Putin vs. Big Pharma: The ultimate smackdown

“Under 80”? I just turned 70 (as young as can be still, younger than spring) and Vietnam was pretty gnarly, even if it wasn’t “real war”. I went to France, but skirmishes on the streets of “Southern California” were dense enough that it had my Marine boss, Beirut sniper (Lincoln Security) asking my sidekick Raphael twenty years later about my background, “Ed thinks you’ve been in combat.” I found that more amusing than the most outlandish of our “domestic wars”, on their best day, since I’d never left the beaches of Laguna, where Timothy Leary had lived at “Mystic Arts” ten years before, quite close by on PCH, dosing as many people as he could find, with all kinds of LSD black market hallucinogens, a la what then DCI Richard Helms (not on my short list of favorites, no way no how, as bad as Dulles or Sydney Gottlieb, by accounts) described them as, “We thought of LSD, in a way, the same way we thought of the bombs on Nagasaki and HIroshima, as a way to nuke the minds of dissidents so they would be easier to control.” (That’s a paraphrase, but a close gist of his actual words on that.) San Francisco found out all about that. (And Laguna Beach.)

I had an interesting back and forth on the street (front of a store) with a man I’d call a “suspected agent” one day in 2015, who said, “Yes! Leary talks all about that in his books, if you read them, and I have, but he said that the whole plan backfired on Helms and his CIA people, because it made so many of their targets simply much more thoughtful.” I answered, “Yeah, for the lucky ones, I know a few. But I also had schoolmates during those key years, some quite brilliant, who got permanently fried on that stuff, they were just never the same. Just look at Brian Wilson (Beach Boys front man, songwriter) he is completely absent from anything like the real universe, perma-fried.”

He was sent to try to persuade me to back off in my pestering the public with some of these questions, “Look, most people are just walking around looking for a place to take a warm shit.”

That’s typical CIA ideology, “Look, just let the folk be, while we herd them to the apparent slaughter, where else do they have to go, the road is straight and clear before us?” In so many subtexts, implied.

I shot back, “Yeah, that’s why I like France for that kind of thing so much more, maybe because you could never find a warm place, sometimes even in some great restaurants, you often had to go down some freezing hall and squat over some porcelain hole in the ground, so people there are reminded there about realities.” He didn’t know what to say, when I added, “They are SO much better at watching each other’s back, when it comes to government scams.”

I read a fascinating book about all that, the whole scene then in my “backyard”, in fact I actually know some of the people profiled in the book “Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and LSD to the World”. (Nick Schou, edited by my ’60s ROTC schoolmate, David Talbot, if you can believe it, I wrote about it on other threads: I don’t know Talbot, although I shared a campus with him for 5 years, a time neatly bookended for us by the ’60s assassinations.)

What an outlandish and ultimately sad chronicle of all those types in Laguna Beach, where I knew at ground level some 40 years ago many of the crowd that “roamed the streets” literally on acid, in their dealings with what we called “The Brotherhood” simply, or known to the farflung annals, of those years, as “The Hippie Mafia”. No doubt it was a “colorful” time, but fastly rooted in government psyops and surveillance, from the very getgo. The book focuses its start there on John Griggs, “leader” of the The Brotherhood, who was a young fatality after a few years caused by very bad toxic acid. Timothy Leary told us all then, “John Griggs is the holiest man in America.” Wow, what a sales? I know any number of people who bought that kind of tripe from Trip Master Tim. Even then I thought there was something terribly wrong. With all that, and with him.

All about curious government control, as always, for spurious reasons posing as real (MKULTRA and Artichoke and Monarch, etc etc as code names). I’m glad those years are behind us. Leary was gone by the time I got there in ’77, having been “arrested” off Laguna Canyon Road in ’69 as he played his part in that deadly charade for PD, FBI, and CIA and so many other shadowy players in that bizarre psychodrama.

As one friend who owned, a piano tuner who owned his own store, right in the middle of town, off PCH, Lou once said to me, “The thing about acid is it’s a portal to the DMZ. The demilitarized zone of the spirit world, where the door is open. And anyone who takes it should ask himself, by WHOSE permission do I go there? And since God hasn’t given any of them that permission, apparently, they just might be on their own?” (And, of course, the Sydney Gottlieb CIA people relied on that.)

A poignant and pertinent question. But kids “just out having fun” back then put all kinds of things in their bodies, many of them driven to distraction by so many shady psyops all around, not very beknownst to them, if at all, often they thought it was a bad jacket to be worn, an “initiation” of some kind, or whatever. California was full of “that” and many lived to tell the tale.

But that “DMZ” was a term that came directly from General Westmoreland’s rice paddies of Vietnam, and many vets that I knew had used many such drugs -counterintuitively!- to prep themselves for physical battle, as was dramatized in movies then like “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket” and many others.

Between the drug experiences and the many unanswered questions about why we were there in Indochina, by 1988 S. Brian Willson (“Blood on the Tracks”) in his capacity as advocate attorney for vets, and a hard-bitten veteran himself, told us that 250,000 Vietnam soldiers returning here had taken their own lives. I questioned him after his UCLA talk about it (and he having just survived the amputation of both his legs by a Navy train that accelerated and ran over them a few months before) in disbelief at the number, and he told me “That’s actually a very conservative estimate, because many more have simply disappeared (e.g. “Kissing Trains” with John Lithgow as a PTSD crazed vet disappearing into the Pacific Northwest forest, only to be tracked and saved on the brink of “kissing a train” by his son).

So the soldiers, after ROTC I could have well been one, but for several 4F exemptions and expatriation, got a “double dose” of the DMZ, and quite a few didn’t make it back out. Of one, both, or either.

But back in that day, half century ago, I really do believe that there were opportunities enough to fight in a “real war”. Sometimes the combatants didn’t even need to leave their own sofas.

Serious. I truly think it depends more on the POV ~ not the provenance of the “actual” bullets and bombs.

But I do know some who went through things like the Blitz, courtesy of von Braun. The legendary crooner Tony Bennett, fought then in the Battle of the Bulge and said it was “like getting your own front row seat in Hell”.

But War seems, after further review, to be a wily thing, it can “pop up” anywhere, any time. I got to know a one-time mercenary just before Coronapalooza began. After a couple years off and on sharing our stories, he told me he had once signed on for a “soldier of fortune” tour long ago, but he got cold feet and backed out, last minute. His team leader said that when they all finished “over there” they’d come back and kill him. But turns out all of them died but one, on their misadventure.

He found out and visited the lone survivor, finding him in a rest home. He didn’t make it back either, after all. Just sat all day in bed, in a corner, staring straight ahead and babbling.