| In order to understand what happened with LSD in relation to the counterculture, we should first understand what a conspiracy really is, by definition. What constitutes a conspiracy, exactly, and are all conspiracies bad? A conspiracy by definition is as follows: “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” Therefore, the next question we have to ask is “What is the motive for the action?” Because if this action is harmful, and the motivation is clearly to do wrong and harm, then it qualities as a “conspiracy.” In the same manner, if a dozen of my friends and I get together to throw a surprise party for a special friend of ours and we all decide collectively to keep it a secret, does it qualify as a “conspiracy?” Not by the definition of a conspiracy, no, it does not. There is evidence that British bankers, and even CIA connected channels funded some of the underground LSD labs and had tentacles into the works of Sands, Scully, Owsley and the whole of them. I have seen several of these “connect the dots” theories and I have been a conspiracy researcher for over 30 years now. At one point, I drew up a “Map of the New World Order,” when I was in my late 20’s. This was about 12 feet wide and 10 feet high, and had every possible elite organization and banking groups and secret society member, and I showed how they were all connected to banking, health, war, education, entertainment, and the occult, etc. This map had lines drawn from each person to the other, and it connected everyone in this historic global conspiracy. After a few years of working on it, I started to realize, that these people did not all know each other, over the long time period I had traced, could not have all discussed these same plans, and though they were connected, there was not harmonious unity everywhere, and there were groups who actively opposed each other, and I chalked it all up to “ordo ab chaos,” or order out of chaos, a famous Masonic German Hegelian philosophy. But that means that someone, someone was above them all, orchestrating everything and somehow, they would have had to enforce all resistance, and that seemed illogical and slightly paranoid to me. It goes beyond sensibility, unless you believe that aliens or reptilians run things somehow, then your mind is open to those ideas, but otherwise, it’s not really possible to enforce ideal allegiance in massive groups of people over time. It’s asserted by some ultra-paranoid conspiracy theorists that chemists like Sands, Scully, and Owsley were in on some “plot’ along with the nefarious element in the CIA, to use rock musicians in the sixties to help prepare the new generation for the acceptance of LSD and psychedelic drugs. This conservative morally self-righteous idea was born in the minds of the Larouche organization with their book, Dope Inc. (1986) which is not a bad book, in and of itself. The problem lies in the lumping of everyone together in a vast nefarious conspiracy. Larouche sees all drugs as evil tools of Great Britain, for control. This is true in the sense of |
addictive drugs such as heroin or opiates, but psychedelics have a completely different social relationship. There are no groups and organizations out there touting the benefits of opiates and throwing concerts for the legalization of opium. In a similar way, Christians have always been told by their “authorities” that drugs like mushrooms are the “work of the devil,” so LSD would be no different in that regard. Now let’s take an example of “connect the dots.” Aldous Huxley introduced Michael Hollingshead to LSD. Hollingshead obtained some from Hofmann and called Huxley and supposedly said, “Perhaps acid is above all a therapy for the wide spread sickness of insensitiveness and ignorance which psychologists call ‘Normality’ or ‘mental health.’ Then Huxley suggested to Hollingshead to go to Harvard and meet Timothy Leary whom Huxley had already been interacting with. Hollingshead was the Executive Secretary for the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange in 1961. He is quoted as saying, “This grandiose title meant that I was in the service of a semi-official British propaganda agency in the field of international cultural relations,” in his autobiography, The Man Who Turned on the World. Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter were paid to try drugs at Stanford, and come in and sample stuff, and one time, Kesey was given LSD and it inspired him to write Cuckoo’s Nest. Money from that was used to finance the Merry Prankster Bus Trip to New York to see Timothy Leary right before the Acid Tests were held. Hollingshead’s involvement in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which Ronald Stark ran is suspected in being a CIA front because of Stark’s connections. Billy Hitchcock’s money from the Mellon family is also implicated in this vast web of paranoia, because he helped put Millbrook together and invited Leary to stay there. Kesey threw the Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead and this helped forge the new direction for music in the psychedelic sixties. The sixties psychedelic revolution brought about a transformation in society of a positive nature, and these were people who wanted to stop wars, not start them. The argument put forth by those who promote this as a “conspiracy” is that the CIA had it in for America, by doing this. This implies that everyone in the CIA is bad, and has bad motivations and I don’t go along with that idea. It also implies that everyone sits around thinking of how they are going to do something evil and keep it covered up. Nobody who uses LSD and shares it with friends considers what they do as bad in any way. The idea is to spread awareness, not control people’s minds. The idea is to help people take their minds back. Spreading love and awareness are the most important objectives to the majority of people. For those who have never used LSD, it has the profound ability to change someone for the better and make them a better person, if they have that potential within themselves. LSD itself is not very useful for controlling people, though, if your goal is to control people, LSD may show you how to do that even better in more clever ways. |