gun and shot him in the chest. Miller told me that our buddy Dave, a long haired metal dude, had sold the acid to the 16-year old. We were fucked.

Soon thereafter, Dave the metal dude started working with the cops and upon my arrival in Fairfax, Miller and I were lured into a sting operation and arrested by undercover Fairfax County narc Mike Sullivan. This kid Scott, a small insecure kid who Miller was breaking in was arrested with us. We were charged with LSD conspiracy by the state of Virginia.

The DEA was called into interrogate us. DEA task force agent Joe Woolf explained that the DEA was well aware of all my dealings and that if I gave up the shipment of LSD I had stashed they would make it worth my while. I told him "I'm not saying anything until I see a lawyer." He yelled back, "Oh yeah, well your lawyer's gonna want to suck my dick."

My parents bailed me out of Fairfax County Jail, putting up their house to secure the bond. They were angry though. The DEA had ransacked our house but no drugs turned up. Then disaster struck. Scott, the new kid, under pressure, cracked, confessing to police that he was holding 100 sheets of acid for me in his basement bedroom. It was time to see that lawyer.

My mother suggested this lawyer Michael Reiger. She had heard he was a hotshot criminal attorney. Not knowing any better, I agreed. In my first consultation with Reiger, he pressed me to tell him the whole story. So I did. I gave him six grand cash as a retainer. "This isn't drug money, is it," he asked.

"Like you fucking care?" I retorted. In my opinion there wasn't much to the case. I expected leniency because I was from the affluent suburb of Burke Centre and had no criminal record. I thought maybe I'd have to go into a drug rehab or something. My attorney, Mr. Reiger, seemed to take the whole affair lightly. But I hadn't taken into account the revenge factor of the Fairfax County Police Department.

At the urging of the Fairfax County Police, the case went federal. They portrayed me as an arrogant hothead who flaunted cash and sold LSD to unsuspecting high school students. The evidence against me consisted of fingerprints on the acid blotter paper and various written records of drug transactions. Mr. Reiger insisted we needed a federal lawyer to assist him. So I hired Tom Carter. The first time I met Tom Carter, he informed me that Christine Wright, the U.S. Attorney, was going to indict me on seven different 10-to-life counts consisting of LSD conspiracy and distribution charges. He counseled that I plead guilty to a Continuing Criminal Enterprise charge that carried a mandatory-minimum 20-year sentence and that I cooperate with the government. The CCE charge was known as the drug-kingpin charge, something they would have slammed on Scarface. It didn't look good.

Following Mr. Carter's advice I pled guilty but I wasn't going to cooperate and I had no intention of serving any time. I always said I'd rather die than go to prison. I started making plans, one of the stipulations of my plea bargain was that I was to be released on my own recognizance. Judge Claude Hilton conducted my plea proceedings at the Alexandria Federal Courthouse in Old Town, Alexandria, on August 28, 1991. "How do you plead?" He demanded.

"Guilty." I answered.

"All right then," he concluded. "The court formally accepts your plea. You are released on a personal recognizance bond until sentencing on December 13, 1991.” I planned on being long gone by then.

My homecoming after the guilty plea was difficult. My parents were angry and disappointed in me. My mom, a religious woman, was particularly devastated. My dad, the military type, was standoffish, offended. I remember my mom crying, telling me I needed to pray to the Lord for guidance. Between her tears I decided all I needed was some luck to get the hell out of there. Luck and a solid bong hit.

I began to prepare for my flight. I had to be careful so as not to raise any suspicions. I was faking my way through debriefings with the feds. During those interviews I was interrogated by U.S. Attorney Christine Wright, DEA Agent Joe Woolf, and the arresting Fairfax County undercover agent Mike Sullivan. I bullshitted them, making them think I would lure in big-time LSD dealers from Cali for them to bust. But the truth was I didn't know any big-time LSD dealers. Even if I did, I'm no rat motherfucker. Anyway, all my dealings were with anonymous people over the phone. The feds didn't know that though.

