I OPINION Monday, April 13, 1987 ,, Page 4 The Michigan Doily . .... U1Iie Sirbi3an 1auI Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan CIA did acid experiments Vol. XCVII, No. 132 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. A bid for science TIH STATE OF MICHIGAN should actively lobby for the proposed Department of Energy "super collider," but not without cautious consideration of the adverse effects of such a major project. The purpose of the super collider is to provide physicists with a tool "powerful enough to advance scientific understanding of the building blocks of matter. This in itself is worthwhile. The "super collider" would also provide a much needed boost to state employment as at least 2500 permanent jobs and many temporary construction positions would accompany the $4.4 billion project. Countless other jobs would arise from the influx of tourists and scholars who would visit the site. An annual budget of $270 million would serve as a constant infusion to the local economy. Aside from the positive economic effect of this undertaking, the state's universities could also benefit greatly from their proximity to such advanced scientific resources. Michigan's universities would inevitably draw scientists both as guest lecturers and as permanent faculty because of the super collider.. Such economic and scientific ad - vantages compel the state to cam - paign for this facility. Nonetheless, legislators must uphold their obli - gations to citizens' rights. At least 1800 citizens of Monroe County, which along with Lenawee County contains the proposed site of the facility, have signed a petition against the collider. If the state cannot persuade a majority of the residents of Monroe of the safety and advantages of the project, it should find another place where citizens do support the collider. Along these lines, residents' fears may subside upon learning of the uneventful operation of Illinois' Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory for the last twenty years. The 150 some odd residents of Monroe and Lenawee Counties directly affected by this project deserve full compensation if forced to relocate. The issue of displacement also applies to the ancient Indian burial grounds in the proposed area. It seems that Michigan should be able to find a way of building around the Indian burial ground. While the $4.4 billion already appropriated for the project cannot be reallocated now, energy officials in the future should explore alternative uses for such funds. Basic scientific research is necessary, but more funding should go to studies of energy sources, such as solar and wind power, which will reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels. The $4.4 billion could also find use in many other areas with more immediate practical applications - housing, nutrition and education for example. Socialist critics are right to believe that the $4.4 billion will go to corporate contractors and an elite of scientific employees. Furthermore, the pay-off to society as a whole for the advanced research is both uncertain and in - tangible compared with schools, roads or health care. Unfortunately though, this criticism applies to many projects undertaken in this capitalist society - SDI for example - and projects such as the super collider are fairly benign in comparison. Michigan has an excellent oppor - tunity to advance both its economy and educational stature by seeking the Department of Energy "super collider," but it must minimize the possibly detrimentalimpact of this project at the same time. Construction and tourism associated with the project would buoy the state economy. World renowned scientists would certainly enhance the prestige and educational resources of the state's universities. No gains are without costs, and the proposed collider would adversely affect the lives of those residents displaced by the con - struction. Consequently, every effort possible should be made to minimize displacement and to compensate any affected home - owners. By Michael D. Shapiro Investigative journalists Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain have written an altogether remarkable book, Acid Dreams. Starting with declassified CIA documents and working from open literature and accounts and interviews with participants, they have put together a social history of LSD. The subject is fascinating, and one which reaches far beyond our cultural memories of the hippie movement. By its nature, much of this history has been hidden, and it's quite remarkable that they have been able to ferret out as much of it as they have. This is some of what they tell: The story starts in 1942 with the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, embarking on a program to develop a "truth drug" for use in interrogation. This quest continued in the CIA at least into the early sixties. During this period they did crazy and evil things. They used uninformed human subjects - some from the military, some from prisons and insane asylums, some people from off the street. They spiked each other's drinks without warning. (This seemed to be the thing to do during one period.) Many of the "experiments" amounted to nothing less than psychological torture. People were brutally interrogated while under the influence of massive doses of LSD. In one method of drug based interrogation, the victim was strapped into a chair with an intravenous in each arm, one for uppers and one