ENDLESS SUMMER OF LOVE
Endless Summer; Eternal Sunshine
Iona Miller, Memoir, 2010
“If you remember it, you weren’t there.”
But let us remind you....
Orange County; Orange Sunshine
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
“If you remember it, you weren’t there.”
But let us remind you....
Orange County; Orange Sunshine
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
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2013 BEL SITE: http://www.brotherhoodofeternallove.org/
BROTHERHOOD OF ETERNAL LOVE: THEN & NOW
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
Taxonomic Mandala
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Various reports have spin-doctored the BEL story for their own journalistic ends. Each has disinformation or skew
Tim Leary Raps
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love remains virtually unknown in the early 21st century. Yet their influence upon the 'counterculture' that began in 1960s and which remains a strong influence to this day, was vast. They pioneered the first major hashish smuggling operation into the US and opened up Afghanistan to the US black market in the process, repercussions of which are still being felt today. They became the first international LSD smugglers and brought the world a particularly potent batch known as Orange Sunshine. They established the first major drug pipeline with Sinaloa, Mexico, possibly giving rise to the Sinaloa Cartel in the process. In the course of the 60s they were involved with countless other major figures and organizations in the burgeoning hippie movement that included Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Augustus 'Bear' Owsley Stanley, the Hell's Angels, the Weathermen Underground, the Back Panthers, the Moody Blues, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and many more. They were a hippie cult experimenting with communal living along the lines of the Manson family and on a religious mission to 'turn on' the world one tab at a time. They were also an international drug cartel and eventual CIA front whose tragic and bloody legacy would have enormous implications for the destiny of this country. -- some silly book said this
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- Closer to the truth:
"They were not a bike gang they were the Street Sweepers car club, John Gales' dad was a Harley dealer...this was started from the ones that wrote the first book and High Times pushed this story ..in the story they said Farmer died from PCP They weren't even there in the beginning. There was only one gun i think Tommy was the one who got it. High Times (Issue 2, 1972) and Rolling Stone started the whole hippie mafia thing in the first place. There were different factions of the brothers that didn't even know each other. There were hard feelings between them later. The core started out as jocks in school in '57....the Blue Coats. The Blue Coats wore those jock coats with the letter, you know, school colors. John had his for wrestling." --Freewheelin' Gary
As these corrections come up, I am adding them to my BEL page. But once these stories go public, they turn into memes, not truths. Then people "want" to hear the story that way, right or wrong -- they THINK they know, and that is what gets repeated. The truth and the legend differ.
"I met a brother that supplied most of Chicago in '69. We became very close; he was dealing at a show. I had known him a while and got lots from him. The cops were coming after him he bumped me, handed me a big bag of acid said, "Keep walking don't look back; I'll catch up to you." He did....after that I was getting lots of 500 for $375. He took me under his wing. Later they popped him with 60,000 hits, beat him down. He bought his way out ,went back west, never seen him again. He was the one that turned me on to my first trip Orange Sunshine. A little later Aaron Russo in '68 had a club like the Whiskey in Chicago. It held about 500; it was called the Electric Theater. The Electric Circus from New York sued over the name. They changed it to the Kinetic Playground. It was the scene for 2 years, then the cops burned him out."
John Griggs, Varsity Wrestler, Anaheim High School, 1960
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Griggs, Junior & Senior (1961) Portraits
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The Hippie Mafia", Rolling Stone #123 and #124.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/94439371/Eszterhas-The-Strange-Case-of-the-Hippie-Mafia-Pt-1-1972
http://www.scribd.com/doc/94439371/Eszterhas-The-Strange-Case-of-the-Hippie-Mafia-Pt-1-1972
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Cover / Feature Article: Carlos Santana
Other Features: Strange Case of the Hippie Mafia, First Intergalactic Space Olympics, Monkees Man Does a Fillmore of the Air. Articles: Allman's Berry Oakley Killed, Jefferson Airplane Tries Shock Rock, Ashford & Simpson, Why Bill Graham Lunged at Herb Resner, Jackson Five on Their Own. Record Reviews: Miles Davis, Santana, Black Sabbath, Harry Chapin, Mott The Hoople, Jesse Winchester, Ry Cooder, Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, Sonny Rollins, Jackson Five, Michael Jackson, Jermain Jackson, Persuasions, Bee Gees. |
Cover / Feature Article: Keith Moon - The Who
Other Features: Lee Marvin, Famous Motorcycle Gang, The Moody Blues, The Hippie Mafia, Interview with 4 year old perfect Master. Articles: Blood Sweat and Tears, Mickie Most, Gato Barbieri, Little Eva. Record Reviews: Pete Townshend of the Who, John Entwistle of the Who, Carole King, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Sandy Denny, Poco, The Four Tops, Mom's Apple Pie, Luther Ingram. |
Part 1 & 2 - http://www.scribd.com/doc/95924904/Eszterhas-The-Strange-Case-of-the-Hippie-Mafia-Finereader-Ocr
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8344935/TendlerMay-The-Brotherhood-of-Eternal-Love-Social-History-of-LSD
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8344935/TendlerMay-The-Brotherhood-of-Eternal-Love-Social-History-of-LSD
Art by Terry Lamb - http://www.terrylambart.com/
FRAME 4 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brotherhood of Eternal Love
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
Ever see the movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World?" My favorite character is the lifeguard from California. You first see him dancing with his beatnik girlfriend in his beach pad. That movie was made in 1962, right before the hippies arrived on the scene. But you can recognize their precursers in those beach party beatniks. I think a lot of hippie culture actually started around Newport Beach with the original surfer scene. A lot of the surfers were really beatniks who had basically dropped out of society to smoke pot and ride waves. They had a lot of religious experiences doing that and formed some of the first communes by sharing cheap houses near the beach and turning them into surfer crash pads. John Griggs moved to Laguna Beach shortly after he dropped acid for the first time. He created "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love," which became the biggest LSD, marijuana and hash smuggling operation in North America for a few years. --Steven Hager, "Brotherhood of Eternal Love"
The Feds knew about the Brotherhood, but it took them years to penetrate the organization because they were so tight. They weren't just a smuggling organization, they were a religious movement. Much of what you see today at Rainbow Family Gatherings looks a lot like what was going on around Griggs at Laguna. Yet Griggs remains relatively unknown. http://hightimes.com/cancup/hager/6908?utm_source=rss_home&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da1f875738c0d35%2C0
It Was About Spirituality, Not Drugs, Man
I don't take the party favors anymore (for decades) because my creative vision never Turned Off, but I was there at Ground Zero when the West Coat Revolution began: Things were never the same for me after listening to The Fugs play "Aphrodite Mass." In SoCal the Doors of Perception had swung open and the doorstop slid into place. At first Hollywood wasn't yet accommodating youth culture. But there was a scene in Pasadena, centering around Euphoria art and coffee house, the Pasadena Civic, Ice House, a popular radio station, second-hand stores and headshops. Rumor linked Owsley's lab to Euphoria.
The Rinky Dink coffee house, Dick Dale shows in Balboa and other beach attractions were the havens of youth culture. In 1962 Dale moved to the Pasadena Civic, playing surf guitar to overflow crowds. We'd already been through surf and folk cult movements, and were heading into the folkrock era. I was part of all three scenes, especially the Newport surf crowd. Anaheim and Disneyland were frequent playgrounds full of new clubs and good drugs. Extreme mobility and innumerable recreational outlets fueled a new lifestyle.
Hyper-hedonic
The hidden history of conservative Orange County is that it gave birth to a hyper-hedonistic cycle, fueled by economic boom. Suddenly, surfing and drugs went together. Surfboards carried contraband across borders in their hollowed out cores as freaks ranged the globe, seeking the Endless Summer. Headshops sprung up everywhere, some more infamous than others. Laguna Beach, which had gained fame as an art colony soon became notorious for other reasons. Social consciousness went Monterey Pop.
Probably no headshop was more notorious than MYSTIC ARTS WORLD, a front for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love at 670 So. Coast Hwy. Many towns established curfews to keep minors under control. Being young alone was "Probable cause". Laguna's "Mystic Arts World", a headshop on Pacific Coast Highway was established in 1967 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It burned down in a mysterious June 1970 fire considered by many to have been an act of arson carried out by local members of the right-wing John Birch Society.
I remember buying my first tarot deck in La Jolla, Ca., at the Mithras Bookstore/Unicorn Cinema (photo above), near the Self-Realization Fellowship surfing outpost, "Swamis." The floors and walls were papered with old kitchy newspapers and movie posters, shellacked into immortality. The Cinema was small and featured remarkable programming. It was eclectic in the extreme -- mixing foreign, Hollywood, experimental, short and silent films in nearly equal measure. The bookstore, which sold a highly personal selection of new and used books, was the entry to the cinema, and stayed open until the last film had concluded. As a consequence it had two lives. In the daytime it was a quiet bookstore, and in the evenings it pulsed with the life of the cinema. The theater tickets were dispensed from a counter in the store, and the cinema goers waited for the change of films while browsing the shelves.
