LSD AND THE CIA :: essays research papers

LSD was invented in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin High. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children.So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a shortsighted chat with God.While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.At least one person committed self-destruction after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a highstory plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardi an did more than watch. In June 1994 the victims family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others bewildered their grip on reality.MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA ingestiond for its program directed at gaining control over clement behavior through covert use of chemical and biological materials, as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World warfare 11, of which the CIAs veteran spies were justly proud.Helms later became CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his Watergate "lying to Congress" conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powerss aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notably unethical aspects with the rationale, We are not Boy Scouts.At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogra m the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right-Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this reprogramming.