Excerpts
Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he'd be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been. Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102. >>FULL EXCERPT
In the summer of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News broke the story of the connection between L.A. crack dealers and the U.S. funded Nicaraguan Contras. More than a month later, the Washington Post weighed in with a five-story, roughly 10,000-word broadside that ripped the series apart, debunking its central tenets and wondering aloud what it is about black people that makes them so paranoid.
The Post’s editorial board explained that “the shock of the story for many was not simply the sheer monstrousness of the idea of an official agency contributing to a modern-day plague—and to a plague targeted on blacks. The shock was the credibility the story seems to have generated when it reached some parts of the black community.”But it wasn’t their fault they were so gullible, the Post assured in a separate piece, blaming a “history of victimization” that had led to “outright paranoia.”
“It doesn’t matter whether the series’ claims are ‘proved’ true,” read another story. “To some folks—graduates of Watergate, Iran-contra and FBI harassment of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—they feel so true that even if they’re refuted, they’ll still be fact to them.”
Facts, indeed, are a funny thing. The Washington Post, while it launched its assault on the Mercury News, had facts at its disposal demonstrating that the story was accurate. >>FULL EXCERPT
Huffington Post: LSD's Vanishing Act
One day in the fall of 2001, I realized that I hadn't seen any LSD in an awfully long time. I was living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland at the time, where the drug had been a fixture of my social scene since the early-nineties. Most of my peers had continued dosing through college or whatever they chose to do instead. Even some watermen and farmers I knew had tripped on occasion.
Because most acid users don't take the drug with any regularity--a trip here or there is the norm--its absence didn't immediately register. It's the kind of drug that appears in waves, so the inability to find it at any given time could be chalked up to the vagaries of the illicit drug market.
I began asking friends going to hippie happenings to look for the drug. Eventually, I had a network of people poking around for it at concerts and festivals across the country, as well as in towns where you'd expect to find it, such as Boulder and San Francisco. They found nothing--and no one who'd even seen a hit of LSD since sometime in 2001--even at Burning Man, a gathering of thousands in the desert of Nevada. Strolling around Burning Man and being unable to find acid is something like walking into a bar and finding the taps dry. >>FULL EXCERPT
Huffington Post: NAFTA And The Drug Cartels; "A Deal Made In Narco Heaven"
During the first year of his administration, President Bill Clinton made free trade a top priority, pushing for the passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. It wasn't an easy task. Having helped Democrats take the White House for the first time in twelve years, organized labor was in no mood to see manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico.
The debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption. And how the agreement would also end up benefiting the cartels.
So he ordered his people not to talk about it.
"We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes." Phil Jordan, who had been one of the Drug Enforcement Administration's leading authorities on Mexican drug organizations, told ABC News reporter Brian Ross four years after the deal had gone through. "For the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven." >>FULL EXCERPT
AlterNet.org: How the DARE Generation Got High
In the summer of 1999, the sixties generation celebrated itself by throwing a concert to mark Woodstock’s thirtieth anniversary. The do-over event was organized by the same ponytailed businessman who’d put the first one together, and typical of something organized by an aging boomer, it was a corporate shit show. Pizza sold for six dollars a slice, and in the middle of a heat wave, water cost four dollars for a tiny bottle. For those who couldn’t make it to the concert in upstate New York -- at a Superfund-listed former U.S. Air Force base -- the entire festival was available on pay-per-view.
More than 200,000 young people did show up, though. And unlike their gate-crashing parents, they paid $150 each to get in.
The sixties crowd might have lost their idealism somewhere along the way, but their children showed some antiestablishment -- or at least antisocial -- spirit on the last day of the festival, breaking into a riot, setting fires, looting vendor booths and ATMs, and allegedly raping four female concertgoers. >>FULL EXCERPT