Tag Archives | LSD

Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’

By JacobSloan on October 10, 2011 in News 54

Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:

But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s mantra was”Think different.” Jobs did.

… Read the rest

1950s Housewife Tries LSD

By JacobSloan on October 7, 2011 in News 161

A “stable, well-balanced” housewife describes her experience after receiving a 100 gama dose of LSD-25 as part of government research — she served as a voluntary participant in clinical trials of the drug. She tries to express what she sees but unfortunately “can’t talk in technicolor.” She sums the journey up with, “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty…this is reality.” Luckily, people who attempt such encounters now are jailed.

Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research

By James Curcio on July 22, 2011 in News 29

Beware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:

Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!

THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!

To be fair, Alex didn’t make this shit up.… Read the rest

The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs

By JacobSloan on July 12, 2011 in News 61

I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:

Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.

… Read the rest

Drugs And The Meaning Of Life

By JacobSloan on July 6, 2011 in News 103

Does the altering of consciousness, through means chemical or otherwise, lie at the very heart of existence? Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, usually known for ripping religion to shreds, delves into the meaning and value of drugs in an essay via SamHarris.org:

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment — and even in our dreams — we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous — though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—while drugs like tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth.

… Read the rest

Did The CIA Test LSD On An Entire French Town?

By JacobSloan on September 7, 2010 in News 15

For a short, nightmarish period in August 1951, dozens of residents of Pont-Saint-Espirit suffered from extreme hallucinations, leading to five deaths. A newly-unearthed memo hints that it was a CIA experiment, the BBC reports:

On August 26, 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.

“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.

Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon. He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.

Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms. Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.

… Read the rest

From LSD To Cyberculture Legend

By moezilla on June 9, 2010 in News 2

RU Sirius and Mondo 2000 The legendary editor behind Mondo 2000 magazine reveals how LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a high school underground newspaper all fermented into High Frontiers, Reality Hackers and eventually his famous cyberculture publication as part of the new “Mondo 2000 History Project”.

R.U. Sirius shares the introduction, where he remembers an avante-garde newspaper in college. (“We all have a roaring great time interviewing Timothy Leary… We’re all dazzled, feeling like the host of Planet Earth’s party had lifted the velvet rope and let us in.”) But he also describes how he came to edit the first “cyber culture” magazines (predating Wired) from 1984-1998, and announces a new “open source history project” – a collaboratively-edited electronic document with stories and perceptions from “All those who touched directly upon the history of the scene/magazine”.

At the age of 31, Sirius moves to Marin County with a California to-do list: “Start the Neopsychedelic Wave. Start a Neopsychedelic band.… Read the rest

Carey Grant: The First Star To Promote The Wonders Of LSD

By JacobSloan on April 2, 2010 in News 8

Who was the first mainstream American celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs?

Carey Grant, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the ’30s through the ’60s, who had his “life transformed” by LSD and “arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.” The blog of New York’s WFMU radio examines the crazy saga of Carey Grant and LSD:

I learned many things in the quiet of that room … everything is or becomes its own opposite … You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream … I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship. — Cary Grant

When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.

… Read the rest

National Geographic Puts LSD Under The Microscope

By ArsMoriendi on March 22, 2010 in News 11

That's enough acid to send an army insane!

(Via Sitting Now), National Geographic’s Explorer series examines the myths and effects of LSD:

LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.

Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness.

Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future.

Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease?

… Read the rest

The Mystery Of Cursed French Bread (A Secret CIA Experiment?)

By ralph on March 20, 2010 in News 3

Cursed French Bread? Ted Goodman on PhyOrg recounts the strange events of August 16, 1951, when dozens of villagers in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds, from, what was described as by villagers, eating le pain maudit (“cursed bread”).

Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.

Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.

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