Christine Wright was particularly fanatical about the case. Her nipples seemed to pop out of her shirt whenever she discussed the possibility of inflicting misery on others. Her diabolical aura made her seem like a female Darth Vader. I felt like Luke Skywalker fighting the dark side of the force. The evil factions of the United States Government were arrayed against me, as I attempted to escape their clutches.

I contemplated suicide, but the prospect of death was terrifying so I decided to stage my suicide instead so the feds would think I was dead, throwing them off my trail and making my transition to a new life easier. If I never turned up, I would be declared legally dead in seven years. It was a good idea I thought.

Great Falls was the place where I would pretend to die. I had it all planned out. I would stage my suicide and then split. Great Falls was a National Park frequented by tourists and kayakers. Vast cliffs towered over the rushing Potomac and the jagged rocks below where class-IV rapids ran wild, representing the most accessible whitewater river in the world. I pictured my body being smashed and mangled against the rocks in the whitewater frenzy as it washed out to the Atlantic Ocean.

I left my wheels in the parking lot for the U.S. Park Police to find. On the banks of the Potomac, near where the Great Falls were crashing down, I left a half-empty bottle of Stoli's vodka, my jacket and wallet, everything necessary to establish my identity. I left a note in the Subaru:

Journey to the center of the star ain't that far
Boundaries are limitless in my head Now I'm dead

Such a tender young imagination Adds to my frustration
I crave death
Death is my maker
So ends the journey of a lost soul
Wrong person Wrong place
Wrong time

The note captured my feelings exactly. I'd rather have died than have gone to jail. The prospect of spending my youth in prison was too much for me to handle. My whole world had crumbled so quickly. I just wanted to escape the situation. I felt so empty inside as all my hopes and dreams turned to dust. I was left with only one aspiration: To run.

As I walked away from the Potomac I walked away from my shattered life. "Let's go." I told my godbrother who drove me to D.C. National Airport to begin my life on the lam.

I flew to LA where an old girlfriend, Nancy, took me in. She was kind of slutty but sexy and pretty. Not too bright though. She lived at Point Magoo, a Navy Port, up the coast from LA. Her dad was the XO on the base. Her folks didn't know I was a fugitive.

This was the start of my fugitive lifestyle. I lived under a series of false identities, zigzagging from Hollywood to Dallas to St. Louis. At first I experienced extreme paranoia. I was always looking over my shoulder. I thought the feds were waiting around every corner to arrest me and take me to prison. It was all mental though. There were no feds, only me and my paranoid delusions.

For the first couple of weeks after my arrival in Cali, Nancy and I scoured the Washington papers for news of my disappearance. It was strange seeing the headline news in the Metro Section of the Washington Post, "Fairfax LSD Kingpin Missing: Suicide Note found in car." As I read the article I became distraught. Law enforcement officials had declared my suicide a hoax after the park police made an extensive search of the area and found no evidence of a body. It appeared my ruse was up.

When my cash flow ran out I ended up in Texas. My old buddy Zane put me up. He reacquainted me with Mexican Eddie and I started moving some brick weed. Zane's friends at UT were good customers but you can't make money selling weed in Texas. It's too cheap and plentiful. I was selling quarters to the Harrigan’s crowd when I met Jeff, a sleepy eyed, mellow, guitar playing stoner who cooked at the restaurant. He started helping me make moves and I eventually found out he was from St. Louis. So I proposed a little trip.

We took 20 pounds of brick pot up to Missouri. The shit flew out the door. At a grand mark-up per pound, the market was good. Through Jeff I met Dan the man who had a glass blowing business and made some killer pipes and Laid-back Dave who was a senior at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Both of those dudes moved some serious weight. It looked like my fortune was rising again. I went by Christopher Hoss. I had different fake ID's with the first name Christopher so when people asked my last name I said Hoss to avoid confusion. It sounded like a Texas name.

Dallas to St. Louis became my new smuggling route. I was running up 20-pound loads every other week. The loot was rolling in as I started hanging with the TGI Friday party crowd. I was actually getting over all that paranoia shit. Then disaster struck again.

