Scientists Suggest Fresh Look at Psychedelic Drugs

[Jan Klimkowski]

Walter Bowart on his seminal interview with Tim Leary:

We drank wine and talked lightly about news of mutual friends. Finally he
insisted that he and I go to a quite place and make a tape recorded
interview. I'd just finished Operation Mind Control and had sent it of to
the publisher. It was too late to get anything new into it and, I told
Tim, that frankly I was weary of the subject. He insisted that we tape
an interview.

"I'll tell you things I've never told anyone before," he said.
I couldn't resist such a journalistic temptation, so we went to my office
with our glasses and turned on the tape recorder.

He started by congratulating me for breaking the CIA-mind control story. I
couldn't take full credit for that, but I listened, accepting his
compliments for the three of us who'd been working on the mind control
case for a few years.

"The game you're playing, and the stakes at which you're gambling... you
may be wrong ninety-nine times, but if you're right once, you've won a
billion, or whatever you're playing for, so keep going..."

I certainly wasn't playing for the money. The stakes were higher. These
stakes were no less than freedom of human thought and perhaps the
remnants of democracy in the world. But maybe I was naive. Maybe I
should write screenplays and make some money instead of running around
the country researching the victims of CIA mind control experiments
conducted in the streets of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and
other cities, as well as in prisons, mental hospitals, in the ranks of
the military services, on unwitting and unvolunteering men women and
children.

"The contract I'm making with you," Leary said, " is, I never lie. I'm
wrong a lot of the time, but I'm going to tell you everything you ask
me. I'm not going to hide anything. on the other hand, and there is no
question that I want to ask you... on the other hand I want to know
things..."

So, it was to be quid pro quo then?

I agreed to share any information I had with him on the CIA's involvement
with drugs and mind control, but I told him, fact was, everything I knew,
except the personal details of certain survivors, had already been made
public.
"Have you ever knowingly worked for the CIA?" I asked.

"If I were working for the CIA," he said, " I would have ten people
working making a living exposing me. If I were the CIA, I'd own New
Republic. I'd own The New Masses. I'd own Rolling Stone. I'd have 50
groups
of people exposing the CIA..."
"Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" I
asked.
Without hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that
eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made
were
suggested to me by CIA people...

"I like the CIA!" he said. "The game they're playing is better than the
FBI. Better than the Saigon police. Better than Franco's police. Better
than the Israeli police. They're a thousand times better than the KGB. So
it comes down to: who are you going to work for? The Yankees or the
Dodgers?"

Leary had this in common with people I knew at the Mellon Bank. Baseball
metaphors. Heavy baseball metaphors, same as Nixon used. I'd heard Leary
use them since I met him in 1965. I wondered if it was just a
coincidence?

Leary drank his wine and drifted a bit, talking about his current
favorite subject, outer space. I brought the conversation back to the
subject of mind control, telling Leary some of the details I'd learned
about the CIA's use of drugs for thirty years in their attempt to find
the perfect "recruitment pill, aphrodisiac, and amnesia drug." I
explained the magnitude of the story and I told him that, based on my
interviews with survivors of the experiments and psycho scientists who'd
done some of them, I had to conclude that the CIA had long ago reached
their goal of creating the perfect security device short of assassination
-- one which controlled the human mind.

I told Leary that, based on some of the documents I'd read, it seemed
that he could have been just one of many scientist who'd been used without
his knowledge by the CIA to conduct their mind control experiments.

"I've known this for ten years," Leary said.

"You were witting of it?" I asked in surprise.

"Of course," Leary said, leaning back in his chair with confidence.

I couldn't believe my ears. The CIA had created the "Psychedelic Sixties"
with Timothy Leary's help?

"You were wittingly used by the CIA?" I asked again. "...During the
sixties? You knew you were being used by the CIA?"

"Wait," Leary said. "When you say CIA, it's like saying Niggers...

"I knew I was being used by the intelligence agents of this country."

"What were you doing for them?" I asked. "What the hell were you doing?

