☮ Social ☮ How do YOU feel about Leary, the McKennas and Shulgins, RamDass/Alpert, Kesey, etc.?

[Delsyd]

Another honorable mention for Nick Sands and Tim Scully.
Sands was a little cooky in that Leary way but also a great chemist who learned from Owsley. He’s also credited as the guy who discovered smoking DMT freebase and one of if not the first to synthesize rather than extract it.
(yes, I’m slightly obsessed with LSD and DMT and all the key players in their history)

 

[TripSitterNZ]

nick sands is the most holy person to have walked the earth. A fucking legend among legends

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

...at a conference once we talked for a long time about LSD quality and the perennial question of good vs bad acid, for instance.

What did he say? That it is psychological, branding, and the placebo effect?

 

[Xorkoth]

McKenna: very entertaining speaker. Mesmerizing at times. And I think he seemed like a good person trying to do good things. But I definitely don't take his conclusions seriously, though he had some interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

Leary: The worst thing to ever happen to the psychedelic movement/scene. A narcissist who formed a cult of personality and was instrumental in causing psychedelics to become demonized to heavily and buried in a closet for decades scientifically. Fuck that guy.

I’m not sure we can lump the Shulgins in with the rest of em. Just sayin

100%, Sasha Shulgin is only a psychedelic figure because he pioneered the world of "RCs" that us psychedelic drug nerds love. He wasn't trying to be a figure, he just was fucking awesome and by all accounts a great guy, and a genius and brave chemist. The only man to ever get a DEA license to synthesize new psychedelic compounds and test them on himself and others.

 

[ControlDaddy]

Like this post very much. The class based insights are very thoughtful and accurate as far as they go. I'd slightly differ about some people's backgrounds though. The Psychedelic Movement, capitalized, is extremely bourgeois, but people take drugs in different contexts depending on their backgrounds. The workhorse of the psychedelic movement, at least prior to being able to get whatever you want shipped to your home, were the gypsy-living tour kids and their counterparts in the rave scene, they are often from more of a lower middle class background and do bring a different energy to it. They sort of perform the hippie thing but not necessarily inhabiting the universalistic peace and love thing and the more introspective analysis paralysis trap. They bring a more primitive, tribal energy sometimes with a gangsters swagger. Their whole attitude towards the actual subjective experience of taking psychedelics is different too, hard to quantify but I'd say it definitely features less intellectual masturbation and grandiosity, but still definitely chasing peaks.

All this shit is worthy of a PhD thesis. The effect of the Internet drug trade has got to be big, too. I got out before this was a thing (at least for the end user, something that started with the Silk Road) so I don't know what effects it's having on the ground other than a lot of kids probably getting put out of work. If you're ordering shit online and your only context is reading sites like this or Erowid or whatever then that's going to have a profound effect on how you experience the drugs. Not only will reading endless trip reports and discussions of drug effects shape your subjective experience but doing it without IRL social context I would imagine heightens the mental-masturbatory effects on the ego. I imagine a scenario from to the beginning of ordering shit from an email address to taking it by yourself and constantly within the trip contextualizing it based on shit you've read. I sort of used to do this in the sense that I'd read up and post on BL about doing new drugs but by necessity my interactions with drugs touched the real world and interacting with people rather than having it all "automated" as you might say. Not having even this sort of grounding aspect does seem a gateway to the sort of effete, bourgeois pseudo-intellectualism and ouroboric navel gazing you discuss.

<stands><applause>

 

[JackARoe]

I ha been thinking about this and the bottom line for me is I cherish the history we have with all of these people. I am not really one to form solid judgements as I keep going back to the history to probe it and my opinion changes at times. But my personal opinion is the way Kesey hooked up with Owsley to get as much acid out to the public was very important. Granted it was careless and had casualties. But it kind of threw a monkey wrench in crappy warped politics. Sticking flowers in guns is historical for me. I was not one that though only the elite should get it. We may not have some of the music we have today which is a tangible outcome. I mean I understand why someome like Huxley woutd think it should not just be given to anyone. Because they did forsee casualties. But again some of us may never have had a chance it it were less known.

