LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Doug Millison]

If knowledge of LSD was so widespread and common as "wood jim" suggests, why
the public outcry when the mass media finally took up the subject in '67?
Surely "everybody" was familiar with the substance, and knew from those
first few thousands of users that LSD provided a spiritually profound
experience that was virtually harmless when done in the right circumstances
(to use the words of Bill Wilson, AA founder, and just one of many who spoke
of LSD as such in the late '50s and early '60s before it was outlawed), and
there could have been no demonization of the substance as actually happened.
Go back and read the few accounts that were published about LSD and other
psychedelics at that time and you will find almost universal praise for the
substances and a desire that they be widely used in psychotherapy and
spiritual development (these statements are perhaps most credible from the
researchers in the '50s who started working with LSD with the idea that it
was a way to reproduce and study psychosis, but who were surprised, then
delighted to find that instead of making people crazy, in the right settings
it could make crazy people whole and healthy again -- read Stanislav Grof on
this, but he was not alone in this judgement) -- but by the time that a few
hundred thousand people worldwide had actually used these substances, and
continued to pass them on to others, the U.S. government chose to stop it,
and was able to do so because so few people had direct experience with LSD
and knew it to be harmless when used in the right circumstances.

Instead, precisely because so few people had any knowledge of LSD as a user
or from a user, the U.S. government was able to stir up fears and promulgate
misinformation about a substance because it was largely unknown -- the same
way it did with marijuana in the 30s.  If in the '30s use of marijuana had
in fact been a practice indulged in by most people, or had been well
understood by most people, the government never would have been able to
outlaw it -- as had been the case with alcohol.  Alcohol use was truly
widespread, "everybody" used it and knew about it, what happens if you drink
too much, what happens if you use it in moderation, and the government was
unable to effectively ban it.  But in the case of marijuana and later with
LSD, precisely because the substances were largely unknown, and because use
of them was confined to relatively small circles of people, many of them on
the margins of society, the government was able to ban them.  This of course
didn't stop the increase in use -- as more and more people understood how
harmless marijuana is, use of that substance grew to be quite common.  Nor
did it stop the use of LSD and similar substances, but such use has remained
marginal, due to a very effective scare campaign of exaggeration and
misinformation.

The distinction with prescription drug abuse, and particularly
tranquilizers, is clear, too.  The government never has had a problem in
permitting -- subsidizing, even, through federally-funded research, tax
breaks, and other forms of corporate welfare -- drug companies from
disseminating substances that calm people down, keep them from thinking
clearly.  Valium -- there's a household word, a drug that is taken daily by
millions and millions of people, but not LSD, not now, and not in the past.
If Pynchon had wanted to portray a typical, drug-using suburban housewife,
Oedipa would be taking a prescription tranquilizer, not refusing to follow
her doctor's suggestion to take LSD.