"Did they want you to turn the kids on, huh? Were they trying to make the
kids see God and leave the Vietnam war alone?"

"Walter, are you starting off into nationalism..." Leary said, trying to
put me on the defensive -- exhibiting his fatal character flaw -- sold
on himself as a master psychologist, a master manipulator.

"I'm asking you what was the CIA's motive? What were you used for?" I
said again.

"The CIA recognized what you probably haven't recognized yet, that I'm a
very important national asset...

"What can I say,?" Leary said.

That was Leary. He believed his own press releases.

He lit his half-smoked joint and continued. "Yeah. I saw in nineteen
sixty-two or three, that there was a world struggle for the control of
minds. That's a crude way to say it...

"I saw, after Hiroshima, there would never be a big world war. World war
would be at the neurological level, not at the level of tanks and planes
and bombs...

"I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the
next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the
control of consciousness. So I had to think very carefully about that...

"I wanted my side to win the war...

"There's no winning or losing... but I wanted my side to stake out enough
territory....

"I'm talking about time territory, not space territory....

"Of course, you need enough space territory to get your time to make sure
that the particular version of the territory of consciousness I would be
represented in... I believed, after studying all the other versions,
that my philosophy of the future... skip philosophy... my Clausewitz
tactics and strategy, or my natural chauvinistic consciousness
commitments were very fierce and strong...

"I wanted my species to be recognized, understood and have a strong
single voice in creating the reality of the future...

"I wanted to create a segment of the future which I felt I would be the
spokesman for..."

I let him talk. When he paused to catch his thought which had drifted
away on a puff of muggles, I repeated the question: "Did you ever
wittingly work for the CIA?"

"Yes," he answered strongly. "I was a witting agent of the CIA, but, I'm
not a willing agent of Nixon! I did everything in my power to throw out
Nixon!" (So, it would appear, did the CIA.)

"I'm a witting agent in that I think Roosevelt was a disaster, but
historically necessary.... So, pin me down and I'll tell you exactly
what I'm doing for the CIA," he said.

"What are you doing for the CIA?" I said, disbelieving everything he
said.

"I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of
Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very
small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..."

"So, you work for the Central Intelligence Agency?" I asked. "Is it the
Deputy Director of Plans you work for? Who makes out your checks?"

"It's none of your business to know how those things work. I'll answer
you no questions that have to do with business. I'll answer you any
question about history or people..."

He drifted off into a monologue talking about neurological cosmology, his
outer space connections. Again I brought the conversation back to the
central question again :" What year did you start working for the CIA?"

"Well, I never worked in the sense that nobody ever came to me and said
would you work for the CIA..."

"Nobody recruited you?" I asked.

"No, nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or
that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now,
that I was being advised by the CIA..."

"But a moment ago you did say that you knew at the time. You said that
you were wittingly working for the CIA..."

"Don't you understand," Leary barked, "I'm talking about a very narrow
segment of CIA activity which has to do with personality assessment. The
OSS was the forerunner of CIA mind stuff... OSS founded... Howard Murray,
who was the head of the OSS, the started the personality research.
MacKinnon who was OSS, started personality assessment research, so that
all
personality assessment in the 1950's was basically CIA initiated..."

Later research disclosed the Donald W. MacKinnon, Ph.D. (Bryn Mawr
College) and Henry A. Murray, M.C., Ph.D., Lt. Col. (Harvard) were among
74 OSS staff members who worked to develop personality assessment
techniques which are still used to select employees of the CIA and other
intelligence agencies.

"Good grief," I said. "I knew they supported Dr. Rhine's ESP experiments
at Duke University..."

"I didn't know that," Leary said. "But I think they should have..." and
finally the wine began to take effect and the interview degenerated into
speculation about CIA's activities in various LSD research projects.
Leary was curious about several of them and he asked me to see if I
could dig up some information for him.
Leary asked me about other LSD researchers of the early days. He wanted
to know about Walter Pankhe and he was especially interested in the Chez.
psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who, he said, had been brought from behind
the "Iron Curtain" to the U.S. to run one of the only official "LSD
Research Projects."

