-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Ibogaine Story - Report on The Staten Island Project
Paul DeRienzo
Dana Beal
Autonmedia@1997
POB 568 Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, New York 11211-0568
718-963-2603
-----
CHAPTER 1.
The War With The Junkies
It never would have happened if Tom Forcade hadn't shot himself in the head.
Forcade, who'd built High Times up to four million readers by being six
months ahead on new trends, was the only one who could keep the functions of
his sprawling Empire reconciled. But by October 1978, hounded by the DEA and
acutely depressed by scheming, ambitious underlings as well as the death of
his best friend Jack Coombs in a plane crash in Florida, the King was at the
end of his tether.
He was also wired on coke, and dependent on valium. Which is a funny thing,
since he had attended the opening of Howard Lotsof's film Smoke-In, and
Howard always told important people about Ibogaine.[1] But Lotsof's odd
factoid about Ibogaine interrupting his heroin/coke addiction in the early
'60s had no tangible application for Tom. Lost in the din, Forcade could no
longer pick out the one distant trend that could have saved him from his own
bad habits. Tom Forcade had run out of time.
In one weekend, Tom committed suicide; Jim Jones snuffed himself out with a
thousand followers; Dan White assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George
Moscone in San Francisco. And the pendulum started to swing back. It was as
if the CIA engineered a coup in a Third World country called the
Counterculture.
High Times' motivating spark was extinguished. It began to drift. And there
was this problem with the junkies in the art department.
A few years later John Lombardi would write in Esquire of his wife, Wendy, a
talented photographer, strung out on smack. Down on Grand Street around the
corner from the Soho Weekly News, Marcia Resnick and Johnny Thunders were
living on the couch at Sunset Studios, doing up incredible quantities of
smack, which they could afford because she was dealing it out of the back
door of the Soho to a celebrity scene that included John Belushi. Both Marcia
and Wendy were often employed by High Times art director Toni Brown, who was
to end up in 1981 on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network,
denouncing her former employer and thanking Jesus for getting her off drugs.
With High Times, Forcade pioneered the true marijuana mass market. Before he
died he tried to create the same acceptability for his other favorite drug,
cocaine. But he always drew the line at heroin. He and Dana Beal had done the
first YIPPIE march against CIA heroin on July 4, 1971. He knew, even though
the William Burroughs groupies were dogging him the year before his suicide
to do it, that this was one frontier the magazine should not cross.
It wasn't intolerance of drugs. After all, High Times stood for exuberant
promotion of marijuana versus alcohol and cigarettes. And the '60s survivors
clustered around Tom would have been horrified by the idea of turning in a
friend just because they did problem drugs. But the deal was that junkies
didn't proselytize. What '60s survivors all knew was that heroin equalled ODs
and hepatitis. Except for coke, High Times editorial policy foreshadowed the
Dutch "harm reduction" model of market separation of pot and hard drugs.
The trouble, as heroin began to come back at the end of the '70s and the Art
Set got strung out, was that they only had two ways to pay for it on salaries
that were minute compared to their prestige. Sell it, which meant turning on
new people. Or because the DEA would not seriously impede the flow of
reefer for another five years they could always set up a pot dealer for a
rip off.
It worked like this: pot dealers had more marijuana and cash than they knew
what to do with. But like all newly rich, they were starved for recognition.
So some behind-the-scenes entrepreneur would be drawn to the minor glitterati
at the Village Voice, Soho or High Times, and find they could gain entry to
the scene, if they came bearing gifts. They would waive their usual built-in
scruples when they discovered their new celebrity friends were dabbling in
heroin. Soon their new friends would reveal that they also knew someone in
need of a pot connection. After a couple of times, the artist would take a
big front and "lose' it. Or report they had been "tied up and ripped off "
Scenario 2 came when credit was eventually cut off, and the celeb's bill with
their junk connection got too high. Then that nice harmless photog or writer
(now slightly tarnished) would do a Jekyll and Hyde, and "finger" their pot
connection to some junkie stickup artists. For enough of the take to erase
their bill and maybe keep themselves in smack for a month, they would send
the gunman around to tie you up for real, pistol-whip you, and take
everything you owned.
Wendy Lombardi had long since blown her credit when, on the night of
Forcade's wake at the Windows on the World, her third old man (the
disreputable one with the missing teeth) approached Dana Beal as he was going
into his neighbor's place across Bleecker Street. This low-life followed Dana
upstairs, where he tried in vain to persuade the neighbor to throw some
business his way. After Wendy"s "friend" was brushed off and shown out, Dana
turned to his neighbor and said: "That guy is setting you up for a rip."
Sure enough, the deadbolt downstairs had been reversed, leaving it unlocked.
After locking it, the neighbor decided to miss the wake. Later that evening
he heard people fooling around with the door downstairs, went to the window
and yelled, and saw some people fleeing west up Bleecker Street.
Now in a heightened state of vigilance, the neighbor was ready the next day
when two gunmen broke in next door and tried to get in via the roof He chased
two pistoleros away with his shotgun. The Yips made sure the story was
disseminated throughout the entire High Times scene. Wendy Lombardi's cover
was blown.
About a month later, as Dana was knock-ing on the front door of the
YIPster Times
building at 9 Bleecker, he noticed Wendy and boyfriend bearing down on him
from his left . Just as Ben Masel opened the door, a fist blind-sided Dana on
his left jaw. But there happened to be almost fifteen people hanging around
the ground floor. A tussle ensued, and in a twinkling, the authors of this
unprovoked assault were hustled inside, where everything short of major
bodily harm was done to get them to give up the identities of the two gun-
men and the other gang members.
But such was the underlying non-violence of the Yips that nothing was done to
the two miscreants sufficient to get them to give up anything except one name
Wendy blurted out in the beginning "John." They were released into the
night, minus a shoe.
And then a funny thing happened as the story circulated, especially in the
art departments of the Voice, High Times, and the Soho Weekly News. It
mutated into its opposite, and the intended victims of the armed robbery
became a violent cult of YIPPIE breakaways (i.e., not Abbie Hoffman). This
was right after Jonestown. The seed had been planted.
What it boiled down to was this: Unlike pot, the people's drug, heroin made
people totally absorbed with their own jones. In a scene of junkies who
considered themselves to be celebrities to begin with, the pot-smoking masses
were despised, looked down upon as sheep fit only to be shorn of their cash.
junkie sympathies were with their friends, and their right as an elite[2] to
rip off the YIPPIES.
