Investigation reveals the CIA poisoned an entire town with LSD to see what would happen

When the inhabitants of the quaint village known as Pont-Saint-Esprit in southeastern France experienced hallucinations and what can only be described as mass insanity back in 1951, the flour at a local bakery was blamed. However, a writer who was researching a book found evidence that it was actually an intentional mind control experiment carried out by the CIA.

In what is known locally as the “Mystery of the Cursed Bread,” local people were suddenly gripped by frightening hallucinations involving snakes, dragons and fire on August 16, 1951. Five people died and dozens of people were committed to asylums, with hundreds being left with some degree of madness after the incident. People were delirious, with Time magazine reporting at the time that some believed their heads were turning to molten lead or that flowers were blooming from their bodies.

Locals still talk about the incident, recalling being placed in straitjackets or chained to beds to stay under control. Some say they’d rather die than experience it again. The most widely accepted explanation at the time was that a poisonous fungus known as ergot must have contaminated the flour at a local bakery, the Roch Briand. The fungus, which can occur naturally on rye, is known to cause hallucinations.

Author H.P. Albarelli Jr. has a different explanation. While he believes the bread could indeed be to blame, he suspects it did not have anything to do with the psychedelic fungus and was instead laced with LSD. Indeed, experts say that ergot contamination would have led to a far more widespread outbreak of hallucinations than just this one village.

Writer unearthed documents pointing to LSD experiment

Albarelli reached this shocking conclusion while looking into the suicide of a biochemist who had been in charge of LSD research for the CIA, Frank Olson. Olson jumped from a 13th-floor window just two years after the incident.

The writer found CIA documents that aroused his suspicion bearing the ominous title: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

Belin is a reference to the then-executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, David Belin. The commission was created by the White House to look into worldwide abuses carried out by the CIA.

The only place LSD was being produced at that time was at the Sandoz Chemical Company, whose Switzerland base is just a few hundred kilometers away from Pont-Saint-Esprit.

One of the documents he discovered was a report from a CIA agent who said that a Sandoz representative said to him: “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all… It was not grain ergot.”

According to the Telegraph, two former colleagues of Olson admitted to Albarelli that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident had been part of a mind control experiment that the CIA and U.S. Army was running. It is not known whether the French secret service was aware of the operation.

Albarelli also said that more than 5,700 American servicemen had been drugged by the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1965 as part of its research into using LSD as a weapon. LSD was the subject of widespread experiments during the early 1950s as the Korea conflict took place and Cold War tensions escalated.

This is just one of many cases where people have been used as test subjects for experiments without their knowledge. It’s not surprising that the agencies involved are keeping mum about it, and it looks like those who were affected, like so many other victims of mass human experiments, may never know what really happened.

Via Natural News

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Featured Image: LBJ Library/Flickr

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Cops Who Tasered Handcuffed Teen on His Testicles Until He Died – On Video – Can’t Be Charged

Mesquite, TX — As the Free Thought Project reported earlier this year, police were caught on video tasering a young man’s testicles and his body — until he died. Now, we have just learned that although the Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson found that the officers involved had committed a crime during their torture — they cannot be charged.

“If I could go back in time and have this case, it would be indicted,” said Michael Snipes, the first assistant district attorney. “We would have pursued criminally negligent homicide charges.”

These charges cannot be brought now, however, because — in spite of the family just finding out about their son’s horrifying death — cops kept the footage of it secret long enough for the statute of limitations to expire.

As My Statesmen reports, such charges cannot be brought more than three years after the incident, which came to the district attorney’s attention as the result of an American-Statesman investigation two months ago. And while there is no such limitation on the higher charge of manslaughter, Snipes said the officers’ behavior that contributed to Graham’s death didn’t reach the level of a knowing disregard for his life.

Now, the nightmare Graham’s parents have been enduring since losing their son that fateful night, just got even worse.

On August 14, 2013, Kathy and Robert Dyer got a phone call one night that is every parent’s nightmare — their son, Graham, was in the hospital. The 18-year-old boy had been severely injured during a struggle with police and was fighting for his life — a fight he would lose.

When Kathy and Robert got to the hospital that night, police refused to let them see their son. “They said he was in serious trouble — that he had felony charges for assaulting an officer,” Kathy recalled.

