Pubdate: Thu, 09 Mar 2006
Source: Harvard Independent (MA Edu)
Page: Cover Article
Copyright: 2006 The Harvard Independent, Inc.
Contact: http://www.harvardindependent.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3984
Authors: Shane Wilson and Jon Liu
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/LSD (LSD)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
HARVARD IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS
Of veritas and LSD.
When news broke a fortnight ago that two undergraduates had been
arrested in connection with a nude, acid-fueled spectacle in the
corridors of Quincy House's C-entry, one could have been forgiven for
checking the calendar. Yes, it was 2006, not 1966 -- yet once again,
the banks of the Charles were playing host to psychedelic excess.
Thirty-eight hits' worth of excess, to be precise -- the number that
the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) allegedly found in
the room of Soren J. Siebach '08, as first reported in a February 25
article on the Crimson's website. The other arrestee, whom HUPD has
not yet named, was hospitalized for drug treatment after assaulting
two officers; naked and "acting in an aggressive and threatening
manner," in the words of police logs, he initially eluded capture
because his skin was too sweaty to seize.
Siebach, a Utah native, came to college with a perfect ACT score and
an avowed interest in "disco skating," according to his high-school
newspaper. Now he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years'
imprisonment, thanks to Massachusetts school-zone provisions. (Quincy
House is across the street from the Radcliffe Child Care Center, a
"private accredited preschool" under the law.)
Siebach's cohort will face arraignment next week on one count of
marijuana possession and two counts of assault and battery against a
police officer, said HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano. The former
charge has a maximum sentence of six months; the latter, two and a half years.
The incident came as a surprise, wrote Quincy C resident Kevin J.
Feeney '08 in an e-mail. "A lot of people are confused about what did
happen that night, and I suppose worried about what will happen."
Nonetheless, Feeney said, "the talk has stayed relatively quiet.
Nothing on the open list, no official statement." He described the
Quincy community overall as "sympathetic toward everyone involved. We
haven't gone Salem, yet."
Catalano, the HUPD spokesperson, characterized the incident as
unusual -- especially in light of the hallucinogen involved. "We
weren't necessarily surprised," he said, "but it was something new.
Most of our drug arrests involve marijuana." He could not recall
another specific LSD-related arrest from his six years with the Department.
In all likelihood, Catalano said, the event does not signal a
resurgence of LSD use at Harvard -- though one wonders who was on the
receiving end of Siebach's alleged "intent to distribute" the 38
hits. Regardless, the Quincy House sideshow represents just the
latest chapter in Harvard's long and storied history with D-lysergic
acid diethylamide -- a history that has seen the hallucinogen
flirting with both sides of the countercultural divide.
American Pioneers
Today, the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, described on its
website as "a unique collaboration between the Massachusetts
Department of Health and Harvard Medical School," serves as a premier
teaching hospital for psychologists, psychiatrists, and other
mental-health professionals. In a less genteel time, however, the
Harvard-affiliated Center was called the Boston Psychopathic Hospital
- -- and in 1949, it witnessed the American arrival of a European immigrant: LSD.
Six years earlier, the Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman had discovered
first-hand the hallucinogenic powers of the compound, which he had
originally synthesized in 1938. But according to John D. Marks' 1979
book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" (Time Books),
Hoffman's substance received little attention in the States until a
Viennese psychiatry professor named Otto Kauders extolled its virtues
at a conference held at Boston Psychopathic. Kauders, described in an
Associated Press obituary as "internationally known," suggested that
the schizophrenia-like state that LSD seemed to induce might come in
handy for researchers; if they could find an antidote to the drug,
they might also find the cure for a range of mental illnesses.
Fascinated by Kauders' ideas, the neuropsychiatrist Max Rinkel, a
German emigre working for Boston Psychopathic's Department of
Research, requested a sample of LSD from a Swiss pharmaceutical company.
