Tag Archives: lsd

Jolly West Part IV

References: The Deep State and Scientology, The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard, Jolly West Part I, Jolly West Part II, Jolly West Part III

“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – “Dr. West’s talk”, box  133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers

Jolly West goes West 

In late Fall 1966, after he had conducted his sixth installment of handiwork on the mind and brain of Jack Ruby (see, Jolly West Part III), CIA MK Ultra contractor Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was beginning a new chapter in the mind control saga.  According to Tom O’Neill’s Chaos*, at that time West was granted a ‘sabbatical’ from the School of Medicine Neuropsychiatric division at the University of Oklahoma. That school was headed by another CIA MK Ultra operator Dr. Stewart Wolf, who presumably signed off on the mission. West asserted that he was going to pursue a fellowship at another known MK Ultra laboratory, Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay area.

*Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Little Brown and Co. 2019. While delivering on the promise of its title, Chaos is also the most revealing work on CIA Mind Control (MK Ultra/MK Search) programs published in the past fifty years. This is the third and last article to summarize, then expand upon, discoveries first published in Mr. O’Neill’s book. Subsequent articles will further corroborate both O’Neill’s work and our narrative beginning with The Deep State and Scientology.

Documentation confirms at least seven MK Ultra subprojects were run out of Stanford, making it perhaps the central hub of CIA Mind Control experiments in academia during the fifties and sixties, see CIA Letter to Stanford. One of those programs, titled MK Ultra Subproject 2, stated these lofty objectives: “To study methods for the administration of drugs without the knowledge of the patient”, and, “To study the possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness.” see, Stanford MK Ultra subproject 2.

Another undocumented, but widely acknowledged and admitted, Stanford subproject was right up Jolly West’s expertise alley, involving the testing of LSD on human beings. That would be the 1959-1961 (and perhaps beyond) project which noted author Ken Kesey allegedly voluntarily participated in. Based out of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, Kesey tapped a long-continuing supply of LSD by partaking in the Stanford-CIA project. (West also listed on a 1990s CV, “Consultant in Psychiatry, Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital 1966-1967″, the very years subject of this article). While almost continuously high on CIA supplied LSD, Kesey turned his home into a psychedelic party site for influential Beat era poets, writers and artists. Dozens of influential hipsters were introduced to LSD there. Kesey ultimately took his LSD cult on the road under the title “The Merry Pranksters”.  They would turn on thousands to LSD from coast to coast, and were integral in creating the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as ground zero of the hippie movement.

Kesey became the third CIA linked or sponsored “Johny Appleseed of LSD” to be launched across America to broadly promote and introduce the hallucinogen. The first was former OSS (CIA predecessor) Captain Al Hubbard who bought tens of thousands of LSD hits from then-sole manufacturer Sandoz in 1950 and spent the next decade travelling across the US attempting to dose as many influential people as possible. (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain 1985). The second was Timothy Leary who began dosing as a Harvard faculty member in the fifties, then toured the planet urging people to ‘turn on [to LSD], tune in, and drop out “. (ibid.) By July 1967 Time Magazine benighted Leary as “The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia.” Note, Al Hubbard had no relation to creator of Dianetics and founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. Ironically, however, federal agencies would later use the name similarity as a pretext to unlawfully stalk the latter. But, we’ll get to all that later.

Tom O’Neill reported in Chaos that while West claimed to be working on a Stanford fellowship in 1966 and 1967, the university had no record of it. I have since discovered that West testified under oath in Jack Ruby’s probate trial on 6 June,1967 that his then-current address was “the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.” (Page 153, Jack Ruby Probate Trial). That places the elusive West at the time, at the location, and working for the folks capable of creating a cult whose 1969 crime still affects the American collective psyche nearly six decades later.  

The Human Experimental “Laboratory”

Later published papers by West described his 1966-1969 special operation as a study of hippies and their reactions under LSD and marijuana use.That latter date may seem a stretch to some MK ultra researchers. However, it is based on West’s own words in one of those papers. Published on Sept 6, 1968, in “Flight from Violence: Hippies and the Green Rebellion”, West asserted that “we studied the Green Rebellion (hippies) at first hand through September [1967] and, on a modified basis, we have been doing so ever since.”  Keep this in mind when we introduce other participants in his San Francisco hijinks. West chose the epicenter of hippiedom (the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco) because he wanted to “study them in their natural habitat” (ibid), as if he were studying some lower form of life. He constructed what he called a “pad (apartment) as laboratory” from which to covertly observe them. (ibid)  

As if creating a false cover, West’s papers emanating from the “pad” are bloviating affairs, full of general newsy cliches  and random anecdotes with no sources cited. They do not contain a single, concrete observation from his “laboratory”, nor any finding which could possibly be construed as “scientific.”  Which begs the question, what was Jolly West actually doing during those years?

