The Offspring of Ergot
A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very sensitively if a member of the tribe has received LSD. Even though no changes appear in this single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes the laws of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal order.
—LSD: My Problem Child, Albert Hoffman
The psychadelic 60s emerged from the glossy maw of the schizogenic 50s, a period where MKULTRA's shadowy subprojects mantled every form of media, where novel wonder drugs inducing an "artificial psychosis" started to seep into the mainstream—often promoted by the very same mad scientists who, behind the scenes, experimented on children, mental patients, and their own selves. This "mainstreaming of MKULTRA" occurred in real-time. There was not a single moment of pause between “model psychosis” research and modeling LSD for the mimesis of psychosis.
The periodicals, magazines, and other temporal objects of the early 1950s revea lthat LSD had already been characterized in the New York Times (1951), for example, as a drug meant to simulate psychosis. The story goes that psychotomimetic theory, the idea that LSD simply created a hyper-suggestive, psychotic state was somehow “disproven”. In reality, it was merely overwritten with hundreds of advertisements masquerading as “science articles.” Many psychedelic proselytizers continued to use "psychotomimetic" (mimicking psychosis) interchangeably with “psychedelic” well into the 1960s.
Lysergic acid diethylamide was immediately regarded as a neurotoxin, the malevolent progeny of ergot, with a common understanding that "[l]ysergic acid diethylamide seems capable of morphing a rational psyche into the disjointed realms of insanity characteristic of schizophrenia." At the dawn of the 1950s, a writer identified as "Ralph F. Martin, M.D." cites the common reference for ergot poisonings:
The mind-blighting qualities of crude ergot have long been known. Ergot (Claviceps purpurea) is a fungus that grows as a parasite upon rye and other grains. It has been responsible for many strange and fearful epidemics. Records of the Middle Ages describe terrible epidemics in which the characteristic symptom was gangrene of the feet, hands, and arms. … The disease was called Holy Fire or St. Anthony's Fire, the latter name being in honor of the saint at whose shrine relief was said to be obtained. … The [recent 1951] mass poisoning in France revealed it is not uncommon for victims to go berserk.
—Tulsa World Tulsa, Oklahoma • Thu, Sep 13, 1951 Page 4, Ralph Martin
The article represents a microcosm of LSD coverage, a confusion of anti-dope histrionics and Batesonian “black propaganda” techniques in a single text. The author lays out the dangers of the forbidden potion, but then, setting a standard for psychodysleptic shilling that would continue for decades, swiftly contorts into presenting the “euphoric lift.” Finally, adhering to the formula that would be perfected by R. Gordon Wasson half a decade later, he layers on the mystique by referencing “ecstatic states for special religious occasions among Indian tribes in Mexico and in North America near the Mexican border.”
These are the “style notes” journos that seem to have been given as early as 1951. This initiatory article uses a number of strategies to trigger the mimesis of psychosis. First, the author capitalizes on the mystery around the drug, saying "no one knows what dosage might produce an insane state that might prove irretrievable" and "little is known of its addictive qualities." The piece also offers a rare peril that can be accessed through hallucinogens with phrases like “[lysergic acid] may prove an evil loosed from the Pandora's box of medical science," and "it might prove far more destructive than opium." In my opinion, all of this “forbidden fruit” marketing was necessary to engineer a youth rebellion, nothing safe ever became cool.
Most importantly, the report links LSD to mystical practices, referencing the “ecstatic states” supposedly achieved through pagan rituals, absent from most modern religions, enhancing its intrigue. The drug's unique properties are emphasized with claims that it is "the most powerful of all 'phantastica'." The word “phantastica” would later be replaced by “psychedelia” both of them misnomers, the latter purposefully constructed by Osmond & Huxley in order to occlude the schizogenic properties of the substance, adding yet another rule to the style guide: special language. Lastly, the euphoric effects of LSD are described as a "pleasant dream-stage comparable to that produced by mescaline.” All these ingredients would be experimentally mixed and matched, distilled, and intensified until the desired results were achieved in the mid to late 1960s.
The 1950s psychotomimetic media campaigns had an ambitious agenda: to seize and encapsulate the fantastical experiences that typically slipped beyond the constraints of language and to instrumentalize the inexpressible. In the throes of “Cold War paranoia,” it appeared to target the unaligned gifted child who could potentially transform into a "hidden persuader." The spectral efflux of LSD served as their ink, with the 1950s societal trance as their ever-changing and contorting canvas. Several other psyops were running concurrently, transposed, and intertwined with the mimesis of psychosis. Hallucinogens furnished dimensionality in a 2D media-based reality, it gave glossy magazines and glowing TV a richer palette of symbolic intoxicants, a new armory of colors and shapes, allowing them to pull the audience into this novel plane of gratification, at depths formerly unattainable.
