Dream with Me for a Moment
by Phillip Day

"You live and learn. Well, at any rate, you live." - Douglas Adams

"Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean
they aren't out to get you." - Patrick Murray

"And the dictator… will do well to encourage… the freedom
to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the
radio. It will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which
is their fate." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932

The area of psychiatry that really worked for its expansion was in the realm of drug treatment. As we shall see, psychiatry can justifiably be charged with laying the foundations for today's runaway drug culture. How, in later years, the mental health industry would remain firmly unapologetic with regard to its role in popularising the recreational use of drugs, continually failing to bring itself to condemn the habit, while simultaneously fostering drug dependency in its own patients, many of them children. Indeed, as we shall see, psychiatry remains one of the leading drug pushers in the world, hooking millions on its expensive and extremely lucrative medications. With its earning power through the pharmaceutical industry finally appreciated and welcomed by the mainstream chemical industry, psychiatry now has its place in medicine secured, even in the minds of most traditional physicians.

Psychiatry originally started out as a great embarrassment to traditional medicine, which repeatedly refused to bring this renegade practice into the fold. Later, electroshock and lobotomies, coupled with the sheer human rights abuses that were starkly evident to all but psychiatry itself, had kept the whispers susurrating around the corridors of medical officialdom. Psychiatry however was canny enough to recognise it had a public relations problem, even if it could not, incredibly, fully appreciate why it was happening. With the advent of America's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), inaugurated after World War 2 under Robert Felix, the mental health industry began to employ some well-needed political spin to add some spit and polish to its tarnished public persona.

Nothing helped more to integrate mental health into mainstream medicine, in the public's view, than when psychiatry began prescribing drugs to its patients to control their behaviour. This was 'real' medicine being prescribed after all. Since the inauguration of modern allopathic medicine, instituted so effectively under America's Abraham Flexner and John D Rockefeller in the early years of the 20th century, drug regulation, the training of doctors in institutions funded by the drug industry and the modern drug-dominant health system have enjoyed an unparalleled financial and social success, which the allopathic system jealously guards to this day. Psychiatry remained outside this hallowed realm; viewed along with other alternative health 'charlatans' as unscientific and old-fashioned quackery. Yet World War 2 had demonstrated to the medical and government powers that human thought, behaviour and desire could be controlled using artificial means. Even after the war, as we have seen, the eugenics ideal lived on. Indeed, questions as to the whereabouts of many leading Nazi psychiatrists and doctors following the uncovering of unspeakable horrors in Europe were quietly buried or diverted, hardly earning any mention in the media of a post-World War 2 Europe, keen to put the traumas of the past behind it.

But after the war, psychiatry was truly to enter the drug arena, and thereby assure itself of massive funding and a mainstream social status as a reward for all its efforts. Now, straitjackets could be discarded in favour of a more mobile and profitable restraint - the use of drugs.

THE DRUG LANDSLIDE BEGINS
US President Howard Taft recognised the brutal impact of psychiatric drugs on society, remarking in 1910: "The illicit sale [of cocaine] and the habitual use of it temporarily raises the power of the criminal to a point where in resisting arrest, there is no hesitation to murder. It is more appalling in its effect than any other habit-forming drug used in the United States."

Even as recently as the 1950s, society still traditionally frowned on mind-altering substances, disdaining those who took them as weak and addicts who could not help themselves. Bruce Wiseman comments that "…this view of drugs may seem ancient, but it came from centuries of mankind's experience with them. After enough eyewitness accounts of fathers, sisters and acquaintances decaying, living the fate of the opium smoker, the morphine addict, the cocaine user - few needed further convincing." Interestingly, today there are those who frown upon recreational drug use while addicted themselves to pharmaceutical medication.

Back in the 1800's, bromides had been used to desensitise the central nervous system, assisting in calming the patient. Raw opium was considered too dangerous; its historical, addictive properties were widely known. The pathetic plight of the opium addict caused those familiar with the problem to develop approaches they believed would relieve the sufferer of their addiction. A new substance was brought forward and named 'morphine'. By 1870, physicians were complaining that morphine itself was horrendously addictive and was beginning to cause more problems than the opium addiction it was expected to cure.