At one point in the conversation Leary told me he had talked at length
with Al Larkin, a reporter for the Boston Globe which had been
investigating his research at Harvard looking for the CIA link.

"Al Larkin told me that the guy that led me to get fired from Harvard was
a man named Herbert Chanoch Kelman... Does that name mean anything to
you?" Leary asked.

I called Larkin the next day and he admitted that he'd been investigating
Leary's involvement with CIA and Harvard since the MKULTRA story had
local interest. ( Harvard is in Boston.)

"I was in the process of pursuing a number of different avenues," Larkin
said, " pursuing the possibility of some of Timothy's money coming through
one of the organizations established as a front for CIA money I talked
to him about it at that time and he said he had no knowledge of it,
although the time span of the two things did coincide.

"I was particularly interested in a project Leary did at the Concord
Reformatory, since it was very similar to some of the projects funded by
the
CIA. It did fit into the proper frame... I was unable to get any records
on the Concord Project. I did talk to one of the people who was very
closely involved with the MKULTRA research in Massachusetts. I mentioned
Leary's name, and the guy almost became livid,
as any good CIA patriot should. He said, 'We would never have given
anything to him!'"

Larkin said the man's name was Dr. Robert Lashbrook who was number two in
the MKULTRA experiments which consumed tens of thousands of unwitting
human guinea pigs, causing at least one known death to a non-volunteer
victim. Lashbrook was given immunity to testify before Kennedy's
congressional committee investigating the CIA's mind control operations.

I relayed to Larkin the details of my interview with Leary. If what Leary
had told me was true, it looked like the CIA, then, had made a large
contribution to the creation of the Psychedelic Sixties.

"Let me ask you a couple of questions which really shouldn't be
repeated," Larkin said. "What is Leary's financial condition right now?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. Why?

"The reason I raised it, he mentioned, two months ago, that he was
writing a piece for The New York Times on this topic. He said that he
hoped to sell it to The Times on the MKULTRA project.

"I never saw the piece, and I talked to him a few weeks ago and he said,
he was talking to someone at Esquire about it. He said, 'I think I'm
going to write a piece for them on this, cause I need the money..."

"Then it occurred to me," Larkin said, "that Timothy Leary, who had very
little interest in my initial questions about his involvement, suddenly
had become interested and may have seen it as a way to establish some
credibility for his writing about this. In other words, he realized when
The Times didn't want his piece, so he had to enhance his credibility
somehow and maybe do it by dropping a hint to you, and then suggesting
that you call me. I have a message here that says that I am to call him.
He may be wanting to tell me to call you. You see what I'm driving at?'

I told Larkin that I'd played my interview with Leary to several of his
friends who all concluded that, because of the contradictions, Leary
was not telling the truth. One of the things he said on the tape was
"FBI" when he clearly meant to say "CIA."

"He said that you (Larkin) found out that this doctor named Herb Kelman
had been responsible for him getting thrown out of Harvard. Leary said
that you found out Kelman was a CIA man. Is that true?"

"No. No.,," Larkin said. "He's misinterpreting what I said. Leary told me
that Kelman led the fight to get him thrown out of Harvard. I found out
that Kelman got a thousand dollars from the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA
fund. So, I called Kelman and said to him 'what was your role in the
removal of Leary?' He admitted that he played a role in it and he said,
'I didn't like what Leary was doing. I was opposed to human
experimentation. I was opposed to giving drugs to undergraduates and I
knew that he was doing it.'

"Kelman said, 'I was a young researcher then, and I didn't carry a lot of
weight but I was outspoken. And when the furor died down somewhat I
continued to argue for it to reemerge.'

So I said to Kelman, "What about this money?'"