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Graham had taken LSD that night and his friends called police after he had a bad reaction to it. Police claimed Graham injured himself as they drove him to jail. While the video does show Graham flailing back and forth, police failed to mention to the parents that they’d tortured him, repeatedly, with a taser — including deploying it on his genitalia.

Although this tragic incident happened in 2013 Kathy and Robert are only now finding out what happened to their son. For more than two years, the Mesquite police department would keep the video of Graham — before he went to the hospital — a secret. Now, after watching the video, we know why.

Thanks to the work of Eric Dexheimer at Austin’s MyStatesman, the Dyer’s story is now being told. And although the Mesquite police department won’t face charges for their horrifying actions, they are getting some much-deserved negative attention.

As MyStatesman reported in April:

It seemed improbable the five officers who’d brought him in couldn’t safely subdue Graham. The youngest of the Dyers’ three children was small and slight — 5-foot-4, 110 pounds. He was a skateboarder, not a linebacker.

As the morning passed, a series of scans showed Graham’s brain activity slowing to a stop. “The worst day ever,” Kathy said. Their son’s autopsy said he died of self-inflicted head injuries — an accident, the medical examiner concluded.

Even in the dark days following their son’s death, the Dyers tended to believe the police. Why wouldn’t they? Kathy, a civil engineer, and Robert, a teacher, were solid citizens.

Even though they were originally inclined to believe police, Dyer’s parents continued to ask more and more questions, like what were all those “chicken feet” scratches all over Graham’s body? Or, why did the emergency room doctor’s notes say Graham appeared to be a victim of assault?

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However, when Kathy and Robert went down to the Mesquite police department, they were not given answers to any of their questions — because police weren’t required to answer any of them.

According to the ridiculous state law, police departments aren’t required to hand over records for any incidents that don’t result in a conviction. Since police killed Graham before he was able to stand trial for his alleged crimes, they were shielded from handing over the evidence.

For years, the Dyers would fight to get this information from police. Eventually, because of their persistence, the Dyers finally obtained the video footage from their son’s last hours alive. When they viewed it for the first time, they realized everything police said that happened that night was a lie.

Those chicken feet scratches, they would learn, were from taser prongs.

The family hired Susan Hutchison to build a civil rights case against the department. During her investigation, horrifying details emerged.

As My Statesman reports, Hutchison said the additional information contained more troubling details about Graham’s interaction with the police. Taser records indicated four officers shocked him multiple times, she said. As Graham is being stunned with a Taser in the back seat of the cruiser, one can be heard saying: “Mother[expletive], I’m going to kill you.”

And kill him they did.

At one point in the horrifying video, an officer is seen sadistically deploying the taser directly on Graham’s penis. It’s as if these officers enjoyed causing harm to this clearly distressed boy.

When asked about the use of the tasers, the department wrote it off as standard procedure.

“A Taser was deployed in an effort to control decedent, prevent escape and prevent him from injuring himself,” the city stated in court documents, adding the officer had been aiming for Graham’s leg and it was dark.

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However, in the video, we can clearly see the cop hold the taser to Graham’s genitals. This is, by no means, standard procedure to ‘prevent suspects from hurting themselves.’

Even with this lawsuit, the Dyers keep hitting roadblocks in holding these cops accountable, like the statute of limitations protecting the criminal cops who killed their son.

As Hutchison said, police departments “In effect, have complete immunity and no accountability—at least in Texas.”

The Dyers aren’t even going after money. As My Statesman reports, Robert said his goal for the lawsuit is modest: “I just want them to say they fucked up.”

“I’m not saying doing LSD wasn’t stupid,” Kathy said. “And things happen. But this should have never happened.”

In spite of this selfless family getting railroaded by the corrupt system, they have taken action to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families.

As the Statesmen reports, Kathy and Robert testified in front of legislators in support of a bill that could help other families in their position.

Sponsored by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, House Bill 3234 would have compelled law enforcement agencies to release their investigative records if, like Graham, the suspect had died, or, if not, gave his consent to their release. The couple’s emotional testimony appeared to move several of the lawmakers on the state House Committee on Government Transparency and Operation.

However, thanks to the police state worship in Texas, the bill only made it out of committee and then died.

The family has now pledged that they will fight to the end for justice.

