"Twenty-five minutes latah, the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men became relaxed and began to giggle."
They certainly did. The black and white footage from 1964 shows the hitherto ferociously well-drilled servicemen lying flat on their backs, helpless with laughter, or staggering against trees, intoxicated by the hilarity of it all, and by the acid.
"One ahr and ten minutes after taking the drug," intones the narrator, "With one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting he could no longer control himself or his men.
"He himself then relapsed into laughter."
Perhaps bizarrely, the whole thing was considered something of a triumph.
Ultimately, though, this field exercise conducted by the government's secretive Porton Down chemical weapons research establishment was the first in a series that would end in failure.
Half a century ago this year, the military's experimentation with acid ended with the chairman of the Chemical Defence Advisory Board declaring that the idea of using LSD as a weapon of war was "more magical than scientific".
That the British military gave up on LSD in 1968, at the very moment the Sixties counterculture was enthusiastically embracing it, is but one of the ironies.
Comment: Interesting timing.
This was a rare relatively comic interlude in the history of Porton Down, the establishment that recently identified Novichok, the nerve agent developed by Russia, as the substance used to poison former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Comment: They have done no such thing: Keep Calm & Blame Russia: RT Documentary on Inconvenient Facts in Skripal Saga
Before the 1964 exercise, Portdon Down had a far darker entanglement with LSD.
In the early 1950s it had explored the possibility of administering LSD in interrogations as a "truth drug".
British servicemen were allegedly asked if they would volunteer to help with research into finding a cure for the common cold.
Then, it was later claimed, they were given LSD.
Donald Webb recalled how as a 19-year-old airman in 1953, he volunteered for what he thought would be a "cushy number", only to be given LSD several times over the course of a week, suffering nightmarish hallucinations: "cracks appearing in people's faces, you could see their skulls, eyes would run down cheeks ... You could see things growing on you."
Webb, who said he suffered flashbacks for ten years, was given compensation along with two other ex-servicemen in 2006, although the Ministry of Defence made no admission of liability.
Even more sinister than the LSD "truth drug" experiments, was Porton Down's use of servicemen as human guinea pigs for testing nerve agents.
In 1953, the same year that Donald Webb said he experienced his LSD ordeal, leading aircraftman Ronald Maddison died aged 20 after an experiment with sarin went wrong.
An initial inquest, held behind closed doors for "reasons of national security", returned a verdict of death by misadventure.
It was 51 years before a second, public inquest overturned that verdict and replaced it with one of unlawful killing by the British government.
By the early 1960s, Porton Down had the same interest in nerve agents, but the focus on LSD had shifted from its potential use as a "truth drug", to a means of incapacitating the enemy.
In 1994, when the Conservative government was asked about these experiments in Parliament, the modern management of Porton Down was careful to stress that the establishment's current purpose was to devise defensive measures against enemy chemical weapons attacks.
The answers given in parliament in 1994, however, did not make any explicit reference to what Porton Down's role might have been in 1964, and some have argued that at the time the UK had an offensive, as well as defensive chemical weapons programme.
Professor Malcolm Dando of Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies, for example, has drawn attention to the Cabinet Defence Committee meeting of May 1963, chaired by Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, which agreed to: "an increase in research and development on lethal and incapacitating chemical agents and the means of their dissemination."
To the British government of the Sixties, in the form of the Advisory Council on Scientific Research and Technical Development, the hope was that LSD and other such chemical weapons could produce a "humane type of warfare".
The idea seems to have been that "incapacitating agents" could neutralise the enemy without killing him, and perhaps more importantly, without inflicting collateral damage on any civilians who might be present if, for example, the fighting was in a built-up area.
They tried all sorts of things. In 1962 the British noted that their American counterparts were exploring the possibility of weaponising cannabis to make it a battlefield incapacitating agent.
Comment: And much worse: Pentagon Biological Weapons Program Never Ended: US Bio-labs Around The World
Porton Down had a liaison programme with industrial chemists and academic researchers, allowing it to learn about things like what Guy's Hospital Medical School was doing with snake venoms.
And according to Prof Dando's account, by 1964 there was some degree of urgency in the hunt for an effective, "humane" incapacitating agent.
