This tiny revelation is but a parenthetical remark in a story full of surprises, many of which are profoundly unsettling. The drug that connected so many of us to the organic mystery of a vastly alive universe turns out to have been, at least in the beginning, a secret CIA project to find a truth serum. Its frightening to think that CIA spooks have used LSD with electroshock and torture to get information out of prisoners. Its even more frightening that they have used it themselves to little positive effect. Or perhaps not. Its ironic and still scary to think that the CIA tried to control the LSD experiment even though hundreds of thousands were turning on in the heyday of the sixties. Neither the ironies nor the chilling implications stop here. The authors have plowed through thousands of pages of declassified intelligence material to reveal a complex tissue of connections between secret government agencies and the academic world on the one hand, and between the Utopian hopes of a generation and the machinations of those same agencies on the other. Its a riveting story that makes the most paranoid and outlandish theories of the sixties seem insufficiently paranoid. -- Andrei Codrescu, Introduction..Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 04:45:31 +0000
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