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.
[to be continued….]