"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan, I too have no critique on how you are trying to critique [using scientific methodology] the French Village incident - and/or logic of it. I'll have more to say on this in the morning...too tired now.

Peter - thank you. I look forward to your further comments.

But, I wanted to correct you. LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938 from ergotamine, a chemical derived by Arthur Stoll from ergot, a grain fungus that typically grows on rye. It was later that the drug could be manufactured from its constituent organic groups - rather than a lesser transformation from a similar natural substance. There is a distinction. The end product, however, would be the same. So, timing is not an issue here. It existed and Hoffman made his famous bicycle trip before the War! The Swiss and the Germans tested it during the War.

I must be tired too, because you are quite correct that LSD was first synthesized in 1938, and we all know the story of Dr Hofmann's famous bike ride.

What happened in 1954 was

that Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory

Or, put another way:

In 1953 the CIA provided Eli Lilly with funding to attempt synthesis of LSD for CIA use without the need for the expensive and scarce reagents required by Sandoz. A year later, Lilly chemists succeeded in their quest, and subsequent supplies were from Lilly[1,2].

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References:
1.CIA documents: Document #24, 16 November, 1953, Subject: ARTICHOKE Conference; Document #268, 23 October, 1953, Subject: Meeting in Director's Office at 1100 hours on 23 October with Mr. Wisner and [deleted]; Document # 316,6 January,1954, Subject: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25); and Document #338, 26 October 1954, Subject: Potential Large Scale Availability of LSD through newly discovered synthesis by [deleted]; interviews with Sandoz and Lilly former executives; and Sidney Gottlieb's testimony before Kennedy subcommittee, 1977, p. 203.
2.Marks, John (1979). The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: CIA and Mind Control. W W Norton & Co Ltd, 264. ISBN 0393307948

So, the technical challenge to the use of LSD on a mass scale in 1951 is that it would have been hugely expensive and time consuming to gather the ingredients necessary to synthesize enough LSD for a mass experiment.

Also, looking at the known literature about early LSD experiments, most of them involve a very small number of individuals in highly controlled settings - eg the interrogation of Dimitrov.