Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (50 page)

What was Helms trying to hide? The wholesale destruction of these memoranda suggests there may have been a lot more to the CIA’s LSD program than the revelations that came to light during the post-Watergate housecleaning of the mid-1970s. Of course, it’s highly improbable that the CIA would ever have drawn up a “smoking gun” document describing the details of a plot to dump millions of hits of acid on the black market. Nor is it likely that the Agency anticipated the catalytic impact of LSD and its disruptive effect on the youth movement. The CIA is not an omniscient, monolithic organization, and there’s no hard evidence that it engineered a great LSD conspiracy. (As in most conspiracy theories, such a scenario vastly overestimates the sophistication of the alleged perpetrator.) If anything, it seems that a social phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as the psychedelic subculture was beyond the control of any single person or entity.

But there’s still the puzzling saga of Ronald Stark, which begs for some kind of explanation. How does one distinguish between an international confidence trickster and a deep-cover spy when both professions are based on pretense and deception? Stark was a man who thrived in a clandestine netherworld where “facts are wiped out by artifacts,” as Norman Mailer wrote of the espionage metaphysic, and “every truth is obliged to live in its denial.” He appeared on the psychedelic scene like a meteor and produced more acid than any other underground source from 1969 through 1972. While pursuing his exploits as an LSD chemist, he communicated on a regular basis with American embassy personnel, and on numerous occasions he hinted of ties with the intelligence community. At one point he told an associate that he shut down his LSD laboratory in France on a tip from the CIA. He also haunted the radical fringes of Paris, London, and Milan during the heyday of the youth rebellion.

What does it all mean? Was Stark a hired provocateur or a fanatical guerrilla capable of reconciling bombs and LSD? When did the CIA learn of his role as a drug dealer, and was his activity tolerated because he passed information on the counterculture and the radical left to the Agency?
*
Although it is highly improbable that the CIA
would have gotten involved in trafficking street acid as a matter of policy, it’s not at all certain that stopping the flow of black market LSD was a particular priority either. Perhaps the best explanation is that certain CIA officials were willing to condone Stark’s exploits in the drug trade as long as he functioned as an informant.

Stark’s name surfaced once again in 1982 when he was arrested in Holland on charges of trafficking hashish, cocaine, and heroin. The following year he was deported without fanfare to the United States, where he was still wanted on drug charges stemming from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love conspiracy case. The entire matter was handled so discreetly that the press never learned of his return. Stark spent a few months in a San Francisco jail until charges were dropped by the US Justice Department, which claimed that too many years had passed to prosecute the case. In December 1984 he died of a heart attack, leaving others to ponder his ambiguous legacy.

Above all Ronald Stark remains an extraordinary international enigma. “A genius, but a tortured soul”—that was how an Italian magistrate described him. Even if he was never anything more than a brilliant private operator, his remarkable career illustrates the tangled web of espionage, crime, and extremist politics that is so much a part of the secret history of LSD—a story as wild and perplexing as the drug itself. Indeed, as Hunter Thompson wrote, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

Postscript
Acid and After

Ronald Stark liked to brag to members of the Brotherhood that he had developed a new process for synthesizing LSD-25 of exceptional quality. But as was often the case with Stark, this was only a partial truth. Actually it was Stark’s assistant in France, a young British chemist named Richard Kemp, who in 1970 discovered the cheap and easy method Stark took credit for. Kemp had been working for Stark in his French laboratories. Eventually they had a falling out, and Kemp left with his payoff—200 grams of pure LSD—and returned to England.

A self-described political revolutionary, Kemp viewed LSD as a tool for furthering the radical cause. While living in a cottage in Wales, he gathered around him a core of like-minded individuals and set up an elaborate network for disseminating his product. During the mid-1970s Kemp’s group succeeded the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as the main psychedelic distribution operation in the world. Kemp’s high-quality acid flowed from the United Kingdom to France, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia, West Germany, and the US. The British smuggling ring, however, had none of the mythos attached to the Brotherhood. Their notoriety would only come after they were busted. For even as Kemp was completing a manufacturing run of a kilo and a half of crystalline LSD, the police were watching him closely.

Scotland Yard assigned twenty-eight detectives to nail Kemp’s operation. The thirteen-month investigation became known as Operation Julie, so named after the key undercover agent, Sergeant Julie Taylor, who penetrated Kemp’s network. (She was immortalized in the song by the British rock group the Clash: “Julie’s been working for the drug squad . . .”) The police arrested a hundred and twenty people, including Kemp, in the spring of 1977. Six million doses of
LSD were seized in the raid. (Curiously, all of the acid later disappeared, prompting speculation that the police may have sold the drug.) During the trial the prosecution claimed that Kemp’s group produced half the world’s supply of LSD in the mid-1970s. Kemp, unrepentant to the end, was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Sixteen others also received jail terms.

But this wasn’t the end of the Julie story. By quirk of legal necessity, Kemp had to reveal the formula he used for making LSD. Once this new information entered into the public record, it quickly moved along the underground grapevine, sparking a major acid renaissance that continues to this day. A United Nations survey in the early 1980s noted that LSD was reappearing in considerable amounts in many countries. During this period tens of millions of doses were seized in a few busts in California. As any special agent for drug enforcement knows, supply like that means demand. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, 8% of today’s high school seniors are using LSD, and 25% of people from eighteen to twenty-six years of age have experimented with hallucinogens.

Acid has indeed outlived the 1960s, but the psychedelic underground has changed in many ways. The recent recrudescence of LSD use has occurred without the press fanfare of years past. As John Lennon noted shortly before his death in 1980, “You don’t hear about it any more, but people are still visiting the cosmos. We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That’s what people forget. . . . They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.”

