Disinformation » LSD

The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’

moezilla — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 02:37:58 +0000

Remember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.

“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are.” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).

He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?

He started his career taking photographs for the annual report of Mobil Oil!

The Incredible Krystle Cole Trip

majestic — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:57:27 +0000

Vice presents the wild trip of Krystle Cole as part of its Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia series:

There is no facile synthesis of the events that transpired at the Wamego missile silo between October 1 and November 4, 2000. The available information is a viscous solution of truths, half-lies, three-quarter truths, and outright lies, the fractionation of which yields no pure product. The dramatis personae are many and varied. The chemicals in question often obscure and untested. What is known is that in 1997, a virtuosic organic chemist named Leonard Pickard joined forces with Gordon Todd Skinner, the heir to a spring-manufacturing fortune, to organize what would later become the world’s most productive LSD laboratory. A laboratory that, according to some sources, produced 90 percent of the LSD in circulation, in addition to unknown quantities of MDMA, ALD-52, ergot wine, and quite possibly LSZ… but I’ll get to that later.

Leonard Pickard is an anomaly among clandestine chemists—one of very few who was able to achieve great success in academia. He studied at Harvard, Purdue, and UCLA while producing kilos of MDA and LSD in secret laboratories under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. He was charismatic and gentlemanly, with excellent posture (he would advise slouchers to let their vertebrae fall vertically, like “a beautiful string of pearls”). A notable photo depicts Leonard at a scientific conference in Sussex, gently appreciating the scent of a long-stemmed rose. He was like that…

[continues at Vice]

Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’

JacobSloan — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:14:51 +0000

Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:

But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s mantra was”Think different.” Jobs did. And he credited his use of LSD as a major reason for his success.

1950s Housewife Tries LSD

JacobSloan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:10:15 +0000

A “stable, well-balanced” housewife describes her experience after receiving a 100 gama dose of LSD-25 as part of government research — she served as a voluntary participant in clinical trials of the drug. She tries to express what she sees but unfortunately “can’t talk in technicolor.” She sums the journey up with, “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty…this is reality.” Luckily, people who attempt such encounters now are jailed.

Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research

James Curcio — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 02:42:42 +0000

Beware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:

Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!

THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!

To be fair, Alex didn’t make this shit up. It’s not just conservatives, authoritarians, loons and republicans who make research concerning the nature and uses of psychedelics virtually impossible. In the years following the relatively methodical experiments of the first psychonauts — Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley and Ernst Jünger (the term “psychonaut” was coined by Jünger in his book Annäherungen [Approaches] (1970)] — A waves of naively uncritical and over-enthusiastic “researchers” provided untold amounts of ammunition to those wishing to delegitimize, halt and prohibit psychedelic research.

The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs

JacobSloan — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:23:57 +0000

I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:

Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.

Drugs And The Meaning Of Life

JacobSloan — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:31:21 +0000

Does the altering of consciousness, through means chemical or otherwise, lie at the very heart of existence? Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, usually known for ripping religion to shreds, delves into the meaning and value of drugs in an essay via SamHarris.org:

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment — and even in our dreams — we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous — though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—while drugs like tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum — 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or “Ecstasy”) has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and it appears to be neurotoxic.

I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable, nor, I think, desirable. Someday, I hope she enjoys a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If my daughter drinks alcohol as an adult, as she probably will, I will encourage her to do it safely. Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience …

Read the rest at SamHarris.org

Did The CIA Test LSD On An Entire French Town?

JacobSloan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:15:19 +0000

For a short, nightmarish period in August 1951, dozens of residents of Pont-Saint-Espirit suffered from extreme hallucinations, leading to five deaths. A newly-unearthed memo hints that it was a CIA experiment, the BBC reports:

On August 26, 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.

“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.

Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon. He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.

Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms. Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.

That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD.

David Belin, meanwhile, was executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in 1975 to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the CIA.

Albarelli believes the Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show – if they had not been “buried” – that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD.

The conclusion drawn at the time was that one of the town’s bakeries, the Roch Briand, was the source of the poisoning. It’s possible, Albarelli says, that LSD was put in the bread.

From LSD To Cyberculture Legend

moezilla — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:53:01 +0000

The legendary editor behind Mondo 2000 magazine reveals how LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a high school underground newspaper all fermented into High Frontiers, Reality Hackers and eventually his famous cyberculture publication as part of the new “Mondo 2000 History Project”.