Regardless what people think of the personalities, one classic moment was when Tim Leary and Ram Dass did an interview together. Old friends who knew each other sort of jiving and making fun of each other and where they ended up. I like when these historical figures meet. The Youtube videos of Ram Dass and Terrence McKenna or Shulgin with Terrence Mckenna. Good ideas are thrown out and good conversation happens whatever they thought of each other. I have been fascinatied with all of them. And I personally don't have any ideas on how history should have been different. There are some good posts though that I do agree with here in this thread.

Some newer personalities tried to emerge but I know nothing about them and they seemed to fizzle away. LIke Daniel Pinchbeck for example who I never read, or at least yet. Some of these newer people didn't make the same history. There are others that I see but have no idea who they are.

 

[Delsyd]

Pinchbecks book “Breaking Open the Head” was actually a good read. I liked that it was the first book besides the Xihkals that I read that mentioned experiences with RC’s. And the first chapter is his description of the ibogaine trip he had with the Bwiti tribe, it was one of the best ibogaine trips reports I’ve ever read.
But he was certainly going down the Leary McKenna route of psychedelic proselytizing. I lost track of him around the time he became obsessed with 2012. But his first book is still one of my favorites about psychedelics.
I agree with you @JackARoe that they all played an important role in the history.

This thread makes me want to start a Psychedelic Reading List thread.

 

[Xorkoth]

This thread makes me want to start a Psychedelic Reading List thread.

Do it! That's a great thread idea.

 

[Chris Timothy]

@finitelifeform
I've noticed the same affluent background with John Lilly, of whom it's only in his last book revealed he's the son of a bloody banker.. It's not quite as impressive as being a polymath by cunning alone. It makes for a sudden disconnect that wasn't there before. Then again, one can still think positively of the Internet, as a means to intellectual riches to which old minds in turn did not have access. I think you're mistaken about Alan Watts though. His parents had modest financial means, sent him to boarding school instead of private school iirc, and in any case he was not accepted to the university of his choice. He got accepted into academics after publishing the results of the reading he did in the evenings. Your point maybe stands though, as he did have a stunning amount of social capital.

Which is apparently lost on you as you describe his work as a phase? I find that more and more layers open up every time I revisit ancient wisdom. I don't see why it shouldn't be a never-ending source of inspiration for those who enjoy the intellectual adventure. Meddling with conspiracy thinking on the other hand best be a honeymoon phase. It is a one-dimensional, tiring trick, fastfood for the mind, providing the thrill of discovery but with mere illusion of intellectual grasp. I mean, what even has the military to gain with publicly pushing a failed mind-control method? If it was an experiment, why risk destabilizing one's own country for it? Am I missing something here?!

 

[SKL]

Pinchbecks book “Breaking Open the Head” was actually a good read.

Oh, man, fuck that guy. I haven't actually read any of that stuff but I'm going off my IRL interactions with him, was enough to put me off. He's stupendously arrogant and, like many in the scene actually, is a predatory sex pest towards a lot of young and naïve women. That topic, and the one of "groupies" and camp-followers, could be a thread in itself too. I know at least one prominent figure in the NY scene has been publicly #MeToo'd. Probably more, I don't follow the gossip anymore, but the scene is lousy with it. Worse than a knitting circle.

I didn't get the impression Pinchbeck had a lot of interesting stuff to say, either (I remember once asking him some rather combative questions after a speech of his but can't for the life of me remember what the topic was now.) Most other well known figures that I have met (it's a pretty long list) were pretty much models of humility though at least next to someone like Pinchbeck. Doesn't mean they didn't have their dirty laundry, though, many of them did.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

Oh, man, fuck that guy. I haven't actually read any of that stuff but I'm going off my IRL interactions with him, was enough to put me off. He's stupendously arrogant and, like many in the scene actually, is a predatory sex pest towards a lot of young and naïve women. That topic, and the one of "groupies" and camp-followers, could be a thread in itself too. I know at least one prominent figure in the NY scene has been publicly #MeToo'd. Probably more, I don't follow the gossip anymore, but the scene is lousy with it. Worse than a knitting circle.