In November of that year, General Sir John Hackett, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, told a meeting of the Advisory Council on Scientific Research and Technical Development: "It was very desirable to find a safe incapacitating agent ... General Staff Targets had been issued."
And so on Tuesday, December 1 1964, 17 volunteers from 41 Royal Marine Commando were given water containing 200 microgrammes of LSD.
There would eventually be three such field exercises. Someone at Porton Down had the sense of humour to recognise that the letters LSD were also the pre-decimal symbols for pounds, shillings and pence - hence the codenames Moneybags, Recount and Small Change.
Moneybags, the December 1964 exercise, was the first.
After drinking their LSD, the marines "embussed" to Porton Down trials range for a small-scale field exercise simulating the kind of counter-insurgent fighting experienced during the Cyprus emergency.
It did not proceed with the normal military efficiency.
At least two different commentaries seem to exist for the footage filmed by Porton Down scientists that day. In the version acquired by the Imperial War Museum, the sober narrator explains: "At 1140 the first effects of the drug make their appearance. Two marines are reported to the troop commander for insubordination.
"The other men ... relax and begin to giggle."
The film pans from a prone, giggling marine to an almost destroyed tree trunk, as the narrator observes: "Men have relapsed into laughter and inconsequential behaviour, though they are still capable of sustained physical effort. This man nearly succeeded in felling this tree using only a spade."
After it ends with one man up a tree and the troop commander helpless, the marines are taken to hospital for "awbservaytion":
"The troop commander is experiencing one of the characteristic effects of the drug. Everything he looks at appears to be patterned. While looking at the white ceiling, he describes geometrical patterns which are coloured and three dimensional. They appear to move in and out of each other..."
More worrying was the anxiety etched on the face of one marine who appeared to be having a bad LSD trip.
"For three hours," the commentary explained, "He was completely divorced from reality. Even now, three and a half hours after the administration of the drug, he does not know what he is doing or where he is."
The marine can be heard telling the medical observers: "No, I'm not going to die ... No, I've not died mate."
The commentary does say that by the next morning he had recovered to the point that he was "capable of carrying out his normal duties."
But it is not entirely clear what long-term effects - if any - there were on the marines.
When questions were asked about this in Parliament in 1994, the official response was that there was "no evidence of any deterioration in the health" of the 72 service volunteers involved in laboratory LSD tests from 1962 and in the Moneybags, Recount and Short Change field exercises.
Despite LSD now being a Class A drug, in 1994 MPs were told, via information supplied by Porton Down's then chief executive Graham Pearson: "There is no evidence to link controlled administration of a single dose of pure LSD with any long-term effects."
Back in 1964, the obvious incapacitation of the marines seems to have been considered an encouraging start.
There were, however, some concerns.
Andy Roberts' book Albion Dreaming states that after Moneybags, and amid growing public anxiety that led to LSD's recreational use being banned in 1966, the Applied Biology Committee considered delaying the trials "until more is known of the persistence of mood effects."
The committee also noted "disconcerting results in one particular case of multiple self-administration and concern over possible addiction".
Presumably, one of the Porton Down scientists had grown rather too fond of the laboratory stock.
Comment: More likely that subject was supplied by Porton Down for further observation: Inside Porton Down, the shady UK chemical weapons lab that developed VX, used innocent civilians as guinea pigs
But the needs of "humane warfare" seem to have come first. The 1965 annual report of the Advisory Council on Scientific Research and Technical Development stated: "Experiments on this humane type of warfare should be pressed forward with all speed."
And so in September 1966, with the ban on medical, as opposed to recreational use of LSD still seven years away, the Recount field exercise began, to be followed, in January 1968 by Small Change.
They seem to have achieved similar results to Moneybags.
Interviewed while being monitored in hospital after Recount, one soldier says: "Things started to seem a bit unreal ... Not able to concentrate, chocolate tasted bitter, similar to when first getting drunk, just wanted effects to wear off."
Film of Small Change shows volunteers from A Company, 1st Battalion Staffordshire Regiment, becoming as relaxed as the marines had been in 1964.
But as with Moneybags, amid the cheerfulness of most of the group, there were signs that a few had been disturbed by the experience.
Asked how he felt, one sergeant replied: "Most confused, very unpleasant."
