 On November 28, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson plunged to his death from a window of a New York City hotel. Olson was a military biochemist working for the CIA, but when he started suffering from paranoia about his work, he was moved to a psychiatric hospital. On the way to the hospital, Olson and his solitary CIA escort spent the night in New York City in a room on the 10th floor of a hotel. This is where, according to the official report, Olson committed suicide. 22 years later, it would be revealed in declassified documents that Olson's paranoia was based on fears that he was being secretly drugged with LSD while on the job. His fears were not unfounded, and in fact, Olson had been unknowingly given a dose of LSD while on a work retreat, as had several other CIA employees. In 1996, the New York District Attorney's Office opened an investigation into Olson's death, and what they found strongly suggests that Olson's death was not a suicide, but rather a murder to cover up the reckless experiments the CIA was conducting with the drug LSD. I'm Chris Cowton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In this episode, we are going to look at the history of LSD out of all the drugs we've talked about on this podcast so far. I think the history LSD is probably the most difficult to believe, at least for people outside of the libertarian community in particular, so this episode is going to cover some truly fascinating stories. In 1938, a chemist named Albert Hoffman was researching the pharmacology of Ergot for Sando's laboratories in Switzerland. He was searching for a compound that would stimulate blood flow, and his 25th Ergot derivative was a compound known as lysergic acid diethylamide, thus his reason for calling it LSD-25. Like the compounds before it, this substance seemed to be of no value, so he placed the clear liquid in a glass vial and bare it sat on his laboratory shelf for five years. On April 16, 1943, Dr. Hoffman decided to run some more tests on LSD-25. While he was preparing a new batch of the compound, he accidentally let it touch his ungloved fingertips, and the LSD was absorbed through his skin. So for the next three hours, Dr. Hoffman sat in his laboratory days to buy, I'm quoting from his diary here, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality in depth, alternating with a vivid kaleidoscopic play of colors. So he had just experienced the world's first acid trip, at least first formal acid trip. There were episodes in which people seemed to have hallucinate off of the rye that LSD is derived from. This is the first one with actual LSD. Hoffman decided to continue experimenting on himself, and he swallowed the next time he decided to try the LSD, he swallowed 250 micrograms of the compound, which seemed like a very small dose, but LSD is actually incredibly potent in small quantities, so it hit him just far stronger than expected. And this experience was much less pleasant than the first. After dosing himself, Hoffman and his assistant hopped on their bicycles and rode to Hoffman's home, so he's basically acid tripping while he's bike riding home, and he wrote in his diary about this experience, he said, I had a great difficulty in speaking coherently, my field of vision swayed before me, and objects appeared distorted like images and curved mirrors. I had the impression of being unable to move from the spot, although my assistant told me afterwards that we had cycled at a good pace. Occasionally, I felt as if I were out of my body. I thought I had died, my ego was suspended somewhere in space, and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa. This kind of hallucination would come to be referred to as a bad trip. Thus LSD was born. Hoffman continued his experiments, but it was his colleague, Dr. Werner Stoll, who first published his findings on the psychological properties of LSD in the Swiss Archives of Neurology in the year 1947. In 1949, he published another report entitled A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts. From these publications, LSD was brought to the attention of the CIA shortly after the agency was formed in 1947. Since World War II, the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, had already been experimenting with a highly potent strain of cannabis as a possible truth drug to use in advanced interrogations. Now with the early reports on LSD, agency officials thought that they might have the substance needed to finally develop a mind control drug. The CIA, since its formation, and even really before its formation with the OSS, it had been experimenting with cannabis, heroin, cocaine, and mescaline as potential mind control drugs. As part of project paperclip, they even brought in roughly 600 Nazi scientists after the war to help conduct their research, since the Nazis had been conducting similar research prior to their defeat. So in 1950, the CIA merged all existing mind control studies into a single project code named Bluebird. Project Bluebird was highly classified so that only its members and the CIA director Roscoe Healing-Ketter knew of its goings on. The next year, Project Bluebird was reformed under