Love, Forever Changes
But years before that I spent my formative years with the notorious Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), surviving initiation ordeals at The Church in Anaheim before the move to Laguna, the infamous "Dodge City" on Woodland Dr. where anything went, including Tim Leary. When I do the math, it turns out I was there at the inception, 1966.
Months after the holiday season, the great room at The Church was eerily decorated by an Xmas tree decorated with cigarette packages hung upside down from the ceiling by a noose...or, hey, was that a hallucination? Naw, don't think so. Then, there was the night some dork tried to commit suicide by downing, of all things in that setting, a whole bottle of Bayer aspirin. What a bummer to make some guy heave while you're high. Proximate sexual activity is too common to more than mention. The sexual revolution was in full swing. "Farmer" John Griggs became the originator of a cosmic hippie philosophy that still persists as a meme; it even took in Tim Leary for a year and a half. Later, BEL paid the Weather Underground to bust him out of Lompoc.
They were associated with the cult films, Endless Summer and Rainbow Bridge.
Nick Sand turned out to be the wizard behind the early scenes of BEL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXAKijc1Vmc&feature=related
ORANGE SUNSHINE
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orange+sunshine&hl=en&ei=MYs8TrLwHYvSiALolozDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In 1966 a biker gang from California, lead by “Farmer” John Griggs held up a Hollywood producer at gunpoint and stole his stash of Sandoz LSD. After taking the acid they appear to have experienced some sort of epiphany, and began to experiment with psychedelics and mysticism. In the summer of 1966, John Griggs travelled to Millbrook and met Timothy Leary who urged Griggs to form his own church.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, consisting of 30 original members was formally established in October 1966, 10 days after LSD was made illegal in California. The groups stated objective was: “to bring the world to a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Ghandi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men… We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s Will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him”.
As part of this new religion, LSD was used as a communal sacrament. To support the emerging religion they opened a shop, selling “hippie paraphernalia” in Laguna Beach, California. However the shop did not provide the necessary income for its intended purpose, which was to purchase land for the church.
Subsequently the Brotherhood started dealing drugs: Initially they smuggled Marijuana from Mexico, however over a few years they developed a smuggling and distribution network that reached to Afghanistan. They also sold LSD produced by Owsley in San Francisco.
In late 1967 Owsley was arrested and supplies of LSD dried up. The Brotherhood made contact with Owsley’s former assistant Tim Scully in 1968, along with another chemist, Nick Sand who had previously served as chemist to Arthur Kleps’ Neo-American BooHoo Church. By June 1969 Sand and Scully had produced an estimated 10 million doses of high quality LSD.
In the summer of 1969, at a rock concert in Anaheim a member of the Brotherhood appeared wearing a T-Shirt reading “Orange Sunshine Express” scattering pills of Sand and Scully’s LSD around him. “Orange Sunshine” was born. It is estimated that 100,000 doses of LSD were given away that day.
Orange Sunshine quickly reached mythical status: Timothy Leary (who had moved to the West Coast following the disintegration of the Millbrook community in 1967) endorsed Orange Sunshine over other brands of acid and gave public lectures on the theme of “Deal for Real: The Dealer as Robin Hood”, claiming that psychedelic drug users had an obligation to distribute drugs, to pay tribute to brotherhoods, or groups of men. It was said that Orange Sunshine was different to other LSD because of cosmic influences and special karma. It was put forward that it was not just selling drugs but enabling people’s existence and spiritual development.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s Orange Sunshine spread worldwide, reaching Goa, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Israel and Mecca. The Brotherhood had developed a reputation as spiritual crusaders.
However by the summer of 1969 cracks were starting to appear: Griggs died after an overdose and a teenage friend of Timothy Leary’s daughter was found drowned in a pond at the Brotherhood commune with traces of LSD in her system. Members of the Brotherhood were jailed on marijuana charges. After Griggs’ death the approach to distribution became more competitive and less focused on the founding sentiments of the church. Additionally, the supply of Orange Sunshine LSD was dwindling and they had lost their contacts for raw materials.
Scully left the Brotherhood in 1969, shortly after a man named Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhoods chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been “tipped off”.
In 1972 the Brotherhood was busted, and Stark ended up with most of the Brotherhood’s property and money in his name. This was shortly after The Weathermen aided Timothy Leary in his escape from jail (with funds provided by the Brotherhood).
Stark was jailed in Italy in 1975, and received several visitors from the US and British consulates. He was freed in 1979.
For further info: “Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond” Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.
ACID DREAMS
http://books.google.com/books?id=_oq8djFLFL0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=acid+dreams&hl=en&ei=YIk8TpOnEqvRiAL83pDDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
ENDLESS SUMMER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw7xBwBWaT8&feature=related
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
Ever see the movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World?" My favorite character is the lifeguard from California. You first see him dancing with his beatnik girlfriend in his beach pad. That movie was made in 1962, right before the hippies arrived on the scene. But you can recognize their precursers in those beach party beatniks. I think a lot of hippie culture actually started around Newport Beach with the original surfer scene. A lot of the surfers were really beatniks who had basically dropped out of society to smoke pot and ride waves. They had a lot of religious experiences doing that and formed some of the first communes by sharing cheap houses near the beach and turning them into surfer crash pads. John Griggs moved to Laguna Beach shortly after he dropped acid for the first time. He created "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love," which became the biggest LSD, marijuana and hash smuggling operation in North America for a few years. --Steven Hager, "Brotherhood of Eternal Love"
The Feds knew about the Brotherhood, but it took them years to penetrate the organization because they were so tight. They weren't just a smuggling organization, they were a religious movement. Much of what you see today at Rainbow Family Gatherings looks a lot like what was going on around Griggs at Laguna. Yet Griggs remains relatively unknown. http://hightimes.com/cancup/hager/6908?utm_source=rss_home&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da1f875738c0d35%2C0
It Was About Spirituality, Not Drugs, Man
I don't take the party favors anymore (for decades) because my creative vision never Turned Off, but I was there at Ground Zero when the West Coat Revolution began: Things were never the same for me after listening to The Fugs play "Aphrodite Mass." In SoCal the Doors of Perception had swung open and the doorstop slid into place. At first Hollywood wasn't yet accommodating youth culture. But there was a scene in Pasadena, centering around Euphoria art and coffee house, the Pasadena Civic, Ice House, a popular radio station, second-hand stores and headshops. Rumor linked Owsley's lab to Euphoria.
The Rinky Dink coffee house, Dick Dale shows in Balboa and other beach attractions were the havens of youth culture. In 1962 Dale moved to the Pasadena Civic, playing surf guitar to overflow crowds. We'd already been through surf and folk cult movements, and were heading into the folkrock era. I was part of all three scenes, especially the Newport surf crowd. Anaheim and Disneyland were frequent playgrounds full of new clubs and good drugs. Extreme mobility and innumerable recreational outlets fueled a new lifestyle.
Hyper-hedonic
The hidden history of conservative Orange County is that it gave birth to a hyper-hedonistic cycle, fueled by economic boom. Suddenly, surfing and drugs went together. Surfboards carried contraband across borders in their hollowed out cores as freaks ranged the globe, seeking the Endless Summer. Headshops sprung up everywhere, some more infamous than others. Laguna Beach, which had gained fame as an art colony soon became notorious for other reasons. Social consciousness went Monterey Pop.
Probably no headshop was more notorious than MYSTIC ARTS WORLD, a front for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love at 670 So. Coast Hwy. Many towns established curfews to keep minors under control. Being young alone was "Probable cause". Laguna's "Mystic Arts World", a headshop on Pacific Coast Highway was established in 1967 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It burned down in a mysterious June 1970 fire considered by many to have been an act of arson carried out by local members of the right-wing John Birch Society.
I remember buying my first tarot deck in La Jolla, Ca., at the Mithras Bookstore/Unicorn Cinema (photo above), near the Self-Realization Fellowship surfing outpost, "Swamis." The floors and walls were papered with old kitchy newspapers and movie posters, shellacked into immortality. The Cinema was small and featured remarkable programming. It was eclectic in the extreme -- mixing foreign, Hollywood, experimental, short and silent films in nearly equal measure. The bookstore, which sold a highly personal selection of new and used books, was the entry to the cinema, and stayed open until the last film had concluded. As a consequence it had two lives. In the daytime it was a quiet bookstore, and in the evenings it pulsed with the life of the cinema. The theater tickets were dispensed from a counter in the store, and the cinema goers waited for the change of films while browsing the shelves.
Love, Forever Changes
But years before that I spent my formative years with the notorious Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), surviving initiation ordeals at The Church in Anaheim before the move to Laguna, the infamous "Dodge City" on Woodland Dr. where anything went, including Tim Leary. When I do the math, it turns out I was there at the inception, 1966.
Months after the holiday season, the great room at The Church was eerily decorated by an Xmas tree decorated with cigarette packages hung upside down from the ceiling by a noose...or, hey, was that a hallucination? Naw, don't think so. Then, there was the night some dork tried to commit suicide by downing, of all things in that setting, a whole bottle of Bayer aspirin. What a bummer to make some guy heave while you're high. Proximate sexual activity is too common to more than mention. The sexual revolution was in full swing. "Farmer" John Griggs became the originator of a cosmic hippie philosophy that still persists as a meme; it even took in Tim Leary for a year and a half. Later, BEL paid the Weather Underground to bust him out of Lompoc.
