Tag Archives | LSD

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.

‘CIA Experiment’ Sends French Village Mad

By Raymond on March 11, 2010 in News 3

From News.com.au:

A US writer has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA spiked a French village’s food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.

The Sun online reports journalist H P Albarelli Jr came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of a biochemist who fell from a 13th floor window two years after a mystery illness that caused an entire French village to go temporarily mad 50 years ago.

Hundreds of residents in picturesque Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations on August 16, 1951.

At least five people in the southern French village died and dozens were locked up in asylums after witnessing terrifying hallucinations of dragons and fire.

In the horror scenes an 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs.

[Read more at News.com.au]… Read the rest

Mindfvck: Drawings Done Under the Influence of LSD

By ralph on December 8, 2009 in News 0

Interesting site callled MINDFVCK I just StumbleUpon-ed (below is an obvious before/after):

These nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s.

The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Read/See More: MINDFVCK… Read the rest

LSD Experiments: Soldiers On Acid

By ralph on December 4, 2009 in News 9

Posted on Environmental Graffiti:

What looks like a soldier having a bit of fun was actually a series of controlled experiments that lasted for decades. We’re talking about mind control or the use of hallucinogenics such as LSD as weapons used in warfare. Said to have been pioneered by the Nazis; Britain, the United States and others soon followed suit with their own experiments on unwitting soldiers and civilians, the Vietcong and now terrorists…

Images say more than a thousand words; this video taken in 1963 of British soldiers under the influence of LSD surely does:

As the narrator aptly describes,

Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.

Can Mind-Altering Drugs have Mental Health Benefits?

By Raymond on November 17, 2009 in News 2

From the Telegraph:

New studies are testing whether psychedelic drugs such as LSD and MDMA can treat OCD, post traumatic stress and cancer related anxiety.

On September 19 this year, 12 people gathered in the suburban Hermsdorf district of Berlin for a group psychotherapy session that allegedly involved illegal drugs. A day later, two of the participants were dead and another in a coma. The substances used and exact cause of death have yet to be confirmed. Local newspaper reports have claimed that heroin and MDMA (ecstasy) were taken, but other drugs may have been in circulation.

Garri Rober, the therapist who led the session which included his wife, Elke, is facing possible charges in connection with the deaths and on suspicion of supplying illegal drugs. The other nine participants were released from hospital the next day.

This tragedy, which received international coverage, threatens to derail a fledgling renaissance in legitimate research using psychedelic drugs in the management of common disorders from migraines to obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.

… Read the rest

Animation: Pitcher Dock Ellis’s No-Hitter while on LSD

By Raymond on November 15, 2009 in News 2

From BoingBoing:

We’ve posted before about Dock Ellis. He was the baseball player who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping balls on LSD. Ellis died last year. In his honor, James Blagden and Chris Isenberg animated Ellis’s retelling of his acid adventure on the mound. “Dock Ellis’s Legendary LSD No-Hitter animation“

[Read more at BoingBoing]

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