The Day the Manufacturer Lost Control

“In 1953, the CIA purchased the entire world supply of LSD from the manufacturer, enough for an enormous number of doses. The manufacturer was relieved to sell it. They had no idea what to do with it.”

Albert Hofmann's problem child became the world's problem almost immediately after it left the laboratory.

the Basel drug company had been distributing LSD-25 since 1947 under a trade name, primarily to psychiatric researchers studying schizophrenia and alcoholism. By 1953, word had spread beyond the academic psychiatric community. The CIA's Technical Services Division, which was running MK-Ultra under Sidney Gottlieb, learned about LSD's extreme potency and psychological effects and decided it needed to control the supply.

They bought it all. The entire global stock, for an amount the manufacturer considered reasonable. This was enough for an enormous number of doses. Gottlieb's goal was to determine whether LSD could be used as a truth serum, an interrogation tool, a method for temporarily incapacitating enemies, or a vector for inducing psychiatric disorders in targets.

The answers, after a decade of human experimentation including MK-Ultra's various subprojects, were: no, no, no, and unreliably. The CIA's LSD program produced no usable intelligence techniques. It produced a death (Frank Olson in 1953), extensive psychological damage to unwitting subjects, and eventually a political scandal when the Church Committee exposed the program in 1975.

Hofmann, describing this period in My Problem Child, is characteristically measured. He understood that the company had no means to control what happened to LSD once it left the laboratory, the chemistry was publishable, the synthesis was reproducible, and the demand created by the drug's effects was not something a pharmaceutical company could manage. The CIA's purchase was one symptom. Leary's mass distribution was another. The street market that emerged in the 1960s was a third.

What the company could control, and eventually did, was its own production. In 1965, as the counterculture's use of LSD became impossible to ignore, the manufacturer stopped making it. By then, illicit synthesis labs had been running for years. The problem child had left home.

Sources

• Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven (1987)
• Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979)
• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)