"Ha ha! Cha cha! Na na! Givin' you psychoses, Big Willy style!"
LSD has long been a staple of overweight, furry men with ponytails who list their occupation as 'Earth Shaman' on tax forms. The CIA is more typically known for their starched suits than their mind exploring orgies. So if we told you that the CIA was trippin' balls before Hunter S. Thompson even knew that balls existed, you'd probably call us liars. Well, prepare to have your mind, like, blown man. Here are the five strangest things you didn't know about the CIA, and how LSD really came to be.
"Ha ha! Cha cha! Na na! Givin' you psychoses, Big Willy style!"
"Okay, Frank. Are you absolutely, completely, 100 percent positive you didn't dose my coffee this morning? 'Cause I'm pretty sure just I took an offramp into the Metaverse here. I'm just sayin'..."
So at one point, there was a Master Magician in charge of drugging employed to the CIA. Sure, it's a little terrifying to consider that the severe young government operative holding a gun to your head probably thinks you have a cow-face, and is detaining you for trying to disentangle his soul with your negative energy. But you have to admit - "CIA Drug Magician" is a pretty sweet job title."Did you finish your drink, baby? Do you want to fuck me now? Do you still want to be inside of me, Larry?"
Oh, and in case you think the CIA was being at all responsible with their unfettered access to acid, whores and one-way mirrors, allow George White; the man in charge of the entire project, to describe his career, in his own words, as taken from this memo sent to his superior at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics: "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" And that is officially the scariest violence-fueled drug rant ever. He sounds like Hunter S. Thompson crossed with Conan the Barbarian. Surely he's... joking or something, right? Let's double-check this with an outside source like, say a fellow agent in Operation Midnight Climax, one Lt. Ira Feldman:"Don't worry, sir, we'll technically obey your every word! Why am I stressing the word 'technically'? Was, I? Why, no reason..."
Your tax dollars hard at work.
Author Ken Kesey, widely credited with kickstarting the entire hippy movement in the early 60s, was himself a subject of MK-ULTRA's experiments. It was unknown to Kesey at the time exactly what the experiments were for, or by whom--as it's doubtful he would've been quite as stoked to join up if he'd known the government was attempting to erase his personality using Nazi science--but his participation in the MK-ULTRA drug studies was what eventually led him to start the Merry Pranksters, who first widely advocated the "mind-expanding" properties of LSD and eventually gave rise to the modern hippy. Kesey himself, of course, was a genius and a visionary, but regardless of his
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