Kelman said that he didn't know the Human Ecology Fund was a fund set up
by the CIA and he was very up-front about it -- he said that he had
been editing a book for a small private organization and before it could
go to print he had to bring the authors together in Cambridge and the
organization which was sponsoring the book didn't have any more money
and he needed the thousand dollars and he went to talk to a guy named
Edgar Schein..."

Schein was one of the leading investigators during the Korean war into
the 'brainwashing' hoax. Schein knowingly worked for the CIA.

"He'd told Kelman to go to the Human Ecology Fund and he wrote a letter
for him... but no one ever asked Kelman to do anything. According to him,
the book had nothing to do with the areas which would interest the CIA,
it seems to me to be obviously one of those small cover projects they had
to do to maintain their credibility in academia... So Leary's
interpretation of the thing is a little bit more... hardcore..."

For some months that's where this story stood -- unfinished, in limbo. I
didn't even bother to transcribe the interviews. Then the first
coincidence -- certain proof of the cryptocracy's ongoing Agit Prop
operation: A cell mate of Leary's was located. He said that when Leary
came back from his escape he was very frightened.

"In Vacaville, he had one of the best positions. He was working in the
education wing. He was making it with a pretty little blonde nurse... He
was writing and doing meditation, but he was running scared. He was
scared behind the Panthers in there... The way the CIA got Tim out of
Algeria was they told him that Eldridge Cleaver wanted to kill him,
that's why Tim left..."

This cell mate of Leary's wanted to be identified only as Yogi. He said
that Leary had some "heavy" friends in prison who protected him.

"But he let everyone down. It's a well known fact that they took him out
at night -- the Feds did. Before he was testifying, they had Federal
guards with him at all times. In the end he was in protective custody...
When he was in prison no one knew he was a stool pigeon. He was a hero.
He was living on his rep that he was the head Boo-Hoo of the acid
freaks. That was enough to protect him by the heavy hippies who looked
up to him.

"All of a sudden they took Timmy out at night.

"Usually, when you go somewhere, you go by bus, but the Feds took him by
car. They stayed with him at all times. That's when we began to suspect
that he was working with the Feds...

"He still was Chief Boo-Hoo to most in prison. But then the word came
down that he was testifying on Weathermen, and he even gave up his own
lawyer and turned over the people who helped him get out of the country.
He was giving out who was who in the groups, what they were doing,
smuggling and narcotics... He gave up all that... they'd take him down
to custody and they'd talk to him. Obviously, they told him, 'If you
want to get out of here... if you don't give us what we want to know,
we're going to make sure that you die in prison!'

"It was too much for him. I know that they were coming regularly to make
him turn over on his own daughter. He could have gone out in style. He
could have helped a lot of people... Then everybody found out he was a
fucking weak punk.

"I don't know anyone who really respects him. That's why I told you the
other night, I told you to tell him about me and see how he reacts. He
knows me as Yogi, the guy who brought him the note from Nick (Sands?) in
San Francisco. He used to go to the 3HO Yoga classes there...

"That was a beautiful day. Ram Das came and all of us was there. Tim
didn't even have enough class to show up. He said that Ram Das was a
child molester and he didn't even want to talk to him..."

"Could Leary have been working with the CIA or FBI during the whole 6time
he was in prison," I asked Yogi. "Before his escape, and before he came
back to prison?"

"He sure could," Yogi said. "He had to be something because to turn over
like that, with the rep he had with all the beautiful people... I know he
got a lot of people started on the spiritual path. He helped a lot of
people get into meditation and yoga... He gained a lot of good karma for
that, but he's going to need it.

"I really felt bad that someone who got so many people on the spiritual
path was so weak in the end. I can't judge. I still got that joint
consciousness. He's a rat and that's that. Let God take care of him. He
had to do it the weak way. All my partners and all the people I knew in
the joint, everyone felt the same way..."

I transcribed no tapes. Yogi's testimony was just hearsay -- the talk of
a convict. The second coincidence came: I was introduced to Leary's
cell mate in Folsom.
Again this man doesn't want to be identified. Both men said that they
would, however, come forth to back me up if I ever needed them.