They were associated with the cult films, Endless Summer and Rainbow Bridge.
Nick Sand turned out to be the wizard behind the early scenes of BEL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXAKijc1Vmc&feature=related
ORANGE SUNSHINE
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orange+sunshine&hl=en&ei=MYs8TrLwHYvSiALolozDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In 1966 a biker gang from California, lead by “Farmer” John Griggs held up a Hollywood producer at gunpoint and stole his stash of Sandoz LSD. After taking the acid they appear to have experienced some sort of epiphany, and began to experiment with psychedelics and mysticism. In the summer of 1966, John Griggs travelled to Millbrook and met Timothy Leary who urged Griggs to form his own church.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, consisting of 30 original members was formally established in October 1966, 10 days after LSD was made illegal in California. The groups stated objective was: “to bring the world to a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Ghandi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men… We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s Will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him”.
As part of this new religion, LSD was used as a communal sacrament. To support the emerging religion they opened a shop, selling “hippie paraphernalia” in Laguna Beach, California. However the shop did not provide the necessary income for its intended purpose, which was to purchase land for the church.
Subsequently the Brotherhood started dealing drugs: Initially they smuggled Marijuana from Mexico, however over a few years they developed a smuggling and distribution network that reached to Afghanistan. They also sold LSD produced by Owsley in San Francisco.
In late 1967 Owsley was arrested and supplies of LSD dried up. The Brotherhood made contact with Owsley’s former assistant Tim Scully in 1968, along with another chemist, Nick Sand who had previously served as chemist to Arthur Kleps’ Neo-American BooHoo Church. By June 1969 Sand and Scully had produced an estimated 10 million doses of high quality LSD.
In the summer of 1969, at a rock concert in Anaheim a member of the Brotherhood appeared wearing a T-Shirt reading “Orange Sunshine Express” scattering pills of Sand and Scully’s LSD around him. “Orange Sunshine” was born. It is estimated that 100,000 doses of LSD were given away that day.
Orange Sunshine quickly reached mythical status: Timothy Leary (who had moved to the West Coast following the disintegration of the Millbrook community in 1967) endorsed Orange Sunshine over other brands of acid and gave public lectures on the theme of “Deal for Real: The Dealer as Robin Hood”, claiming that psychedelic drug users had an obligation to distribute drugs, to pay tribute to brotherhoods, or groups of men. It was said that Orange Sunshine was different to other LSD because of cosmic influences and special karma. It was put forward that it was not just selling drugs but enabling people’s existence and spiritual development.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s Orange Sunshine spread worldwide, reaching Goa, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Israel and Mecca. The Brotherhood had developed a reputation as spiritual crusaders.
However by the summer of 1969 cracks were starting to appear: Griggs died after an overdose and a teenage friend of Timothy Leary’s daughter was found drowned in a pond at the Brotherhood commune with traces of LSD in her system. Members of the Brotherhood were jailed on marijuana charges. After Griggs’ death the approach to distribution became more competitive and less focused on the founding sentiments of the church. Additionally, the supply of Orange Sunshine LSD was dwindling and they had lost their contacts for raw materials.
Scully left the Brotherhood in 1969, shortly after a man named Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhoods chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been “tipped off”.
In 1972 the Brotherhood was busted, and Stark ended up with most of the Brotherhood’s property and money in his name. This was shortly after The Weathermen aided Timothy Leary in his escape from jail (with funds provided by the Brotherhood).
Stark was jailed in Italy in 1975, and received several visitors from the US and British consulates. He was freed in 1979.
For further info: “Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond” Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.
ACID DREAMS
http://books.google.com/books?id=_oq8djFLFL0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=acid+dreams&hl=en&ei=YIk8TpOnEqvRiAL83pDDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
ENDLESS SUMMER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw7xBwBWaT8&feature=related
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Dude, Spare Me the Trip Reports
We buzzed up and down Hwy 1 in our white Renault Caravelle Cabrio, the hot car in Paris at the time. Other times we rode in our boyfriends' surf wagons. I remember the foggy drives through Laguna Canyon, survivable only by intuitive second-sight. Because I had relatives there, I was already familiar with the twisting roads. I also have fond memories of the 'Jonah in the Whale' Cave at 1000 Steps Beach. When you sat in it, it felt like being in the belly of a whale. We also loved the 7 sea caves in La Jolla. We partied in Los Trancos, a historic district of 1930s style houses and in the cliff villas.
Maybe there would be a Leary sighting. The twist in BEL's philosophy was that they smuggled hash to pay to make more acid they virtually gave away. They believed their panacea would change the world. Or, at least, that was the story. First they got their legs wet, smuggling pot from Sinaloa, Mexico in rainbow surfboards, then they went to Afghanistan for hash.
BEL's stained-glass shopfront pleasure palace cum headshop, "Mystic Arts World", became a hippie Mecca that stalled traffic on Hwy. 101. You never saw so many beads in your life. Tim Leary declared his candidacy for California Governor from there in 1969. Being young and naive at the time, I had no idea we were partying with what would later be called "the hippie Mafia" by Rolling Stone magazine. That is, until my cousin married one of them.
The Original "Mystic Arts World" is arguably one of the first Organic Spiritual Centers, offering vegetarian health foods and herbs, incense, art, jewelry, beads, a mystic book store, secret stash rooms, and Holy Sacraments with a private Meditation Temple for members of the BEL.
Maybe there would be a Leary sighting. The twist in BEL's philosophy was that they smuggled hash to pay to make more acid they virtually gave away. They believed their panacea would change the world. Or, at least, that was the story. First they got their legs wet, smuggling pot from Sinaloa, Mexico in rainbow surfboards, then they went to Afghanistan for hash.
BEL's stained-glass shopfront pleasure palace cum headshop, "Mystic Arts World", became a hippie Mecca that stalled traffic on Hwy. 101. You never saw so many beads in your life. Tim Leary declared his candidacy for California Governor from there in 1969. Being young and naive at the time, I had no idea we were partying with what would later be called "the hippie Mafia" by Rolling Stone magazine. That is, until my cousin married one of them.
The Original "Mystic Arts World" is arguably one of the first Organic Spiritual Centers, offering vegetarian health foods and herbs, incense, art, jewelry, beads, a mystic book store, secret stash rooms, and Holy Sacraments with a private Meditation Temple for members of the BEL.
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Tahquitz Canyon (Palm Springs) - Another Lost Horizon
Hey, Dude, Where's My Acid?
Scully left the Brotherhood in 1969, shortly after a man named Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhoods chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channeling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been “tipped off”.
The Brotherhood became a secret society, also chronicled as The Lords of Acid.
Lords of Acid - How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Became OCs Hippie Mafia ...
In years to follow, BEL paid for the Weather Underground to bust their hero Tim Leary out of the Lompoc, California prison, then to rescue him from the Black Panthers in Algeria. Some suggest Leary himself was a CIA spy or at least a backpocket agent.
How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Is Connected to the Weather ... ... .
Lords of Acid - How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Became OCs Hippie Mafia ... (Riebling), http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/brotherhood_of_eternal_love.pdf
WORLDVIEW WARFARE: Eternal Sunshine of the CIA
http://belhistory.weebly.com/index.html
"In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA engaged in an extensive program of human experimentation, using drugs, psychological, and other means, in search of techniques to control human behavior for counterintelligence and covert action purposes. According to Walter Bowart of the East Village Other, the CIA was the world's largest consumer of Sandoz LSD. They'd worked with the Bureau of Narcotics, the NIMH, LEAA and other agencies to covertly give LSD to unwitting persons in "real life settings."
Once they were done with unwitting individuals, CIA let the LSD genie out of the bottle into the general population with their own choice of High Priest, who they had already initiated in their trial by fire. Was “the Pope of Dope” a “tool” of the cryptocracy?
Bowart reports finding stronger evidence of Leary/CIA links: While doing research for my book, Operation Mind Control (originally published in 1978), I'd come across a CIA document with Leary's name on it. The CIA memo directed agents to contact Leary and company, who were then operating an organization called International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The memo asked its agents to discover if any agency personnel were taking acid with this group. The CIA wanted to determine what IFIF really knew about what was then billed as "the most powerful drug known to man," LSD, a drug which the agency was experimenting with in an attempt to create mind controlled zombies.
Another, earlier similar CIA document I found ordered agents to contact Aldous Huxley for the same reason. There were no follow-up documents to indicate whether the CIA had, or had not, made contact in either instance. Still, other documents indicated that Leary had received money channeled by the CIA through various government agencies. The files showed that, in all, there were eight government grants paid to Leary from 1953 to 1958, most of them paid through the National Institute of Mental Health, now known to have "fronted" for the CIA in the MKULTRA program. (Bowart)
When Bowart asked, "Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?" He reports, without hesitating Leary said, "Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary admitted to Bowart that even in the 60s he knew he was being wittingly used by intelligence agencies. He claimed from 1962 forward he operated as an intelligence agent aware of the world struggle for the control of minds – of consciousness. He wanted to be on the winning side.