Robert W. Hyde, the hospital's assistant superintendent, volunteered
to serve as the guinea pig. Rinkel later described Hyde's first foray
into psychedelia at a neuropharmacology conference in Princeton.
After downing 100 micrograms of LSD, Rinkel said, Hyde "became quite
paranoid, saying that we had not given him anything. He also berated
us and said that the company had cheated us...That was not Dr. Hyde's
normal behavior; he is a very friendly, pleasant man." To be sure,
Hyde's transformation blew no minds, and his drug-addled persona,
however abrasive, paled in comparison to that of his literary
namesake. Even so, his was the first documented "trip" in American
history -- organized and funded, at least in part, by the Harvard
Medical School.
In another early test case described by Rinkel, he and a
Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist "were very fortunate in
having an outstanding contemporary American painter volunteer for an
experiment with LSD." The volunteer was Hyman Bloom, a then prominent
Boston artist who had studied under Denman W. Ross, a Harvard
professor emeritus. Not only were Bloom's LSD-loosened words recorded
for science; he also translated his experience into a series of
pencil drawings. The scribbles charted Bloom's hallucinatory descent.
Two hours into the experiment, Rinkel said, Bloom wrote "Hindu
religion" in the upper corner of a piece of paper; "in the lower part
he drew monsters, commenting: 'This face comes out like a cat-like
face.'" At times, he was reduced to "making dots and dashes"; at
other times, he managed to sketch out a picture of "a butchered beef
or ox" that he later sold to a private collector. Seeking the opinion
of an expert critic, Rinkel turned to Wilhelm R. W. Koehler, the
William Dorr Boardman Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Harvard.
What Koehler said is unknown, but with or without his approbation the
Fogg Art Museum eventually acquired over 60 of Bloom's works, thanks
in part to donations from his old mentor, Professor Ross.
In 1966, Bloom spoke to the New York Times about his path-breaking
trip, calling it "really a great experience." "On the other hand," he
said, "it was more difficult to draw."
With Rinkel's help, the heavily Harvard-connected Bloom had become
one of the first people ever to combine art with LSD; he would not be
the last. Yet while Bloom and Rinkel led the way in creative and
aesthetic uses of the drug, Rinkel's colleagues at Boston
Psychopathic -- and in particular ur-tripper Robert W. Hyde -- were
steering the hallucinogen in much more sinister directions.
Central Intelligence
It is not clear precisely how or when it happened, but perhaps as
early as 1952 Boston Psychopathic had become ground zero for Project
MKULTRA. Described in a 1977 New York Times article as "a secret,
25-year, $25-million effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to
learn how to control the human mind," the project sought to counter
potential Soviet brainwashing by developing its own techniques for
manipulating and programming behavior -- techniques that sometimes
involved hallucinogenic drugs. "The most fascinating thing about
[LSD]," an anonymous former MKULTRA official told author John Marks
in 1979, "was that such minute quantities had such a terrific
effect." But precisely what "effect" LSD had was still poorly
understood. By funneling money to academics through a number of
private foundations and front groups, the CIA aimed to find out
exactly what the drug could do.
And Dr. Hyde aimed to help. Officially, only he and his immediate
superior -- hospital superintendent, Harvard Medical School graduate,
and Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Harry C. Solomon --
knew where the money for the hospital's LSD program -- some $286,000
spread across nine years -- really came from. Unofficially, other
high-level researchers could not be so easily hoodwinked; one, Dr. J.
Herbert DeShon, told Marks that his colleagues were aware of the
intelligence agency's role but "agreed not to discuss it."