Rare Footage Shows US and British Soldiers Getting Dosed with LSD in Government-Sponsored Tests- 1958-1964 (VIDEO)

(image: Youtube screenshot)

By: Open Culture | 

We’re usually right to reserve judgement when it comes to conspiracy theories. But the reason they often sound plausible is a compelling one: What we do know about the secret activities of agencies like the CIA, FBI, KGB, NSA, etc. often points to a surreal, nefarious, extra-legal dimension full of plots Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick might have written. In such a dimension was born Project MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed by the CIA in the early fifties and only officially stopped in 1973.

Most famous for introducing a young hospital orderly named Ken Kesey to LSD when he volunteered for an experiment—and thus acting as a primary cause of the Acid-fueled Haight-Ashbury movement to come—MK-ULTRA tested drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture as a means of manipulating interrogation subjects. At the same time as the CIA drugged willing and unwilling participants, Army intelligence conducted research into using LSD as a mind control agent.

Raffi Khatchadodourian tells the story in The New Yorker of Dr. Van Murray Sim, founder of the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal program of clinical research on psychochemicals. To his colleagues, Sim “was like Dr. Strangelove; he was a leader; he was the ‘Mengele of Edgewood’… manipulative and vengeful, ethically shortsighted, incoherently rambling… and devoted to chemical-warfare research.” He volunteered himself as a test subject for VX, a lethal nerve agent, for Red Oil, a “highly potent synthetic version of marijuana,” and for other hallucinogens designed for “psychochemical warfare.”

Sim dosed himself several times with LSD and in 1957 proposed a series of “practical experiments” with the drug at Edgewood. “It was deemed important,” writes Khatchadodourian, “to conduct LSD tests on people who were provided no information about what the drug would do.” You can see film of one of those tests above, conducted in 1958 on Army volunteers who, the narrator tells us, “responded like well-trained soldiers to the request: immediately and without question.”

The soldiers are put through a series of drills. Then they are dosed and drilled again. There is much laughter among the squad, but one man succumbed to such severe depression that five minutes after they begin, the medical officers “end his participation.” After a few more minutes, “the men found it difficult to obey orders. And soon the results were chaos,” the narrator says. In reality, as we can see, the soldiers seemed happy and relaxed, not in a “chaotic” state, though their unwillingness to obey would certainly seem so to the brass.

British intelligence also tested LSD on its troops. In the film above from 1964, several armed British Marines are given a dose and sent out into the field exercises. The results are strikingly similar. Immediately after taking the field the drugged marines begin to giggle, laugh, and relax. But one man “is more severely affected than the others, losing all contact with reality, dropping his rifle, and becoming unable to take part in the operation. In fact, he has to be withdrawn from the exercise a few minutes later.” The remainder of the test subjects collapse in fits of hilarity.

“In the end,” writes Rich Remsberg at NPR, the U.S. Army decided that LSD “was too expensive” and “unstable once airborne,” though it did lead to something called Agent BZ, “which was weaponized but never used in combat.” But at the peak of its testing programs, Army intelligence, the CIA, and even Operation Paperclip—the secretive program that recruited former Nazi scientists into its ranks—showed an obsession with the drug, amassing huge supplies of it, and testing it on witting and unwitting subjects alike.

In one operation, called “Midnight Climax,” unsuspecting clients “at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted,” writes David Hambling at Wired. “Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked” with acid.

While the CIA pulled pranks—and inspired Kesey’s Merry Pranksters—the Army took its program overseas to Europe under the aegis of “Operation Special Purpose.” Even today, Khatchadourian writes, “the non-Americans who were tested have still not been identified.” Operation Special Purpose’s experiments “were disastrous, offering little or no useful intelligence, and risking untold psychological damage to the subjects.” The Cold Warriors in charge thought of the drug as a weapon, and threw ethics and scientific caution to the wind. In certain tests, interrogators intended “to cause maximum anxiety and fear.” They degraded and threatened subjects “as long as the drug was effective: eight hours, or possibly more.”

In recent years, LSD research has made a promising return, and has shown that, when used for purposes other than mind control, torture, and manipulation, the hallucinogenic compound might actually have beneficial effects on mental health and well-being. Today’s research builds on experiments conducted by psychiatrists at the same time as MK-ULTRA and Operation Special Purpose. “From the 1950s through the early 1970s,” writes the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), “psychiatrists, therapists, and researchers administered LSD to thousands of people for alcoholism, as well as for anxiety and depression” in terminal patients.

