Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Page 7

  SOL: One last question. It is necessary, you said, to protect property rights. It will be necessary for there to be some basic rules.

  LEARY: Render unto Caesar everything external.

  SOL: What is Caesar?

  LEARY: Society, politics, rules.

  SOL: How would this be achieved in the projected society which could be achieved, ideally? Would we have to elect 1 out of every 15 persons and have him go and represent those 15? Will there be tribal elders?

  LEARY: Democracy is a failure because it is based upon a political unit which is not organic—the individual mind. The political unit should be the tribe; property should be held by the tribe, by the extended family. Voting should be by the extended family. The idea that one man decides to vote for Johnson or Goldwater. Ha, ha! Some choice, right? My mind is going to decide. That’s putting too much burden on my mind; it exaggerates my personality. We must return to—advance to—the tribal unit of society.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  4

  God’s Secret Agent A.O.S.3*

  He doesn’t want me to use his name.

  Rosemary and I had been waiting for Him for five hours. He’s always and deliberately erratic about appointments. Science fiction James Bond paranoia. Throw off police surveillance. Suddenly I could feel His presence. A telepathic hit. He really does emit powerful vibrations. A minute later His boots drummed on the walk.

  He looked tired, pale, but the furry, quick animal tension was still there. Black leather sleeveless jacket. Wide-sleeved, multicolored theatrical shirt. Jangling bells. The magician. The electronic wizard.

  He had been up several days working in his laboratory and was coming off an acid high. He wanted to be warm.

  Rosemary and I built up the fire, lit candles and fell out on a low divan. He paced the floor in front of us. He’s not tall, and He likes to stay above His listeners, higher than everyone else, moving while they rest.

  He started a three-hour rap abour energy, electronics, drugs, politics, the nature of God and the place of man in the divine system. Laughing at His own brilliance, turning himself on, turning us on. Einsteinian physics and Buddhist philosophy translated into the fast, right, straight rhythm of acid-rock hip.

  The television folk heroes of today are the merry outlaws of the past. The television Robin Hoods of the future, the folk heroes of the twenty-first century, will be the psychedelic drug promoters of the 1960’s. A good bet for romantic immortality is A.O.S.3. God’s Secret Agent A.O.S.3, acid king, LSD millionaire, test-tube Pancho Villa, is the best-known of a band of dedicated, starry-eyed chemical crusaders who outwitted the wicked, gun-toting federals and bravely turned on the land of the young and the free to the electronic harmony of the future.

  In the daily press the Reagans and Romneys merit the adulatory headlines. The Holy Alchemists, if mentioned at all, are denounced as sordid criminals. But the simple truth is that the Reagans and Romneys will soon be forgotten. Can anyone remember which Republicans were struggling for the nomination in 1956?

  The mythic folk heroes of our times will be the psychedelic-drug outlaws, the science fiction Johnny Appleseeds who build secret laboratories, scrounge the basic chemicals, experiment, experiment, experiment to develop new ecstasy pills, who test their homemade sacraments on their own bodies and the flesh of their trusting friends, who distribute the precious new waters of life through a network of dedicated colleagues, forever underground, hidden, as the mysteries have always been hidden from the hard-eyed agents of Caesar, Pharaoh, Herod, Pope Paul, Napoleon, Stalin, Lyndon B. Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.

  For the last seven years I have watched with admiration these LSD frontiersmen, the Golden Bootleggers, manufacture and pass on the sacraments. Laughing, pupil-dilated, visionary alchemists who seek nothing less than the sudden mind-blowing liberation of their fellow man.

  First, of course, there was reluctant Albert Hoffman of Sandoz, the staid, involuntary agent mysteriously selected to give LSD to the human race. The full story of this remarkable Swiss scientist remains to be told. But this much I have heard. His first LSD trips were deep, revelatory religious experiences. The establishment press tries to tell us that Hoffman’s first sessions were accidental and frightening and freaky. The facts are that Hoffman, a spiritual man, grasped immediately the implications of his discovery and initiated a high-level, ethical, gentleman’s conspiracy of philosophically minded scientists to disseminate LSD for the benefit of the human race. His tactical mistake (if, indeed, he made one) was to work through the established professions, failing to see that a complete revision of social form would necessarily follow the use of his discovery.

