LSD

[jbor]

It is certainly interesting but I'm not certain that it's particularly
relevant to _Lot 49_ or _GR_. There is no reference to the C.I.A. in _Lot
49_, and I don't think that there is any suggestion that Pointsman and co.
are working for the C.I.A. at St Veronica's in the latter novel -- Pointy is
more of a maverick and, on the evidence of his discussion with Kevin Spectro
(47-53), his experiment on Slothrop is part of a personal obsession of his,
isn't it, rather than part of some overarching secret service initiative? --
though the C.I.A. is certainly obliquely referenced later on in a different
context relating to Slothrop.

In _Lot 49_ what do you make of Hilarius renouncing the LSD experiments
altogether?

    "Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have?
    Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax
    it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it
    dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You
    begin to cease to be." (95-6)

It doesn't sound to me like the vengeful and unrepentant cry of an evil Nazi
scientist in willing cahoots with the C.I.A. trying to brainwash everyone
for fun and/or profit. It sounds to me more like Hilarius has tried to
"atone" and serve his "penance" for his involvement in war crimes by working
for the U.S. Establishment, trying to contribute to society, doing what he
is told or expected to do, but that what he is engaged in in the community
hospital-sponsored experiment is against his personal and professional
beliefs and judgement. I'd be interested to hear what you think.

best


on 8/13/01 2:19 PM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> from Lee & Shlain's _Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD:
> The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond_, this intriguing  bit of history,
> in light of the characterization Pynchon creates for Oedipa's shrink
> in COL49, and Slothrop's drugged interrogation in GR:
> 
> "After the war, the CIA and the military picked up where the OSS had
> left off in the secret search for a truth serum. The navy took the
> lead when it initiated Project CHATTER in 1947, the same year the CIA
> was formed. Described as an "offensive" program, CHATTER was supposed
> to devise means of obtaining information people independent of their
> volition but without physical duress.  Toward this end, Dr. Charles
> Savage conducted experiments with mescaline [...] at the Naval
> Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But these studies,
> which involved animal as well as human subjects, did not yield an
> effective truth serum, and CHATTER was terminated in 1953. The navy
> became interested in mescaline as an interrogation agent when
> American investigators learned of mind control experiments carried
> out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during WWII.
> After administering the halluncinogen to thirty prisoners,  the Nazis
> concluded that it was "impossible to impose one's will on another
> person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had
> been given." But the drug still afforded certain advantages to SS
> interrogators, who were consistently able to draw "even the most
> intimate secrets from the [subject] when questions were cleverly put.
> [...] The mescaline experiments at Dachau were described in a lengthy
> report by the US Naval Technical Mission, which swept across Europe
> in search of every scrap of industrial material and scientific data
> that could be garnered from the fallen Reich. This mission was the
> stqage for the wholesale importation of more than six hundred top
> Nazi scientists under the auspices of Project Paperclip, which the
> CIA supervised during the early years of the Cold War. Among those
> who emigrated to the US in such a fashioin was Dr. Hubertus
> Strughold, the German scientist whose chief subordinates (Dr. Sigmund
> Ruff and Dr. Sigmund Rascher) were directly involved in "aviation
> medicine" experiments at Dachau, which included the mescaline
> studies. Despite recurring allegations that he sanctioned medical
> atrocities during the war, Strughold settled in Texas and became an
> important figure in America's space program. After Wernher von Braun,
> he was the top Nazi scientist employed by the American government,
> and he was subsequently hailed by NASA as the "father of space
> medicine. [...] "Like the Nazi doctors at Dachau, the CIA victimized
> certain groups of people who were unable to resist:  prisoners,
> mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, sexual deviants,
> ethnic minorities." "
> --Lee & Shlain, pp. 5-6, citing a Congressional records on Project
> CHATTER and "German Aviation Research at the Dachau Concentration
> Camp ," US Naval Technical Mission [Report No. 331-N45] October 1945;
> p. 24.
> 
> As a Pynchon reader I find it interesting that the CIA's involvement
> with psychedelic drugs (after mescaline came a host of substances
> until the agency hit on LSD) finds its foundations in Nazi aviation
> research in a concentration camp -- echoes, to my ears if not to any
> other reader's, of  the origins of the U.S. rocket program,
> considering the role of Holocaust slave laborers in the manufacture
> of the V-2.
> 
> News of the CIA experiments with LSD was widely publicized -- and
> apparently came as a surprise to more than a few of the Senators in
> attendance -- at  Senate hearings in 1977 led by Ted Kennedy as
> chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific
> Research.  Acid Dreams is based in part on a study of the CIA records
> gathered by Senate investigators for those hearings.
> 
> IF (a big if, perhaps too much of a stretch for some readers,
> perhaps, and I put it forward here only as something to think about,
> if you like thinking about that sort of thing), if Pynchon has based
> Slothrop's drugged interrogation in GR on CIA research with LSD, then
> P would have been in touch with information that very much under
> wraps at the time he was writing the book (even if news of the
> officially-sponsored research by Leary and the several other
> scientists in the 50s and very early 60s had been mentioned in the
> press in addition to specialist publications and conferences, the CIA
> experiments were not widely known). It's also possible that, when he
> wrote of Slothrop's drugged interrogations and the wildly
> hallucinogenic material they contain, Pynchon may have had in mind
> Project CHATTER, which does not appear to have been kept secret the
> same way the CIA kept their own despicable experiments and medical
> atrocities secret -- Pynchon might have seen the U.S. military and
> Congressional records on Project CHATTER and the contribution to the
> U.S. rocket program from Nazi researchers who experimented on
> concentration camp prisoners with mescaline, or perhaps he heard
> about them from somebody else.
> 
> Naming a company with Pynchonian echoes, Lee & Shlain also report:
> 
> "During the mid-1960's he [Hubbard, described as "Johnny Appleseed of
> LSD" for his early work in evangelizing use of the substance] was
> employed by Teledyne, a major defense subcontractor as "director of
> human factors research." In this capacity Hubbard served as adviser
> and consultant to a combined navy and NASA proejct that involved
> testing the effects of psychochemical agents on a newly designed
> "helicopter avionics system." Teledyne worked closely with various
> government organizations, including the CIA, to apply these
> techniques to additional areas of military interest. "
> --Lee & Shlain, p. 53
> 
> Whether Pynchon intends any connections for Dr. Hubertus with
> Oedipa's Dr. H, Slothrop's drug adventures in GR, etc., who knows,
> but I think it's fun to know this stuff as I read P's books.
> 
> Speaking of "experimentally-induced insanity", early LSD researchers
> carried out their work with the belief that the substance induced a
> reaction similar to that seen in "insane" subjects -- LSD was often
> called a "pschotomimetic" for that reason.
> 
> 
> 
> "jbor"
>> Later on Herr Doktor admits that at the end of WWII he was working at
>> Buchenwald on "experimentally-induced insanity" on the Jewish prisoners (by
>> pulling faces at them!), but says that since then he has "tried to atone".
>> (p. 95) It seems to me that whatever the purpose/s of the current LSD
>> experiments in Kinneret -- I don't think it's ever made explicit in the text
>> what these might be (even so, it is certainly possible that the community
>> hospital and Hilarius have differing agendas) -- Hilarius has viewed his
>> work in the U.S. as part of this atonement phase, a type of "penance".
>>