I didn't get the impression Pinchbeck had a lot of interesting stuff to say, either (I remember once asking him some rather combative questions after a speech of his but can't for the life of me remember what the topic was now.) Most other well known figures that I have met (it's a pretty long list) were pretty much models of humility though at least next to someone like Pinchbeck. Doesn't mean they didn't have their dirty laundry, though, many of them did.

Yeah Pinchbeck and his wife are nutty, and a lot of mental illness runs through their families.

It is very true that a lot of people in "the scene" are extremely narcissistic, arrogant, and there is a problem with people sexually abusing/harassing women when they take drugs with these people. Or basically I have met people prominent in 'the scene' who cheat on their spouses, and think nothing of going on sex and drugs vacations to third world countries where they have sex with prostitutes who are all trafficked/forced into prostitution.

Please do create a thread about this.

 

[anti_MK]

Much is not known and it will be a long time before it will be known because, as it's already known, much of what they do today in terms of influencing the masses and the sorts of campaigns they can unleash, will tie in to the stuff that hasn't been mentioned. Some people argue that MKULTRA never really stopped and it's easy to believe that when you look at how psy-ops have had an effect on society since then. What they learn they don't unlearn and what they get away with they don't just throw away as obsolete once they are found out.

It's a game of chase but ultimately by the time things are discovered, there's already something else to be chasing after you've found the pieces for the last thing you were chasing.

The question is: where are these things happening now?
It is possible that the big, well-known European lab that has been behind the grey market lysergamides in recent years is a "black op".

Several advantages:

1 / Good cover to test a whole bunch of molecules on a large scale without the consent issues (unlike in the past with MK-ULTRA).

2/ Slush fund to allow the financing of illegal operations, like destabilization of political regimes or others (like in Chile in 1973 or the cocaine affair linked to the Contras to finance the anti-communist rebellion in Nicaragua).

Already in the 60s :

"STP was not the only weird drug being injected into the arteries of the acid ghetto (Haight-Ashbury). According to the doctors at the Free Clinic, there had been a real hecatomb with so-called THC (a synthetic version of marijuana). In fact, it was phencyclidine, or PCP - known as Angel Dust - launched on the pharmaceutical market by Parke-Davis Laboratories, as an animal tranquilizer...although the Army had tested it in the late fifties on American GI's at Edgewood Arsenal. At the same time, but this time on behalf of the CIA, Dr. Ewen Cameron was administering PCP to lunatics at the Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal, as part of Operation MK-Ultra. Subsequently, the Agency had stockpiled PCP as a "non-lethal incapacitating agent," although according to CIA reports, in high doses it could cause convulsions and death.

According to a former Agency contractor, Agency personnel helped chemists set up clandestine LSD labs in California during the Summer of Love to "monitor" what was going on in the acid ghetto...A CIA agent who claims to have infiltrated the acid networks, called Haight-Ashbury a human guinea pig farm."

A dozen years earlier George Hunter White and his CIA colleagues had set up one of their casemates in San Francisco to test hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting people. They had shut down White's operation in the mid-1960s, when the area was experiencing an acid boom. Suddenly there was a crowd of young people ready to swallow almost anything-especially substances that had only been tested in the laboratory...." (page 188-189)

From the book "Acid dreams" of Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

The question is: where are these things happening now?
It is possible that the big, well-known European lab that has been behind the grey market lysergamides in recent years is a "black op".

Several advantages:

1 / Good cover to test a whole bunch of molecules on a large scale without the consent issues (unlike in the past with MK-ULTRA).

2/ Slush fund to allow the financing of illegal operations, like destabilization of political regimes or others (like in Chile in 1973 or the cocaine affair linked to the Contras to finance the anti-communist rebellion in Nicaragua).