  Rosemary had made tea and put a red sanctuary light on the gold-framed madonna. He paced in front of us like a newly caged anima1. (Rosemary, what kind of animal is He? Oh, He’s furry, warm, nervous, whiskers twitching, ears alert, carnivorous but gentle. Like a squirrel, but bigger. Perhaps a badger or a raccoon. They are very intelligent.)

  He preaches: Oh, man, how beautifully it all fits together. Dig, the first atomic fission occurred in December 1942.

  Is that the one in the Chicago squash court?

  Yeah. Now dig. The Van Allen belt is a thick blanket of electronic activity protecting this planet. What is the earth? A core of molten metals covered by a thin layer of soft, vulnerable, organic tissue. Life nibbling away, nibbling away at the rock beneath. All life on this planet is a delicate network unified. Each living form feeding on the others. And being eaten. The Van Allen belt is the higher intelligence protecting earth from lethal solar radiation, and it’s in touch with every form of living intelligence on the earth—vegetable, animal, human.

  I laughed. Alchemist, you are so orthodox! Our Father who art in heaven above! I pointed upward. He really is up there, huh? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in the Van Allen belt!

  He didn’t stop to acknowledge my comment. Somehow He records neurologically what I say and reprograms it, and prints it back out to me in endless tapes of electronic poety, but He never listens.

  Now dig. The Supreme Intelligence sees that man has rediscovered atomic energy. Wow! We gotta stop those cats before they disrupt the whole living network. The only thing DNA fears is radiation. That’s why the Van Allen belt is there.

  OK, now get this. Four months after the first fission, Hoffman accidentally, ha ha, rediscovers LSD, which is now psychoactive.

  Rediscovers?

  Yeah, man. Actually Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938, but it gave no hit. No turn-on. Now why is it that Hoffman handles LSD in 1938 and nothing happens and then in 1943, three months after atomic energy is released, he puts his finger on lysergic acid and gets flipped out? What happened? Did Hoffman suddenly get careless? Or had LSD suddenly been changed into a psychedelic chemical? Competent chemists just don’t change their handling of compounds. Hoffman’s techniques are standard.

  His eyes are dancing and He’s laughing and his hands and body are moving. He was a ballet dancer once before He started making drugs.

  Now dig. The atomic fission in December 1942 changed the whole system of energy in this solar system. The higher intelligence decides to make a few simple changes in the electronic structure of some atoms, and zap! We have LSD, an incredibly powerful substance that is the exact antidote to atomic energy. People take LSD, and flash! They get the message and start putting things back in harmony with the great design. Stop war! Wear flowers! Conservation! Turning on people to LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.

  Hoffman’s plan was to persuade square psychiatrists and medical researchers to use LSD. But of course, it never happens that way. The respectable researchers were afraid. They didn’t get the point. So the first far-out, messianic apostle-alchemist of the psychedelic age was a rum-drinking, snake-oil-fundamentalist-Bible Belt salesman type named Hal Lubbard. Like A.O.S.3, Hal Lubbard is a legendary, behind-the-scenes operator whose brilliance was deliberatly shielded behi
nd a veil of rumor. This much is known. In the 1950’s Lubbard was turned on to LSD and got the message at once. He had made money in uranium mining during the forties and saw the connection right away. (Do you?) Then this incredible shaman playing the role of an uneducated, coarse, blustering, Roman Catholic hillbilly boozer proceeded to turn on several dozen top sophisticated scientists and show them the sacramental meaning of LSD.

  When the medical associations complained about nonmedics dispensing drugs, Hal chuckled and bought a doctor’s degree from a diploma store in the South for fifty dollars, and as Doctor-Tongue-in-Cheek, Lubbard was accepted admiringly by psychiatrist Osmond, scientist Hofer, and Aldous Huxley and philosopher Gerald Heard and even Sidney Cohen of UCLA. Hal Lubbard was the first psychedelic tactician to see that supply-control of the drug would be a key issue in the future, so he kept up a mysterious schedule of procurement-distribution flights. East Coast–West Coast–East Europe–West Europe, bargaining, wheedling, swapping to build up the first underground supply of the most precious substance the world has ever known. The current retail price of LSD is from $20,000 to $50,000 a gram. A million dollars an ounce.