The scientists involved in Small Change concluded that LSD had, again, successfully reduced unit efficiency.
But by now practical concerns were being raised about how the drug could be deployed in combat.
Persuading friendly volunteers to drink water they knew might be spiked was one thing, getting LSD into a hostile enemy on the battlefield was another.
The Porton Down scientists were finding LSD hard to deliver as a gas. And to be effective in this form, the doses needed to be high - worryingly high.
The dream of a "humane", casualty-free incapacitating agent was dying.
As Prof Dando has suggested, the British were discovering what was allegedly demonstrated to tragic effect during the Moscow theatre siege of 2001.
The Russian authorities are believed to have tried using something similar to fentanyl - the opioid now contributing to huge addiction problems in the US - in the hope of incapacitating the Chechen hostage takers.
The alleged result was that scores of hostages were killed by the effects of the drug.
Perhaps then the right decision was made in 1968, when after Small Change, Professor R. B. Fisher, chairman of the Chemical Defence Advisory Board, circulated a paper advising: "The notion of an incapacitator is a little more magical than scientific."
The field trials of LSD were over.
The military left the experimenting with acid to the hippies, who by now were busy trying to prove that LSD was for making love, not war.
I've studied his work since the early '70s and recommended it here many, many times.
It's my view that he makes far more sense than say, Gurdjieff et al. who, despite their having some few things to say, don't begin to get into the actual depths in which we struggle lifelong. Instead we are provided intellectual exercises leaving us, like water striders, to skitter across the surface tension of our fathomless depths, all the while imaging ourselves to know one thing or another.
Here he is at some length on LSD, how it works and what it does. Note that I've excerpted only the academics' comments, there are many more lay comments at the bottom of the article on the [Link] -ed page.
======= On the Real Meaning of LSD and Hallucinogens ===========
There is an article, I believe, from the recent New Yorker about someone who took Acid (LSD) in the seventies and wonders what happened to the youth of today who prefer the shutting down drugs such as Prozac versus the opening up drugs such as Acid. He claims that society no longer wants to take risks, preferring to keep it safe. He believes that our choice of drugs is indicative of the general zeitgeist , reflecting the world we live in. In the early years (the 70’s) we craved freedom; now we crave security. He seems to be nostalgic for those old Acid days. And doesn’t discuss their dangers enough; and I believe it is one of the most dangerous drugs around. What does it do?
Grosso modo , it immediately depletes serotonin and other GABA chemicals, and diminishes the work of the gates, thus allowing all kinds of pain on all levels [to surge, ensemble,] toward the prefrontal cortex. Gamma amino butyric acid is a repressor holding down pain and blocking against feeling hurt. What Acid does is disrupt gating and allow us to feel our pain…..but all at once. Since that constitutes an overload, the exact feelings are blocked or disconnected but their energy level gets through to higher centers. And what do those higher centers do? They absorb all that force and begin the cognitive defense against it. They do what any person does when overloaded with imprinted pain; they manufacture far-out, bizarre ideas to encapsulate the force. This is true with LSD and in everyday life. That is why LSD is sometimes called a psychotomimetic. The ideas are far out because they are forced by a heavy load into concocting something. And the leitmotif of the feeling, the feeling of feeling, gets through so that the content of the hallucination somehow reflects what the person is dealing with. Someone is trying to kill me (death is near). Or they feel a cosmic oneness with the universe, which seems like an hallucination to me. Since what the person is thinking is idiosyncratic solely to her. And what helps eradicate the hallucination it for the moment is a tranquilizer/pain-killer. It is so easy to see the connection between pain and hallucinations since pain-killers stop those beliefs in their tracks.
The frontal cortex is the last refuge of defense; going psychotic to keep from becoming insane. Absorbing heavy energy with beliefs before they can affect the heart to produce a fatal cardiac arrest. It is not the drug that makes hallucinations; it is the pain that has no specific context that drives the higher levels to become exotic. There is a context but it is usually a very early imprint with no specific scene attached. Its force, however, is preverbal with life-threatening consequences. There is no specific scene for the cortex to hang onto.