for downers. The interrogator would then give alternate Sdoses.People were kept tripping for over 70 days at a time. Others were kept asleep for months and then kept tripping, half asleep with loudspeakers under the pillow to reprogram them. In one experiment, people were given LSD, then lobotomized, then given LSD again to see if there was any difference. Much of this work was done by respected academics. During the fifties, the CIA ran a whorehouse in San Francisco where drug addicted prostitutes were paid to get the customers stoned while the CIA's man in charge sat behind a mirror sipping martinis, watching. By day he worked for the narc squad busting pushers. He later said, "...I toiled whole heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage, and all with the sanction and blessing of the All Highest?" In charge of much of this was Richard Helms, who admitted he had "no answer to the moral issue," but thought it all necessary to "keep up with Soviet advances.'' LSD also had a fairly wide currency in therapeutic circles. The authors say there were over a thousand scholarly articles on this, and people seemed to be getting results. Among other things there seemed to be results in treating alcoholism, and in treating terminal patients. Leary came to acid through this academic route, and had success preventing recidivism in prison Michael D. Shapiro is a graduate student in mathematics. inmates before he went public. But another strange thing was also going on. A former OSS super spy by the name of Captain Hubbard had turned on to acid through his CIA contacts. He seems to have been the first person in that milieu who looked on the acid trip as a spiritual experience. (He claimed to have witnessed his own conception and participated in it during his first trip.) He embraced acid with a messianic zeal. And he had access to the highest levels of government and industry. During the fifties and sixties, he turned on thousands of people. People like Hubbard and his disciples were convinced that LSD was spiritual dynamite capable of waking people up out of their life-long sleep, and thought that the best way to use it was to turn on the elite. So it became a thing of artists, psychiatrists, churchmen, corporate executives and the highest level of government (prime ministers are hinted at) at a time when the rest of us had never heard of it. For example, at the height of the cold war, Henry and Clare Booth Luce were tripping with their friends regularly. During this same period, a Catholic priest wrote in a letter to the faithful, "We humbly ask Our Heavenly Mother the Virgin Mary, help of all who call upon her to aid us to know and understand the true qualities -of these psychedelics, the full capacities of man's noblest faculties and according to God's laws to use them for the benefit of mankind here and in eternity." Eventually it was people like Leary on the East Coast and Kesey on the West who brought acid to the attention of the world at large. Interestingly, it seems to have been Allen Ginsberg who was the first to have suggested that this experience of God in a chemical shouldn't be kept among an elite, but should be given to everybody. It was a bold and simple idea. After all, why should a few have God as their private preserve? When Leary's circle started going public, things started to move fast. After various attempts to get things hushed up, Leary and Alpert were thrown out of Harvard, the first time this had happened to faculty members in the twentieth century. Selected academic opinion was rallied towards the view that LSD should be a controlled drug, and the FDA quickly moved to classify it. The experts who lined up behind this opinion were almost exclusively people with close contacts to the CIA, and the FDA and CIA were very close. Though the authors can't prove it, it seems fairly clear that this was orchestrated by the CIA. Researchers who had been working with LSD for a long time suddenly found themselves frozen out. Leary and Alpert moved on to their famous Milbrook scene and things began to heat up. Congressional hearings were held and Leary, Ginsberg and Kleps were among those to testify. (Kleps had been at Millbrook, but was of a different mind than Leary). Leary testified that acid was a wonderful thing and would usher in an earthly paradise and shouldn't be banned. Ginsberg testified that acid was a very useful tool for exploring and healing the mind, that the medical dangers had been exaggerated, and that it shouldn't ,be banned. Kleps testified that acid was, powerful and amazing stuff, and that.if they banned it, they were going to faceA massive cultural and political rebellion throughout the entire land of a kind and scale that had never been seen before. The authors go on to chronicle that rebellion as best they can. The heyday of the Haight, its collapse under the pressure of massive media fed immigration. the perennial tensions between the hippie types and the political types, and the police infiltration and subversion of the movement. There's fascinating information here about the intrigues and social history of the supply system, Those times are very hard to write about. Those times were more diverse than the earlier periods, if only because their wr so many more people involved. There was a feeling of incredible ferment and reassessment, and along with it, a tremendous sense of ambiguity. And the involvement of the media makes it very hard to separate