This second former convict has also gone straight and wants to protect
his name. He was then the head of his own construction company and was
making more money honestly, than he ever made at crime.

This man, we'll call him Ray, spoke of the period when Tim could not be
found by his wife, Joanna. He said that one day Leary was returned to
their cell with his head shaved and blue lines painted on it.

"Tim got just about the whole works. He was a different type of case than
I was. They felt that they could use him a lot more than someone like me.
I was an unknown, but if they could turn someone like Leary around and get
him to do what he's doing right now, in fact, he'd be very useful to the
government... the high priest had to be de-throned.

"Tim is a very fascinating person. There is only a handful of people who
did what he did -- who took a whole generation and turned them on. That
was the challenge to the Feds, if they could find out how his mind
worked, and use him...

"Well, one day he comes back to the cell with lines on his head. They
were actually very precise measurement lines. His head was shaved and it
was marked with all these careful, precise blue lines.

"I asked him what the lines were for. He told me that they were going to
give him a lobotomy. They were going to stick ice picks into his brain.
He told me that it was really going to be great. They had him completely
brainwashed. He said, 'this is going to be the greatest thing. All my life
I've been going through this, you get up, you get down, but now, ' he
said, 'I'll be just as smart as I am, but I won't have to feel emotions
any more. Wow!'"

"You think they broke him?" I asked.

"Totally controlled him. They gave him a lot of those fright drugs. They
kept him in solitary. They did everything they could to break his mind,
and they succeeded. Look at him now..."

"Suddenly he tells me he worked for the CIA for years," I said.

"Well, that may be one of their defenses. In other words, by admitting
what you did, nobody believes it and it makes you look ridiculous. When
they're done with you -- and I've been through a lot of their drugs and
tortures -- at a certain state, you're really like a zombie. You're so
conditioned chemically that a guy isn't even aware of what's happened.
Leary bought the whole thing. They really have gotten good at it. You
know, nobody is going to believe us..."

Then they didn't, but will they now?

"Leary never would have gotten out of prison," Ray said. "He'd either
bend or they'd break him. No matter how sympathetic you may be, to really
understand the situation, you have to go through it yourself. You say,
well they couldn't break me. I wouldn't do it. It just couldn't happen.

"But believe me, we are like just so much putty and clay and we can just
stand so much, and when they're finished with the mind control, it's
almost impossible to tell..."

Still Ray's was just the testimony of another ex-con. While the testimony
of his prisonmates was merely hearsay, at least they appeared to believed
what they said. Leary, it seemed, believed nothing.

Even after 20 years these questions remain: Did Leary work for the CIA in
the 1960's. If he did, why did he admit it? Was he proselytizing LSD
during the '60's under CIA direction? Was Leary's escape from Vacaville,
allegedly with the help of Cubans and Weather Underground, encouraged by
the U.S. government so that Leary could later 'finger' those who helped
him? Was his sojourn in Algeria with Cleaver, and in Switzerland, then
Afghanistan also CIA directed.

One CIA document was dated 1 November 1963. It was headed:" MEMORANDUM
FOR THE RECORD. SUBJECT: International Federation for Internal Freedom
(IFIF), ALPERT, Richard, Ph.D., LEARY, Timothy F., Ph.D., Drugs, Mind
Affecting, Agency Policy Regarding."

The last two paragraphs of that memo, now thirty-three years old, remain
unanswered: The CIA Security Office (OS) "has not been able to determine
whether any staff employees of the Agency have engaged in the unauthorized
taking of any of these drugs, but there is information that some
nonagency groups, particularly on the West Coast, have taken these drugs
in a type of religious experimentation. While as previously mentioned
there are no staff employees involved, some individuals known to have
taken the drugs have sensitive security clearances and are engaged in
classified work.