the name Project Artichoke. Now you can find the documents online since they've all been released as part of the Freedom of Information Act, and they're available on the CIA website, and if you're able to wade through the bureaucratic nonsense, there really is some interesting stuff in these documents. I'm going to read you one particularly interesting part of a 1954 document regarding one of Artichoke's experiments. It says, The essential elements of the problem are as follows. One, as a trigger mechanism for a bigger project, it was proposed that an individual of blotted out dissent, approximately 35 years old, well educated, proficient in English and well established socially and politically in the blotted out government, be induced under Artichoke to perform an act involuntarily of attempted assassination against a prominent blotted out politician, or if necessary against an American official. After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the subject would be taken into custody by the government and thereby disposed of, and disposed of in quotation marks. So this is the kind of thing that the CIA was trying to figure out how to accomplish, and LSD was one of the substances they thought could be harnessed for just such a purpose. Assassinating people probably in communist countries since this was 1944. My guess would be Cuba, but I don't really know what government they were referring to in the document when they blotted it out. As an interrogation drug, LSD seemed promising, at least at first, and in one experiment for example a military officer was instructed not to reveal a certain military secret right before he was given a dose of LSD, and while he was under the influence of the drug, and I'm quoting from the report here, he gave all the details of the secret and after the effects of the LSD had worn off, the officer had no knowledge of revealing information. So with these early experiments, the CIA really thought they had hit the jackpot, so LSD just overtook all the other drugs as the primary focus of experimentation. One of the experiments funded by the CIA was conducted by Dr. Harris Isbell who worked with heroin addicts at the Addiction Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. While addicts were checked in for drug rehabilitation, Isbell was secretly dosing them with LSD every day for literally close to three months at a time. So he reported to the CIA, and this was actually what they looked to as promised in the study, he reported that some patients were convinced that their hallucinations were the product of people controlling their minds, so obviously LSD must actually have mind control potential. Eventually words spread among addicts about the goings on at Lexington, so patients started checking themselves in just to have access to the mystery drug they were being dosed with. On April 13th, 1953, Alan Dulles, who is now the director of the CIA, he sanctioned a new operation to study LSD, which was called MKUltra. This is the one that most people who are interested in this stuff have heard of to some degree. So MKUltra was separate from the Project Artichoke Unit, and the two groups quickly saw themselves as rivals. It was MKUltra's lead scientist, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, who got approval to dose unknowing citizens with acid. They started by dosing fellow agents, so by the mid-1950s, if you were a CIA employee, a surprise acid trip was literally just a risk associated with the job. As agents were secretly spiking each other's coffee, they started just with agents within the groups, MKUltra and Project Artichoke, but eventually it moved on to agents who had no connection to the LSD experiments, so just the agents who did could watch them trip, and it was basically just a bunch of CIA pranksters having fun, but they're justifying it under the purview of MKUltra and Project Artichoke. Among the victims of these surprise acid trips was Frank Olson. So he was a biochemist who specialized in biological warfare, and he was not connected to MKUltra or Project Artichoke, and he had never taken LSD before in his life. And in 1953, he and several other CIA technicians went on a three-day hunting trip in Maryland, and Dr. Gottlieb was one of the members involved in the hunting trip, and on day two, he secretly spiked the evening cocktails with LSD. And after the drug started to set in, Gottlieb revealed to everybody what he had done. And most of the members there just enjoyed the prank. They erupted into laughter, they thought it was completely hilarious, but Olson did not. During this trip, Olson became extremely depressed and withdrawn, and he even requested that his boss fire him for having messed up the experiment during the retreat. Messed up the experiment were his words. Instead, his boss sent him to Dr. Harold Abramson, who was a physician. He wasn't a psychiatrist. He was just a physician. He was working in an allergy clinic out of Columbia University. And although Abrams wasn't a psychiatrist, Olson opened up to him about his fears that the CIA was spiking his coffee with substances to keep him from sleeping, that he believed that people were plotting