Prescription Ecstasy and Other Pipe Dreams: An Update on Psychedelic Research

RU Sirius interviews Jag Davies of MAPS about developments in psychedelic research:

RU: So a while back, MAPS got approval for a study in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Where are we at with that?

JAG: It’s almost over. They’ve treated 15 out of 20 patients. It’s very slow. There are lots of pre-conditions for the study because it’s such a controversial substance. But the results are ridiculous. Their CAPS score—(CAPS is the Clinician Administered PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] Scale) is about five times higher than in treating chronic treatment-resistant patients with Zoloft. It’s very likely that we’re going to be able to go on to do our next set up studies—Phase III studies. And there are a whole other slew of studies that are sort of copying this one that we’re doing in a bunch of other places like Switzerland, and Israel, just to be sure.

More at link.

Padilla Injected with a "Truth Serum"

Further confirmation that MKULTRA never died:

Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. He was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured this extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.

Padilla also says he was injected with a "truth serum," a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors.

And Klein has clearly done her homework:

Now that his mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration that's the whole point.

Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources" was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-Ultra program. In the 1950s, it funnelled about $25 million to scientists to research "unusual techniques of interrogation." One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal's McGill University.

Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960, Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia."

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the U.S. military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army's field manual, reissued just last year, states, "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior," as well as "significant psychological distress."

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the U.S. government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of U.S. psychological torture.

Reagans on Drugs

Feeding 10k People in a Day

A break in the madness--and couldn't we all use one right now?--for a story about how amazing and wonderful human beings can be.

From boingboing:

Sarah Rich of Worldchanging is in Delhi at the Doors of Perception conference, checking out local food systems. She's posted a write-up of a Sikh institution, the Langar, which feeds 10,000 people a day on donated food and volunteer labor. She writes:

As Debra Solomon told us when introducing the excursion the previous evening: "They do the most exquisite dishwashing ritual you'll ever see." But actually, the Sikh guide who escorted us through the temple grounds told us in no uncertain terms that the kitchen activities are absolutely without ritual. "Cooking food is cooking food," he said, "No ritual. Just cooking." But if it can't be called a ritual, it can surely be called a dance -- a rhythmic, continuous choreography with mounds of dough, cauldrons of lentils, dozens of hands, and an endless stream of hungry visitors.

Every Sikh temple throughout the world has a Langar (Punjabi for "free kitchen"). This is not a soup kitchen. It's not exclusively for the poor, nor exclusively for the Sikh community. Volunteering in the cooking, serving and cleaning process is a form of active spiritual practice for devotees, but the service they provide asks no religious affiliation of its recipients. Our guide's chorus was, "Man, woman, color, caste, community," meaning you will be fed here regardless of how you fit into any of those classifications.

This spirit of inclusion and equality is reinforced by the kitchen's adherence to vegetarianism, not because Sikhs are vegetarian, but because others who visit may be, and by serving no meat, they exclude nobody.