Related to this was another problem. YIPster Times, although the best
underground paper in the country, had never gotten its ad-base on a regular
footing. It was a party publication, known to be supported by a network of
small and middle-sized contributors around the country. In late '78, because
the YIP's had just put every cent they could beg or borrow into a "Bring
Abbie Home Benefit" at the Felt Forum (timed for the tenth anniversary of
Chicago), the paper was in hiatus. Forcade had not been able to fund it for
months before his death. Although socially contiguous with High Times, it was
viewed as a tract instead of a "real" newspaper. When Tom died, the YIPS
automatically became outsiders. Wendy depicted her misfortunes as a sinister
attack on the journalistic establishment by political fanatics.
Still, 1979, when it came, was the year of the fall of the Shah and Somoza.
YIPster Times resumed publication, better than ever, as Overthrow. In early
'79, the Yips also gathered in all the followers of all the smoke-ins and
opened Studio 10 at 10 Bleecker. It was an instant success, with five bands a
night for $3, dollar Heinekens, and free pot on the bar.
In March/April, with great fanfare, the Marijuana Coalition created ROCK
AGAINST RACISM (RAR) to have a legal concert in Central Park for the end of
the annual pot parade in May.
Even the indictment of Beal on specious pot conspiracy charges out of Omaha,
Nebraska, was dismissed in the fall without going to trial.
Professor Ansley Hamid of John Jay College studied the effect of the
switchover from pot to crack in Jamaican communities in New York City in the
early '80s, and described how with pot (which engenders no tolerance, and no
significant dose-escalation in users) enough capital was retained in the
community to start secondary businesses, restaurants, etc., while the coming
of crack sucked those communities dry, enriching only the few at the top of
the pyramid.
By early 1980 the New York pot scene's inner core was wired on coke and
strung out on smack. It wasn't unusual to see a major dealer (himself coked
to the gills) cursing out one of his boys who'd gotten so messed up on
schmagoo that they couldn't finish paying off their last pot front. But if
you didn't dip into the drugs, you found yourself shut out socially. And hard
drugs were expensive, unless you dealt. Contributions to the legalization
movement dried up.
Up at High Times, which had gone through management changes, a far more
ambitious solution to heroin's voracious appetite for money was in the works.
Dean A. Latimer had come out on top in the latest management shuffle. His
favorite drug after alcohol was always opium. And most of all, that
powerhouse in the art department wanted to cross the line Forcade wouldn't:
to solve the adverse equation of heroin tolerance versus money by vastly
expanding their customer base by using High Times directly to mass market
smack, like marijuana before it.
A furious struggle ensued. Tom had packed the editorial side with New Left /
YIP veterans of the underground press, who expended much of their waning
influence stopping that story. This left the junkies feeling embittered and
discriminated against by a "politically correct" coterie that included
Overthrow, the successor to YIPster Times.
The potheads, although they didn't yet know how to express it, knew the
dispute went directly to the market separation of soft and hard drugs. The
junkies got even: Potbashing became fashionable at the Voice for the whole
first half of the next decade. Activism fell out of fashion at High Times.
But the most interesting reaction came a few months later at the Soho Weekly
News.
In early May, an article ran trashing the annual pot parade and heralding the
death of the marijuana movement. The next week this poster went up
advertising a new issue, showing a fashionable female snorting smack.
Message: the new wave distinguish themselves from hippies by doing dope. And
on the newsstand, emblazoned with the headline "NOW HEROIN," was an angelic
blond peering from the cover of the Soho over a mirror with lines of what
appeared to be cocaine, but was intended to represent heroin. The lead
feature, with a big picture on the inside of a beautiful male torso injecting
heroin, began with the story of Scott, driven, workaholic, trendy gallery
owner, cooling out on weekends with smack.
The message was cleverly bracketed with pro forma warnings that heroin, like
alcohol and cigarettes, could kill you. But that only added to the romance.
The writers clearly felt they had to balance their personal misgivings with
the pervasive acceptance of heroin on their immediate scene. The overwhelming
thrust was that everyone was doing it. You could do it and not get addicted.
They even told you where to cop the best stuff, and how to do it up (mix it
with lemon juice).
Not a word about clean needles or serum hepatitis. (No one knew yet about
AIDS, although it's now clear that this very scene, including Studio 10, was
at the epicenter of the early epidemic.) It was the same damnable article
that'd been axed from High Times. The radicals had kept it from going out
across the country. But equivalent New York publication, by putting the
physical survival of the local scene at risk, especially by influencing the
bands of ROCK AGAINST RACISM and Studio 10, was a direct slap at New York
YIP'S traditional role as trend-setter for the country.[3]
Once again, there was a furious brouhaha. The Soho received numerous
complaints, calls, etc. RAR picketed. But the Soho staff, who considered the
article "balanced," never acknowledged the central criticism to its
subliminal thrust especially the graphics. Most people don't read, they
look at pictures. Consequently, the editors refused to print RAR'S letters
objecting to putting heroin on the same footing as pot.
Now all the ugly rumors about RAR / YIP came back: that YIPster Times was not
a "real" newspaper deserving of journalistic courtesy; that it was a
top-down, violenceprone group; most of all, that mere pot advocates had no
right based on the bitterly learned lessons of collective experience to
criticize other drugs. The nature of YIPPIE! is to thrive on symbiosis with
the media. Such was the depth of upset amongst the junkie celebs of the
interlocking art departments, that even though YIP did one of its best-ever
rounds of protest during the 1980 Democratic Convention, not a word of it
appeared in the Voice and the Soho Weekly News. (To be fair, this also had
something to do with the fact that Abbie with friends on both papers was
in the process of re-surfacing from underground, and they were saving their
column-inches for him. His close partisans always disdained the generation
who came after him, and succeeded where he could not: in keeping the
revolution alive after the collapse of the Antiwar movement, through the
Smoke-Ins. For them, no one from the smoke-Ins could ever be PC.)
On the neighborhood level most of the best bands playing Studio 10, through
their management, were tied into Sunset Studios and the Soho scene. They were
dabbling also, so the example they set for their fans undermined the YIP
leadership. And into the scene came those willing to supply heroin together
with the cheapest pot prices imaginable freebooters like Bruce Brown, black
sheep son of Liberty and David (producer of "Jaws") Brown. Bruce had the
authority of a degree in Marxist economics, the prestige of a show on WBAI
("Psychoto-mimetic Radio"), and instant access to the dealing world due to
the theory (untrue) that his dad would pay off his dealing debts as a last
resort. With his bag of tricks, he made the rounds at the Voice, High Times
and the Soho with the greatest of ease.
At first, he seemed a loyal friend. But gradually it became clear that to
compensate for a feeling that he was a mere academic without a genuine
background as a '60s organizer, he tended to disparage the self-discipline
necessary for long-term accomplishment. Like all those who undermine freedom
in the name of freedom, he instilled not genuine autonomy but
self-destructive license, telling the kids the whole point of the revolution
was to get as fucked up as possible. (Later he died of AIDS, after sharing
needles and infecting almost everyone he turned on to smack.)
