On August 16th 1951 a number of people in the quiet southern French town of Pont St.Esprit began to fall ill. Stomach pains were soon followed by violent and often terrifying hallucinations. Local hospitals were soon overwhelmed and more than thirty people were taken to asylums in nearby towns. It was soon decided that the cause was bread poisoning and the evidence pointed to just one Bakery. The reason, it was believed was 'ergot', a fungal infection found in Rye bread which had often caused mass poisonings in Medieval times. Journalist
Hank Albarelli, however, claims that a recently released
CIA memo shows that
the CIA were in fact testing LSD on the inhabitants of the town.
[more inside]
posted by dng
on Aug 24, 2010 -
56 comments
Cary in the Sky with Diamonds. "Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy. With LSD research beginning a comeback, the authors recount how two Beverly Hills doctors promoted a new 'wonder drug,' at $100 a session, profoundly altering the lives of their glamorous patients."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Jul 9, 2010 -
12 comments
A year before his passing at the age of 102,
LSD discoverer
Albert Hofmann pens a letter to Apple CEO
Steve Jobs (who had remarked publicly about his own use of the hallucinogenic as a creative factor)
asking for Jobs' support for further research into the use of LSD in psychotherapy. In the remainder of the article, Ryan Grim
touches briefly on the use of LSD by scientists and computer programmers who have transformed the world through novel discoveries and inventions.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jul 9, 2009 -
64 comments
The Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that military scientists tested hundreds of chemical and biological substances on them, including VX, tabun, soman, sarin, cyanide, LSD, PCP, and World War I-era blister agents like phosgene and mustard. The full scope of the tests, however, may never be known. As a CIA official explained to the GAO, referring to the agency's infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments, "The names of those involved in the tests are not available because names were not recorded or the records were subsequently destroyed." Besides, said the official, some of the tests involving LSD and other psychochemical drugs "were administered to an undetermined number of people without their knowledge."
posted by Joe Beese
on May 19, 2009 -
42 comments
Is there no humor in public relations? The public relations blog PRBlogNews included a post last week on PR and LSD (
a long strange happy tradition). It appears to have been a joke, mixing a selection of early youth-on-acid videos with a vintage discourse about LSD by Dr. Richard Alpert (later
Ram Dass) re-imagined as a history of successful "tripvertising." It must have stirred some sort of trouble; there's been a follow-up, "LSD and PR don’t mix" post (
Don’t eat the brown acid) which warns
against mixing PR and LSD (and hot dogs).
posted by mmahaffie
on Aug 14, 2007 -
11 comments
A landmark rigorous
study, 36 years after Walter Pahnke's
Good Friday study ocuments the ability of psilocybin - the chemical in "magic mushrooms" - to trigger mystical experiences. 16 of 24 participants, who had no history of psychedelic use, rated the drug episode (after 2 months) to be among the 5 most meaningful experiences in their lifetime. A longer 40-year
follow-up by MAPS on those who took LSD under the supervision of psychiatrist Oscar Janiger in the 1950s, found qualitatively the same result.
posted by daksya
on Jul 10, 2006 -
236 comments
The Bicycle Ride. This animated short, "The Bicycle Ride," is a
fanciful depiction of Dr. Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD. 3:47 video.
posted by fixedgear
on May 12, 2006 -
36 comments
Fox pussies out. Recently a bill passed in mexico
legalizing all drugs under certain specified quantities. The bill was promoted By Vincente Fox's party, and came from his offices. However he decided not to sign it under U.S. pressure.
There go my vacation plans.
posted by Paris Hilton
on May 4, 2006 -
57 comments
LSD documentary records were a forgotten side-track in the war on drugs, reaching a high point in 1966 with the release of
LSD, an
album featuring interviews with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg, and Ken Kesey, and featuring a live recording (which may or may not have been real) of a kid going on his first bad trip. (Not to be confused with Leary's own record of the same title.) In 1966, with neither internet nor home video, the record album was one of the most sophisticated communications media available, and it was a big year for LSD hysteria, with a
LIFE cover story and a Sal Mineo-narrated LSD version of Reefer Madness called
Hallucination Generation. LSD-related
magazines and periodicals,
reviews of psychedelic music, and more from
lysergia.com.
posted by dhartung
on Mar 20, 2005 -
21 comments
91 pounds of LSD? ...at that dosage level, Pickard and Apperson possessed 2 billion hits of acid—enough to give every person in the Western Hemisphere two doses and still have 250 million hits left over.
Ryan Grim is writing about acid again at Slate.
posted by Gankmore
on Mar 15, 2005 -
98 comments
The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide. 2. This is not an
LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in
1975. This is a
biological warfare story.
Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “
bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.
3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the
Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the
current Administration.
This is his son Eric's search for his father.
posted by hortense
on Jan 2, 2005 -
23 comments
PiHKAL - Phenethylamines I Have Known
And Loved: A Chemical Love Story, by Alexander and Ann Shulgin, is the online version of the book of the same name.
It contains personal accounts by the Shulgins detailing the chemical procedures used in the synthesis, and lengthy qualitative reports regarding the subsequent ingestion, of 179 different
types of
Phenethylamines, the family of chemicals that
includes
2C-B,
Mescaline - the active ingredient in
Peyote, and
MDMA - better known as
ecstasy. See also the sequel
TiHKAL -
Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved:
The Chemistry Continues, again by the Shulgins, whose highlights include
DMT and
LSD.
posted by ChasFile
on Apr 9, 2004 -
16 comments