"Any information concerning the use of this type of drug for experimental
or personal reasons should be reported immediately to Chief/SRS/OS
(Office of Security) with all specific details furnished. In addition,
any information of Agency personnel involved with the International
Federation for Internal Freedom, or with Drs. ALPERT or LEARY, or with
any group engaging in this type of activity should also be reported."

The memo was signed, "Chief/SRS/OS."

No follow-up was furnished in the CIA MKULTRA documents. This document is
clearly an in-house query from the security division chief who was worried
about what the other divisions of the CIA might be doing. Non-Agency
groups meant contract agents or front groups. Staff employees are
high-ranking CIA personnel who take their orders, usually, direct from
Langley. The CIA operates on a "need to know" basis, with no individual
knowing anything more than the minimum he or she needs to know to perform
his or her job. Various agencies within the CIA, often the Office of the
Deputy Director of Plans, then Richard Helms, were taking matters into
their own hands with direction from above. Since the Chief of Security was
so concerned, there must have been good reason. And what about Leary's
own statement's that he wittingly followed the directions of the CIA in
the 1960's?
When former CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner was asked whether or
not the CIA supported Timothy Leary or gave Leary LSD, he replied only,
"The CIA gave it to those who were doing the research."

Was Leary's involvement with promoting private enterprise in outer
space, and especially his involvement with the L-5 Society also CIA
inspired?
A phone call to an old friend who'd once been a director of the L-5
Society revealed that it been about to fold for lack of subscriptions in
1080, when a retired military officer with known intelligence connections
sent an unsolicited donation of $10,000 to save it from failure. He said
he's wondered himself about the L-5 Society's Director, Carolyn Hanson
who'd been with Leary when he visited me.
I asked Ms. Hanson to tell me what her political ideas were and she
evaded my question. I asked her another question and she was very
cryptic. Leary had introduced her as "the smartest woman in the world,"
and she blushed and demurred, "Well, one of the smartest."

A few years later, in the mid 80's, Leary was writing books dictated by
voices he heard, he said, coming from outer space.

Now knowing what we know about mind control, one has to ask if Timothy
Leary was himself a victim of the same cryptocracy he once owed his
allegiance to, like so many other government employees.

http://www.iahushua.com/WOI/leary.html

[Keith Millea]

Very good posts Thomas and Jan.

Here I go re-thinking again.I've always been against the so called use of guidance when it comes to the use of LSD.Now I recall in a recent thread about Aldous Huxleys death how I was so impressed with the way that his wife Laura did guide him through this transition while he was on LSD.Of course,this is in an extrordinary context.I guess this is why I said earlier that LSD is so hard to talk about,everything is so unpredictable.

Here is the thread on Huxley

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=4256

[Jan Klimkowski]

The thread linked below is also directly relevant:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=1191

[Phil Dragoo]

My friend Jeff had returned from a period of months on one of the Keys. Looking very Lord of the Flies. He invited me to accompany him to a lecture at a MENSA meeting. The dry man in the grey suit was from the FDA. He was telling us, “Tests have shown marijuana causes short term memory loss.”



My hand shot up. He nodded at me. I asked, “Which tests were these?”



“I uh can't recall, but there are tests,” he replied.



I, alone, laughed, with gusto.



A couple of years down the road. Santa Fe. The bald woman on tabla. Ginsberg droning his warplanes, horny rap over his recorder. Ram Das smiling, with gong.



Ginsberg had everyone staring at the doorknob and being with their breathing.



He went out chanting.



I am perhaps simplistic, but it never stopped me before.



It is, as Huxley famously said, a Door. And he used it elegantly, magnificently, with his wife, at the end. No truer Staircase to Heaven.



To see things infinitely does of course go against survival—how dodge cars now, saber-tooth tigers then, if tripping on the beautiful Mozartian hatbox galactic telescoping universe, becoming old, young, beautiful, ugly.



Of course Gottlieb et al sought control for its own sake—see how the ego tugged Leary like a leash.



And as for a “guide,” perhaps a Satini-from-Boulder would be useful if one were too footloose.