Supported by CIA largesse, Hyde and a handful of collaborators --
including a fellow Medical School professor and a future Bureau of
Study Counsel director -- undertook basic LSD research, publishing a
series of journal articles that meticulously investigated the effects
of the drug on experimental subjects. In flat, academic prose, the
articles' abstracts paint a lurid picture of what the project
entailed. A 1952 study published in the American Journal of
Psychiatry and co-authored by Hyde, Rinkel, DeShon, and Solomon
outlined "the effect of [LSD]...upon normal male and female
individuals, who responded to the administration of this drug with a
psychotic-schizophrenic like reaction. Disturbances of thought and
speech, affect and mood, perception, depersonalization, behavior, and
intellect are reported." A 1957 study entitled "Experimentally
Induced Depersonalization" claimed to catalogue "569 distortions"
induced in 48 subjects dosed with LSD; "these are classified as
changes of self, of others, of objects and physical environment, and
of general thought processes...Persons with strong positive or
negative feelings are especially exposed to depersonalization experiences."
Such responses, however intriguing or frightening, remained vague and
difficult to measure. Hyde pressed on with more experiments,
examining as many as 100 subjects at a time in ever sharper
physiological and psychological detail. According to a 1994 Boston
Globe investigation, these subjects included Harvard and Radcliffe
students -- enticed by the $25 offered in exchange for participation
- -- along with hospital staff members and mentally ill patients, many
of whom did not or could not give informed consent by today's
standards. In later years, students might well have leaped at the
opportunity to get paid for taking the drug, but according to the
Globe, Boston Psychopathic's subjects typically did not understand
what they were getting themselves into when they "volunteered." They
knew they would participate in a drug study; they did know that LSD
was the drug in question. Even if they had, LSD was still obscure in
the '50s and early '60s. Only medical professionals had a good idea
of what the substance could do -- and at Boston Psychopathic, they
kept their mouths shut for the sake of the project.
Despite the efforts of Hyde and his colleagues, however, the secret
of "mind control" continued to elude MKULTRA. Ideally, Boston
Psychopathic's public research was supposed to yield covert
applications: "in effect," wrote Marks, "the scientists would write
openly about how LSD affects a patient's pulse rate, but they would
tell only the CIA how the drug could be used to ruin that patient's
marriage or memory." But while LSD did sometimes render people
extremely suggestible or otherwise vulnerable, its effects were so
contingent, so unstable, that it made for an unreliable truth serum
or brainwashing agent. By 1961, the Harvard-affiliated hospital's
CIA-funded drug research came to a close. For at least one of its
subjects, however, the story did not end there. The Globe uncovered a
1981 letter written by a student -- alma mater unknown -- who took
part in an LSD test in 1955. Devastated by the experience, he dropped
out of school and meandered around the globe for more than two
decades, lost and alone.
"A New Race of Mutants"?
Far better known than Harvard's complicity in clandestine
intelligence research is its relationship with the late
counterculture icon Timothy Leary. Leary, a lecturer in clinical
psychology, joined forces with Richard Alpert, an assistant professor
in the same field, to explore the mind-expanding powers of
hallucinogenic drugs -- first psilocybin (the substance that makes
"magic" mushrooms magic), then LSD.
Colleagues at the Center for Personality Research attacked Leary and
Alpert for their unscientific methodology, which consisted chiefly of
giving people drugs and seeing what happened. Herbert C. Kelman, then
a lecturer on social psychology and now the Richard Clarke Cabot
Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, denounced Leary and Alpert as
"nonchalant" and "anti-intellectual," according to a March 15, 1962,
article in the Crimson (prior to the founding of the Independent).
The rogue researchers placed an inappropriate "emphasis...on pure
experience, not on verbalizing findings," Kelman reportedly said. "It
is an attempt to reject most of what the psychologist tries to do."
The Harvard Corporation agreed, dismissing both Alpert and Leary in
1963. By 1967, Alpert had traveled to India, taken up yoga, and
renamed himself Ram Dass ("servant of God"). By 1970, Leary had been
convicted of marijuana possession twice and had been broken out of
jail once, thanks to the radical group known as the Weather
Underground. At least the former faculty members were keeping themselves busy.
