Demonization of marijuana resulted in hosts of citizens doing hard time for possessing a joint or two

In the lobby along the south wall of the Original Headquarters Building of the CIA stands a statue of Maj. Gen William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

It’s part of a memorial to the Office of Strategic Services, the first full-service intelligence organization in the United States, the seed of the CIA.

In July 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put Donovan in charge of looking into whatever the agency deemed threatening to the security of the United States. Those who work at the Langley, Virginia complex today see Donovan as not only the first director of the OSS but also the “Father of American Intelligence.” He’s their George Washington.

From the outset — even though pre-Cold War — Donovan was interested in finding a drug, a chemical brew, that would make people blab classified secrets, unknowingly and without resistance.

That is, the drug would break down spies, prisoners of war and the like so they would open their memory banks for inspection. Donovan hoped the truth-prodder would also ferret out double agents inside the agency.  

In the spring of 1942, less than a year after the United States entered The War, Donovan brought together several prominent psychiatrists and the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger, and assigned them the task of finding what they referred to as TD, the “Truth Drug.” Years later, Donovan would say they were open to anything: “We were not afraid to try things that were never done before.”

Thus they began with alcohol, barbiturates, caffeine, peyote, and scopolamine (a drug designed to relieve nausea, vomiting, and dizziness from motion sickness). One section of a 1977 Senate Subcommittee report describes experiments with scopolamine combined with morphine and chloroform.

The combo was supposed to “induce a state of ‘twilight sleep’” as Doctor Robert House had decades before with criminal suspects in Dallas, Texas. Pre-Miranda.

For a variety of reasons — the subcommittee’s report is available online — “Donovan’s Dreamers,” as they were called, quickly turned to marijuana. The agency’s scientific team said they could manufacture a clear, viscous, odorless, colorless version of the new TD on the block. Cannabitic juice could be injected in a person’s food — meat, mashed potatoes, salad — or shot into a cigarette waiting for an unwitting subject to light up and spill the beans of subversion.

But the new experiments with “grass” did not provide the reliable data the agency had hoped for. Some people chilled when dosed, others had “toxic reactions.” A declassified OSS document of Jan. 31, 1946 says marijuana “defies all but the most expert and searching analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis.” Translated: It was time to move on.

Those interested in the United States government’s early search for a truth-producer can turn to Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain’s “Acid Dreams: The complete social history of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond” which first appeared in 1985.

The book is filled with a host of undeniable data. Indeed every statement about the government’s involvement in drug experimentation is backed by a declassified document from the archives of the CIA, FBI, and different branches of the military.

And those documents say the fireworks show really began in earnest when the TD explorers tuned into LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). In April 1953, three days after the newly-appointed CIA director, Allen Dulles, spoke to fellow alums at Princeton University, the agency launched its MK-ULTRA, a powerhouse complex of mind-control strategies designed to achieve international sovereignty.

Dulles told his Princeton chums “how sinister the battle for men’s minds had become in Soviet hands” and it was up to the CIA to declassify the opposition. Enter LSD.

LSD is an atomic drug. It produces effects so primordial in a person that deep personality changes occur in a single session. Therapists had been using it for years to help patients find their way out of despair-riddled confusion.

During the late-fifties, the movie actor Cary Grant took 100 “trips” under the guidance of a therapist. He talks about his ventures in the documentary “Becoming Cary Grant.”

While Grant was morphing into his better self, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary was using LSD to effect personality change in criminals housed in Massachusetts prisons. In his autobiography “Flashbacks,” Leary reveals how he came to this work and how it eventually got him fired from Harvard.

Regardless, when the government started using LSD, the Keystone Cops showed up en masse. That is, in order to speak with authority about acid, CIA field agents dosed themselves and started dosing each other during coffee breaks while the dosers took out their notebooks to jot down every exhibited deviation.  

As part of Operation Midnight Climax, agent George Hunter White set up safehouses fitted with one-way mirrors where prostitutes on the CIA payroll brought unwitting “subjects” to grapple with the mind-bending realities of LSD while having sex.

To expand its work, the agency awarded more than three-quarters of a million dollars ($7 million today) to psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to conduct their own studies on how people behaved when acid destroyed equilibrium.  

If you’re familiar with the transmigrations of Timothy Leary you know how things changed after he and his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. And, if you’ve read Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” you know people have deep religious experiences on acid; some say they speak to God.

But, if you were alive in, or studied, the sixties you know that at a certain point a crack-down came. In May 1966, Nevada and California led the charge by forbidding the manufacture, sale, and possession of LSD. No more TD for the masses.

The federal government’s Drug Abuse Control Amendment passed the year before gave the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare the power to designate certain “stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic” drugs as controlled substances requiring licensing for sales and distribution.

Of course the saddest part of the story was Harry Anslinger’s continuing demonization of marijuana, which resulted in hosts of citizens doing hard time for possessing a joint or two. Colonel Kurtz summed up Anslinger at the end of “Apocalypse Now”: the horror.

Anslinger called marijuana a, “deadly dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once became a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.”

He said using it was, “a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marijuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters.”

And forget concentrates like hash; they make “a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get to him.”

Anslinger found support for his insanity when “Reefer Madness” appeared in 1936 and the Marijuana Tax Act was passed a year after. Every piece of governmental lit of the era addressing grass, smoke, Mary Jane, reefer — take your pick — said users were mad men hiding in the bushes waiting to rape and pillage your daughter.

It’s autumn 2018 now and things have changed somewhat. There are now nine states and the District of Columbia where a witting subject can buy a lid of Lemon Kush over the counter like a bottle of chardonnay. And the data collected on the ongoing experiment in Colorado, for example, prove that Anslinger had been enveloped in a mirage of madness.

But, as the great American poet Allen Ginsberg, who took nearly every drug under the sun, used to warn: Every time you take a mind-expanding drug, you’re fooling with your nervous system. And that’s no small matter.

Thus, if an explorer in the land of legalized TD discovers that his metamorphoses do not result in personal growth and sharing in convivial community, it’s time to move on.