Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
By the way, Laura Huxley's letter to her brother-in-law on Aldous' death
is fascinating, full of little-known information and simple humanity.  
Worth reading:

<http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxley_laura_article1.sh
tml>
  

    
>The American Buddhist mantra "You don't have to believe everything
you 
think" might be quite useful in such situations.<
Yep. But it might not be applicable in certain situations, it's not
something that someone thinks, but simply trying to process to
conclusion  some thing that actually needs a time out.:-) 
Re the story of Jerry and ALL: i found it interesting that many
accounts of the ayahuasca experience have involved people seeing
jaguars and other creatures which they've never seen with their own
eyes, people who were not Amazon natives who in fact had never been to
the Amazon. Some sort of primal memory being activated?
  

    
re 146, note Huxley went out on 200 mics, there was a second 100 mic
injection after an hour or so.
  

    
Absolutely fascinating Laura Huxley letter.
  

    
New study indicates that MDMA plus therapy may be a promising treatment 
for veterans' PTSD:

<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mdma-drug-ptsd-trauma-psyched
elic&sc=DD_20100421>
  

    
re #141 and Leary archives. Don - it sounds like you hit the same wall
with your book that I hit with White Hand Society. I've concluded that
there are a couple different factors at work there, but all of them
lead to no access. I agree that we suffered from the camp's reaction to
the Greenfield biography (which IMO was outstanding) too. Apparently
both John Higgs (I Have America Surrounded) and Greenfield had solid
access to the materials. But Higgs' book was lauded by Leary's people
and Greenfield's was reviled. I did eventually get help from Michael
Horowitz in accessing Leary papers that were among Burroughs' files at
the Berg Collection. And that's the way it went, I ended up with more
than enough primary Leary resources, but all gathered from other
collections. And, as you note, plenty of his own books, articles,
interviews, etc.

When I asked Higgs about it, he seemed to think that Leary's archives
would eventually end up in Europe b/c no American institution would
touch them. I know he collected a great deal over his lifetime (which
Horowitz safegaurded, often against great pressure), so I'm sure it's a
rich resource. I also know that Futique Trust is trying to raise money
to digitize the archives: http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/donate/ 
     
  

    
FYI, in this rare but available book, "Poems All Over the Place (Mostly 
Seventies," Ginsberg registers his concerns that the LSD "movement" was a 
creation of the CIA:

<http://search.barnesandnoble.com/used/results.aspx?CNT=Allen+Ginsberg&TTL=Poem
s+All+over+the+Place%2c+Mostly+%27seventies&usedpagetype=usedlisting&wid=13180
35>

He mentions that he, Kesey, and Peter Orlovsky were drawn into the
Stanford LSD research in 1959 by one "Greyson Bateson" and a Dr. Joe
Adams. I wonder if Allen meant Gregory Bateson, who was in Palo Alto at 
the time, coming up with his double-bind theory of schizophrenia?  There 
are no Google traces of Greyson Bateson.

Allen also mentions that these early LSD sessions were *taped.*  I'd love 
to hear Allen's tape!
  

    
Yes, I wager I'm correct about Gregory Bateson.  See this -- not a 
trustable source, but still:

<http://www.spacekb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/astro/2601/The-Who-s-Who-in-Mindcontrol-
Remote-Viewing-Research>

The first psychologist to lead a seminar at the Esalen Institute. Friends
with Gregory Bateson. Former chairman of the psychology department at Bryn
Mawr. Spent a year researching parapsychology at Stanford University.
After leaving Stanford, he became a clinical psychologist, and worked at
the Veterans Administration hospital studying the causes of schizophrenia.
He also worked with LSD at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto,
under grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. This was during
the time that NIHM was channelling funds for the CIA's MK-ULTRA LSD
experiments, so it is safe to say that Adams was working, directly or
indirectly, for the CIA, although I don't know if he was aware of it (most
researchers weren't).

Adams himself took LSD as part of these studies, and suffered two
psychotic episodes, the second of which earned him a stay in a mental
hospital. (Anderson, Walter Truett, The Upstart Spring, Addison-Wesley
Publishing, 1983, pg 59-62)
  

    
Interesting, re Adams, maybe it is that only the pure of heart can
enter the kingdom. I am curious to find out more about Bateson.

While I doubt there was ever a coherent plan to open Pandora's Box by
control addicts like the CIA, there is plenty of evidence of efforts to
close it agin, too late perhaps, and with unintended consequences
enough to stimulate even Huxley's palate. 

Acid was leaking out of Harvard into the inner circles of Washington?
  