The YIP organization at the time was a direct successor of the "new" YOUTH
INTERNATIONAL PARTY formed December, 1969, to replace SDS,[4] by merging the
remnants of YIPPIE! and the WHITE PANTHERS. The Zippies had taken over from
Abbie and Jerry in '72-'73 on the strength of WHITE PANTHER PARTY formations
in New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. As former Field Marshall of the WPP, Dana
was one of four or five recognized YIP leaders in the '70s. Therefore YIP
ultimately derived part of its legitimacy from the charter granted by the
Oakland Black Panthers to John Sinclair and the WPP.
Complicating matters, YIP (Zippie!) sympathized with the New York Panthers in
their split with Oakland. So to the original White Panther dichotomy of life
drugs (pot, psychedelics) versus death drugs (addictive white powders), the
YIPster Times had added occasional articles all during the '70s on the
movement against methadone, the use of accupuncture to treat addiction, and
so on.
Pot was the only substance considered acceptable for heroin de-tox.
This core group did not start a smoke-in movement seeking to legalize pot
explicitly to separate it from hard drugs they did not build Studio 10 to
give this movement a place to get together weekly instead of semiannually
to turn kids on to smack.
So when they discovered kids were coming in from all over the country for the
Demcon protests, only to be turned on to heroin, they freaked. And in
retrospect, introducing heroin (whose dose/tolerance curve, unless you have
$500-a-day, quickly leads from snorting to smoking to shooting) into a scene
where passing the joint was a ritual (and info on clean needles nonexistent)
was kind of like handing out firewater and smallpox-infected blankets to put
down Pontiac's Rebellion.[5]
Yet YIP itself had been fatally weakened when Forcade and Peter Bourne[6]
convinced them to make an exception for cocaine. So, a week after Carter's
renomination, in the fall of 1980, when a novice writer at the Soho Weekly
News wrote a review (actually, positive) of an anti-Reagan comedy skit at
Studio 10, instead of seeming like the first step in breaking the media
boycott, what grated was that they got Dana Beal mixed up with Dean
Tuckerman. It seemed typical of a process where YIP would always be
deliberately consigned to the blurry periphery of the picture instead of the
focused foreground, "because they're only a bunch of publicity seekers."
Maybe it was the crash from coke done during the preceding week. Maybe it was
just too much coffee and sugar. But all the frustration of watching the
internal authority of the group ebb away so that he was powerless to stop the
infiltration of heroin came to a head. Dana got on the phone to the Soho,
reached Paul Slansky, and demanded a correction.
Slansky said: "Write a letter," and slammed the phone in Dana's right ear,
the one with the painful earache.
Flashing on the fate of the never-published letter of protest against the
"NOW HEROIN" issue, knowing for a fact that half the staff was "dabbling" and
that Marcia Resnick was selling smack out of the backalley door, some of
which was reaching Studio 10.... Dana picked up a firecracker (not a bomb as
later reported by the Soho Weekly News, but a short M-80 called an "M-60"),
hopped on his bike, and went peddling over to the Soho Weekly News, three
blocks away.
On the way he met David B., who offered to accompany him; and Alice Torbush,
who told him it was the dumbest idea she'd ever heard. Disregarding this
piece of wisdom, to his lasting detriment, he alighted on Broadway in front
of the Soho and had David B. hold his bike. He went inside and told the
receptionist he wanted to talk to Paul Slansky. Slansky wouldn't come out;
and sent word for him to get lost.
Dana took out a match, lit it, and held it to the firecracker. "You're not
going to light that in here?!" said the horrified receptionist. "Oh yes, I
am," said he. The fuse caught fire. Dana turned toward the door, and
carelessly tossed it back over his shoulder.
As he was passing out through the door cubicle, he glanced back through the
intervening glass panel to see the innocent niece of some honcho at Time
magazine (breaking her media teeth at the second most prestigious weekly in
Manhattan) walk out from the back, just as the firecracker exploded next to a
wastepaper basket.
The concussion stopped the clock on the back wall. It shut down production
for the day. The staff felt like they'd been bombed. The niece (or maybe it
was the daughter) of the Time exec was cut by a teeny, tiny bit of paper wrap
from the firecracker, giving rise to the canard, later disproved before a
jury, that it was a shrapnel-bearing device.
And Dana was plunged into the deepest shit of his life. On the Soho staff
were good friends of Ed Koch. Charges were filed, which seemed especially
unfair, coming just a month and a half after another set of junkies connected
to the Sunset/Soho heroin scene had blown up the front door of 9 Bleecker
with their own M-80, which detonated as Alice T. was answering their knock.
But as a rule Yippies don't file charges.
Dana bided his time and planned how to turn himself in with maximum public
support. The next time that could be was Halloween. The rank-and-file from
the smoke-ins was still supportive, but much of the core organization had
rotted out, and fell away. In the end, the only crew that would organize a
protest on Dana's behalf was Howard and Norma Lotsof
In nine days before the 1980 Halloween smoke-in, which was not a regular
annual event at the time, they blanketed lower Manhattan with posters. Howard
and his film crew had never been part of the YIPPIES proper; they were
contract workers, making movies like Smoke-In. But they were close and loyal
friends, and Howard credits that Halloween smoke-in with causing him to cross
a key threshold in his own life.
Ever since Howard had been busted in '66, he'd never been a subject of the
news. He'd always been behind the camera, not on-camera. But Dana was late to
Washington Square Park. Dana wanted to make certain there were plenty of
people, so that he could lead 600 people to protest outside the Soho and not
get grabbed before he turned himself in at the Fifth Precinct five blocks
South, on Elizabeth Street. So events forced Howard to get up and give a
speech, to become a spokesperson, as he has been ever since.
Dana got out of jail after the weekend. The YIPS were almost broke. More
protests at the Soho Weekly News seemed likely not to produce the same
turnout. Escalating violence would only hurt innocent bystanders; anyway, it
was out of the question once Soho contacts with the District Attorney
produced a phony felony assault indictment on December 12. Then in early
December, Howard and Norma came to Manhattan and proposed utilizing the one
unique secret in the YIPPIES' possession.
Howard had always said that in 1962-63, out of twenty people who participated
in an informal trial of Ibogaine, five of the seven using heroin, or heroin
and cocaine together, had quit for six months or longer, without intending
to. Why not really solve the problem by dosing the junkies with Ibogaine?
Why not pay Howard's rent and food for two months so that he could do a
literature search at New York University library, and figure out how it
worked, whether it had mass application, and most important, if it could help
the kids in the scene who'd fallen into bad habits?