  Lubbard’s plan was to have a chain of medically approved LSD clinics throughout the country. It was a brilliant, utopian, American-businessman stroke of genius and would have, among other things, ended the threat of war on this planet, but Lubbard failed to realize that spiritual revelations and Buddhist ecstasies were the last thing that the medical associations and government bureaus run by J. Edgar Lyndon were going to approve, and the International Foundation for Advanced Studies, his pilot clinic in Menlo Park, California (which turned on several hundred of the most influential people in the San Francisco Bay area), was ruthlessly closed by the FDA in spite of its impressive psychiatric and medical credentials. So Hal Lubbard dropped out, disappeared and was reincarnated in the new form of Dr. Spaulding.

  It was a gray, cold, winter day in 1962. Dick Alpert and I took the day off from Harvard and flew in Dick’s plane to New York. Dick’s father was president of the New Haven Railroad, and the cop under Grand Central saluted as we got into the huge black Cadillac with the license plate NHRR, which was equipped with two-way radio and an extra set of wheels to run on tracks.

  I asked Dick, “Who owns Grand Central Station?”

  He said, “Pennsylvania Railroad owns half, and we own half.” Dick was good at throwing away lines. We headed south to visit a chemical factory. Going through the waterfront-Mafia section of Jersey City, I had to laugh. Two Harvard professors driving in a black limousine through the dark slum city to score drugs which would change the world.

  In the wood-paneled conference room of Sandoz Laboratories the top pharmaceutical executives laughed uneasily. We are a medical drug house. How can we market an ecstasy pill to be used by God seekers? The vice-president grinned. Let’s say LSD isn’t a drug. Let’s call it a food and bottle it like Coca-Cola! The company lawyer’s reflex frown. As a food, it still must be licensed by the FDA, and they think medical.

  The conference was a failure. They were sympathetic but weren’t going to lose their AMA-FDA respectability by releasing LSD to the public. We shook hands, and Dick said, “Well, gentlemen, we’ll have to do your marketing for you.” And we all laughed.

  One of the crew-cut executives escorted us down to the car. On the elevator, he suddenly pulled a pill bottle out of his pocket and shoved it in my hand. “I’ve taken LSD. I know what’s happening. Here’s five grams. Don’t say where you got it. Use it wisely.”

  By this time (1962) we had set up a loose but effective distribution system for free LSD. A university psychologist in the Midwest. A God-intoxicated businessman in Atlanta. A few God-loving ministers and rabbis. David Soloman, at that time editor of the jazz magazine Metronome. Allen Ginsberg. Dozens of holy psychiatrists. All giving psychedelics to people they knew were ready for the trip. A responsible network of friends.

  Every time our supplies would run low, a new shaman-alchemist would appear.

  Like Bernie and Barnie, the flipped-out desert holy men, who had been taking the peyote trip with the Indians for years and writing crazy, brilliant, illiterate books on telepathy and accelerated learning through LSD. Bernie claimed to have mastered the German language in two acid sessions. They had learned how to make LSD, which they distributed in rubber-stopped bottles, a strange brown elixir with curious green seaweed strands. They sold the sacrament at bargain rates to dozens of famous people in California before they were treacherously betrayed to the feds. They didn’t get along well with their defense attorneys and built their case around an insane plot to get the judge and jury to taste their brew, which would have revolutionized jurisprudence forever. But the judge recoiled in horror and gave them 19-year sentences, which they jumped. God be with you, beloved guides, wherever you are.

  Some time later (the exact date must be kept vague) I was lecturing in a college town. A note to my hotel. Please call a Doctor Spaulding. Urgent. Had to see me after the lecture.

  He was a distinguished-looking man in his fifties. One of the ten leading chemists in the country. Big-boned, handsome, jolly, athlete-scholar type.

