OFF Re: The Main Scientist behind MK-Ultra - a book recommendation

[matthew cissell]

Hello Kai,

Long time, no post; good to hear from you. And thanks for throwing that
book my way. I was even able to find that chapter you quoted online. Great
source. So we know that Abramson gave Ginsberg LSD for the first time in
1959, but that still doesn't make it clear if that is where Allen heard it
from.

Harold Abramson, according to Stephen Kinzer, had been an officer in the
Chemical Warfare Service during WWII. ("Keep mum, she's not dumb!")
Abramson was one of the CIA's first medical collaborators (Kinzer, p60) in
1947; MK-NAOMI was named after his secretary. And later in 1951 he
administered LSD to Gottlieb under the latter's request - only 6 months
into the job. Kinzer also states that Abramson gave LSD to people at his
Long Island home (Abramson was a New York allergist). In '53 Gottlieb gave
HA $85,000 to run experiments. Would he have let it slip to one of his
guests that he got the substance from the CIA? Ok, maybe Abramson
told Bateson who then told Ginsberg. But that still doesn't explain where
TP might have got the idea (LSD in CoL 49) from. Still, there are other
possibilities.

>From the same page you quoted, there is another passage that is quite
thought provoking.  "Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of
getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank
Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to
Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew everybody,
Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to
the academic hinterlands." That got me thinking about publications.

The webpage where I found the text from *The Search for the Manchurian
Candidate* is called druglibrary.org. And there are other books in their
bibliography section. I list some here. Check those publication dates.
   H. Abramson *The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy* (1960)
   T. Leary  *The Psychedelic Experience *(1964)
   T.M. Ling and J. Buckman  *LSD and Ritalin in Treatment of Neurosis *
(1963)
    Louis Cholden   *Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in
Experimental Psychiatry* (1956) !!

My point is that well before the Acid tests there were scholarly
publications that mentioned LSD, quite a few. Could the multi-faceted
polymath and autodidactic author have come across any of those? I suspect
that it would have been easier (more probable) for TP to run across one of
these books than to have actually heard from someone that had been
administered LSD by one of the many doctors involved in MK-Ultra. I know
that's a big claim and I would have to look at publication numbers for the
books and where they were, likely University libraries and private
collections of practitioners.

Can we take it one step further? As LSD worked its way into society's
synapses, other cultural producers were opening new positions within their
respective fields (from Latin and South American writers and abstract
painters to Ornette Coleman and more) and it all required new language or
terms to describe and classify what was happening. For example, Michel
Foucault had an important experience with LSD that sent him in new
directions in a way that John Barth's reading of Jorge Luis Borges caused a
shift in that writer's production. Compare all that with a Google N-gram
chart of the term "postmodern". It really starts to get used in the 70's
and booms into usage in the '80's before peaking and falling off
significantly at the beginning of the 21st century. (One must also consider
that Academia is not immune to trends and the dynamics of the field that
require that agents act in response to new positions by accepting or
rejecting them, for example. Consider Benny Goodman's attempt to do Bebop
style music, or James Wood's consistent rejection of Pynchon. Or simply the
fact that there are probably very few philosophy papers today that cite
Bergson's "élan vital".)
   In other words, the term "postmodern" was an attempt to explain all the
new weirdness. Architecture, music, art or literature that didn't align
with earlier models or modes of production could be filed under
"postmodern". But that is an argument that requires a book to lay it out
with any clarity.

best regards,
mc otis

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 2:01 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> Hi Matthew,
>
> you write:
>
> > So Ginsberg knew before the Committee blew the lid off it all. How and
> when would be
> interesting to know. <
>
> I think the standard work of Marks (*The Search for the "Manchurian
> Candidate"*, here p. 129) does answer your question at least partly:
>
> "Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margret Mead's former husband, his
> first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend
> of his named Alan Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located
> off the Stanford campus [probably the same program Adi Da - see *The Knee
> of Listening*, chapter 3 - was in a couple of years later - kfl]. No
> stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to
> what he describes as 'the closed little doctor's room full of instruments,'
> where he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to records of his
> choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala [meant here is
> probably: "mantra" - kfl], and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he 'was being
> connected to Big Brother's Brain.' He says that the experience resulted in
> 'a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the
> mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that.'. /
> Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at the Veterans
> Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was
> testing LSD at the same hospital."
>
> Best wishes!
>
> Kai
>
>