Merely by framing portals of sensation promised by delusionegens, the cursed scrawl of the journo breathed a vile life into these experiences, anointing them as subjects worthy of attention and examination. In the more elaborate accounts featuring exotic locales, readers also took a heady hit of parasocial pleasure from the journos drug trip.
The popular media, side by side with ads for sparkling Buicks and rocket-age bikini girls selling home “Atomikits”, transmuted itself into a psychotomimetic tincture, a brew that didn't just distill reality into convenient articles, but started to abuse it, splintering perceptions, and warping the consciousness of the beholder. Man lives in several atmospheres, simultaneously transposed. During the 1950s, his mediasphere was effectively terraformed— chemtrailed into a fog dense with hallucinogenic fumes.
The very first article appearing in ‘the paper of record’ which introduced LSD to the public cited a certain Dr. Paul H. Hoch, a psychiatrist who received his training in Germany before moving to the U.S. on a visitor's visa. He had secured his immigrant status with the legal help of John Foster Dulles, the future Secretary of State and brother of Allen Dulles. Between 1948 and 1955, Dr. Hoch held the position of Director of Experimental Research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). Before his stint at NYSPI, he led the Manhattan State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit and also served as the chief medical officer for war neuroses at the U.S. Public Health Service. The New York Times, in a pattern that continues to this day, was quoting a real-life, pulp comic “mad scientist”—
“…Gottlieb pressed ahead with the task he had been given: pursue mind control research as far as it could go. He had already brought several doctors into his orbit and was pushing them to carry out tests on psychoactive drugs. One of them, Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute, agreed to inject mescaline into one of his patients so its effects could be observed. He chose a forty-two-year-old professional tennis player named Harold Blauer, who had come to him seeking treatment for depression following a divorce.
Beginning on December 5, 1952, one of Hoch’s assistants injected Blauer with a concentrated mescaline derivative, without any explanation or warning. Over the next month he was injected five more times. He complained that the treatment was giving him hallucinations and asked that it be ended, but Hoch insisted that he proceed. On January 8, 1953, Blauer was given a dose fourteen times greater than previous ones. The protocol notes that he protested when he was injected at 9:53 a.m. Six minutes later he was flailing wildly. At 10:01 his body stiffened. He was pronounced dead at 12:15.”
—Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, by Stephen Kinzer
Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, sought treatment for depression at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) in 1952. Despite his diagnosis of pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia, and unrelated to his treatment, he was subjected to experimental injections of mescaline derivatives under a contract with the Army Chemical Corps, aimed at studying their potential use in chemical warfare. Blauer was not informed about the true nature of these "studies". Despite his initial reservations and physical reactions, the injections continued, escalating in dosage. On January 8, 1953, after receiving an exceptionally large dose of one of these compounds, Blauer passed away.
Following his death, a cover-up was initiated to conceal the Army's involvement and the experimental nature of the injections. The official report falsely claimed that the injection was a mescaline derivative administered for diagnostic purposes. Despite a lawsuit from Blauer's wife, Amy, in 1953, the Army's role remained hidden. In 1955, the family received a $15,000 settlement, half of which was paid by the U.S. government.
The truth was revealed only in 1975 when secret files were discovered in a safe at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. The Army finally informed Blauer's daughters about the Chemical Corps' role in their father's death more than 20 years after the fact. Testimony reveals he was tied down while he pleaded for his life, ““Why do you do this? I have plans to go home tomorrow.”
During his tenure at NYSPI, Dr. Hoch clandestinely subjected unwitting mental patients to brain-damaging experiments. These included administering them with large doses of psychedelic substances such as mescaline and LSD, resulting in intense and immediate reactions.
Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psychosurgery. ("It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value," Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex. (Lee & Schlain)
Hoch was “part of a network of doctors and scientists who gathered intelligence for the CIA. Through these scholar-informants the Agency stayed on top of the latest developments within the "aboveground" LSD scene, which expanded rapidly during the Cold War.”
Timeline of an Altered Reality
“For the radical and permanent transformation of personality, only one effective method has been discovered – that of the mystics.”