RAR had $1,500 left over. What is more, Dana had originally been more
interested in LSD than marijuana; and in the six years since Lotsof first
told him of Ibogaine's effect, he had gradually worked the ramifications
through in his own mind. So he said: "Why not?"
Like a stone kicked loose from a mountainside, picking up speed and knocking
loose snowdrifts, that literature search began an avalanche.
Forcade always believed in discerning the ultimate chaotic act," the one act
that would overthrow the system perfectly, with no side effects. His favorite
book was Agent of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad, who Dana met coincidentally just
around the time of this sequence of events. Spinrad thought the only other
significant chaoticist writing was Philip K. Dick. Spinrad told Dana and
Alice they should pick up the hardbound edition of Dick's latest book, VALIS,
which they did, since they were already big Philip Dick fans. Dana read it
three times.
Perhaps because the Chaos Theory involved was much deeper than anything in
Agent of Chaos, Dana found that months, even years afterwards, events would
snap something from mm into exquisite, unforgettable focus. Besides, he
considered parts of it evocative of the immediate situation, especially the
part that read:
"The oppression lifted four years ago, and it will for a little while return.
Be patient during this time... " [7]
Since Dick had no way of knowing, when he wrote this in 1978, that Reagan
would even be nominated (indeed, right up to the October debates, most people
assumed Carter would be re-elected), Dana considered this to be a remarkable
piece of prognostication enough to pay attention, to see if the second half
of the prediction would come true. It was indisputable that with Reagan, all
the excesses and official lawlessness of Nixon were back. Yet would it last
only a little while say, two or three terms? Or half a lifetime?
Meanwhile, the concept that was animating Dana, as he sat writing a
comprehensive review of The Politics of Heroin in South Last Asia, and The
Great Heroin Coup, on the role of fascist networks and covert agencies in
maintaining heroin,[8] was that this time the outcome would be different,
because this time the forces of resistance had something in reserve. They had
begun development of a secret weapon. Definitely a long shot, but not just
another protest. Ibogaine was more like the Manhattan Project.
Ibogaine would be the ultimate chaotic act.
1. The "Lotsof Effect"- interruption of drug addiction requires a heroic
dose (15-18 milligrams per kilo of total body weight) or more $an a gram, one
hundred times the lowest dose effective as a stimulant (10-20 mgs per total
body weight). According to Carol Realini, who worked for Forcade, Tom was
familiar with the intermediate, "psycholytic" dose (and himself hod taken
doses of 250 mgs total body weight), as a "memory drug."
2. Reminiscent of the medieval "droit do seigneur," ' literally, the right of
the lord to first use of a peasant woman on her wedding night. for more on
this, see Diary of a Dope Fiend, by Aleister Crowley, the famous Block
Magician of early twentiethcentury England, who is still a cult figure among
junkies today. Crowley was one of the "occult" influences on Hitler.
3. The contradiction become acute, for instance, when Columbus Yips had to
run and find opiates for the drummer of the headline RAR bond from New York.
They were ex White Panthers who didn't even know where to get methadone.
4. SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, a mass-bosed organization with
100,000 members and chapters on every campus in the country, collapsed in
June, 1969 into three factions, all of whom claimed to be SDS. Before
Chicago, Yippies never numbered more than a few hundred; immediately
afterwards a group styling itself the "Youth International Party for Self
Defense" announced it was dissolving into its constituent collectives, tells,
and affinity groups. In fact, the attempt to replace SDS with a new
mass-based YIP only happened because the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial, which
took up the second hall of 1969 and the opening months of 1970, brought the
Ann Arbor-based White Panthers into frequent contact with Abbie, Jerry and
the nationwide effort going on around the Trial The new YIP peaked in May,
1970, when the Yippie! flog flew on every campus during protests against
Nixon's invasion of Cambodia.
5. See Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, p. 108; also, Alvin
M. Josephy, Jr., The Patriot Chiefs, pp. 122-23.
6. See Chapter Five, p. 45.
7. See VALIS, p. 199.
8. "A New Heroin Conspiracy?" pp. 179-93,
Blacklisted News
Pps. 9-16
=====
CHAPTER 2:
Howard Lotsof
A conceptual split had occurred between a small group in New York, who knew
about Ibogaine and had worked through its implications, and the conventional
wisdom, which held that the next logical step after legalizing pot was to
legalize cocaine. To outsiders, starting work on Ibogaine a month before
Reagan was inaugurated might have seemed like embracing a lost cause. It was
only a little more than ten years since prestigious academics tried, and
failed, to stop LSD prohibition. The tightly-controlled research still
allowed in humans was suspended altogether after 1975, even though it
continued to show promise.[1] In fact, when asked about LSD by an interviewer
in 1978, Keith Stroup of NORML said: "You want LSD. go talk to the YIPPIES."
But even as he was handing Lotsof the money, Dana remembered Leary had
considerable success treating alcoholics and prisoners in the '60s. And in a
way, the decision to develop Ibogaine to fight addiction harkened back even
further, to the Manhattan Project,[2] and to the CIA experiments in
psycho-pharmacologic warfare during the '50s. Because they did experiment
with Ibogaine, and they refuse to this day to release the results.
In March of 1955 Eisenhower's special assistant for Cold War Planning, Nelson
Rockefeller, was briefed by Allen Dulles on all covert CIA operations. The
old Psychological Strategy Board of the National Security Council had been
re-christened the Opera-tions Coordinating Board, designed to shield the
President from direct knowledge of CIA "crown jewels" including Operation
Bluebird and MK-ULTRA, later notorious for dosing unsuspecting Army personnel
with psychedelics.[3] The CIA was looking for, among other things, a
substance that could be put in the water supply or sprayed in an aerosol over
Moscow, which would cause loyal Soviet citizens to wake up in the morning as
patriotic Americans. You'd win without firing a shot. Unfortunately, they
could never figure out a reliable delivery system, and they never found the
right substance.
According to Marty Lee:
"To conceal its role the Agency enlisted the aid of the Navy and the National
Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), which served as conduits for channeling
money to Dr. Harris Isbell, a gung-ho research scientist who remained on the
CIA payroll for over a decade. According to CIA documents, the directors of
NIMH and the National Institutes of Health were fully cognizant of the
Agency's 'interest' in Isbell's work and offered 'full support and
protection'.
