Most people have heard of Pink Floyd, one of the most popular British rock bands of all time. But fewer are familiar with their early days, which were very much tied to the 1960s underground British psychedelic movement. In contrast to the somewhat faceless monolithic hit making machine we are more familiar with, the early Floyd had a very clear face, personality, frontman/sex symbol: Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett
Syd seemed to achieve mythical Rock Star status in Britain's underground before most people even knew the moon had a side which was always dark. His exit from the group in 1968 due to some kind of personal decline only fed the mystique more, and to this day nobody seems to know exactly what happened to him. The "Syd myth" was further propagated by the band itself over the years following his exit, within songs like "Wish You Were Here," "Shine on you Crazy Diamond," and many aspects of the Rock Opera "The Wall."
In cliche Rock history, our heroes must typically die before we elevate them to a certain legendary status. But in this case, our hero checked out "mentally," yet persisted physically all the way up to the year 2003 - managing to be "dead" to the world in a sense for all those years. It's actually a very sad story, a cautionary tale which is still being pondered, and who's moral probably has yet to be completely discerned.
LSD IN BRITAIN
Most reading this are probably somewhat aware of LSD's prominent role in the 1960s Psychedelic Hippy Movement and San Francisco's "Summer of Love." Some of you might even remember a statement by Acid Guru Timothy Leary:
["I give the CIA a total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement counterculture events of the 1960s...The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with this drug..."]
But how many of you knew that LSD was also being used by Britain's military intelligence on both witting and unwitting participants in the 1960s AND EARLIER? A fascinating book called "Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain" by Andy Roberts sheds light upon this previously murky history, leading up to the 1960s counterculture movement of Britain's underground - where Pink Floyd originally emerged. But before getting into the latter, I wanted to go back in history and attempt to trace Syd's "fatal dose" to its origin.
M.O.D. - The Ministry of Defence (MOD or MoD) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for implementing the defence policy set by the government and serves as the headquarters of the British Armed Forces. - wiki
MOD - Mod, from the word modernist, is a subculture that began in late 1950s London and spread throughout Great Britain, eventually influencing fashions and trends in other countries. - wiki
J.I.B. - A "Joint Intelligence Bureau" (JIB) or "Joint Intelligence Center" (JIC) is a centralized intelligence gathering and analysis unit within a country's military, often operating at the strategic level. - Google
The original motivation behind both the USA and Britain's intelligence services taking an interest in LSD seems to stem from fears regarding Russia's then apparent lead, in using it as some sort of "truth serum" or other military application. LSD needed to be better understood and incorporated into the arsenal so that Russia would not have an "upper hand" militarily speaking, I suppose.
According to Albion Dreaming [AD], the first person to bring LSD into Britain was a psychiatrist named Ronnie Sandison, who worked at Worchester’s Powick Hospital. In September of 1952 he accepted an offer to tour the Swiss Mental Hospital Sandoz, where he discussed with an Albert Hoffman, the results of tests they'd been conducting upon patients there, dosed with LSD. Apparently this was all very exciting breakthrough medicine to Sandison, and upon completion of his 2nd visit a couple months later, Hoffman sent him home with a gift: a box of ampoules, each containing 100 μg of LSD, under the trade name Delysid.
[Ronald Sanison [1916-2010) "Pychiatrist who pioneered the clinical use of LSD in Britain and remained convinced of it's benefits" - The Daily Telegraph]
[Albert Hoffman (1906-2008) "the Father of LSD" - New York Times.]
Around the same time, a colleague of Sandison's named Dr. Joel Elkes was also exploring LSD's potential outside of Powick. In 1951 Elkes founded Birmingham University’s Department of Experimental Psychology and had a special interest in the effects of drugs on consciousness. In 1956 Sandison approached Birmingham University to host/fund a special LSD unit, which they were suspiciously quick to support. Sandison seemed to believe that Dr Elkes was the main reason the LSD unit got such quick and vast funding, though he didn't know what his motives were in supporting it. Unbeknownst to Sandison at the time, Dr Elkes had connections to the M.O.D., who considered Dr Elkes an expert in the field. It seems likely that his motivation in pushing LSD research was probably linked to a covert operation within the M.O.D.
[Dr. Joel Elkes (1913-2015) "A pioneer of neuropsychopharmacology" - The Pharmaceudical Journal]
"A 1956 M.O.D. report titled “Abreactive Drugs”, prepared for the Defence Research Policy Committee, notes LSD first came to the attention of the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) “some 4 years ago. This formal discussion about LSD took place during Professor Henry Beecher’s visit to Britain in the spring of 1952. The Harvard Professor of Anaesthesiology had a controversial involvement with psychedelic drugs, having first been involved in secret CIA mescaline experiments in Germany after World War II. Beecher saw a role for these drugs and wanted to spread the word among the Allied intelligence agencies." -AD
PHASE I: LABORATORY TESTS
Britain's first military LSD tests were carried out at Porton Down, commissioned by the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) also known as MI6. This facility on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire carried out research into chemical weapons since its founding in 1916. During these LSD trials of 1953-54, Sandoz was the only known manufacturer of the drug, over in Basel, Switzerland. Yes, the same Sandoz who's Dr Albert Hoffman gave Ronnie Sandison a free box of LSD right about that same time - and who continued to donate free LSD to Sandison until he left Powick in 1964.