R.U. Sirius shares the introduction, where he remembers an avante-garde newspaper in college. (”We all have a roaring great time interviewing Timothy Leary… We’re all dazzled, feeling like the host of Planet Earth’s party had lifted the velvet rope and let us in.”) But he also describes how he came to edit the first “cyber culture” magazines (predating Wired) from 1984-1998, and announces a new “open source history project” – a collaboratively-edited electronic document with stories and perceptions from “All those who touched directly upon the history of the scene/magazine”.

At the age of 31, Sirius moves to Marin County with a California to-do list: “Start the Neopsychedelic Wave. Start a Neopsychedelic band. Start a Neopsychedelic magazine…” At one point he moves in with a fugitive in a renegade group of psychedelic Hare Krishnas, and “A couple of days after the psilocybin trip, the resolve to go forward with the creation of a psychedelic magazine took hold of me….”

Wednesday night he’s giving a free talk in San Francisco!

Carey Grant: The First Star To Promote The Wonders Of LSD

JacobSloan — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:51:09 +0000

Who was the first mainstream American celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs?

Carey Grant, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the ’30s through the ’60s, who had his “life transformed” by LSD and “arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.” The blog of New York’s WFMU radio examines the crazy saga of Carey Grant and LSD:

I learned many things in the quiet of that room … everything is or becomes its own opposite … You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream … I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship. — Cary Grant

When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.

Cary Grant had been interested in various forms of mysticism throughout the nineteen fifties. Initially he was fascinated by hypnosis, particularly self-hypnosis. While filming a knife fight in The Pride and the Passion (1957), Grant received a series of gashes across the torso. His body was covered with scars for several months. Cary had been practicing self-hypnosis prior to the injuries as a means to achieve “complete relaxation.”

He put himself into a transcendental state to will the scars from his body. Grant said he entered the shower one day with the scars, put himself into a relaxed state, and left the shower without a mark on his body. Apparently his doctors were amazed. Skeptics might theorize that Grant was just covered in dried-out stage blood from the film — and this was the first time he’d showered in several months.

National Geographic Puts LSD Under The Microscope

ArsMoriendi — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:15:35 +0000

That's enough acid to send an army insane!

(Via Sitting Now), National Geographic’s Explorer series examines the myths and effects of LSD:

LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.

Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness.

Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future.

Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.

The Mystery Of Cursed French Bread (A Secret CIA Experiment?)

ralph — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:53:48 +0000

Ted Goodman on PhyOrg recounts the strange events of August 16, 1951, when dozens of villagers in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds, from, what was described as by villagers, eating le pain maudit (”cursed bread”).

Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.

Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.

‘CIA Experiment’ Sends French Village Mad

Raymond — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:08:42 +0000

From News.com.au:

A US writer has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA spiked a French village’s food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.

The Sun online reports journalist H P Albarelli Jr came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of a biochemist who fell from a 13th floor window two years after a mystery illness that caused an entire French village to go temporarily mad 50 years ago.

Hundreds of residents in picturesque Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations on August 16, 1951.

At least five people in the southern French village died and dozens were locked up in asylums after witnessing terrifying hallucinations of dragons and fire.

In the horror scenes an 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs.

[Read more at News.com.au]

Mindfvck: Drawings Done Under the Influence of LSD

ralph — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:29:47 +0000

Interesting site callled MINDFVCK I just StumbleUpon-ed (below is an obvious before/after):

These nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s.

The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Read/See More: MINDFVCK

LSD Experiments: Soldiers On Acid

ralph — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:08:18 +0000

Posted on Environmental Graffiti:

What looks like a soldier having a bit of fun was actually a series of controlled experiments that lasted for decades. We’re talking about mind control or the use of hallucinogenics such as LSD as weapons used in warfare. Said to have been pioneered by the Nazis; Britain, the United States and others soon followed suit with their own experiments on unwitting soldiers and civilians, the Vietcong and now terrorists…

Images say more than a thousand words; this video taken in 1963 of British soldiers under the influence of LSD surely does:

As the narrator aptly describes,

Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.

Can Mind-Altering Drugs have Mental Health Benefits?

Raymond — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:50:49 +0000

From the Telegraph:

New studies are testing whether psychedelic drugs such as LSD and MDMA can treat OCD, post traumatic stress and cancer related anxiety.

On September 19 this year, 12 people gathered in the suburban Hermsdorf district of Berlin for a group psychotherapy session that allegedly involved illegal drugs. A day later, two of the participants were dead and another in a coma. The substances used and exact cause of death have yet to be confirmed. Local newspaper reports have claimed that heroin and MDMA (ecstasy) were taken, but other drugs may have been in circulation.