the experience from the hype. In many ways, ultimately it's- a tragedy. There's the tragedy of an entire social movement unable to fulfil its own potential, partly because of the overwhelming hostility of a narrow, rigid, threatened . society, and partly because-of its own inability to grapple with its own weakness. LSD's loosening of the mental bounds seems to invite a certain kind of over reaching and loss of balance. Part of the tragedy, and this will be very hard to overcome, is the fact that LSD was used to do wonderfdl things - before we were all told whAi to think of it as. It's hard to imagine people will ever again be able t encounter it directly for what it can bd Our own hype and history have given it too much baggage. So was it a dead loss? One begins tp get that feeling towards the end of tile book watching everything unravel, People betray each other, send each other t jail. People have turned to vicious violence, some of it political, some of it mindless, some of it both. The drug scen4 has turned to hard drugs, some of it thi heroin that the CIA was smuggling in fdi years inside the bodies of dead GI, Things got very ugly. But I don't thins it was a total loss, and I'll give you on'e reason why. The drug movement and the anti-war movement were very closely intertwined. In spite of the tension~ between them, theyfueled each othef Both of these movements becamo frustrated by their apparent impotence But during the entire summer of 1969 Richard Nixon kept the Strategic Ai3 Command on full nuclear alert to bomb Hanoi. According to Henry Kissinger, the only thing that stopped themwas what he called, "the hammer anti-war pressure." LETTERS City should have stopped Nazi march) Military research at the University: Who pays for it? THE END USE CLAUSE PREVENTS some research with lethal purposes from taking place at the University. Whether or not the it takes place on campus, everyone's taxes and tui - tion fund the research projects. Because of limitations placed on the end use clause and the con - servative make up of the research policies committee, some weapons research occurs on campus. Tuition contributes both directly and in - directly to this by providing support facilities and salaries for researchers at the University who participate in life endangering research. Additionally, state taxes fund many aspects of the Uni - versity such as new research multimillion dollar research pro - jects. The federal budget already puts weapons research above general education. Universities that recruit weapons research projects take on these skewed priorities when money is spent on weapons research facilities rather than on teaching or life improving research. In 1983, the New York Supreme Court ruled taxation comes before religious or moral convictions. An Amish person refused to pay taxes for his workers because the money would end up in the military budget. The court overruled his religious beliefs and forced him to pay for military development. There is no legal way to avoid To the Daily: On Sunday, March 22, 1987, I became enraged as I sat down to read the Ann Arbor News. Ms. Amy Smith's ar - ticle describing the Neo-Nazi demonstration the previous day compelled me to question fur - ther the morality by which Ann Arbor's City Council is driven by. I wonder whether the city's leaders appreciate both the seriousness and the far-reaching consequences of the current racist uproar. And more importantly, I'm skep - tical about the sincerity with which city officials speak when they denouce such actions, and promise a solution. It is inexcusable that police action was not taken Saturday. According to Ms. Smith, the demonstrators arrived unan - nounced, shouting White pow - er slogans and inciting violence without a parade permit. In their alnnual s4nrinv marches- propriate at this time. With the recent outset of racism and claims of discrimination on campus, Ann Arbor Blacks (including University students) have been justifiably up in arms. The presence of Nazis could have obviously antag - onized th already unstable sit- uation and elicited possibly un - controllable danger. The Nazis also pose a threat to the many Jewish and Homosexual mem - bers of society and would no doubt complicate matters tre - mendously. As a minority faction, the Neo-Nazis are pro - tected under the Constitution, Blasphemy! To the Daily: I have a hard time believing that any newspaper would print the trash contained in the article "God is Dead," (Daily, however, the government can limit or curtail those rights, by law, for the public good. Pre - venting a Nazi march in Ann Arbor in the heart of racist paranoia is most certainly for the public good. On the political side of the issue, such a stand against a major racist faction could only boost the morale of the people and prove that the City Coun - cil's equalitarian concerns are sincere. The City Council has echoed University of Michigan president Harold Shapiro's sentiments disdaining the rac - ism on campus, yet allowing,; Nazis to roam the streets o Ann Arbor freely, generating still more anti-Black prejudice just serves to irritate the people to a possible revolutionary: state. Most distressing how - ever, is not even the lie that our leaders are trying to slip by us, but that this disgusiting and only harmful spectacle can take precedence over justice, public safety, and their sup posed motives for racial equality. -Steve Hochman; March 29 o * _/l y( _ ..