GRGR(12) LSD, for good and evil

[Doug Millison]

LSD:  life- or death-affirming?  Maybe both -- we've got evidence to
support that in GR (and certainly in the sources to which the both leads us
rather pointedly), I think.

Terrance reminds us that "Weisenburger notes that LSD is linked in GR with
the North, the color White (death), IG Farben."   This would be, I suppose,
in the passage on page 261, the "indole crowd [...] at the end of a long
European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on
broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain
that havne't known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years--keepers of
a tradition, aristocrats". This would seem to say that the "aristocrats"
have co-opted what sounds like a rather fun, perhaps even orgiastic folk
tradition -- TRP himself seems to undercut the rather rigid reading
Weisenburger provides here of LSD's role in GR.

This passage comes just after the specific mention of LSD on page 260. A
few pages later in this section, Pynchon riffs on OSS ("Office of Strategic
Services" p. 268 -- predecessor to the CIA --  and links it to "the late,
corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone" which would probably also link it to
COL49 and the bones in the lake, and don't forget to remember Dr. Hilarious
when you read of Doc Janiger below). What can we learn about LSD and OSS
outside of GR?

Among other things, that the CIA began researching the possible uses of LSD
in the early '50s, building on research by Nazi aviation doctors with
mescaline (I posted previously in some detail on this earlier in GRGR).
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (in their book _Acid Dreams_) note a 1951
document that indicates that "acid was tested initially as part of a pilot
study of the effects of various chemicals 'on the conscious suppression of
experimental or non-threat secrets' " as part of Operation ARTICHOKE which
had evolved from an earlier program called BLUEBIRD that tested drugs for
their possible use in interrogation, a search for a "truth drug" that
would, Lee and Shlain report, enable an interrogator to use "an intravenous
hookup [... to] regulate the flow of chemicals. The idea was to produce a
'push'--a sudden outporuing of thoughts, emotions, confidences, and
whatnot." (Not unlike Slothrop's drugged adventure down the toilet, for
example).  After ARTICHOKE came the infamous MK-ULTRA , which Lee and
Shlain call "the CIA's major drug and mind control program during the Cold
War", authorized by Allen Dulles (TRP also mentions him specifically in
this section) and "the brainchild of Richard Helms."  MK-ULTRA led to the
deaths and permanent disability of some subjects who were given LSD and
other drugs without their knowledge, and experimented upon while under the
influence -- nasty shit.

Back to the OSS and LSD. Lee and Shlain spend some time talking about
Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, "His friends called him 'Cappy,' and he was
known as the 'Johnny Appleseed of LSD.'"

"Born dirt poor in Kentucky, he served with the OSS during the Second World
War and went on to make a fortune as a uranium entrepreneur," report Lee
and Shlain. "His prestigious government and business connections read like
a Who's Who of the power elite in North America. [...] That Hubbard, of all
people, should have emerged as the first genuine LSD apostle is all the
more curious in light of his long-standing affiliation with the cloak and
dagger trade. Indeed he was no run-of-the-mill spook. As a high-lvel OSS
officer, the Captain directed an extremely sensitive covert operation that
involved smuggling weapons and war material to Great Britain prior to the
attack on Pearl Harbor."

He first encountered LSD in 1951, served as "guide" for  Aldous Huxley's
first LSD trip in 1955, established LSD treatment centers for alcoholism
"at three major hosptials in Canada", turned on "Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los
Angeles psychiatrist [...] part of a small  circle of scientists and
literary figures in the Los Angeles area who began to use psychedelics at
social gatherings in the mid-1950s [...] included philosopher Alan Watts
[...[ This informal group was the first to use LSD socially rather than
clinically. [...] Hubbard, the wandering shaman who visited southern
California on a regular basis, supplied the group with various chemicals."

Lee and Shlain report that Hubbard resisted joining the CIA in the '50s
"because he didn't approve of what the Agency was doing with his beloved
LSD. 'The CIA work stinks', he said. 'They were misusing it. I tried to
tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you
couldn't tell them a goddamned thing.'"

So, LSD serves both the forces of evil (the CIA; "Spies and big business,
in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers" -- an excellent
observation, at GR267) and of good -- former OSS "spook" Hubbard who turned
Huxley and others on to LSD because he saw the drug as liberating, helping
people to return to wholeness, to a deeper and richer experience of life.
It's a floorwax AND a dessert topping. Both/and, not either/or.

In the hipster circles TRP may have traveled in late-50s New York, 60s
California, and elsewhere, it's not hard to imagine that he would have been
aware of the LSD experimentation that was happening as a result of
Hubbard's evangelism, spreading from Huxley and those other southern
California space cadets who were using the drug to explore the bright side
of the Force, so to speak. But, if I read _Acid Dreams_ correctly,
information about the CIA's involvement in a very much darker form of LSD
research in the '50s didn't surface until the early '70s, which leads to
the interesting speculation of where TRP might have learned of it in time
for the writing of GR. Maybe people in those same LSD-using circles beyond
the boundaries of CIA experiments (if, indeed, they were beyond it --
paranoid thought) knew of the evil CIA LSD programs?

Yes, I'm aware that not every use of LSD outside of CIA hands was benign.
Charlie Manson and his use of LSD comes to mind immediately, underscoring
the notion that LSD is a powerful tool for exploration that also, as the
CIA discovered, provides powerful mind control capabilities. I find it
fascinating that TRP appears to illustrate both sides in GR.




d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
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