Garri Rober, the therapist who led the session which included his wife, Elke, is facing possible charges in connection with the deaths and on suspicion of supplying illegal drugs. The other nine participants were released from hospital the next day.

This tragedy, which received international coverage, threatens to derail a fledgling renaissance in legitimate research using psychedelic drugs in the management of common disorders from migraines to obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.

LSD, the drug that was to fuel the Sixties counter-culture, was first explored as a treatment for conditions ranging from neurosis to alcoholism during the Fifties, the “golden age” of psychedelic research. As its use spread from the consulting room to the street, concern about its misuse grew, and it was banned in 1968. MDMA was first used by American therapists in the Seventies before it was adopted by “rave” culture and subsequently banned in 1987.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

Animation: Pitcher Dock Ellis’s No-Hitter while on LSD

Raymond — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:27:28 +0000

From BoingBoing:

We’ve posted before about Dock Ellis. He was the baseball player who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping balls on LSD. Ellis died last year. In his honor, James Blagden and Chris Isenberg animated Ellis’s retelling of his acid adventure on the mound. “Dock Ellis’s Legendary LSD No-Hitter animation“

[Read more at BoingBoing]

UK Drugs Chief: Alcohol and Cigarettes More Dangerous Than Ecstasy, LSD and Cannabis

majestic — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:04:07 +0000

The Belfast Telegraph reports:

The British Government’s chief drug adviser has sparked controversy by claiming ecstasy, LSD and cannabis are less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.

Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, attacked the decision to make cannabis a class B drug.

He accused former home secretary Jacqui Smith, who reclassified the drug, of “distorting and devaluing” scientific research.

Prof Nutt said smoking cannabis created only a “relatively small risk” of psychotic illness. And he claimed advocates of moving ecstasy into class B from class A had “won the intellectual argument”.

All drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should be ranked by a “harm” index, he said, with alcohol coming fifth behind cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, and methadone.

Tobacco should rank ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy.

Prof Nutt said: “No one is suggesting that drugs are not harmful. The critical question is one of scale and degree. We need a full and open discussion of the evidence and a mature debate about what the drug laws are for – and whether they are doing their job.” …

[Read more: Belfast Telegraph]

Got Acid? I’m Tripping Out. The Return of Hofmann’s Problem Child: LSD

majestic — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:14:29 +0000

Gary Stix writes in Scientific American:

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.

For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”

The preliminary study picks up where investigators left off. It explores the possible therapeutic effects of the drug on the intense anxiety experienced by patients with life-threatening disease, such as cancer…

LSD Research Resurgence

klintron — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:04:44 +0000

Erin Halliday, SF Gate:

Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD and other hallucinogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their work, researchers at a handful of major institutions – including UCSF and Harvard University – are reigniting studies. Scientists started looking at less controversial drugs, like ecstasy and magic mushrooms, in the late 1990s, but LSD studies only began about a year ago and are still rare.

The study at UCSF, which is being run by a UC Berkeley graduate student, is looking into the mechanisms of LSD and how it works in the brain. The hope is that such research might support further studies into medical applications of LSD – for chronic headaches, for example — or psychiatric uses. [...]

In 1966, the federal government made LSD illegal, and by the early 1970s, research into all psychedelic drugs in humans had come to a halt, although some scientists continued to study the drugs in animals.

(What a Wonderful Place to Be)

The Psychedelic Torchbearers – Out There Radio: Episode 48

Raymond — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:19:51 +0000

Out There Radio – Episode 48: The Psychedelic Torchbearers

Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS

In the 48th episode of WUOG’s Out There Radio, we revisit the issue of psychedelics with biographical sketches of two generations of psychedelic torchbearers: Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. Don’t miss our final take on the origins and continuation of the contemporary psychedelic movement in our examination of its two most well known, and controversial, proponents. Included in this episode are spoken word pieces and archival interviews from these two fascinating men.

L.et’s S.ave D.emocracy – Out There Radio: Episode 13

Raymond — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:37:42 +0000

Out There Radio – Episode 13: L.et’s S.ave D.emocracy

Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS

Don’t miss our interview with author and psychedelic scholar Robert Forte. We discuss historical and contemporary uses of entheogens (psychedelics) within the context of religion. Also, we take a closer look at the meaning of the psychedelic explosion of the 1960’s and its most controversial figure, Timothy Leary.

Robert Forte interned with Stan Grof before studying history and the psychology of religion at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and served on the board of directors of the Albert Hoffman Foundation. Since 1985 he has been president of the Church of the Awakening.