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I wish people better understood that their advocacy of and for drugs is and was pushed by the CIA to essentially deconstruct and damage a society that would oth

I wish people better understood that their advocacy of and for drugs is and was pushed by the CIA to essentially deconstruct and damage a society that would otherwise organize and oppose the will of the ruling class. There is an interesting book that was recently released, The Poisoner in Chief that is a good introduction, even though it seems it is meant to also be a bit of a rehabilitation of a horrible human, Sidney Gottlieb.

tananaev 4y ago
Any links to support this theory?
j_m_b 4y ago
>that would otherwise organize and oppose the will of the ruling class Eh, perhaps that was their motivation, but I'm not at all convinced that would have been the result. Though illegal, Psychedelics have been widely available for decades. Those results have failed to materialize.
phonescreen_man 4y ago
Are you suggesting the CIA pushed lsd/shrooms to alter society in a way that was beneficial for the ruling class, or they pushed society in a direction to ban those substances to keep people from organizing and becoming a ruling class? Or something else? If you think about it, a lot of the Silicon Valley advancement of the chip and subsequent computer revolution was driven by the early lsd/shrooms advocates. In a way they did become the new ruling class.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Hardly. Negotiations are continuing. Over in China, Ma was cut down to size. Earlier we had Gates' congressional woes before he found philanthropy Jesus, and Jeff's dirty laundry was all over internet. The last time something like this happened was with Oil. Rockefeller was integrated. A couple of centuries before that bankers were integrated. (There was a "glorious revolution" and that's what got serious European/English imperialism going.) Issue with tech titans is that unlike oil, it (software) threatens to directly displace finance. So oil and finance do tussle ("who runs barter town?") but there are synergies. But finance is likely a subset of an abstract notion of 'software'. Lords of software threaten to displace those of finance. (If we lived in a SciFi world, Apple would be secretly building an armed forces with their mountain of cash by now :)
photochemsyn 4y ago
The history of the CIA's acquisition and use of psychedelics and other drugs is detailed in 'Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion' (1994) Certainly the CIA was trying to use psychedelics as interrogation tools and perhaps as part of a 'dirty tricks campaign' (secretly dosing politicians before speeches, etc.), and there was a lot of collaboration with various university psych departments in terms of research (students, prison inmates, etc. as research subjects) as well as in prostitution houses. This is all well-documented. However, it really escaped from their control and had unexpected side effects. A good case example is that of Frank Olson, a bacteriological warfare specialist who was collaborating with the CIA in the MK-ULTRA program. After being dosed in a 'training session' with CIA members, he had apparent pangs of conscience (early 1950s) and wanted to quit the program. This was a period when the USA had an active biological weapons program, built in part on research results taken from the Japanese biological weapons program, and may have been testing biological weapons in North Korea as well. (This was all later exposed in the 1970s Congressional hearings, but at the time was top secret). It's quite likely that the CIA assassinated Frank Olson while claiming his death was a suicide, out of fear he would reveal all this to the public. Hence, I doubt the central theme of your argument - psychedelics can have a wide variety of effects on individuals, and tend to be feared by authoritarians because of these unpredictable effects (abandoning religious belief or faith in authority is not an uncommon result). In addition, drug use is something humans have gravitated towards in every known society throughout recorded history, there's no need to invoke secretive government agencies and hidden motives to explain it.

tananaev 4y ago

Any links to support this theory?

j_m_b 4y ago

>that would otherwise organize and oppose the will of the ruling class Eh, perhaps that was their motivation, but I'm not at all convinced that would have been the result. Though illegal, Psychedelics have been widely available for decades. Those results have failed to materialize.

phonescreen_man 4y ago

Are you suggesting the CIA pushed lsd/shrooms to alter society in a way that was beneficial for the ruling class, or they pushed society in a direction to ban those substances to keep people from organizing and becoming a ruling class? Or something else? If you think about it, a lot of the Silicon Valley advancement of the chip and subsequent computer revolution was driven by the early lsd/shrooms advocates. In a way they did become the new ruling class.

eternalban 4y ago
Hardly. Negotiations are continuing. Over in China, Ma was cut down to size. Earlier we had Gates' congressional woes before he found philanthropy Jesus, and Jeff's dirty laundry was all over internet. The last time something like this happened was with Oil. Rockefeller was integrated. A couple of centuries before that bankers were integrated. (There was a "glorious revolution" and that's what got serious European/English imperialism going.) Issue with tech titans is that unlike oil, it (software) threatens to directly displace finance. So oil and finance do tussle ("who runs barter town?") but there are synergies. But finance is likely a subset of an abstract notion of 'software'. Lords of software threaten to displace those of finance. (If we lived in a SciFi world, Apple would be secretly building an armed forces with their mountain of cash by now :)

photochemsyn 4y ago

The history of the CIA's acquisition and use of psychedelics and other drugs is detailed in 'Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion' (1994) Certainly the CIA was trying to use psychedelics as interrogation tools and perhaps as part of a 'dirty tricks campaign' (secretly dosing politicians before speeches, etc.), and there was a lot of collaboration with various university psych departments in terms of research (students, prison inmates, etc. as research subjects) as well as in prostitution houses. This is all well-documented. However, it really escaped from their control and had unexpected side effects. A good case example is that of Frank Olson, a bacteriological warfare specialist who was collaborating with the CIA in the MK-ULTRA program. After being dosed in a 'training session' with CIA members, he had apparent pangs of conscience (early 1950s) and wanted to quit the program. This was a period when the USA had an active biological weapons program, built in part on research results taken from the Japanese biological weapons program, and may have been testing biological weapons in North Korea as well. (This was all later exposed in the 1970s Congressional hearings, but at the time was top secret). It's quite likely that the CIA assassinated Frank Olson while claiming his death was a suicide, out of fear he would reveal all this to the public. Hence, I doubt the central theme of your argument - psychedelics can have a wide variety of effects on individuals, and tend to be feared by authoritarians because of these unpredictable effects (abandoning religious belief or faith in authority is not an uncommon result). In addition, drug use is something humans have gravitated towards in every known society throughout recorded history, there's no need to invoke secretive government agencies and hidden motives to explain it.