As in the tests in the films above, they found that—with notable exceptions—the drug made people happier, more relaxed, and less afraid of death. “When used by people without a family history or risk of psychological problems,” reported The Washington Post in a story last year on new research, “psychedelics can make us kinder, calmer and better at our jobs. They can help us solve problems more creatively and make us more open-minded and generous.” Perhaps part of the government conspiracy to use hallucinogenic drugs for ill involved suppressing all of the ways they could be used for good.

Corporate Media Just Exposed CIA Using Prostitutes to Drug Victims with LSD for Mind Control Studies

Your government will, indeed, perform experiments on you if it so chooses, and while some are undertaken with Nazi-esque malevolence — like the atrocities committed in the Tuskegee Study, a 40-year operation infecting innocent Black men with syphilis — others, like Midnight Climax, out the State’s utterly twisted flirtation with mind control.

Part of the notorious MKULTRA program, Midnight Climax — every bit as lascivious as one would expect from an agency founded in duplicity — might be one of the CIA’s most revealing experiments in thought control through substances, as well as its lesser-known entrée into the business of drugs and prostitution.

And now the corporate, mainstream media has finally decided to address the abhorrent crimes committed under the green light by nefarious CIA Director Allen Dulles — who signed off on MKULTRA and, thus, its iterations, on April 13, 1953.

One part in a series on the History Channel, America’s War on Drugs, reveals in documents and interviews how the CIA paid prostitutes to entice unwitting, working class johns with illicit sex in order to dose them unknowingly with pure LSD — acid, lysergic acid diethylamide, one of the psychedelics exploding into America’s drug scene in the 1960s — for the project known as Midnight Climax.

Amid fears The Russians might perfect mind control before the United States government could manage to do so, the CIA turned unapologetically to experiments with LSD, leaving victims none the wiser — setting up fake brothels in San Francisco and, later, Marin County, where hired prostitutes would bring the agency’s prey: the unremarkable men of the lower and working classes who would be unlikely to retaliate if anything went awry.

“The CIA was scared stiff the KGB was going to get all this LSD and come over and start dosing people,” Richard Stratton, a former hippie pot kingpin ultimately caught and imprisoned, explains of Midnight Climax for a preview of the History Channel show. “So, we bought every drop of LSD in existence at that point.

“They gave it to George White, and let George White start dosing people.”

Here CIA agent George White is separated from a prostitute and a man on acid by one glass window. #WarOnDrugs pic.twitter.com/bl3emf9SvP

— HISTORY (@HISTORY) June 10, 2017

George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent and covert captain with the CIA precursor agency, Office of Strategic Services, sought to develop or discover a substance with potential to control the minds of prisoners-of-war — a reportedly failed attempt to best the KGB — so they would reveal privy and classified information upon interrogation.

“American chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the brains behind White’s brawn,” Troy Hooper wrote for SF Weekly in 2012. “It was the height of McCarthyism in the early ’50s, and government intelligence leaders, claiming fear of communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from prisoners of war held in Korea, and brainwash spies into changing allegiances. What better way to examine the effects of LSD than to dose unsuspecting citizens in New York City and San Francisco?”

Stocked with booze and attempting to mimic a “French whorehouse,” rooms in the agency’s bogus brothels — replete with images of women in bondage and prints by artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec — also came complete with two-way mirrors for operatives to kick back with martinis, watch the drug-fogged sexual activity, and scribble notes on what they observed.

“It was supposed to look rich, but it was furnished like crap,” a narcotics agent and frequent visitor to one of the elaborate brothels told John Marks, who authored, “The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate:’ The CIA and Mind Control.”

“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure,” Marks penned, but would “go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked.”

Employing various code words and the sterile terminology to be expected of the CIA, agents recorded the encounters diligently — and although the bulk of those documents were destroyed in a purge of information on MKULTRA and Midnight Climax, seven boxes escaped the agency’s attention, surviving to provide insight into both those programs and the psychology of the agency.

One example, quoted by LewRockwell.com, states plainly,

“Certain individuals [the prostitutes] would covertly administer this material [the drugs] to other people [the johns] in accordance with [White’s] instructions.”

Knowing the prostitutes faced inherent risks in the operation and that the program could be derailed easily — particularly as its illegal nature might raise eyebrows around the agency and elsewhere — the CIA’s hired sex workers were not required to keep receipts or otherwise account for spent funds.

