LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Doug Millison]

You guys are talking as if LSD research and use was common knowledge in the
early 60s and that's just not so. We have the benefit of hindsight, and
books that expose to us the very small number of people that knew of such
research at the time it was taking place, but that knowledge was not
widespread at the time, not until mass media hysteria pushed LSD into
mainstream press coverage much later -- I'd bet my next paycheck that the
vast majority of  Americans didn't know a thing about hippies (or the drugs
they were taking) until Time magazine made the Summer of Love a cover story
in '67 -- and outside of underground newspapers, nobody knew much or even
speculated about military and counter-intelligence research with LSD.  In
the early '60s you had to know somebody who knew somebody to even know this
was taking place -- you can read in those books Tim mentioned earlier (Acid
Dreams is especially good) how LSD spread from a literal handful of
individuals in the early 50s (one of them a founding father of the OSS
forerunner to the CIA), in ever-widening ripples, until, after LSD becomes
illegal, a full-blown black market manufacturing and distribution operation
sends millions and millions of doses out into the recreational market in the
late 60s.

The point the familiar-sounding "jim wood" makes about Oedipa not trusting
her shrink is a good one. Knowing that Pynchon is one of the relatively few
people who know that a very few American psychiatrists are administering LSD
to patients in the early 1960s, I think it's significant that he makes it a
prominent element in this 1966 novel.  By the time he publishes GR, and we
can read of the drug experiments on Slothrop -- which sound similar to the
kind of research that the U.S. government sponsored in its military and
counter-intelligence programs in the 50s -- it seems clear, to me at least
and to other readers, that this is another part of Pynchon's critique of the
Cold War.  I've posted before on the way that the CIA used as a base the
experiments with mescaline conducted by Nazi researchers -- the U.S. managed
to bring one of those scientists back at the same time they were grabbing
rocket scientists, as reported in Acid Dreams.