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Comment by Mkultravictim | Hacker News Reader

You might be right, because the real reasons for every bone headed CIA catastrophe is always mundane and boring in the banality of evil sense.

But by the time of CIA's LSD brothel, the CIA had already been experimenting with LSD for over ten years. Timothy Leary and the Acid hippies had already been all over the counter culture for 5 years. Everybody knew what LSD did by then. They already knew what would happen. That's why I believe the brothel wasn't an experiment, it was an operation with a defined objective.

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I have heard a story that the CIA ordered a 55 gallon drum of LSD, by mistake, as part of a wider, earlier "what do psychedelics do?" research program. Then they had this stuff and everybody got to "play" with it; there was supposedly a period when LSD in the coffee was an office hazard there. Then it gradually leaked out a little further and helped spark more general interest and more manufacturing and the love children.

The appealing part of this story was the bit where Sandoz called them back and asked "did you want enough of this to light up the country?" and some ignorant bureaucrat said "that's whats on the form, ship it already." That fits my cynicism about government operations, especially unsupervised ones.

The stories about the government involvement in cocaine are less funny.

Since you mentioned huge volumes, while not the CIA, it reminded me of this [1] case of 8 people who accidentally snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. They all survived with relatively minimal medical intervention, after taking what - trying to guesstimate from serum levels - appears to have been at least several hundred times a normal LSD dose, maybe a few thousands.

I wonder to what extent the CIA experimented with extreme doses if they sat on that much.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/

On that basis I'm surprised they didn't just spike a town's water supply. Flexible ethics and all that.

They did, kind of. They spiked the bread at the bakery in a town in France.

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