In 1898, a solution to the morphine problem was developed and hailed as the non-addictive way forward. The new substance was called 'heroin'. Like laudanum before it, heroin, during the next decade, gained its now-famous notorious reputation for its soft-cushioning, other-worldly, central nervous system and mental effects, while simultaneously locking the patient's mental faculties and dependence into its golden brown embrace. Worse still, heroin, so powerful and thus able to be diluted for greater profit and illicitly distributed to those in need, became the drug of choice for unscrupulous dealers who peddled the narcotic and built their businesses on the misfortune of others.

The dawning of a new and uncontrollable drug problem breeding crime and violence was a new experience for western societies, who found themselves powerless in knowing what to do to combat the scourge. Once discovered, it became almost impossible to extirpate the demand for the insidious new substances, which offered their devotees an alluring escape from the pain and drudgeries of normal life. Psychiatry too was failing to provide an answer, attempting from the outset to pathologise the 'new disease of addiction', trying to cure addicts of their affliction through the use of electroshock and lobotomy procedures.

Barbiturates too were already in circulation, able powerfully to sedate the suffering patient, rendering them more amenable to control. Chloroform also had, for half a century, provided the means to 'knock a patient out', thus removing the horror of having to endure operations fully conscious. In the 1920s, it became possible to synthesise barbiturates and provide the burgeoning drugs market with a constant, reliable, regulated supply of the new product. The 1930's saw the advent too of the stimulant amphetamines, with the American Medical Association even stating that with Benzedrine ('bennies') "…no serious reactions had been reported", and that the public could, under strict supervision of their physician of course, take the drug recreationally to create "a sense of increased energy or capacity for work, or a feeling of exhilaration."

Lester Grinspoon MD articulates in a 1977 report how the medical system was keen to promote their new products to the public as 'safe and effective', with no appreciable downsides:

"Of all the myths surrounding the amphetamines, that of their alleged non-addictiveness is the most transparent, although when they were first introduced, they were hailed as having little or no addictive potential. This is not surprising, as the medical establishment originally guaranteed as non-addictive almost every drug known to cause addiction.… Cases of addiction were reported almost immediately, but the drug industry was so successful in reinforcing and sustaining early medical enthusiasm, that as late as 1958, C D Leake could categorically state that 'no clear case of addiction to amphetamines has been reported.'"

'DOLOPHINE'
World War 2 Nazi Germany, with its unrestricted and well-funded drug research, produced dolophine, named after its Führer. In the aftermath of the war, this drug was renamed 'methadone'. Psychiatrist Marie Nyswander was one of many enthusiastically promoting methadone as the non-addictive solution to heroin. However, by 1963, Nyswander and fellow psychiatrist Vincent Dole, of the Rockefeller Institute, were admitting methadone addiction in their patients, but proffered that it could replace heroin addiction for life.

Dr Michael Smith, of the Lincoln Detox Program in New York, explains how the 'cure' soon became the new problem: "Withdrawal from methadone is a long, drawn-out, brutal experience. There is not a two-to-five-day crisis of vomiting and tremors, as with heroin. These and other frightening symptoms occur for weeks and usually months on end."

Not surprisingly, methadone continued to be touted after the war as the permanent replacement to heroin. By the 1970's, methadone maintenance programs were treating more than 75,000 patients across the United States. In 1987, The Columbus Dispatch was reporting that less than 1% of methadone junkies were able to stop using the drug.

MUGGINGS AND MONEY
Clinics themselves became the cause of the problem. By the mid-1970's, Nyswander and Dole were themselves admitting the failure of their methadone program. A 1987 article in the Journal of Psychiatric Drugs declared: "Approximately half of those who were now paying for [methadone] maintenance reported resorting to crime to pay their clinic fees. As one client described the situation: 'The clinic has now become my drug dealer. I am committing crimes to pay for an addictive drug [methadone]. It's really not much different than the street."