If at first you had a good trip, it is because you have a good enough defense system to allow only some of the pain through….like smoking pot. But you will have a bad trip when first line terrors and rage surge through to produce the equivalent of a nightmare. And indeed, the trip is a nightmare. Daymares are nightmares with the sunlight. Otherwise, no difference. Terror is terror, day and night. The physiology does not change when the sun goes down. It bursts through unchecked because beliefs which work in see-saw fashion with imprinted feelings, are not strong enough to hold them down. Then you make no sense. These neural gates are not Huxley’s, "Doors to Perception"; on the contrary they block perception in specific ways and allow only global perceptions; so-called Universal Truths. You are never “one with yourself or with the cosmos.” You mind has flown into pieces and you can only recapture pieces of yourself. You feel liberated because the lid of the repressive load has been temporarily lifted. It is primal therapy on speed. Instead of getting to one feeling at a time and integrating it; you get [into all of it] all at once and it is really too much. But you do not have enough critical faculties left to understand what is happening.
We did LSD research decades ago and found the brain very speeded up but with low amplitude which means to us the breakdown of defenses. We see on patients on the verge of deep non-verbal feeling that defenses mount with the heightening of the amplitude. When they crash, so does the amplitude. And after some ten trips the effects last for years; trouble sleeping, needing tranquilizers, cannot concentrate and unstable behavior, in general. That is the danger of rebirthing and drugs that prematurely unleash early pains out of sequence. You can and do often get hallucinations; “at one with the cosmos,” etc. I have seen it over and over in those who take drugs, smoke pot all of the time, or go to rebirthing centers. They come to us overloaded and seemingly “in space.” They are not all there. When a "booga booga" therapist thinks this is a good response to his therapy, watch out. When his beliefs merge with the patient all is lost. When the therapist thinks that “at one with the universe” is to be fervently sought they are both hallucinating.
Integration is the sine qua non of progress in psychotherapy. Nothing artificial can make that happen. It is a biologic law; not to be abrogated because someone has invented a quick way to ourselves. To defy biologic laws is to contravene nature and natural law. To bypass nature means not to get well, for it is only through nature that we can be cured. We need to go at nature’s pace, follow the rhythm of the evolution and not [try to] hurry up the process. The human brain is a delicate instrument. We need to play it carefully.
LSD has been used for treating depression. What it does is ease the cap of repression, thereby easing the depression, which, as I have said over and over, is repression elevated to a high level. One no longer feels the specific feelings; they are usually preverbal and of heavy valence so that they cannot be accessed easily.
The writer in the article (Marc Lewis) went from LSD to heroin. No surprise since the gates had been flung open by LSD and needed closing. What better way than through a powerful painkiller. If he did our therapy he would not need heroin. He would have felt the pain in all its agony one piece at a time. LSD shows us nothing except how it feels not to repress pain for a brief moment. That is good. Getting there through drugs is definitely not good. Doing the artificial can never produce natural responses. And it is always nature we are after. We are after inner harmony, and only nature can provide it.
[He sounds rather like some thing the Cs would tell us.]
=============
Art Janov, one of the pioneers of fetal and early infant experiences and future mental health issues, offers a robust vision of how the earliest traumas of life can percolate through the brains, minds and lives of individuals. He focuses on both the shifting tides of brain emotional systems and the life-long consequences that can result, as well as the novel interventions, and clinical understanding, that need to be implemented in order to bring about the brain-mind changes that can restore affective equanimity. The transitions from feelings of persistent affective turmoil to psychological wholeness, requires both an understanding of the brain changes and a therapist that can work with the affective mind at primary-process levels. Janov's, "Life Before Birth," is a manifesto that provides a robust argument for increasing attention to the neuro-mental lives of fetuses and infants, and the widespread ramifications on mental health if we do not. Without an accurate developmental history of troubled minds, coordinated with a recognition of the primal emotional powers of the lowest ancestral regions of the human brain, therapists will be lost in their attempt to restore psychological balance.
Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D.
Bailey Endowed Chair of Animal Well Being Science
Washington State University
=============
Dr. Janov’s essential insight —t hat our earliest experiences strongly influence later well being — is no longer in doubt. Thanks to advances in neuroscience, immunology, and epigenetics, we can now see some of the mechanisms of action at the heart of these developmental processes. His long-held belief that the brain, human development, and psychological well being need to studied in the context of evolution — from the brainstem up — now lies at the heart of the integration of neuroscience and psychotherapy.