The intrepid Tom O’Neill (Chaos) spotted the oddity and actually tracked down West’s files on the ‘study’, consisting mainly of the diaries of graduate students who were staked out at West’s “pad laboratory.” He also interviewed one of those project participants, forty years after the fact. What he found was stunning. The graduate student for nearly one half a century was continuing to ponder the same question, “where in the hell was Jolly West, and what was he up to?”  The lab attendant noted that they simply opened their pad to hippie drifters who wanted to find a place to get high on dope and acid. And the students would observe them. Given no other instructions by West, no environmental stimuli, not even communication, there was virtually nothing to observe for months on end. They seldom saw West and never received a single bit of feedback on their months of notetaking. One student even wondered if the paid observers themselves were the subjects of West’s study, being covertly surveilled. (Chaos)

I have since found another monster clue as to where the elusive doctor West might have been spending a good portion of his time in San Francisco. Perhaps the only doctor who approached West’s epic volume of CIA Mind Control work was his opposite number at his then “fellowship”-sponsoring University, Stanford. That was Dr. James Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a Stanford-affiliated psychiatrist from 1949 through at least 1975. During West’s stint in San Francisco, Hamilton was executing MK Ultra sub project 140. He was busy poaching human Guinea pigs from St. Mary’s Memorial hospital (University of California, San Francisco Medical Center) and plying them with drugs in a private office nearby. Hamilton happened to have been the project leader of the other Stanford-based MK Ultra projects listed above, including the one trying to develop a means of “abolishing consciousness” altogether.

On top of that Hamilton had been the supervising psychiatrist for the CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax. That entailed setting up bordellos in San Francisco in the fifties and early sixties – also referred to as “pads” – where unsuspecting Johns were dosed with LSD and observed behind one way mirror windows tripping with prostitutes. So deep was the CIA’s trust for Hamilton that Sydney Gottlieb himself (Creator of MK Ultra, Head of CIA Technical Services) made a regular practice while in San Franisco of fornicating with as many of Hamilton’s Midnight Climax call girls as possible. (sources, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks 1979, Poisoner in Chief, Stephen Kinzer 2019, The CIA Reading Room and a variety of documents from sites across the web). Bookmark Dr. Hamilton, he will be a lynchpin in the article to follow this one. 

Enter Charles Manson

In early 1967 Charles Mason was a career criminal who had been mostly in, and only sporadically out of, juvenile detention and federal prisons between ages of 15 and 32. He was released from Los Angeles’ Terminal Island federal correction facility in March of that year.

 It was right on the cusp of San Francisco’s “Summer Of Love”, a time and destination (San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District) promoted by the mainstream media, led by Time Magazine (run by CIA friend and LSD recipient Henry Luce and his OSS/CIA-trained deputy C.D. Jackson); and leading CIA MK Ultra Mind Control LSD evangelists Timothy Leary from Harvard and Ken Kesey from Stanford. Time quoted a hip “Bishop” claiming Haight-Ashbury might be the site of the second coming, “The hippies are saying to the Church what the young Church said to the Jews: ‘You have had it.’”

Even MK Ultra stalwart Jolly West himself seemed to promote the LSD inspired hippies – despite having earlier predicted the possibility of the rise of LSD cults that would kill and then forget the crime (ala MK Ultra goals and Manson family reality). West would claim “the hippies seem to take literally the words of such teachers as Moses, Jesus and Gautama…Bishop Pike may have been correct when he likened the hippies to early Christians.” (Flight From Violence) It is remarkable how West promotes the Hippie drug culture when his project participants’ notes hold one thing in common: a plethora of observations of the rapid, and disgusting decline of Haight-Ashbury over a two-year period of Hippie “control.” (West archives box 118, folders 8-10)

Manson who reportedly did not even wish to leave prison, and thoroughly out of character, apparently heeded the calls to drop everything and migrate to Haight-Ashbury. So strong was the appeal that he blatantly violated his parole terms restricting him to Los Angles, and headed to the Bay area, guitar in hand.