But by the time Harvard expelled Alpert and Leary, it was already too
late: the lysergic genie was out of the blotter. A breathless Crimson
story in 1962 "revealed that sugar cubes impregnated with LSD have
been sold in the Square." In 1963, a columnist for the newspaper
called Cambridge "the Drug Capital of the East Coast -- at least for
your better class of compounds." And in 1967, John U. Monro, then the
Dean of the College, took the unusual step of informing the Class of
1970 in a sternly worded letter that, "as anyone bright enough to be
at Harvard knows perfectly well, possession or distribution of
marijuana and L.S.D. are strictly against the law." Added Monro, "if
a student is stupid enough to misuse his time here fooling around
with illegal and dangerous drugs, our view is that he should leave
the college." Even Timothy Leary was (briefly) worried: in 1966, he
suggested that "LSD may be creating a new race of mutants," according
to an April 23 Crimson report.
But how many students actually used LSD? How populous was Leary's
"new race"? Roland J. Cole '70, a co-founder and former vice
president of the Independent, said that fewer students may have been
"tripping" than many imagined. "LSD, in particular, was a new drug,
so it got more attention than existing drugs, even though I suspect
actual use of it by Harvard and Radcliffe students was never very
widespread," wrote Cole in an e-mail. Taking LSD, Cole suggested,
became charged with significance at a time when "political and social
efforts 'to do something different' [and] 'to look at the world in
new ways'" consumed the campus. Tripping "could be seen as a symbol"
more than a common pastime, said Cole.
A former Independent editor from the Class of 1973 offered a
different account from a slightly later period. The former editor,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity, wrote in an e-mail that "the
early '70s saw a remarkable confluence of drugs, sex, and rock and
roll...Psychedelics were certainly to be found in the dorm rooms of
adherents to the Tim Leary/Ram Dass school of profound spiritual
exploration as well as the more bacchanalian Ken Kesey/Grateful Dead
school." But the "bacchanalian" revelry might have had its costs, the
source said. "Most people survived their experimentations; sadly,
rumors suggested a few did not." No one said being a mutant would be easy.
Records and Wreckage
However much LSD was actually ingested by Harvard's student body
during the late '60s and early '70s, a not inconsiderable fraction of
it wound up in the bloodstream of James Toback '66. Toback, the
director behind such movies as Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White,
and most recently, When Will I Be Loved, claims to have taken the
largest recorded dose of LSD in history -- 100,000 micrograms --
while he was an undergraduate here. Unlike some of his peers, Toback
lived to tell the tale; he even set it to celluloid in his
semiautobiographical 2001 film Harvard Man, which starred Adrian
Grenier opposite Sarah Michelle Gellar as a brooding Crimson
basketball player who drops acid and learns the true meaning of
madness. In a telephone interview, Toback discussed the experiences
that inspired the scene.
"No one knew what [LSD] could do," Toback said. "Few people knew
about it. But [Aldous] Huxley, Alan Watts, the Tibetan Book of the
Dead: these books were floating around -- all of which made you want
to try it." (Huxley, the well-known author of Brave New World, and
Watts, a philosopher with a strong interest in Eastern religions,
both made public their use of psychedelic drugs in the '60s. The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, an ancient Buddhist text, was sometimes
used a "guidebook" for acid trips.)
"I was definitely looking at [LSD] as a potential God connection,"
Toback said. "People were talking about it in religious terms."
Curious about the mysterious substance, he managed to obtain it from
a friend who had just returned from Switzerland, home to the
pharmaceutical company from which the Boston Psychopathic Hospital
had also purchased its LSD supply. When his friend went through Swiss
customs, Toback said, an officer asked him to identify his
hallucinogen-soaked sugar cubes. Told that they were LSD, the officer
was elated and asked to try out a cube himself. "I'm not sure what
happened to him," Toback said.
Once he had his hands on the drug, Toback immediately slid into
excess. "I took this massive dose," he said. "It was nine hours of
total bliss followed by eight days of indescribable catastrophe --
physically, emotionally, and every other way." Tripping intensely but
enjoyably, he encountered a classmate, a swimmer from Arizona, who
had himself done LSD once, albeit a much smaller dose. "I told him
that Earth was the insane asylum of the universe. 'Don't you agree?
