favourite year of the 20th Century

[Jimbo]

And while I had heard of sugar cubes and blotter, the stuff we got - and there seemingly was plenty - had a distinct manufactured look to it. Tiny, neat, tapered orange pills. Not hippie-ish. $3.00 a trip. That's the stuff we took at Woodstock.

Once the chemical compound was known it wasn't that hard to manufacture -anyone with a university level education in chemistry could probably do it.

I'm not arguing to be Jimbo-ish but do uni grads have access to a pill making machine? I don't know. Maybe they're cheap. But the peyote I took was an actual peyote button off a cactus or powdered and dumped into gel capsule which were formerly vitamin capsules with the vitamin dumped out. It was only in the 80s when I had blotter acid, just scraps of paper with a stain of the liquid. Nothing ever beat the punch of the 60s stuff.

Funny, in my drawer I have a vacuum sealed and dried psilosibin mushroom I bought in the early 2000s during the brief window when mushrooms were legal in Japan. I often contemplate grinding it up into a smoothie just to kill a day here. I wonder a)does it still pack a punch and b) will it make me sick?

[Robert]

Right on. If the CIA was selling cocaine in the 80s why not acid in the 60s? The money was just as green.

Well, they ( further) developed LSD and left it to their staff to freely distribute it.

The early history of LSD is fascinating, but I tend to think it was something that got out of control quite quickly, beyond CIA's control.
The various conspiracy theories on this are quite interesting, but ultimately I don't buy the idea that the counterculture was somehow created by US intelligence. Quite the opposite - the establishment wanted to crush the hippie movement.

Sure, I wasn´t suggesting the CIA used it as a strategy. The hippies ran off with it voluntarily as it was seen as a way to freedom. I think I read somewhere by that time CIA had already left the idea to use it as a means of mass control.

[The Prof]

The early history of LSD is fascinating, but I tend to think it was something that got out of control quite quickly, beyond CIA's control.

The story of a little village in France is quite interesting as all pointers lead to the CIA spiking everyone with LSD!

It was on a Discovery channel programme I was watching the other day but also in a Guardian article form a few years ago here

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... iment.html

[Jimbo]

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. 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. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

[Minnie the Minx]

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. 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. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Yeah, fucking hilarious! Here's hoping they all really hurt themselves.

[Jimbo]

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. 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. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Yeah, fucking hilarious! Here's hoping they all really hurt themselves.

Those symptoms are like no LSD I've ever taken. And I've taken a lot. I also listen to others who've taken it and their symptoms sound like mine so you can't argue one person's experience is different or unique.

[Minnie the Minx]

What does that have to do with anything?

[Jimbo]

What does that have to do with anything?

The story is bullshit.

[Minnie the Minx]

Why do you think it's bullshit?

[The Modernist]

There were a lot of scare stories spread about LSD in it's early stages so I can see where Jimbo is coming from. Equally we can probably say there were some tragedies as well, particularly as LSD was much stronger then.

[Goat Boy]

I think if you spike unsuspecting people with strong psychedelics things have the potential to go wrong. Especially when most of them have probably never touched anything like that before. How reliable those accounts mentioned in the post above are, I dunno.

[Jimbo]

Why do you think it's bullshit?

Say the town was secretly dosed with barbiturates and a victim said he felt like snakes were bursting from his stomach rather than saying "I was sitting at the lunch counter and fell asleep with my face in my soup." LSD hallucinations are not like bad dreams or mirages and are not physically painful. I'm not saying every experience is necessarily jolly but if I didn't spend hours laughing my head off I wouldn't have such a yearning to do it again. Not sure what I'd do if I was dosed having never done it before like the article said the town experienced but there are parameters and that description is way out of bounds.

[The Modernist]

Why do you think it's bullshit?

Say the town was secretly dosed with barbiturates and a victim said he felt like snakes were bursting from his stomach rather than saying "I was sitting at the lunch counter and fell asleep with my face in my soup." LSD hallucinations are not like bad dreams or mirages and are not physically painful. I'm not saying every experience is necessarily jolly but if I didn't spend hours laughing my head off I wouldn't have such a yearning to do it again. Not sure what I'd do if I was dosed having never done it before like the article said the town experienced but there are parameters and that description is way out of bounds.

I don't think you can compare your experience of voluntarily taking it with knowledge of its likely effects, and someone being dosed without their knowledge and with no idea of what was happening to them. They wouldn't be able to rationalise any of it and would think they were going insane.
Another point to consider is the CIA really had no idea what they were doing then and were using people as guinea pigs. The doses they were giving people were many times stronger than what you would have been taking because they had no idea of the dosage. Even some of their own people were victims of this - see the case of Frank Olson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/29/cia-lawsuit-scientist-1950s-death

[Goat Boy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/03/did-the-cia-really-dose-a-french-village-with-lsd/346370/

[Jimbo]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/03/did-the-cia-really-dose-a-french-village-with-lsd/346370/

Which backs me up that those symptoms were not like LSD.

As for the biological warfare specialist who killed himself, he wasn't the first. It's a dangerous job. See David Kelly.

[The Modernist]

You're ignoring the point I made..never mind.

[Snarfyguy]

[Y]ou can't argue [that] one person's experience is different or unique.

You actually can.

[sloopjohnc]

1962.

I was born in 1962.

I was born in '61. Everything has been going downhill ever since and this proves it.

[pcqgod]

'89 was a happy-ish time for me...just graduated from U.T., working full time at the library, playing in a band, discovering lots of good music in a rich music scene. The years following would be some of the worst in my life, though.