Predictably, psychiatry was to pioneer another drug to cure the methadone problem. This time 'ibogaine' became the hope for an end to the addictions, which psychiatry itself had brokered. However ibogaine's notorious reputation gained it a Class 1 regulation (dangerous and of no medical value) and treatment with it was outlawed in the United States. Bruce Wiseman sums up:

"The lessons of heroin and methadone have been poorly learned by our mental health experts. Most drug addicts already feel they are in a netherworld from which there may be no return and, so far, these experts and their experimental cures have only led them deeper into it."

MASSIVE MARKETS = MASSIVE REVENUES
The explosion of pharmaceutical drug use for mental disorders has fuelled a huge expansion in drug sales globally. Billions of dollars are spent annually in North America alone to treat the 'mentally ill'. These medications have become among the most expensive costs of the US mental healthcare system. The elderly especially have struggled with the rising cost of prescription drugs in Canada, prompting both candidates and their parties in the year 2000 elections to address the issue of the elderly being unable to pay for their medications.

IMS Health US reported in their March 2001 annual report that psychotropic medication sales increased by 21% over the previous 12 months. Sales of medications relating to treatment of mental illness were second throughout the global market.

An IMS Canada Report for the province of British Columbia in 1997 indicated a 66% increase from 1992-1996 in the number of psychiatric prescriptions issued. A recent US study showed that the number of 2-4 year olds on psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac soared 50% between 1991-1995.

DRUGS AND CRIME
Given that psychotropic drug use for mental patients began in earnest in the 1960's concurrently with the releasing of psychiatric drugs, such as methadone, heroin, LSD and Thorazine into Crowley's drug-fuelled, sexually 'liberated' society for 'recreational purposes', we can get a clear picture of what psychiatry has really done for the world if we analyse social statistics coming out of the United States during this period.

Between 1960 and 1992, the US violent crime rate known to police went from around 105 violent crimes per 100,000 to around 760/100,000. During the same period, the aggravated assault rate known to police jumped from 80/100,000 to 440/100,000. The forcible rape rate known to police went from 10/100,000 to 43/100,000. Arrests for drug abuse violations among African Americans soared from 220/100,000 to a peak of 2,400/100,000 in 1990. Those for Caucasians rose from 50/100,000 to 400/100,000 in 1992.

A NEW UTOPIA?
Drugs which produce altered mental states of any kind have always instinctively appalled ordinary citizens, symbolising weakness in the person taking the drugs, a loss of control over one's most basic social responsibilities, and the embarking upon a spiral of addiction often leading to death. That drugs producing these effects could simultaneously be viewed by other, more influential groups within society as a major evolutionary step in the consciousness development of mankind seems, at first glance, dismissible and fantastic. But are we truly surprised when research psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel of the University of California Los Angeles' Department of Behavioral Sciences asks us in 1990 to:

"…dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe drugs? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones, but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death? Imagine an alcohol-type drug that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, driving under the influence, or workplace problems. Would you care for a cigarette that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco, but as harmless as clean air? How about a pain-killer as good as morphine but safer than aspirin; a stimulant more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine; a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more enjoyable than a martini; or a user-friendly hallucinogen that is as benign as a movie?"

Siegel argues that for man to be truly happy, he must satiate his four desires: hunger, thirst, lust and, predictably, the need to become intoxicated. However one views the opinions of the influential Siegel (to which he is, of course, entitled), one must decide what is to be made of the 10 million Americans who take tranquillisers each year, and the millions elsewhere in the world who are hooked on benzodiazapines and other 'popular' medications people like Siegel are pushing.