When the parole violation was discovered, instead of hauling Manson back to prison (standard operating procedure), the US Parole office assigned Manson to a particularly suspicious parole officer in the Bay area. He was a criminologist named Roger Smith. O’Neill learned that Smith was running an experimental parole program that monitored its parolees. Smith had several dozen parolees on his roster when Manson showed up. However, he would soon have none, but for Manson himself. It was Smith who promoted Manson becoming a full time denizen of ground zero of the hippie movement, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He claimed LSD and Manson’s fledgling harem cult (The Manson family, consisting of a bevy of young female, druggie waifs who pledged allegiance to Charlie) somehow made the violence-prone Manson more mellow. Using that justification, Roger Smith did everything he could to encourage the lifestyle change; including breaking federal law on a serial basis to facilitate Manson. Quite the prescription from a federal parole officer (unlimited LSD, unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card and sex slavery cult creation). (Chaos)

So federally protected, despite numerous parole violations and fresh crimes, Manson would remain free to wreak havoc well into his cult’s fateful journey to Los Angeles in 1968 where a year later he would direct the commission of the mass murders that shocked the American psyche. (Chaos)

Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC)

In early 1967 Dr. David E. Smith (no familial relation to Roger Smith) was a straight-laced toxicologist researching the effects of LSD and amphetamines on rats. He was finding that LSD would subdue the rodents while amphetamines would turn them into violent, ruthless killers, murdering and cannibalizing their own. Smith made those experiments at the same time and place that Dr. James Alexander Hamilton was running CIA MK Ultra subproject 140 operations (UCSF St. Mary’s Medical Center – all a stone’s throw from the center of the Haight-Ashbury district). (The CIA Doctors, Dr. Colin A. Ross, Manitou Communications 2006). In January of that year Smith would make a transformation as stark as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was thanks to the chemical he was studying in the lab. In January 1967, partially inspired by the mellow, LSD-tripping rats in his laboratory (literally stated in an interview) he dropped LSD for the first time in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park at the hippie Human Be-In rock concert. While listening to the likes of Timothy Leary and watching thousands similarly tripping, he had a revelation of sorts. He “wanted to become bohemian, to free himself of inhibitions.”  And so, he decided to open what would soon become the epicenter of the hippie culture, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. (HAFMC)

At least that is what he wrote in his self-promotional book on the matter, Love Needs Care (David E. Smith and John Luce 1971).  But years later, perhaps forgetful of the company line, David Smith told a journalist that his inspiration for opening the clinic in fact was precisely the same reason Jolly West came to San Francisco, the promise of experimenting on humans rather than lab animals. Eerily he spoke in the very human-degrading terms of West, “In the beginning my interest in the Haight was as a natural drug laboratory, a giant mouse cage.” (Frank Olsen, The Dark Side of the Summer of Love). That view was corroborated by the head of the Diggers (the volunteers who scraped up life necessities for visiting hippies so they could live free) Emmett Grogran. He wrote of HAFMC in his memoir, “Patients were treated as ‘research subjects’ and the facility itself was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency.” (Ringolevio, 1970, emphasis added)

Remarkably, parole officer Roger Smith would come to operate a federally funded Amphetamine Research Project out of the federally funded HAFMC. He, like David Smith, had previously issued a study acknowledging the powerful violence inducing effect of amphetamines.

And so Manson was federally mandated to regularly check in with this federal parole officer (cum amphetamine experimenter) at the clinic whose founder dubbed “a giant mouse cage, natural experimental laboratory.“  Manson and his family would regularly come to HAFMC for venereal disease treatment, or perhaps the occasional bad LSD trip rescue, sometimes to report in to his parole officer and even just to visit with the man he considered his guardian angel, Roger Smith. Smith earned the nickname amongst the HAFMC regulars as “The Friendly Fed.”

Tom O’Neill discovered that Jolly West would frequent the clinic at that very time, to “drum up hippie business” for his nearby federally funded “hippie crash pad laboratory.” While his own project personnel wallowed in mystery as to West’s whereabouts, he was busy tinkering with human minds at the “giant mouse case… natural drug laboratory” in of an office provided by human experimenter David Smith.  