– Aldous Huxley (1941)
It is necessary to understand that the way in which the media reported LSD would have a profound effect on the experience of LSD. For that portion of the audience who later experimented with the drug, the media hype surrounding it would have significantly shaped their eventual experiences. Reactions to LSD, more so than other substances, were famously influenced by the user's mental and emotional state as well as their environment, a concept referred to as "set and setting" in Timothy Leary's famous formula. This would also include the “media environment.” Leary and Dr. Oscar Janiger explain:
From A Conversation on LSD, 1979—
Leary: Yes, right right. Yeah. And, uh, Ivan. Uh, of course…uh, then, there of course, was part [break in audio – mic muffled] coolness of the Los Angele [break in audio – mic muffled]s, uh, [break in audio – mic muffled] cell, whatever you want to call it. But they kept a, you kept a, uh…
Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster!
Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our undercover agents in Los Angeles were very cool about, uh, and yet they did more in a very laid‐back way, uh, and it's every bit as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country [Ken Kesey and the Merry pranksters]….
Janiger: Yeah, and then Zinnberg says that the visionary experience, and all of the things he was doing at Harvard, and the others, his residence, and the rest he was giving LSD to, they never had a visionary or ecstatic, or mystic experience. That the whole thing was a California invention, he said.
Leary: Wonderful! They're right! Janiger: The only time it happened, was when you cross the Colorado River.
1951: Associated Press Science Report on “One Day Mental Illness”, national distribution, Drs. Paul Hoch, Max Rinkel, and Helen Gilmore at Yale are cited. Dr. C.W. Grady of the Veterans Administration Hospital at Roanoke, Va said the hospital had been able to “effectively rehabilitate 58 veterans” who had been hospitalized for months and even years and had “lost confidence in themselves.” [This is reminiscent of WW2 PTSD research which led to truth serum development.]
1951: “Derivative of Deadly Mold Helps Treat Mental Patients”, Montreal Star, The Sun Times, Canada
1953: Newsweek publishes a feature titled "Mescal Madness," explaining the use of mescaline for understanding mental disorders. The piece includes staged photographs attempting to portray the experience of mescaline-induced psychosis. Perhaps the first attempt at a “psychedelic” aesthetic.
1953: the Washington, DC Evening Star reports that Dr. Amedeo S. Marrazzi of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood presented research to the American Association for the Advancement of Science suggesting that hallucinations and anti-fatigue effects of drugs like mescaline, amphetamines, and ephedrine may result from imbalances in nerve impulses in the brain.
HALLUCINATIONS STUDIED BY EDGEWOOD SCIENTIST
Dr. Amedeo S. Marrazzi, working out of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood, conducted research into the effects of drugs on the brain, particularly focusing on the phenomena of hallucinations. His work suggested that hallucinations might be the result of an imbalance in the nerve impulses in the visual cortex of the brain, caused by certain drugs. In the article, he is reported as using cats as test subjects, electrically stimulating their nerve fibers in the visual centers of their brains. How one would determine whether a cat was hallucinating due to a drug, or due to being a cat, is not mentioned. He was, of course, conducting experiments on humans.
In 1952, both the CIA and Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division (SOD) began a formal contract with the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) for $1,000,000 over two years. This contract, known as Project MK-NAOMI, was part of larger CIA behavior modification projects like ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA. A Top Secret CIA memo from 1954, discovered in 2000, reveals that the SOD contract with NYSPI was established for the creation of biological weapons to be used in behavior modification, from temporary disablement to death.
In 1953, Henry Blauer, the professional tennis player mentioned in Poisoner in Chief, sought treatment at NYSPI for depression. Unbeknownst to him, he became a test subject in a lethal mescaline experiment. Drs. Paul Hoch and James Cattell administered multiple high-dose injections of a mescaline derivative to Blauer without knowing its composition. Moments after the final injection, Blauer had a severe reaction and died within two hours. His death was covered up by government officials for 23 years.
A 1954 CIA memo revealed the complicity and criminal cover-ups of medical doctors and government agencies at various levels. After Blauer's death, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi of the Chemical Corps instructed Dr. Hoch to hide the Army's involvement.
1953: A feature titled "My Twelve Hours as a Madman" is published in the Canadian magazine MacLean's. The author, Sidney Katz, describes his experience participating in a study at Saskatchewan Mental Hospital involving LSD. Katz's first-hand account of the LSD trip is detailed and vivid.
The research, ostensibly funded by the Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa (in reality it was grants totaling about $500,000—roughly $4 million in current dollars—from the Rockefeller Foundation), was spearheaded by psychiatrist and biochemist Abe Hoffer, along with a team that included Dr. Humphry Osmond.