ACID DREAMS: THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND - MARTIN A. LEE & BRUCE SHLAIN

When reading TRIPPING WITH ALLAH a few weeks ago, I noted how the author quickly dismissed the idea of making LSD part of his psychedelic journey and how hypocritical it seemed since his objection seemed to be that it wasn’t deeply rooted in a tradition, like Ayahuasca. Obviously, this is quite false, there is a robust history, if relatively short compared to things like Ayahuasca, but a history that has much more complicated implications for someone like the author, who was, at the time of writing TWA, a Harvard student. The good news is that we now have this book to help us understand the history of LSD, the only psychedelic a W.E.I.R.D. person can reasonably do without accusations of appropriation. Acid is very much a product of the 20th century West, for better or worse. This book gives a good rundown of the history, from bicycle day up through the middle of the 70’s. As you might know, the interest in Acid comes in two waves. An early wave where it is the focus of CIA interests through MKULTRA alongside a handful of smarty-pants, upper-crust intellectuals, such as Aldous Huxely, who often have ties (often unknown to them) to intelligence. Then something happens, and it suddenly pours into the counterculture and nascent anti-war movement where it spawns psychedelic art and rock and becomes a bedrock part of “The 60’s” and the self-congratulatory Boomer Imaginary. There’s all sorts of fun anecdotes, like Leary and his crew taking over a beach in Mexico where they erect a town on the water and have someone tripping in it 24/7 as a sort of psychedelic vigil, but the most interesting part of the book concerns the million dollar question of whether or not the psychedelic boom was counterinsurgency, ie did the CIA flood the New Left with Acid to make render it navel-gaze-y and ineffective? It is interesting to see things like Ken Kesey going to early anti-war demonstrations and telling people to just ignore the war and work on themselves while the Hells’ Angles he brought with him beat people up. Tim Leary’s message, of tuning out and not engaging in politics as such, was on a similar wavelength. William Burroughs, of all people, was an early proponent of this idea, that the amount of acid and its timing was sus. John Sinclair endorses the idea, as do a number of more “classic” leftists from the time. There’s an awful lot of spooky folks mixed up in the early Acid days. Jolly West, who is mentioned here but deserves so much more space (this book was written in the 80’s and we’ve got more info on him now. I’d recommend CHAOS and POISONER IN CHIEF to learn more about what the fuck he was up to), was working at the Haight Ashbery free clinic during the Summer of Love (and when Manson was bringing girls there). Leary himself is bankrolled and put up, first by OSS officer and Ted K. torturer Harry Murry at Harvard, then by Billy Hickcock, a member of the Mellon Family with all sorts of ties to CIA connected banks, like Castle and Resorts International. John Starr Cooke, who is also related to very high up CIA folks helps plan and fund the Human Be-In. Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, who gave LSD to Leary and turned on over 6000 people apparently, was OSS and considered “The Johnny Appleseed of Acid.” The list goes on and on. The most intriguing to me concerns a guy named Ronald Hadley Stark, who was a member and bankroller of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group that both produced millions of hits of Acid in the mid-late 60’s but also funded Leary’s prison break. Stark was a mysterious guy, who did tell people he was in the CIA and, when he wasn’t setting up Acid labs, bounced around Europe, selling drugs and involving himself with terrorists groups across Europe and the Middle East. At one point, after an arrest for involvement in Italian terrorism, a judge in Italy declared that he thought Stark had some relationship with American intelligence. A CIA asset funding the Orange Sunshine Acid seems pretty smoking gun to me but Stark is very mysterious and the book cannot definitely prove what he deal was, maybe he was a con artist/drug dealer/terrorist and saying he was involved with the CIA was part of that. He reminds me of Reeve Whitson from CHAOS, a very strange guy who might be CIA, might just be a real weirdo, but we’ll never be allowed to know, despite the implications being very far-out. Either way, this book was a great read, certainly worth reading and thinking about if you’re interested in psychedelics or American history. At best, Acid can be thought of like the Internet, something created by our nation’s enormous and monstrous military/intelligence-industrial complex that’s managed to really integrate itself into our culture. Definitely going to ponder some of the stuff in here the next time I drop acid. 25 hits of orange sunshine.