I got arrested in a Burger King parking lot with my partner, Jeff the cook. The cops found a half-pound of weed in his truck. We were taken to St. Charles County Jail. The police released us after I agreed to feed them info on high-level traffickers. Another line of bullshit. When they never heard from me they ran my prints and all hell broke loose.

From watching episodes of "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted," I figured it would take two to three months for my prints to match up. What I didn't count on was my U.S. Marshals top-15 status. My prints matched up in three days and the U.S. Marshals Special Fugitive Task Force, led by Marshal Luke Adler, were hot on my trail.

Why was I top 15? Apparently this federali, Henry Hudson, was one of the U.S. attorney's handling my original case in Virginia, and when I fled, I represented the black mark on his otherwise distinguished record. Coincidentally, Hudson left the U.S. Attorney's Office soon thereafter to head the U.S. Marshal's Service. Hudson moved my case to the Most Wanted list, making it among the marshal's top investigative priorities. This was another case of the revenge factor working against me

On October 1, 1993, at 6:45 a.m., U.S. Marshal Luke Adler and the Special Fugitive Task Force busted into my Econolodge motel room in Bridgeton, Missouri, and captured me. I was kind of half expecting it because in the preceding days I could feel them closing in on me. Jeff the Cook had turned himself into the marshals and became an informant. So due to his snitching ass, I was cut off from my clientele, friends, and money. I was stuck in the hotel room with 18 pounds of pot that I couldn't sell. So I tried smoking it.

It was a relief to be caught. I could be myself again. No more fake ID's. No more running from state to state. No more making up phony stories to protect my identity. And at last, I could call mom.

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Seth Ferranti

I was taken to the North County Federal Detention Center. As soon as I was able, I phoned my mother. It was an emotional phone call. I hadn't talked to her for almost two years. She had been repeatedly harassed by the U.S. Marshals during my absence. They threatened her, trying to get her to give information of my whereabouts, information she didn't have. She assured me everything would be okay. She would pray for me and call my lawyers. It was good just to hear her voice. "See you soon mom," I said. As I hung up the phone, I felt tears on my cheek.

I was extradited back to Virginia and brought before the judge. Amid the spectators attending my sentencing, I spotted my mother and gave her a smile. U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea told the judge I was a machine-gun- toting, skinhead-LSD-marijuana freak who corrupted society and deserved to go to prison for life. My lawyer, Reiger, countered that I was a drug- addict mixed-up kid who fell in with the wrong crowd, but that I was really a good person at heart who wanted to change for the better. I felt more like a victim of circumstance, guilty only of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I don't think any of that mattered to the judge.

Judge Hilton tried not to look bored as he contemplated my fate. His countenance grew grim as he shuffled some papers and pronounced my sentence. "You will be committed to the custody of the Attorney General for a term of 304 months." After doing the math, I realized I had a 25-year sentence – more time then how old I was.



Postscript

A first-time, non-violent offender, Ferranti has served 19 years of his 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. His case was widely covered by the Washington Post and Washington Times, and his story was profiled in the pages of Rolling Stone and Don Diva magazine. His current release date is October, 2015. During his incarceration, Ferranti has worked to better himself by making preparations for his eventual release back into society. Ferranti earned an AA degree from Penn State, a BA degree from the University of Iowa through correspondence courses, a Masters from California State University, Dominguez Hills. Along with his studies, Ferranti writes about the prison experience. Numerous magazines including "Don Diva, Slam", "Vice", "FHM". "King", "Feds", "The Ave" have published his articles. Go to http://gorillaconvict.com for more information.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 16, 2014 12:33 am



Peter Green and members of Fleetwood Mac give their accounts of the infamous LSD party at the Highfisch-Kommune in Munich. Band manager Clifford Davis claims that this was the night that Peter Green and Danny Kirwan became ‘seriously mentally ill’. Peter Green says, ‘I had a good play there, it was great.’







http://redarmyfactionblues.com/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 16, 2014 9:58 am

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