"We stopped the trials ... when it was reported that in a few people it might produce suicidal tendencies." - Harry Collumbine, Porton Down Scientist
[A nerve agent trial at Porton Down - Historyworkshop.org.uk]
"The whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s. I was co-operating with MI6 in a joint programme to investigate how far the hallucinatory drug LSD could be used in interrogations, and extensive trials took place at Porton. I even volunteered as a guinea pig on one occasion" - Peter Wright, ex-MI5 Operative
Both Collumbine and Dr Elkes were present during a November 23rd 1955 meeting in which Elkes mentions the responses of subjects to 50–100 μg of LSD who were "quite unaware they'd been given anything." A transcript of the meeting states: "Dr. Collumbine was of the opinion that subjects to whom the drug had been administered without their knowledge were affected to the extent that their reactions were beyond their control when subjected to interrogation by a skilled interrogator experienced in the application of this drug." This "minor detail" of subjects who were drugged without being informed beforehand seems to go unmentioned in the Department of Experimental Psychology archives.
A Professor Gaddum stated "a few doses did not cause problems with the testing of human subjects, but repeated doses might produce an IRREVERSABLE EFFECT." This seems to have lead to a brief pause in the LSD experiments, until it was decided to resume in 1961 after subjects had been properly screened ahead of time. The implication being that certain individuals of a certain psychological profile were more prone to adverse reaction to LSD than others. That's funny, don't remember any of my friends mentioning that when I was a young Acid-Head!
Sandison reported in his 1964 paper that: “We have found that about one half of our cases required extensive rehabilitation involving the establishment of a new set of conditioned social responses.” Does this sound like a drug that should be freely given out indiscriminently to the general public?
Many other doctors in Britain were treating their patients with LSD by the mid 50s - like Roffey Park in Surrey, the Marlborough Day Hospital and Guy’s Hospital in London, Netley Hospital in Southampton, Bromley Psychiatric clinic and others.
PHASE II: MILITARY FIELD CONDITIONS
The inital phase of British LSD reseach seemed to be mostly restricted to laboratory environments - where it was determined that the drug could cause people to lose control of their own reactions to stimuli. It was also found that certain individuals suffered IRREVERSABLE effects, and even induced suicidal tendencies in others. Although specific responses seemed to be a bit elusive so far, the drug was clearly an incapacitating agent. So the next step was to observe how it would affect troops out in the field.
[James Ketchum (1931-2019) a psychiatrist and U.S. Army Medical Corps officer who worked for almost a decade (1960–1969) on the U.S. military’s top secret psychochemical warfare program at the Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, which researched chemicals to be used to "incapacitate the minds" of adversaries.]
Between November and December of 1964, Operartion Moneybags took place at Porton Down. 41 Royal Marine Commandos were filmed in order to observe their responses on LSD during field conditions. A psychiatrist named Ketchum saw the footage, and commented: “No doubt about it – LSD could disrupt even the most elite troops…“ [It is worth noting that Ketchum worked at America's Edgewood Arsenal, a chemical warefare facility where Francis Vincent Zappa, father of Frank, also worked for a time.]
Despite the questionable ethics of these trials, Moneybags was considered a success. Operation Recount was then initiated in 1966, the year LSD was made illegal in Britain. And if you are a Beatles fan, this is also about the same time they began pushing drug use in their music. It's also the year "Paul is Dead" rumors began, incidentally.
During Operation Recount, men from the Royal Artillery's 37th Heavy Air Defense Regiment were not told what drug they would be given or what affects it might have upon them. This was done specifically to observe how they would respond to being caught off guard by the drug.
The US Army supplied Porton Down with 20 grams of LSD from December 1965 to June 1966. Since the M.O.D. claims only of handful of individuals were involved, and that these experiments ceased entirely by 1969, A.D. asks the question "what happened to the stockpile of LSD Porton must have held at the end of the Sixties?"
The detrimental effects of these tests upon human subjects seems to have been vastly downplayed, or completely unmentioned in government documents concerning Porton Down's activities during this time frame.
"In 1953 and 1954 the Secret Intelligence Service commissioned Porton Down to conduct tests on military service volunteers, and also on Porton scientists themselves, to examine their reactions to LSD." - Secretary of State for Defence, Jack Straw
The reason we know what we do about these covert tests, and that they even existed at all, is probably due to pressure upon the British Government and British Intelligence entities for more transparency. Operation Antler was initiated to investigate allegations of malfeasance at Porton Down. Though we know much more today than people did many years ago, the full extent of experiments sponsored by the intelligence services in the early Fifties remains cloaked in mystery.
[Ronald David Laing (1927-1989)"The Psychiatrist who wanted to make madness normal" - BBC
PHASE III: THE GENERAL PUBLIC
In 1956, Ronald Laing got a grant to train at the Tavistock Clinic in London, widely known as a centre for the study and practice of psychotherapy (particularly psychoanalysis). He remained at the Tavistock Clinic until 1964. He also spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley.
Laing's time at Tavistock is noteworthy here, as it was (and probably still is) a major think tank that was likely behind the Beatles and "The British Invasion". For more on this, see the book "Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses," or check out the work of Mike Williams aka "Sage of Quay" on Rumble.com.
In 1960 Laing was given his first dose of LSD by a Dr Richard Gelfer, who believed it mimicked psychosis. Laing was so impressed that he immediately began using it on (and with) his patients, becoming one of the many Doctors utilizing LSD in their therapy sessions (or whatever you want to call them). One patient remarked, "dropping acid with R.D. Laing was both exhilarating and liberating".
R.D. Laing seemed to have become one of the first Doctors in Britain to connect, in a very public way, with the LSD counterculture - even partaking of the Swinging London nightlife and various counter culture events. The hype seemed to peak when he treated the then very famous James Bond actor, Sean Connery.
Given all of the above, the question comes to mind, "was Syd Barrett simply another casualty in the next phase of inhumane LSD experiments upon people?" I've heard theories on his demise approached from just about every angle EXCEPT this one, so we will dive into that in part 2.
This blog was researched, written, and continues to be maintained by 1 person. If you enjoyed it and would like to encourage more of them, donations can be made by clicking the button below.
Related blogs:
No comments:
Post a Comment