"When the CIA came across a new drug (usually supplied by American
pharmaceutical firms) that needed testing, they frequently sent it over to
their chief doctor at Lexington, where an ample supply of captive guinea pigs
was readily available. Over eight hundred compounds were farmed out to
Isbell, including LSD and a variety of hallucinogens. It became an open
secret among street junkies that if the supply got tight, you could always
commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as
payment if you volunteered for Isbell's wacky drug experiments. (Small wonder
Lexington had a return rate of 90%.) Dr. Isbell, a long-time member of the
Food and Drug Administration's Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and
Stimulant Drugs, defended the volunteer system on the grounds that there was
no precedent at the time for offering inmates cash for their services."[4]
As early as 1955, at the virtual beginning of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Harris Isbell did
try doses of up to 250 milligrams of Ibogaine hydrochloride on eight black
ex-morphine addicts, at the Federal Narcotic Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky.
The catch was that they'd been clean for six months, and 250 milligrams is a
sub-therapeutic dose, so the interruption of an active addiction wouldn't
have occurred. Isbell was investigating the potential of indole-alkylamines
to "mimic" psychosis according to the then-fashionable "psycho-mimetic"
model championed by Dr. Paul Hoch of Columbia University.[5]
We know all this because in the '80s CIBA-GIEGY released to Howard a letter
from Isbell requesting Ibogaine for thirteen more subjects. And because one
of CIBA's own researchers, named Schneider, discovered in 1956 that Ibogaine
potentiates morphine analgesia (Ibogaine multiplies the painkilling effect of
opiates), it is fairly certain Isbell checked it out further.
Since Isbell was also looking for an addiction cure, and experimented with
many different psychoactive agents in all different dose regimens, both
during and after withdrawal from morphine, the next logical step would have
been to try to wean active addicts off opiates by substituting progressively
more Ibogaine for their usual dose of heroin. And if he used a threshold
dose, six milligram-per-kg., he would have started observing the Lotsof
effect.[6]
"In addition to this role as a research scientist, Dr. Isbell served as a
go-between for the CIA in its attempt to obtain drug samples from European
pharmaceutical concerns which assumed they were providing 'medicine' to a us
Public Health official. The CIA. in turn acted as a research coordinator,
passing information, tips, and leads to Isbell and its other contract
employees so that they could keep abreast of each other's progress; when a
new discovery was made, the CIA would often ask another researcher to conduct
a followup study for confirmation. One scientist whose work was coordinated
with Isbell's in such a manner was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a noted pharmacologist
from Princeton who tested LSD on inmates at the Federal Prison in Atlanta and
Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey.
"Isbell, Pfeiffer, Cameron, West and Hoch all were part of a network of
doctors and scientists who gathered intelligence for the CIA. Through these
scholar-informants the Agency stayed on top of the latest developments within
the 'above-ground' LSD scene, which expanded rapidly during the Cold War. By
the mid-1950s numerous independent investigators had undertaken
hallucinogenic drug studies, and the CIA was determined not to let the
slightest detail escape its grasp..."[7]
Did the CIA or Defense Department discover Ibogaine's ability to interrupt
addiction? They "refuse to confirm or deny' that any file exists (even
CIBA-GIEBY's reply to Isbell), not only in the face of Lotsof's Freedom of
Information Act requests, but even to NIDA researchers. Evidence has
surfaced, however, that the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky
continued to be on the CIA payroll from 1957 to 1962 the years it would
have taken them to check out Ibogaine and its probable impact. The record of
payments (see exhibits, pp. 20-22) with entries spanning 1953 to 1961 (years
during which Isbell was ARC director of research) minus any additional
descriptions of the disbursements or results of experiments carried out
came into Lotsof's hands when the CIA sent him documents related to someone
else's Freedom of Information request. He forwarded it to the proper
recipient, a private group in Washington, DC called the National Security
Archive. And they sent back four pages showing that Isbell continued to be on
the CIA payroll during the crucial five years it would have taken to check
out Ibogaine and its probable impact.
If they did discover something, they didn't follow it up. In Africa,
the ritual use of the plant of which Ibogaine is the principal alkaloid,
tabernanthe iboga, forms the basis of a religion called Bwiti. To become
fully initiated, all Bwiti must eat enough iboga rootbark to induce intense
visions and enable them to "meet their ancestors" including a kind of
universal African ancestor (the Bwiti).
In Bwiti, An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, Princeton
University anthropologist James W Fernandez recounts an unforgettable first
encounter, soon after arriving in Gabon in 1958:
"Late one evening about three months after I had taken up residence in Assok
Ening... there was a loud knocking at the door ... The open door revealed in
the light of the pressure lamp a man of about 35 with a beard, a long flowing
robe, and a red cord about his waist. "Monsieur," he said addressing me in
French, "I am Metogo Zogo, Nganga Bwiti, and I must speak with you." He fixed
me with an unrelenting gaze. "You seek the truth here but you will not find
it." As I stepped back, he made a dramatic entrance, sweeping himself and
robes into the center of the room. "You do not know me but I am no stranger.
I am a child of this village just returned from a long spiritual journey. I
have been following the truth! You will not find it in this village talking
to these old men. You must come to the Bwiti Chapel in my father's house...
The nganga could not contain himself.. "You want to know the 'old things.'
But none here know them. They have not seen them. We Banzie see them when we
eat eboga. We see the 'old people' there. We know the 'old things' through
them.
"Now you want to know why the condition of this village and of the Fang is
desperate. None of this village execept[sic] we Banzie can tell you that. The
people here are lost in sin. They have not paid the price of those sins. They
have not died for their sins. But we Banzie have died and paid the price. We
die and return, die and return, each time more purified...
"...You should dance with Bwiti. You have heard the harp at night. While all
these villagers are asleep we dance and journey far. They go nowhere here.
They wander around in confusion. They don't know where to go. But we go far."
He took hold of the red-woven cord around his waist. "You see this cord? This
is the Path of Birth and Death. We follow this path. We know life. We know
death."[8]
The red cord represents the umbilicus which connects each of us back,
generation through generation, to the original Mother. Initiates are advised
that in the visions red is the color of the true road that leads to the
Ancestors. In some versions of Bwiti, the Creator God is properly accessed
only through the Mother.[9] Bwiti is the only native religion that has
successfully resisted the inroads of Islam and Christianity. Lotsof's
explanation, simply, is that it's very hard to get into a belief system with
a sacrament as powerful as Iboga and ever forsake it afterwards for another.
Despite being split up into 200 dialects by the rainforest, Bwiti unified the
Gabonese Independence movement of the 1950s.
In the '50s, the United States was still in the thrall of segregation, of the
racist police state of J. Edgar Hoover, nemesis of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm
X. The highest-level person briefed on MK-ULTRA results was Presidential
assistant for Cold War Planning Nelson Rockefeller or his sucessor. The
Cold Warriors equated African de-colonialization with international
communism. The last thing they wanted was a drug treatment which would,
through the population of Black junkies, release another force that could
unify and electrify the Black movement in this country.