As such untenable toeing of the lines tends to do, Midnight Climax quickly devolved into an authoritarian operation, devoid of medical screening and care for its forced test subjects, and ultimately expanding to multiple brothels — and myriad drugs.

In fact, one of the first brothels set up by the CIA in New York City saw the program’s first tragedy — U.S. biological warfare specialist Frank Olson either lept or was pushed from a tenth-story window in 1953.

Sans sufficient scientific controls and medical pre-screening, a 1976 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities asserted,

“Paradoxically, greater care seemed to have been taken for the safety of foreign nations against whom LSD was used abroad. In several cases [overseas] medical examinations were performed prior to the use of LSD. The [domestic] program … demonstrates a failure of the CIA’s leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and their rights were ignored during the 10 years of testing that followed Dr. Olson’s death.”

Indeed, Midnight Climax failed — and miserably, shamefully so.

No employable tactics in LSD were discovered and no efficacious counter-intelligence operations or methods were ever derived — but the program, and its parent MKULTRA certainly succeeded in ruining the lives of many of the program’s unfortunate victims.

SF Weekly reported,

“Testing of unwitting individuals was suspended in 1964 [after the discovery and outrage over the program by the CIA’s Inspector General the previous year], at least officially. Still, the CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York City continued to operate for a year and a half longer. Scrutiny of the program intensified at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and subsequently the Bay Area safe houses shut down in 1965. New York City’s operation stopped in 1966. Intelligence officers conceded that the drug-testing exposed the agency to a serious ‘moral problem.’”

Considering the wholly egregious manifestation of Midnight Climax — its mendacious premise, disgustingly manipulative facets, and the eagerness with which depraved operatives carried out their tasks — it’s a wonder the CIA managed to concede it had dismissed scruples to carry out these human experiments.

It must be noted psychedelics, in themselves, are not necessarily harmful substances — it was the surreptitious slipping of LSD to victims without their knowledge and without medical screening or care which led to deleterious effects for an untold number of people which caused direct harm by the CIA.

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Programs like MKULTRA might have officially ended decades ago, but given the current climate of heightened xenophobia, Red Scare-anoia, and ruthless and unforgiving domestic surveillance, it would be imprudent — if not foolhardy — to grant the U.S. government a clean slate of trust.

To wit — and to what should be the consternation of the American public and a remarkably inarguable cause for citizen vigilance — White, who died in 1975, later recalled of the odious attempts at mind control,

“I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

Mainstream Media Just Admitted Magic Mushrooms are Safest Recreational Drug

Obliterating the war on drugs in one decisively earth-shattering move, an unprecedented new survey cited by the corporate press found that — of all recreational drugs available — magic mushrooms can be considered safest.

Of an astonishing 120,000 participants from 50 nations, researchers for the Global Drug Survey found the percentage of those seeking emergency treatment for ingesting psilocybin-containing hallucinogenic mushrooms to comprise just 0.2 percent per 10,000 individuals.

Rates of hospitalization for MDMA, alcohol, LSD, and cocaine were an astounding five times higher.

“Magic mushrooms are one of the safest drugs in the world,” Global Drug Survey founder and consultant addiction psychiatrist, Adam Winstock, told the Guardian, noting the biggest risk users face is misidentification — ingesting the wrong mushroom — not from the psychedelic fungus, itself.

“Death from toxicity is almost unheard of with poisoning with more dangerous fungi being a much greater risk in terms of serious harms,” he asserted.

Annually, the Global Drug Survey queries the planet about its drug habits — covering type of substances used and in what quantity, patterns of drug use, and whether they experienced negative effects.

Reports the Guardian, “Overall, 28,000 people said they had taken magic mushrooms at some point in their lives, with 81.7% seeking a ‘moderate psychedelic experience’ and the ‘enhancement of environment and social interactions.’”

Winstock noted the greatest risk posed by magic mushrooms comes from combining psilocybin with other substances — or careless disregard for the drug as a powerful hallucinogen — as he explained,

“Combined use with alcohol and use within risky or unfamiliar settings increase the risks of harm most commonly accidental injury, panic and short lived confusion, disorientation and fears of losing one’s mind.”

Indeed, because ‘shrooms’ can induce flashbacks and panic attacks, Winstock advised those considering experimentation to plan “your trip carefully with trusted company in a safe place and always know what mushrooms you are using.”