Isn't it [LSD] the answer?'" But the swimmer demurred. Toback grew
anxious. He asked the swimmer how long his intoxication was supposed
to last. The answer -- "Sometimes it never ends" -- shattered
Toback's "bliss" in an instant.
"My self had been disintegrated," he said. "I realized I was just an
artificial construction. It's like when you're three years old --
your brain hasn't formulated a self yet." Behaving erratically,
succumbing to madness, wandering the streets of Cambridge for eight
days, Toback came close to the breaking point. "If I knew that by
killing myself I could end this feeling," he said, "I would blow my
brains out" -- words that went through his mind at the time and that
he later gave to Adrian Grenier's character in Harvard Man.
But Toback didn't blow his brains out. Instead, someone came to his
rescue -- Max Rinkel, the researcher from Boston Psychopathic who
first brought LSD to the States. "Rinkel saved my life," Toback said.
"My mother called around and spoke to an internist who found out that
[Rinkel] was one of originators of LSD." Miraculously, he still lived
in the area and was willing to administer an antidote to the ailing
Toback. "No one else would have done it," Toback said. "There was a
fair chance I would die from the antidote." Rinkel succeeded,
however, and Toback recovered.
He never did drugs again.
For Toback, LSD served as an agent of what he called "transcendental
education." "The absolute benefit you get" from the drug, he said,
"is that you're completely fearless in the face of death afterwards."
Shuffling off the mortal coil, however bad it might be, could never
outdo the horror of eight days of tripping.
Perhaps, then, the unnamed undergraduate who ran naked through Quincy
House will be able to soldier on through his ordeal, even as his
identity stands revealed and his future falls into the hands of the
criminal justice system. Perhaps LSD has liberated from petty concerns.
More likely, however, he's terrified. Who wouldn't be? Like Miniver
Cheevy, it seems, the student was born too late. At Harvard in the
'50s, he would have been a valuable test subject; in the '60s, he
would have been a subversive hero. Today, alas, he is nothing but a
curiosity -- the last desperate champion of a mutant race.
[sidebar]
LSD SIDEBAR: THE FACTS, THE FEELINGS
'Enveloped by All of Nature'
By Jon Liu
Few drugs carry the lifelong stigma -- perhaps literally, given what
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV calls
the Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder -- attached to
lysergic acid diethylamide. As youthful substance abuse increasingly
shifts from the recreational to the utilitarian -- marijuana and
mushrooms replaced by Adderall and Ritalin -- what place is left for
future "intensified colors, trailing images, perceptions of entire
objects, afterimages, halos around objects, macropsia, and micropsia"?
A Rye-Bred Escape From a White-Bread World
In 1976, psychologist Linnda R. Carporael proposed a novel
explanation for the Salem Witch Trials: ergotism. Ergot is a toxic
fungus commonly found on rye grain; might the witches of Salem --
victims of misogyny and superstition, yes -- have also scarfed down
some particularly nasty bread? Carporael's five-page article in
Science was audacious, and a bit kooky. "Convulsive ergotism," she
wrote, "is characterized by a number of symptoms. These include
crawling sensations in the skin, tingling in the fingers, vertigo,
tinnitus aurium, headaches, disturbances in sensation,
hallucination... All...are alluded to in the Salem witchcraft records."
Ergo, ergot poisoning made Salem's nice little girls into witches.
The '70s may have made this conceivable, even believable. The
psychoactive ingredient in ergot, you see, is ergotamine, which,
through hydrolysis, becomes the salt ergotamine tartrate, a
lysergic-acid derivative that is, in turn, relatively easily
transformed into LSD itself. Give your average second-year pre-med
student the proper grounding in orgo, some batches of contaminated
rye, and access to Google, and, if all goes well and all explosions
are averted, she'll be either a felon or a tycoon in less than half a
week. Or online telling her tale.
