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”…
LSD
(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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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]
The Belfast Telegraph reports: The British Government’s chief drug adviser has sparked controversy by claiming ecstasy, LSD and cannabis are less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the…
Gary Stix writes in Scientific American: Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy…
Erin Halliday, SF Gate: Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD and other hallucinogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their work, researchers at a handful of major…
Out There Radio – Episode 48: The Psychedelic Torchbearers Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS In the 48th episode of WUOG’s Out There Radio, we revisit the issue of psychedelics…
Out There Radio – Episode 13: L.et’s S.ave D.emocracy Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS Don’t miss our interview with author and psychedelic scholar Robert Forte. We discuss historical and…