Just because a trip devolves into a negative experience doesn’t guarantee the user will come away reeling with long-term psychological consequences, as Roland Griffiths and Robert Jesse of Johns Hopkins discovered in a 2016 survey of 2,000 people.

Quizzed about challenging or difficult magic mushroom experiences, just 2.7 percent of users reported having sought medical attention, while 7.6 percent were treated from enduring psychological symptoms — mere fractions of the 84 percent reporting beneficial effects from the psychedelic.

That finding concurs with two additional studies deeming magic mushrooms palliative for severe depression and anxiety.

Unintentionally lambasting the U.S. farcical war on drugs, Winstock pointed out that LSD — whose users, the 2017 GDS found, were hospitalized at a rate of 1 percent — came with problems due to variance in quality.

“LSD is such a potent drug,” he told the Guardian. “It’s so difficult to dose accurately when tabs you buy vary so widely. It’s easy to take too much and have an experience beyond the one you were expecting.”

When partakers practice moderation, ingesting small amounts until one becomes well-acquainted with their effects; procure shrooms only from a “reliable, trustworthy supply”; and taking only “a tiny dose to start,” the ingestion of mushrooms can be made exponentially safer.

Brad Burge, of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), pointed out the self-reporting by users upon which the Global Drug Survey relies should not be taken as documented medical data — particularly as users sometimes ingest multiple substances, thus making the determination of cause and effect murky, at best.

Additionally, what someone could cite as the need to seek emergency treatment vastly differs according to the substance, as Burge explained,

“With a drug such as heroin, a trip to the emergency room is a life-or-death situation requiring resuscitation and medication. With LSD or mushrooms, there is no toxicity and the effects wear after a few hours.”

However, he added, “There is no known lethal dose for LSD or pure psilocybin.”

“People don’t tend to abuse psychedelics,” Winstock asserted, “they don’t get dependent, they don’t rot every organ from head to toe, and many would cite their impact upon their life as profound and positive. But you need to know how to use them.”

“Drug laws,” he added, “need to balance the positives and problems they can create in society and well crafted laws should nudge people to find the right balance for themselves.”

‘Motherf**ker! I’m Going to Kill You!’ Video Shows Cops Torture Teen to Death with Tasers

Mesquite, TX — Kathy and Robert Dyer got a phone call one night that is every parent’s nightmare — their son, Graham, was in the hospital. The 18-year-old boy had been severely injured during a struggle with police and was fighting for his life — a fight he would lose.

When Kathy and Robert got to the hospital that night, police refused to let them see their son. “They said he was in serious trouble — that he had felony charges for assaulting an officer,” Kathy recalled.

Graham had taken LSD that night and his friends called police after he had a bad reaction to it. Police claimed Graham injured himself as they drove him to jail. While the video does show Graham flailing back and forth, police failed to mention to the parents that they’d tortured him, repeatedly, with a taser — including deploying it on his genitalia.

This tragic incident happened on August 14, 2013, but Kathy and Robert are only now finding out what happened to their son. For more than two years, the Mesquite police department would keep the video of Graham — before he went to the hospital — a secret. Now, after watching the video, we know why.

Thanks to the work of Eric Dexheimer at Austin’s MyStatesman, the Dyer’s story is now being told and the Mesquite police department is getting some much-deserved attention.

As MyStatesman reports:

It seemed improbable the five officers who’d brought him in couldn’t safely subdue Graham. The youngest of the Dyers’ three children was small and slight — 5-foot-4, 110 pounds. He was a skateboarder, not a linebacker.

As the morning passed, a series of scans showed Graham’s brain activity slowing to a stop. “The worst day ever,” Kathy said. Their son’s autopsy said he died of self-inflicted head injuries — an accident, the medical examiner concluded.

Even in the dark days following their son’s death, the Dyers tended to believe the police. Why wouldn’t they? Kathy, a civil engineer, and Robert, a teacher, were solid citizens.

Even though they were originally inclined to believe police, they continued to ask more and more questions, like what were all those “chicken feet” scratches all over Graham’s body? Or, why did the emergency room doctor’s notes say Graham appeared to be a victim of assault?

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However, when Kathy and Robert went down to the Mesquite police department, they were not given answers to any of their questions — because police weren’t required to answer any of them.

