Friday, November 19, 2004

. . . History, repeated.

In 1973, while Stansfield Turner (the then Head of the CIA) was assuring the Senate that all 'M K Ultra' operations had ceased, I was recruited in Berkeley to be the 'control' for the ongoing M K Ultra study. 4 years before, a philosophy professor I knew supplied me, and other select candidates with some of the last doses of Sandoz Lab's "Yellow Wedges"(little yellow triangles of pure 25, from the Laboratory that Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of ) thus providing me with a baseline dosage to which, over the next 10 years or so, I was able to compare the ongoing production of from various and sundry sources, including Timothy Leary's Laguna Beach "Brotherhood of Eternal Light" product: "Orange Sunshine"; Augustus Stanley Owlsley("Kid Charlemagne")'s wonderful "White Crystal"; "Windowpane" and "Pyramids"; "Mr Natural" blotter; and my own favorite and contribution to the vernacular of missionaries everywhere: "Purple Microdots". All of these were, at one time or another, either produced by, or utilized by, the government of our country in an ongoing attempt to discover whether or not they were effective tools in the CIA's ongoing, supposedly nonexistant 'behavior modification experiments'. "Black Ops." foisted upon unsuspecting American citizens in the name of "Truth, Justice and the American Way."!

I was personally given or took over 500 times ('What the hell', I thought, 'if this is the way I can serve my country, AND I'm being supplied by my own government, so be it!)'. I took doses every three days for two years and ingested more than 20,000 microgram doses at once over 20 times, and one time was given, unbeknownst to me, a 100,000 microgram dose. I NEVER hallucinated, never had a 'bad' trip and could, after a while, define both dosages and identify specific analogs and their percentile estimates, in any particular batch of crystal (hence my choice as the CIA's 'control'). People would come up to me and say: "Here, John, eat this." and within a couple hours I could tell them: "OK, it about 140 mics. of yellow crystal with about 5 percent 19, and 10 percent 27, and a trace of 15." The "Company"( the old euphemism for the CIA) loved me, and I must apologise to the poor North Vietnamese over whom many doses of the same I had sampled were poured from "Huey's" during the Vietman War, in an effort to get them to become highly susceptible to the helicopter-mounted-loudspeaker-broadcast-Viet-language-suggestions to surrender (perhaps a bit better than being shot, but to the unsuspecting, or those without MY particular brain chemistry, I'm sure that, for them, it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience)!