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Time Magazine Endorses LSD and Starts The Drug Epidemic

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     In 1967, the Monterey California Pop Festival marked a new relationship between LSD and music. Author Peter Stafford writes: “Many there took LSD to celebrate and enhance their appreciation of this festival. Musicians and artists soon began wide-scale experimentation with ways to perform that would complement, direct and heighten the effects of LSD, or present a ‘flash’ of the experience for the uninitiated.”

	1969: Woodstock Rock Festival. LSD: Experimented with and marketed by psychiatrists, artists were used to promote LSD as a “consciousness-raising” agent. As leaders in their field, these artists were capable of enormous influence on the culture. Psychiatrists played Russian roulette with human lives, knowing that for some, LSD created psychosis.

     The media, notably LIFE magazine, whose publisher Henry Luce tried the drug, ran articles promoting it. A March 1963 article claimed that LSD was “derived from a natural product.”

     The authors of a 1967 paper, predicted that special LSD clinics would be utilized where possibly, “creative individuals, in periods of depression or blockage, will seek facilities where a feeling of renewal can be released.” The study reported a number of different phenomena associated with psychedelic drugs, including, “Psychotic psychedelic experience characterized by intense fear to the point of panic, paranoid delusions of suspicion or grandeur, toxic confusion, depersonalization... all of these can be of powerful magnitude.”

     Yes, LSD induced the very “madness” psychiatrists were supposed to be curing. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Jimmy Hendrix, and many others would find their lives and careers devastated under the weight of these delusions and the accompanying depersonalization that Fleetwood Mac guitarist, Peter Green would blame years later for ruining his career. [See sidebar on Peter Green.]

     Although LSD and other similar drugs were eventually banned as dangerous, by then there had been a radical shift in community attitudes concerning the value, use and place of psychotropic drugs in society. Paving the way for even greater changes, predictions of the coming “choose your mood” type of society began to appear in scientific publications.

     Within two decades, the antidepressant Prozac emerged, with the reputed ability to fix depression, weight and sexual problems, bulimia, Pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS), smoking, migraines and a lot more. Today, millions are “turning on,” “mellowing out” and trying not to be “uptight” with this little psychiatric helper.

     And like LSD, lithium and Thorazine in the past, the “new” antidepressants are heavily promoted through the arts and entertainment industries: in movies, songs and even in greeting cards.

     With the general public increasingly tuned to these drugs, the marketing possibilities are endless. And as the true dangers of each new “miracle” pill are confirmed, following years of hard evidence collection, psychiatrists will put their weight behind the next pill development quietly waiting in the wings – as went Valium, Halcion and so many of their past “wonder” drugs.

Sensitivity Training: An Agent of Change

     As much as LSD was a major agent of change for the ’60s, the “Human Potential Movement” also made significant contributions to the upheaval of that era and beyond. Beginning in the ’40s, German psychologist, Kurt Lewin, developed “Sensitivity Training” or “T-groups” to show how people “could be socially and psychologically manipulated to give up their souls....” In the ’40s he had worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was concerned with the “psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation.” And indeed, Sensitivity Training changes a person’s ideals and values by invalidation: refuting, denying, degrading or discrediting his values and certainties and replacing them with another’s values or ideas.

     Adherents, such as psychologist Ed Schein, who studied brainwashing techniques in Korea, admitted that it was modeled on Pavlov’s brainwashing techniques. In an introduction to one of his papers on Sensitivity Training, Schein says that this method includes “coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing as well as a multitude of less coercive, informal patterns.”

     Developed by Lewin through the National Training Laboratory (NTL) under the National Education Association (NEA), Sensitivity Training earned many names: Group Therapy, Conflict Management, Planned Change, Mind Set, Nude Therapy, Marathon Therapy, Group Dynamics, Role Playing, Social Psychology, Human Relations Lab, Sensory Awareness Groups, Conflict Resolution and Encounter Groups, to cite some.

     The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, an influential focal point during the “Hippie” movement of the sixties, was an offshoot of this development. According to Sensitivity Training advocate, Abraham M. Maslow, President of the American Psychological Association, Esalen became “the most important educational institution in the world.” It inspired several thousands of encounter groups.

