: LSD? CIA? ETC?

[Doug Millison]

Interesting that, as Mike points out, the "summer of love" was in large part
a media-created event.  The media coverage drew people to San Francisco, a
Top 40 hit song celebrated it ("be sure to wear a flower in your hair"), and
the underground drug labs had ramped up to sell them LSD when they got
there. The fact that LSD was by then illegal, and that police were cracking
down on some dealers and users, added the touch of paranoia necessary to
ensure than many of them had bad trips, instead of the spiritually uplifting
experiences reported by so many people prior to the outlawing of LSD and
related substances. 

In COL49, GR, Vineland Pynchon plays with all of this -- the way the
government and the media manipulate mass opinion, the government's role in
the proliferation of LSD and work to use it for counter-intelligence or as a
weapon.  

Otto mentioned Stanislav Grof, perhaps the single most prolific LSD
researcher that we know about.  In addition to conducting some 3,000
therapeutic LSD sessions with subjects, Grof also consulted with NASA and,
some people believe, other U.S. government agencies. I posted previously on
Pynchon-L excerpts from a book -- perhaps it was Michael Hollingshead's book
about his involvement in the very early spread of LSD -- that mentions
Grof's work in administering LSD to U.S. astronauts as part of their
training in the 60s.

Speaking of paranoia, many people who are involved in the current effort to
pick up where LSD and other psychedelic research left off when the
government banned it (see the MAPS web site for updates) believe that the
recent wave of negative publicity around "Ecstasy" -- horror stories that
generally turn out to be false and twisted distortions of the facts --
represents a similar effort to discredit a substance (MDMA) with the
potential to show people a way of being outside the boundaries of the
corporate/government sanctioned view of life and work and consciousness.
The MAPS.org mailing list does a good job of analyzing current news stories
about MDMA and other drugs, calling on credible scientific researchers in
the relevant subject matter areas to add the missing perspective and correct
factual errors.

You can find a lot of information about the use of entheogens -- the term
preferred by many now because of the negative baggage that comes with
"psychedelic" and to reflect the sacramental potential of these substances
-- from the web site published by the Council on Spiritual Practices, an
organization based here in San Francisco.

One possible reason that people today may find it difficult to believe that
everybody didn't know about LSD in the early 60s is that we have the benefit
of books and documentary films that, in recent years, have pulled together
the history of that period.  These film makers and historians, of course, go
to extraordinary efforts to pull together bits and pieces of the information
that was available in that era -- a fragment here, a fragment there -- to
put together a picture that was not broadly available at the time.