against him, even said he heard voices telling him to throw his wallet away, and he followed these instructions, even destroying several uncashed checks in the process. So Abrams reported that Olson was in, quote, a psychotic state with delusions of persecution that had been crystallized by the LSD experience. This is when the CIA decided to move him to a psychiatric clinic known as Chestnut Lodge, and on the way there, he and the CIA assigned to escort him checked into the Statler Hilton, where Olson apparently jumped out of the 10th story window to his death the next morning. It would be decades before anybody would seriously question the suicide story, and I won't go into details about that here because it would require an entire episode in itself. H.P. Albarelli Jr. actually wrote an 800-page book documenting the entire investigation entitled A Terrible Mistake, which he also goes into a great deal of detail about the CIA experiments with LSD, and in the book he openly refers to Olson's death as a murder. But if you want that story, I'd recommend you look into it for yourself so you can decide whether or not the evidence is convincing because it's just far too much to cover here. Olson's death, whether or not it was a suicide, immediately meant the halting of the in-house LSD experiments as they were now seen as too significant of a liability. Instead, the CIA decided to move their experiments to the civilian world. Dr. Gottlieb went to Harry Anzlinger and requested the services of one of his best agents, so Anzlinger agreed and loaned him an FBN agent named George Hunter White. I think I briefly mentioned George Hunter White in another episode and said that there was going to be more about this guy, so here is me keeping my promise. This dude was about as bad as you can imagine a government agent being. If there's any figure who makes the libertarian case against giving people even small amounts of power, it's George Hunter White. His first assignment was to rent an apartment in Greenwich Village in New York, all funded by the CIA. He turned the apartment into a safe house and installed two-way mirrors between two of the rooms, as well as surveillance equipment, and so White would then lure women up to his apartment and secretly dose them with LSD. Then he would go into the other room where he could watch them through the two-way mirror and he would keep a diary of how they reacted. The frequency of bad trips was so significant in this environment that White nicknamed LSD Stormy and continued to refer to the drug as Stormy for the remainder of his 14 years working for the CIA. In 1955, White moved his base of operations to San Francisco. This is when he started Operation Midnight Climax. In this CIA-funded operation, George Hunter White would enlist the services of prostitutes. He paid them $100 a night and he offered them protection from legal problems if they were to help him, so if they got arrested, he'd get them off the hook. He got them to go to bars to pick up men who the prostitutes would then secretly dose with LSD and while the unsuspecting bar patrons were acid-tripping, White or some of his subordinates would be sitting in a booth across the bar just taking photographs of them. In the off hours, White and his men would party with CIA-provided drugs and have sex with the prostitutes and when they weren't doing that, they were harassing drug pushers in San Francisco as an FBN agent. All of this went on for a full eight years before it was finally shut down in the 1960s, so he's getting prostitutes to spike civilians with LSD and these people, they don't know what's going on. LSD wasn't even really a thing at the time, so they're calling ambulances, Lord knows what happens to them. There's no record of that, but they're being taken to the hospital, of course the government's not paying for their bill, they don't know what happened, and then when he's not doing that, he's partying with drugs and hookers, both of which are illegal, but he's doing it all with the sanction of the CIA and when he's not doing that, he's hypocritically harassing drug dealers in San Francisco as part of the other organization under Anselinger that he's associated with. So there's an incredibly famous quote by George Hunter White in reflecting on his work for the CIA. This quote is actually given its own page before the dedication in Albarelli's book where White said in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, he said, I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, still, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest? That's the kind of man George Hunter White was. Other MKUltra projects were equally disturbing. One recipient of MKUltra money named Loretta Binder kept children from the ages of seven to 11 years old, pumped full of LSD and other hallucinogens for weeks. In the case of two children, she actually did this on and off for nearly a year. So she's just taken like prepubescent children and keeping toast with hallucinogens because they wanted to study, if I remember correctly, they wanted to study how children communicated with each other. The logical connection here is beyond me, but this actually