But in In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks poses a simpler
explanation. Basically, the CIA concluded that the LSD conversion experience
"wore off" with the drug. CIA researchers had great familiarity with LSD,
which had acquired as yet no stigma, having dosed each other with it many
times. This casu-al familiarity may have inclined them to under-rate the
strength and potential impact of other, more exotic substances which agents
never both-ered to try for themselves even as they were vastly accelerating
the introduction of psyche-delics into us academia, according to Marks.[10]
When, at the beginning of the '60s, Tim Leary gave Allen Ginsberg acid,
Ginsberg immediately flashed that an indole alkylamine of some kind could
free the junkies, (although he was thinking more along the lines of
substitute drugs.) Then, when the Harvard Administration cracked down, Leary
issued a call for his Great Leap Forward: for undergraduates everywhere to
continue and broaden paraclinical. research into all the indole-ring
psychoactives, with one goal being to find a cure for addiction (See
Leary-Ginsberg article, pp. 23-25, continued pp. 36-38).
One of those who responded was a smart 19-year-old named Howard Lotsof, who
was living with his parents in New Jersey after a childhood spent in the
Bronx and Queens. His introduction to psychedelics was Aldous Huxleys Doors
of Perception, which he read when he was 15. His interest was part
illumination-seeker, part lay scientist. His hero was Einstein.
In the movement from the very repressive decade of the '50s, to the release
and comingtogether in the '60s, Howard sided with those who were
dissatisfied, and who believed that if chemistry could be the means to
resolve some of their questions and find some answers, they should use it. In
those days it was possible to start your own chemical company with nothing
more than a letterhead, and order all kinds of neat substances that were
later controlled.
One day Howard was having breakfast with a chemist he knew who had been
active in the small underground LSD scene of the '50s. The chemist offered
him a dose of Ibogaine that he had in the freezer. Lotsof asked him what he
could tell him about it. "Well, it's a thirty-six-hour trip," said the
chemist.
A thirty-six-hour trip was the last thing Howard could imagine himself
wanting to do, so he gave it to a friend and asked him to check it out. A
month later, at 12:20 at night, Howard got a phone call from the friend, who
said: "You know that drug you gave me? It's not a drug, it's a food. We have
to tell Congress!"
Howard was 19 at the time, living at home with his parents, so he said: "You
woke my mother up. I'll get back to you." After succeeding in getting the
house back to sleep, he decided the matter bore further investigation. It
took his circle six months to get further supplies, and they still didn't
know what they had.
To discover the interruption effect, you need active addicts, and you need
enough experience with LSD to know sub-optimal doses of indole-alkalamines
can produce a bum trip where a larger dose will get you above the 11
tree-top" effect of getting tangled up in your own emotions. Only people
seeking a highdose, thirty-six-hour experience would do the amount about a
gram for a 150-pound person that produces a therapeutic result.
Contrary to some published reports, Howard did not hand the stuff out to some
friends at a party. ("Some party," he says. "After the first hour it would
consist of everyone lying around in a darkened room, not talking.") It was
administered one dose at a time, over eight months, to twenty people. Seven
of them, including Howard, happened to be using heroin or cocaine.[11]
Howard's own experience began in the cab of a truck, because he happened to
take it as he was in the process of moving back New York from New Jersey.
Perhaps because he was 19 and very busy, Howard was not overwhelmed by
Ibogaine ataxia (usual slight loss of balance coupled with an overwhelming
urge to lie down). He was dropped off in the West Village and managed to make
it upstairs to his regular session with his psychologist, and told him to
turn on the taperecorder so that he could tell him what he was seeing.
Despite doing only about half of the dose addicts get today (and perhaps
because he was sensitized by amphetamine) he was having a "full-blown
Ibogaine experience," with the Freudian overtones of dreams, or of a birth
visualization:
"The first thing I saw was a pulsating yellow screwdriver, which disappeared
abruptly. And the next thing I knew I was walking up a ladder leading to a
10-foot diving board over a pool. As I was walking up the diving board, my
bathing suit disappeared and I was naked. As I dived into the pool, my mother
appeared beneath me with her legs open, and I was diving into her vagina. As
I got closer, she changed into my sister, who changed into an infant. Then I
went into the water, and that was it. The vision turned into a new one.
For three or four hours, the way the visualizations changed was always the
same and different from any other hallucinogen. It appeared that you'd get
one vision, and then a gold or silver web would carry it off and an entirely
new set of visions would arrive."
On another trip, he was watching a stage, and all of a sudden music started.
The music was like, B0MdidaB0MPdidaB0MdiaaB0MP and pairs of cavemen and
cavewomen came dancing onto the stage. The men were behind the women, and
they were dancing with them. And then two more of them came onto the stage,
rolling this giant stone heart. Later he "had the sensation of slides opening
up, and sliding downward at a tremendous speed, with all my experiences
arranged, accessible like filing cabinets flashing past." He also experienced
behavioral immobility, which wore off only when the visualizations ceased,
leaving him in a strange, high energy state. Howard explains:
"The hallucinatory period ends abruptly, and the first reaction generally is,
'What happened? I thought this was supposed to last for 36 hours.' Then all
of a sudden you realize that it hasn't stopped, it's just changed. You're no
longer watching this motion picture, but there are like giant lightning
flashes and movements of light all over the place ... but there's no
waviness, things do not lose their normal form, as they do under heavy
dosages of common hallucinogens like LSD or mescaline, where a wall will seem
to wave.
"Another difference was, with hallucinogens generally, if you were to move
your hand you'd see a wave-like pattern. With Ibogaine, you don't get a
continuous wave, you get distinct images, and I noticed it the first time,
when I was walking on the street... I was on my way to the west side, and I
turned around, there were seven distinct after-images of myself And as I took
a step, a new one would appear, and the last one would disappear.
"During that second high-energy period, which lasts from six to twelve hours,
you're seeing all these flashes of light, and what's happening is you're
getting thoughts coming into your mind which support the deep symbolic
material which came out in the initial three or four hour visualization
phase. For instance you might be thinking that all people are playing roles,
that the basic interaction of humans is on a sexual, nonverbal type of level.
And these realizations slowly diminish, till after about twelve hours that
phase is completely closed out. Apparently a secondary stimulation effect
occurs, and that slowly curtails, somewhere between twenty-four and thirty
hours, and the subject goes to sleep."
Says Norma: "I remember thinking, when is this going to end? I'm so tired. I
couldn't imagine anyone doing it for fun."
Strangest of all, Howard awoke after three hours of sleep completely
refreshed.
