Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (52 page)

traffic jam:
fluxus interclusio

travel agency:
itinerum procuratio

warmonger:
belli instigator

washing machine:
machina linteorum lavatoria

Just say no to drugs? It may surprise you to know that the U.S. government was using them—and maybe even spreading them. This story is from
It’s a Conspiracy,
by the National Insecurity Council.

D
uring World War II, Nazi scientists tested hallucinogenic drugs (like mescaline) on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp. The Nazis were ostensibly trying to find a new “aviation medicine,” but what they were really looking for was the secret to “mind control.”

After dosing inmates for years, the Nazi scientists concluded that it was “impossible to impose one’s will on another person…even when strong doses had been given.” But they found they
could
extract “even the most intimate secrets” from subjects under a drug’s influence.

After the war, U.S. military intelligence found out about the Nazi experiments and wondered if hallucinogenic drugs might be used for espionage. Could such drugs be sprayed over enemy armies to disable them? Could the drugs be used to confuse or discredit leaders in hostile countries? The possibilities seemed endless. So, in 1950, the CIA took over where the Nazis had left off.

THE CIA ON DOPE

• In 1953, the CIA initiated a full-scale “mind-control” program called Operation MK-ULTRA. Its experiments included hypnosis, electroshock, ESP, lobotomy—and drugs. The operation is said to have lasted 20 years and cost $25 million.

• According to the book
Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion:
“Nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s—marijuana, cocaine, PCP, DMT, speed, and many others—had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by the CIA and army scientists. But…none received as much attention or was embraced with such enthusiasm as LSD-25 [lysergic acid diethylamide]. For a time CIA personnel were completely infatuated with the hallucinogen. Those who first tested LSD in the early 1950s were convinced that it would revolutionize the cloak-and-dagger trade.”

But how could the CIA find out if the drug was an effective secret weapon unless it was first tested on people?

THE SECRET DRUG TESTS

In 1973, the CIA destroyed most of its files on the MK-ULTRA project; but some files escaped destruction. From these files, Congress and the public learned, for the first time, that for years the CIA had been experimenting with drugs.

• To test LSD, the CIA had set up both clandestine operations and academic fronts. For instance, it established a “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology” at the Cornell University medical school, which dispensed “grants” to institutions in the U.S. and Canada to conduct experiments with LSD.

• The LSD project was administered by the CIA’s Technical Services Staff. A freewheeling atmosphere developed in which anyone was likely to be dosed without warning in the name of research. Before the program concluded, thousands of people had been involuntarily dosed.

• Not only the CIA, but also the U.S. Army was involved in LSD experiments.
Acid Dreams
reports that in the 1950s, “nearly fifteen hundred military personnel had served as human guinea pigs in LSD experiments conducted by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.” The Army even made a film of troops trying to drill while stoned on acid.

THE REST

The government had no choice but to admit it had given LSD to about 1,000 unsuspecting people from 1955 to 1958 and has paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits that were filed when subjects given drugs became permanently incapacitated or committed suicide. A few examples:

• In a San Francisco operation code-named “Midnight Climax,” prostitutes brought men to bordellos that were actually CIA safe houses. There, as reported in
Acid Dreams
, they would “spike the drinks of unlucky customers while CIA operatives observed, photographed, and recorded the action.”

• In one experiment, black inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital were given LSD for 75 consecutive days in gradually increasing doses.

• In 1953, a civilian working for the Army was slipped LSD at a CIA party. He jumped to his death from a 10th-story window. It was ruled a suicide until 1975, when the government revealed the truth. The CIA apologized and Congress awarded his family $750,000.

• A CIA-funded psychiatrist in Canada dosed patients with LSD and used other mind-control techniques, trying to “reprogram” them. Nine of the patients sued the CIA for damages. The case was settled out of court in 1988.

• According to
Acid Dreams:
“A former CIA contract employee reported that CIA personnel actually helped underground chemists set up LSD laboratories in the San Francisco Bay area.” Many counter-culture heroes believed this was true:

“The LSD movement was started by the CIA. I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of the CIA scientists.”

—Timothy Leary

“We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD. That’s what people forget…They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.”

—John Lennon

FOOTNOTE: THE OSWALD CONNECTION

• Was Lee Harvey Oswald given LSD by the CIA? In 1957, Oswald—then a 17-year-old marine—was assigned to the U.S. naval air base in Atsugi, Japan. According to
Rolling Stone,
this base “served as one of two overseas field stations where the CIA conducted extensive LSD testing.”

• Two years later, Oswald was discharged and moved to the USSR, supposedly as a defector. “If Oswald was sent to Russia as a pseudo-defector, performing some covert task for the U.S., then it’s quite possible he was given LSD as part of his training.” (
Rolling
Stone)

Recommended Reading:
Acid
Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion
, by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain

We can’t identify the first book ever read in the bathroom, but we
have
been able to find the stories behind a few other publishing milestones.