did take place. One of the creepiest MKUltra doctors was Dr. D. U. N. Cameron. So he was particularly obsessed with schizophrenia, and MKUltra funded his experiments on schizophrenia patients. Now, some of this stuff doesn't have to do with LSD, but it's worth talking about anyway just because you can't, if you want to offer a critique of the government, this is stuff you can't leave out. So these experiments did include slipping unsuspecting schizophrenics and other psychiatric patients with LSD, and he frequently ordered experimental lobotomies on patients. And when he was doing these lobotomies, he would have only a mild anesthetic administered because he wanted the patients to be awake so he could document their changes in consciousness as they were cut open. So he's literally torturing people for experiments like Nazi doctor experiments. There's a book titled The Nazi Doctors that just documents all the horrible things Nazis did to Jewish people during World War II as scientific experiments. Dr. U. N. Cameron is not one of the Nazi doctors that was brought over, but he's doing things that just remind me very much of the experiments I read about in the book Nazi Doctors. It's just creepy, creepy stuff. Another experiment with a schizophrenic patient named Robert Logie, who Cameron held for 23 days in a room, and he had an audio recording playing over and over again that said, you killed your mother. You killed your mother. So this was just looping for 23 days while the schizophrenic was held captive in this room. So by the time Logie was released, he was shocked to discover that not only had he not killed his mother, but that she was still alive and well. Another of Cameron's patients during his MK Ultra experiment was a woman named Linda McDonald who was actually referred to him just for mild postpartum depression and I think she had back pain. And so Dr. Cameron was recommended as just this great authority on this stuff. She wasn't suffering from anything serious, but she was sent to him for his expertise. In her notes, she even said that she wrote down that she was told to bring her guitar with her. So this woman was 25 years old. She was married and she had five children. And Cameron diagnosed her, as far as we can tell, this wasn't even a valid diagnosis. There's no evidence that she had this condition before he diagnosed her with it, but he diagnosed her as an acute schizophrenic, so severely schizophrenic. And he had her transferred to what he called his sleep room, which is basically a torture chamber, and he kept her there for the next 86 days. And while she was there, they kept her sedated, almost like in a point of just being comatose, almost the entire time. And over the 86 days, they administered 102 electroshock treatments. So when she was finally released, she had no memory and she even had to be toilet trained again because the treatment had reduced her basically to an infantile state. She didn't know who she was. She didn't know anything about her family. She didn't even know how to use the toilet properly when she came out of this. So Logie and McDonald were just two of the many patients that Cameron tortured with MK Ultra funds. And Cameron was just one of the many doctors working under Sidney Gottlieb. So I obviously don't have time here to tell every horror story that came out of this project, but numerous books have been written on the subject, so there's quite a bit of material. One final interesting aside is that it was also the MK Ultra experiments that introduced a young Ken Casey to the drug LSD. Ken Casey, if you're not familiar with him, he would go on to be a big figure in the counterculture world, and he is most famous for writing one flu over the cuckoo's nest. So he discovered LSD through the MK Ultra program when he was a creative writing student at Stanford when he was younger. So the CIA obviously never developed its mind control drug like they hoped, but for a while they did attempt to use it to undermine the credibility of socialist world leaders. The idea was that an agent would slip the leader some LSD right before they gave a publicized speech so that people would see them rambling about God knows what and they would lose faith in the socialist leader and replace him. That El Castro was among the targets of these missions before the CIA just gave up and moved on to simply trying to assassinate him. The other one was the president of Egypt at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and he was the target of these surprise hallucination missions, and other documents mentioned that this was attempted on other Cold War enemies as well, though nothing really ever came of it. It never worked. Also in the 1950s, one of the vice presidents of JP Morgan and Company, this is moving on from the CIA stuff and getting into just the cultural rise of LSD, which I think is also very, very interesting. So one of the vice presidents of JP Morgan and Company, a man named R. Gordon Wasson, he and his wife, they like to travel up and down the country in search of different kinds of mushrooms. And their hobby eventually brought them to Mexico, where they were introduced to a certain