David Smith told O’Neill that “[West] studied people at our clinic” and “he recruited subjects from our clinic” but insisted he was kept entirely in the dark as to any details of West’s work. He claimed the only thing he knew about West’s background was that he had slayed an elephant with an overdose of LSD (See, Tusko tanked). Smith sought to distance himself from West in the interview and explained his ignorance by claiming “we were service at that time, not research.”  Some service, to render your patients to unknown experiments by a man whose only claim to fame was drugging the mightiest earth-walking mammal to death.

While the Smiths both claimed to be in the dark as to West’s activities, as did West’s own project personnel, West himself left the secret hiding in plain sight. He wrote in a later study that he engaged in “transforming ‘bad trips’ into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.”  (Flight From Violence)  In his person diary which I located at the UCLA archives, West acknowledged ‘bad trips’ as the first and foremost mental health problem at the then-fledgling HFAMC: “For the most part, the problems seem to be related to the use, misuse, and abuse of drugs. LSD is a significant offender in this respect, contributing a substantial number of ‘bad trips’ to the total volume of business.” – Jolly West’s Haight-Ashbury project Diary June 24, 1967

TRANSORMING TRIPS and HYPNOTISM

Whatever West was doing in the “back rooms” of HAFM, he never committed it to paper. He even took measures to keep his own “crash pad laboratory” team in the dark. While many on the team noted West’s near continuous absence from the crash pad lab, one of them noted that West’s representative at the pad: “he discouraged anyone on the project from visiting it [HAFMC] or helping it or having anything to do with it.” Virtually, the only thing we know for certain about what Jolly West actually did in San Francisco during the years 1966 and 1968 when he was there is this admission, “transforming bad trips into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.” How exactly does one accomplish that? Consult anyone who ever had anything to do with turning potentially bad LSD trips into good trips, from doctors to psychiatrists to LSD gurus to social workers, you will find one, single common denominator: the use of the power of persuasion. You talk the person through it.

What particular power would West turn to? There is only one ‘therapeutic’ tool West ever boasted expertise in, and he did so repeatedly: hypnosis, the ultimate tool of persuasion. He considered himself a master hypnotist. It was that primary skill that he flouted to CIA MK Ultra chief Sidney Gottlieb that resulted in at least a decade of taxpayer dollars flowing to him to conduct mind control experiments, utilizing primarily hypnotism and drugs. (Jolly West I, II, and III). And just as west had used certain drugs with high levels of making patients suggestible on Jimmy Shaver (Jolly West Part II) and Jack Ruby (Jolly West Part III), West mentions favorably the use of chlorpromazine for ‘bad trips.’ (West diary) Chlorpromazine has been listed to this day in studies to numerous to recount as top of the list in terms drugs that create suggestibility.

Both Smiths are on record claiming Manson and his followers’ minds were thoroughly marinated with acid while they and West were routinely in the house (HAFMC). We know from both Smiths that Manson and his several followers were the only recurring and consistent HAFMC denizens (referred to as a fixture of the clinic) worthy of mention in their several hundred-page book (Love Needs Care) and many papers and articles they wrote on the clinic. The odds of West plucking one or more of the family (cult), and particularly Charlie who was attracted to hypnotism like positive charge to a negative terminal (see below), for his LSD trip readjustment expertise are outstanding. It was those overwhelming odds, even without noting the West admission we have here, that lead O’Neill and so many more since to suggest that perhaps West took the well-LSD-seasoned brain of Charles Manson and programmed it to kill, right in line with West’s 1953 promises to the CIA’s Gottlieb to create the Manchurian Candidate (Jolly West Parts I, II, and III).

O’Neill recounts in Chaos how he kept a quotation from Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book “Helter Skelter” taped above his computer. “The most puzzling question of all” about the Manson murders to Bugliosi was ‘how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers’…”it may be something that he learned from others.” Perhaps we should entertain another possible theory besides Manson being programmed to kill. That is Manson being trained to program to kill. That is, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) being hypnotized and programmed himself, Manson also did his own hypnotizing. 

Some of the most convincing material for that theory in my view are contained in the end notes of Chaos. Two such notes are from page 369 where O’Neill conducts a side investigation into claims by LA hypnotist William Deanyer that Manson visited him for tips and fine-tuning of skills he already apparently possessed in the 68/69 period. Deanyer claimed the encounters to a Manson biographer (Ed Sanders, The Family), and Deanyer’s daughter corroborated them directly to O’Neill.  