The most prevalent form of LSD currently available on the black market is blotter paper soaked with the drug. The “blotters” are cut into small squares and adorned with various emblems: R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, rocket ships, the atomic rings, or Walt Disney characters such as Goofy and Mickey Mouse. The dosage level of street acid usually falls between 100 and 125 micrograms, which is half the average dose found on the black market during the 1960s. As one San Francisco-based dealer put it, “It’s just another high now. Doses are lower, just enough to put a smile on your face, give you a buzz, not like the heavy colors and trips of the sixties.”

The return of acid in the 1980s has spawned a new wave of psychedelic rock bands. These acts frequently dress in granny glasses, sport pudding-bowl haircuts, and play hits from the 1960s. In London
the psychedelic bands constitute a movement of sorts on the club circuit, where they are known as the “Paisley Underground.” But the bands openly proclaiming themselves psychedelic do not represent a unique genre of music; rather, they blend in with the contemporary pop music scene, where the parameters of personal and group identity have been pushed to the outer limits.

A few of the original psychedelic bands from San Francisco still tour—most notably, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. The Dead made a mystical pact with their fans, vowing to carry the psychedelic torch as long as they can play their music. They still attract the old sixties Deadheads, as well as younger people who feel they are connecting with that era through the music. Cults have formed around legendary rock figures such as Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. (Morrison’s gravesite in Paris is a magnet for young people who regularly come to pay their respects to the Lizard King). Dr. David Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic reports that teenagers today are taking LSD and listening to Beatles records as a rite of passage. “They seek a nostalgic cultural experience, to individually experience what happened in the sixties,” Smith said.

In the same spirit people still visit the Haight as a kind of pilgrimage. They come to the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury as if it were a shrine or a power place. Some take the ritual walk up the street to Golden Gate Park and sit atop “Hippie Hill” near the Polo Fields, where the first be-in was held. A few familiar places remain from the old days, such as the Free Clinic, and scattered street freaks still haunt the neighborhood. But these are ghosts from the past now that the area has been gentrified after ten years as a slum.

Many turned-on youth continue to view LSD as a sacrament and approach the drug experience with due respect and caution. But for others, acid is primarily a recreational buzz. Psychedelics are used by more people than ever before, appealing to a larger cross-section of American society—from young debutantes tripping at the disco to high school joyriders downing acid with their six-packs. LSD has made inroads among blacks, Latins, and gays in addition to middleclass whites. The drug is prevalent on the club scene in big cities, as well as on the college campus. Today’s students, whether buttoned-down or punked-out, seek a strong dose of intense fun, and that’s what acid gives them. LSD parties are common on weekends with psychedelic clans hitting the drugs as heavily as they hit the
books. It’s for getting guiltlessly—if not righteously—high. LSD is one among many popular drugs on the campus scene: alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, nitrous oxide, Quaaludes, and new compounds such as “ecstasy” (an MDA-related substance) and ketamine (a “psychedelic anesthetic”).

While more people are using psychedelics than ever before, bad trips are much less frequent, largely because the psychosocial matrix surrounding LSD has evolved. When the social and political movements symbolically entangled with LSD collapsed in the early 1970s, the climate informing expectations about the drug lost much of its emotional charge. The new generation of acid trippers has not been weaned on the psychedelic controversies of yesteryear, when taking LSD was tantamount to an act of social defiance. Without the shrill warnings about psychosis or chromosome damage, or all the hubbub about the glories of expanded consciousness, there are fewer freak-outs and untoward incidents.

The recreational use of LSD as a “technology of the self” has its corollaries in the proliferating hi-tech leisure industry that includes computer video games, cable television, home video, and films whose multimillion-dollar special effects threaten to outstrip the theater of the mind. Ways of playing with reality are big business indeed. Many of today’s TV commercials are more “psychedelic” than the most far-out acid poster of the 1960s. (Psychedelic poster art was recently shown in a special exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). The corporate cooptation of psychedelia is evident in the army’s television ads, which feature flashing images, strobe effects, hard rock, and the slogan “Be all that you can be . . . you can
do it
in the army.”

The resurgence of LSD in the 1980s is part of a boom in recreational drug usage throughout the US and Western Europe (where a highly politicized counterculture continues to thrive in various cities, most notably Amsterdam and West Berlin). Marijuana is now a $15-to-$20-billion-a-year industry (making it the third-largest American business, behind Exxon and GM), even though federal allocations for drug law enforcement have grown more than 75%, to $1.2 billion, during the last five years. Although marijuana possession is currently a parking ticket fine in some places, the laws governing LSD are as stringent as ever. LSD remains classified as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for substances deemed to have no medical value whatsoever. Scientific investigations into LSD are at a complete
standstill, and psychiatrists who once used the drug for therapeutic purposes are pessimistic about future prospects. Despite—or perhaps because of—these restrictions, an underground network of LSD therapists quietly persists in the United States.

Meanwhile the CIA, which has always been at the cutting edge of developments in psychopharmacology, continues to conduct secret research aimed at creating more sophisticated forms of chemical control. There are new superpowerful mind drugs that affect sensory modalities in highly specific ways. (One substance, for example, only alters auditory perception; under its influence all sounds become atonal, while other human faculties remain unaffected). Scientists have developed other compounds with recreational applications, including aphrodisiacs and a “two-martini pill” that produces a euphoric state without the subsequent hangover. Some of these drugs—such as “designer heroin” and “designer cocaine”—have already moved from the laboratory to the street, and the consequences have been fatal.