kind of mushroom used medicinally in rural areas called tionanacotl, which meant God's flesh. After eating these mushrooms, Wasson began to hallucinate, and in 1957 he published an article in Life Magazine detailing his experiment. He said, quote, for the first time, the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time, it did not mean someone else's state of mind. And among the many people who read the article was a young psychiatry professor by the name of Timothy Leary, who was something of an up-and-comer in the profession. He actually helped write a textbook. He also, I don't have this in my notes here, but one interesting tidbit is he created a personality test that was used by the government to assess the stability of prisoners and other people. It was called the Leary Test, I think. It was named after him. And when he later went into prison, when he was arrested, he was actually administered his own personality test that he designed. So obviously it came back that he was just mentally perfectly competent, which probably wasn't true at the time. He really went off his rocker in later years. He was a very brilliant guy, but he went off his rocker. But I just always found it a funny story that he was administered a personality test in prison that he helped design. But anyways, three years after Wasson's article, when Leary was working at Harvard University, he took a trip to Mexico himself. And at the time of the trip, Leary had never so much as experimented with marijuana. So the magic mushrooms that he consumed during this trip were his first experience with any kind of mind-altering substance. Leary later referred to this episode as, quote, above all and without question, the deepest religious experience of my life. He genuinely believed that he had found God. When he got back to Harvard, he started doing research on psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and another Harvard professor named Richard Alpert. He would later be called, I can't remember his weird LSD name. It was like Ram Dass, I think, something like that. I don't have that on my notes either, but he also kind of went off the rails. But Richard Alpert was intrigued by Leary's work and became his research partner. The first and possibly most famous study conducted with psilocybin by Leary and Alpert was one looking at criminal psychology. In this study, members of Leary's research team would take mushrooms with some prisoners during therapy sessions, while other prisoners were only treated with conventional therapy without the drug. So the results of these experiments showed that the prisoners treated with psilocybin had a recidivism rate of 25% compared to 80% of those treated with only conventional therapy. I've seen some articles, like blog articles circulating online that talk about this experiment. And I think I've read that some of them attribute it to LSD. This was not an LSD experiment. This was before Leary even knew what LSD was. So it was a psilocybin experience. So do be careful if you're looking at some of the old history of Timothy Leary, some of the stuff is falsely attributing LSD to what was actually psilocybin. Leary would not actually be introduced to LSD until a couple years later when a friend named Michael Hollingshead tried psilocybin with Leary and really wasn't impressed. So he urged Leary to try LSD. Hollingshead had actually obtained a mayonnaise jar containing one gram of LSD while he was living in New York. A gram of LSD is enough LSD for 10,000 doses. So this mayonnaise jar of LSD was just a gigantic, gigantic amount. At first Leary was skeptical. He thought that just one psychedelic experience was the same as any other. Like a psychedelic was a psychedelic, right? And there was no need to bother with any variety. But one night sometime later, Hollingshead convinced some mutual friends to try LSD and Leary was present to this. And so when Leary saw their reaction to the drug, he took an entire spoonful, just a gigantic dose out of the mason jar. And after that one trip, Leary would never look back. So Leary and Alpert brought LSD into their experiments at Harvard and the experiments gained at least enough attention that the CIA started issuing warnings that quote, information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental or personal reasons should be reported immediately. In addition, any information of agency personnel involved with doctors Alpert or Leary or with any other group engaged in this type of activity should also be reported. Now, this was when LSD was still legal, by the way, but the CIA was already issuing these statements saying that you need to turn people in for this. So it kind of foreshadowed what was to come, obviously. It's also worth noting that when Leary was experimenting at Harvard with hallucinogens, he was taking almost the entirely opposite approach from the experiments conducted by the CIA, where the CIA was secretly dosing people with LSD in a hostile environment and then interrogating them, basically with men in lab coats holding clipboards. Leary was coaching his patients on what to expect from the encounter. So it was a non-hostile environment. It wasn't a