According to the ridiculous state law, police departments aren’t required to hand over records for any incidents that don’t result in a conviction. Since police killed Graham before he was able to stand trial for his alleged crimes, they were shielded from handing over the evidence.

For years, the Dyers would fight to get this information from police. Finally, because of their persistence, the Dyers finally obtained the video footage from their son’s last hours alive. When they viewed it for the first time, they realized everything police said that happened that night was a lie.

Those chicken feet scratches, they would learn, were from taser prongs.

The family hired Susan Hutchison to build a civil rights case against the department. During her investigation, horrifying details emerged.

As My Statesman reports, Hutchison said the additional information contained more troubling details about Graham’s interaction with the police. Taser records indicated four officers shocked him multiple times, she said. As Graham is being stunned with a Taser in the back seat of the cruiser, one can be heard saying: “Mother[expletive], I’m going to kill you.”

And kill him they did.

At one point in the horrifying video, an officer is seen sadistically deploying the taser directly on Graham’s penis. It’s as if these officers enjoyed causing harm to this clearly distressed boy.

When asked about the use of the tasers, the department wrote it off as standard procedure.

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“A Taser was deployed in an effort to control decedent, prevent escape and prevent him from injuring himself,” the city stated in court documents, adding the officer had been aiming for Graham’s leg and it was dark.

However, in the video, we can clearly see the cop hold the taser to Graham’s genitals.

Thanks to the insane laws in Texas protecting police, the Dyers are having a hard time holding any of the cops involved in their son’s death accountable, even with the lawsuit.

As Hutchison said, police departments “In effect, have complete immunity and no accountability—at least in Texas.”

The Dyers aren’t even going after money. As My Statesman reports, Robert said his goal for the lawsuit is modest: “I just want them to say they fucked up.”

“I’m not saying doing LSD wasn’t stupid,” Kathy said. “And things happen. But this should have never happened.”

Govt’s Own Data Finally Admits Magic Mushrooms & LSD Can Stifle Opioid Addiction

Before the War on Drugs cast its shadow across humanity, a collective mind expansion was being achieved in part thanks cannabis and psychedelics. For decades the military-corporatist state has suppressed the human right to ingest “illicit” substances – while profiting from this prohibition – but the pursuit of knowledge has a way of thriving despite fascism.

While research on the medicinal uses of cannabis has increased at a tremendous pace, therapeutic research into psychedelics has also garnered more interest in recent years. In 2014, advanced cancer patients “experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months” with a single dose of psilocybin (the “magic mushroom” active ingredient).

Psilocybin is successfully treating patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In Dec. 2016, clinical trials showed that psilocybin can heal mental illness, such as depression and anxiety, like a “surgical intervention.”

Addiction, too, can be treated with psychedelics. Psilocybin has a far better success rate at helping people quit smoking cigarettes than any nicotine-replacement therapy. As one study participant said, “Smoking seemed irrelevant, so I stopped.” This comes as no surprise; in the 1960s and 70s LSD was being shown to help people overcome alcohol addiction.

Now, as the opioid epidemic rages in America, psychedelics are again telling us they can help.

The Drug Policy Alliance reports on a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. According to the government’s own data, people who have experienced psilocybin or LSD have a “decreased risk of opioid abuse and dependence.”

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From the study:

“Among respondents with a history of illicit opioid use, psychedelic drug use is associated with 27% reduced risk of past year opioid dependence and 40% reduced risk of past year opioid abuse. Other than marijuana use, which was associated with 55% reduced risk of past year opioid abuse, no other illicit drug was associated with reduced risk of past year opioid dependence or abuse.”

Researchers analyzed “44,000 illicit opioid users” from a six-year timeframe, finding a “pervasive and significant” association between psychedelic use and decreased opioid misuse. The authors note that their results are consistent with other studies showing psychedelics can treat substance use disorders.

What makes this study so glaring is the fact that it is based on six years of data from the federal government’s own National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which surveys 70,000 people each year.

How ironic that two drugs deemed illegal by the federal government – cannabis and psychedelics – clearly help people overcome addiction to legal opioid drugs and heroin.

As we reported in August 2015, a major study showed that deaths from prescription painkillers plummeted in states with legal cannabis. Other studies confirmed that the use of prescription pills drops in states with legal cannabis, which explains why big pharma fights against cannabis legalization.

