Astral Weeks by Ryan H. Walsh

Author:Ryan H. Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that Lyman’s acid evangelism took root in Boston, the true birthplace of American hallucinogenic culture. The year was 1949, the location was the Boston Psychopathic Hospital on Fenwood Street, a mile and a half from Fort Hill. Dr. Otto Kauders, head of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna, lectured on a new drug that mimicked mental psychosis. In the audience, Dr. Milton Greenblatt and Dr. Max Rinkel listened in awe as he described how a small dose had driven its inventor temporarily crazy. “We were very interested in anything that could make someone schizophrenic,” Greenblatt recalled. If doctors could cause temporary insanity with a medicine dropper, they might better understand how to treat their patients. Perhaps LSD-25 could even help cure schizophrenia. Rinkel arranged an order of LSD-25 to be shipped from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland to Boston.

Neither Greenblatt nor Rinkel took the first dose of LSD in North America—for that, they turned to their boss, Dr. Robert Hyde. Rinkel gave Hyde a glass of water with 100 micrograms of LSD, less than half of inventor Albert Hofmann’s initial, accidental dose. Feeling no effect, Hyde insisted he be permitted to make his rounds. Rinkel trailed him, later reporting that he “berated us and said the company had cheated us, given us plain water. That was not Dr. Hyde’s normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man.” Hyde and Rinkel soon ran larger LSD-25 tests on student volunteers at Boston Psychopathic.

The CIA caught wind of the study’s unusual results and was eager to fund the operation. For them, a drug like this was valuable for far more than studying mental illness. They might develop a truth serum or find a way to reprogram minds. In 1953, Rinkel and Hyde began receiving grants from one of the CIA’s fronts, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Soon, hundreds of students from Harvard, Emerson, and MIT were unwittingly assisting the agency’s research into the possibility of mind control.

The subjects knew they were receiving something called LSD, and that reactions would range from “pleasant” to “unpleasant,” but nothing prepared them for how otherworldly, surreal, or ego-crushing the experience might be. “We lost a couple,” Philip Slater, one of Rinkel’s assistants, told author Don Lattin. “One had to be hospitalized. Another went out in the street to see if cars were real.” None of those involved in the experiments had the proper training or understanding to guide participants through what could be a positive, life-changing moment. In 1994, Dr. Robert Reid told the Globe that he was aware of at least one death associated with the program. “They gave this patient LSD one morning and when I came back from lunch that day, I was told she had hung herself in the downstairs bathroom.”*

Intelligence agency director Allen Dulles described the CIA’s efforts as a “battle for men’s minds.” It was rumored that the Soviets were working day and night on “brain perversion techniques,” so to compete, Dulles authorized a secret operation called MK-ULTRA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.