https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cql5Yf_h8EU
Transcript:
(00:15) [Music] [Music] [Music] it was everywhere I looked lately a [Music] subtle but persistent sense that something was just wrong off do degrees to the left sure everything seemed normal on the surface people getting up going the word to the store to dinner but something had definitely changed it was like someone high up the chain flipped a switch and
(01:21) put society on autopilot the people were they're sure they weren't fully there you know what I mean at first it was just an odd feeling persistent itch but that soon gave birth to an ugly awareness that a lot of these people have just been permanently disoriented from their bearings maybe we all had the only sense of normal I seem to feel anymore was the constant longing for a time when everything felt one time I couldn't quite place but I wasn't the only one there is a blankness in an accumulating
(02:04) sense that each soul I passed by was becoming more and more likely and the worst of them had become nothing more than empty vessels for brands products events corporations trends ideologies and identifications the more that things and people got weird and desperate to express themselves the more they all seen the same words were becoming mere by words signals to the brain pass codes and cues for action but less and less ideas concepts and meanings lost in translation the day's flowed by but they felt the stage play hollow like
(02:52) walking around and dream never fully wake up from was I awake was I still dreaming did it matter that morning started like every other morning I slept in late but kept hitting the snooze button anyway doling out ten minutes slices of sleep to myself it was sometime during that half sleep half conscious period when a soft knock came at the door the note was rather curtain but on the back was a coal number and a time if I know anything after a hard boil of life is written in a feminine hand I was charmed that someone was still literate
(03:37) enough to call my attention to an entry filed away under the Dewey Decimal System I wasn't sure that Lyon was still operating since everything these days seemed to come with a website but maybe there was someone still reading real books at any rate the library seemed pretty quiet well libraries are usually quiet but this place was desolate the book she led me to was titled the use of LSD in psychotherapy edited by one Harold a Abramson basically it had to do with the conference on D lysergic acid diethylamide lsd-25 to you and me
(04:18) that was apparently held in 1959 and published by the New York city-based Josiah Macy jr. Foundation known cut out for the Central Intelligence Agency doing research and a mind control throughout the Cold War a while the trouble draw my attention to it it was well known that the agency was involved in unethical LSD research one of a number of ugly facts that got revealed to the public during the 70's when they held the church committee hearings still he had to wonder how far it all truly went apparently Abrams and went a lot
(04:54) farther than people realize this unpublished report from 1958 which ended up in my hands described a method for testing aerosolized LSD but apparently to determine that it was only a third as effective as oral dosing maybe they tested the food too so what were they really up to aerosol implied the masses the cursory internet search confirmed the worst Harold Abramson was a doctor connected to a gang of patriotic OSS and CIA scientists who played around pretty seriously with dishing out the stuff to score some
(05:35) points in the clandestine world of espionage nobody knows how far their mischief played out but the stuff they do tell you is bad enough I read about the horrors of some poor sap named Frank Olson I found chemical warfare and LSD research to be a deadly cocktail not the stuff itself mind you but the reaction to cause with his superiors in the agency after they realized his hesitation using it on human populations Olson specialty had turned out have been the development of aerosolized anthrax the papers said he committed suicide by
(06:12) jumping out of a 13 story Manhattan hotel room it was only decades later that the family started asking nosy questions and researchers came across the real story murder circling around his unassuming identity as a bacteriologist biological warfare scientist it seems that a circle of CIA researchers working at Fort Dietrich including Frank Olsen for surreptitiously administered LSD in the cocktails by the chieftains of the MKULTRA project back in 1953 when it all started Frank Olson had something of a bad trip
(06:49) and decided to quit the funny business of strange substances his friends said that he was having a nervous breakdown one of those was Harold Abramson himself an LSD researcher on unwitting patients who had apparently given Olson psychiatric advice just before his untimely death only nine days after it all started maybe we'll never know what Frank Olsen figured out after he was dosed or who pushed him out of that window but it's enough to make any mind wonder perhaps it was connected to his activities in France where the CIA had a
(07:26) team operating in 1951 at the same time that a mass hysteria took over the tiny French village called pont-saint-esprit that's for some 250 inhabitants were driven to the brink of insanity 50 of them were institutionalized and seven died people tried to drown themselves because they thought they would be eaten by snakes a kid tried to strangle his own grandmother and one guy even thought he was a plane and jumped out of a second-story window officially it was blamed on her got poisoning but a claim was accidentally baked into the town's