"What are you doing for the CIA?" Bowart asked, disbelieving everything he said. "I'm raising the intelligence of an elite... a very elite group of Americans," he said. "So I think the future of freedom depends on a very small group of people who are smart enough to defend that liberty..." “…nobody ever recruited me. People came and advised me to do this or that. I didn't know that I was being advised by the CIA. I assume now, that I was being advised by the CIA..."
Then he back-pedaled, again declaring that CIA sponsored his and all other personality assessment research, including that used to assess those for CIA employment and other intelligence agencies. They also supported J.B. Rhine’s ESP experiments at Duke University. He was relatively clueless about other LSD researchers, such as Walter Pankhe and Stanislav Grof.
The whole question is muddied by the possibility Leary was trying to make money as a writer on MK Ultra, and wanted to increase his journalistic credibility. Many thought he was just lying, a habit for which his best friends give him a mixed review. Others contend he himself was a victim of chemical and electronic mind control in prison, designed to break and “turn” him. Did he turn state’s evidence for a “get out of jail, free card?” FBI records indicate it is so. Either way, wittingly or unwittingly, truth or lie, the “king of the hippies” was a pawn in CIA’s Great Game of global manipulation. “Why not indeed?” Isn’t the REAL question just WHO is directing the Skull and Bones “retail outlet,” CIA?
Drugs rule, or he who controls the drugs rules and controls by means of drugs and the enormous cash slush funds they generate. Destruction of the real economy and the replacement of development with looting on a global scale is already in an advanced stage throughout the world. The world runs on top of a black market in guns, gold and drugs.
In 1969 Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhood's chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been "tipped off".
I doubt any of us realized we were part of possibly the biggest CIA experiment ever unleashed on an unwitting public, but later revelations proved it so. Congress exposed it. LSD experiments and unwitting guinea pigs were major parts of the CIA dark ops known as MK ULTRA, a mind control program. The CIA released LSD on an unsuspecting public through the agenda devised by Tavistock Institute, the "Aquarian Conspiracy", from SRI and select co-evolving projects. Ultimately, CIA deemed LSD useless as a truth serum and abandoned that avenue of research, but the genie was out of the bottle and dropped onto the sugar cube. The cultural engineering of the 60's was underway.
The connection was notorious Captain Al Hubbard, the American superspy and uranium entrepreneur. He was the first Johnny Appleseed of LSD, turning on thousands of people, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, church figures, and housewives. Aldous Huxley got his acid from "Captain Trips" in 1955. Later, Leary would also acquire his experimental doses through CIA back channels.
Hubbard had an angelic vision telling him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he read about LSD the next year, he immediately sought and acquired LSD, which he tried for himself in 1951. Although he had no medical training, during the Fifties Hubbard worked at the Hollywood Hospital with Ross McLean, with psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond, with Myron Stolaroff at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, and with Willis Harman at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) running psychedelic sessions with LSD.
At various times over the next twenty years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. It is also rumored that he was involved with the CIA's MK-ULTRA project. How his government positions interacted with his work with LSD is unknown.
Hubbard is reputed to have introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures. He became known as the original "Captain Trips", traveling about with a leather case containing pharmaceutically pure LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.
I became aware of this backstory in my later relationship with the journal, Psychedelic Monographs & Essays, the first serious journal to recount the early history of dissemination and psychedelic culture. No one was talking about a "hippie mafia" at the time of the psychedelic explosion, at least, not to me. It was a spiritual crusade.
Later I asked Tim Leary how do you "turn it off," but he was no help on that. Once I tapped my psychedelic wellspring it became a gusher -- an infinity of visionary imagery which continues to flow and demands its own creative emergence. My question to the answer of drugs was, "How do you do this without drugs." Many found that answer in meditation. The drug became irrelevant. Years later, another friend would fill me in on what went on in Leary's Harvard years with the Pink Power Pills, http://ionamiller2008.iwarp.com/whats_new_24.html
LSD: Weapon or Sacrament?
Counterculture vs. Counterintelligence
In forming counterculture, the whole self disengages from cultural currents, the electronic environment and corpo-political propaganda and Agit Prop. What happens when an entire generation questions social norms? This ‘spiritual’ quest might be alienating if it wasn’t something shared with most of one’s generation. It became the American psychedelic underground, and many subculture lifestyles followed it.
A drug culture that began as a narcissistic dissociation from the warring world devolved into a polydrug abusing culture of self-medication by the early 70s.The CIA bait-and switch tactic, starting with LSD, created the 1970s cocaine fad and made liberalism synonymous with depravity. Any hope of controlling economies or cultures or unfolding events is doomed to suboptimize the results and yield only nasty unintended consequences.
The subversively indoctrinated counterculture failed to realize that in adopting the hedonistic ‘spiritual’ drug, they were inadvertently “sleeping with the enemy,” the CIA. The therapeutic promise of the drug was lost on the conservative government and research stopped cold.
Nevertheless, many of the wold’s greatest minds were inspired by psychedelics. For example, Francis Crick was on 50mcg. of LSD when he came up with the double-helix structure of DNA. Others include Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Dr. Kary Mullis and the notorious Timothy Leary.
Pychedelics gave rise to the Human Potential movement, “Californian” ideology, mind spas like Esalen, and the so-called Aquarian Conspiracy which has blossomed into New Age thought. All have a root in CIA experiments in extraordinary human potential, parapsychology, and creativity. As with many alchemical panaceas, the substance is both a cure is a poison – a dream to some, a nightmare to others.
Acid Cult: Weapon or Sacrament?
CIA’s favorite stepchild was LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), developed at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. CIA was their biggest customer because they thought they could weaponize it. Later, acid was manufactured for the government by Eli Lilly. Lilly has been featured as one of the most unethical of all drug companies by the Wall Street Journal. Daddy Bush has run both CIA and Lilly during his career.
In 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a synthesized batch of LSD, which they patented (US Patent for Lysergic Acid Amides, Serial No. 473,443, issued February 28, 1956) and promoted heavily.
In 1955, Aldous Huxley (Britain’s “Timothy Leary,” who wrote the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World) had his first LSD trip and published Heaven and Hell. He had written The Doors of Perception in 1954 detailing his experiences with mescaline. He contributed to the debate on “Paradise-engineering,” and issues of universal happiness, biotechnology, post-genomic medicine, peak experiences and designer drugs.Hedonism and the state-sanctioned sugarcoating the Four Horsemen of Pain, Disease, Unhappiness, and Death. Consumption of mass produced goods and beliefs.
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modeled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. http://www.huxley.net/
Former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1979)—along with the Washington Post (1985) and the New York Times (1988)—reported an amazing story about the CIA and psychiatry.
A lead player was psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. Cameron was curious to discover more powerful ways to break down patient resistance. Using electroshock, LSD, and sensory deprivation, he was able to produce severe delirium. Patients often lost their sense of identity, forgetting their own names and even how to eat.
The CIA, eager to learn more about Cameron’s brainwashing techniques, funded him under a project code-named MKULTRA. According to Marks, Cameron was part of a small army of the CIA’s LSD-experimenting psychiatrists. Where did the CIA get its LSD? Marks reports that the CIA had been previously supplied by the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Sandoz, but was uncomfortable relying on a foreign company and so, in 1953, the CIA asked Eli Lilly to make them up a batch of LSD, which Lilly subsequently donated to the CIA.
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levinepr0504.html
Need To Know
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that throughout history the smartest people were directed into specialties that kept them from getting the “Big Picture” so kings and the elite remained unthreatened by them in their power. The church did much the same. They began losing control when the Freemasons sowed Enlightenment thought. Academia still forms and directs our thinking processes and what kind of opportunities are open to us.
Those whose imaginations range into the areas of suppressed science quickly find out it is neither supported nor tolerated. Funding and careers are at stake, and in some cases lives. Are there some things we should not know? Dangerous subjects? Forbidden subjects?
In these days thick with conspiracy theories, it isn’t hard to imagine yet another one. But perhaps the most useful approach is to take a look backward to find the taproot of forces manipulating our society today. Are sinister forces shaping our moral, educational, political, economic, and cultural lives?
Is the fruit of that poisoned tree coming to fruition? The answer is a hearty, “Yes.” In fact, insiders say that no pop culture phenomenon since the 50’s is an accident. Once TV entered virtually every home, some mind control experiments came to a rather abrupt halt; they weren’t needed. Mass mind control from the cradle to the grave had been accomplished. The era of Madison Avenue, stylish fads in possessions and beliefs, had begun. Recent political propaganda, spin doctoring, and agit-prop have become painfully obvious even to the uninitiated.
But the antecedents of programmed consumerism go back much further to the time of Freud and fomenting political forces in Great Britain. The mother of all propaganda machines can be found in The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and its forerunner Tavistock Clinic or Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, which has tremendously influenced both left and rightwing thinking and put itself in the service of the “racket of war.”
A great game is being played on us unawares, and we are pawns in that game. Call it “Global Architectronics.” Public opinion cannot only be manipulated, it can be created --a perception not a reality. But, who or what would want to shape and control public opinion? We can ask ourselves like Parcival in the Grail Castle, “Who do these things serve?” and/or follow the modern investigative imperative to “Follow the Money.”
