1953,
the CIA purchased massive quantities of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories
in Switzerland, and immediately began testing its effects on
subjects. The drug was administered, without consent, to mental
patients, prisoners, military service members, prostitutes and johns
- “people who could not fight back,” as one agency officer put
it. A mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD every day for 174
days. Some test subjects went insane, others believed they had gone
insane and committed suicide. The evidence suggests that the CIA was
the first major importer of LSD into the United States. Although it
was intended for experimental purposes, there are records of CIA
employees taking it recreationally, and of CIA acid parties in the
early days. According to one academic study: “Researchers were
growing lax in controlling the drug. They began to share LSD in their
homes with friends.” From there, the drug leaked into elite
society, and then to the student population through students who
volunteered for CIA-sponsored experiments. Novelist Ken Kesey, author
of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was a participant in one of
these early experiments while a student at Stanford in 1959. He
enjoyed LSD so much that he took a job at the VA hospital where the
experiments were being conducted so that he could gain access to the
stash. After becoming rich and famous for writing his book, he threw
wild parties for writers, poets, musicians and other cultural
tastemakers, where he gave acid away like candy. In 1964, he and a
bunch of his fellow heads took a psychedelic bus trip across the
United States preaching the gospel of LSD. Soon, acid was everywhere, and the counterculture was on.
In
the book, Chaos:
Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.
[great book] author Tom O’Neil exposes gaping holes in the
official story of the Manson Family murders. O’Neil himself is
reluctant to put forward an alternative explanation, but he
demolishes the mainstream Helter Skelter account, and provides strong
circumstantial evidence that Charles Manson was the subject of a
government-sponsored study of how various drugs and psychological
techniques affected behavior, especially aggression, of individuals
and groups. Manson’s parole officer, Roger Smith, was a
postgraduate student studying criminology at UC Berkeley. It was
Smith who advised Manson to move to Haight Ashbury in the summer of
1967, and it was then that Manson, previously a low-rent criminal on
parole for forging checks, was first introduced to LSD. Smith was not
a regular parole officer, and Manson was not a normal parolee. Manson
was assigned to Smith under an experimental program called The San
Francisco Project, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), a federal agency compelled by a judge in 1977 to admit that
it had allowed itself to be used as a front for CIA operations. As
the program required, Smith became much closer to Manson than was
typical for a parole officer. Even within the project, Smith’s work
with Manson was unique: The other six parole officers on The San
Francisco Project were each assigned between 20-100 parolees each,
but Smith only managed one: Charles Manson.