Based on the facts, any measure to combat opioid abuse should include the use of medical cannabis. However, the Comprehensive Addiction & Recovery Act or ‘opioid bill’ passed by Congress in 2016 did not contain a single reference to cannabis, and lawmakers actually rejected an amendment to “potential for marijuana to serve as an alternative to opioids for pain management.”

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Clearly, there’s something about psilocybin and LSD and cannabis which, when taken responsibly, can allow a person to break free from strangleholds on life.

“I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet.”

“I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.”

“I was bathed in God’s love, and that continued for hours. I really had no other way to describe this incredibly powerful experience.”

These are some quotes from people in clinical trials taking psychedelics, and the last one is from an atheist.

Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD in 1938 and accidentally touched some with his finger, described the first-ever LSD trip as follows:

“At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”

The mystical experience of psilocybin described by patients can be thought of as the opposite of PTSD, where a single event has a lasting negative effect on the mental state.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is helping to understand the mechanisms of how psychedelics can treat addiction and depression. Stimulation of serotonin 2A receptors by psychedelics decreases activity in certain areas of the brain, especially the “default mode network” (DMN) which is involved in our ingrained thought patterns and behaviors. Decreasing DMN stimulation can allow people to break free from destructive brain patterns.

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An exhaustive survey carried out by Johns Hopkins Medicine supports the conclusions of clinical research, finding that “A history of psychedelic drug use is associated with less psychological distress and fewer suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts…”

Fascinating research using fMRI shows that, under the influence of psilocybin, the brain enters a pattern of activity similar to the dream state. Primitive areas of the brain linked to emotions, memory and arousal become more synchronized, while higher-level thinking and the “sense of self” become unsynchronized.

As long as the nonsensical War on Drugs continues to be waged by government, the power of psychedelics to free people from opioid addiction and numerous other mental ailments will remain out of reach for millions.

Study Reveals Why LSD Trips are So Long and How it Can Treat Depression & Schizophrenia

For decades, scientific exploration into the realm of psychedelic drugs has been strictly forbidden by the US government. However, recently, as a result of constant pressure from civil rights groups, scientists are finally getting the opportunity to see what these drugs are all about. LSD has been a primary focus of recent research, and study after study has shown that this substance has many beneficial uses.

One recent study conducted by a team of researchers from The University of North Carolina, Stanford University and the University of California has shown that LSD could be used to treat schizophrenia and depression.

The researchers used a process known as crystallography, in which atomic and molecular structure of certain interactions are studied. Specifically, the researchers were able to discover how LSD molecules interact with the serotonin receptors in our brain.

Professor Bryan Roth, one of the lead researchers on the team described how the process was used.

“There are different levels of understanding for how drugs like LSD work. The most fundamental level is to find out how the drug binds to a receptor on a cell. The only way to do that is to solve the structure. And to do that, you need X-ray crystallography, the gold standard,” Roth said.

“Once LSD gets in the receptor, a lid comes over the LSD, so it’s basically trapped in the receptor and can’t get out. LSD takes a really long time to get on the receptor, and then once it gets on, it doesn’t get off,” he added.

Roth specializes in schizophrenia research and was inspired to start this study after noticing that patients who he dealt with had reported their first schizophrenic break while taking acid.

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“They were never the same again. Although this is rare, it has been reported. People also report flashbacks and LSD is an extremely potent drug. So for those reasons, along with its potential as part of therapeutic treatment, LSD is scientifically interesting,” Roth said.

Professor Ron Dror, another researcher, explained how he used computer imaging to find out how the drug interacts with the brain.

“There is a headache drug that binds to the same receptor as LSD. The two drugs bind in the same receptor pocket, but the shape of that binding pocket is different when one drug or the other is bound. We used computer simulations to help explain why the two drugs favor different binding pocket shapes,” Dr. Dror said.

“It has long been observed that LSD trips are long. The simulations helped explain why the receptor holds onto LSD for so long despite the fact that they have such a dynamic connection,” he added.

The researchers hope to develop a drug that could interact with serotonin receptors the same way, which could revolutionize treatment for people with depression and schizophrenia.

Another recent study from the University of Cardiff showed that LSD actually unlocks portions of the brain that are not usually used.

This study follows several others which have also found enormous therapeutic benefits possible with psychedelics. However, the persistent negative stigma surrounding even cannabis makes changes to drug policy for psychedelics — regardless of how many people could be helped — doubtful at best.