Synthetic Religion
Since civilization began, monarchs and their militaries have sought to control their own populations and those who threatened them. Elitists with overarching ambitions have existed in all eras. One of the most effective means of social control predates civilization, arising in the superstitious world of neolithic period.
By healing, birth and death rites, and oracles shamans gained a stranglehold on the minds of their followers with magical medicine and mysterious incantations. They told the people what to expect in the future and what fearsome and mysterious forces were operating out of view in nature. Their rites controlled the food supply, the weather, and tribal beliefs. Myths were imposed on fresh minds.
Drugs were also a staple in the medicine kit, both to kill pain and to provide pleasure and communion in tribal celebrations. These mind expanding drugs revealed a separate reality, populated by fabulous and fearsome creatures of the imagination. After these close encounters, naturally, their shamans claimed to placate the demonic and serve the greater good.
Shared beliefs bound groups together in common cause with a groupthink worldview. They “belonged.” But shamanism and sorcery are centered truly around illusion and power, not spirituality. It is an attempt to define the reality – to impose a pre-scientific definition of reality.
Shamanism finds its modern counterpart in psychology/psychiatry but also in the cultural fad of the New Age movement, a nostalgic, if self-absorbed, spirituality. And the founding of Tavistock is rooted in the careers and theories of many of the most imminent mind doctors of the last century: Freud, Jung, Laing, Bateson, and more.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
- HELP ME (Basic Survival)
- TRIBAL We (Collective Survival)
- GRATIFY Me (Immediate Wants)
- RIGHTEOUS We (Stable Authority)
- COMPETETIVE Me (Material Success)
- HOLISTIC Us (Global Harmony)
- INTERDEPENDENT Me (Sustainable World)
- SPIRITUAL We (Collective Renewal)
Today, our minds can be tortured, directed and contained through subtler but more nefarious means.We are still put in mental stocks by megamedia and Big Pharma, and their combination – pharmaceutical adverts.Chemical straightjackets range from Ritalin, to antidepressants, to hormones, prescriptions and recreational drugs.
Paradoxically, there is an alleged War on Drugs by the very governments and agencies who are accused of profiteering on Black Market importation and distribution.CIA has been implicated in the infamous "Air America" Golden Triangle heroin importations in the Viet Nam era, cocaine running during Iran Contra, the crack epidemic in American ghettos, poppy production in Afghanistan (largest crop ever in 2006), and in promoting Orange Sunshine LSD through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to derail and discredit the peace movement in the 1960’s.
This follows an older tradition, an aspect of psychological warfare.British profiteers grew narcotics in India and forcibly sold them to China during the Opium Wars.Even tea was notorious during the American Revolution.Black Ops have a history of being supported via illicit drug trade.Anyone who is the end-user drives the whole karmic chain of supply and demand.And, it’s a bloody trail.
All drugs, even alcohol, tobacco and sugar are big business. It’s all part of The Spectacle, whether the source is nation-states, megacorporate drug companies (Big Pharma), global drug rings, or designer independents.Humans are hardwired with a “craving for ecstasy.”Social issues include suppression of direct mystical experience (religious experimentation vs. “pharmacratic inquisition”), modulating your own pleasure/pain axis, sexuality, and self-determination (individual freedom vs. state control).
We’ve developed even more cruel and unusual punishment for would-be “free thinkers,” and dissidents since the era of MK Ultra, the CIA mind control programs.During the Cold War, the CIA attempted to outdo Soviet and Asian brainwashing techniques and close the “mind control gap.”
With the Manchurian Candidate, they tried to secretly manufacture the perfect assassin – a cyborg. Then the agency experimented with a variety of drugs designed to neutralize or disable the enemy, or to use as truth serums.They also used electroshock, sensory deprivation, psychotronics, and radical hypnosis. Brain washing wipes the mind and numbs the emotions; reprogramming plugs in new "software" that contours thoughts and feelings, and can trigger behaviors at the will of the programmer.
Though it was a leading candidate, LSD was determined no good for mind control, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be an influential social control.Once the drug became associated with the counterculture, it was banned (1967), which only made it more attractive.Yet it still worked its magic by deflecting energy and attention into hedonistic druggie lifestyles instead of confrontational political activism.
Through its Psychological Warfare Division, CIA-controlled media used CIA promoted drugs to discredit the peace movement.It used CBS, The New York Times, Associated Press, United Press International, even The National Enquirer, and other major United States media to maintain its control over sensitive subjects.This gave new meaning to the phrase, “the medium is the message” – infowars.
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Griggs (right) with Rosemary and Tim Leary in 1968.
Laurel Canyon Music Scene & CIA
MORE:
Inside The LC:
The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon
& the Birth of the Hippie Generation
HOME - http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/index.html
Part I May 8, 2008
Part II May 13, 2008
Part III May 13, 2008
Part IV May 19, 2008 Part V June 6, 2008 Part VI June 6, 2008
Part VII June 22, 2008
Part VIII July 24, 2008 Part IX August 11, 2008 Part X August 29, 2008 Part XI November 13, 2008 Part XII November 27, 2008 Part XIII January 26, 2009 Part XIV March 17, 2009 Part XV June 6, 2009 Part XVI June 13, 2009 Part XVII May 21, 2010 Part XVIII May 26, 2011 Part XIX August 14, 2011 Part XX Coming Soon!
Inside The LC:
The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon
& the Birth of the Hippie Generation
HOME - http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/index.html
Part I May 8, 2008
Part II May 13, 2008
Part III May 13, 2008
Part IV May 19, 2008 Part V June 6, 2008 Part VI June 6, 2008
Part VII June 22, 2008
Part VIII July 24, 2008 Part IX August 11, 2008 Part X August 29, 2008 Part XI November 13, 2008 Part XII November 27, 2008 Part XIII January 26, 2009 Part XIV March 17, 2009 Part XV June 6, 2009 Part XVI June 13, 2009 Part XVII May 21, 2010 Part XVIII May 26, 2011 Part XIX August 14, 2011 Part XX Coming Soon!
Usual Suspects
Robert Ackerley passport photo
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Richard ALPERT:lieutenant to Leary in early psychedelic movement
Bobby ANDRIST:major Brotherhood smuggler and organizer
Paul ARNABALDI:partner to Kemp and Solomon
Christine BOTT:Kemp's girlfriend
Peter BUCHANAN:tax adviser to Sand
Terence BURKE:Federal agent in Kabul
Brian CUTHBERTSON:major British LSD organizer
Michael DRUCE:chemicals supplier and businessman
Lester FRIEDMAN:university chemist who helped Sand
John GALE:extrovert salesman for Orange Sunshine
Sam GOEKJIAN:Stark's European lawyer
John GRIGGS:moving spirit in the creation of the Brotherhood
Billy HITCHCOCK:Leary's benefactor at Millbrook
Albert HOFMANN:Swiss research chemist who uncovered LSD
Michael HOLLINGSHEAD:writer, and friend of Leary
Aldous HUXLEY:writer, thinker and advocate of psychedelics for mankind's betterment
Dick KEMP:LSD chemist to Stark and Solomon
Ken KESEY:best-selling author, exponent of extrovert psychedelia with the Merry PrankstersDoug KUEHL:Federal agent in California
Glen LYND:founder Brother and smuggler
Donald MUNSON:smuggler and adviser to Scully and Sand
OWSLEY (Augustus Owsley Stanley III): first of the great underground LSD chemists
Neal PURCELL:Laguna Beach policeman and Brotherhood opponent
Michael RANDALL:founding Brother and major organizer
Richard RATHJEN:Federal tax agent
Nick SAND:New York bootleg chemist who joined Owsley and Scully
Tim SCULLY:apprentice to Owsley, chemist to the Brothers
David SOLOMON:drug book author, and founder of British LSD group
Ron STARK:international LSD entrepreneur and Brotherhood partner
TERRY the TRAMP:Owsley's Hell's Angels drug dealer
Gerry THOMAS:one of Solomon's early business partners
Henry TODD:marketing and organizational genius of British LSD group
The TOKHIS brothers:the Brotherhood's Afghan hashish source
George WETHERN:second in command of Hell's Angel drug dealing
Ergotamine Tartrate:The base material of LSDLysergic Acid:The natural component of LSDLysergic Acid Diethylamide:LSD, the compound of lysergic acid and diethylamine
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Richard ALPERT:lieutenant to Leary in early psychedelic movement
Bobby ANDRIST:major Brotherhood smuggler and organizer
Paul ARNABALDI:partner to Kemp and Solomon
Christine BOTT:Kemp's girlfriend
Peter BUCHANAN:tax adviser to Sand
Terence BURKE:Federal agent in Kabul
Brian CUTHBERTSON:major British LSD organizer
Michael DRUCE:chemicals supplier and businessman
Lester FRIEDMAN:university chemist who helped Sand
John GALE:extrovert salesman for Orange Sunshine
Sam GOEKJIAN:Stark's European lawyer
John GRIGGS:moving spirit in the creation of the Brotherhood
Billy HITCHCOCK:Leary's benefactor at Millbrook
Albert HOFMANN:Swiss research chemist who uncovered LSD
Michael HOLLINGSHEAD:writer, and friend of Leary
Aldous HUXLEY:writer, thinker and advocate of psychedelics for mankind's betterment
Dick KEMP:LSD chemist to Stark and Solomon
Ken KESEY:best-selling author, exponent of extrovert psychedelia with the Merry PrankstersDoug KUEHL:Federal agent in California
Glen LYND:founder Brother and smuggler
Donald MUNSON:smuggler and adviser to Scully and Sand
OWSLEY (Augustus Owsley Stanley III): first of the great underground LSD chemists
Neal PURCELL:Laguna Beach policeman and Brotherhood opponent
Michael RANDALL:founding Brother and major organizer
Richard RATHJEN:Federal tax agent
Nick SAND:New York bootleg chemist who joined Owsley and Scully
Tim SCULLY:apprentice to Owsley, chemist to the Brothers
David SOLOMON:drug book author, and founder of British LSD group
Ron STARK:international LSD entrepreneur and Brotherhood partner
TERRY the TRAMP:Owsley's Hell's Angels drug dealer
Gerry THOMAS:one of Solomon's early business partners
Henry TODD:marketing and organizational genius of British LSD group
The TOKHIS brothers:the Brotherhood's Afghan hashish source
George WETHERN:second in command of Hell's Angel drug dealing
Ergotamine Tartrate:The base material of LSDLysergic Acid:The natural component of LSDLysergic Acid Diethylamide:LSD, the compound of lysergic acid and diethylamine
More on Brotherhood of Eternal Love
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia:
The Story of the LSD Counterculture Stewart Tendler and Davaid May
High Times Reader
http://books.google.com/books?id=vGxs0ad3x3IC&pg=PA40&dq=the+brotherhood+of+eternal+love&hl=en&ei=sY88Tv6VGtLWiAK9q5XDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Chronology
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Compound-25
Slow Dance of Golden Lights
Outlaw Days
The Badlands — Brotherhood International
The Brotherhood of Eternal Self-interest
Here Comes the Night
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Panther Books Granada Publishing Ltd.