THE GHOST OF ALEISTER CROWLEY
During the researching of this book, it seemed that the influence of the occult was never too distant from psychiatry and the world of institutional and social drug-taking. Traditionalists will point to the enigmatic Book of Revelation which declares that in the 'last days' "…By their sorceries [Greek: pharmakia] did the merchants [big business?] deceive the whole Earth." (Rev 18) Presumably, at the time these verses were written, drug abuse was a problem even in these earlier cultures. The implication biblically is that drug-taking induces altered states and precipitates contact with demons. As we will see in the next chapters, the drug and Luciferian legacy left by arch-wizard Aleister Crowley, dubbed 'the patron saint of rock stars', was to produce testimony after testimony of what appears at first sight to be exactly this type of problem.

Crowley, who advocated constant drug abuse as a means of 'expanding self', could easily have been dismissed as an eccentric 'Hooray Henry', were it not for the fact that, after his death in 1947, holed up in a squalid bedsit in Hastings, England, his ideas and procedures were given a lurid immortality by the pop music culture which posthumously adopted him. Crowley wrote under the influence of his spirit-guide, which he later identifies as Satan: "I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory and stirs the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet and be drunk thereof!"

A UTOPIA OF COTTON WOOL
More recently, psychiatrist Seymour Rosenblatt in 1981 was prepared to visualise the next step in drug-taking evolution:

"Consider some of the possibilities currently being promoted by serious scientists: In the next twenty years [i.e., by the year 2001], it has been conjectured, we will be able to control people's feelings and emotions. Madness will go the way of smallpox, and mental institutions will become as rare as monasteries. Everyone will be able to get a night's sleep. Senility will be arrested by a pill or injection. Our memories will be extended beyond their present capacities, and both drug addiction and alcoholism will become things of the past.

Sex offenders will be controlled by medication. Our system of penology will be in the purview of chemistry. Steel bars will be replaced by pharmacological agents, leaving criminals to roam free but restricted from harming people.

We will have jamais vu [never seen] drugs that create feelings of novelty and déjà vu [already seen] drugs to breed familiarity. Both boredom and anxiety will be alleviated, and our sex lives will be enhanced and intensified.

Blood cells will be harnessed to become the psychiatrist's allies. They will become like beasts of burden, hauling drugs throughout our bodies. There will be no side-effects, no nausea, no liver damage.

Finally we shall emerge into a drug-free society in which genetic engineering precludes mental illness. The substances produced by our biochemists will exactly match those endowed to us by nature."

Well, here we are, Rosenblatt's twenty years on. What's wrong with his picture, with the benefit of hindsight? Can we not see the lie to one beatific view of man's near future? The drug carnage we face today, if one re-reads Rosenblatt's envisioned utopia, is as shocking as it is condemnatory.

THE LIQUID LOBOTOMY
Nazi-occupied Paris saw the development of a new drug to treat allergies. Soon researchers found that the drug "produced a previously unknown type of central nervous system effect." After the war, French scientists found that they could engineer an offshoot of this drug which could produce "maximum behavioural disruption." French psychiatrist C Quarti tried the drug on herself. She later recorded her experiences one hour after taking it: "I began to have the impression that I was becoming weaker. That I was dying. It was very painful and agonising." An hour after that: "I felt incapable of being angry about anything."

The new drug reached America in 1954 and was marketed by Smith, Klein and French. It was known as 'Thorazine'.

Bill Mandel, a San Francisco Examiner columnist, decided to find out what a day's dose (50mg) of Thorazine would do: "Simply put, Thorazine made me stupid. Because Thorazine and related drugs are called 'liquid lobotomy' in the mental health business, I'd expected a great grey cloud to descend over my faculties. There was no great grey cloud, just small, unsettling patches of fog. My mental gears slipped. I had no intellectual traction. It was difficult, for example, to remember simple words. I'd start to describe something and find myself unable to remember such terms as 'screwdriver' and 'volume'."

Significantly, a 1977 California study revealed that 29 patients in four state hospitals were being prescribed in excess of 800mg a day, 16 times the amount experienced by Bill Mandel. One can but imagine the massive debilitating effects the drug would have had on its recipients.

