GRGR(12) LSD, for good and evil

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

Undercuts it how? I don't understand? Yes, the aristocrats,
the elite, the white, indole crowd, has, with chemistry, its
cannon being that man is no longer at the mercy of nature,
co-opted something. What do you think they have co-opted?
You describe it as fun, folk, yes, but there is more, much
more here, isn't there? And if we consider the traditional,
use of naturally produced (say, blighted grain, mushrooms)
substances used in religious ceremony, it seems to me that
LSD, at this juncture, in this context is not life
affirming, but another pornography. 


 

> 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
> http://www.dougmillison.com
> http://www.online-journalist.com