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
First published by Panther Books 1984
Copyright: Stewart Tendler and David May 1984
ISBN 0-586-04909-6
Ten days after California banned LSD in October 1966, Lynd, his wife and a friend walked into the offices of a Los Angeles attorney on Sunset Boulevard and signed the papers incorporating the Brotherhood; Lynd was the only Brother who did not have a criminal record, so he was designated to organize the incorporation. According to the legal papers, the Brotherhood, tax exempt, was dedicated 'to bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Rama-Krishnam Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi and all true prophets and apostles of God'. Was there a hint of Leary's influence in this list? Griggs had recently returned from a trip to the East, and the Brothers were largely 'unschooled'.
To achieve its ends, the Brotherhood intended to 'buy, manage and own and hold real and personal property necessary and proper for a place of public worship and carry on educational and charitable work'. Was there an echo of the League's tenets in article 4-D which read: 'We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him'? This was 'a recognition that the search for God is a private matter', written another way.
Lynd said years later: 'Well, it was John Griggs' main idea to incorporate because he had talked to Leary, and it was possible to incorporate to become tax-exempt as far as land goes and, if and when marijuana ever becomes legal, become tax-exempt on marijuana.' There were no fixed rules for joining; no name signing or ritual. But there was one basic rule among the Brothers—they believed in taking as much of the psychedelics as possible, the largest doses of LSD they could buy. The articles of association did not explain how the Brotherhood intended to buy its land or establish its place of worship. You cannot really tell a lawyer or the State of California that you intend to raise capital by breaking the law—by massive dealing in drugs.
The Story of the LSD Counterculture Stewart Tendler and Davaid May
High Times Reader
http://books.google.com/books?id=vGxs0ad3x3IC&pg=PA40&dq=the+brotherhood+of+eternal+love&hl=en&ei=sY88Tv6VGtLWiAK9q5XDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Chronology
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Compound-25
Slow Dance of Golden Lights
Outlaw Days
The Badlands — Brotherhood International
The Brotherhood of Eternal Self-interest
Here Comes the Night
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Panther Books Granada Publishing Ltd.
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
First published by Panther Books 1984
Copyright: Stewart Tendler and David May 1984
ISBN 0-586-04909-6
Ten days after California banned LSD in October 1966, Lynd, his wife and a friend walked into the offices of a Los Angeles attorney on Sunset Boulevard and signed the papers incorporating the Brotherhood; Lynd was the only Brother who did not have a criminal record, so he was designated to organize the incorporation. According to the legal papers, the Brotherhood, tax exempt, was dedicated 'to bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Rama-Krishnam Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi and all true prophets and apostles of God'. Was there a hint of Leary's influence in this list? Griggs had recently returned from a trip to the East, and the Brothers were largely 'unschooled'.
To achieve its ends, the Brotherhood intended to 'buy, manage and own and hold real and personal property necessary and proper for a place of public worship and carry on educational and charitable work'. Was there an echo of the League's tenets in article 4-D which read: 'We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him'? This was 'a recognition that the search for God is a private matter', written another way.
Lynd said years later: 'Well, it was John Griggs' main idea to incorporate because he had talked to Leary, and it was possible to incorporate to become tax-exempt as far as land goes and, if and when marijuana ever becomes legal, become tax-exempt on marijuana.' There were no fixed rules for joining; no name signing or ritual. But there was one basic rule among the Brothers—they believed in taking as much of the psychedelics as possible, the largest doses of LSD they could buy. The articles of association did not explain how the Brotherhood intended to buy its land or establish its place of worship. You cannot really tell a lawyer or the State of California that you intend to raise capital by breaking the law—by massive dealing in drugs.
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Al Hubbard: The Original Captain Trips, CIA Superspy
Vintage Video with Al Hubbard & Tim Leary - A Conversation on LSD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaumQvMWBA
by Todd Brendan Fahey
Published originally by High Times, November 1991
THE HANDLER - Captain Trips
Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...before Timothy Leary...before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests...before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.
You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life--a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.
They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.
Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and friendly like a golden retriever.
The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank Vancouver Yacht Club. Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."
Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline, and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some. "He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs. Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain" came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in the US Merchant Marine.
At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver--a former Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it was the inner voyage that drove the Captain until his death in 1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever in his brain.
His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.
"He blew in with that uniform...laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!" Leary recalls. "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn't believe...claimed he was friends with the Pope."
Did Leary believe him?
"Well, yeah, no question."
The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me," Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him."
Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley, author of the sardonic novel Brave New World. Huxley had been turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook The Doors of Perception. Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals then known as "psychotomimetic"--literally, "madness mimicking."
But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a credo for the next generation:
To fathom hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
* * *
Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a "barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had absolutely no training, "but he had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.
In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post- Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11" x 14" box, had powered a ferry- sized vessel around Seattle's Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard Energy Transformer.
Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the boy inventor. Vancouver magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.
After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.
The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently became agent Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of World War II--an operations of dubious legality, which had him facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.
Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early 40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By 1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and a Canadian island. And he was miserable.
"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth. He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to," says Harman. "But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."
In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conduction the experiment, and came back with some LSD for himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True Believer.
"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament," recalls Leary.
A 1968 resume states that Hubbard was at various times employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73 by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."
Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology, often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with such a project "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."
[Note: Recently, a researcher for WorldNetDaily and author of a forthcoming book based on the Frank Olson "murder," revealed to this writer that he has received, via a FOIA request of CIA declassified materials, documents which indicate that Al Hubbard was, indeed, in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White--an FBI narcotics official who managed Operation Midnight Climax, a joint CIA/FBI blackmail project in which unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose exploits were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at posh hotels in both New York and San Francisco. The researcher would reveal only that Al Hubbard's name "appeared in connection with Gottlieb and White, but the material is heavily redacted."] Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."
Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That letter would be priceless--but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both there in full force."
Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.'"
He was not alone.
Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.
Hubbard abandoned his uranium empire and, for the next decade, traveled the globe as a psychedelic missionary. "Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," says Stolaroff. His first pilgrimage was to Switzerland, home of Sandoz Laboratories, producers of both Delysid (trade name for LSD) and psilocybin. He procured a gram of LSD (roughly 10,000 doses) and set up shop in a safe-deposit vault in the Zurich airport's duty-free section. From there he was able to ship quantities of his booty without a tariff to a waiting world.
Swiss officials quickly detained Hubbard for violating the nation's drug laws, which provided no exemption from the duty-free provision. Myron Stolaroff petitioned Washington for the Captain's release, but the State Department wanted nothing to do with Al Hubbard. Oddly, when a hearing was held, blue-suited officials from the department were in attendance. The Swiss tribunal declared Hubbard's passport invalid for five years, and he was deported. Undeterred, Hubbard traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he had another gram of LSD put into tablet form by Chemapol--a division of the pharmaceutical giant Spofa--and then flew west.
Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.
According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.
His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.
Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.
But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.