Free thinking does not require a chemical tool; conceptual links may be opened like so many caribiners.



I suggest the lyric of John Lennon, specifically the key phrases, “but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone any how” as well as “you better free your mind instead” as being dangerous to the Cold War world being re-established by Reagan-Bush—and see how Reagan was almost replaced by Bush.



Chapman, Hinkley. In the manner, perhaps, of Sirhan.



Control in that regard being dark, evil, smelling of death.



But the context—set and setting if you will—of therapy to bring one BACK from that darkness, that might be the valid therapeutic use, and the valid role of control.



Giinsberg howled of “the shrieking fairies of Madison Avenue” and we eschew their call to focus on the bright, shiny things made by armies of Chinese workers driven to jump from factory windows.



The shamans are busily designing new consciousness constrictors.



This forum is a window.

[Jan Klimkowski]

TPTB have never forgiven David Nutt, Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, for his time running the scientific advisory committee to government drugs policy.....

Magic mushrooms' psychedelic ingredient could help treat people with severe depression

Trials of psilocybin blocked by drugs law red tape, says Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London


Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Sunday 7 April 2013
Jump to comments (210)

Magic mushrooms
Scientists believe the chemical psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, can turn down parts of the brain that are overactive in severely depressive patients. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

Drugs derived from magic mushrooms could help treat people with severe depression. Scientists believe the chemical psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, can turn down parts of the brain that are overactive in severely depressive patients. The drug appears to stop patients dwelling on themselves and their own perceived inadequacies.

However, a bid by British scientists to carry out trials of psilocybin on patients in order to assess its full medical potential has been blocked by red tape relating to Britain's strict drugs laws. Professor David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, will tell a conference today that because magic mushrooms are rated as a class-A drug, their active chemical ingredient cannot be manufactured unless a special licence is granted.

"We haven't started the study because finding companies that could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence is proving very difficult," said Nutt. "The whole field is so bedevilled by primitive old-fashioned attitudes. Even if you have a good idea, you may never get it into the clinic, it seems."

Research by Nutt has found that psilocybin switches off part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It was known that this area is overactive in individuals suffering from depression. In his tests on healthy individuals, it was found that psilocybin had a profound effect on making these volunteers feel happier weeks after they had taken the drug, said Nutt who was sacked as the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2009 after repeatedly clashing with government ministers about the dangers and classification of illicit drugs.

Nutt's team also discovered that another section of the brain known as the default mode network was also influenced by psilocybin. "People with depression have overactive default mode networks and so ruminate on themselves, on their inadequacies, on their badness, that they are worthless, that they have failed to an extent that is sometimes delusional. Again psilo-cybin appears to block that activity and stops this obsessive rumination."

To determine if psilocybin could be used as a treatment to help patients, Nutt and his team were given £550,000 by the Medical Research Council to begin a three-year project to test the drug on people with depression. Patients who had failed to respond to two previous treatments would be selected. The aim was to test 30 with the drug and 30 with a placebo.

However, the group has found its path blocked by bureaucracy. So difficult has the government and the EU made it for companies to manufacture the active ingredients of Class A drugs that price tags of around £100,000 were given by chemical companies.

"We only need a relatively small amount of the drug, an order worth only a few hundred pounds," said Nutt, who is set to describe his work with psilocybin at the UK Festival of Neuroscience conference in London today. "If we have to pay £100,000 we simply cannot afford to carry out the rest of the study. We have not given up but it is proving very difficult," he said.

"Depression is now the largest cause of disability in Europe. There are many effective treatments but only about a third of individuals respond fully. At least 10% fail to respond to three different treatments. We badly need more types of treatment but we cannot pursue these because the government is denying scientists access to powerful tools that could help people in need. The regulations that govern researchers access to Class A drugs are totally inappropriate and harmful."

[Malcolm Pryce]

I suspect the problem is not just that psilocybin is a Class A drug but also that it is effectively free and grows in fields. Big Pharma with its multi-billion dollar antidepressant gravy train is not going to allow that without a fight.