     In 1975, English psychiatrist and LSD guru, Humphrey Osmond wrote: “The Human Potential Movement, and variously called sensitivity training, encounter groups, T-groups... appears to be gaining in popularity in our society. Many of these interpersonal encounters are frequently regarded as ’acidless trips’ or another means of expanding consciousness.... In the past few years especially, an increasing number of reports suggest that such group encounters can precipitate psychiatric disturbances in some participants. Many of the descriptions of these disturbances appear compellingly similar to those experienced with psychoactive drugs, especially the psychedelics.”

     “Expanding consciousness” became simply a deceptive name for any activity which changed an individual’s or group’s value system, whether through drugs or sensitivity-styled groups. Consistent with psychiatry’s and psychology’s broader behavioral modification purposes, the effects of both mind-altering drugs and group therapies have caused major upheaval in all areas of society including education, family, law, justice, morals, drugs, crime, and religion.

     And, because of their influence, the arts and entertainment industries have been heavily utilized to these purposes.

“They gave you tranquilizers... It was a struggle to stay awake. You don’t know what you are doing. You don’t feel alive.”

Peter Green
songwriter/
guitarist

1996

	PETER GREEN: Fleetwood Mac songwriter/guitarist, considered one of the greatest white blues guitarists ever, was a casualty of the 1960s and psychiatry’s LSD. To “cure” the effects of the LSD, he was given more powerful psychiatric drugs and electroshock.

arlos Santana regarded him as the greatest of them all. He played with a tone which B. B. King is rumored to have said “was the only thing he ever heard that made him sweat.”

     Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie said, “He is still held in the highest regard by his peers and devotees, some of whom consider him the best white blues guitarist ever.”

     How do you know when you have not only reached the top, but have majorly defined where “top” is in any artistic field? Perhaps it could be the point when your contemporaries – the world’s best themselves – begin to refer to you as their inspiration and benchmark.

     If so, there is no doubt that Peter Green, founder, hit songwriter and guitarist of the famed musical group, Fleetwood Mac, did both reach and define the top of his field in 1969 – the year when Fleetwood Mac sold more records than the Beatles and the Stones put together, with hits like “Albatross” and “Green Manilishi.”

     Just prior to his disappearance, Green’s behavior had dramatically changed: once characteristically “brash and arrogant,” he suddenly became “passive and withdrawn.” He began to hate the fame, and started to give away his fortune while trying to convince the other group members to do the same. “Whatever interest he had in his career, he lost; his self-belief as a musician evaporated,” a UK article reported in 1996.

     As fast as Green reached the top, he plummeted out of world view and remained invisible for the next 26 years – another casualty of the ’60s drug culture and specifically, the experimental psychiatric drug, LSD.

     So much for this ’50s and ’60s wonder drug, promoted heavily by psychiatry as the ultimate creative aid for artists. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence to substantiate this view. In fact, psychiatry itself had already confirmed in numerous studies that LSD was a dangerous, psychosis-producing hallucinogenic.

     Green’s crash from fame took a different turn from that followed by many other LSD victims. Within four years, he was receiving legally enforced psychiatric treatment, and during the next ten years, was subjected to both heavy psychiatric drug treatments and electroshock, as he cycled in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

     Green later recalled, “I didn’t want it (ECT); I was scared of it. They take your mind away from you....” “They gave me tranquilizers, and I didn’t really know much about it. It was a struggle just to stay awake. You don’t know what you are doing. You don’t feel alive.”

     About LSD, Green said, “LSD makes you break with your feelings; you disown them because they are uncomfortable. The thing about LSD is you can’t get back.... You lose all your fears. You could kill yourself, and it wouldn’t matter.” And sadly, so many do not make it back.

     However, by some miracle, Green is still alive today. In fact he recently picked up his guitar and resumed public performance. And with headlines like “The Rock Star Who Returned To Earth,” it is obvious that even the media understands the impossible odds of his return. It is a testament to his formidable inner strength and the power of the artistic spirit.