Re: IVIV: chapter seven—Lords of Acid

[Michael Bailey]

 Robin Landseadel wrote:
>
>        . . .And then Stubby drops a bombshell of his own: "Unbeknownst to
>
>        me,     Timothy Leary worked for the CIA. He came to infiltrate our
> gang."

precious little does he elaborate though...

and consider the source.

Personally, I kind of like the notion: Leary as deep-cover spook, bad
enough to take jail time and even to escape...

hard to swallow, but so are peyote buttons.  He did, I seem to remember reading,
name names to get out of Vacaville.

If we presume he was recruited at Harvard, and that CIA was behind the
rise, as well as the fall of the BEL, then there must have been a grand scheme
of some kind on their part.  They wanted to popularize psychedelics
but at the same
time to cast a spell of confusion over them

Did they want to produce in the general populace the same sorts of
attitudes they were looking for in their controlled tests?

Did they want to subvert antiwar and social justice agitation by linking it
with drug use?

Was it a CIA initiative, or was it at the behest of some think tank?

Also, compare that covert action (if covert action it was) with the
crack-cocaine
epidemic later spread (and documented much more satisfactorily) by the
same source.

The xanthocroid surfers got turned on to acid, and weed, by the time
the operation got
to melanin-rich Oakland it was spreading a poison with lots fewer
redeeming factors.

just brainstorming