[Adele Edisen]

I think there can be, and have been, some therapeutic and ethical uses of LSD. One such project I know about occurred in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Louisiana State University School of Medicine during the early 1960s. Residents in Psychiatry could volunteer to take LSD doses in order to experience perceptual and other mental changes similar to those experienced by psychiatric patients whom they would be treating as physicans. Just to experience the inability tro control one's own thoughts. visions, and sensations would allow the physicians to have greater empathy for the patients. It was done in a carefully controlled situation, and antidotes were available in case anyone were to have an unexpected reaction to the drug.

In another study I read about, architects, again on a volunatary and controlled basis, took LSD to learn of the visual distortions mental patients could have. Their intent was to be able to design mental hospitals which would be less frightening to patients. This was during the times when psychiatric hospitals were still being built to treat the mentally ill.

Reputable psychotherapists used LSD in controlled situations to aid in promoting access to their patient's repressed subconscious memories to facilitate their recovery and healing.

The use of unwitting civilian and military subjects in uncontrolled situations, as in MKULTRA and other CIA and U.S. Army and military projects was reprehensible. These projects yielded little, if any, valuable scientific information because that had not been their goals in the first place, nor were they intended to provide humanitarian assistance and comfort to the subjects so used.

The lethal dose of LSD in humans is not clearly known, but every animal species tested for the LD-50, the phamacological lethal dose which kills half of the animals being tested is known, and reported in the Merck Index. a volume which lists drug actions, not to be confused with the Merck Manual, a physician's handbook of diagnoses and treatments of medical conditions.

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

Timothy Leary and friends conducted many projects while he was still at Harvard. But they seemed to put the kibosh on them in the 70s.

[Jim Hackett II]

I detest the term "counter-culture" used to describe a wide spread CHOICE exercised by much of the younger population in the face of the Empire removing the velvet glove from the mailed fist.

In the face of a generation being ordered to kill for another meaningless DOD exercise, but having no voice to say "Stop the Insanity" before you kill me too!
The Draft changes the social dynamic, our draft is now economic and class based. Enforced with poverty not law as in the previous "duty-bound" psychology.

In the face of the cover-ups many knew of long before RMNixon and 4 dead in Ohio, the result in alternative world views would be expected.

Personally my own reaction to making the choice to reject the "Archie Bunker" mold, was "A pox on both your houses". The Oppressors of the USG assets as well as the opposing violence bearers of bad karma in "counter-culture" jackets.

Seeing the efforts of the above to abort meaningful organizing proved to me who was evil and who was not.

Only one side was being paid for their efforts, those seeking as in Op Chaos the destruction of the "counter-culture".

Where did psychedelics fall into this mix? I think coincidental for me.
Internal re-evaluation of values was the result I experienced.
I can only speak of my own experiences, but smaller amounts and proper setting was beneficial to my internal peace after USMC discharge. Not under "medical supervision", but at my choice and rarely done. No "guides" except my own internal compass of right and not right.

Before the USMC I drank and smoked pot, and they damn well knew that day 1.
After USMC, Where were the USG assets and VA? pissing down my neck and telling me it was raining.

A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES PROMOTING VIOLENCE ... resulted.
A much more healthy view.
It was OK to feed me poisons like Dioxin but illegal for me to take a trip without ever leaving the farm....!?
A pox on both your houses!

[Peter Lemkin]

VERY interesting interview tidbits with Leary [Dr. Tim, whom I once met in person]. If I ever harbored any doubts about his connections to intelligence they were quashed with his strange adventures in Algeria with Cleaver and later with his magical escape from prison and other such. My guess is he was being [at minimum] guided by the CIA way back in his Harvard days/daze. He was a 'loose cannon' in the structure, for sure.....as was in very different ways Jim Jones, for example. These types were IMHO both under 'control' and 'out of anyone's control' - at the same time. When they wanted these types to do something, they had the means...and the rest of the time they just watched them 'experiment'.