Lucas Richert and Erika Dyck have reported on the renewed interest of the medicial community in psychedelics in the blog of the 2×2 Project. This article is another one in the discussion about revising US drug laws with respect to those drugs whose use is currently criminalized and whose use as subject of research proscribed. The history and political use of psychoactive drugs in the 1960s provides a cautionary tale about the hamhandedness of state power.
In the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency had a secret research program using psychoactive drugs on US soldiers as research subjects in the quest to discover a truth serum, a drug that would bypass the ability of the subject to lie. Or at least that has been the public story since the public became aware of the program. There is a sense that at least some of the Hippie political rebellion in the 1960s is blowback from this not-well-considered program. Among those involved in this research as researcher or subject were Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (born in 1931 and later changing his name to Ram Dass), and Ken Kesey.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World was published in 1931 and no doubt raised the issue of using pharmaceuticals for control of populations politically among those psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians associated with the militaries of various nations. Raised them to the extent that exploration of chemical weapons and the psychology of propaganda, both hot subjects in the 1930s had not already raised them.
Albert Hofmann was a chemist for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, which like most pharmaceutical companies in the 1930s was examining the chemical composition of traditional medicinal plants and figuring ways to improve their performance, reduce their risk and side effects, and also patent the result. Hofman started research on two medicinal plants, Drimia maritima or sea squill and Ergot. The purpose of this research was to synthesize a respiratory and cardiac stimulant that would not affect the uterus. In the process he synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938. He set it aside for five years and returned to research on it in 1943. During this research he spilled some on his finger and experienced hallucinations and other effects that would later be given the term “trip”. After reflecting on the experience, three days later he intentionally ingested a measured dose of 250 micrograms and went for a bicycle ride.
In the early 1950s, psychiatric researchers considered LSD as a psychomimetic model for exploring psychoses with the use of normal test subjects. It was given to all sorts of test groups for all sorts of reasons: treatment for alcoholism, tracking mental degeneration if artists (right!); increasing artist and composer productivity or creativity,
A subculture of recreational use of LSD grew up within the psychiatric profession as a result of its use as a psychiatric model.
The CIA in it MKULTRA program was concerned about the brainwashing of soldiers in the Korean War and the rumored use of a “lie serum”. MKULTRA conducted a program in which research subjects were given LSD without their informed consent.
By 1965, because the CIA had provided experiences of LSD to ordinary people (Ken Kesey was one), what was an elite recreational drug began to enter mainstream American culture, hyped by no less a publication than Look magazine and its Esalen-promoting editor George Leonard. And in that year, the FDA decided that the drug was dangerous and persuaded Sandoz to stop production. That moved production for the rapidly growing psychedelic culture to undercover labs that produced products of variable quality and after criminalization began mixing in amphetamines and even low doses of rat poison. Bad trips, always somewhat of a problem in LSD research proliferated, which increased the calls for heavier criminalization.
In the meantime, research on LSD was completely halted. Now it is beginning to resume within a medical paradigm. The upside of this is that there will be well-recorded data and statistically valid trials to test various medical applications, safety, and effectiveness. The downside is that Western culture has never had a tradition of managing psychoactive substances or a tradition of mystical uses of psychoactive substances. The even further downside is that Western culture is a consumer culture with a “more is better” and “more more frequently is even better” mindset. It is a culture that can barely stop for holidays. As was seen in some cases in the 1960s and 1970s, that is poor environment for managing the use of psychoactive substances. Or for respecting limits.
The criminalization of drugs in general and psychoactive substances in particular allowed the crushing of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s through diversion into a dream state of consumption of psychoactive drugs (creative for some but not allowing for sound politics), ordering police to become instruments of enforcement of conventional commercial values and political views with violence, and diversion of politics into consumption of symbols of change instead of the reality. It was not orchestrated; it was a series of ad hoc responses by fearful elites. And it created strange stories like that of the Manson family or of Altamont (the media’s favorite anti-Woodstock Generation stories at the time) as being totally linked to radical politics and the drug culture.
At Altamont, the organizers trusted the Hells Angels to provide security better than the Bay Area cops. And they agreed to pay the Hells Angels in beer. And one beer-drunk Hells Angel beat to death one of the concert-goers. Because the primary duty of security was not to protect the concert-goers but to ensure that everyone inside the fence had paid.
The LSD sub-culture soon disappeared but first-time LSD use was a consistent percentage of the population until after 9/11. Then it dropped. As did first-time drug use in general. Especially among youth.
So now the debate will be reopened. Hopefully this time there will be more attention paid to social environment and the framework within which use occurs. And to how our culture can frame its expectations about the proper role of psychoactive drugs in individual life and society in something broader than an medical pop-a-pill model.
And maybe this time we will be more sensitive to how tolerance and then repression of drug use is driven by political anxieties in society.