Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer

Author:Stephen Kinzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

11

We Must Always Remember to Thank the CIA

“Capture green bug for future reference,” Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce wrote during one of her LSD adventures. “Do you hear the drum?”

That kind of fractured unreason flashes through the minds of many LSD users. Observing it ultimately led Sidney Gottlieb to conclude that LSD is too unpredictable to be the “truth serum” or mind control drug for which he had so relentlessly searched. Reluctantly he filed it away with heroin, cocaine, electroshock, “psychic driving,” and other failed techniques. But it was too late. LSD had escaped from the CIA’s control. First it leaked into elite society. Then it spread to students who took it in CIA-sponsored experiments. Finally it exploded into the American counterculture, fueling a movement dedicated to destroying much of what the CIA defended and held dear.

Among the first LSD parties held outside the CIA were those that Dr. Harold Abramson, Gottlieb’s favorite physician, threw at his Long Island home on Friday nights. At first he invited only a handful of other doctors. News spread. The guest list widened to include other New York professionals. Invitations were much sought after. “Harold A. Abramson of the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory has developed a technique of serving dinner to a group of subjects, topping off the meal with a liqueur glass containing 40 micrograms of LSD,” Time reported in 1955. By the late 1950s, according to the novelist Gore Vidal, LSD had become “all the rage” in New York’s high society.

Clare Boothe Luce, a former ambassador to Italy who was married to the publisher of Time and Life magazines—and who had carried on an extended affair with Allen Dulles—got her LSD from Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist who had worked at Edgewood Arsenal. The film director Sidney Lumet was another early experimenter. So was the swimmer-turned-actress Esther Williams. The first celebrity to speak publicly about LSD was Cary Grant, the debonair exemplar of 1950s masculinity. He gave a series of interviews to a Hollywood gossip columnist, Joe Hyams, and another to Look magazine that became the basis for a glowing profile headlined THE CURIOUS STORY BEHIND THE NEW CARY GRANT. After taking LSD more than sixty times, Grant said, he had found a “second youth” and come “close to happiness” for the first time in his life.

“After my series came out, the phone began to ring wildly,” Hyams later recalled. “Friends wanted to know where they could get the drug. Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD … In all, I got more than 800 letters.”

As LSD leaked into high society, it was also being discovered by groups of young people. Volunteers who took it in experiments at hospitals and clinics, many of them secretly funded as MK-ULTRA “subprojects,” raved about their experiences. That led their friends to clamor for LSD just as eagerly as their social betters.

“Researchers were growing lax in controlling the drug,” according to one academic study. “They began to share LSD in their homes with friends … The drug was spreading into the undergraduate population.

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