they've always been up to some bullshit in California, huh?

[alyaza]

the stereotype (and—i guess—reality) of Silicon Valley being hopelessly dependent on its residents making use of stimulants and drugs seems to date surprisingly far back; apparently, they've been up to this trick since one Myron Stolaroff decided it would be a cool idea to give the manufacturing elite of the time a series of really expensive LSD trips:

Wealthy enough by then to go at it alone, [Myron] Stolaroff left Ampex to found the International Foundation for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto, where he “augmented” the engineering elite with LSD. [...] During the first half of the 1960s, the foundation guided hundreds of subjects through personal LSD trips at $500 a pop (around $5,000 in 2022 money), and the reviews were raves. Palo Alto was the glowing center of the bourgeois acid scene, a vindication of drug pioneers such as Timothy Leary, who imagined a trickle-down liberation of the American mind[...]

(evidently, the time-honored tradition of giving your excuse to recreationally do drugs a very important sounding name is just as old!)

as it happens, people really like LSD and the experience it gives them. Stolaroff made a killing off of this idea, as far as i can tell; he also, admittedly, had the bonus of living in a time where this kind of psychonaut experimentation on people in the Silicon Valley millieu led to slightly more productive outcomes than Venmo for ISIS from his clients:

A team including Stolaroff’s deputies Harman and James Fadiman (of Engelbart’s augmentation center at SRI) published their preliminary findings a few years later, summarizing the experiences of professional men who took acid and tried to solve work problems. In addition to the LSD effects we now take for granted (a broadening of context, access to the subconscious, increased empathy), they reported slightly improved work performance across a number of categories. One engineer described the experience thusly: “I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched this circuit flipping through its paces.” An architect found himself with a perfect design: “I drew the property lines.… Suddenly I saw the finished project. I did some quick calculations.… it would fit on the property and not only that.… it would meet the cost and income requirements.… it would park enough cars.… it met all the requirements.”

tragically, this period also coincided with regulations catching up to this new and interesting drug. the Food and Drug Administration being given power to regulate psychedelics, alongside a general push to criminalize psychedelics (in the case of California led by Ronald Reagan), meant you could no longer do essentially whatever you wanted with the stuff. or, at least, you had to get good at evading the law. thus Stolaroff and his contemporaries were forced to improvise a bit to continue fucking around:

The foundation was at the edge of a breakthrough—a planned visit from some high-placed federal officials—when the politics of LSD shifted, and in 1966 Stolaroff found his clinical research abruptly shut down. Luckily, Palo Alto contained plenty of other well-funded nooks and crannies. Harman got a placement at SRI, too, and he quietly resumed the acid experiments under the auspices of the Alternative Futures Project.

such is life.

it is actually pretty interesting what the Bay Area scene of drug counterculture got up to in the 1960s; people like Stolaroff were not necessarily on the vanguard of recreation with LSD, but as far as public perception went they were doing something very few people had before. (the primary analogue of the time would have probably been Aldous Huxley and his experience with mescaline—which he documented in the book The Doors of Perception—but even then that book seems to have been a mostly British and not American phenomenon.) their subsequent influence on culture was substantial—and on the whole probably a net benefit—even outside of their impact on Silicon Valley. i have heard good things about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey's much lauded novel and perhaps the classic artistic manifestation of Bay Area bohemianism at the time. (others might offer Bob Kaufman, another long-time drug aficionado, who was even more avant-garde—embracing impermanence in his art and taking a ten year vow of silence for example—and had the likely-fatal defect of being Black and countercultural in his time.)

but if nothing else, the Silicon Valley manufacturing class and its artistic bohemian types actually used LSD to achieve something less psychotic than "attempted mind control and brainwashing," which had been the primary purview of LSD experimentation before that point. see, the actual vanguard of psychonautical experiment in America (and one of the reasons LSD even became available for mass consumption, since the CIA demanded a ton of its manufacture) was literally MKUltra. you can't take two steps in America without stumbling into something unimaginably fucked up, so it's only natural that our initial innovations in what psychedelics can do to people were wrapped up in Cold War neurosis and vehement anti-communism, with a splash of violating human rights in there too.

as summarized in the book Quick Fixes, MKUltra was

placed under the aegis of the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff, the head of which, Sidney Gottlieb, was handpicked by Dulles for his “zeal and creative imagination.” Gottlieb was given free rein to crack the secrets of the human psyche, and thereby offer America a shortcut to global dominance. Drug experimentation was a crucial part of this work, and after a short time, Gottlieb became convinced that LSD was his miracle drug—perhaps because of his own extensive use of it. Through a variety of “subprojects,” whose heads were often unaware of the true source of their funding, Gottlieb “tested” LSD in scenarios that ranged from the merely criminal to the mind-bendingly macabre.

how this looked practically was—to be blunt—large-scale human experimentation on and abuse of unwilling patients in a manner that, in some cases, would have been indistinguishable from Nazi or Imperial Japanese experimentation on humans during World War II. under Gottlieb, medical practitioners such as Donald Ewen Cameron were given an immense amount of latitude, leading to nonsense like "psychic driving"—in which Cameron used, in a typical example, "administered electroconvulsive shocks [to a patient] that reached thirty to forty times the strength other psychiatrists used. After days of this treatment, the patient was moved to a solitary ward. There he or she was fed LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water, and oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with earphones, into which he piped phrases or messages like “My mother hates me,” repeated hundreds of thousands of times."

Kesey, it should be noted, was almost certainly introduced to the muse of LSD (and a plethora of other fun drugs to use recreationally) through MKUltra or at least an immediately adjacent program—he seems to have come away not particularly worse off for it himself, something that clearly cannot be said for many of his contemporaries. additional bloody details seem prudent to spare so as to not have this be a true downer of a blogpost, but if you're in the mood to be mad, Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief seems to be the magnum opus of Gottlieb's place in this barbarity (and how he parlayed it into a much broader career that included clandestine operations against Cuba and others).