Cypherpunk Inadequacies / Why the 60's failed

[Steve Kinney]

On 09/02/2017 09:06 PM, grarpamp wrote:
> A "store" for SK's top 10% wealth transfer? Lol, designed.
> Less time hobbled on "psychedelics".
> More time on "revolutin".
> Or at least gettin hippie dirty, jiggystyle.
> Crypto rave, on.

As an unwitting participant in either one of the last MKULTRA era
experiments, or an independent M.D.'s "good deed for the day," I have a
special relationship with LSD:  I got microdosed twice a week for six
weeks in 1972, and that experience went a long way toward making me
whatever the fuck I am today.  A few years later I thought I was taking
LSD for the first time... but then came the "Hello old friend!" moment.

Never underestimate the power of the psychedelics:  Our de facto masters
don't, and that is why LSD is on the very short list of illegal drugs
not readily available to anyone who goes looking.  Everybody who's hip
to the jive /says/ they can get acid, but ask if it's real and they look
at their shoes and mumble.  MDMA is the only other example that comes to
mind at the moment, and it is seriously prohibited for the same reasons
as LSD:  Its effect on the individual users' cognitive and emotional
development, and potential aggregate impact on social and political
norms, is Not Wanted:  Better every American who is willing and able
should be using heroin - which BTW is typically included in the fake
MDMA that is readily available everywhere in the U.S.

Once upon a time, a misplaced decimal point in a report received by the
CIA made it appear that the Soviet researchers had ordered hundreds of
thousands of doses of LSD from its sole source, Sandoz.  Nobody at CIA
had heard of LSD, but the literature indicated that it was believed to
have unique potentials for research and therapeutic purposes.  This made
the huge order from Russia look very significant.  The propaganda meme
of "Communist Brainwashing" was still current as an explanation for U.S.
prisoners in North Korea confessing to war crimes.  In a strange example
of blowback, this myth prompted the CIA to attempt to duplicate
"brainwashing" themselves.

In the 1950s, LSD was being studied by psychiatrists and psychologists
who believed it could produce breakthroughs in treatment of intractable
mental illnesses.  Russia's supposedly HUGE order for LSD made it appear
that they had found a very important practical application for it, maybe
even as a tool for "brainwashing."  So the CIA cut a deal with Sandoz:
They placed an even larger order themselves, as part of an agreement
that Sandoz would sell exclusively to the CIA.

This is how the MKULTRA we know and love was born.  The spooks were up
to their ears in acid and had no idea what it was for, so they started
giving LSD to a broad cross section of people in various situations just
to see what would happen, and unleashed all the Mad Scientists they
could interest in the subject with carte blanche to do whatever it took
to find out what LSD does and how to weaponize it.

It turned out that the only significant military application for LSD was
as a disabling agent producing temporary confusion, disorientation and
loss of focus on structured tasks.  Pharmacological research beginning
with the study of LSD eventually yielded a family of nerve agents that
produce instant, persistent paranoid psychosis: BZ, DZ and others which
are still in the inventories of various services.

Academics employed by the MKULTRA program through front organizations
included Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, who did the now classic studies
defining the "psychedelic effect."  Long story short, the LSD experience
can permanently affect a person's subjective frame of reference, moving
it in the direction of empathy, compassion and creativity.  Worst of
all, from an intelligence service viewpoint, LSD can cause indoctrinated
neurotic complexes to collapse "of their own accord."

So LSD turned out to be worse than useless to the CIA:  The psychedelic
effect works directly against the mission profile loosely described as
"brainwashing," at every scale from individual targets to whole national
populations.  By the mid-1960s a decision was taken to actively suppress
the use of LSD, and soon after batches of LSD poisoned with nerve agents
similar to those mentioned above made their way into underground supply
chains.  The full spectrum of domestic propaganda assets were engaged to
assure the successful demonization of LSD.  The last time I checked,
simple possession of LSD was a Federal felony carrying a minimum
mandatory 10 year prison sentence.

One should not over-estimate the beneficial impacts of LSD:  It is no
panacea.  Users whose "set and setting" for the LSD experience is
escapist thrill-seeking usually realize little or no measurable benefit,
no matter how much they use or how often.  But in the hands of people
already committed to self examination - or so oriented by structured
activities such as religious services or psychotherapy while "tripping"
- LSD works like dynamite:  It clears massive obstacles in one go.
Unlike dynamite, it does so safely then "plants your feet back firmly on
the ground."  But what has been seen can not be unseen, and once forced
open the doors of perception never quite completely close again.

Shamans, including the actual Siberian ones and the working mystics of
other "primitive" cultures, have understood and used the psychedelic
effect for as long as anything recognizable as religion has existed.
LSD only happens to be the all around best psychedelic drug discovered
to date.

The "great cultural revolution" of the 1960s was strongly influenced, if
not actually set in motion, by LSD.  Leary became an evangelist of a
sort, and systematically "turned on" as many influential people as he
could - actors, musicians, artists, writers, etc. - with an focus on
those who would best be able to spread the gospel of chemical liberation
to others in those trades.  He was not alone in this effort:  Sidney
Gottleib, the infamous founder of the MKULTRA program, took LSD
"hundreds of times" and personally recommended it to business and
political leaders as a performance enhancing drug.

If you want to promote peace, love. brotherhood, etc., you could do
worse than giving people some LSD to play with.  Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxbXu0sE9vk

When a monkey gazes into a mirror, no wise philosopher looks back.  LSD
won't make an idiot into a genius, or (all by itself) turn a self
defeating neurotic personality around.  But by definition nobody has
ever been "hobbled" by psychedelics, and more than a few users have
found themselves looking at the shattered remnants of their own mental
and emotional chains lying on the ground, and walked away from them.
















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