History of LSD

The Great LSD Conspiracy

While Leary was in the slammer, his erstwhile patron Billy Hitch-cock got tangled in a legal mess of his own making. It had taken almost four years for the government to gather enough evidence to indict the young Mellon heir for income tax evasion. He also faced charges stemming from stock market malpractice. A lengthy jail term seemed almost certain unless he struck a bargain with the authorities. He called Tim Scully, who had dropped out of the acid business a few years ago, and explained the...

High Surrealism

After their expulsion from Harvard, Leary and Alpert were determined to carry out additional studies in the religious use of psychedelic drugs. They set up a grassroots nonprofit group called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), whose ranks quickly swelled to three thousand dues-paying members. Local offices sprang up in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. IFIF believed that everyone should be allowed to use mind-expanding chemicals because the internal freedom they provided...

Midnight Climax

In a speech before the National Alumni Conference at Princeton University on April 10, 1953, newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles lectured his audience on how sinister the battle for men's minds had become in Soviet hands. The human mind, Dulles warned, was a malleable tool, and the Red Menace had secretly developed brain perversion techniques. Some of these methods were so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them. Dulles continued, The minds...