surprise acid trip and he wasn't interrogating them. He was coaching them and basically providing psychiatric therapy as part of the process. So the result was that the CIA's impression of LSD was like George Hunter White observed. LSD created just these very horrifying hallucinations. Leary's experiments, by contrast, had effectively no cases of so-called bad trips. The experiments at Harvard quickly became highly controversial, especially after students were testifying that Leary and Alpert had given them LSD, though it should be mentioned that they were trying to defend the pair. They said it was one of them said it was the most educational experience he had ever been through. But in 1963, Richard Alpert became the first Harvard faculty member to be fired since the 19th century and Timothy Leary became the second only a few days later. The Harvard scandal made Leary famous though and this is when he decided that his mission in life was to spread the religion of LSD to young people everywhere. Timothy Leary was essentially now beginning his life as the high priest of LSD, which he would be known as for the rest of his life and still is referred to as such pretty much today. Now what Leary and Alpert did after being fired from Harvard basically just shows how off the deep end they had already gone. In 1963, right after being fired, they founded a group called International Federation for Internal Freedom which quickly amassed several thousand dues-paying members. The group moved to a hotel in Zihuataneo, Mexico where they continued their now cultural experiments with LSD. More than 5,000 people applied to come live at Zihuataneo which was starting to look a lot like some kind of like cult commune and there was a tower on the beach and the rule on the compound was that there had to be somebody keeping watch in the tower at all times and whoever was keeping watch was required to be high on acid during their entire shift. Even potheads and beatniks who were denying membership in the compound started setting up camp not far away. So rumors started spreading about the orgies that were supposedly taking place constantly at the hotel. I don't know if these rumors were true or not but the word spread through the Mexican media and only six weeks after they arrived, Mexican government decided that they just needed kick the group out. Luckily for them, they had made friends with William Mellon Hitchcock who was the grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil and the nephew of Andrew Mellon. So this guy had inherited an incredibly large fortune. He was living quite causally off of $15,000 per week. And remember that this was in the 1960s. So that was a lot of money. So Hitchcock let the group relocate to his 4,000 acre estate in New York and he only charged them a measly $500 a month in rent. So this estate had a 64 room mansion called Melbrook. It had stables for horses. It had tennis courts, lake, polo fields, all kinds of amazing things. So the group when they moved there, they renamed themselves the Castalia Foundation and they set up shop at Melbrook. And just as a funny story, while they were on the plane over to Melbrook, Richard Albert had the mayonnaise jar of LSD in his suitcase and it spilled out and soaked into his clothes. So not wanting to waste any of their 10,000 doses of acid, the group traveling from Zewatnaya would get high by sucking on Richard Albert's underwear. So life at Melbrook was basically just a constant acid party with people tripping on acid for up to 10 days at a time. Hitchcock rarely even joined in with them. He was working on Wall Street. He actually was, I guess, being productive as an investor. But he took up residence in a four bedroom guest house a half mile away and he did join them in some time. So he was part of the acid culture but he wasn't constantly getting high like a hippie as everybody else was. But he was funding them essentially. So I guess communist living works when you have a mega rich person funding you. So out of this group sprang the acid culture that just exploded in the 60s and 70s. And there's a lot of rich cultural history here which you can read about in the book Acid Dreams which is the primary book I'm pulling from on this episode. But I can't really go over it all. I just enjoy some of the stories that came out of it too much to not mention them. So one of my favorite quick stories is a new figure who joined the Millbrook group named Arthur Klepps. After his own experience with LSD he thought he had found religion just like many other people had. And he founded a church in 1966 called the Neo-American Boohoo Church and he even wrote a Boohoo Bible which contained cartoons, true or false tests among other ridiculous sections that one titled The Bombardment and Annihilation of the Planet Saturn. So it was just crazy, crazy religious movement. And he wanted to get government sanctioned for the church's LSD use which he was inspired by the peyote rituals that were approved for the Native American church. So he sued in a court for the same right for LSD. This by the way was right before acid became illegal. So it was when the government was discussing criminalizing