Grounded in these two principles, Dr. Janov continues to explore the lifelong impact of prenatal, birth, and early experiences on our brains and minds. Simultaneously “old school” and revolutionary, he synthesizes traditional psychodynamic theories with cutting-edge science while consistently highlighting the limitations of a strict, “top-down” talking cure. Whether or not you agree with his philosophical assumptions, therapeutic practices, or theoretical conclusions, I promise you an interesting and thought-provoking journey.
Lou Cozolino, PsyD,
Professor of Psychology,
Pepperdine University
=============
In, "Life Before Birth" Dr. Arthur Janov illuminates the sources of much that happens during life after birth. Lucidly, the pioneer of primal therapy provides the scientific rationale for treatments that take us through our original, non-verbal memories — to essential depths of experience that the superficial cognitive-behavioral modalities currently in fashion cannot possibly touch, let alone transform.
Gabor Maté MD, author of:
"In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction"
=============
An expansive analysis! This book attempts to explain the impact of critical developmental windows in the past, implores us to improve the lives of pregnant women in the present, and has implications for understanding our children, ourselves, and our collective future. I’m not sure whether primal therapy works or not, but it certainly deserves systematic testing in well-designed, assessor-blinded, randomized controlled clinical trials.
K.J.S. Anand, MBBS, D. Phil, FAACP, FCCM, FRCPCH,
Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Anatomy & Neurobiology,
Senior Scholar, Center for Excellence in Faith and Health,
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare System
=============
A baby's brain grows more while in the womb than at any time in a child's life. "Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script That Rules Our Lives" is a valuable guide to creating healthier babies and offers insight into healing our early primal wounds. Dr. Janov integrates the most recent scientific research about prenatal development with the psychobiological reality that these early experiences do cast a long shadow over our entire lifespan. With a wealth of experience and a history of successful psychotherapeutic treatment, Dr. Janov is well positioned to speak with clarity and precision on a topic that remains critically important.
Paula Thomson, PsyD,
Associate Professor, California State University,
Northridge & Professor Emeritus, York University
=============
I am enthralled.
Dr. Janov has crafted a compelling and prophetic opus that could rightly dictate
PhD thesis topics for decades to come. Devoid of any "New Age" pseudoscience,
this work never strays from scientific orthodoxy and yet is perfectly accessible and
downright fascinating to any lay person interested in the mysteries of the human psyche.
Dr. Bernard Park, MD, MPH
=============
His new book “Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” Janov shows that primal therapy, the lower-brain therapeutic method popularized in the 1970s international bestseller “Primal Scream” and his early work with John Lennon, may help alleviate depression and anxiety disorders, normalize blood pressure and serotonin levels, and improve the functioning of the immune system.
One of the book’s most intriguing theories is that fetal imprinting, an evolutionary strategy to prepare children to cope with life, establishes a permanent set-point in a child's physiology. Babies born to mothers highly anxious during pregnancy, whether from war, natural disasters, failed marriages, or other stressful life conditions, may thus be prone to mental illness and brain dysfunction later in life. Early traumatic events such as low oxygen at birth, painkillers and antidepressants administered to the mother during pregnancy, poor maternal nutrition, and a lack of parental affection in the first years of life may compound the effect.
In making the case for a brand-new, unified field theory of psychotherapy, Dr. Janov weaves together the evolutionary theories of Jean Baptiste Larmarck, the fetal development studies of Vivette Glover and K.J.S. Anand, and fascinating new research by the psychiatrist Elissa Epel suggesting that telomeres — a region of repetitive DNA critical in predicting life expectancy — may be significantly altered during pregnancy.
After explaining how hormonal and neurologic processes in the womb provide a blueprint for later mental illness and disease, Dr. Janov charts a revolutionary new course for psychotherapy. He provides a sharp critique of cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoanalysis, and other popular “talk therapy” models for treating addiction and mental illness, which he argues do not reach the limbic system and brainstem, where the effects of early trauma are registered in the nervous system.
“Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” is scheduled to be published by NTI Upstream in October 2011, and has tremendous implications for the future of modern psychology, paediatrics, pregnancy, and women’s health.
Editor