The Two Letters of 1953: Huxley to Osmond, Dulles to the CIA
On April 13, 1953, Allen Dulles signed the MK-Ultra authorization. On May 3, 1953, Humphry Osmond administered mescaline to Aldous Huxley. Two projects began within three weeks of each other, with the same substance, with opposite theories of what it was for.
Three weeks separated two events that together define everything that has happened to psychedelics in the seventy years since.
On April 13, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles signed the authorization memorandum for MK-Ultra. The program would test LSD and other substances on unwitting subjects in prisons, hospitals, and CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York. Its goal was developing techniques for interrogation and mind control. Its theory of LSD was that the drug made minds manipulable, that it dissolved the coherence of the self enough to allow suggestions to be implanted, confessions to be extracted, loyalties to be reversed.
On May 3, 1953, Humphry Osmond arrived at the Huxley house in the Hollywood Hills with a bottle of mescaline solution. He gave mescaline to Aldous Huxley, sat nearby as a guide, and watched while Huxley experienced something that would take a book to describe. His theory of mescaline was that the drug made minds more transparent to themselves, that it opened the "reducing valve" that ordinarily narrowed perception to the useful, allowing the subject access to what Huxley would call Mind at Large.
Same substance. Three weeks apart. Opposite theories of what it was doing.
The CIA's theory was tested at Operation Midnight Climax, the safe house program that George White ran in San Francisco from 1953 to 1966. The results were unambiguous: LSD was useless as a control mechanism. What it produced was not compliance but chaos, wildly variable experiences that made subjects less, not more, susceptible to suggestion. The program produced no useful intelligence techniques.
Huxley's theory was tested in The Doors of Perception, the letter he wrote to Osmond immediately after the session, and the decade of correspondence that followed. The results were also unambiguous: the drug did exactly what he had expected. The correspondence between two men working out what that meant produced the conceptual vocabulary of the entire subsequent field.
The CIA closed MK-Ultra in 1973. The records were destroyed. What survived was the fragment: enough to document that the program happened, that it harmed people, and that it produced nothing of value.
The Huxley-Osmond correspondence was published in 1977 as Moksha. It is still in print. The clinical model it developed, careful preparation, trained guides, controlled setting, integration afterward, is the model of every psychedelic therapy protocol operating today.
The two projects began three weeks apart. One of them was right about what the substance was. The other had the institutional power to suppress the research for fifty years. History clearly records which was which.
Sources
- Huxley-Osmond Letters
- Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
- MK-Ultra FOIA files