Others have also spoken of Manson’s long history of application of hypnosis. Actor Danny Trejo has said that Manson was a somewhat accomplished hypnotist as far back as 1961 where he encountered him in jail. He described Manson as a “small, scrawny, poor, bum.” Yet, he said Manson was so adept at hypnosis he could convince the prisoners that they were high on drugs; producing the same effect of drugs of choice on their minds. It exlained to Trejo how such a diminutive convict could survive so long in jail without protection. see, Trejo on Manson.

If hypnotism really was Manson’s forte and continuing trick of survival it answers Bugliosi’s haunting question as to how on earth he programmed others to kill.  If you think it is far-fetched for West to believe a career criminal like Manson worthy of training or capable of mastering hypnosis, you might reconsider when you read West’s published words about the minds of accomplished, criminally-inclined hypnotists (quotations taken from Dangers of Hypnosis, Louis J. West, MD, and Gordan H. Deckert, MD, JAMA April 5, 1965):

1.

“We do know of sexual seductions that appear to have been achieved by hypnotic suggestion. For example, an ugly, uncouth janitor who had learned hypnosis (at an “Academy of Hypnotism”- fee, including lessons and certificate, $50), seduced several female tenants whom he initially hypnotized in “demonstrations.”” 

That would explain how the “small, scrawny, poor bum” could create a literal harem ½ his age who would perform orgies on demand and kill for him. Incidentally, Manson’s other alleged hypnotism instructor, William Deanyer, was indicted and tried in the fifties for sex slave trafficking for that very stunt (though saved by directed verdict from a Federal Judge, and perhaps by Deanyer’s continuing hypnotic influence over the victims) (Chaos).

2.

“Because of his ability to induce hypnosis and thereby influence others, the operator may become convinced that he is somehow superior to other people or that he enjoys powers beyond the scope of ordinary men.”

That would explain Manson’s and certainty that he was in fact the second coming of Jesus Christ as well as Satan. If Manson were also being hypnotized, it would be consistent with West’s pontifications about hippies being the new early Christians (a theme Manson incessantly riffed on post-summer of 67)

3.

As to Manson’s followers’ gravitational attraction to Manson:

“Hypnotized repeatedly as a subject in demonstrations, eventually she could not make the most trivial decisions without consulting the hypnotist, and when he moved to a city 1,500 miles away, she followed him leaving her family, friends, and job.”

4.

More on the formation of his Family (cult):

“Since World War II organized hypnosis has seen the insidious growth of cult-like conditions. If those who employ hypnosis succumb to this cult-forming temptation, the label “crackpots” may become appropriate.”

5.

Finally, on how Manson’ already antisocial character could be manipulated into a full blown psychotic personality by hypnosis applied to him:

“Upon hypnotic intervention the prominence of the neurotic (eg, hysterical, phobic, or compulsive) symptoms may yield, only to bring to the fore, in intensified form, the underlying schizophrenic psychopathology.”

According to West’s own words, a skilled hypnotist could create a split personality psychopath. West’s confidence in a practitioner’s ability to do just that later led to his help in forming a foundation dedicated to convincing the media and public that Multi-personality disorder (clearly a form of schizophrenia; though psychs sometimes argue otherwise) was predominantly an iatrogenic (doctor created) condition. Stay tuned for later article on the CIA’s False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Also, see Jolly West parts 1-3  for West’s claims of creating psychosis with relative ease.

If West were to create or exacerbate a condition of paranoia, it could become a permanent condition, according to West himself. He testified in the probate proceeding of Jack Ruby’s Will on the eve of the Summer of Love: “Paranoia is almost by definition incurable.” (testimony of Dr. Louis Jolyon West, March 27, 1967, pp. 181-182, ibid.).  Across the spectrum of Manson literature, from absurd propaganda pieces like Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter to Tom O’neill’s meticulously documented history Chaos, one word is shared by nearly all in describing Manson’s state of mind, paranoid.  

At the end of the day West considered himself above all else a master hypnotist. He lectured on the subject. In one of those talks he asserted the following:

“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – Dr. West’s talk, box  133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers

Granted, because of the suspicious lack of detail anyone seems to recall or to have committed to writing about the mysterious Dr. West’s activities a HAFMC, it is easy to speculate and attempt to fill the void. But, even assuming Manson was not a ticking time bomb created directly by West to explode a year or so later, one cannot ignore the two things held in common by the three federally funded experimenters who spent months under the same roof with Charlie Manson in 1967.  David Smith, Roger Smith and Jolly West were all exploring and experimenting with the same chemicals (LSD, then amphetamines) that coursed through the veins of Manson and his sex/murder cult slaves. All three confirmed in writing that switching from LSD (for heightened suggestibility – perfect for hypnosis) to amphetamines created people capable of wanton, senseless and grisly violence. All three were with Manson in the critical period wherein the laws of supply and demand were manipulated to change the drugs of choice for Manson, his family and the entire US counterculture. The CIA’s fingerprints were all over that transition.

Summer of Love Becomes Summer of Chaos

It so happened that the Summer of 1967 also marked the season when the CIA was ordered by then President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson to flank the FBI’s efforts to roll back and demolish anti-war resistance. The peace movement was then seen as majorly driven by an LSD-soaked generation of counter-culturalists. Since the CIA had created that counterculture (wittingly or not), when the agency christened the new effort as “Operation Chaos”, it very aptly described what it’s previous decade of domestic meddling caused as well as what it would soon create even more of. Popularly dismissed as a discreet surveillance campaign focused on foreign connections to US civil rights and anti-war protest groups, serious students of the history of the CIA consider that pretext. After all, it took the literal break-in and theft of FBI documents several years later to learn that at that very same time J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were actively infiltrating those civilian groups, and intentionally creating conflict and strife within them (chaos); even to the point of encouraging and causing assassinations (See COINTELPRO ). To believe the CIA would be outdone by its comparatively straight-laced fellow agency to some is naïve. After all, it was the FBI’s failure to quash the counterculture through such tactics for several years that prompted the President to sic the CIA on it. In any event, chaos truly did exponentially increase from the moment of the inception of Operation Chaos.

Just as the LSD-inspired counterculture hit its apex of power and prestige in the summer of of 1967, a sea change occurred in the historically CIA-controlled drug influx into Haight-Ashbury (and ultimately the entire country).

As noted at the outset, the CIA had a remarkable run as the primary promoter and distributor of LSD across America for more than a decade. The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia Timothy Leary himself admitted during the peak of his fame, “The LSD movement was started by the CIA…I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.” (p 190, Poisoner In Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt 2019).

However, by the mid-sixties the CIA was up against a movement by a number of members of Congress who by then were flooded with constituents railing about the increasing numbers of runaways and delinquents LSD was creating. By April 1966, the primary manufacturer of LSD, Sandoz of Switzerland, announced a recall and halt to production in the face of the growing backlash. See e.g., New York Times April 15, 1966: Distributor of LSD Recalls All Supplies.

In the Times story, Sandoz refers to a growing black market, something the incurious newspaper does not elaborate on. That market was as much as cornered in the all-critical LSD-culture of California. One man produced nearly all of the West Coast’s LSD from 1965 into the 1967 Summer of Love. His name was Augustus Owsley Stanely III.  In 1965 as LSD supply was becoming extremely thin, Oswald slithered up next to California’s LSD Johnny Appleseed Ken Kesey, supplying top quality LSD for his Merry Prankster ‘acid tests’, huge open parties with massive vats of Kool-aid spiked with LSD to introduce one and all (witting or unwitting) to turn on, tune in and drop out as an unthinking mob. Stanley toured with the Merry Pranksters and then for years with its rock entertainment drawing card, the Grateful Dead. In Time Magazine’s July, 7, 1967 ode to the Summer of Love it referred to Stanley as the “Henry Ford of LSD—the man who turned the psychedelic underground into a mass-production industry.”

Most have overlooked a glaring anomaly in Stanley’s history.  We’ll examine it for reasons that will become obvious. Stanley was born into privilege, the grandson of a Kentucky U.S. Senator. By all accounts he was a precocious, if mischievous boy. In 1950, at the age of 15, Stanley purportedly voluntarily checked himself into St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. St. Elizabeth’s was still under the directorship of OSS/MK Ultra pioneer Dr. Zigmond Lebensohn at that time. (see, The Deep State and Scientology). While Lebansohn’s OSS (CIA predecessor) hypnotism and drug experiments began as early 1943, they are widely reported to have continued at St. Elizabeth’s well into the fifties. In fact, I discovered a document from UCLA archives showing Lebensohn collaborating with Jolly West as late as 1954 on an experiment entitled “Studies in Hypnosis” (see, Lebensohn). Stanley remained in “voluntary” mental hospital commitment for nearly a year and one half. He told his biographer it was really a great experience – he learned “self-control” through “hypnosis.” (Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Robert Greenfield, St Martins 2016). After a stint in the Air Force, Owsley took technical positions for military industrial complex collaborators and contractors Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Rocketdyne, all with no college degree, and only one semester of post-High School education.

Almost date-coincident with Time’s honoring his psychedelic achievements, Stanley suddenly ceased LSD production, thus cutting off the most reliable and pure source since Sandoz quit supplying it. Instead, he produced and boldly promoted a new drug, one that David Smith acknowledged marked the seminal turning point in the shifting of Haight-Ashbury as an Eden of free love and peace into the dirty, diseased, and very violent dangerous arm pit of San Francisco. Stanley’s new drug was named STP, after the fuel additive used by racecar driving teams. STP was marketed as a 72-hour LSD trip. 10 times the length of the typical trip because of one important ingredient, methamphetamines (popularly known then as ‘speed’). The drug that both Smiths had previously experimented with and acknowledged caused aggression and violence. Because of the suggestibility, group-think mentality of the drug-fueled culture, STP spread rapidly and wide.

West’s Haight-Ashbury project files indicate he was fully aware of the “experimental” nature of Owsley’s drug work and his/Grateful Dead’s distribution role. Here is the notation in his file of the debrief of an informant (including promise not to disclose):

“He sees Owsley as using the area on experimental grounds, for testing of drugs. He now says Owsley’s place is in L.A. not Los Altos. (with promise I would not reveal, he stated that the Grateful Dead distribute a great deal of acid for Owsley).” (Box 118, folder 9, West UCLA archives)

Even before the month of July 1967 had ended, the San Francisco Chronicle noted of STP in the Haight: “It turned love-ins into speed-ins.” While STP quickly earned a horrendous reputation because of the abhorrent experiences and behaviors associated with it, its introduction marked the beginning of a marked dearth of LSD and overabundance of addictive amphetamines coursing through the Haight, then all of California and the rest of the nation.

David Smith described the rapid decline evident in San Francisco in his book Love Needs Care: “The love philosophy was exploited, and the sense of community vanished during the summer of 1967, while those individuals who gave the district its illusive solidarity drifted or were driven out, to be replaced by others, interested primarily in speed.” The co-author of Smith’s book Love Needs Care, John Luce was more explicit: “The Summer of Love turned into a winter of wreckage, where psychedelic dreams curdled into heroin haze and hollow-eyed hustles, leaving behind not liberation but a ledger of lost souls and societal scars.”

As the Haight-Ashbury model decay spread across the country (including the transition from LSD to amphetamines) the hippie image would transform in American minds from harmless space cadets into cut-throat violent speed freaks. Chao-incarnate.

1968 – ACID HEADS TO SPEED FREAKS

Meanwhile, Manson’s federal protector and HAFMC anchor Roger Smith formally began receiving federal funds for a study he was conducting on amphetamines, Amphetamine Research Project (ARP) in the clinic. He tapped David Smith’s HAFMC administrator Alan J. Rose as his project assistant. Smith continued to facilitate Manson’s probation-violating treks across America and Mexico into 1968. When some of Manson’s girls were left behind, Alan Rose invited them to live in his home. Rose dropped LSD and engaged in orgies with the group. When several of them were arrested during a trip to Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, Rose was rushed there to assist in springing them from jail. Roger Smith personally took custody of and cared for Manson’s infant son for weeks, while he and Rose worked on freeing the child’s mother who was arrested in the affair. Roger used his authority as a federal parole officer to vouch for the women and under false pretenses pulled off what looked to be impossible, the premature release of the Manson cult members. 

Rose continued living with the girls, doing drugs and taking sexual liberties with them after their release. When Manson established a base in the L.A. area, Rose physically led the girls in their return south to the Manson cult. He lived, took drugs and had sex with them and participated as a Manson-obeying member for another several months. Two things are crystal clear in Rose’s and Roger “Friendly Fed” Smith’s wake.

First, the ARP, and its two principle federally funded and empowered officers (Rose and Roger Smith) facilitated the freedom and creation of what would become the Manson family cult.  Second, that creation would go from relatively peaceful to violent and deadly by transitioning to the very drug the ARP was studying the effects of, methamphetamines.