His departure came as the Canadian Medical Association was becoming increasingly suspicious of Hollywood Hospital in the wake of publicity surrounding MK-ULTRA. The Canadian Citizen's Commission on Human Rights had already discovered one Dr. Harold Abramson, a CIA contract psychiatrist, on the board of MacLean's International Association for Psychedelic Therapy, and external pressure was weighing on MacLean to release Al Hubbard, the former OSS officer with suspected CIA links. Compounding Hubbard's plight was the death of his Canadian benefactor, leaving Hubbard with neither an income nor the financial cushion upon which he had become dependent.
His services were eventually recruited by Willis Harman, then-Director of the Educational Policy Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Stanford University. Harman employed Hubbard as a security guard for SRI, "although," Harman admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work."
Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special [LSD] sessions for us."
According to Dr. Abram Hoffer, "Al had a grandiose idea that if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society."
Hubbard's tenure at SRI was uneasy. The political bent of the Stanford think-tank was decidedly left-wing, clashing sharply with Hubbard's own world-perspective. "Al was really an arch-conservative," says the confidential source. "He really didn't like what the hippies were doing with LSD, and he held Timothy Leary in great contempt."
Humphry Osmond recalls a particular psilocybin session in which "Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea that he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea...I became much concerned that he might shoot me..."
"To Al," says Myron Stolaroff, "LSD enabled man to see his true self, his true nature and the true order of things." But, to Hubbard, the true order of things had little to do with the antics of the American Left.
Recognizing its potential psychic hazards, Hubbard believed that LSD should be administered and monitored by trained professionals. He claimed that he had stockpiled more LSD than anyone on the planet besides Sandoz--including the US government--and he clearly wanted a firm hand in influencing the way it was used. However, Hubbard refused all opportunities to become the LSD Philosopher-King. Whereas Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves. When cornered by a video camera shortly before this death, and asked to say something to the future, Hubbard replied simply, "You're the future."
In March of 1966, the cold winds of Congress blew out all hope for Al Hubbard's enlightened Mother Earth. Facing a storm of protest brought on by Leary's reckless antics and the "LSD-related suicide" of Diane Linkletter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Drug Abuse Control Amendment, which declared lysergic acid diethylamide a Schedule I substance; simple possession was deemed a felony, punishable by 15 years in prison. According to Humphry Osmond, Hubbard lobbied Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who reportedly took the cause of LSD into the Senate chambers, and emerged un-victorious.
"[The government] had a deep fear of having their picture of reality challenged," mourns Harman. "It had nothing to do with people harming their lives with chemicals--because if you took all the people who had ever had any harmful effects from psychedelics, it's minuscule compared to those associated with alcohol and tobacco."
FDA chief James L. Goddard ordered agents to seize all remaining psychedelics not accounted for by Sandoz. "It was scary," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, whose Beverly Hills office was raided and years' worth of clinical research confiscated.
Hubbard begged Abram Hoffer to let him hide his supply in Hoffer's Canadian Psychiatric Facility. But the doctor refused, and it is believed that Hubbard buried most of his LSD in a sacred parcel in Death Valley, California, claiming that it had been used, rather than risk prosecution. When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research--none using humans, and none of them associated with Al Hubbard. In 1968, his finances in ruins, Hubbard was forced to sell his private island sanctuary for what one close friend termed "a pittance." He filled a number of boats with the antiquated electronics used in his eccentric nuclear experiments, and left Daymen Island for California. Hubbard's efforts in his last decade were effectively wasted, according to most of his friends. Lack of both finances and government permit to resume research crippled all remaining projects he may have had in the hopper.
After SRI canceled his contract in 1974 Hubbard went into semiretirement, splitting his time between a 5-acre ranch in Vancouver and an apartment in Menlo Park. But in 1978, battling an enlarged heart and never far away from a bottle of pure oxygen, Hubbard make one last run at the FDA. He applied for an IND to use LSD-25 on terminal cancer patients, furnishing the FDA with two decades of clinical documentation. The FDA set the application aside, pending the addition to Hubbard's team of a medical doctor, a supervised medical regimen, and an AMA-accredited hospital. Hubbard secured the help of Oscar Janiger, but the two could not agree on methodology, and Janiger bowed out, leaving Al Hubbard, in his late 70s, without the strength to carry on alone.
Says Willis Harman: "He knew that his work was done."
* * *
The Captain lived out his last days nearly broke, having exhausted his resources trying to harness a dream. Like in the final fleeting hour of an acid trip--when the edge softens and a man realizes that he will not solve the secrets of the Universe, despite what the mind had said earlier--Hubbard smiled gracefully, laid down his six-shooter, and retired to a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona.
On August 31, 1982, at the age of 81, Al Hubbard was called home, having ridden the dream like a rodeo cowboy. On very quiet nights, with the right kind of ears, you can hear him giving God hell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaumQvMWBA
by Todd Brendan Fahey
Published originally by High Times, November 1991
THE HANDLER - Captain Trips
Before Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...before Timothy Leary...before Ken Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests...before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.
You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life--a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.
They called him "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.
Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should."
He is treated like a demigod by some, as a lunatic uncle by others. But nobody is ambivalent about the Captain: He was as brilliant as the noonday sun, mysterious as the rarest virus, and friendly like a golden retriever.
The first visage of Hubbard was beheld by Dr. Humphry Osmond, now senior psychiatrist at Alabama's Bryce Hospital. He and Dr. John Smythies were researching the correlation between schizophrenia and the hallucinogens mescaline and adrenochrome at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, when an A.M. Hubbard requested the pleasure of Osmond's company for lunch at the swank Vancouver Yacht Club. Dr. Osmond later recalled, "It was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."
Captain Hubbard was interested in obtaining some mescaline, and, as it was still legal, Dr. Osmond supplied him with some. "He was interested in all sorts of odd things," Osmond laughs. Among Hubbard's passions was motion. His identity as "captain" came from his master of sea vessels certification and a stint in the US Merchant Marine.
At the time of their meeting in 1953, Al Hubbard owned secluded Daymen Island off the coast of Vancouver--a former Indian colony surrounded by a huge wall of oyster shells. To access his 24-acre estate, Hubbard built a hangar for his aircraft and a slip for his yacht from a fallen redwood. But it was the inner voyage that drove the Captain until his death in 1982. Fueled by psychedelics, he set sail and rode the great wave as a neuronaut, with only the white noise in his ears and a fever in his brain.
His head shorn to a crew and wearing a paramilitary uniform with a holstered long-barrel Colt .45, Captain Al Hubbard showed up one day in '63 on the doorstep of a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.
"He blew in with that uniform...laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!" Leary recalls. "He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That's what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn't believe...claimed he was friends with the Pope."
Did Leary believe him?
"Well, yeah, no question."
The captain had come bearing gifts of LSD, which he wanted to swap for psilocybin, the synthetic magic mushroom produced by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories. "The thing that impressed me," Leary remembers, "is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him."
Among Hubbard's heavyweight cheerleaders was Aldous Huxley, author of the sardonic novel Brave New World. Huxley had been turned on to mescaline by Osmond in '53, an experience that spawned the seminal psychedelic handbook The Doors of Perception. Huxley became an unabashed sponsor for the chemicals then known as "psychotomimetic"--literally, "madness mimicking."
But neither Huxley nor Hubbard nor Osmond experienced madness, and Dr. Osmond wrote a rhyme to Huxley one day in the early 1950s, coining a new word for the English language, and a credo for the next generation:
To fathom hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
* * *
Those who knew Al Hubbard would describe him as just a "barefoot boy from Kentucky," who never got past third grade. But as a young man, the shoeless hillbilly was purportedly visited by a pair of angels, who told him to build something. He had absolutely no training, "but he had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," says Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, CA.
In 1919, guided by other-worldly forces, Hubbard invented the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a radioactive battery that could not be explained by the technology of the day. The Seattle Post- Intelligencer reported that Hubbard's invention, hidden in an 11" x 14" box, had powered a ferry- sized vessel around Seattle's Portico Bay nonstop for three days. Fifty percent rights to the patent were eventually bought by the Radium Corporation of Pittsburgh for $75,000, and nothing more was heard of the Hubbard Energy Transformer.
Hubbard stifled his talents briefly as an engineer in the early 1920s, but an unquenchable streak of mischief burned in the boy inventor. Vancouver magazine's Ben Metcalfe reports that Hubbard soon took a job as a Seattle taxi driver during Prohibition. With a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system hidden in the trunk of his cab, Hubbard helped rum-runners to successfully ferry booze past the US and Canadian Coast Guards. He was, however, caught by the FBI and went to prison for 18 months.
After his release, Hubbard's natural talent for electronic communications attracted scouts from Allen Dulles's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Also according to Metcalfe, Hubbard was at least peripherally involved in the Manhattan Project.
The captain was pardoned of any and all wrongdoing by Harry S. Truman under Presidential Pardon #2676, and subsequently became agent Captain Al Hubbard of the OSS. As a maritime specialist, Hubbard was enjoined to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada at night, without lights, in the waning hours of World War II--an operations of dubious legality, which had him facing a Congressional investigation. To escape federal indictment, Hubbard moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.
