If you have known me or have understood my writing well you should see that I have no problem calling out the political system, in part because I have no emotional attachment to it. My short history of getting involved in the political process was when limited to a Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, so I had no problem in giving the whole political establishment the finger, and deciding to focus my energies on different avenues to create change. When it comes to established histories of acid, the psychedelic movement, and rock and roll, my feelings are different. I spent years of my life delving into the psychedelic history from Albert Hoffman’s famous bicycle ride to Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to living in it modern day cultures at rainbow gatherings and music festivals, and small psychedelic cultures that spring up in hip towns like Ann Arbor and Asheville where I have lived. Turns out I was falling for a different sort of psy-op than our political theater, but an equally neutralizing psy-op none the less.
As I dug into the work of Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin, I discovered the fore-fathers of the psychedelic movement had shadowy roots deeply entangled in the military and intelligence agencies. And just as it had become apparent in my journey into politics that there were certain channels within the mainstream media that are meant to co-opt progressive movements by appealing our intellect and compassion, similarly there are certain figures, books, and music that have been elevated through the mainstream that appeal to those of us who enjoy experimenting with psychedelics. Despite their illegal status, psychedelics are mainstream. Unlike the anti-war movement within America, psychedelics are advertised in mainstream media giants like The New York Times and Vice News, and you’d have to be living under a rock to not know about festivals like Burning Man where anyone who can buy a ticket is given the opportunity experiment with psychedelics with virtually no threat of being arrested. Given how open psychedelic use has become at festivals, cops could make huge sums of money for the state and private prisons going undercover at festivals, but they don’t. Have you ever considered why?
It is no longer a secret that the military did experiment with psychedelics, and when I first learned about this part of acid’s history, probably like most psychedelic users, I thought “oh ha ha, they tried to use it to control us, but instead they gave us the tools to set us free.” Although this is a comforting belief, it is way too simple of an explanation and does address the questions like why is acid still so accessible to the majority of people, and advertised so glowingly in progressive mainstream publications that are owned and controlled by billionaires. It is hard to buy the claim the psychedelics will set us free, when we are 50 years down the road from the hippies, and we are no freer in America now then we were 50 years ago.
I will not try to summarize the issues raised by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin in their book, The Manufacturing of A Deadhead in this article, or list the instances where FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) documents implicating acid gurus like Albert Hoffman, or Terrance McKenna in being attached to nefarious intelligence agency plots. I will leave it up to you to read the attached article yourselves. I can’t ever really say for sure what the goal of the intelligence agencies was in bringing psychedelics to the mainstream. While I am convinced that Atwill and Irvin’s research does implicate the military and intelligence services in continuing to use acid and other psychedelics as a psyop to control the masses, I am not in full agreement with their conclusion of why. I am writing this article to hopefully crowd source some ideas from readers, and because, as a longtime advocate of using psychedelics, it is important update my stance with this new information. Rather than a “just do it” attitude, I would suggest that people who are considering trying psychedelics are prepared to completely change their life around before imbibing. The experience will open up the possibility of initiating changes much less painfully than going cold turkey in a lifestyle shift. Yet if the user falls back into old habits shortly after trying psychedelics, the experience is useless. It is no better than an opiate used to temporarily numb the pain away. And using it as a temporary escape can become quite addictive.
Since learning of Atwill and Irvin’s work, I have spent a lot of idle thoughts brainstorming why the intelligence services would use psychedelics to control the masses, when I have felt so strongly that psychedelics are an integral part of my path in breaking away from the mainstream paths that funnel people into being useful idiots for Military’s (in their own words) New World Order. I don’t have all the answers yet, but this is what I’ve come to. The military must have learned of the potential of psychedelics in their research and knew that its use could be dangerous to the power structure that was in place, so they introduced it to the public in a way to minimize the damage. It did so by creating false gurus who gave some truth mixed in with more lies in a way that appeals to people who have gone through the psychedelic experience. Like I said earlier, the experience creates the possibility for a person to make major changes in their life. But major lifestyle changes require time, money, and a lot of effort. By limiting people’s use of psychedelics to sanctioned events that like music festivals or Burning Man, psychedelics are used by most people as a sort of vacation or weekend retreat from corporate life. But few go into the experience looking at an open ended future after they imbibe. Used in this manner, psychedelics pose no threat to the existing power structure, and in fact psychedelics co-opt many people who are inclined to anti-establishment sentiments. Imagine if all the people who went to Burning Man focused their energy towards creating a viable anti-war movement. Imagine if the yearly pilgrimage of burners was instead to the capital lawn to demand an end to our military fighting illegal wars and dropping bombs every twenty minutes. Imagine if all the resources used to bring people from all over the world to Burning Man was instead used to bring aid to Yemen where 6.5 million people are at risk of starvation. Then we would have a movement that threatened the military’s control. Right now, the psychedelic movement is just another black hole, like the Democratic party, where progressive ideas go to die. Though it was hard to acknowledge given my emotion attachments built over devoting years of my life to psychedelic research and experimentation, I have to admit I was wrong. The psychedelic movement in America is just another military and intelligence agency psy-op.
https://logosmedia.com/2013/05/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/