Consider the "Share Your Experiences" section of , which appears half
support group, half forum for experimental poetry, and half
cracked-AARP reminiscence zone (it seems fair to assume that regular
LSD users experience at least 1.5 times more reality than the rest of us).
Jack from India: "it was in goa.....saw plants turn into
animals.....wierd faces in the sea....lots of colors all
around....had a gr8 time." Sunrise from England: "first time 4 purple
ohms, 27th october 1989, remember gold rain falling from the street
lights, hands shimmering with colour, willow tree danceing with
rainbow branches, on the horizon purple and gold stars twinkling,
mosaic patterns on the walls, could go on." Jimmy from a location
unknown: "i saw me...... i looked me in the eyes..."
Whether staring at oneself in the eyes is a net positive or negative
seems impossible to answer without further research. It seems hard to
argue, however, with the profundity, if not the desirability, of some
of Liquid Sound Design's more narratively coherent testimonials. "I
took 2 Jerry Garcia's and a hit of E," writes a user from Oregon. "It
was like day shifting to night and back really fast in my room. Then
things divided up into segments of reality, where everything that
existed was seperate from everything else. It looked like a comic
book with one depth level and lines cutting out shapes of everything.
We went to a tree. My friends told me not to stay from the tree,
which I interpreted in many ways. Someone said the leaves looked like
slugs, and then everywhere there were slithering slugs. I wasn't
scared, just fascinated."
If the bright orange pages of Liquid Sound Design seem to signify a
typically inchoate Internet -- and drug -- society, Erowid.org might
be its antithesis, and perhaps the end of drug culture as such.
Looking at its LSD page -- a meticulously organized list of
histories, warnings, and linked scientific studies -- one can't help
but feel a twinge of epochal despair. Has Gen-Y succeeded in
rationalizing and disenchanting even drug use?
Even the testimonials are long and studied. In a college admissions
essay of a piece titled "Why I'm Never Touching LSD," a teenager
tells a strangely Kafkaesque tale: "Then K and her parents ran
upstairs...right through me. 'Oh Shit', I thought 'I was dead.' I ran
after them and saw my own body on the ground completely still. Then I
realized that I hadn't been breathing and had no pulse the entire
time I was downstairs."
Sadder still is the melancholia of A: "[By 1985] I had bought a
condominium, and was working. I began to realise that I really
couldn't do this anymore. My life was no longer free and
uncomplicated. When I would try to trip, I would find myself becoming
bogged down with worrisome thoughts... such as getting the bills
payed, making sure I did my tasks at work, suddenly there was just
too much responsibility..."
The title of A's Erowid piece? "Enveloped By All of Nature, then I
Joined the Rat Race."
The Comedown
Anecdotally at least, it seems that even some of today's most
drug-prone Harvardians have decided that the negative consequences of
acid, disciplinary and psychological, may not be worth the positive.
A junior studying in the humanities told the Indy that he tried LSD
twice in high school but wouldn't do it again. "It made me have
paranoid hallucinations both times," he said, "and the second time
lasted for a very long time and was totally unpleasant." Anyway, he
reasoned, acid is "not as good as mushrooms [because it's] not
euphoric" and "not as good as stimulants or sedatives because LSD
doesn't really make you feel good by messing with those parts of your
chemistry." Ultimately, the junior concluded, "Drugs that mess with
your cognition aren't fun; drugs that mess with your mood are great."
As for Soren Siebach, LSD has nonetheless quite likely messed with
his mood. In an e-mail to the Indy, he wrote that he left Sunday for
his home in Utah, where he'll have to hold down a full-time job for
six months before the College will even consider letting him back. An
official Harvard penalty will be set "only after all the criminal
stuff is resolved." Asked about the reaction of his friends and
family, Siebach wrote back curtly, "My family has been as good as I
could have hoped. I've told as few people about it as possible."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake