LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, And Beyond

Acid Dreams
The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond

Authors: Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain Publisher: Grove Press Date: 1985 ISBN: 0-802-13062-3

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —Old Talmudic saying

Table of Contents
Introduction: Whose Worlds Are These? .................................................................3 Prologue..................................................................................................................5 Part One: The Roots of Psychedelia.......................................................................13 1 In The Beginning There Was Madness … ................................................................ 13 2 Psychedelic Pioneers............................................................................................
For a while he feared he was losing his mind: "Occasionally I felt as if I were out of my body …. I thought I had died. My 'ego ' was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa." Somehow Hofmann summoned the courage to endure this mind-wrenching ordeal. As the trip wore on, his psychic condition began to improve, and eventually he was able to explore the hallucinogenic terrain with a modicum of composure. He spent the remaining hours absorbed in a synesthetic swoon, bearing witness as each sound triggered a corresponding optical effect, and vice versa, until he fell into a fitful sleep. The next morning he awoke feeling perfectly fine. And so it was that Dr. Albert Hofmann made his fateful discovery. Right from the start he sensed that LSD could be an important tool for studying how the mind works, and he was pleased when the scientific community began to use the drug for this purpose. But he did not anticipate that his "problem child," as he later referred to LSD, would have such enormous social and cultural impact in the years to come. Nor could he have foreseen that one day he would be revered as a near-mythic figure by a generation of acid
"The LSD movement was started by the CIA," quipped Timothy Leary with a wide grin on his face. "I wouldn 't be here now without the foresight of the CIA scientists." The one-time Pied Piper of the flower children was in top form, laughing and joking with reporters, as though he hadn 't been chased halfway around the world by US narcotics police and spent the last few years in prison. "It was no accident," Leary mused. "It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence, and I 'm all in favor of Central Intelligence." A jovial mood prevailed throughout much of the panel discussion. Old comrades who had not seen each other for a long time swapped tales of acid glory and reminisced about the wild and unforgettable escapades of yesteryear. "As I look at my colleagues and myself," said Richard Alpert, one of Leary 's original cohorts at Harvard University in the early 1960s, "I see we have proceeded just as we wished to, despite all conditions. I feel that what we are doing today is partly demonstrating that we are not psychotic!" Alpert went on to declare that he didn 't care if he ever took LSD again but that he appreciated what his hundreds of trips had taught him and hoped there would be a more favorable climate for serious LSD research in the near