Parlaying connections and cash, Hubbard founded Marine Manufacturing, a Vancouver charter-boat concern, and in his early 40s realized his lifelong ambition of becoming a millionaire. By 1950 he was scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of Vancouver, owned his own fleet of aircraft, a 100-foot yacht, and a Canadian island. And he was miserable.
"Al was desperately searching for meaning in his life," says Willis Harman. Seeking enlightenment, Hubbard returned to an area near Spokane, WA, where he'd spent summers during his youth. He hiked into the woods and an angel purportedly appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to," says Harman. "But he hadn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."
In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. "He knew that was it," says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conduction the experiment, and came back with some LSD for himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True Believer.
"Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament," recalls Leary.
A 1968 resume states that Hubbard was at various times employed by the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and, ironically, what is now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Whether he was part of the CIA mind-control project known as MK-ULTRA, might never be known: all paperwork generated in connection with that diabolical experiment was destroyed in '73 by MK-ULTRA chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, on orders from then-CIA Director Richard Helms, citing a "paper crisis."
Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against the Soviets' own alleged chemical technology, often with disastrous results. The secret project would see at least two deaths: tennis pro Harold Blauer died after a massive injection of MDA; and the army's own Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist, crashed through a closed window in the 12th floor of New York's Statler Hotel, after drinking cognac laced with LSD during a CIA symposium. Dr. Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with such a project "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."
[Note: Recently, a researcher for WorldNetDaily and author of a forthcoming book based on the Frank Olson "murder," revealed to this writer that he has received, via a FOIA request of CIA declassified materials, documents which indicate that Al Hubbard was, indeed, in contact with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White--an FBI narcotics official who managed Operation Midnight Climax, a joint CIA/FBI blackmail project in which unwitting "johns" were given drinks spiked with LSD by CIA-managed prostitutes, and whose exploits were videotaped from behind two-way mirrors at posh hotels in both New York and San Francisco. The researcher would reveal only that Al Hubbard's name "appeared in connection with Gottlieb and White, but the material is heavily redacted."] Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."
Heard had written a letter to Stolaroff, describing the beauty of his psychedelic experience with Al Hubbard. "That letter would be priceless--but Hubbard, I'm sure, arranged to have it stolen.... He was a sonofabitch: God and the Devil, both there in full force."
Stolaroff was so moved by Heard's letter that, in '56, he agreed to take LSD with Hubbard in Vancouver. "After that first LSD experience, I said 'this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.'"
He was not alone.
Through his interest in aircraft, Hubbard had become friends with a prominent Canadian businessman. The businessman eventually found himself taking LSD with Hubbard and, after coming down, told Hubbard never to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah.
Hubbard abandoned his uranium empire and, for the next decade, traveled the globe as a psychedelic missionary. "Al's dream was to open up a worldwide chain of clinics as training grounds for other LSD researchers," says Stolaroff. His first pilgrimage was to Switzerland, home of Sandoz Laboratories, producers of both Delysid (trade name for LSD) and psilocybin. He procured a gram of LSD (roughly 10,000 doses) and set up shop in a safe-deposit vault in the Zurich airport's duty-free section. From there he was able to ship quantities of his booty without a tariff to a waiting world.
Swiss officials quickly detained Hubbard for violating the nation's drug laws, which provided no exemption from the duty-free provision. Myron Stolaroff petitioned Washington for the Captain's release, but the State Department wanted nothing to do with Al Hubbard. Oddly, when a hearing was held, blue-suited officials from the department were in attendance. The Swiss tribunal declared Hubbard's passport invalid for five years, and he was deported. Undeterred, Hubbard traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he had another gram of LSD put into tablet form by Chemapol--a division of the pharmaceutical giant Spofa--and then flew west.
Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.
According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.
His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.
Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.
But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.
His departure came as the Canadian Medical Association was becoming increasingly suspicious of Hollywood Hospital in the wake of publicity surrounding MK-ULTRA. The Canadian Citizen's Commission on Human Rights had already discovered one Dr. Harold Abramson, a CIA contract psychiatrist, on the board of MacLean's International Association for Psychedelic Therapy, and external pressure was weighing on MacLean to release Al Hubbard, the former OSS officer with suspected CIA links. Compounding Hubbard's plight was the death of his Canadian benefactor, leaving Hubbard with neither an income nor the financial cushion upon which he had become dependent.
His services were eventually recruited by Willis Harman, then-Director of the Educational Policy Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Stanford University. Harman employed Hubbard as a security guard for SRI, "although," Harman admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work."
Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special [LSD] sessions for us."
According to Dr. Abram Hoffer, "Al had a grandiose idea that if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society."
Hubbard's tenure at SRI was uneasy. The political bent of the Stanford think-tank was decidedly left-wing, clashing sharply with Hubbard's own world-perspective. "Al was really an arch-conservative," says the confidential source. "He really didn't like what the hippies were doing with LSD, and he held Timothy Leary in great contempt."
Humphry Osmond recalls a particular psilocybin session in which "Al got greatly preoccupied with the idea that he ought to shoot Timothy, and when I began to reason with him that this would be a very bad idea...I became much concerned that he might shoot me..."
"To Al," says Myron Stolaroff, "LSD enabled man to see his true self, his true nature and the true order of things." But, to Hubbard, the true order of things had little to do with the antics of the American Left.
Recognizing its potential psychic hazards, Hubbard believed that LSD should be administered and monitored by trained professionals. He claimed that he had stockpiled more LSD than anyone on the planet besides Sandoz--including the US government--and he clearly wanted a firm hand in influencing the way it was used. However, Hubbard refused all opportunities to become the LSD Philosopher-King. Whereas Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves. When cornered by a video camera shortly before this death, and asked to say something to the future, Hubbard replied simply, "You're the future."
In March of 1966, the cold winds of Congress blew out all hope for Al Hubbard's enlightened Mother Earth. Facing a storm of protest brought on by Leary's reckless antics and the "LSD-related suicide" of Diane Linkletter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Drug Abuse Control Amendment, which declared lysergic acid diethylamide a Schedule I substance; simple possession was deemed a felony, punishable by 15 years in prison. According to Humphry Osmond, Hubbard lobbied Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who reportedly took the cause of LSD into the Senate chambers, and emerged un-victorious.
"[The government] had a deep fear of having their picture of reality challenged," mourns Harman. "It had nothing to do with people harming their lives with chemicals--because if you took all the people who had ever had any harmful effects from psychedelics, it's minuscule compared to those associated with alcohol and tobacco."
FDA chief James L. Goddard ordered agents to seize all remaining psychedelics not accounted for by Sandoz. "It was scary," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, whose Beverly Hills office was raided and years' worth of clinical research confiscated.
Hubbard begged Abram Hoffer to let him hide his supply in Hoffer's Canadian Psychiatric Facility. But the doctor refused, and it is believed that Hubbard buried most of his LSD in a sacred parcel in Death Valley, California, claiming that it had been used, rather than risk prosecution. When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research--none using humans, and none of them associated with Al Hubbard. In 1968, his finances in ruins, Hubbard was forced to sell his private island sanctuary for what one close friend termed "a pittance." He filled a number of boats with the antiquated electronics used in his eccentric nuclear experiments, and left Daymen Island for California. Hubbard's efforts in his last decade were effectively wasted, according to most of his friends. Lack of both finances and government permit to resume research crippled all remaining projects he may have had in the hopper.
After SRI canceled his contract in 1974 Hubbard went into semiretirement, splitting his time between a 5-acre ranch in Vancouver and an apartment in Menlo Park. But in 1978, battling an enlarged heart and never far away from a bottle of pure oxygen, Hubbard make one last run at the FDA. He applied for an IND to use LSD-25 on terminal cancer patients, furnishing the FDA with two decades of clinical documentation. The FDA set the application aside, pending the addition to Hubbard's team of a medical doctor, a supervised medical regimen, and an AMA-accredited hospital. Hubbard secured the help of Oscar Janiger, but the two could not agree on methodology, and Janiger bowed out, leaving Al Hubbard, in his late 70s, without the strength to carry on alone.
Says Willis Harman: "He knew that his work was done."
* * *
The Captain lived out his last days nearly broke, having exhausted his resources trying to harness a dream. Like in the final fleeting hour of an acid trip--when the edge softens and a man realizes that he will not solve the secrets of the Universe, despite what the mind had said earlier--Hubbard smiled gracefully, laid down his six-shooter, and retired to a mobile home in Casa Grande, Arizona.
On August 31, 1982, at the age of 81, Al Hubbard was called home, having ridden the dream like a rodeo cowboy. On very quiet nights, with the right kind of ears, you can hear him giving God hell.
"Hippy Mafia", cont.
Glen and Marilyn Lynd, circa 1968. Lynd had just returned from Afghanistan on one of the Brotherhood's earliest smuggling trips.
He would go on to play a cataclysmic role in the group after he and his wife moved up to the Idyllwild ranch with Leary.
He would go on to play a cataclysmic role in the group after he and his wife moved up to the Idyllwild ranch with Leary.
Glenn Lynd, 1969, Oregon Coast
Mike Hynson and Dave Hall, who made the first hash run to India, hanging out in Hawaii with John and Carol Griggs.
