Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond

[Magda Hassan]

Before this gets too far out there, hijacked in a sense, let me return to my point.

When I read Acid Dreams, I kicked myself for believing Leary and his BS story about Meyer. So then I went back and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. So I searched for all his books I could find between when he said he met Meyer, and when he mentioned it in Flashbacks. He had over twenty opportunities to write about it in over twenty years.

He did not. That clinched it for me.

THen reading about his associations with Billy Hitchcock and the Eastern Establishment that was so closely related to the CIA, and the Bowart interview, I decided that Leary was a CIA asset involved in spreading the message of pyschedelic drugs in the late sixties. He was the outside guy and Ronald Stark was the inside guy. Lee and Shlain do a very nice job at the end of Acid Dreams in the sub chapter called The Great LSD Conspiracy (p. 276) in summing up who Stark really was. Very much suggests a high level deep cover agent.

After I finished the book, like I said, I felt like a dupe. And then when I learned that the other guy spreading the Meyer/JFK drugs in the WH story was Angleton, well, just how much evidence do you need?

I agree that Leary was freelancing or otherwise for the Company but as for Mary Meyer not being mentioned in his other books well, his other books were not auto-biographical but philosophical and political. So I'm not so sure about that not actually being true.