Already in the 60s :

"STP was not the only weird drug being injected into the arteries of the acid ghetto (Haight-Ashbury). According to the doctors at the Free Clinic, there had been a real hecatomb with so-called THC (a synthetic version of marijuana). In fact, it was phencyclidine, or PCP - known as Angel Dust - launched on the pharmaceutical market by Parke-Davis Laboratories, as an animal tranquilizer...although the Army had tested it in the late fifties on American GI's at Edgewood Arsenal. At the same time, but this time on behalf of the CIA, Dr. Ewen Cameron was administering PCP to lunatics at the Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal, as part of Operation MK-Ultra. Subsequently, the Agency had stockpiled PCP as a "non-lethal incapacitating agent," although according to CIA reports, in high doses it could cause convulsions and death.

According to a former Agency contractor, Agency personnel helped chemists set up clandestine LSD labs in California during the Summer of Love to "monitor" what was going on in the acid ghetto...A CIA agent who claims to have infiltrated the acid networks, called Haight-Ashbury a human guinea pig farm."

A dozen years earlier George Hunter White and his CIA colleagues had set up one of their casemates in San Francisco to test hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting people. They had shut down White's operation in the mid-1960s, when the area was experiencing an acid boom. Suddenly there was a crowd of young people ready to swallow almost anything-especially substances that had only been tested in the laboratory...." (page 188-189)

From the book "Acid dreams" of Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain.

PCP was around in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was sold as 'crystal THC/CRYSTAL T', Angel dust, wet, sherm, dust, and in the late 1970s love boat-I wonder if the cast of the TV show smoked it?

 

[Zephyn]

i love to listen to mckenna ramble for hours, but he is nothing as clear as leary was during this experimentL https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...1A3307A887FFD2131CA01A3&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

which i feel like, if you listen to it all, cant be anything but good intentions. i dont know how far along learys career as a psychonaut was this produced, but i thin khe would be impressed by some internation psytrance parties these days

 

[Zephyn]

in case that didn't work this guy has been massively discredited, as if you all would have done any better being some of the first exposted to this shit

 

[Neuroborean]

The question is: where are these things happening now?
It is possible that the big, well-known European lab that has been behind the grey market lysergamides in recent years is a "black op".

Several advantages:

1 / Good cover to test a whole bunch of molecules on a large scale without the consent issues (unlike in the past with MK-ULTRA).

2/ Slush fund to allow the financing of illegal operations, like destabilization of political regimes or others (like in Chile in 1973 or the cocaine affair linked to the Contras to finance the anti-communist rebellion in Nicaragua).

Already in the 60s :

"STP was not the only weird drug being injected into the arteries of the acid ghetto (Haight-Ashbury). According to the doctors at the Free Clinic, there had been a real hecatomb with so-called THC (a synthetic version of marijuana). In fact, it was phencyclidine, or PCP - known as Angel Dust - launched on the pharmaceutical market by Parke-Davis Laboratories, as an animal tranquilizer...although the Army had tested it in the late fifties on American GI's at Edgewood Arsenal. At the same time, but this time on behalf of the CIA, Dr. Ewen Cameron was administering PCP to lunatics at the Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal, as part of Operation MK-Ultra. Subsequently, the Agency had stockpiled PCP as a "non-lethal incapacitating agent," although according to CIA reports, in high doses it could cause convulsions and death.

According to a former Agency contractor, Agency personnel helped chemists set up clandestine LSD labs in California during the Summer of Love to "monitor" what was going on in the acid ghetto...A CIA agent who claims to have infiltrated the acid networks, called Haight-Ashbury a human guinea pig farm."

A dozen years earlier George Hunter White and his CIA colleagues had set up one of their casemates in San Francisco to test hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting people. They had shut down White's operation in the mid-1960s, when the area was experiencing an acid boom. Suddenly there was a crowd of young people ready to swallow almost anything-especially substances that had only been tested in the laboratory...." (page 188-189)

From the book "Acid dreams" of Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain.

yes man, good to see that someone else has seen this and posted before me...
do you think we could research about this?
I have a friend that could help us, he knows quite a lot about the bussiness...
can you send me a DM and we discuss about it? it won't be time consuming, I cannot focus on this either, but we could do a "slow-research" so to speak.

