Potash - Drugs as Weapons Against Us: the CIAs Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Leftists

Drugs as Weapons Against Us

The CIAs Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists

John L. Potash

Table of Contents

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIAs Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists

Copyright 2015 John L. Potash. All Rights Reserved

Published by:

Trine Day LLC

PO Box 577

Walterville, OR 97489

1-800-556-2012

www.TrineDay.com

publisher@TrineDay.net

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947508

Potash, John L.

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIAs Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists

1st ed.

p. cm.

Epud (ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-93-1

Mobi (ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-94-8

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-92-4

1. Drug abuse -- Political aspects -- United States. 2. Psychotropic drugs -- United States -- History -- 20th century. 3. Social history -- 1960-1970 -- United States. 4. LSD (Drug). 5. Counterculture. 6. United States -- Central Intelligence Agency. I. Potash, John L. II. Title

First Edition

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Printed in the USA

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I came to write about this subject from personal experience. Ive been working as a counselor for twenty-five years, largely in the field of addictions. I studied psychology as an undergraduate. Some may think I came into my views with an anti-drug agenda from early on, but it was much the opposite. I abused drugs in high school and my first year of college before weaning off them, but I still positively coupled them with leftist activism.

I grew up in Baltimore with an immediate family that always had leftist sympathies. My father organized doctors against the Vietnam War. My mother was a public defender with a leftist perspective (leftist meaning, for example, anti-war, anti-pollution, anti-poverty and pro-civil rights). Her father was a successful activist lawyer whose work led to the FBI starting a file on him. He did decades of free work for the NAACP, and he successfully represented several Black Panthers in New York.

During my freshman year of college, I started getting more interested in leftist activism. Then I took LSD about a half-dozen times. I never had the proverbial bad trip, but I did see my grades drop drastically afterwards. A classmate I befriended later in college took about the same amount of acid in his sophomore year and had the same experience. That classmate and I discussed our prior ability to write at least a full page of an essay in our heads word for word before committing it to paper. We both lost that ability after our LSD experiences. While our grades came back up after about a year or more following our last hits of acid, we both still couldnt remember more than one sentence at a time for our class papers. This caused me to drop the activism for a few years, until I felt that I had regained my normal mental capacity.

LSD also negatively affected my confidence and emotional control for many months, if not years, after the acid trips. I wrestled in college, and I saw another upper-classman wrestler try to come back to the team after a hiatus from school during which he ate dozens of hits of acid. He ended up so anxious before each match that he had to vomit. This weakened him, and he couldnt perform half as well as he did in practice, leading him eventually to quit. Both personally and professionally throughout the following decades, I would see this weakening in emotional control amongst many former acid users.

In college, after leaving drug abuse behind, I started reading some of the activist books from my grandfathers library. Initially, I had a hard time not coupling the use of LSD and other drugs positively with the leftist activism of the Sixties. Thus, I repressed my negative experience with acid, writing a senior paper in college that partly glorified the drug. It took a while to fully come to terms with LSDs negative effects. Similarly, I have met a number of people who were politically active in the Sixties and appear to repress acids negative effects on them. On the other hand, one or two activists have introspectively and openly discussed their negative LSD experiences with me.

My earliest years of work started making me aware of the power structure around alcohol and other drugs, even before doing addictions work. I tended bar at a restaurant owned by powerful people. The owners worked in the state government and were also connected to the Mafia. I then worked as a probation officer and saw high-level drug traffickers let off of major charges, while low level dealers and users received jail time. Coworkers told me about the vast amount of money laundering going on through the local restaurants. In 1989 I started working as an addictions counselorwork that I continued in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and New York City. In New York I completed a Masters in Social Work and started counseling on a broader range of mental health issues.

I began conducting the research for this book in 1990. I came across many alternative media articles that glorified LSD and other drugs. I read various books that discounted the negative effects of acid, despite the authors quoting interviewees who said they thought their mental abilities were hurt by it. While in graduate school at Columbia University in the mid-1990s, I poured over articles in the medical school library. I uncovered a number of articles that discuss how LSD can cause mild-to-severe cumulative damage to our minds.