Re-Creational 4
If this drug could facilitate psychotherapeutic transference, perhaps it could also be used for other purposes, such as a truth drug. That was the leading interest of those in the CIA's Chemical Division who eventually set up the LSD program known as MKULTRA, which was well under way by 1953. In his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks discussed an aspect of re-creational LSD usage based on his examination of the first 16,000 pages of relevant documents released by the CIA in the late 1970s.
What is worth commenting on is that LSD provided a great many surprises to the CIA and various branches of the armed services as they began to try to use and control it.For one thing, these agencies were the means by which many counterculture activists of the 1960s first became acquainted with this drug.
Also, as these clandestine agents on many occasions tried it on each other, they themselves were affected in subtle and unexpected ways.
Marks quotes one of the MKULTRA pioneers who talked about his first trip on LSD. The description given presents an unusually clear example of how the drug operates re-creationally. After ingesting LSD, nothing physically about one changes, only something of one's point of view. It is like slightly moving a fulcrum of perspective, just enough to make the half-empty glass appear half-full. This account by Marks shows how that early CIA experimentation expanded an agent's perception of reality:
"'I was shaky at first, but then I just experienced it and had a high. I felt that everything was working right. I was like a locomotive going at top efficiency. Sure there was stress, but not in a debilitating way. It was like the stress of an engine pulling the longest train it's ever pulled.'
"This CIA veteran describes seeing all the colors of the rainbow growing out of cracks in the sidewalk. He had always disliked cracks as signs of imperfection, but suddenly the cracks became natural stress lines that measured the vibrtations of the universe.
He saw people with blemished faces, which he had previously found slightly repulsive. 'I had a changed value about faces,' he says. Hooked noses or crooked teeth would become beautiful for that person. 'Something had turned loose in me, and all I had done was shift my attitude. Reality hadn't changed, but I had. That was all the difference in the world between seeing something ugly and seeing truth and beauty.'"
While the CIA, Army and Navy were gearing up for turning on great numbers of people to LSD without public scrutiny and often without any foreknowledge on the part of the experiencer, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, way up in Saskatoon, Canada, were thinking about the psychotomimetic aspects of this drug. One morning at about 4:00 a.m,, they got the notion that they might be able to use this effect to produce a kind of artificial delirium tremens (d.t.s) in their alcoholic patients. When d.t.s occur naturally, about 10 percent of the experiencers recover immediately and never drink again. Osmond and Hoffer reasoned that they might be able to contrive similar results in a somewhat better than usual setting. The idea seemed a bit bizarre and laughable, but in the morning they wondered whether or not it might be that a controlled LSD-induced delirium might help alcoholics stay sober.
They tried this out on two of their patients, and one recovered immediately. About a 50 percent recovery rate came about when they ran further LSD trials, leading Osmond to question whether or not large samplings were really needed. In any event, as familiarity with this drug increased, their sense of LSD's potential grew. Hoffer has since remarked that "by 1957 it was apparent that even though many of our patients were helped by LSD, it was not its psychotomimetic activity which was responsible. In spite of our best efforts to produce such an experience, some of our subjects escaped into a psychedelic experience."