  He drove his car with strange jungle caution, checking the rear-view mirror, doubling around blocks. He drove to the middle of a deserted supermarket parking lot and stopped the car. Cloak and dagger. He came right to the point. He had taken LSD several times. He knew what it would do. He also knew that the government was alarmed. A lot of high-level people had turned on and knew that LSD was a religious experience. But they were worried. Big power struggle over control of drugs in Washington. The narcotics bureau of the Treasury Department wanted to keep all drugs illegal, to step up law enforcement, add thousands of T-men, G-men and narks to the payroll. On the other hand, the medics and scientists in the government wanted the FDA to handle all drugs, including heroin, pot, LSD. Make it a medical matter. Would I make a deal? Would I tell the FDA all I knew about the black market and smash the underground distribution of LSD? If I cooperated, I’d be guaranteed research approval to use LSD. We had to help the FDA get control of the drugs. Then marijuana and LSD would be legal for licensed use. But we had to keep the kids from getting LSD or the hard-line-cop faction in Washington would get the anti-LSD legislation they wanted. If I didn’t cooperate, I’d be busted.

  I looked at him and laughed. Not a chance. This is a country of free citizens. LSD and marijuana are none of the government’s business to give or take away. If it’s a choice, I’d rather have the kids using LSD than the doctors. Kids are holier. And if it’s a choice between becoming a government informer or get busted, I’ll go to jail.

  Dr. Spaulding laughed knowingly. Okay, I had to make the offer, but I knew you wouldn’t scare. But you should know that a big government crackdown is coming. All the sources of LSD will be sealed off. You better stock up. How much do you have on hand now?

  Not much. A few thousand doses.

  How much LSD can you use?

  I looked at him in surprise. He starts out like a fed, and now he’s offering me acid.

  He saw my look and started to explain. A few of us saw this coming several years ago. We started stockpiling the raw lysergic acid base. We have the largest supply of LSD in the world. More than Sandoz, more than Red China, more than our Defense Department. We want to give it away to responsible people who won’t try to profit by it and who can get it out to the people. Okay. How much can you distribute in one year?

  The scene was surrealistic. This famous, eminently respectable professor offering to set us up with unlimited supplies of acid. It was hard to keep from laughing. I asked him one question—why?

  Oh, you know why, Tim. Can you see any hope for this homicidal, neurologically crippled species other than a mass religious ecstatic convulsion? Okay. How much do you want?

  We can get rid of 200 grams in a year. That’s 2 million doses.

  Dr. Spaulding nodded. Fine. You’ll receive a four-year supply—a thousand grams in
the next few weeks. Each package will contain 100 grams of LSD powder. Get scales to put it in doses. Keep it sterile. Alcohol or even vodka. Dilute it down. If you can’t get a pill machine, dilute it down and drop it on sugar cubes.

  He started the car and drove back to my hotel. How many people are you distributing to this way? Not many, he answered. In chemistry, every process has to develop at its own natural tempo. We have enough LSD stored now to keep every living American turned on for several years.

  That was the only time I met Dr. Spaulding. A week later the acid began arriving at Millbrook—in brown manila envelopes and hollowed-out books mailed from different cities throughout the country. In hardly any time at all we had given away 10 million doses.

  It was ten in the evening by now. Rosemary and I were starved. A.O.S.3 was still too high to be hungry, but He was responding telepathically to our stomach pangs. Organic matter nibbling the granite, each life form eating each other. Endless transformation of energy. Galaxies feeding each other.

  Alchemist, do us a favor and don’t mention eating, okay? We haven’t had supper yet.

  He was spinning us along an epic-poem trip through the levels of creation. He can really tell it. I’ve studied with the wisest sages of our times—Huxley, Heard, Lama Govinda, Sri Krishna Prem, Alan Watts—and I have to say that A.O.S.3, college flunk-out, who never wrote anything better (or worse) than a few rubber checks, has the best up-to-date perspective of the divine design I’ve ever listened to.

  To begin with, He begins where they all begin—at the beginning. He had taken the full LSD trip, hurled down through His cellular reincarnations, disintegrated beyond life into pulsing electron grids, whirled down beyond atomic form to that unitary center that is one, pure, radiant humming vibration. Yin. Yin. Yin. Yang. Yang. Yang.