Murder, Mayhem & CIA Acid Parties (let's give a bunch of LSD to criminals just to see what happens) https://t.co/1mt3BVrgDj
— Martyr Made π¦πͺ (@martyrmade) July 27, 2022
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.