T
HE FANNIE FARMER COOKBOOK

Originally, cookbooks didn’t give precise measurements for recipes—they just told readers to use a “pinch” of this, a “heaping spoonful” of that, and a “handful” of something else. Fannie Merrit Farmer, a domestic servant in the late 1850s, had no trouble following such recipes herself—but she found it almost impossible to give instructions to the young girl who helped her in the home where she worked. So she began rewriting the family’s recipes using more precise measurements.

Forty years later, she had become the assistant principal of the prestigious Boston Cooking School. In 1896, she decided to publish her first book of “scientific” recipes,
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
Her publisher was so worried it wouldn’t sell that he forced Farmer to pay for the printing costs herself. She did. It sold 4 million copies and permanently changed the way cookbooks are written.

DR. SPOCK’S BABY AND CHILD CARE

Dr. Benjamin Spock was a New York pediatrician with a background in psychology when Pocket Books approached him about writing a childcare book for new mothers. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten such an offer: in 1938 Doubleday had asked him to write a similar book, but he turned them down, saying he was inexperienced and wasn’t sure he could write a good book. He almost rejected Pocket Books for the same reason—until the editor explained that it didn’t
have
to be a very good book, “because at 25¢ cents a copy, we’ll be able to sell a hundred thousand a year.”

Feeling reassured, Spock accepted the offer and wrote
The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care.
He began with rhe admonition “Trust yourself’—and wrote a book that was unlike any child-rearing book that had been written before. “The previous attitude in child-rearing books was, ‘Look out, stupid, if you don’t do as I say, you’ll kill the baby,’ ” Spock recalls. “I leaned over backward not to be alarming and to be friendly with the parents.”

His warm, supportive voice paid off;
The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care
became the second-bestselling book in American history, second only to the Bible. It has sold an average of 1 million copies a year
every year
since it was published in 1946. Its impact on American culture has been profound. According to
The Paperback In America:
“For two generations of American parents, it has been the bible for coping with their newborns…. A comparison of new mothers to the number of books sold during the baby boom’s peak years—from 1946 to 1964, when nearly 75 million babies were born in the United States—put the estimate of ‘Spock babies’ at one in five, and that failed to account for the number of women who shared or borrowed the book or used it to raise more than one child.”

THE COMPLETE BOOK OF RUNNING

Jim Fixx was a part-time author and full-time editor at
Horizon
magazine…until 1976, when his boss “suggested” he find another job. Fixx didn’t want another magazine job, but all he knew how to do was write, and he had four kids to support. He’d been running for about eight years, and knew there was no book that gave practical advice for beginning runners, so he came up with an idea to make a quick $10,000—a “breezy, superficial” book called
The Lazy Athlete’s Look Younger Be Thinner Feel Better & Live Longer Running Book.

As it happened, one of the last things he did for
Horizon
magazine was meet with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jerzy Kozinski. “As Kozinski and I sat talking in his studio in midtown Manhattan,” Fixx recalled, “the conversation turned to my book.”

      
“You have a big job ahead of you,” Kozinski said “To write a book like that, you have to read everything that’s been written on the subject.” Until then I hadn’t thought of doing anything of the sort. All I wanted to do was get the book written quickly and collect my check. But I realized that Kozinski was right. The conversation turned a modest and easily manageable plan into a two-year obsession.

The book came out in 1978. It immediately hit the bestseller list, and became the bible of one of the biggest sports in America. Years later, Fixx died of a heart attack while jogging.

Here are some of our favorite lines from the Silver Screen.

ON INTELLIGENCE

Doc:
“This kid is so dumb he doesn’t know what time it is.”

Golfer:
“By the way, what time is it?”

Doc:
“I don’t know.”

—W.C. Fields,

The Dentist

ON MARRIAGE

“If love is blind…marriage must be like having a stroke.”

—Danny DeVito,

War of the Roses

“What’s marriage anyhow? Just a tradition started by cavemen and encouraged by florists.”

—Olivia de Haviland,

The Strawberry Blonde

“Marriage is forever—like cement.”

—Peter Sellers,

What’s New Pussycat?

ON SEX

“I like my sex the way I play basketball: one on one, and with as little dribbling as possible.”

—Lt. Frank Drebin,

The Naked Gun

ON RELIGION

Luna:
“Do you believe in God?”

Miles:
“Do I believe in God? I’m what you’d call a theological atheist. I believe that there is an intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey. Do YOU believe in God?”

Luna:
“Well, I believe that there’s somebody out there who watches over us.”

Miles:
“Unfortunately, it’s the government.”

—Woody Allen’s
Sleeper

ON RELATIONSHIPS

“She dumped me cause she said I wasn’t paying enough attention to her, or something. I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening.”

—Harry,

Dumb & Dumber

“A guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay.”

—Susan Sarandon,

Bull Durham

“I’m not livin’ with you. We occupy the same cage, that’s all.”