 

[lonelyDude]

shulgin is a god.

the rest are just tourists.

and to make it worse they put hope in peoples hearts that a drug could show them the truth when all they needed to do was look inside them selves.

shulgin showed us how what and how much.

no greater gift has ever been given to us and to think he paid so dearly for it.

bless him and his wife.

 

[Neuroborean]

shulgin is a god.

the rest are just tourists.

and to make it worse they put hope in peoples hearts that a drug could show them the truth when all they needed to do was look inside them selves.

shulgin showed us how what and how much.

no greater gift has ever been given to us and to think he paid so dearly for it.

bless him and his wife.

McKenna is a tourist?
you don't need to create substances to be a "God", he is a great philosopher, Leary... I don't like him, I think he was overbearing and self-obsessed, I don't generally like people who like Crowley's ideas.

 

[lonelyDude]

he is a great tripper and as other trippers think like him they relate.

but he is far from anything I would think of as amazing.

remember its only trippers who even know about him most of the time so no plato there thats for sure.

 

[unodelacosa]

shulgin is a god.
the rest are just tourists.

Laying it on a bit thick there, aren't you? … Also, in no particular order:

• David E. Nichols
• Jonathan Ott
• Darrell Lemaire
• Nicholas Sand
• Tim Scully
• Albert Hofmann
• Casey William Hardison
• Owsley Stanley
• William Leonard Pickard
• John C Lilly

and to make it worse they put hope in peoples hearts that a drug could show them the truth when all they needed to do was look inside them selves.

To make what worse? Sounds like a platitude.

shulgin showed us how what and how much.

Right so definitely Sasha did pioneering work and bravely published the results. He was also privy to very particular circumstances and conditions that afforded him the unique opportunities to produce such a robust oeuvre. He happened to be in the right field at the right time in human history, did well in producing a successful insecticide for Dole Chemical which in turn granted him carte blanche to pursue psychedelic research before it became widely popular, controversial, and consequently banned (no thanks to ppl like Tim Leary who thought it was a good idea to advise young people to "drop out").

no greater gift has ever been given to us and to think he paid so dearly for it.

"No greater gift"? Seriously? You don't think that's getting a little carried away? Yes, his association with DOM cost him his job at Dole, and yes after he published PiHKAL, the DEA paid him a visit and killed a couple Peyote plants and rifled through his lab like good little tentacles of the State/Lord Cthulhu, but Shulgin "paid dearly"? All in all from what I can tell, Shulgin lived a full, interesting, and satisfying life wherein he carved a legendary spot for himself in the annals of psychedelic drug history all while having the amazing once-a-century level of privilege to research, invent, produce and test phenethylamines and tryptamines. Sure each of us has our own set of trials and tribulations, as it were, but I like to think Shulgin lived a mostly charmed life.

McKenna is a tourist?

In a manner of speaking, yes, though worthy of consideration (@lonelyDude) ☞ https://youtu.be/bJbFn9-LQew

you don't need to create substances to be a "God"

In some sense, I'm pretty sure you do. After all, God is purportedly “The Creator”, if you believe in that sorta thing. But in another sense, WTF is a "god" exactly? (it's rhetorical)

he is a great philosopher, Leary...

Sure, if by “philosopher” you mean “cheese-eating rat fink”. I have a hard time respecting a self-absorbed bitch-ass snitch. Fuck that guy.

And then back to @lonelyDude discussing, I believe, Terence McKenna…

remember its only trippers who even know about him most of the time so no plato there thats for sure.

Yeah but come on, compared to Plato, any philosopher can appear to be lackluster. That's like comparing flashlights to the sun.

Regardless I have to agree w/you about Terence McKenna, some of his ideas stooped into pseudoscience. Then again, Isaac Newton was an alchemist and Copernicus believed in retrograde motion of the planets… it took Johannes Kepler years later to explain the elliptical motion instead of perfectly circular motion of the planets and thus account for what appeared to be retrograde motion of planetary orbits.