THE CRIME THAT CREATED CHAOS

The shift to speed began gradually but escalated right up to the Manson family’s infamous ritual murders of pregnant Hollywood star Sharon Tate and her several houseguests in early August 1969. That escalation is recounted by several Manson cult members in their memoirs and trial testimony. Significantly, Manson himself did not partake of speed, stating (unrefuted by family members) in a 1970 Rolling Stone Interview, “I don’t fuck with speed at all and I’ve never had a needle in my arm.” (Reference)

Roger Smith at the very least should have known where the Manson clan was headed. Just a couple months before the Manson carnage, Smith wrote in the following in the Journal of Psychodelic Drugs (Spring 1969):

“The paranoid speed freak is highly prone to violent behavior…Threats of mayhem and murder are common within speed groups, and many begin to collect guns and knives to make the threats more convincing.”

And that same knowledge ought to be attributed to West. More than a year into West’s Haight-Ashbury program one of his project members began a dual role, member of the ARP acting as its representative in West’s larger project. This is documented in this late June 1968 diary entry: “I will be a part of the project [ARP] and attend all meetings and clinical conferences. I will get subjects and follow them through their rel. to the project. Also, I will put in hours at the pad [West’s ‘crash pad laboratory’] as kind of the rep. of the project, when people who are subjects come here just to rap, etc.” – Box 118, Folder 10, page 62 Jolyon West papers, UCLA archives. This puts O’Neill’s Chaos interview with Roger Smith into an entirely new light. Smith went to great lengths to distance himself and his project from Jolly West.

In September 1970 Alan J. Rose finally got around to putting his name to something, a study on the Manson family, The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study (David E. Smith, M.D., and Alan J. Rose, M.A. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 3 (No. 1), pp. 115–119, Sept. 1970).  It was most notable for its omissions. First, Love’s boss – Roger Smith – who directed the “study” was absent (even though there are reports Rose was living at Roger Smith’s home at the time of the report). Instead, HAFMC founder David E. Smith co-authored the report. Second, the name “Manson” is missing, though David Smith later confirmed it was about the Manson family. Third, it euphemizes by withholding the details of the cult’s infamous crimes. Finally, and most significantly, not a single mention is made of amphetamines, the fuel Manson lit his cult’s murderous fires with and which the cult began imbibing date coincident with the Amphetamines Research Project (in the person of Love himself) deeply embedding within it. Instead, it speaks only of LSD and marijuana use. Since David Smith has consistently advocated both LSD and marijuana – literally to this day – as passive, peace-enhancing drugs, the replacement of amphetamines with LSD and marijuana is less curious than it is suspicious. 

In 2022 David Smith was interviewed by researcher Dan Storper about O’Neill’s Chaos and the suggestion that Roger Smith may have been riding shotgun for some CIA program to create a killer in Manson. David Smith’s response was telling: “I talked with Roger and he denied it. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.” 

Roger Smith revealed later that somewhere along the line West’s primary interest went from LSD to amphetamines. He told O’Neill that he I had no idea that Jolly West was recruiting subjects for his LSD experiments in the same HAFMC that Smith operated his Manson contacts out of. But, he did say this about West “I got on this kind of professional circuit with psychiatrists and basic researchers who were looking at high dose amphetamine use and Jolly West was very involved in that.”

Right around the time of the Manson family murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her friends Jolly West moved to Los Angeles and began his twenty-year run as head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric department. O’Neill’s review of West’s papers indicated that West kept a collection of Manson trial press clippings, but was careful not to keep any notes. He also, very uncharacteristically, rarely commented on the murders, the trial or the cult even though the entire affair played out on his doorstep and grew out of his shared “mouse cage, laboratory” at the HAFMC. However, two psychiatrists under his department were involved in the trial offering their views on how the murderers ought be understood.

In 1970 by the time Manson hysteria became a national thing, David E. Smith offered words that perhaps reflect the fear Operation Chaos set out to create in the first place: “the place [Haight-Ashbury] is full of Charlie Mansons.” (Love Needs Care). In other words: America, be afraid; be very afraid.

The increasingly CIA-controlled mainstream, corporate media would beat that drum for decades to come, until today mere mention of the word “cult” engenders a visceral reaction to most Americans. 

In spite of his fingerprints being all over the formation of the killer cult that created that domestic terror, Jolly West – in his inimitable style – soon strutted back into the limelight to capitalize on and exacerbate those fears for the rest of his days.