CHEMICAL STRAITJACKETS
More and more, drugs have come to be viewed as chemical straitjackets in institutions, prisons, nurseries, old people's homes and now in open society. Such was psychiatry's growing faith in drugs that in 1963, America saw the implementation of the Community Mental Health Centers Act, which saw psychiatric patients 'deinstitutionalised' and turned onto the streets, drugged up and more than a few homeless. Psychiatrist Dr Thomas Szasz remarks: "The insane person could now be controlled with a chemical, instead of a mechanical straitjacket. The restraint could be put in him, instead of on him."

Within twenty years, the program showed itself to be an unqualified failure. Many discharged patients were unable to cope with the harsh rigours of life on the streets and would turn to crime, violence and street drug addiction. By 1991, the New York Times was calling 'deinstitutionalisation' "…a cruel embarrassment, a reform gone terribly wrong."

Today, many cities around the world, which adopted their own versions of deinstitutionalisation, have been paying the social penalty for this catastrophic wrong turn. Few administrations are willing to shoulder the unpopular and costly responsibility of putting such a difficult problem right. And so the abuse continues. The public sees a deranged person on the street, believing them to be insane, or 'not right in the head', yet how many of these unfortunates are simply doped up with drugs that have been prescribed 'to keep them out of trouble'?

The use of psychiatric drugs to make the elderly more manageable in care homes is of course commonplace. A 1986 study of 2,000 US pharmacies discovered that 76% of prescriptions written for nursing home residents over 65 were tranquillisers. 60% of these called for heavy tranquillisers such as Thorazine. This is all the more appalling when one learns that 73,000 US elderly die every year from adverse drug reactions, interactions and medication errors.

Seen as more socially acceptable, drugs replaced the need for applying the high-profile and reputation-destroying electroshock and psychosurgical alternatives to control the custodial cases. A global paradigm shift had occurred in society with the advent of new psychotropic substances. Gone now was the centuries-old, moral barrier that prevented society from solving its problems with mind-bending drugs. Now it was OK to prescribe psychotropics to patients with a free conscience. After all, this was cutting-edge medicine. And the patients had been diagnosed 'mentally ill' by professionals.

OVER THE RAINBOW
At the same time Thorazine was being trumpeted to the world as the answer to man's cerebral woes, another substance was being investigated in a laboratory. The compound was first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman of Sandoz Laboratories in 1938, who was studying the hallucinogenic properties of the rye fungus 'ergot'. Hoffman's revolutionary new kaleidoscopic trip was to skew the perceptions of an entire generation to come.

Ergot had been investigated for its role in the medieval mass delusions, referred to as 'St Anthony's Fire', which would periodically blanket unsuspecting villages and towns, and madness would reign for several days. In Salem, Massachusetts, the famous 'bewitching' episodes resulted in the lynchings and deaths of 'witches', who had apparently caused the episodes with their vindictive spells. Was this another example of ergot poisoning?

After some non-conclusive testing, Hoffman shelved his substance, until in 1943, he accidentally absorbed a minute dose through his fingertips:

"Soon [I] felt a remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication, characterised by an intense stimulation of the imagination and an altered state of awareness of the world…. As I lay in a dazed condition with eyes closed, there surged up from me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic play of colours. This condition gradually passed off after about three hours."

Hoffman named the 25th permutation of the series 'lysergic acid diethylamide', or LSD-25.

Werner Stoll, president of Sandoz, was the first to consider the compound for psychiatric use, even the compound was already known to produce 'a transitory psychotic disturbance' in normal subjects. It wasn't long before psychiatrists were obtaining samples of the drug for their own experimentation, combining psychoanalysis with LSD to get their patients to 'open up'. The CIA too began to take an interest in "…psychiatric reports suggesting that LSD could break down familiar behaviour patterns, for this raised the possibility of reprogramming or brainwashing."