    
A pithy footnote on a study by Adams:

"The ideas expressed herein are in large part the result of the 
observations and experiences of the author during the two years of his 
tenure as USPHS Fellow, l95S19oO, and as a staff member of NIMH Project 
MY-2621, located at the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto Medical 
Research Foundation, Don D. Jackson, Principal Investigator, James 
Terrill, Staff Psychologist, Charles Savage and Jerome Oremland, Research 
Associates. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Thomas Gonda, Department of 
Psychiatry Stanford University, who sponsored my fellowship application, 
and to Leo Hollister, Richard Hamister and John Sears, who cooperated in 
the biweeklv administration of LSD-25 to two hospitalized patients over a 
period of many months at the VA Hospital, Palo Alto. The views expressed 
herein are emphatically the sole responsibility of the author, who 
experienced a psychotic reaction lasting several months following a 200 
mcg LSD-25 session, without hospitalization, and one year later managed to 
experience a spectacular psychotic episode without benefit of drugs, 
resulting in one month's hospitalization. The statements herein are by no 
means free of the biases or values of the author-for example, I do not 
like to see people kept deceived or locked up for years in order to help 
preserve respectability, the sex mores, or status systems. I have no 
complaints whatsoever concerning my own treatment, and I consider myself 
extremely fortunate indeed."

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/adams.htm
  

    
An article about Leary's Homer Street house in Newton MA, discussed in
Don's book:

<http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/04/05/learys_old_hou
se_brings_flashbacks_aplenty/>
  

    
In Sam Cutler's just published "You Can't Always Get What You Want" he
implies that Altamont was sabotaged by feds working in partnership
with the mob to circulate massive quantities of "bad acid" in the
crowd. Cutler managed the Stones on that tour. If that's true, it
would've been a hugely (sadly) successful COINTELPRO/MKULTRA operation.
      
  

    
I guess, but what is the chemical formulation of "bad acid"?
  

    
And how did Sam come by this knowledge?     Hell's Angels on a power trip
fueled by free beer seems more like what would be left over after shaving
with Occam's razor.
  

    
Wish I had the book here so I could quote passages... but I gave it
away... 

It was certainly the most provocative part of the book even though it
was quickly referenced at the end. 

The info was presented as an extrapolation of his observations while
managing the tour and info passed along by a drug smuggler friend who
was an insider on that tour.     
  

    
Well, Sam Cutler as I know him on Facebook appears to be a total
sweetheart and great guy, but the notion that acid was routinely cut with
strychnine or whatnot in the fading days of the Haight was just simply not
true. Retrospectively, it seems like a way for people to have explained 
bad trips in a time of dimming idealism, overcrowding, and takeover of 
drug dealing by the Mafia.
  

    
I've heard via people who were there that speed was being passed off
as acid, and taken by people who didn't know better. 
  

    
And don't forget the ill-fated introduction of STP during the Summer
of Love, which was supposed to be a superpsychedelic--the Next Step
Beyond LSD.

Also I've read about PCP being passed off as LSD during the late '60s.

And I've read similar things about speed, as well as speed being added
to doses of acid.
  

    
My informant was sold a large quantity of PCP as "chocolate mescaline"
in Summer '72, turned out the seller didn't know it either. He took it
several times over that summer, including to his "get it" Dead show,
even shared it with friends, at least one of whom expressed doubts but
unfortunately wasn't listened to. My informant had no idea what the
real stuff was supposed to be like, either acid or mescaline. Luckily,
no damage. Once he had contact with the real stuff, he had no problems
seeing the difference.
  

    
my informant also mentioned that pretty much anything could find its way
into a gelcap as mescaline back then.  more recently, some concoction called
'fizz' showed up in Bolinas, some blend of acid and speed in a mister.
  

    
I remember some drug-testing lab -- was it PharmChem, if you remember
them? -- stating that of all the thousands of samples of street
"mescaline" they'd tested over the years, *not a single one* was
authentic.  Inevitably, when I mention this, someone pipes up and says
"But I had a tab of chocolate mesc in the '70s that was real!"  When I
then point out that even pharmaceutically pure mescaline sulfate requires
two double-oh size capsules full of fluffy white, needle-shaped crystals 
to produce an effect, they're generally quiet after that.
  

    
I think PharmChem is still in biz - or they were last time I checked. 
They just switched sides in the drug war.
  

    
I had a bill in Congress named after me once. It had to do with
analyzing street drugs and making the results public, and it was
introduced by a friend of mine in the FDA who just needed a name for
it. He put the bill together after a mutual friend of ours spent three
days in a coma as the result of taking "acid." He'd had the forethought
to buy two tabs, though, and when the second one was run through
analysis it had 36 separate chemicals on it, none of which were LSD,
although I remember a mescaline compound in weak concentration. The
bill failed, of course. 
  

    
Don, your book has gotten an excellent reception and you've given dozens 
of interviews to promote it.  Now that you're moving on to other projects, 
I'm curious:

1)  What might you now do differently in writing this book?
2)  Was there anything you wish you could have had more time and space to 
follow up on?
3)  What comes next for you?
4)  Both of the daily newspapers you wrote for in SF are shells of their 
former selves, even if superb writers like <jrc> can still be found at the 
Chronicle.  What is the future of news?
  

    
Hope Don comes back!

In the meantime, remember when KSAN used to analyze street drugs and 
report on the contents?