LSD it was criminalized in 1966 in fact in California and it was made illegal nationally in 1968. But the judge hearing the case just threw it out completely because he did not believe and this is absolutely true here he did not believe that a church whose official theme song was Ro Ro Ro Your Boat was a serious religion which was naturally upsetting to Klepps who was now referring to himself as the Chief Boohoo. So by the second half of the 1960s LSD use was coming under heat. In 1966 Congress held a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency to talk about the so-called LSD problem and with a growing idea of the domino theory of drug abuse and name taken from the domino theory of communism but what we really just refer to as the gateway drug theory now the idea of criminalizing LSD was being strongly considered. And like other drugs demagogic and false headlines were spreading a misleading narrative about LSD. One government official actually called LSD the greatest threat facing our country today more dangerous than the Vietnam War if you can believe that. Now don't get me wrong the stuff going on at Milbrooks is not in my opinion a testament to how great LSD is these people were nuttier than a peanut farm but headlines like thrill drug warps mind kills was just simply false in fact most of the stuff still taught in public schools about LSD is completely untrue I remember being told that LSD stores in your fat cell can be triggered years later giving people surprise acid trips this is pretty much a complete fabrication to the degree that it's true at all it's something that occurs so rarely as to be just incredibly statistically insignificant the actual physiological effects of LSD appear to be entirely non-threatening so the dangers of this drug mostly stem from the fact as far as I've seen that people were quitting their jobs and advocating communism which is dangerous enough in itself I suppose but in the hearing on LSD Congress heard testimonies from CIA officials who had been conducting LSD experiments in the decades prior Timothy Leary also testified and as crazy as this guy was through much of his life and he really was crazy his testimony was really quite sensible and he said that he did not advocate indiscriminate use of hallucinogens and that people needed to understand what they were doing when they used them as early as his Harvard experiences he engaged in coached therapy sessions with LSD in which he would prepare the patient for the LSD trip and this made bad experiences nearly non-existent like I mentioned before and in fact these kinds of LSD therapy sessions still take place in secret though obviously it's hard to get a good idea of how widespread they are since it's illegal but that actually does still exist in the United States and Canada today so the CIA was testifying about this terror inducing drug while Leary was testifying about a drug that actually had legitimate psychotherapy potential and as far as the research can tell us this potential is valid if inadequately studied things to the laws there does really seem to be some potential in using LSD in psychotherapy at least the early experiments showed a lot of promise but the FDA as you can expect sided with family and they took the CIA testimonies as the more valid so on October 24th 1968 LSD was banned throughout the country the LSD craze would continue into the 70s but it would eventually die down it lost its religious fervor especially and a lot of this was due to events such as the Manson murders which took place by people who were constantly dosed with LSD just like the Milbrook folks and so this made people realize that contrary to the testimonies of the Leary crowd the drug wasn't this miracle substance that made everybody good this is what a lot of people were saying oh it turns bad people good it means it's very very religious doctrine so the experiences really were different for each individual and they could vary with each trip so obviously LSD is still used with relative frequency to the present day but the doses are much smaller than they used to be and the days of the drug having a religious following are long behind us so I will wrap up this episode here there's a lot more that I could say about the cultural history of LSD but I don't want to run too far over on time so definitely it's worth looking into some of the books about them if you if you like these stories I think LSD maybe doesn't have the most important history compared to some of the other drugs when we're looking at the war on drugs but I think it has some of the most entertaining history and that's why I wanted to do an episode on it so in the next episode we're going to get back into the the war on drugs and we're going to be looking into the Nixon year so this is when things really start heating up a lot takes place at the same time coming together to create really the modern war on drugs very very important stuff a lot of this stuff you probably won't already know about so you're definitely going to want to listen to this episode so make sure that you subscribe to this podcast and thanks for listening for more content like this visit mesis.org