(08:01) bread fungus grows on rye but it also happens to be the source from which LSD was dry turns out however based on research from a guy named HP a Borelli jr. declassified documents showed that it was a covert test conducted by the CIA u.s. armed not only gassed the town with aerosolized LSD but also spiked the fruit using LSD courtesy of the Swiss based pharmaceutical comes from Samuel and resolved just to see how people would react around the same time CIA man George hunter White was conducting his own road test on aerosolized LSD and the
(08:45) New York subway system not a whole lot of detail about how that went over the documents confirm that at least two tests took place in the early 50s it sounded like the stuff of fiction figuring out how people would react and mash two psychoactive substances maybe what they had more in mind was a population that wouldn't know couldn't question things everybody liked to rally and protest about changing things but whatever really came a few angry folks with signs and a mob of people that couldn't be bothered for the time let
(09:22) alone sub cause maybe there was a reason for it all sation please remember you must have a validated fare before boarding the Train some reason why things seem so off [Music] didn't mean we should have watched the vents the skies or the foods at the grocery store was a tasteless odorless detectable in any way maybe some scientists would stumble upon a curious reading maybe some journalists would accidentally do his job maybe somebody important would stop whatever was going on maybe we were all sleepwalking through the motions a few
(10:27) people read the headlines and all the others watch the primetime shows and all the other facades of what life was supposed to be all about left then right smile nod repeat and Drudge ever onward through the fog [Music] No [Music] [Music]
(11:57) [Music] [Music] [Music] fifty years ago it occurred to me that the scientific methods and the results obtained by scientific research might be applied to the problem of the organization of science among the fields of new sciences was one I call chemical psychology relationships between
(13:05) chemical substances and bio psychological elements the effects of opium bromides hashes ether Alcohol Tobacco and cetera Bing was relieved mood to change living dreaming and the trolly news what are the narcotics let's take it from the scientific viewpoint many are indispensable for pain killing and sleep producing a cure and escape from reality if the following years I collected whatever material I came across such as Eva McCollum Studies on the adverse influence of manganese free diets of the maternal behavior in red as well as that
(13:45) of the less scientifically controlled data from primitive tribes concerning the effects of certain herb on behavior during the work of the League of Nations Committee on chemical warfare one of the participating scientists told me of his own experiments with a virgin mouse and the ruse Kinsey has injected a particular chemical substance the mouse started building a net I saw perfectly well then the danger of a government putting some chemical substance in the bread before elections and I myself played with the ID of a fence efficient
(14:21) gas to be sprayed over troops and populations to make them friendly peaceful for at least offensive to prevent war [Music] did that really just happen it seemed like the punchline I'm a bad joke but nobody was laughing there is a tremendous advantage in experimenting with humans for while you can deal with unicellular and to let develop multicellular organisms on the basis of behavioristic psychology only a man you can use introspective psychology and all the psychological disciplines based on communication as well a mathematical
(15:17) formula or model for the human individual would help considerably it goes without saying that experiments would have to be conducted on emotionally and mentally abnormal in addition to normal people all aiming both Texas and federal I'm not go to details where they figured it is everyone expendable I mentioned the possibility of inventing cocktails to kill your thoughts and to enable representatives to work day and live in merging situations pharmacology to lead to the styles of drugs giving you of preventing or curing me or to enhance
(16:00) the physical or mental welfare of men and animals [Music] I traced the voice on the reel back to a 1954 panel on neuropharmacology held in Princeton New Jersey and sponsored by the Macy's Foundation the transcript of which was edited for print by our good friend dr. Harold Abramson the guy speaking on the tape was one William Warburg the permanent delegate for Denmark to the United Nations and before that to the League of Nations the guest list for this neuropharmacology included known CIA MKULTRA contractors including
(16:48) not just Athens the Carl C Pfeifer Enrique featured Amedeo s Marazzi Hudson Hogan and many others who were inextricably connected to that line is dark and unethical research those comments were made in jest these people were serious [Music] elite scientists and invitation-only meetings talking about gassing the whole population into complacency in the name of some kind of world peace a second world war and the reality of a nuclear war led way to a cold war where all the tools of modern science intersected with justifiable reasons to
(17:49) experiment with people they had now come up with countless ways for dealing with enemies and suspects beginning people riled up and for keeping them calm wheezing energy keeping thinking clear doing without sleep subduing excitement in assemblies adhering mother-love abolishing sorrow and contributing to the prevention of war all this seems to be within reach maintaining social order was the highest priority perhaps the receiving a chemical reason for the growing wave of apathy after the fields to be applied I think some of
(18:37) them are obvious [Music] looking around a society I had to wonder how far have they really gone it sounded like they meant to have peace by any means but was it even really still peace if it was all coercive and nobody was the wiser [Music]