"Ten steps out of my door it hit me: For the first time in months, I did not
want or need to go cop heroin. In fact, I viewed heroin as a drug that
emulated death; I wanted life. I looked down the street, at the trees, the
sky, my house and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn't feel
afraid."
Five out of seven of the twenty in the initial trial were addicts who quit
heroin or cocaine, involuntarily, for six months or longer, says Lotsof And
after two days, five of the seven had not gone through withdrawal, and had no
desire to use heroin, for periods ranging up to eighteen months up to six
months from a single treatment, and up to eighteen months from a series of
five treatments.
The other two got up the next morning and began their routine of going out to
cop junk. "Why?" Howard asked them.
"Because we're junkies, they said. "We like being junkies."
Howard was energized:
"I don't know if you know anything about heroin addiction, but one of the
people that it worked on was a roomate of the other two that it didn't work
on. He was living with those guys for six months while they were shooting up
every day, and he wasn't using it. Now, if you know anything about heroin
addiction, you know how hard that is. So we knew we had something very unique
here."
Early on, they sent a sample to Tim Leary, who didn't like it because it's
not euphoric (no LSD mood swings, either). But Leary wasn't looking for
treatments, but for something with a more universal, sacramental application;
and he was tethered by his preference for a user-friendly party drug, whose
therapeutic potential was supposed to sneak up on millions without them
noticing (See pp. 23-25, cont. 36-38).
Howard procured a big supply of Iboga root and sent it to a dope chemist he
knew. The chemist refused to do anything with it after producing a small
initial sample. He was not a junkie and did not find the Ibogaine euphoric
and in 1963 underground chemists were were not interested finding cures for
humanity's ills. They were looking for psychedelics they could market as
great new highs. Howard was also puzzled by another nowfamiliar reaction:
Instead of seeing Ibogaine as a Godsend for junkies who want to withdraw
painlessly, some saw it as an affront to the myth, the potency of KING HEROIN
the "hard stuff." Howard says: "Dealers were not interested in selling
anything that would cause people to quit doing drugs."
Through the years, though, the memory of one vision from his first Ibogaine
experience resonated, and sustained him. At the end of the visions, he'd
found himself in a darkened room, where a deep voice came to him, and said:
"You will bring Ibogaine to the world, and set it free."
Still, it did not occur immediately to Howard and his circle to promote
Ibogaine as an addiction interrupter, and events soon intervened to throw his
plans into confusion. In 1963, the FDA was beginning to investigate
hallucinogens, and they realized his laboratory was ordering large amounts of
hallucinogens for experimentation. Before Lotsof could do much more than log
his Ibogaine findings, he got a "visit" from the FDA enforcement unit
responsible for tracking a shipment of 100 grams of mescaline, which had come
in one or two days earlier and had already been disbursed.
"Where's the mescaline"' asked the two agents. At that time unauthorized use
of mescaline on humans could only get you six months, but that was still
enough to cause Howard to think fast: "It was used in rat experiments," he
said.
"Where are the rats?" they asked. "They were destroyed in the course of the
experiments," shot back Howard.
The agents eyed him for a moment; one said, "Good answer." It was, in fact,
the only answer that could have gotten him out of trouble. In the search of
his place, the agents unearthed two grams of the Ibogaine. "That's not
mescaline," he said. "It's Ibogaine. You can't take that."
The agents' mouths formed an "0. " They demanded to purchase the two grams as
a sample and gave Lotsof a receipt. The feds now knew that he was involved in
Ibogaine research. They cut off his supplies of all controlled substances.
If that didn't make Howard a marked man, events in Berkeley, where Howard and
Norma felt it wise to relocate in late '63 and '64, certainly didn't endear
him to the authorities. There they played a role in the Free Speech Movement
of Mario Savio, which erupted in September of that year when the university
administration sought to keep student civil rights activists returning from
the South from setting up the traditional literature tables on Sproul Plaza.
Howard modestly describes himself and Norma as bit players in the drama,
"mostly ferrying strikers around in our car."[12] But he does recollect a
piece of "movement intelligence" about an FBI investigation of anti-war
sentiment at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratories. Their report, which
concluded that 90% of the staff at this top secret facility were using LSD,
implicitly zeroed in on the flaw in the earlier CIA evaluation of LSD.
The Agency has dismissed its potential as a communist tool, one ex-analyst
told John Marks, because under its influence "You tend to have a more global
view of things" to be "more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea..." Or, as
another put it, "I think everybody understood that if you had a good trip,
you had a kind of above-it-all look into reality. What we subsequently found
was that when you came down, you remembered the experience, but you didn't
switch identities. You really didn't have that kind of feeling. You weren't
as suspicious of people. You listened to them, but you also saw through them
more easily and clearly. We decided that this wasn't the kind of thing that
was going to make a guy a turncoat to his own country."[13]
But what happened if practically everybody in a group took LSD? What if the
conversion effect was re-inforced by group feedback, and important government
scientists started questioning the Vietnam war effort? The FBI's report,
according to Lotsof, was forwarded to the Senate, initiating the campaign for
total crackdown. "When the authorities realized their multi-million-dollar
institution could be brought to a crashing halt with a few cents worth of
chemicals, the decision was made to ban LSD."
It was the CIA's worst nightmare come true. One of their pharmaco-warfare
genies had gotten out from government labs to the underground. In effect,
"the communists had the Bomb," along with a mode of delivery the us wasn't
willing to use.
Howard, who couldn't survive financially in Berkeley, accepted a free ride
back to New York at the end of 1964, where he and Norma lived quietly in
Brooklyn.
In 1965, the Senate held hearings, and Congress passed a law that became
effective at the beginning of 1966. It established felony sentences for
trafficking in a whole range of psychedelics including LSD and mescaline. At
the same time a wave of media hysteria was loosed upon the country, intended
to reprogram the populace to forget about therapeutic benefits and think
broken chromosomes and acid-heads staring into the sun until they go blind.
Curiously, Ibogaine was not on the list, but the feds cut extraordinary
corners to nail Lotsof much more so than if he were the inconsequential
acid dealer they claimed.
Howard was the very first person raided when the law took effect. Feds were
waiting for Howard and Norma at their place in Brooklyn when they came back
from a trip to Philadelphia. It was a typical case where there are no drugs
only conspiracy charges based on the word of an informant, because the drugs
are gone. More curious still, the conspiracy was supposed to have taken place
nine months earlier.. before the new law had become effective.
All Assistant us Attorney Robert Morgenthau had was the word of a flaky kid
that Howard Lotsof'd cut loose more than a year earlier, and who, upon
getting busted, offered to give them... Lotsof Howard was on some kind of
priority list. His friends tried to get him the famous civil rights attorney
Marvin Garbus, but that didn't work out. So with inadequate counsel, there
came a point when the judge turned to Howard and said: "Mr. Lotsof, you claim
to be a serious researcher. Name one thing you ever discovered."
