by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain Grove Press, 1986
A review by Beatrice Devereaux for The Fessenden Review.
"I fear I owe you an apology, I have been reading a succession of pieces about the CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia and I remember when you first suggested I look into this I thought you were full of beans. Indeed you were right." -- C.L. Sulzberger, editor The New York Times, in a letter to Allen Ginsberg.
It is more or less common knowledge that the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Army experimented with lysergic acid
diethylamide starting in the late 40s, and continued to toy with
it for more than two decades. However no one has documented
those experiments to the extent that Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
have in their book "Acid Dreams."
One of the characters in the book is Dr. Paul Hoch.
Hoch, who later become New York State Commissioner for
Mental Hygiene ... gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then
lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before
and after psychosurgery.
"It is possible that certain amount of brain damage is
of therapeutic value," Hoch once commented. In one experiment a
hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and
the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as
surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.
YEEOOWW! Get me out of here I wanna go back to Dr. Mengele.
To our knowledge, a more thorough history of the dispersal
of LSD (and other psychedelic drugs) into our society has not
been published. Much of "Acid Dreams" is based on information
acquired from the government through the Freedom of Information
Act and so, we assume, is of some truth. If half of what's in
this book is true, it makes one nostalgic for the gentle
compassion of Idi Amin and Pol Pot.
Despite a few flaws, not the least of which is Lee and
Shlain's anti-establishment bias, this is a remarkable book -- if
for no other reason than the sheer magnitude of research it must
have taken to compile it. The two authors have done their
homework and the narrative is well structured and impressively
assembled. Like any cultural history documenting an explosive
period there are a wealth of colorful characters. In the later
chapters the now familiar, perhaps too familiar, gang of
yahoos appear: Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Richard
Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Dr. Ralph Metzner, Ken Kesey, Augustus
Owsley Stanley III -- the list goes one.
But in the early chapters -- Holy Guacamole! Meet Richard
"this stuff is dynamite" Helms (CIA director from 1967 to 1973)
and Major General William "war without death" Creasy, chief
officer of the US Army's Chemical Corps in the 1950s who, during
Congressional testimony, called for the testing of hallucinogenic
gases on subways in American cities and Captain Alfred M.
Hubbard, the spy who become the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. "If you
don't think this stuff is amazing," said Hubbard, "just go ahead
and try it." And, the man who started it all, the kindly Swiss
doctor, Albert Hoffman.
A favorite plan, during Helms' administration at the CIA,
involved slipping "P-1" (the code name for LSD when used
operationally) to socialist or left-leaning politicians in
foreign countries so that they would babble incoherently and
discredit themselves in public.
General Creasy, "Acid Dreams" tells us, promoted the
psychochemical cause with eccentric and visionary zeal. The
General was opposed to artillery though he knew that dislodging
enemy soldiers was a potentiality that had to be anticipated.
"Suppose ... you found a way to spike the city's water supply or
to release a hallucinogen in aerosol form. For twelve to twenty-
four hours all the people in the vicinity would be hopelessly
giddy, vertiginous... Victory would be a foregone conclusion, as
smooth and effortless as the French army in 'The King of Hearts'
strolling into a town inhabited solely by asylum inmates."