Extensive funding was made available by the Agency to these psychiatric researchers to continue their work. One institution involved was the federal Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Under the guidance of Dr Harris Isbell, inmates were offered the choice of reduced custodial sentences or 'recreational' drugs. Most chose Isbell's drugs, expecting to get the usual heroin or morphine. What none realised was that Isbell was also giving them the highly experimental LSD. According to John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Isbell kept seven men on LSD trips for 77 days straight. One teenager reported later that he had tried the drug just once and had hallucinated and suffered with nightmarish, demonic visions for 17 hours. Isbell is also reported to have tested other unproven drugs from the CIA and National Institute for Mental Health upon inmates ignorant of the name or probable side-effects of the chemicals. The later head of the National Institute of Mental Health, Robert Felix, had, perhaps coincidentally, served at the Lexington research centre before the war.

Canada's Dr Ewen Cameron, former President of the American Psychiatric Association, was particularly taken with the potential of 'acid', regularly using LSD, in combination with electroshock, in his attempts to 'depattern' his paying patients. Cameron had ironically been one of the psychiatric consultants working for the Nuremberg war tribunal and its much-publicised new Nuremberg Code, which he would later cynically violate with his bizarre and dangerous mind-control experimentations.

The Eli Lilly Company, manufacturer of today's Prozac, allegedly obtained the formula for LSD with the help of the CIA and boasted that the drug would soon be available in tonnage quantities. LSD, according to researcher Beverly Eakman, became something of a lark for CIA staff:

"At one dinner for Agency colleagues, Dr Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-ULTRA, is said to have announced to the guests that he had slipped something special in the dessert. One of those guests, Dr Frank Olsen, had to be hospitalized and hurled himself from his hospital window. A 1954 memo surfaced from the internal security department quite seriously requesting that Agency staff stop putting LSD in the punch bowl at the office Christmas party."

UCLA psychiatrist Louis Jolyon 'Jolly' West was hired by the CIA as part of MK-ULTRA. West was to become notorious with his own experimentation, earning the infamous reputation of being the only person to kill an elephant with LSD.

But it was in the realm of open society that LSD, along with other psychiatric drugs, would have their most devastating and lasting impact. When Harvard psychologist and pop-culture guru Timothy Leary, a devoted follower of the infamous Crowley, publicised his own use of LSD with drug mystic Aldous Huxley in the early 1960's to expand 'self' and reign as one with the universe, an endlessly curious, 'newly-liberated' society listened with rapt fascination as Leary invited them to "tune in, turn on and drop out." LSD became a favourite in the arts. Pop artists such as Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and others were introduced to the drug. Key musical events, later popularised around the world, were flooded with LSD. Among the crowds at the 1967 Monterey California Pop Festival and 1969's Woodstock, the pushers went quietly about their work, enthusiastically urging their customers to 'live life to the full' and 'trip out'. Life magazine even ran articles promoting LSD after the magazine's publisher, Henry Luce, experimented with the drug. One March 1963 article had even claimed LSD was "…derived from a natural product."

ALDOUS HUXLEY
Aldous Huxley, who had 'obtained' a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), wrote prolifically of his trip experiences on LSD. Huxley's hallucinogenic experiences with Dr Humphrey Osmond became the basis of the former's book, The Doors of Perception, believed to have been the inspiration behind the name of Jim Morrison's band 'The Doors'. Huxley later tripped with former US Treasury Agent and Mafia confidante Alfred 'Cappy' Hubbard. Their experiences were reported in Huxley's widely acclaimed Heaven and Hell. Hubbard had obtained 6,000 bottles of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories which he handed out to friends and family members. One bottle ended up with Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr Oscar Janiger, who found a great reception for it with the Hollywood set.

The drug experiences Huxley, Crowley, Jung and other 'mystics' had described were popularised in cheap paperback editions of their works which found their way into the countercultures of Berkeley and Stanford Universities and into the hippie communes all over the world. In spite of Huxley perishing while 'tripping' in 1963, the new drug culture had arrived to stay. And psychiatry had been the one to introduce it.

Excerpted with permission from The Mind Game by Phillip Day

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