"Well, your Honor, I discovered that Ibogaine can interrupt cocaine and
heroin addiction with a single dose." The judge slammed his gavel down and
barked, "The jury will disregard that testimony!" and cleared the courtroom
for the day.
With that one decision not to allow Lotsof to testify into the court record,
Ibogaine development was set back two decades sacrificed to insure that the
first-ever prosecution under a popular new law would not be derailed. Trial
proceedings ground on to their foregone conclusion: Howard was found guilty
on four misdemeanors and sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison.
Howard got the message: The U.S. certainly didn't want him around as an
Ibogaine spokesman. He was in jail during the "Summer of Love" in 1967, when
Dana got to know all the other local psychedelic luminaries. When Howard got
out of prison in 1968, he decided to steer clear of further dissent. He
travelled to Nepal, where for the first time in five years, eating opium, he
became re-addicted. When he tried to find some Ibogaine to de-tox, in 1969,
it was completely unavailable.
In 1968, State Police under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller informed the feds that
Ibogaine was being used to cut heroin in the Syracuse area. (Syracuse was a
Rockefeller stronghold).[14] Ibogaine soon became Schedule I, like LSD and
heroin. Meanwhile, Rockefeller was busy engineering public acceptance of his
anticrime brain-child, named Adolphine by its Nazi inventors re-named
"methadone" by the patent-holder, Rockefeller University.
Returning to New York, Howard and Norma enrolled in a methadone program, and
got into New York University film school. But methadone withdrawal lasts
about eight to ten times longer than kicking junk. It lingers in the tissues.
The very long-acting quality that makes it socially preferable to smack (the
addict can hold down a job because he doesn't have to do up every four hours)
makes it a prison without walls. Addicts call it "the orange handcuffs."
Still, Lotsof had one unique advantage over the average addict, who literally
doesn't remember what it's like to be off drugs. From Ibogaine, Howard
remembered that somewhere, the trap had an exit.
Gradually, laboriously, five milligrams at a time (since methadone cold
turkey can kill), he and Norma de-toxed themselves. On his own, Howard
invented what is today the only standard method for methadone de-tox: several
months of Hell.
A big factor in subsequent negative attitudes toward methadone later, among
the initial supporters of the Ibogaine Project, came from Norma and Howard's
recounting their own difficulties in getting off of it. They were just
finishing getting off methadone in December 1973, when they were introduced
to Dana Beal by a friend of pot guru Ed Rosenthal.
As final survivors of the psychedelic movement, they hit it off from the
start. Soon Dana was making regular morning rung or the D train to hang out
at their place in Brooklyn near Pratt Art Institute. One morning in early
1974, in the period of the gas lines after the first OPEC price hike, they
were discussing which drug was "most psychedelic." Howard said it had to be
Ibogaine.
"What's it like?" asked Dana.
"Kind of like harmaline," said Howard.
"Oh, you mean telepathine,"[15] said Dana, regurgitating the only thing (its
synonym) he knew about harmaline.
"Yeah," said Howard. "But you know what? It stopped my heroin addiction."
The effect on Dana wasn't like a blinding flash of light more like a bell
going off. As the putative new leader of the YIPPIES, Dana was poking through
the wreckage of the movement for anything that could be an asset. He filed
this interesting fact away among the YIP crown jewels.
During the next six years, as they collaborated on a number of projects,
including three films, Howard gradually regained the confidence he would need
to become Ibogaine's spokesman. But to this day, Norma Alexander, a brilliant
Afro-American woman who is chief financial officer of NDA International,
refuses to go on camera as a spokesperson. She's still paranoid from the '66
bust and from being Black in America.
Rockefeller capped off his successful installation of methadone maintenance
with the toughest drug law in the country, named in his honor and still used
to imprison substantial and growing numbers of young, Black men.
--[notes]--
1. Experiments at Cold Harbor, Maryland continued to show clinical benefit in
the treotment of alcoholism until the program was ended in 1976, ironically
spurred by revelations of misuse of LSD by the intelligence community. In
1992, the FDA gave Donna Dryer and Richard Jenson the first IND in modern
times sanctioning clinical use of LSD.
2. Harry Anslinger considered U.S. mind-control experiments with cannabinoids
and other substances so sensitive that in 1943 he entrusted the research to
the Manhattan Project, which made no sense, except $at he had the clout as
Bureau of Narcotics chief to put it there, and to know about the existence of
the "Manhattan Engineering District" in the first place Germany was busy
experimenting with mescaline; their work become the basis of Canadian
psychiatrist Cameron's 'psychic driving" experiments during the '50s. Aldous
Huxley, meanwhile, led a team of 200 British scientists looking looking for a
way to use psycho-octive chemicals to win WWII. In the early '60s a
24-year-old Austrian psychiatrist named Hans-Georg Behr cornered Huxley and
asked: "You didn't really $ink you were going to be able to defeat the Nazi
High Command by getting them high, did you?" "No," said Huxley, "But we were
able to keep 200 scientists from being sent to the front."
3. See the 1975 Church Committee Hearings. In 1993, a jury awarded Frank
Olsen's family $4 million for his wrongful death due to being dosed with LSD
with no warning as part of Operation Bluebird.
4. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of
LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, pp. 24-25.
5.Dr. Hoch introduced chlorpromozine into the New York State mental hospital
system.
6. For description, see p. 22.
7. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of
LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, pp. 25-26. Isbell also believed that
cocaine was not addictive, according to Stanley Yalis, then head of the
National Institute of Mental Health. That would make Isbell a likely key
disseminator of this idea through the psychedelic movement of the 1960s.
8. James W. Fernandez, Bwiti. An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in
Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 291-292.
9. See also footnote, p. 12 5 of this report, ibid.
10. See Manchurian Candidate, pp. 70-7
11. His future wife, Norma Alexander, participated in the study, but as a
control.
12. Howard now claims that he doesn't remember a story he used to tell in the
'70s, of how someone smuggled a Bible into the local hoosegow, to the
hundreds of kids being held after the takeover of Sproul Hall. A Bible soaked
in LSD, whose pages were sacramentally consumed, thereby turning the Civil
Rights Movement on to add. But these oral histories con only be saved by
diligent effort.
13. John Marks, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, pp. 70-71.
14. Personal communication, Gerald Colby.
15. The whole extract of ayahuasca, banisteria, coapi, telepathine, contains
additional tryptamines that give it a different effect from pure harmaline.
Pps. 17-28
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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